PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

The New Dynamic Relations in Asia: How Can the Adjust Its Strategic Vision?

By Charles Horner

Hudson Institute

PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

The New Dynamic Relations in Asia: How Can the United States Adjust Its Strategic Vision?

By Charles Horner

Old international problems remain in the world’s trouble spots. It’s the surrounding world which has changed. The di- visions in Asia and Eurasia of the era are long gone. The new dynamic relations among , Central Asia, South and , and West Asia will be the largest single influence on the shape of world politics. The United States will be hard-pressed to retain its influence over those relationships. As new actors from the East become more involved in politics to their West, the United States must ad- just its strategic vision and its operational methods.

n its analysis of security challenges in the next twenty years, Hudson Institute pays especially close attention to the constantly changing configuration of re- Ilations among different parts of the world. Though the names of world trouble spots seem always the same—Israel, Palestine, Kashmir, , , Iran, Hudson Institute / 1 Darfur, —what actually makes them troublesome can often change and the PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

world around them can change even more. This has certainly been true since the collapse of the in l991. Our understanding of the effect and implica- tions of any of these disputes—and the threats they may pose to the larger peace of the world changed then—and they now have another meaning for today as the larger world continues to transform itself. For example, the divided Europe, and the Bamboo Curtain divided from the East and Southeast Asia. But the disappearance of the old Sino-So- viet border, in and of itself, has also had profound effects. It restored Central Asia and, to a degree, , to their previously well-established roles as independ- ent actors. It reconnected them to regions of the world to which they once had had close historical ties and influence, and it thus made many of the political divisions of the late twentieth century seem hardly to have occurred at all. In centuries past, the internal dynamics of Central Asia often had profound repercussions both to the East and to the West. It now appears that these lines of influence were only tem- porarily severed. Today, many enduring problems are now connected to each other in ways utterly different from how we first met them during the Cold War. We need, therefore, to adjust our angle of vision and, as we see them in new ways analytically, our govern- ment also needs to cope with them in new ways bureaucratically. It has been thirty years since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response, the United States had organized a diverse coalition that included NATO, China, , , and Saudi Arabia. The l980s were also years of intense United States- China strategic co-operation, with Central Asia as one of its foci. How is it that this group of countries came to involve itself in the affairs of the poorest country on the planet? For the United States, in the short term, it was obviously an opportunity to raise the costs to the Soviet Union of the preservation of its empire. But, for the longer term, the United States now sensed that the geopolitical fulcrum of the vast area of West and Southwest Asia had already moved from the core Middle East to the Persian Gulf, and was again on the move, this time to the Caspian region. This had bureaucratic consequences. What was once seen as core business in the U.S. Department of State—the work of Middle East desks in the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian affairs—was rebalanced as early as l992, when a separate Bureau of South Asian Affairs was established. In 2006, that Bureau took over the Central Asia desks and was renamed the Bureau of Central and South Asian Affairs. The logical next step will be the establishment in the new Adminis- tration of a freestanding Bureau of Central Asian Affairs and also the designation of a high-ranking American diplomat to serve as coordinator of American policy and activity in the Caspian region. Hudson Institute / 2 The bureaucratic trend in the Department of Defense is comparable. Its Central PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

Command was established in 1982. The newly independent Central Asian states were added to its area of responsibility in l999—as if in tandem with NATO’s late l990s migration toward Southeast Europe, thence to Afghanistan, where it will remain indefinitely. Thus, it is likely that CENTCOM, now embracing twenty-seven countries on two continents, will become more focused organizationally in the years ahead. In fact, CENTCOM’s most recent “posture statement” (April, 2007) described a variety of activities that would be undertaken and enhanced in Central Asia. These new arrangements enabled the strategic redeployment undertaken by the United States during the l990s, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. The focus of American attention in NATO, once Northwest Europe, shifted to Middle Europe as NATO expanded there, and then to Southeast Europe. The operational manifestation of this was NATO’s intervention in the Balkans in l999, and the po- litical manifestation was the admission of Romania and Bulgaria into NATO in 2004. Islamic Turkey was now directly connected to its West European allies, and a NATO land bridge to Central Asia thereby established. At the same time, United States relations with South Asia were also being trans- formed. Toward the West, there was a requirement for closer co-operation with Pakistan in the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. Toward the East, there was a pro- found United States rapprochement with that looked even further east, to- ward Rising China. During the same period, and for various reasons—the “War on Terrorism” being only one—the United States became more substantively and strategically involved in South Asia. These relationships, in and of themselves, also created yet another bridge into Central Asia. Thus, America’s presence now flows into the region from several directions. But for all the activity if the Untied States in these regions, what has become far more important is how these regions now interact with each other in shaping events. West, Southwest, Central, and even East Asia are developing ties among themselves of all kinds which have increasingly little to do with us as such, and much more to do with the others.

oday, the United States has once again organized a coalition to fight in Afghanistan, but its strategic rationale is not that of the l980s, and the re- T gional context would not be recognized by the strategic planner of the 1980s. We are also seeking to call attention to an underappreciated aspect of the Rise of Asia and its impact on global affairs. We are studying how the rise of China and India is transforming the dynamics of intra-Asia relations, especially now that their putative rivalry is already seen in Indochina, in the waters of the South China Sea Hudson Institute / 3 and on its littoral, and thence further into Australasia. The strategic rapprochement PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

between India and the United Sates, and also the one between India and Japan, are starting to have their effects in Asia. Indeed, intra-Asian rivalry may be to the twenty-first century world what intra-European rivalries were in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth. One place where we are already seeing the effects of the rise of China and India, and their nascent rivalry, is the Persian Gulf. The new actors from the East are now engaged. We have grown accustomed to seeing that region as a place shaped by an eastward-looking West but, in the next twenty years, we will have to factor in the consequences of a westward-looking East. We already see it in the presence of more than three million South Asians as “guest workers” in the Gulf and in China’s multi-billion dollar commitment to the development of oilfields in Iraq. We see a huge movement of capital from the Gulf States to both China and India, and we foresee an energy connection that will link Central and West Asia to South Asia in unprecedented ways, outside of the international energy grid of today. How do we integrate a sense of the interests of these new South and East Asian actors into our own Near East strategy? Diplomatically, we may invoke a quartet of the United States, , the European Union, and the United Nations bureaucracy, but that particular quartet is increasingly obsolescent. ■

Hudson Institute / 4 Charles Horner is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute. PERSPECTIVES FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

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