Vietnam’s new foreign policy approach, which some analysts have labelled ‘more friends, fewer enemies’, reflects its precarious position as a bird on the wire caught between China and the United States.

In the past few months, Vietnamese officials have held a number of high-level meetings with leaders of both states. At the end of July, President Truong Tan Sang travelled to Washington to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership with President Barack Obama, highlighting the improved relations between the former foes under America’s increasingly Asia-focused strategy. A little over a month later, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and reiterated the Vietnamese Party and State’s long-lasting and consistent policy of consolidating and strengthening neighbourliness and cooperation with China. Read more

Professor Hugh White, a respected Australian academic and strategist, has long argued that as China has emerged as a great power in the Asia Pacific, it’s time for the Middle Kingdom to play a greater role in the regional order, to the extent that the United States should forgo its long-standing primacy and share its regional leadership with China. Whether the US comes to terms with this fact, White contends, has far reaching implications for the region, as the US insistence on its primacy will inevitably lead to China’s growing grievances. As a consequence, US–China strategic rivalry will intensify and regional peace and stability will suffer in the long run.

White’s argument is valid with respect to China’s impressive economic and military rise over the last three decades, which brings it greater respect and influence in regional affairs. However, whether China should enjoy a greater regional status rests not only on its growing power, but also its moral authority and regional acceptance. The region’s future peace and stability, therefore, is not determined by whether the US forgoes its primacy or not, but primarily by how China behaves to prove it deserves such a concession from the US. Read more

Called a ‘War Speech’ by the Washington Post’s Max Fisher, Secretary of State John Kerry dispelled all doubt at his Monday evening press conference over the Obama administration’s consideration of military action against Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad regime. Almost a year to the day since President Obama made his ‘red line’ comment regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, its most recent (and visible) use on the outskirts of the Syrian Capital of Damascus has forced the President and his administration into the awkward position of preparing for another Middle Eastern conflict at a time they’d promised to be thinking about the Asia-Pacific.

Despite the words of key administration officials  and even its unveiling as the Administration’s foreign policy blueprint by President Obama before the Australian Parliament in 2011, doubt over the US ‘Rebalance to Asia’ formed unsurprisingly quickly. At the core of these doubts, even prior to current issues related to sequestration, stood the tall order of US disengagement from combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due in part to the considerable investment of the Administration’s early energy into reducing the visible presence of the US in the Middle East, it seemed inevitable to some that the region would reemerge as the primary focus of the Administration as unaddressed issues would build critical mass and become too large to ignore. Read more

Jousting with Hugh White on international structures is both fun and a deeply Anglospheric thing to do, but I make no concessions about the longevity of the Anglosphere. That’s because I see the term as largely synonymous with the accepted global international order. The term Anglosphere is no more about the English than the Panama Canal is about hats. Rather it points to the historic origins of many of the rules of the road that structure international society. One thinks of the Monty Python sketch asking ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’? The list of what the Anglosphere has delivered includes the UN, Bretton-Woods, NATO, ANZUS, the English language, international law, support for human rights, the internet, fast food and precision-guided munitions. Oh yes, and they brought peace after World War II, which is the basis for—among many other benefits—economic growth in Asia.

Hugh asks: ‘whether this grouping will do much for us in the future when wealth and power will no longer be so strongly concentrated in Anglo-Saxon hands,’ but the critical point is not ethnicity but rather the framework of international rules. The willingness of the group of nations that subscribe to those rules to intervene in conflicts to protect international order is, however, an important feature of the broader Anglospheric approach to international society. No other combination of states is likely to provide such an international order-setting orientation any time soon. This is a much broader point than simply acknowledging the military capabilities of the five eyes countries and their like-minded friends—as both Hugh and I do. Read more