By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Asia Has No Hegemon

Debates about the balance of power in Asia typically rely on one of three views. Some analysts believe, fatalistically, that China has become an unassailably dominant force in the region. Others place continued faith in U.S. primacy and see China as weak, vulnerable, and ultimately containable. Still, others, including U.S. allies such as Australia and Japan, tout the emergence of a multipolar Indo-Pacific that could arrest China’s ambitions for regional hegemony.

An accurate understanding of the balance of power in Asia is critical to formulating a sound U.S. strategy for China. But none of these prevailing narratives get things quite right. Asia today is uniquely bipolar, dominated by the world’s only two superpowers. Asia is not a European-style concert of powers, a Middle Eastern free-for-all, or a Cold War–era system of opposing blocs. Countries in Asia are for the most part hedging between two giants. The even balance between the United States and China also makes Asia’s power politics the most stable among the major regional theaters.

To construct a more comprehensive and accurate view of the distribution of power in Asia, the Lowy Institute created the Asia Power Index, which goes beyond the traditional shorthand measure of economic size to look at military capability, national resilience, and the expected future distribution of demographic and economic resources, as well as four dimensions of regional influence: economic relationships, cultural influence, defense networks, and diplomacy. What it reveals is a durable duopoly: the United States has lost primacy in Asia but remains around ten percent more powerful there than China. Scholars have posited that a power transition is triggered when a rising power’s overall strength approaches 80 percent of that of the established power. By 2018, China had already convincingly breached this threshold. But the dynamic is not that of a rising power eclipsing an established one; it is a dynamic of two powers that will likely continue to coexist as peer competitors applying different means of influence: the United States mainly uses security partnerships; China mainly uses economic relationships.

In Europe, by contrast, a cohesive multipolarity prevents any single country from posing a hegemonic threat. Russia may hope that the United States’ support for Ukraine will falter, but it does not have the resources to launch a direct conflict with a much larger bloc of EU and NATO countries aligned against it. The Middle East, meanwhile, is defined by messy multipolarity. A handful of players—China, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—are jostling for advantage as the United States continues to retreat from the region, but no regional power reigns supreme.

Bipolarity stabilizes Asia for the moment and enables the United States to protect its vital regional interests, preventing a potential hegemon from disrupting the peace, and safeguarding the economic benefits that Washington derives from trade and investment with the region. But to ensure that this suitable status quo prevails, the United States must contend with the strengths and limitations of its power, rather than overestimate the advantages of its regional alliance partnerships, and strengthen its appeal to nonaligned countries, which are still the majority in Asia.

 

The Mirage Of Multipolarity

Asia’s bipolarity has endured even as many have hoped that India and Japan could become pillars in a truly multipolar region. But, according to the index, each of those countries has less than a third of China’s economic capability, a measure that accounts for the size of their economies, as well as their technological sophistication. India and China have the two largest militaries in the world by number of personnel. Yet India’s ability to project power and influence east of the Strait of Malacca is limited. Neither its military nor Japan’s comes close to matching the capability of China’s People’s Liberation Army or the pace of its recent naval buildup. New Delhi and Tokyo can compete with Beijing in terms of cultural and diplomatic influence in Asia. But when it comes to economic relationships—trade, investment, and development financing—Japan has just 40 percent of China’s regional influence, down from 60 percent in 2018, and India a mere 15 percent.

Over the last decade, governments around the world have embraced the idea that Asia should really be understood as a two-ocean super-region, “the Indo-Pacific,” conjuring hopes that India as well as Australia and Japan could play decisive roles in preventing China from establishing a post-American order. But no major powers in the region are able to match China in the absence of the United States as a security guarantor. Without the United States as a balancing force, East Asia would be utterly dominated by China.

The surprising weakness of U.S. partners is disconcerting for Washington. It undermines the narrative that the United States is upgrading the alliance network it built in the Pacific after World War II—a multipolar makeover that the Biden administration has stressed as its primary achievement in Asia. As U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in 2021, a new “latticework of alliances and partnerships” is enabling U.S. regional allies—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand—and other partners such as India to contribute more to the region’s security and to push back against China.

It is true that, with the exception of Thailand, Washington’s Asian allies are more closely aligned with the United States than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. But this must be assessed in the context of deepening bipolarity—a system in which only the United States has the power to challenge China.

A Japanese hovercraft at the biennial U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific military exercises, Waimanalo, Hawaii, July 2024

Combined military exercises and defense dialogues between the United States and its Asian allies have dramatically intensified since 2021. This strengthening of ties is particularly pronounced in the U.S.-Japanese alliance, which has shifted from focusing purely on the defense of Japan to cooperation on regional and global security issues. And Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul have renewed and institutionalized their trilateral ties.

Australia, meanwhile, is deepening its relationship with the United States by acquiring nuclear-powered submarines through the AUKUS trilateral security partnership the two countries have with the United Kingdom. The Philippines is stoutly defending its maritime interests in the South China Sea and, in 2024, participated for the first time in combined military exercises with Australia, Japan, and the United States, a grouping that American officials have dubbed “the Squad.” Manila has also given the United States new access to additional military bases, including at sites close to Taiwan.

These achievements offer some advantages to the United States: prestige in the peacetime competition for influence, improved military access and basing in the region, and a minor augmentation to the United States’ capabilities in the event of a conflict with China. They also send a message to Beijing that an outright conflict, especially over Taiwan, could lead to a broader allied response. Indeed, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has seized on the Biden administration’s rhetoric about the collective strength of U.S. partners to draw an explicit parallel between the expansion of NATO in Europe and the United States’ alliance-building efforts in Asia.

Yet both Beijing and Washington overestimate the real changes to the United States’ alliance network in Asia. The comparatively small footprint of its alliances—comprising just five countries—has not grown in decades. Upgrading alliances alone cannot deliver a decisive additional advantage to the United States in its competition with China. In the event of a conflict or military contingency with China, U.S. allies would come under heavy pressure from Beijing to limit the United States’ access, basing, and overflight rights.

And the overall size of these U.S. allies’ military forces remains small. When it comes to firepower, as measured by the number of missile launch cells on board ships and submarines, Australia, Japan, and South Korea combined have less than a quarter of the United States’ capability. Together, the defense budgets of U.S. allies in Asia are less than a fifth of that of the United States. Well-known deficiencies in the United States’ readiness for a conflict, such as its inadequate munitions inventories, cannot be quickly remedied through allied cooperation. For instance, Japan’s highly publicized decision in July to sell Patriot missiles to the United States has already been thrown into doubt owing to a shortage of a critical component that only the United States produces.

It is telling that almost every form of renewed security cooperation in recent years has been first sought by a U.S. ally rather than by the United States. The creation of AUKUS, Japan’s partnership with the United States to enlarge its military capacity, and Manila’s renewed cooperation with Washington were all efforts to bind the United States at a time when it has become far more discerning about how it deploys its global power.

And Washington’s actions—if not its rhetoric—show that it understands that Asia is not, in fact, meaningfully multipolar. The United States still resists fully sharing its defense technologies and strategic and operational plans with Asian partners, which can be read as an implicit recognition that these allies are unlikely to make a decisive difference in a conflict with China. Washington remains central in every meaningful security grouping in Asia. Most fundamentally, all of the United States’ alliances in Asia continue to be anchored by bilateral security guarantees, in contrast to the collective defense commitment that applies to NATO allies equally.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan meeting with Chinese military officials, Beijing, August 2024

 

The Benefits Of Bipolarity

This might all sound like bad news for Washington. Yet in many ways, Asia’s bipolarity is good for the region—and good for the United States. For one thing, the fundamentals of U.S. power in the region remain strong. Overall, the United States’ enduring military advantages outweigh its weaknesses, at least for now, especially in undersea warfare and long-range strike capability. Its capacity to put China’s military assets at risk from afar was demonstrated earlier this year, when a U.S. B-2 bomber fired a low-cost munition and sank a decommissioned Chinese vessel. This type of long-range strike capability is much harder for China to counter than the incremental improvements to the U.S. military posture in Japan and the Philippines.

And even with China’s rapid advances in some technologies, such as electric vehicles, the United States remains a larger global hub of innovation. The United States possesses the world’s preferred currency, enjoys abundant energy resources, and has favorable demographic trends, whereas China struggles on all three of those fronts. Most debilitating to China, its economy faces long-term headwinds caused by a contracting and aging workforce.

The stability brought about by bipolarity in Asia, which has benefited the United States as much as any other country, is underappreciated. Asia has no shortage of flash points, notably over Taiwan and the South China Sea. What is surprising, however, is not that these flash points—and episodic gray-zone clashes—exist but that they have not turned into more deadly conflicts. Contrast this relative peace with Europe, where Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine continues. Moscow, no longer able to wield a veto over Europe’s security architecture, has become its arsonist. In the Middle East, the war in Gaza threatens to escalate into a wider regional conflict as a multitude of players struggle to gain the upper hand.

Countries in Asia should not be complacent about the risk of increased conflict. But they should also recognize that things could be much worse for them. Even from China’s point of view, Asia would be more dangerous and chaotic without the influence of the United States. If the United States were to retreat from Asia, Beijing would still have no clear route to establishing a stable China-centric order. It has territorial or maritime disputes with at least ten other countries in the region. And without the United States’ security umbrella, South Korea—and possibly even Australia or Japan—might seek to develop its own nuclear weapons. The prospect of a nuclear arms race underscores the ultimate value of the Biden administration’s effort to shore up alliances in Asia. By giving allies greater confidence in U.S. commitments and the endurance of a bipolar balance of power, the United States can help prevent them from seeking dangerous alternative pathways to security.

The existence of two poles also allows most Asian countries to swim between them and avoid having to align with just one. U.S. diplomacy “is not about forcing countries to choose,” Blinken said in articulating this proposition in 2022. “It’s about giving them a choice.” The existence of this choice matters because nonaligned countries are the majority and the center of Asian regional institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the East Asia Summit. Some of these countries—Singapore, for example—use the space that bipolarity affords them to hedge against the risk of overdependence on any one partner. Others, such as Vietnam, have even profited more directly from U.S.-Chinese competition by positioning themselves as “connector economies,” or intermediaries between the two superpowers, which no longer wish to maintain strong direct economic ties.

It is among countries outside the alliance system, however, that Washington also faces the greatest danger to its standing in Asia. The United States does not need the nonaligned countries to choose it —they never will. But there are worrying signs that these countries are gradually drifting toward China and abandoning active hedging. For example, many countries in Southeast Asia are shrugging their shoulders at China’s bullying and coercion of the Philippines. In a high-profile move, Malaysia recently recognized Beijing’s position on reunifying Taiwan. Indonesia, for its part, sees Beijing as by far its most important partner supporting its economic development. China is on track to secure permanent access to a military base in Cambodia in a secretive deal. Even as its allies rally behind the United States, a view has hardened among the region’s hedgers that it is a distant and unreliable power.

The United States no longer enjoys primacy in Asia. But an effort to restore this primacy would be seen by many Asian countries as disastrously revisionist. Instead, the United States should develop a strategy that focuses on shoring up its position as a status quo power, one of two poles in Asia. This means doing more to reestablish its military edge in Asia by prioritizing the deployment of submarines, fighter aircraft, and warships to the region. Washington should continue to invest in alliances as part of a strategy to deter China but avoid overestimating the importance of these alliances to the overall balance of power in Asia. And to redress the shift away from the United States by the region’s nonaligned countries, it should engage more with them diplomatically and economically. Doing so will not restore U.S. primacy but can help ensure that bipolarity—the least bad option for America and the region—endures.

 

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