The US Pivot and its Implications for the Current East Asian Security Architecture
After the end of the Second World War, the US became the chief guarantor of peace and security in Asia-Pacific by preserving a continental balance of power. The “San Francisco System” signed in San Francisco on September 8, 1951 was at the heart of this e
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The Evolution of American Interest in Asia-Pacific After the end of the Second World War, the US became the chief guarantor of peace and security in Asia-Pacific by preserving a continental balance of power. The “San Francisco System” signed in San Francisco on September 8, 1951 was at the heart of this effort. It not only restored independence to Japan but also established the bilateral U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which granted the United States the right to “maintain armed forces … in and about Japan,” and encouraged Japanese rearmament. Viewed from the perspective of a separate peace, which neither invited Communist China nor the Chinese Nationalist regime, the San Francisco settlement thus laid the groundwork for an exclusionary system (based on an asymmetric engagement) that not only detached Japan from its closest neighbors and had long-term consequences for the Chinese-Japanese relationship, but also introduced what became the classical hub-and-spokes system consisting of additional bilateral security alliances between the US and Australia, New Zealand (ANZUS 1951), the Republic of the Philippines (1951), the Republic of Korea (1951) and finally Thailand (after the dissolution of SEATO in 1967), which gradually established American outposts from Hawaii to Manila. And ostensibly the system propelled Japan (and partly the other partners) into a posture of looking east across the Pacific to America for security and, indeed, for its very identity as a nation.
S. Fröhlich (*) Institut für Politische Wissenschaft, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018 S. Fröhlich and H. Loewen (eds.), The Changing East Asian Security Landscape, Edition ZfAS, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-18894-8_2
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As a result, China’s leaders for almost five decades accepted the American geostrategic dominance in the Pacific. Even when the country had become more prosperous since the introduction of capitalist market principles in 1978 and its military transformation had started at the beginning of the 21st century its goal (at least officially) was still not to achieve strategic parity with the United States. The main goal rather was to catch up with the West economically. With annual growth rates averaging around ten percent China surpassed Japan as the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities in 2008 and became the largest creditor nation in the world. Today the country is the second largest economy in the world after the United States, the world’s biggest recipient of direct foreign investment, as well as the US’ and EU’s most important trading partner—as a matter of fact, as the Atlantic powers consider how to pivot together to Asia, Asia, that is particularly China, is pivoting to the Atlantic as well (Hamilton 2014, pp. 125–172). However hopes that China’s integration into the global economy signaled converging interests between China and the West soon turned out to be an illusion. With the economic r
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