Democracy and American grand strategy in Asia: the realist principles behind an enduring idealism.

• Author: Green, Michael J.
• Position: Report

Keywords: democracy promotion, US foreign policy, China, Japan, India, ASEAN.

MICHAEL J. GREEN is Senior Advisor and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University.

At the time of writing, DANIEL TWINING was the Fulbright/Oxford Scholar at Oxford University and a Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Has democracy promotion been discredited as a central theme of American foreign policy after the US experience in Iraq? Many American critics and friends overseas appear to believe so. So do many American elites and parts of the broader public. Polling by the German Marshall Fund of the United States demonstrates that the American public's support for promoting democracy overseas has fallen from 52 per cent in 2005 to only 37 per cent in 2007. (1) Opinion-shapers like Fareed Zakaria and Francis Fukuyama argue that the United States must move from promoting democratic elections to pursuing a more realistic statecraft that privileges hard American interests over a softer-edged idealism. (2) American presidential candidates pledge, if elected, to run more "competent" foreign policies than the current administration, a far cry from the ambition of "ending tyranny in this world" which President George W. Bush declared as America's mission in his second inaugural address. (3) Hillary Clinton has declared the construction of a stable "Muslim democracy" in Afghanistan to be perhaps too great a challenge, (4) while Congressional Democrats issued a foreign policy manifesto before the 2006 elections that did not include the word "democracy". (5) If real, these trends have important implications for American foreign policy in Asia, where China's growing influence, premised partly on its model of a more traditionally "Asian" authoritarian modernity, challenges the United States' predominant position. A move away from ideational objectives in US foreign policy in Asia could also change the content and character of newly strengthened relations with the region's traditional democracies, particularly Japan and India.

From a historical perspective, however, the American foreign policy elite's intellectual malaise over the infusion of US statecraft with democratic values today appears to repeat a pattern evident since the beginning of the last century. In this reading, realist critics have emerged whenever the United States has encountered challenges abroad from illiberal adversaries, exposing American presidents to criticism that their attempts to export American ideals have undermined national security. E.H. Carr emerged as a critic of Wilsonian idealism in the 1930s, as fascist regimes established themselves in a world President Woodrow Wilson had pledged to "make safe for democracy". (6) Hans Morgenthau rose to intellectual prominence in the early years of the Cold War to define "interest in terms of power", in a repudiation of President Franklin Roosevelt's idealistic belief that the United States and the Soviet Union could be partners, not adversaries, in managing the post-World War II order. (7) The realism of President Richard Nixon and National

Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was the counterpoint to John F. Kennedy's "pay any price, bear any burden" idealism, which they blamed for propelling the United States into the morass of Vietnam. Today, fuelled by setbacks to American democracy promotion in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere--and by the geopolitical challenge to US interests posed by rising autocracies in China, Russia and Iran--American elites and the broader public appear less certain about the value of infusing American foreign policy with moral principle.

The Argument

It would be wrong, however, to believe that the ideational approach of American foreign policy will diminish, particularly in Asia. This is true for three reasons. First, there is not in fact a tension between the United States' material power and its ideals as a democracy. The United States' identity as a democratic-capitalist power with a universalizing ideology leads it to define its interests in Asia in terms that legitimate its military alliances and its regional presence in ways that sustain the prosperity and security of America and the region.

Second, America's post-Bush leaders identify an embrace and promotion of bilateral and multilateral cooperation among Asia-Pacific democracies as central to US regional strategy. Presidential candidate John McCain calls for a new US partnership with Indonesia and the construction of a broader alliance of democracies to help manage international order in the Asia-Pacific century. (8) Hillary Clinton, like McCain, wants to institutionalize security cooperation with the quadrilateral partnership of Asia-Pacific democracies comprising the United States, Japan, India and Australia. (9) Before he dropped out of the race, Rudy Giuliani urged the incorporation of Japan, India, Australia, South Korea and Singapore into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (10) And Barack Obama has called for a new worldwide concert of democracies to overcome obstruction by the authoritarian governments of Russia and China in the UN Security Council. (11) The Princeton Project, a consensus-based foreign policy manifesto assembled by a Democratic-leaning academic and Washington elite, similarly calls for the construction of a new concert of democracies to manage twenty-first century challenges. (12)

Third, and most important, democracy promotion and security cooperation among like-minded democracies will remain a central objective of American foreign policy in Asia because those elements magnify American power and facilitate US goals. The democratization of nearly every major power in the Asia-Pacific region, with the critical exception of China, creates a solid foundation for trans-Pacific cooperation based on a set of norms and values that few states in the region shared with the United States in 1945. Democracy is America's greatest source of soft power in Asia, uniting it with states as diverse as Indonesia and Mongolia, and with great powers like Japan and India, based on a shared belief in representative government and rule by law. As China's influence grows, this set of shared values will become an increasingly important aspect of US power, complementing the military and economic tools that have been viewed as indispensable for stability in the region for half a century. In Asia, there is no tension between the United States' promotion of democratic values and defence of its vital interests in the world's emerging centre of wealth and power.

In short, the ideational balance of power in Asia directly affects the material balance of power. Moreover, an ideational balance of power in the region that favours universal democratic norms can have a direct and positive impact on the internal ideational balance within China. Despite reference to a "Beijing consensus" in favour of authoritarian capitalism, the reality is that there is anything but consensus among China's elite about the pace at which political liberalization should follow economic development. To the extent that Beijing makes the case for non-interference in internal affairs as the guiding principle for Asian integration, it is a defensive argument rather than the sort of messianic vision that once divided the United States and China at the beginning of the Cold War. For Washington, building a regional consensus on neoliberal norms will remain an indispensable element in the strategy of encouraging China to itself become a responsible stakeholder. The challenge for US foreign policy will be to pursue that goal without inadvertently provoking the ideational equivalent of a security dilemma as Beijing responds to perceived threats from "peaceful evolution" strategies.

This article examines these trends in American policy in Asia, the outlook for greater strategic and diplomatic cooperation among regional democracies and the implications for the region, including China, of a US democracy-based approach to Asia policy. It assesses the tensions--within American foreign policy and in Asia--in such an approach, as well as the opportunities for the United States and regional powers inherent to such a strategy. It also assesses the implications for Southeast Asia of an American democracy-based strategy in the broader Asia Pacific.

The Emergence of a "Values-based" US-Japan Alliance

During the Cold War, and despite the democratic character of both the United States and Japan, their alliance was premised on Japan's functional role as a strongpoint in the US strategy to contain Soviet power, a US determination to constrain Japan's own strategic autonomy and Japan's focus on economic recovery under the US security umbrella. Japanese politicians evinced little interest in promoting democratic values overseas. Indeed, in 1954, US ambassador to Japan John Allison lamented that "Japan has no basic convictions for or against the free world". (13) Japan's support was essential to the West's victory in the Cold War, but even in its aftermath Japan did not adopt the kind of values-based foreign policy that assumed ascendancy in Washington and European capitals. In the early 1990s, Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa declared that Japan's relationship with authoritarian China was as important as its relationship with its fellow democracy the United States, casting doubt on the future of the alliance and raising the prospect that a Japanese-Chinese condominium in Asia would develop at Washington's expense. (14) Throughout the 1990s, as the Clinton Administration made democracy promotion a central pillar of American foreign policy and sought Japan's support for liberal reform in Asia, China remained the largest recipient of Japanese overseas development assistance, and Tokyo was Myanmar's largest aid donor despite brutal...