Asia Policy最新文献

{"title":"Essence of Indecision: Understanding Indian Security Policy Choices","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911624","url":null,"abstract":"Essence of Indecision:Understanding Indian Security Policy Choices Frank O'Donnell (bio) As India's decisions become more consequential to global politics, understanding the influences behind them is increasingly crucial for scholars, policy experts, and world political leaders. Rajesh Basrur's new book, Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India's Foreign Policy, deftly explains the interplay of India's internal politics, external environment, and policymaker preference hierarchies to offer a persuasive theory of Indian decision-making on foreign and defense policy. Importantly, the book includes case selections that encompass security policy decisions made not only during the current government led by Narendra Modi, which began in 2014, but also during the previous several decades. As such, this book is highly recommended for both scholars and relative newcomers to the topics of South Asia studies, rising powers, and international security. As befits one of the most thoughtful scholars of India's security policies, Basrur eloquently engages with existing theoretical schools of international relations and their explanations of Indian external conduct. He develops the neoclassical realist paradigm as a theory more permissive of domestic political explanations than the external systemic focus of structural realism. The author modifies this paradigm to introduce an analytic tool of evaluating whether policymakers make the necessary decisions within their power to protect citizens. This test inherently draws upon realist thought, dating back to Kautilya and Machiavelli, that the primary—and moral—obligation of leaders is to protect their subjects. As Basrur powerfully argues, locating responsibility for state failures in this regard is crucial not just for better policymaking but for theoretical development in bridging the \"materialist/normative divide in academia,\" as \"in important respects, the moral is the empirical when accountability is neglected in making policy\" (p. xii). Democratic leaders cannot control all elements of their domestic political context and have even less influence over often fast-moving developments in regional and international politics. Reflecting this reality, [End Page 129] Basrur conceptualizes the distinct categories of involuntary and voluntary drift (pp. 9–10) to explain why \"uncertainty and indecisiveness have periodically afflicted India's foreign policy in areas of critical importance to its national security\" (pp. 1–2). Involuntary drift occurs when leaders cannot implement effective policy due to players with domestic veto power. In the two cases of involuntary drift exemplified in negotiating the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement (2005–8) and Indian policy toward the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009), these veto players were Indian political parties opposed to the prime minister's preferred course of action. The parliamentary fragility of coalition governments meant that these parties were able to variab","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"U.S.-China Great-Power Politics and Strategic Ambiguities in an Evolving Indo-Pacific Security Architecture","authors":"Beverley Loke, Ralf Emmers","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911618","url":null,"abstract":"U.S.-China Great-Power Politics and Strategic Ambiguities in an Evolving Indo-Pacific Security Architecture Beverley Loke (bio) and Ralf Emmers (bio) A complex regional security architecture exists today in the Indo-Pacific, comprising overlapping multilateral and minilateral arrangements. Resulting from an incremental process of cooperation, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its associated forums such as the East Asia Summit (EAS), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the ASEAN +3, and the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting–Plus (ADMM-Plus) have become important multilateral venues for regional countries to exchange strategic perspectives. However, these inclusive and multilateral ASEAN-led platforms have in recent years been challenged by the rise of exclusive minilateral arrangements driven by U.S.-China great-power politics. China's influence-building measures include the Belt and Road Initiative, the Xiangshan Forum, and, more recently, the Global Security Initiative. U.S.-led minilaterals include the Quad, which brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and AUKUS, a trilateral security pact signed in September 2021 by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These developments have reinvigorated debates over the form, purpose, and effectiveness of the Indo-Pacific security architecture.1 They have also contributed to the emergence of additional ambiguity in the regional architecture at the level of embedded regional alignments. Institutions like the EAS are structured around ASEAN's impartiality in the rise of great-power competition and seek to institutionalize regional relations by promoting diplomatic rules of engagement that are acceptable to all. In contrast, the Quad and AUKUS are arrangements that openly exclude China and seek to balance its rising power. [End Page 52] While it might seem counterintuitive, we claim that constructive and purposeful strategic ambiguity in the regional architecture can help maintain regional stability, especially in light of the intensifying U.S.-China hegemonic ordering. Indeed, we posit that it is precisely when states are narrowly aligned on specific economic, security, or ideological grounds that perceptions become hardened, thereby cementing \"us/them\" binaries and heightening regional instabilities. In short, this essay argues that inclusive and exclusive forms of cooperation enhance stability by generating strategic ambiguities in an evolving Indo-Pacific security architecture. The argument is laid out in two sections. The first section describes how ASEAN's inclusive platforms—discussed here through the EAS—have lost momentum and how the regional architecture has in recent years been characterized by an exclusive approach that omits one of the great powers. The next section claims that inclusive and exclusive approaches to security cooperation are not incompatible, as they enable flexibility and fluidity in regional alignments. The Evolving Securit","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Survival of Mobile Firepower: An Uncertain Factor in Taiwan's Asymmetrical Defense","authors":"Shang-su Wu","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911627","url":null,"abstract":"executive summary: This article considers the strategic importance of mobile firepower for Taiwan's asymmetrical defense and analyzes the geostrategic threats to the survival of Taiwan's mobile surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and standoff firepower. main argumentIn the face of China's military superiority, Taiwan has adopted an asymmetrical approach to its defense that relies significantly on mobile SAMs and standoff firepower to deny People's Liberation Army (PLA) platforms, such as transport aircraft and landing ships, access to the island. Mobility presents a tactical advantage for Taiwan, as it renders Chinese surveillance more difficult. However, Taiwan's mobile units could be constrained or rendered immobile given the geographic environment in Taiwan, especially in urban regions like the Taipei metropolitan area. At the outbreak of a potential war with China, Taiwan's mobile units could face preemptive strikes, and concealing the deployed units for an indeterminate time while awaiting a PLA invasion would also be challenging. The amount of mobile firepower that Taipei can retain after PLA attacks may determine whether Beijing's invasion is successful, but with a narrow margin for losses and an incomplete buildup, Taiwan's mobile firepower may nevertheless not be adequate to redress the island's military inferiority. To consolidate the status quo in the strait, Taipei should strengthen its mobile firepower and Washington should offer critical support. policy implications • Although there is no clear minimum level of firepower that Taipei would need to retain in an attack scenario, the current margin is narrow. If the PLA efficiently neutralizes Taiwan's mobile units, Taiwan's asymmetrical defense would be significantly undermined or even fail. • Moving and hiding mobile units around Taiwan could be challenging, given that suitable routes in urban and mountainous areas are predictable and could be cut off. To thwart a potential PLA invasion, the mobile units would also need to be hidden for an indeterminate period, which could be difficult. The necessity of defending Taipei would further reduce the tactical flexibility of the mobile units. • China has various surveillance and attack means that could be used to neutralize Taiwan's mobile units and defensive means to lower the threat from mobile firepower. The efficacy of these measures and the extent to which Beijing could concentrate them for this mission is uncertain. • Third parties, particularly the U.S., are crucial in strengthening Taiwan's mobile firepower, especially in terms of quantity and evaluation.","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"11 8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ASEAN and Ambiguity","authors":"Mathew Davies","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911613","url":null,"abstract":"ASEAN and Ambiguity Mathew Davies (bio) Perhaps more than any other regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ambiguity seem to go hand in hand. Since the establishment of ASEAN more than 50 years ago, it has been easy to point to the region on a map but harder to say what the organization is for, and harder still to say what it does. This essay identifies the origins, workings, and consequences of this ambiguity in Southeast Asian regionalism. While the term ambiguity has been widely and often used in discussions of ASEAN, it has not been analyzed or dissected as its own analytical lens.1 To address this issue, I identify two types of ambiguity in this essay—an ambiguity of purpose (i.e., What is ASEAN for?) and an ambiguity of meaning (i.e., What values does ASEAN embody, promote, and protect?). Further, whereas the term ambiguity is often deployed negatively or derisively as a trait ASEAN should be faulted for and endeavor to overcome, this essay adopts a more nuanced position. Ambiguity is a risk mitigation strategy, and it can be a positive factor for the realization of goals. Very often, it is far from being unintentional or uninformed. At least for some of ASEAN's core goals, ambiguity has been a productive and intentional strategy; removing ambiguity through specification, especially when accompanied by growing regulation, is a governance misstep. This is not to say, of course, that ambiguity is only ever positive, and this essay also identifies the ways in which it both weakens regional governance and produces significant overconfidence. [End Page 22] The Origins and Growth of ASEAN Meeting in Bangkok in 1967 to sign the ASEAN Declaration (also known at the Bangkok Declaration), the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand most likely had the risks of failure uppermost in their minds. Previous attempts to establish a regional body, including the Association of Southeast Asia and MAPHILINDO, had been unsuccessful, and the five abovementioned states were dangerously vulnerable to the vagaries of domestic insurrection and global political competition.2 Failure would exacerbate the insecurities, material and ontological, of the region. Yet, the foreign ministers that met in Bangkok faced daunting obstacles to success. Most fundamentally, the five countries they represented neither liked nor trusted one another, and their diplomatic relations were marred by tensions, disagreements, and overlapping sovereignty claims. At least in part, these tensions were the product of centuries of colonial rule and the resulting political dislocations and silencing that accompanied first European colonialization and then, far more briefly, the Japanese occupation of the region. The ASEAN framework that was crafted was a response to the necessity of coexisting in similar circumstances, with similar economic and geopolitical needs, absent a common understanding, let alone mutual trus","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ambiguous Architecture of Economic Integration in East Asia","authors":"Natasha Hamilton-Hart","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911615","url":null,"abstract":"The Ambiguous Architecture of Economic Integration in East Asia Natasha Hamilton-Hart (bio) Regional economic integration in East Asia has been built on an architecture of ambiguity and informality. A foundational informal architecture of cross-border business ties and business-government relationships has facilitated regional commerce for many decades. Ambiguity has contributed to building formal integration through intergovernmental cooperation because commitments are often only possible due to the flexibility ambiguity provides. In the current moment of heightened tension between the United States and China, the United States is aiming to eliminate areas of ambiguity and flexibility in its growing array of export controls and other policies intended to hamper the acquisition of advanced technology by Chinese entities and \"de-risk\" exposure to China. This essay examines how informality and ambiguity have facilitated the development of East Asian economic regionalization and what this looks like in an environment of U.S.-China rivalry. The De Facto Economic Regional Architecture East Asia has emerged as a robust economic region over the past three decades, as evidenced by the growth of cross-border investment flows and the rise of intraregional trade. Regional trade and investment flows have been organized to reflect the logic of global value chains, sometimes referred to as global production networks, by which the production of goods is dispersed across national boundaries in an effort to realize efficiencies of scale and specialization.1 The rise in trade of intermediate products created a distinctive condition of complex interdependence: firms and national economies are enmeshed in multiple, crosscutting relationships of mutual [End Page 31] dependence that span not only critical inputs and final markets but also technology, logistics, distribution, digital services, and information flows.2 Early analyses of the emerging structure of regional integration in East Asia noted that the de facto regionalization occurring there, even by the 1990s, was different from the European experience in which integration was essentially a product of formal regionalism.3 Formal regionalism meant cooperative commitments by governments to liberalize trade and investment, harmonize standards, and remove other restrictions on the free flow of commerce and people. Regionalization, in contrast, appeared to occur in advance of formal intergovernmental agreements in East Asia and was, in this sense, informal and market-based rather than state-led. In fact, as was clear by the end of the twentieth century, the new structure of integration via global value chains was fundamentally different from that predicted by traditional trade and investment models based on the full production of finished goods, such as washing machines and automobiles.4 Instead, very specific production functions were disbursed geographically, while transactions along the value chain were governed ","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Diplomacy and Ambiguity—Constructing Interests in Cooperation","authors":"Wesley Widmaier, Mathew Davies, Lorraine Elliott, Ralf Emmers, Natasha Hamilton-Hart, Wenting He, Beverley Loke, Susan Park","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911617","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction:Diplomacy and Ambiguity—Constructing Interests in Cooperation Wesley Widmaier (bio), Mathew Davies (bio), Lorraine Elliott (bio), Ralf Emmers (bio), Natasha Hamilton-Hart (bio), Wenting He (bio), Beverley Loke (bio), and Susan Park (bio) [End Page 1] \"Diplomacy requires constant adjustment to changing circumstance; it must leave a margin for the unexpected; the unpredictable is what always happens in foreign affairs. Nuance, flexibility, and sometimes ambiguity are the tools of diplomacy.\" Henry Kissinger1 Scholars and practitioners of Asian diplomacy are well acquainted with notions of \"constructive ambiguity,\" a concept associated most prominently with U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Indeed, Kissinger's use of ambiguous language—capable of being interpreted in a range of fashions—enabled what was arguably the most important geopolitical shift of the past half-century.2 Specifically, the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, issued by the governments of the United States and the People's Republic of [End Page 2] China (PRC), saw the United States affirm \"that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.\"3 By expressing U.S. views in this fashion, Kissinger elided disagreements over who might govern the \"one China\" and enabled the United States and the PRC to establish a de facto partnership opposing Soviet influence in Asia. This ambiguity also served to instill a degree of caution in the PRC and Taiwanese governments, leaving U.S. policy regarding any conflict opaque. Even as Kissinger should be faulted for pursuing an amoral realism in regional contexts, his pragmatic courting of interpretive \"slack\" enabled an era of geopolitical stability. Indeed, one might argue more broadly that key elements of the wider rules-based international order that arose after World War II were themselves based in a pragmatic acceptance of ambiguity, as such ambiguity might ease the process of responding to shifts in security and economic \"fundamentals.\" For example, in place of the classical gold standard that had exacerbated deflationary pressures over the interwar decades, the fixed exchange rates of the Keynesian Bretton Woods framework had a normative component, reflecting a shared commitment to cooperation in pursuit of increased demand and growth. Even where it was recognized that a \"fundamental disequilibrium\" might compel devaluation, this criterion itself remained ambiguous, providing policymakers a zone of discretion in efforts to maintain growth.4 In this way, policymakers sought less to eliminate ambiguities than to manage them in ways that could buffer security or economic pressures. Nevertheless, such possibilities for the use of constructive ambiguity have been increasingly overlooked in recent decades. Rather than manage ambiguities, policymakers have sought to promote clarity and transparency in a way that can limit or eliminate the scope for interpretive nuance.5 Co","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ambiguity and Decarbonization Pathways in Southeast Asia","authors":"Lorraine Elliott","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911614","url":null,"abstract":"Ambiguity and Decarbonization Pathways in Southeast Asia Lorraine Elliott (bio) In a 2023 keynote address on Southeast Asian energy transitions, Asian Development Bank vice president Ahmed Saeed argued that the complexity of climate change mitigation and adaptation would require the region to become \"comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.\"1 This essay examines what that uncertainty and ambiguity looks like as members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) commit to transition to low-carbon economies under the provisions of the 2015 Paris Agreement that was adopted under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the \"plurality of meanings\" that created space for \"more than one interpretation\"2—i.e., constructive ambiguity—was strategically important for reaching international consensus on the Paris Agreement, it has at times proved counterproductive in the determination and governance of decarbonization modalities across ASEAN. As this essay will demonstrate, decarbonization ambiguity in Southeast Asia can be characterized as \"the type of uncertainty that emerges from complexity,\"3 in this case the bio-physical complexity of climate systems and the technological, social, and economic complexities and uncertainties of climate mitigation pathways and outcomes. Constructive ambiguity as a diplomatic strategy and possible governance modality is implicated in pathway and outcome ambiguities. This runs the risk of sending conflicting messages to both public- and private-sector stakeholders that can result in risk-averse responses, ineffective policy measures, or even policy paralysis in the face of complexity and uncertainty.4 [End Page 11] Constructive Ambiguity in the Climate Governance Context Under the Paris Agreement, parties committed, in principle, to ambitious efforts to keep global average temperatures \"well below\" 2ºC degrees above pre-industrial levels with the hope of limiting this to 1.5ºC.5 In pursuit of that goal, Article 4 of the agreement calls for a \"global peaking\" of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and a \"balance between anthropogenic emissions…and removals\" in the second half of this century, a goal that is usually referred to as \"net-zero.\"6 Several provisions in the Paris Agreement are deliberately or strategically ambiguous on how that ambition—itself a conceptually elusive term—might be operationalized and governed. This is relevant, for example, to Article 4 on whether a weakening or rollback of individual country mitigation commitments is permissible (though most commentators suggest that it is not),7 Article 6 on environmental integrity and voluntary cooperation on non-market approaches to internationally transferred mitigation outcomes,8 Article 9.1 on climate finance,9 and to the more general UNFCCC provisions on loss and damage.10 Aysha Fleming and Mark Howden make the case for embracing this kind of ambiguity, seeing value in \"multiple knowledge spheres ","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ambiguity and National Interests: Foreign Policy Frames and U.S.-China Relations","authors":"Wenting He, Wesley Widmaier","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911616","url":null,"abstract":"Ambiguity and National Interests:Foreign Policy Frames and U.S.-China Relations Wenting He (bio) and Wesley Widmaier (bio) In early 2023, one might have been excused for expecting that a downward turn in U.S.-China relations would only accelerate. Indeed, two years earlier in January 2021, despite Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign having cast Donald Trump as a threat to the \"soul of this nation,\"1 Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, singled out Trump's China policy for praise. In his confirmation hearings, Blinken declared that \"Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China.\"2 Over the Biden administration's first two years, U.S.-China relations accordingly maintained a broadly confrontational tone. While the administration dropped the crudely nativist language of the Trump administration, it substituted instead the crusading narrative of a global struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes. This approach would be reinforced by an initially cool diplomatic tone toward China, spanning a tense bilateral meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in March 2021 to the postponement of Blinken's February 2023 visit to China, prompted by the dispatch of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace. Nevertheless, one could go too far in anticipating an accelerating decline. Despite tensions over specific technological exchanges, the Biden administration has also persistently rejected wider arguments for a \"decoupling\" of the U.S. and Chinese economies, seeking to place a floor under any broader decline in relations. Indeed, in April 2023, [End Page 41] Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attracted considerable attention with a speech at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies that, while acknowledging the primacy of security concerns, warned against any attempt to decouple the two economies, even holding out hope for the possibility of economic and environmental cooperation.3 Further, in July 2023, Yellen visited Beijing, where she stressed the need for joint U.S.-China leadership in addressing common interests concerning the global macroeconomy, developing country debt, and climate change. This essay suggests that the coexistence of Blinken-styled tensions and Yellen-styled accommodation encapsulates a more enduring feature of U.S.-China relations. Throughout interpretations of policy challenges, \"zero-sum\" framings, which draw on security discourses and trade metaphors to highlight concerns for relative position, have existed in tension with oft-overlooked \"positive-sum\" framings that reflect Keynesian perspectives that stress the need for cooperation in the face of uncertainty and instability. To enable an understanding of these tensions, this essay offers an analysis highlighting the ambiguity of national interests, which are in turn shaped by agents acting as interpretive practitioners who construct events in ways that shape interests in cooperation or conflict.4 To draw attention to the overlooked","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"India's Foreign Policy and the Ethic of Responsibility","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911622","url":null,"abstract":"India's Foreign Policy and the Ethic of Responsibility Ian Hall (bio) Classical realism was formulated in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s to tackle a pressing problem: how to reconcile democratic politics with power politics. Most classical realists valued democracy as the form of government most likely to protect rights, uphold freedoms, and enable a majority of citizens to flourish.1 But at the same time, they observed that democracies often pursue foreign policies that are ill-conceived or downright dangerous.2 For this reason, classical realists lamented that democratic leaders are frequently outmaneuvered by authoritarians better schooled in the dark arts of international relations. Rajesh Basrur's excellent book Subcontinental Drift: Domestic Politics and India's Foreign Policy responds to a similar challenge. This time, however, it is faced by India, a rising power whose foreign policy is \"periodically afflicted\" by \"uncertainty and indecisiveness\" (p. 1). Basrur's concern is the mismatch between India's ambition and its mixed record of success in the post–Cold War world. He argues the problems stem from domestic political constraints and the \"limitations\" of India's policies and policymakers (p. xi). If the postwar classical realists looked at India today, they would likely agree. They also blamed subpar foreign policies on domestic politics, which in democracies can empower poor leaders and flimsy ideas. They pointed to strategies like isolationism and appeasement, championed by popular politicians and widely supported in the interwar years but which undermined the capacity of democratic states to deter aggression and defend [End Page 116] their citizens when conflict eventually erupted.3 Even when it comes to their own security, the classical realists complained, democratic leaders and peoples can be feckless and reckless. Sometimes they were naive. At other times, they were prone to crusading moralism and ideological dogmatism, which could have even worse effects on national security and international order than simple idealism.4 For Basrur, the shortcomings with foreign policymaking in India—in particular, the causes of \"policy drift,\" in which necessary action is not taken or is performed suboptimally—are more quotidian. He shows how they can and do arise from the messiness of coalition politics, the complexities of federalism, and elite irresponsibility. But the consequences of these shortcomings, as his book shows, are still serious, and analysts and policymakers need to understand them properly if they are to remedy them effectively. Subcontinental Drift contributes to this effort by examining four episodes in India's foreign policy with the help of neoclassical realism, which draws inspiration from its classical forebear to explain state behavior in international relations.5 Each case study is impeccably argued. Basrur finds evidence for what he terms \"involuntary drift\" in the long struggle to secure support for the U.S","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Meeting in the Middle? Multilateral Development Finance, China, and Norm Harmonization","authors":"Susan Park","doi":"10.1353/asp.2023.a911619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/asp.2023.a911619","url":null,"abstract":"Meeting in the Middle?Multilateral Development Finance, China, and Norm Harmonization Susan Park (bio) International norms are strong when they are taken for granted and followed automatically.1 Through contestation, norms may erode over time as challengers focus on how to procedurally follow the norm or substantively interrogate the idea itself.2 Some scholars have observed that norms may be contested because actors can seek to reject, revise, or deny the purpose of the norm.3 Yet norms can prove resilient and robust even in the face of opposition, highlighting the importance of structural factors as they relate to a norm's embeddedness, institutionalization, and legal character.4 In the 1990s, China was viewed as a novice in multilateral forums, and it was hoped that China would be socialized into international norm adherence through engagement in multilateral economic and security settings.5 Decades on, China is now promoting and changing international norms within multilateral institutions that may fundamentally reshape how finance, trade, development, and energy policy are practiced.6 [End Page 61] The scholarship on China and norms has emphasized its role shifting from being a norm-taker to a norm-maker.7 This essay examines how China's changing role in multilateral development finance is opening an ambiguous space for the reconciliation of a variety of development finance norms with Chinese practices, specifically through inside and outside pathways that could lead to norm harmonization. The first section looks at how China is fundamentally reshaping traditional, Western-led multilateral development finance. The section examines the institutions created by China to pursue Beijing's own international development agenda. The essay then unpacks how responses to Chinese development finance are reshaping Western activities that open the way for harmonizing some multilateral development norms, such as environmental protection. The question remains as to whether this harmonization process will lead to China leveling up to meet international norms, whether certain norms may weaken to enable China to follow them, or whether China and these norms may meet somewhere in the middle. For decades, international development was driven by the Western-led Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Highlighting how policy norms could be taken up and diffused to borrowers,8 the IMF and World Bank promoted neoliberal \"Washington Consensus\" policies in the 1980s, which morphed into the post–Washington Consensus approach in the 1990s to incorporate good governance, gender, development, environmental, and social protection norms, among others. Although this approach experienced some decline following the global financial crisis,9 the IMF and World Bank remain engaged in maintaining the neoliberal economic paradigm they constructed in their activities.10 International political economy scholars have noted how China's promo","PeriodicalId":53442,"journal":{"name":"Asia Policy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136205897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}