Incredibly, territorial disputes between China and its neighbors over uninhabited islands threaten to become a flashpoint threatening peace in East Asia. While tensions have since cooled a bit, the Economist recently warned that "China and Japan are sliding towards war." Last August, large, angry, and violent protests broke out in dozens of Chinese cities against a decision by the Japanese government to buy several of the disputed islands (called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China) from a Japanese private citizen. Again this month, China sortied aircraft and ships near the islands, and Japan scrambled fighters in response.

Moreover, this is not China's only maritime territorial dispute.  In the South China Sea, China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam pursue conflicting claims among the uninhabited shoals, islets, and atolls comprising Scarborough Shoal and the Paracel and Spratly Islands (including Mishief Reef). This is not a bloodless issue. In 1988, more than 70 Vietnamese sailors died in a naval clash with China near Johnson South Reef. Since then, China and the ASEAN states issued a 2002 joint declaration pledging not to use force to resolve their disputes and to avoid actions that would escalate them. However, no progress has been made toward settling the underlying disagreements, and the declaration was violated almost immediately.

Because of the United States's bilateral defense treaties with Japan and the Philippines, we could be drawn into a conflict we do not seek. Moreover, we have an enormous stake in continued economic growth and prosperity in East Asia, which depends on peace. 

What is behind the strong passions surrounding groups of uninhibited rocks whose total land mass is less than five square miles? Fishing rights are at stake -- and a cod war is not unprecedented -- but it would hardly seem worth the risk between states whose annual trade stands at three quarters of a trillion dollars.

Oil and gas wealth is a stronger motivation. No one yet knows the extent of the resources buried beneath the East and South China Seas (in part because their ownership remains in dispute), but if Europe's North Sea serves as a fair precedent, they could be worth trillions of dollars. 

Finally, nationalism compounds the problem. Unlike Europe, in East Asia, the wounds of World War II remain unhealed. Diplomatic rows or even riots are periodically caused by disputes over history text books or visits by politicians to shrines for dead military leaders.  Hence, the explosive anger last autumn causing protestors to attack Japanese cars and sushi restaurants, although they were owned by fellow Chinese citizens. 

How to head off a potentially catastrophic confrontation?  Five ideas will help.

First, all states must recognize that no single state can impose a solution, and every state exercises effective veto over exploitation of energy resources. A deep water oil rig can cost up to $600 million, yet can be sunk by a $20 million patrol boat. No commercial oil company, investor, or insurer would risk such a costly and vulnerable piece of equipment in a contested region where hostilities might erupt. Thus, East Asian nations effectively have a choice between continuing to wrangle over natural resources with no production, or reaching an agreement to divide the resources and jointly benefit from them. 

Second, all states in the region would do well to bear in mind that despite occasional nationalistic rhetoric, this is an economic question. These barren islands are not like the   West Bank or the Balkans, where centuries of human history and intermingled populations complicate the division of land. No country's national heritage is at stake in this question -- only economic benefits that cannot be exploited in the absence of an agreement. Therefore, all governments would do well to tone down their rhetoric about national rights and core interests in discussing the disputed maritime territories. Inflaming nationalist tendencies among citizens will make solving the problem more difficult, not less so.

Third, the disputants should accept that these matters cannot be settled solely by legal arguments or in court. Claims and counterclaims, along with contradictory old maps and sea charts, abound. Asserting that one interpretation of proper title to a territory is "indisputable" is pointless when other nations claim an equally "indisputable" title. Disagreements among nation states -- except in narrowly defined areas in which they offer prior agreement to accept external dispute resolution, e.g. the World Trade Organization -- are political matters and must be resolved by diplomacy and agreement, though perhaps aided by legal tools. 

Fourth, in contemplating ways to resolve this matter, the states involved should look to earlier precedents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands used a combination of a ruling by the International Court of Justice and subsequent negotiations to resolve conflicting claims to North Sea continental shelf resources. The parties entered the negotiations realizing that no single state could claim the lion's share of the benefits, and that resolving the matter to allow oil exploration to move ahead was in all parties' interests. 

Harvard Professor Richard N. Cooper, observes that the neutral zone shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia may also serve as a precedent for resolving the East Asia maritime territorial disputes. Without resolving their disputed border, the two countries agreed to share the wealth from oil produced in the zone, which was created in 1922. Today, over 650,000 barrels per day are pumped from the region to both countries' great benefit.

Fifth, the countries of East Asia should begin to heal the wounds of World War II. For example, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States could agree on principles to guide their interaction, including, among other things, peaceful resolution of territorial disputes and joint development and management of regional resources (such as fisheries), and follow up with separate annual meetings of foreign, economic, and defense ministers to implement them.

Military conflict over the maritime territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas would be a senseless waste. China may see a tactical advantage in waiting to address these issues as its economic and military power grows, but allowing the disputes to fester risks the outbreak of war and squanders the opportunity to develop potentially rich natural resources. It also prevents nations in the region from working effectively together to solve other pressing problems. The bright prospects for peace and prosperity in East Asia should not be allowed to founder on Mischief Reef.

Peter Bergen has a new piece up on CNN's website that argues the United States can declare victory over al Qaeda and wind down the war against the group. Reading through his article, I found several places where I profoundly disagreed with his analysis and therefore with his overall conclusion that al Qaeda has been defeated.

First, Bergen begins with a false analogy by arguing that the current war is nothing like World War II, and that therefore there can be no culminating peace as was signed between the Allies and Nazi Germany. This argument implies that a definitive victory over al Qaeda, one on the model and scale of the victory over the Nazis, is impossible. The current war is indeed nothing like WWII -- it's an irregular conflict being fought against an insurgent group, while WWII (for the most part), was a regular conflict fought against recognizable nation-states. It might therefore be impossible to sign a peace treaty on the decks of a battleship when this war ends, but it is entirely possible to win irregular wars and to win them as definitively and recognizably as WWII was won, as the examples of multiple conflicts throughout the twentieth century show. For instance, from 1898-1954, the U.S. absolutely defeated three separate insurgencies in the Philippines, including a nationalist insurgency, an insurgency by local Muslims, and a communist insurgency. The British took on and repeatedly defeated insurgencies (the Boers, the Malay communists, and the Kenyan Mau-Mau, for instance), and it is actually difficult to find, beyond the Sandinistas and Castro's group, an insurgency that has succeeded in Latin America.

Second, Bergen argues that the war against al Qaeda is not an "essential challenge" to the U.S. and thus can be safely relegated to some level of effort short of war. It is true that the death of 3,000 Americans in the first attack on the U.S. homeland since WWII was not an existential threat to the U.S., nor have the pinpricks that al Qaeda has managed since 9-11 posed a serious challenge to the continued existence of the United States. On the other hand, this assessment fails to take into consideration the global growth of al Qaeda, its absorption of every other major jihadist group on the planet, and its ability to take and control territory throughout the Muslim-majority world. While I have heard some deride this spread as only threatening the 'garden-spots' of the world, we need to remind ourselves that it was from just this sort of uncontrolled territory that 9-11 was carried out, and once the 'garden-spots' are taken, our vital lines of communications and territories that we (apparently) care more about will be threatened. In addition, I would note that it has only been through our wartime footing that we have managed to keep al Qaeda in even this loose net. If we downgrade our effort, al Qaeda will be able to grow even faster and push its control even further.

Third and fourth, the article goes on to conclude that it is possible to "declare victory" and move on because 1) al Qaeda's offensive capabilities are "puny" and 2) U.S. defenses are strong. The first of these assessments is based on an assumption about al Qaeda that is unwarranted; that is, that al Qaeda's main objective and goal is to attack the United States. The recent release of documents from Abbottabad make it clear that attacking the United States was (and is) but the first step in a staged strategic plan, a plan that begins by attriting the United States, and weakening it so much that the United States will be forced out of all Muslim-majority countries. The next stage of al Qaeda's strategic plan is to take over and control territory, declaring "emirates" that will be able to spread safely because the United States will be too weak to intervene. This means that the affiliates are not just dangerous when they attack the United States (which Bergen implies in his article), but are a threat to our security when they overthrow local governments and set up local emirates that have greater, global ambitions. I would also note that while polling data is important for understanding how well we are doing in our fight against al Qaeda -- and here the indications are positive -- it is a fact that insurgencies need only a tiny percentage of active support in order to be self-sustaining (usually defined as 5 percent of the populace). Al Qaeda would like the consent of the governed, but they are perfectly happy to violently enforce obedience to their rule when necessary. And by the way: No al Qaeda affiliate or partner (including the Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, or the Shabaab) has been deposed from power by an uprising of the local population alone. They have needed outside intervention in order to expel the insurgents, even when the people have hated al Qaeda's often brutal rule.

On Bergen's second point, I agree that U.S. defenses are strong, but disagree profoundly with the current mission of Special Operation Forces as the right method to defeat al Qaeda. This counter-terrorism mission is based on killing al Qaeda members, i.e. attrition, a strategy that assumes that al Qaeda is still a terrorist group as it was in the 1990s. This is simply not true. Even then, the group's leadership aspired to bigger things, and al Qaeda has now succeeded in becoming an insurgent group, one that takes and holds territory, recruits far more soldiers than we can kill, sets up shadow governance and attempts to overthrow governments around the Muslim-majority world. While attrition can succeed as a strategy against terrorist groups (see i.e. the Spanish and French fight against ETA), it is absolutely counterproductive against an insurgency, which simply uses the killings to recruit more members and to fuel its propaganda.

Fifth, some part of Bergen's declaration of victory is based on wishful thinking. He argues, for instance, that killing or capturing AQAP's bomb-maker will 'likely' cause the threat from AQAP to recede. This assumes that 1) the bomb-maker never trained replacements and 2) that AQAP is incapable of thinking up other ways to attack us. It also ignores the real threat from AQAP if it manages to overthrow the government in Sana'a and push on into Saudi Arabia.

Finally, the last sentence of his article is a straw man. The objective of the Allied war on the Nazis was the same as every other regular war: To break the enemy's will to resist. It was simply not necessary to kill every Nazi in order to achieve this objective. The objective of irregular wars is rather different, however: to secure the population by clearing out the insurgents; then holding the territory through persistent presence; and finally creating the political conditions necessary to prevent any further appeal by the remaining insurgents. In this view, winning against al Qaeda does not depend on body counts, but rather would look very much like victories against other insurgents: the spreading of security for populations in Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and elsewhere; the prevention of a return of al-Qaeda to these cleared areas; and the empowerment of legitimate governments that can control and police their own territories. By these standards, we have not yet defeated al Qaeda; in fact, beyond Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, we have hardly engaged the enemy at all.

President Obama flew west, met with Asia-Pacific leaders, and trumpeted his intention to strike a high-standards trade deal with other committed trading partners in the region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

That paragraph could describe either this last weekend or Nov. 2009, when the president first revived the TPP (it was initially launched in Sept. 2008 under the Bush administration and set aside by the new Obama team). Perhaps that's why the story about the weekend's APEC leaders' gathering in Hawaii was buried in the inner pages of the Washington Post and failed to make the front page of the New York Times. The papers may have learned, with this president, to duly note the statements of grand intentions, but to save the gaudy headlines for actual accomplishments.

There has been some movement over the last two years, of course. The nine nations currently involved in the TPP negotiations have been meeting and hammering out a "framework" for the agreement. The Obama administration, over that time, moved from a tentative "intent to engage in discussions" to a full-fledged embrace of the TPP. New countries are now clamoring to join in the negotiations.

But enormous obstacles remain:

• Core structural issues of the TPP remain undecided. Will the TPP be a ragged quilt of existing agreements stitched together with new patches? Or will it be a new seamless fabric designed to cover existing and future participants? If the latter, it offers two great virtues: simplicity for businesses trying to trade across the region, and a clear high standard that any newcomers will have to meet (think China). But the United States has held out for the former. It already has FTAs with a number of the TPP participants and the idea of refighting all of those market-access battles is daunting for an administration that took almost three years to pass three already-completed FTAs.
• Will new members make significant commitments? Reports from APEC that Canada and Mexico want to follow in Japan's footsteps as new applicants to the TPP were described as a coup for President Obama. Perhaps. It certainly would heighten the economic significance of the TPP, if and when it is concluded. But the new entrants will make an already elusive agreement even more difficult to reach. Japan is more than reluctant to liberalize its agricultural sector. New Zealand has previously objected to Canada's illiberal approach to dairy imports. It is not hard to imagine an extreme in which one has a very large number of participants who engage in endless talks that never conclude (this has recently been known as "Doha" in the WTO context).
  Read on

The past two months have witnessed a series of revelations regarding China's growing military power. In December 2010, Admiral Robert Willard, Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, declared that the aircraft carrier-killing DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile had achieved initial operating capability. Last month, photographs and video of the J-20 fifth-generation stealth aircraft, a plane considerably more advanced than observers expected of China, appeared on the internet.

On Monday, Ross Babbage, the founder of Australia's respected think tank, the Kokoda Foundation, issued a monograph, Australia's Strategic Edge in 2030 that examined the changing military balance in the Western Pacific and its implications for Australia. It is a report that demands the attention of policy makers in Washington.

Babbage argued that China's aggressive military modernization is rapidly undermining the pillars that have supported American presence in the Western Pacific for more than half a century. As he puts it, "China is for the first time close to achieving a military capability to deny United States and allied forces access to much of the Western Pacific rim." He catalogues China's anti-access efforts, which include cruise and ballistic missiles that can attack ships and fixed targets; a massive investment in cyber-warfare capabilities, with reports of tens of thousands of Chinese cyber intrusions daily; new classes of both nuclear and conventionally powered submarines; a substantial increase in the Chinese nuclear stockpile; a huge investment in space warfare; and a massive increase in fighter bomber and other airborne strike capabilities.

Babbage argued that Australia will need to take drastic action in order to protect its interests in a region increasingly dominated by China. These include acquiring a fleet of 12 nuclear-powered attack submarines (the report hinted at leasing or purchasing Virginia-class SSNs from the United States), developing conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles, increasing Australia's investment in cyber warfare, and hosting American forces on Australian soil.

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Australian voters will cast their ballots Saturday to choose potentially their third Prime Minister in nine weeks. Still in a post-putsch daze following Prime Minister Gillard's "et tu, Julia?" ouster of Kevin Rudd in June, the electorate will now decide between either rewarding Gillard and the Labour Party's palace coup with a full term, or starting afresh by choosing the colorful Tony Abbott and a Liberal Party government.

Most polls show an essentially deadlocked race, with the added wild card of the third party Greens potentially securing enough votes to force a hung parliament or coalition government.  Absent a clear sign from voter surveys, some prognosticators have looked for other sources of insight, such as Harry the Psychic crocodile who picked a Gillard victory. The fact that the purportedly clairvoyant reptile's method of "picking" involves eating a poultry carcass attached to a photo of the candidate's face is decidedly not confidence-inducing. Put it this way -- it is rarely a good thing for a political campaign to be represented by a dead chicken. Especially a dead chicken devoured by a crocodile.

One of the paradoxes of the tight campaign is that conditions in Australia overall are quite good, a fact which would normally hand the ruling government a comfortable victory. Australia has weathered the global economic crisis well, technically avoiding recession by suffering only a single quarter of GDP contraction, with unemployment holding at 5.3%. While some credit goes to the banking sector's avoidance of toxic debt and an adept government stimulus package, Australia's resilient foundations are rooted in the remarkable economic boom and fiscal stability achieved under former Prime Minister John Howard, which contributed to Australia's No. 1 ranking in the 2008 Legatum Prosperity Index.

On economic issues, the electorate's increasingly fond memories of the Howard government likely account for some of the Liberal Party's resurgent appeal. And voter concerns over a return to budget deficits under Labour are real, as are lingering resentments over Rudd's disastrous campaign to push a 40 percent "super-profits tax" targeted at the Australian mining industry, which had been a major driver of the past decade of growth.

Foreign policy issues have played almost no role in the campaign. Nevertheless, nations in the region, and especially the United States, have a substantial stake in the outcome. Australia is one of America's strongest and longest-standing allies, the only nation to have fought alongside the United States in every war of the past century. U.S.-Australia relations under the Obama administration have been cordial though not particularly robust -- and certainly not helped by President Obama's two cancelled visits. In an interview this week with the Diplomat, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer made the telling comment that "the Obama administration has placed less emphasis on alliances and allies. This means that Australia by its very nature has a lower profile in Washington than we had during the Bush administration, particularly during the Howard years."

However, in recent months the Obama administration has substantially improved its strategic posture in the Asia-Pacific. From the joint naval exercises with South Korea, to stabilizing relations with Japan, to upgrading ties with Vietnam, to serving notice that the United States does not accept China's hegemonic assertions in the South China Sea, the administration seems to have found a new compass in the region. While new partnerships with nations such as India and Indonesia will feature in a successful Asia strategy, America's existing alliances in the region will still serve as the foundation.  

Here is where the U.S.-Australia relationship is indispensable. Both nations share interests and values, and often a common perspective on pressing regional and global issues -- whether the war against jihadist terrorism, China's growing assertiveness (even using Fiji -- yes, Fiji -- as a proxy), democracy and human rights promotion, maritime security, free trade, or energy security. America has no stronger ally in the region. Whatever the outcome of tomorrow's elections, they represent an opportunity for the Obama administration to reinvigorate ties with this enduring alliance partner.

By Christian Brose

Australia has released a pretty far-reaching and extraordinary defense white paper that is getting a lot of attention, and raising a lot of questions about the future of great power politics in the Pacific. Here is Andrew Schearer writing today in the Wall Street Journal Asia:

Asia has long looked to the United States to underwrite two critical public goods: free trade and security. Now there is anxiety in the region about its continuing willingness and ability to so, and governments are looking for ways to adapt. For the latest example, look no further than Australia's defense policy paper, released on Saturday.

Westhawk was on top of this early (as always). Here is his rundown of what Canberra has committed itself to:

1) Doubling Australia's submarine fleet with next-generation submarines,

2) Replacing Australia's surface combatants with new-generation warships,

3) Expanding Australia's amphibious lift capacity,

4) Purchasing 1,100 protected combat vehicles of various types for the Army,

5) Replacing the Army's helicopter fleet with latest-generation aircraft,

6) Improving the training and equipping of Australia's special operations forces,

7) Acquiring 100 F-35 fifth-generation strike-fighter aircraft,

8) Upgrading and expanding airlift, air early warning, and air refueling capabilities,

9) Acquiring long-range strategic strike land-attack cruise missile inventories,

10) Upgrading ISR capabilities across the force,

11) Acquiring cyber and electronic warfare capabilities,

12) Acquiring independent space mission assurance capabilities,

13) Exploring the development of missile defense capabilities to defend troops in field and Australia's population and key infrastructure.

Not too shabby. And this from the government of Mandarin-speaking, left-wing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, no imperialist war-monger he.

Schearer, in his Journal piece, is troubled by this, and I think he anticipates the reaction of some U.S. conservatives:

[I]t's clear that if the Obama administration does not show it is serious about maintaining the U.S. military presence in Asia, Australia may end up with no choice but to get serious about strengthening its military defenses, even beyond what is in the policy paper. "Smart power" has its place, but U.S. allies in Asia would feel more secure if America backed reassuring rhetoric with real military muscle.

But why is it a bad thing for our allies to strengthen their defenses? Absent some major surprise, the relative decline of U.S. power seems like a pretty sturdy long-term trend, and we shouldn't do anything to catalyze it further than recent events may have already -- say, by assuming that future conflicts will necessarly look like our present ones or that the old axiom of power abhorring vacuums won't apply to new great powers. That said, I see the Australian white paper as a reason to be optimistic that America's relative decline can be managed in a smart way that leaves us in a good strategic position. Westhawk puts his finger on one reason why:

If the Australian defense ministry can reach these conclusions, why shouldn't the Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Indian, and Russian defense ministries also formulate these same planning assumptions?.... The greatest loser from such a chain reaction would be China.

I'd go even further. The United States should want the Indians, and the Japanese, and the South Koreans, and the Indonesians to reach the same conclusions. We should actively encourage them to reach the same conclusions. And that goes for our NATO allies as well. (The Russians, not so much.) We should work to get more and more of America's like-minded allies investing in the capabilities to shoulder a greater share of our collective defense. And to that end, the perception that the "unipolar moment" is passing can actually play in our favor, as will the fact that China's "peaceful rise" remains an open question at best.

This is not an argument for America to retrench -- to send the signal to our partners that they are free-riders who need to be weened off a dependence on U.S. power. To the contrary, it's a reason to do even more with our Pacific allies and to expand our joint capabilities. The rise of potentially aggressive great powers creates a natural incentive for their wary neighbors to provide more for their own defense, and I think we actually further that trend by showing a greater resolve to do so ourselves.

Less clear is whether what is true for Australia (and perhaps other Asian powers) will also be true for, say, Europe. But that's a whole other problem.