Category: Blog

Examining domestic foreign policy debates within rising powers provides insights into how these countries will behave as they rise. Five important rising powers in the critical Asian and Eurasian regions today are China, Japan, India, Iran and Russia. An international research team under the direction of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, is in the process of analyzing the foreign policy debates and schools of thought within these countries. This research is part of the Sigur Center’s project on “Worldviews of Aspiring Powers” sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, and led by Sigur faculty members Henry R. Nau and Deepa Ollapally.

This Policy Brief draws from the presentations of the research team at a project conference held in Beijing, China in May 2010. It examines the attitude of the five rising powers toward hard power, specifically economic power and military power. There is a great deal of diversity within and between these five countries regarding the emphasis placed on these types of power. The following discussion offers a look at some of these differences and similarities.

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By Dawn Murphy, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, The George Washington University

The first Confucius Institute (CI) opened its doors in Seoul, South Korea on November 24, 2004. Since then, the number of these Chinese cultural outposts has increased rapidly, with the Chinese government opening approximately two CIs per week throughout the world. To date, over 500 CIs operate in 87 countries across the globe. In the United States and other countries where CIs operate, the explosive growth of CIs gives rise to questions regarding their purpose and function. Experts are debating the problems encountered by CIs and ask whether CIs represent the expansion of China’s soft power. In this Commentary, I examine the function and purpose of CIs and argue that, despite their rapid worldwide growth and popularity, CIs suffer from a host of international obstacles as well as from criticism within China. Furthermore, CIs play a limited role as extensions of China’s soft power because they fail to account for contemporary aspects of Chinese culture.

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By Ren Zhe, Hokkaido University, Japan

Among the most contested questions in Indian foreign policy today are those related to the extent and type of power that India should use to project itself internationally. Should India rely on military, economic or ideational power? How should Indian policymakers make trade-offs between military, economic and normative objectives? What mechanisms does India prefer for global leadership?

These are some of the questions that are addressed in this Policy Brief based on a series of seminars held in Delhi during January 2010. The seminars are part of the Worldviews of Aspiring Powers project, undertaken by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. The Brief outlines India’s foreign policy debates, emphasizes the limits of those debates, and begins to explain why the debates are limited. This work will lead to major conference in Washington DC in 2011, and the subsequent publication of a book.

Professor Rajesh Rajagopalan of Jawaharlal Nehru University and Professor Deepa Ollapally of The George Washington University presented papers on hard power and economic policymaking respectively, followed by commentary from discussants and the audience. The seminars were attended by a number of prominent academics, analysts, government and military officials, and journalists.

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By Nikola Mirilovic, Research Associate, Sigur Center for Asian Studies, The George Washington University

The China–ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) became operational on January 1, 2010. CAFTA encompasses a population of 1.9 billion people, about one-third of the world’s total, and a combined gross national income of $6 trillion, about one-ninth of the world’s total. It represents the third largest free trade area in the world after the European Union and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) in terms of aggregate economic size and the largest free trade area among developing economies.

Key Points

• CAFTA is the largest free trade area among developing countries.
• CAFTA encompasses trade, services, and investment.
• CAFTA represents China’s first regional economic integration arrangement across countries.
• CAFTA has been motivated by trade diversification for China and for ASEAN.
• There are fears in ASEAN countries of competition from China.
• China provides investment funds and lending facilities to fortify the free trade area.

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By Jiawen Yang, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University

In January 2010 India’s Free Trade Agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) became operational with Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. India had signed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in goods with ASEAN in August 2009. The FTA provides for the elimination of tariffs on about 80 percent of the traded goods by 2016. India has specified a ‘negative list’ of items to be excluded from the list of tariff concessions and a ‘sensitive list’ for which tariffs will be reduced to 5 per cent. For ‘special products’ like crude and refined palm oil, tea, coffee, and pepper, tariffs will be brought down to levels between 37.5 to 50 per cent by 2019. The FTA also provides for bilateral safeguards against a sudden surge of imports.

Key Points

• Regional and bilateral deals are increasingly important for New Delhi
• ASEAN will be a vital hub for India’s regional integration
• India is playing catch-up with China in ASEAN
• Modest export gains for India are balanced against expectations of gains from future services and investment agreement
• Globally, India ranks among the top ten service exporting nations; ASEAN is among the largest services importers
• The Indian government has been slow to take up farmers’ domestic concerns
• The most important gains in India’s image are at the regional level

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By Amita Batra, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Why have Washington and Tokyo racheted up the issue of relocating the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Okinawa into a high-stakes faceoff that could corrode and even irreparably damage the US-Japan alliance?

From the US perspective, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is walking away from a painstakingly negotiated deal formally approved by the Diet in May 2009 when the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was still in power. That agreement would restructure US military bases in Japan, relocate the marine base at Futenma on Okinawa to Henoko on Okinawa, and shift a large portion of the US Marine presence from Okinawa to Guam, thereby reducing the burden on Okinawans. The US is exasperated by Hatoyama’s weak leadership and by the contradictory messages coming from his cabinet.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during his October 2009 visit to Tokyo veered from customary diplomatic niceties by publicly lecturing Tokyo that there was no alternative to the 2006 realignment plan and that “it is time to move on.” Gates snubbed his hosts by declining a dinner invitation from Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa, saying he had to prepare for a trip to meet with NATO. The message: Gates had more important tasks than massaging the feelings of Japan’s new government.

The Pentagon may have also wanted to mobilize Japanese domestic pressure on Hatoyama. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) did not win the August 2009 election due to its stance on Okinawa bases. Signs that the party was mishandling relations with the US could alarm the media and public enough to compel acceptance of the existing plan. The same calculation probably motivated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to summon Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki to her office on a day when a snowstorm closed the rest of Washington. Clinton demonstrated the absence of daylight between State and Defense.

Compounding the problem are US suspicions about the DPJ’s general foreign policy orientation. Despite his repeated statements that the alliance with the US will remain the cornerstone of Japan’s foreign policy, Hatoyama has provoked consternation in Washington by criticizing “U.S.-led [economic] globalization” in a pre-election magazine essay, by terminating Japan’s naval refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of the military campaign in Afghanistan, and, in his summit meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao, proposing a half-baked concept of an East Asian community without including the US. Washington worries that the DPJ may be reorienting Japan toward East Asia at the expense of the US. DPJ Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa’s high-profile visit to China in December accompanied by a massive delegation including 143 DPJ Diet members only reinforced US concerns. In sharp contrast to his pro-active China diplomacy, Ozawa appears reluctant to engage US officials (partly because he is riled that they ignored him during his years in the opposition.)

For nearly 15 years, the two largest economies on Earth and two of the world’s top military powers have spent much of their alliance management time discussing the fate of one airfield, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Station on the island of Okinawa.

This is a poor preoccupation for the allies given the other, huge issues that confront the two countries – dealing with nuclear North Korea, the rise of China, the global problem of Islamic extremism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many other matters such as recovery from the global recession and mitigation of the global warming threat. It is time to move beyond it.

Japan’s new leader, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, has just reopened the issue when it appeared settled. That is his prerogative, and there are military alternatives for the United States – but any such decision should not be made lightly and would oblige Japan to find new and bold ways to contribute more to the alliance as well as global security.

In 2006, Tokyo and Washington finally agreed to move Futenma to a less populated, northern area of the main Okinawan Island. The current facility’s location in the heart of Ginowan City brings with it problems of noise, risk of accidents and interference with local economic development strategies.

But Mr. Hatoyama is not sure he wants to bless a deal put together by the Liberal Democratic Party that his upstart Democratic Party finally managed to defeat in an election this past summer. At a substantive level, members of his governing coalition feel the small island is asked to do too much for the alliance, hosting more than half of all U.S. military personnel in Japan.

Mr. Hatoyama’s reluctance pits him against not only the LDP, but the Japanese bureaucrats who want to implement the relocation plan and the United States – which has said its entire willingness to relocate half of its Marines from Okinawa to Guam is contingent on Mr. Hatoyama accepting what other parties saw as a done deal.

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Given President Barack Obama’s Southeast Asian ties and his visit to Asia, Amitav Acharya, in a lecture at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, discussed Southeast Asian perspectives of Obama. His analysis incorporates discussions from both official and non-official sectors of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. More specifically, Acharya examines two questions:

1. How do Southeast Asians view Obama as a person and as a president?
2. How has Obama’s election been viewed; how has it affected domestic politics in Southeast Asia?

Read more here.