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In Asia, the United States is long on attitude, short on strategy. Re-upping this podcast deep dive I did last year into America's gathering policy failures in Asia. I pull the thread on several themes:
1. America's oversecuritization of its approach to Asia - to borrow the same metaphor, Washington is long on security and short on just about everything else. As I sometimes tartly put it, the United States is in serious danger of becoming "the Hessians of Asia."
2. Washington's strategic narcissism in filtering its entire Asia strategy through the prism of American competition with China. In other words, rather than trying to "get China right by getting Asia right," we are instead making every policy, initiative, and relationship derivative of America's own focus on Beijing.
3. Our collective national failure to adapt to an integrating Asia - one that is more "Asian" and less "Pacific" and more closely resembles its historical norm rather than the Cold War anomaly.
4. Our persistent inability to understand that Asian countries have domestic politics too - and how that, in turn, sometimes leads American policymakers both to misread Asian countries' interests and overestimate American leverage.
5. Why the United States isn't getting enough strategic traction EVEN in the Asian countries that are most ambivalent about the rise of Chinese power. When the mathematical operations that matter in Asia (and elsewhere) are addition and multiplication, it is strategically nonsensical to go long on subtraction and division.
6. What the Trump team gets right - for instance, about why Asian governments aren't attracted to a highly ideological American approach to their region - but then gets wrong in the execution and thus risks losing the strategic plot.
7. Why Washington won't be able to successfully ring-fence security cooperation by invoking shared fears of China while simultaneously coercing its allies and partners in the economic and technology domains.
8. Why China is more resilient than the United States thinks - but why Beijing, for all its strategic, political, ideological, and systematic differences from Washington, often shares American strategic narcissism.
9. How Beijing went from loathing sanctions to using them, copycatting the American architecture and, as I bluntly put it here, "learning from the best" - namely, Americans.
Give the podcast a listen. The United States needs to approach Asia as it is, not the region of its wishes, dreams, and fantasies.
pacificpolarity.substack.com/p/evan-feigenb…
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