If I had to suggest a definition of the US policy whose outlines seem to me, in moments of optimism, to be emerging late in the Bush second term, I would call it ‘balance plus accommodation, with a deterrent undertone’. The official statement, in which it was most clearly conveyed, was a speech by Robert Zoellick, then Deputy Secretary of State, on 21 September 2005. He is an accomplished diplomat, and naturally mixed the signals in that speech adroitly for his various audiences. (Some Australian journalists even identified it as a Cold War speech.) But let me quote what I think were the primary signals, which, judging by Beijing’s reactions, seem to have been quite readily picked up by his Chinese audience:

Zoellick’s audience contained many ‘China hawks’ who understood the change it was signalling, and received it coldly. No doubt the regime in Taiwan also got the message, and was chagrined. President Chen Shui-bian issued what might be accounted a defiant rejoinder in his Chinese New Year speech, putting proposals for a new constitution, and urging that Taiwan should seek a seat in the United Nations, which would of course imply that the international community had accepted the island as an independent sovereign state. Washington’s reply was immediate, and as strong a rebuke as any ally has ever delivered to another. The spokesman said that the United States had not been consulted and that the proposal represented a unilateral change to the status quo and thus was totally at odds with Washington’s stance. President Chen’s term of office lasts until 2008, but he and his party are increasingly unpopular in Taiwan, and Ma Ying-Jeou, the former leader of the most significant opposition party, the old Kuomintang (and also former Mayor of Taipei) has been visiting the mainland, and elsewhere, and making conciliatory statements. On 2 May 2007, Ma was officially named the Kuomintang’s nominee for the 2008 presidential election and it will be a nice piece of historical irony if he is elected and finally makes peace with the heirs of Mao, who are these days more Chinese nationalist than Maoist.

I will return presently to the question of what kind of global diplomatic structure the changed distribution of power in the society of states might require, but let me look first at some regional strategic and diplomatic changes in the Asia-Pacific which seem to support my hypothesis.

These changes are shaping up, as was implied earlier, as an echo of the strategy hinted in the Acheson White Paper of 1949. Its central focus was on the ‘Island Chain’ stretching down from Japan to Australia. Taiwan was not included in that chain, because at the time it was thought of as simply part of China. The remnants of the Kuomintang and its army had taken refuge there, but in 1949 no-one expected them to hold out for very long. The outbreak of the Korean War a year later (when US President Harry S. Truman included Taiwan in the area within US protection, along with South Korea) changed that assumption. And, for some 50 years afterward, that June 1950 definition of the US stance on the positions of Taiwan and South Korea remained central to US strategy in East Asia.

The strategic ‘backstop’ for the original 1949 concept, by contrast, had been on Japan and the island of Guam, and the most recent phase of US strategic and diplomatic thinking seems to return focus to these two locations. The United States is strengthening its submarine and cruise missile deployments on Guam. The US Air Force is also constructing an operations centre there to serve the entire Pacific area.^[10] The strategic ties between the United States and Japan have been strengthening since 1995, and Japan has of course a good deal more to be anxious about than the United States or Australia from the re-emergence of a China that is both powerful and still dwelling on old wrongs at Japan’s hands.

But the current US concept is both diplomatically and strategically more ambitious than its 1949 predecessor, since Southeast Asia and South Asia are both within its compass. The Philippines and Singapore have been successfully cultivated in terms of US naval access, and India has been more sedulously wooed by the recent US Ambassador, Robert Blackwill,^[11] than any of his predecessors since the Kennedy period. China and India were at war as recently as 1962 and China still holds a swathe of what India regards as Indian territory, but the potential common strategic and diplomatic interests of the United States, Japan and India extend beyond these considerations.

The twenty-first century is taking shape in many people’s minds as Asia’s century, and that raises the obvious question of whether it will evolve towards one paramount power, a bipolar balance, or a ‘concert of powers’. By about 2050, as noted earlier, India will have more people than China, and may be as advanced economically, and more stable politically. It has as ancient and splendid a civilisation as China. Most importantly, as already mentioned, it has no area of strategic rivalry with the United States, Japan or Russia, whereas China has sources of potential quarrel with all three: with the United States, on influence over Japan and East Asia in general; with Japan itself over the past; and with Russia, over the vast territories of the Russian Far East, which the old Tsarist Empire won from the old Chinese Empire in a series of ‘unequal treaties’ during the nineteenth century and which now turn out to be so rich in valuable commodities like oil. So, a great deal is implied in the notion of a common strategic interest between the United States, India and Japan, and indeed perhaps Russia as well.

Moreover, until recently, most analysts would have asserted that the United States would be very unlikely to relinquish its ‘forward deployment’ in East Asia, particularly its troop deployment in South Korea, and its strongly asserted strategic commitment to Taiwan. But times change, and no sensible strategist wants to fight on an unfavourable battlefield. Even Doug Bandow, a strategic commentator with very strong right-wing affiliations, a policy adviser for former US President Ronald Reagan, with connections to a number of conservative Washington think-tanks, defines the South Korean deployment as ‘a commitment that costs far more than it is worth, absorbs valuable military resources, and keeps the Korean people in a dependent relationship that insults their nationhood’.^[12]

The so-called ‘tripwire’ of US troops has been moved south, and cut by a third. If North Korea is in possession of deliverable nuclear weapons, those troops would obviously be hostages in any future military encounter. Young Koreans, especially, value friendship with China above the tie with the United States, and regard the North Koreans more as long-lost brothers than as long-term enemies. The South Korean Government has made it clear that it would resist being involved in any regional dispute (for instance, over Taiwan) and would even object to US troops based on its territory being used in any such encounter. But Bandow, who is a realist as well as a conservative, makes it clear that there are larger considerations at work for Washington: ‘As much as the United States might prefer to maintain its current dominance over every continent on earth, it cannot expect its regional dominance to last for ever.’^[13] In other words, it must reassess its strategic priorities as the global distribution of power changes. And those East Asia deployments may not be as high on the list as they once were.

I would not expect any official US statement in the near future to carry any open endorsement of these views on the evolution of US policy on Northeast Asia, particularly as regards Taiwan and South Korea, although it is possible that the issue may arise in the 2008 US Presidential contest. On the whole, re-definitions are usually proclaimed only after really traumatic crisis periods such as the attacks on 11 September 2001 or the period of the Tet Offensive of 1968, which evoked Richard Nixon’s Guam Doctrine of 1969. Some sudden and acute reversal of fortune on Iraq or Iran would be the likeliest candidates for an equivalent in the next few years, though one should not underrate the possibilities of the erratic leader in North Korea, with his missile firings and nuclear ambitions, or, indeed, even radical change in South Korea.

We should also bear in mind that there is an even more obvious location for changing US commitments: the Atlantic arena. The Europeans are in the enviable position of facing no serious military threat for the foreseeable future, so it is difficult to see why deployments of US land forces (109 000 at present)^[14] should be stationed there, except that it provides a useful forward-staging area for Afghanistan and the Middle East. Russia, whose population may fall to 80 million by the end of this century, (as against the 250 million of the old Soviet Union) is more likely to need the strategic backing of the 600 million people of the European Union than be in any position to take them over. But the future of that relationship is too large and speculative an issue to discuss here.