Pivoting in Earnest Toward East Asia

The single most important foreign policy challenge that the new president’s administration will have to confront is the intensifying security competition between the United States and China. Through much of the 1990s and 2000s, scholars who warned of a new era of great power competition involving these two countries remained a distinct minority in the US foreign policy discourse. However, during the first presidential term of Donald Trump, such voices were brought to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy toward East Asia; today, it is the optimistic advocates of peaceful “engagement” with China that have become the beleaguered minority.  

In fact, the United States and China should have expected to engage in intense security competition with each other from the beginning of the 21st century. As American scholars and policymakers have long understood, the United States holds a “vital stake in preventing domination of four key regions—Europe, East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Latin America”—by a rival power. China has continued its meteoric rise to superpower status over the past two decades, today exceeding the Soviet Union at its peak in virtually every dimension of national power. Thus, while it is increasingly unlikely that a single great power will come to achieve a dominant position in Europe or the Persian Gulf akin to that which the United States enjoys in the Western Hemisphere, the same cannot be said for East Asia. In this crucial region, China’s rapidly growing economic and military power makes it a serious candidate for regional hegemony in the decades ahead. As my ongoing research with John Mearsheimer shows, the ferocious transregional security competition that is likely to set in between two great powers that dominate their respective regions—the Western Hemisphere for the United States and East Asia for China—is bound to put increased duress on both powers’ ability to safeguard their territorial integrity, political autonomy, and economic prosperity over time. This is why the United States is right to fear the rise of China and should go to great lengths to prevent it from gaining hegemony over its neighborhood. 

China, for its part, should understand that it cannot credibly commit to refraining from exploiting its growing power at the expense of the United States and its allies. Beijing does not have to do much to create intense security fears among these countries. Even if China has no intention of aggressing against them for the time being, they obviously cannot trust that it will stay that way ten, twenty, or fifty years down the road. Therefore, out of essentially defensive motivations, the United States and its allies will continue to pursue forceful measures to correct the growing imbalance of regional power driven by China’s rise—measures that will invariably look quite threatening from China’s perspective. China is right to feel threatened in this way, even if its interlocutors are acting with defensive motivations. Its leaders should know that there is ultimately little China can do to fundamentally mollify the fears of its neighbors and the United States and that China will be searching hard for ways to bolster their security at its own expense.  

Thus, out of its own legitimate concerns, China will adopt riskier measures to shore up its own security, which will reinforce the fears harbored by the United States and its allies, driving them toward even more aggressive containment measures. Mutual feedback effects will make both sides adopt increasingly hawkish policies toward each other. The upshot is that the continued intensification of security competition with China is likely to be unavoidable during Trump’s second term in the Oval Office.  

Some may argue that the United States can relax about the threat posed by China since, being surrounded by formidable neighbors like Japan and South Korea, there is hardly any chance that China will come to dominate East Asia in the foreseeable future. Note, however, China is already closer today to being a dominant power in East Asia than it was, say, a decade ago. Indeed, Robert Ross observed as early as 2006 that a growing number of smaller states in East Asia are already moderating their foreign policies to avoid punishment from Beijing.  

In principle, the Indo-Pacific’s more substantial military powers—Japan, South Korea, and Australia—may be able to organize and aggregate their capabilities to check Chinese expansion. But this would be a daunting task given East Asia’s maritime geography and the collective-action problems exacerbated by the lack of a common front. This is why the second Trump administration should focus laser-like on leading an effective regional balancing coalition against China. Specifically, Washington must support the military efforts of these countries, deploy its military forces alongside theirs, and promote institutional arrangements to efficiently combine the capabilities generated in the region by the United States and its allies.  

Finally, there are past strategic blunders the United States should work to rectify in order to stifle China’s chances at becoming a peer competitor. In particular, the U.S. reluctance to promote a negotiated settlement with Russia in the ongoing Ukraine War—and its attendant tendency to court ever-increasing increments of dangerous escalation there—has arguably made it difficult for Moscow to behave as an East Asian great power that could help counterbalance China. Its deep involvement in Israel’s conflicts in the Middle East has further kept the United States from fully pivoting its strategic resources to East Asia. As such, although China may indeed find it difficult to rise to peer-competitor status vis-à-vis the United States anytime soon, the United States has indirectly contributed to raising its prospects through some of its strategic choices.  

All of this is to say that China’s chances at becoming the dominant power of East Asia will be conditioned, in good part, by how much effort the United States devotes to containing its rise. The Trump administration would do well to understand this and work to earnestly reorient U.S. grand strategy for the great-power competition in East Asia. 

Joshua Byun is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College.