WASHINGTON– China’s announcement of a more than 11 percent increase in declared military spending — following two full decades of double-digit increases — raises several uncomfortable questions for Asia and the West. It is natural for a rising power like China to develop capabilities to defend its expanding array of interests. On the other hand, China’s ascent has been made possible by a benign security environment that well served China’s goal of “peaceful development.” China’s growing military capabilities now threaten to upset that order in ways that, ironically, could complicate China’s security environment at the same time as slowing economic growth intensifies its internal challenges.

China’s defense spending — now officially $106 billion but estimated by the Pentagon and independent researchers to be more than $160 billion — is on track to exceed that of all its Asian neighbors combined within a few years. This is particularly striking in light of a wider Asian arms race: India is the world’s largest arms importer, Japan is ending its ban on military exports, and Southeast Asian states are procuring submarines and other sophisticated capabilities. Asian countries now spend more on their militaries than do the nations of Europe. And unlike in Europe, where nations are allied in a zone of peace, Asia is a competitive arena where disputes over territory and history are alive with danger.

However, it is less the size of China’s defense budget than its composition that alarms so many beyond its borders. Chinese military spending privileges the navy, air force, and strategic nuclear force — instruments of advanced power projection — rather than traditional defensive capabilities. What exactly does China seek to do with its large and growing fleet of advanced attack submarines, a blue-water navy including an aircraft carrier, and stealth attack aircraft? No Chinese leader has yet explained how these capabilities contribute to China’s peaceful rise. If China’s diplomatic strategy has been to reassure its neighbors, its military acquisitions have done precisely the opposite.

These military capabilities also raise eyebrows because some expressly target unique U.S. vulnerabilities — including the U.S. military’s reliance on information dominance and aircraft carrier battle groups. China’s development of anti-satellite weaponry is designed to “blind” U.S. fighting forces in the event of conflict. China’s acquisition of “carrier-killing” ballistic missiles promises to have a deterrent effect on the U.S. Navy, whose plans for the defense of Taiwan and other allies hinge on carrier access to Western Pacific waters now in China’s target zone.

Aggravating these concerns over Chinese power projection and anti-access capabilities has been China’s recent assertiveness towards its neighbors. China’s sharp-elbowed claims to the entire South China Sea — an international waterway through which one-third of world trade flows — have mirrored Beijing’s revisionist claims to settled Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh. China’s 2010 ban on exports to Japan of rare-earth minerals following a clash at sea in Japanese waters was the first time China has used its economic power as a political weapon, a lesson to those who believed that the business of China was business.

Meanwhile, U.S. military officers worry that they have almost no contact with uniformed Chinese counterparts. A minor incident in international airspace or waters could turn into a military conflagration due to a lack of open communication channels. The opaque nature of Chinese decision-making, questions about civilian control over the military, and the growing role of the People’s Liberation Army in shaping Chinese foreign policy have further inflamed regional insecurities.

Ironically, China’s best efforts to increase its security by developing powerful military capabilities and asserting its interests more vigorously may only render its leaders more insecure. Other Asian countries are moving closer to the United States, and each other, to balance growing Chinese power. President Barack Obama is reorienting the United States’ military posture away from Europe and the Middle East in ways that reinforce, rather than diminish, the U.S. leadership role in Asia. Resentment of the uses and abuses of Chinese power has also spilled over into the economic realm: Western businesses are no longer the cheerleaders for China they once were as concerns over economic piracy, currency manipulation, forced technology transfer, and the role of the state in the Chinese economy come to the fore.

No matter how much they spend on defense, or to what end, China’s leaders have a deeper reason to worry. Economic growth is slowing; as the World Bank and others have argued, China must undergo an economic transition to a more sustainable development model that will necessarily require political reform. This will change the nature of the relationship between China’s authoritarian regime and its people. Despite the recent military budget increase, China this year will still spend more on internal security than on national defense. It makes one wonder: who do Chinese leaders believe is the real danger?

Daniel Twining is Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington DC.   

Image by Luther Bailey.

WASHINGTON — The discovery that Osama bin Laden had been sheltered for years within sight of core Pakistani military and security installations has refocused attention on the existential questions of both Pakistan itself and its relationship to the transatlantic alliance.

Is Pakistan an ally or an adversary of the West?
The answer, as with so much in Pakistan, is ambiguous.  It remains clear that Pakistan would profit in many ways from a trusting strategic relationship with the United States and Europe – and vice versa.  But it is also evident that the terms of their relations need to change in light of Pakistani support for Osama bin Laden and the pathologies he represented.

Can Pakistan survive as a state?
Pakistan’s own identity as a state is ambiguous.  It was founded by a secular nationalist but its society later was subjected to state-sanctioned Islamicization.  Its name is derived from the unity of its provinces, yet the state is subject to growing centrifugal tendencies that risk pulling it apart.  Much of Pakistan remains out of Islamabad’s political control.  A democratic constitution and free elections co-exist with a “deep state” dominated by the security services.

Can Pakistan bring stability to its neighborhood?
Pakistan’s external relations are similarly conflicted.  The country’s civilian leaders seek peace with India even as its intelligence agencies sponsor terrorism against Indians.  Islamic extremism is surprisingly weak as an organized political force, yet Pakistani leaders pursue policies that cater to it.  No country has a greater interest in a stable, secure, and prosperous Afghanistan, yet Pakistan pursues policies that breed chronic instability next door.  By providing sponsorship and sanctuary to NATO’s battlefield adversaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan — recipient of billions in civilian and military assistance from America and Europe — bites the hand that feeds it.

Can Pakistan’s double-dealing be managed or contained?
At least we know what doesn’t work.  In the early 1990s, after a close partnership with Islamabad to defeat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States slapped sanctions on Pakistan and effectively walked away.  What followed was the rampant nuclear proliferation of the A.Q. Khan network and Pakistan’s creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Pakistan also began to fall apart as a state during this period of isolation from the West, with the result that General Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup was welcomed by many Pakistanis and Western leaders alike.  In light of this record, cutting Pakistan off today would not serve Western interests.

What role should Pakistan play in calming Afghanistan?
Some in the West advocate a threat-reduction strategy that reassures Pakistan on its eastern and western frontiers.  Such a policy would include rapidly drawing down NATO forces in Afghanistan, giving Pakistan the lead role in shaping an Afghan political settlement, and using American leverage to force India to come to terms with its quarrelsome neighbor.

The problem here is that predatory Pakistani behavior in Afghanistan pre-dates Western military involvement there.  Geography and history may mean that the Pakistani military’s obsession with “strategic depth” in Afghanistan can never be satisfied.  Indeed, it is more likely that a strong, sovereign Afghanistan with long-term Western partners and capable institutions would do more to alleviate Pakistani insecurities than a weak Afghanistan unable to control its territory or govern its people.

Can Pakistan ever reconcile with India?
Pakistani hopes that America’s burgeoning friendship with India will solve Pakistan’s “India problem” are misplaced.  Moreover, Pakistan continues to articulate its anti-India strategy through its actions.  The Pakistani military’s involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks and other terrorist atrocities have eroded the influence of the Indian camp for peace.  Furthermore, it seems odd to blame Pakistan’s pathologies on a country next door that is democratic, increasingly prosperous, and a global success story; it is increasingly clear that Pakistan fears India’s success as inimitable to itself.  Finally, the closest India and Pakistan have come to a settlement of their long-running conflict over Kashmir occurred from 2004-7 when Washington pursued a policy of “dehyphenation” that improved relations with both Pakistan and India independently – suggesting that returning to a policy of linkage would, as in the past, produce the opposite effect.

In the long-term, the goal of the West must be to build up Pakistani civilian institutions to counter-balance control of foreign policy by the Army and the intelligence services.  It must help professionalize Pakistani military culture by encouraging the withdrawal of Pakistan’s military authorities from their nation’s politics through continued training and close engagement between the Pakistani armed forces and the militaries of the democratic West.   This can be combined with continuing pressure in the form of drone strikes against terrorists taking sanctuary in Pakistan.

Politically, a key goal must be to decouple the leadership of the Afghan Taliban from its Pakistani sponsors.  Reports that Afghan Taliban commanders have chafed under Pakistani tutelage suggest that such an opening is ripe — and could tilt the balance toward an Afghan political settlement that does not grant Pakistan overlordship of its neighbor but instead strengthens Afghan sovereignty.

Sooner or later, India’s successful ascent combined with progress in Afghanistan should suggest to Pakistan’s military leaders that a foreign policy predicated on exporting terror is self-defeating.  Perhaps only then will Pakistan play its part in reconciling with India and Afghanistan in a way that promotes the economic integration of South and Central Asia, creating a regional hub of dynamism and growth that is more conducive to its people’s aspirations.  But for now, the big questions remain.

Daniel Twining is a Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund in Washington.

Photo of John Kerry visiting Pakistan by Salmaan Taseer

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WASHINGTON — What ever happened to China’s “peaceful rise”?  It is certainly true that the emergence of other great powers in history was not peaceful.  But China promised to be different.  According to its leaders and many foreign experts, China’s internal development would hinge on its support for a stable world order underpinned by the global public goods provided by the United States and its allies.  Its economic engine and “smile diplomacy” would serve as a magnet for its neighbors.  Its membership in regional and international institutions would socialize Beijing to be a good neighbor and “status quo superpower.”   Trade and engagement with the wider world would mellow the heavy hand of Chinese authoritarianism and, over time, produce a more representative, accountable political system.

Beijing’s alarming response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, one of its most distinguished civic activists, and an Asia-Pacific defense ministers’ meeting this week focused on countering China’s maritime assertiveness are reminders that these aspirations are yet to be realized.   In the economic realm, too, China’s mercantilist trade policy risks hollowing out the developed economies that are the primary markets for Chinese products.  And Beijing’s use of its economic power as a weapon – as demonstrated by the continuing de facto ban on rare-earth-mineral exports to Japan following a skirmish over disputed islands in the East China Sea – has shocked a global business elite whose enthusiasm for the China market was based on the premise that the business of China was business.

Western governments have struggled to construct China policies that at the same time encourage China to behave as a responsible power while deterring behavior detrimental to international stability, security, and prosperity.  Both the Clinton and Obama administrations toyed with the idea of making China America’s privileged partner in Asia, with effects harmful to U.S. relations with key allies and to the U.S.-China relationship itself.  The Bush administration first identified China as a “strategic competitor” before moving to a policy of great-power entente with China as U.S. energies centered on the war on terrorism and the construction of a new partnership with India.

In Europe, concessions to Chinese sensitivities on Tibet and human rights issues – often at the expense of the universal values that grew out of Europe’s Enlightenment tradition – seem to have earned more Chinese scorn than gratitude.  This has been compounded by Europe’s inability to speak with one voice on China, uncertainty about Europe’s own future as a global actor, and the underdevelopment of European states’ relations with other key Asian powers as part of a wider strategy toward the world’s emerging center of power and prosperity.

The continuing search by the developed democracies for the right strategy to advance their interests in China is understandable.  While China’s development trajectory resembles that of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, its scale is of a different order.  This is also true of the global impact of its rise as a great power.  Given its scale and import, it is perhaps the ascendance of the United States in the 20th century that most closely parallels China’s emergence today as a global power.

Yet the differences between the American and Chinese models are instructive.  The United States was what Thomas Jefferson had called an “empire of liberty,” where human freedom and economic growth flourished under a framework of law and political accountability.  America developed a global coalition of allies over the first half of the 20th century and has been enlarging it ever since.  With these allies, it provided global public goods that created an architecture of order around principles of international law, open commerce, international institutions, and liberal governance.  Leading states found it more beneficial to align with America rather than balance against it; a countercoalition to contain U.S. power never formed after the Cold War, due in part to the transparency of U.S. politics and American strategies to reassure rather than threaten other great powers.  The contrast with China on all these fronts is stark.

China has different traditions and will follow its own path.  But its government’s unwillingness to tolerate even a modicum of political dissent, as demonstrated by its shrill rejection of the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor Liu Xiaobo for advocating the basic rights of all Chinese people; its manifest lack of external allies, beyond wards like North Korea and Burma; its inability or unwillingness to provide global public goods, for instance by unilaterally asserting Chinese ownership of the South China Sea; its shift from emphasizing the universal benefits of China’s contribution to a “harmonious world” to a narrow, unilateral definition of “core interests” that threaten its neighbors; and the creation through China’s own actions of an emerging coalition of states that seek to deter or restrain its growing power – these and other policies do not bode well for any kind of “Chinese century,” real or imagined.

Daniel Twining is Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

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WASHINGTON – Ten months ago the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ended six decades of near-unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), ushering in a new political era.  But on July 11, elections for Japan’s upper house rolled back DPJ gains and produced yet another divided government, seemingly dashing hopes for effective reform.  A look beneath the surface of the election results, however, reveals glimmerings of a new direction for Japan during an era political transition – one that could augur a revitalization of Japanese power and purpose at home and abroad.

After taking a majority in the Japanese Diet’s lower house last August, the question before this month’s elections was whether the DPJ could complete its political revolution by winning the upper house.   Instead, the party suffered a net loss of ten seats, winning just 44; the opposition LDP outperformed expectations by capturing 51 seats.

The government will now be unable to move its legislative agenda through the Diet’s upper house.  Yet the opposition remains fractured and the LDP weak: its support in the proportional-representation ballot fell to only 24 percent, against the DPJ’s 32 percent.  A surprisingly strong performance by the Your Party, which supports smaller government, pro-business policies, and a closer U.S. alliance, makes it an important swing player in a more fluid political environment.  But factionalized politics will make needed structural reform difficult.

How did the DPJ squander the strong hand it was dealt in last year’s election?  Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s mishandling of an announced doubling of Japan’s consumption tax contributed to his party’s precipitous decline in support.  However, this was not because the Japanese oppose fiscal reform—nearly two-thirds of those polled agree that raising consumption tax to tackle Japan’s massive debt-GDP ratio of some 200 percent is necessary, and the LDP also supports raising it.

Rather, Prime Minister Kan’s unfortunate handling of the issue—he proposed it only to walk back from it at the first signs of opposition—recalled for many voters the weak and indecisive leadership of his predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama.  Ironically, many voters abandoned the DPJ in this election not because they oppose reform but because they yearn for the bold leadership promised (but not delivered) by the DPJ’s ascent to power last year.

Rather than a return to the old status quo of conservative pork barrel politics, Japanese politics now appears to be a competition between parties old and new to effectively tap voters’ yearning for national reform and renewal.  In effect, “floating voters” constitute a majority of the Japanese electorate; they will support whichever parties can credibly pursue reforms that generate economic vitality and more effective governance.

This tendency has created a degree of political ferment unimaginable in Japan just a few years ago—pressuring the ruling DPJ to perform, encouraging the old LDP to renew itself, and elevating smaller reformist parties into potential kingmakers in any coalition government.  These trends are progressive and encouraging—even as they vex a Japanese political class unused to such voter flux and demands for accountability.

As is often the case in democracies, Japan’s voting public is ahead of its leaders in recognizing the need for change.  Slow-to-no economic growth and historic debt levels are not sustainable in a world turned upside down by rich country debt crises and a new intensity of economic competition from China, India, and other emerging giants.  The transformation of Japan’s external security environment from North Korea’s nuclearization to China’s ascendance demands Japanese adaptation to new realities.

The good news for America is that there now exists in Japan a cross-party consensus on strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance, including the DPJ—a relief for Washington after previous Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama rattled the alliance with a botched attempt to renegotiate American basing rights on Okinawa.  Public support in Japan for a robust (and more equal) alliance with the United States is by some measures at historic highs.

Expanding Japan’s international leadership is the flip side of domestic revitalization.  Japan could start by intensifying strategic and economic relations with like-minded countries beyond the United States.  This could include enhanced ties with South Korea, Australia, and India, including in trilateral partnerships with each of these countries and America.  Washington and Tokyo could work with Brussels to launch a U.S.-Japan-EU trilateral concert to coordinate on global governance.  NATO could use this November’s Lisbon summit to enhance operational ties with the Japanese military to defend the global commons – particularly the sea lanes on which Japan is uniquely dependent.  Japan could join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade initiative to boost prosperity across the Pacific Rim.

Domestic constitutional and market reforms would strengthen Japan’s hand abroad, reinforcing Japanese competitiveness in a globalized world.  At the same time, its leaders may find that expanding Japan’s economic, diplomatic, and strategic horizons can help catalyze domestic renewal.

Dan Twining is Senior Fellow for Asia with the German Marshall Fund.

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WASHINGTON — Last week’s summit among the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, and China occasioned predictable analyses of the dawn of a new world order led by these developing giants.   Their scale is indeed breathtaking.   Each is subcontinental in scope; together they represent nearly every region; their combined GDPs may surpass those of the G7 within two decades; and between them they boast nearly half the world’s population.   They possess complementary advantages.   China is a manufacturing superpower; India is the world’s largest democracy and “knowledge power”; Russia is a potential “energy superpower,” according to the U.S. National Intelligence Council; and Brazil dominates a region lacking any great power competitor.   An alliance among these behemoths could change history in ways that diminish the West.

But in many ways, these countries are more rivals than partners.   India’s national security planners identify China as their most important adversary, and bilateral tensions have grown even as two-way trade has multiplied.   Russia defines itself as a European power and feels threatened by China’s rise, particularly given the challenge of defending the mineral-rich Siberian heartland from creeping Chinese economic colonization.   Russia, China, and India compete vigorously for influence in Central Asia, as do China and India in South and Southeast Asia and in markets for natural resources worldwide.   Brazil has important commercial relations with China, but their political regimes could not be more different.   Leaders in both Brazil and India have invested much more in a trilateral partnership with South Africa that unites them in an alliance of values spanning three continents.

Nor are the economic interests of the BRICs as complementary as they might appear.   Although it suffers from acute misgovernance, Russia is an industrialized country that sits on the UN Security Council and in the G8; it is not a developing state excluded from great power clubs.   Russia is also a declining power rather than a rising one — its demographic and social indicators are ruinous, and its energy-dominated economy is ill-equipped to compete with the innovation and manufacturing prowess of the Asian giants.   Brazil is a middle-income country that experienced in the 1970s the economic takeoff China and India are now enjoying; its moderate growth rates and industrial structure put it in a different league, and constrain the speed of its further rise.  

The economic asymmetries don’t stop there.   India’s consumption-driven, private-sector-led, services-oriented economy is the converse of China’s export-driven, state-dominated, mass-manufacturing economy.     China’s artificially cheap currency handicaps the export prowess of the other BRICS.   That’s why their finance ministers were quick to side with the United States before this week’s G20 finance ministers’ meeting in calling for China to allow the renmimbi to appreciate — an “absolutely critical” requirement, declared Brazil’s central bank chief, and an assessment echoed by his Indian counterpart.

Partly as a result of these rivalries and differences, each of the BRICs (with the partial exception of Brazil) covets closer partnership with the West — and prioritizes those relations above ties to each other.   Each views its ties to the United States as its most important bilateral relationship.   Each works to maximize investment in and trade with the developed markets of Europe.   Trade with the West is in many ways more complementary and mutually beneficial than their structurally imbalanced trade with China — in which Brazil, Russia, and India export raw commodities and import low-cost manufactures.   These relations are not entirely unlike the unequal and extractive nature of economic exchange that characterized relations between the European empires of yesteryear and their overseas colonies.

Moreover, it is more likely that geopolitical competition in the 21st century will occur between rising powers like China and India — or will pit revisionist states like China against established powers like America — than that the future strategic landscape will divide between a BRIC bloc and the West.   Countries like India, Brazil, and Russia have too much at stake in their relations with North America and Europe, and remain too wary of the Chinese colossus, to make Beijing their alliance partner of choice.   And we should not overlook another set of ascending powers — South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa — all democracies with strong ties to the West and, as their membership in the G20 shows, emerging global players.  

These rising powers are knocking at the door of global governance frameworks and institutions.   Are Western nations willing to let them in? Are they willing to invest in relations with potentially like-minded countries such as India — and at a level of quality and intensity that the transatlantic allies previously reserved only for each other?   Failure on either front would give the BRICs a lot more in common than they have now.

Daniel Twining is a Senior Fellow for Asia with the German Marshall Fund in Washington.

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WASHINGTON — World leaders meeting in London to discuss Afghanistan’s future have dealt themselves a weak hand.   The principal obstacles to success in Afghanistan have not been the adversary’s strength or any lack of support for the international mission by the Afghan public.   Rather, the primary obstacles to victory have been Western temporizing, irresolution, and planned force reductions on a timeline that better suits the Taliban’s strategic objectives than our own.   The weakness of the Afghan government, a critical handicap, is itself partly a byproduct of these broader strategic failures that have incentivized Afghan leaders to hedge against international abandonment in ways detrimental to state-building and development.

The litany of Western strategic errors in Afghanistan spans multiple administrations of different political stripes on both sides of the Atlantic.   Chief among them have been the chronic underinvestment in building up the Afghan security forces; the deployment of insufficient international forces, many with caveats constraining effective military action; the lack of an international civilian development footprint commensurate with NATO’s military role; the failure to “Afghanize” massive aid flows in ways that have hollowed out rather than built Afghan capacity; an overinvestment in relations with Afghanistan’s central government at the expense of connecting Afghans to provincial and local institutions of governance; the lack of any concerted strategy to strengthen liberal forces in neighboring Pakistan; and the absence of Pakistani military pressure — until recently — on terrorist sanctuaries along the Afghan border.

President Obama and his European partners, led by Great Britain, are making welcome course corrections, from ramping up police training to expanding the size of the Afghan National Army to surging military forces with a new mission of protecting the Afghan people.   Encouragingly, majorities of Afghans continue to support democracy in their country, remain willing if not eager to tolerate the presence of international forces, and viscerally oppose any Taliban restoration.

Why, then, does the adversary appear to have the momentum in this conflict?   Why are the Quetta Shura and Pakistani intelligence already planning for the day the Karzai government falls and the Taliban assumes power in the Pashtun heartland?   Why are friendly countries like India bracing themselves for a Western defeat in Afghanistan?   How can the combined power of the world’s democracies be insufficient to defeat a force of 25,000 insurgents lacking popular support and legitimacy?

The answers to many of these questions lie not in the Hindu Kush but in Western capitals.   Transatlantic leaders have failed to persuade their publics that the security of the West is at stake in Afghanistan.   American and European forces are fighting and dying there to prevent it from ever again becoming a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach.   Defeat in Afghanistan would embolden every violent Islamic movement that hopes to inflict mass casualties on European and American civilians through the export of terror, calling into question the values and security of open societies everywhere.

Perversely, Western leaders have undermined both public support for the Afghan mission and the potency of the ongoing military surge by announcing premature troop-withdrawal deadlines.   Why should Western publics recommit to a mission whose importance their own leaders minimize by publicly tabling exit strategies that seem more likely to produce defeat than victory? And why should the Taliban even bother to fight NATO forces when it can simply wait them out?

Transatlantic leaders have also fueled the adversary’s esprit de corps by supporting reconciliation with elements of the Taliban, a subject of intense discussion in London.   No counter-insurgency has been won without taking insurgents off the battlefield by splitting and co-opting the adversary.   But to be successful, such efforts must be made from a position of military strength — join us and be part of our winning coalition, or we will defeat you — not from the current position of weakness in which the West finds itself, with President Obama’s declared deadline for the drawdown of American military forces just over a year away.

If there is one thing the allies can accomplish in London, it is to signal to the Afghan Taliban — and to all Afghans and neighboring powers sitting on the fence, waiting to cast their lot with the winning side — that NATO is in this fight to win it.   It must stay as long as necessary to help Afghans build a government, economy, and security forces that will co-opt, defeat, or render the Taliban irrelevant to the aspirations of the Afghan people, which for reasons both moral and strategic must be safeguarded in a democratic state allied to the West.

Daniel Twining is a Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund.

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In a GMF video feature, Senior Fellow Dan Twining explains the importance of the Afghanistan conference on January 28, and the key topics shaping the discussion.

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WASHINGTON — One year after President Obama assumed office, 55 percent of Americans think their country is on the wrong track, according to National Journal.   Sixty-one percent believe their country is in decline, according to NBC and The Wall Street Journal.   Half the American public, according to Pew, embraces the isolationist premise that the United States should “mind its own business” in world affairs — sentiments not seen since the 1930s. This is not the kind of change many of us want to believe in.

Meanwhile, in response to President Obama’s outstretched hand, China has taken off its velvet glove to reveal a clenched fist of iron; the spectacle of a junior Chinese official scolding him in Copenhagen symbolizes a troubling turn in relations with a country rendered overconfident by excessive U.S. deference.   Iranians wonder whether Washington cares more about negotiating a nuclear deal with an illegitimate regime than supporting their efforts in the streets to change that regime.   Russia has given the United States little in return for President Obama’s concessionary diplomacy, reflected in his unilateral decision to cancel a missile defense deployment that Central European governments had risked their parliamentary majorities to defend.   In Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken greater comfort from President Obama’s extraordinary announcement of a deadline for withdrawing American forces than have the Afghan government and people from his laudable decision to surge American troops there.

President Obama’s magic still works in post-modern Europe — perhaps partly as a result of his promise to rein in American power.   But crises in relations with Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other partners suggest that distance doesn’t necessarily make the heart grow fonder.     Our European friends may soon discover that the only thing they like less than a strong, assertive America is a weak, insular one.

Daniel Twining is a Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund

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As U.S. President Barack Obama visits Asia, many European and American observers have embraced the narrative that an emerging, China-centric New Asian Order will reshape world politics, relegating the West to inexorable decline and marginalization. Like any fallacy, this contention contains just enough truth to be plausible. But it is more reflective of a Western inferiority complex than of ground reality along the Pacific Rim.

There is no question that the once Western-dominated world is transforming as globalization propels the rise of new powers in Asia and Latin America. Yet these nations want to integrate into, not overthrow, a rules- and market-based international order profoundly shaped by Western principles and power. Countries like India and Brazil, and next-generation BRICS like Indonesia and Mexico, are democracies that define their national interests with reference to economic liberty, a belief in the democratic peace, and adherence to the principles of human dignity that underlie all open societies.

These are universal values that had their origins in the European Enlightenment. Their embrace by most emerging powers should be welcomed by all who believe a world featuring greater levels of individual liberty and opportunity is a world safer for all.

The revisionism of these rising democracies seeks greater welfare for their people, a bigger stake in a liberal international order, and the prestige that accompanies equal membership with Western nations in the great power club. This is a revisionism of a different sort than that which subjugates neighbors, exports violent ideologies, and mobilizes national populations for aggressive ends.

So the West should welcome rising democracies into the institutions and practices of global governance. Just as European recovery boosted American prosperity and security after World War II, so economic growth and greater international stewardship by countries like Japan, South Korea, India, and Indonesia would strengthen an international system that continues to provide greater levels of human security and opportunity to more people than any other.

This leads us to the question of China €“ an authoritarian state undertaking an eye-opening military buildup on the back of an aggressive form of state capitalism. Non-transparent Chinese development assistance props up undemocratic regimes in Burma and Sudan. Chinese arms sales embolden autocratic leaders in Iran and North Korea. Leaders in Russia and elsewhere praise China’s developmental model as a cure for their own socioeconomic ills, with troubling implications for prospects for political liberalization.

Does this make China an ideological competitor to the West? Will a new international “Beijing consensus” in favor of authoritarian modernity replace the “Washington consensus” that favors market democracy? Probably not. Rather than a confident superpower, China is in many ways a wary and defensive one €“ largely because its leaders’ greatest source of insecurity is its own people.

China’s mandarins were flummoxed by the “Color Revolutions” earlier this decade; they have been outspokenly opposed to Western efforts to promote good governance and deepen cooperation among Asian democracies. It’s almost as if the Chinese Politburo has adopted a Marxist-Leninist determinism about the future of human social organization €“ but has identified participatory democracy rather than a communal “worker’s paradise” as its most likely form.

More Asians live under democratic rule than in any other region of the world. In this respect, China is an outlier among the great and rising powers €“ not the pacesetter. And forget about China’s ability to hold the West hostage by virtue of serving as America’s creditor €“ 70% of China’s GDP is constituted by trade, and it is dependent on the very Western consumers it subsidizes to maintain the rapid economic growth that forestalls popular unrest in China. China and the West are locked in a mutual economic embrace; punitive economic measures by either side would result in mutually assured impoverishment.

This is no guarantee that China and America are not destined for conflict, the odds of which grow with China’s expanding military power and regional ambitions. But given China’s great vulnerabilities €“ lack of popular consent for Communist Party rule, a non-convertible currency and opaque financial system, a disastrous demographic outlook, and encirclement by wary neighbors who fear and seek to balance its power €“ leaders in the West should be confident in their dealings with China.

During his Asia trip, President Obama should therefore be outspoken about human rights and democracy. He should be clear that America will not cede its influence in Asian and international affairs and will stand up for friends who share its interests and values. He should recommit the United States to leadership on free trade — Asian nations’ highest priority and an enduring source of American influence. And he should signal that America welcomes China’s rise, to the extent that it benefits China’s people and allows China to assume the international responsibilities that befit an aspiring world power.

What the President should not do is compromise the principles that have made the West strong, rich, and free €“ principles of economic and political freedom that most Asians, including Chinese societies in Taiwan and Hong Kong, have now embraced as their own.

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WASHINGTON- U.S. General Stanley McChrystal correctly warned — months ago — that unless the international community and its Afghan allies quickly put in place a full-spectrum counterinsurgency strategy to protect the Afghan population while building up Afghan security forces and governing institutions, the conflict there could become unwinnable. Yet victory by the West and its Afghan allies remains eminently achievable: the Taliban enjoys very little popular support and lacks the kind of superpower patron that enabled the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s to defeat the occupying Soviet Army and the Vietnamese communists to outlast American forces in Southeast Asia a decade earlier.

Western skeptics of today ‘s Afghan mission should make no mistake: unlike those earlier conflicts, the international community ‘s objectives in Afghanistan align closely with those of the Afghan people. The Taliban cannot win by popular consent — polls regularly show that only 5-7 percent of Afghans support them or their aims. That is why they terrorize civilians through the threat and use of violence — including concerted attempts to sabotage the Afghan elections — and only sustain their campaign through revenues from illegal narcotics, financial support from fellow extremists overseas, and military training by Al Qaeda’s foreign legions. Put bluntly, the Taliban can only prevail if the international community loses its will to help the Afghan people build a functioning state and society governed by law rather than the barrel of a gun.

The fate of Pakistan is intimately bound up with the success or failure of the state-building process in Afghanistan. Afghanistan ‘s re-Talibanization would dangerously and perhaps fatally destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan, whose population is increasingly radicalized by spillover from the insurgency in Afghanistan and the failure of the Pakistani state to deliver for its people. Conversely, a long-term Western recommitment to help Afghanistan develop a state that can provide security, opportunity, and rule of law to its people would strengthen governance and security in Pakistan, crowding out violent radicals who flourish in the absence of these values and compromising their ambition to use Pakistan as a base to export jihad to Europe, North America, and India.

A transatlantic recommitment to a sustained counterinsurgency strategy that turns around the conflict in Afghanistan would demonstrate more broadly that the Western community of democracies remains the principal provider of public goods €“ in this case, the security and stability of a strategically vital region that threatens the global export of violent extremism €“ in the international system, shoring up an international economic and political order that has provided greater degrees of human freedom and prosperity than any other governmental model.

In contrast, a Western decision to wash its hands of Afghanistan would send a different message to friends and competitors alike. Islamic extremism, rather than continuing to lose ground to the universal promise of democratic modernity, would gain new legs. After all, Afghan Islamists would have defeated their second superpower in a generation. Rival states that contest Western leadership of the international order and reject the principles of open society would increase their influence. Just as most Afghans are not prepared to live under a new Taliban regime, surely most Americans and Europeans are not prepared to live in a world in which the West voluntarily cedes its influence, power, and moral example to others who do not share our commitment to human dignity and liberty.

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