{"source_url": "https://www.openforum.com.au", "url": "https://www.openforum.com.au/2020-in-the-asia-pacific/", "title": "2020 in the Asia Pacific - Openforum", "top_image": "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg", "meta_img": "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg", "images": ["https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/pacific-small.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/themes/first/images/1476098734_5294_-_Twitter_I-1.png", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/forum.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe-610x400.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/logo2-1.png", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/addtext_com_MDAwODA0MjAyMzQ.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/themes/first/images/fb.png", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/themes/first/images/1476098354_linkedin.png", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/themes/first/images/openforum-footerlogo.png", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/EU commission logo-150x106.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Space2.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/stretched.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Graeme-Dobell3.jpg", "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/KrvwJ1568248200.png"], "movies": [], "text": "Render the strategic outlook for 2020 into a core conundrum: How goes the new era of great-power competition? Is it to be security confrontation and economic decoupling?\n\nThe crystal ball is clouded by rivalry. China and the US are simultaneously close and apart, enmeshed and divided, locked together in contest while musing about trade and technology cleavage.\n\nThe region\u2014using either the Indo-Pacific or Asia\u2013Pacific label\u2014slides towards what Peter Jennings calls \u2018a riskier, more dangerous reality\u2019. Australia has ruefully accepted that managing great-power competition is now its \u2018first priority\u2019.\n\nTackling the conundrum is the purpose of the annual survey from the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP). With 20 country committees, plus the EU and Pacific Islands Forum, CSCAP ruminates from many angles in its 2020 regional security outlook.\n\nThe outlook\u2019s editor, Ron Huisken, writes that rivalry between the two mega-states is deepening international division and antagonism:\n\nThe present clash between the US and China is arrestingly sharp and deep not only because the stakes are so high and the parties so profoundly different\u2014most critically, perhaps, in terms of philosophies on governance\u2014but also because it has been brewing over several decades of increasingly intimate and complex interaction.\n\nA fundamental question, Huisken writes, is the tools and mindsets states can legitimately bring to the competition. The answer will determine if interdependence can be maintained or if there will be a significant degree of disengagement.\n\nSo, contest for sure, cleavage perhaps.\n\nReporting from the US, Siddharth Mohandas writes that the Trump administration has \u2018fundamentally shifted the US\u2013China relationship in a more competitive and even confrontational direction\u2019. The US policy focus on China extends far beyond trade to encompass economic, security, technology and ideological issues that \u2018are now increasingly at the centre of American foreign policy\u2019.\n\nIn Canberra, Australia\u2019s top diplomat foresees an era of enduring differences with China, calling it the \u2018new normal\u2019. The same phrase is used by Mohandas in his final sentence: \u2018The evidence of the past year is that instability is not a passing phenomenon but the new normal against which all regional capitals must plan.\u2019\n\nFrom China, Wu Xinbo writes that Beijing senses Washington\u2019s determination to reorient its \u2018policy towards a more competitive and confrontational stance\u2019, pushing China\u2019s \u2018trust towards the US to a historical low\u2019. Wu judges that the relationship has gone from cool to freezing:\n\nThe Asia\u2013Pacific has entered a period of profound changes set off by shifts in the power balance as well by adjustments of strategy and policy settings by regional players. Managing major power competition and dealing with hot spot issues top the regional security agenda, while Sino-US interactions hold the key.\n\nWu says Beijing and Washington must delineate the boundary of their intensifying competition:\n\nRobust economic ties benefiting both countries should \u2018not be decoupled or seriously downgraded\u2019. Economic interdependence doesn\u2019t prevent contention (\u2018actually close economic ties tend to be a major source of frictions\u2019) but can be a buffer by raising the cost of conflict.\n\nBoth parties need to exercise strategic self-restraint. They should \u2018avoid drawing lines and encouraging members of the region to split into rival camps, otherwise the economically most dynamic region will gradually lose its momentum for growth and integration\u2019.\n\nThe most urgent issue for China\u2013US security relations is crisis avoidance and management. For that, \u2018good communication at the strategic level and effective management at the tactical level are indispensable\u2019.\n\nFrom Japan, Yoshihide Soeya writes that one benefit of the Trump presidency has been to allow Japan and China to sweep \u2018contentious and awkward\u2019 issues under the carpet:\n\nThis is because they have bigger tensions and issues with the United States, mostly related to economic and trade negotiations. Since these frictions are not likely to be eased anytime soon, the momentum of improvement in relations between Japan and China is also likely to be sustained for some time to come.\n\nSoutheast Asia offers variations on the familiar themes of ASEAN centrality and not having to choose sides in the battle of the giants.\n\nSingapore\u2019s William Choong gives a nuanced account of \u2018the blessedness of (not) making a choice\u2019. ASEAN members, he writes, want to be equidistant between China and the US, to \u2018avoid stark choices\u2019 in the geopolitical joust. Pressure builds, however, as that equidistant space shrinks. Singapore finds itself walking a \u2018narrowing plank\u2019 or \u2018narrowing tightrope\u2019.\n\nThe readout from Laos, from Sulathin Thiladej, is that the decline of the US and the rise of China are eroding or undermining ASEAN\u2019s centrality and coherence:\n\nASEAN, as a driver for cooperation in the Asia Pacific, is losing momentum as the region\u2019s centre of gravity shifts from Southeast Asia to China. China\u2019s rise has unsettling consequences for ASEAN centrality, creating new tensions and uncertainties that threaten to break ASEAN\u2019s solidarity and coherence.\n\nVietnam\u2019s Le Dinh Tinh says the US\u2013China relationship has five levels, running from cooperation to adversary. The expanding competition between the world\u2019s two greatest economies has reached level-four intensity (rivalry):\n\nThe notion that these great powers are on a collision course has been circulated in the policy communities of both countries. Rather than greater caution, however, we have seen the two sides toughen their positions and resort to measures hitherto unthinkable.\n\nThe view from Australia, from the Australian National University\u2019s Brendan Taylor, says Canberra\u2019s recent bout of \u2018strategic anxiety\u2019 awakens old arguments about whether Australia can find its security with Asia rather than from Asia. His chapter begins with the title of a book written 40 years ago by the Oz diplomat, Alan Renouf, The frightened country, describing an anxious nation that saw more dangers than opportunities in Asia.\n\nDonald Trump\u2019s alliance antipathy \u2018feeds a deep Australian fear of abandonment\u2019, Taylor writes, and Australia\u2019s security outlook is becoming \u2018much darker and apprehensive\u2019.\n\nThe sense of apprehension is one outlook shared by the whole region. Great-power contest is here, hauling into view the scenario of economic and technological decoupling.\n\nThis article was published by The Strategist.", "keywords": [], "meta_keywords": [""], "tags": ["asia-pacific"], "authors": ["Graeme Dobell"], "publish_date": "Wed Jan  1 22:21:22 2020", "summary": "", "article_html": "", "meta_description": "", "meta_lang": "en", "meta_favicon": "", "meta_data": {"viewport": "width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1", "og": {"locale": "en_GB", "type": "article", "title": "2020 in the Asia Pacific - Openforum", "description": "Pundits across the region have different views about the new year\u2019s prospects for the Asia-Pacific, but all agree that great changes are afoot, with growing dangers to the established international order.", "url": "https://www.openforum.com.au/2020-in-the-asia-pacific/", "site_name": "Openforum", "updated_time": "2020-01-02T23:00:05+00:00", "image": {"identifier": "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg", "secure_url": "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg", "width": 799, "height": 533}}, "article": {"tag": "asia-pacific", "section": "Pacific", "published_time": "2020-01-01T22:21:22+00:00", "modified_time": "2020-01-02T23:00:05+00:00"}, "twitter": {"card": "summary", "description": "Pundits across the region have different views about the new year\u2019s prospects for the Asia-Pacific, but all agree that great changes are afoot, with growing dangers to the established international order.", "title": "2020 in the Asia Pacific - Openforum", "image": "https://www.openforum.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/globe.jpg"}, "generator": "WordPress 4.9.13"}, "canonical_link": "https://www.openforum.com.au/2020-in-the-asia-pacific/"}