The Asian Power Squeeze

By Gareth Evans

Former Australian foreign minister

Project Syndicate

CANBERRA – As China gets closer to overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economic power, and its disinclination to accept US military dominance of the Western Pacific grows more obvious, America’s Asia/Pacific allies and friends are becoming increasingly anxious about their longer-term strategic environment. The nightmare scenario for policymakers from Seoul to Canberra is a zero-sum game in which they are forced to choose between their great economic dependence on China and their still-enormous military reliance on the US.

No one believes that the US-China relationship will end in tears any time soon, not least because of the mutually dependent credit and consumption embrace in which the two countries are currently locked. But the outlook a decade or two from now  is already generating a mass of analysis and commentary,  focusing on the tensions that have long festered in the South China Sea, bubble up from time to time in the East China Sea, and are forever lurking in the Taiwan Strait. What, if anything, can those regional countries with competing interests and loyalties do to avoid the pain that they would certainly face if US-China competition turned violent?

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