So far, we have tended to see the situation in Europe as a problem of paramount importance - it is no longer the case. There is no doubt that the focus of events has shifted from Europe to the Far East and the Pacific. Pacific issues are becoming a major international problem for the next fifty years and more.
Jan Smuts, 1921
The global power is shifting from the Euro-Atlantic area to Asia-Pacific. This structural transformation was noticed as early as the 1990s, but at the time America could not resist the intoxicating post-Cold War triumphalism and hubris of its supremacy. Only when pax Americana succumbed to the burdens of exhausting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the global recession of 2008, did the immediate geopolitical importance of the Pacific became fully apparent. By then, China already emerged as a rising power and a major regional rival. In 2011, President Obama announced U.S. Pivot to Asia. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, articulated the new strategy in Foreign Affairs magazine, announcing that the 21st century would be the “American Pacific Century”. Pivot to Asia calls for the withdrawal of U.S. military overseas engagements and a full concentration of forces westward to the Pacific. The Obama administration promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a free trade zone of twelve countries that would contain China. The Trump administration rejected the TPP in favor of a direct confrontation – a trade war with China. The current Biden administration is even more direct – military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the creation of AUKUS, a military-security alliance of the U.S., Britain and Australia, tacitly directed against China.
Signing of the AUKUS on September 15 this year coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Washington Naval Conference. Revisiting this historic event is appropriate and significant, because the Washington Conference and the recent strategic Pivot to Asia are parts of the same trans-generational vision of the American mission in the world and the vital geopolitical role Asia-Pacific plays in it. Inaugurated on November 12, 1921, the conference brought together nine countries to discuss 1) naval disarmament, limitation and control, and 2) to resolve the status of China, i.e. its semi-colonial position. In other words, the U.S. intended to limit the military capacities of its main rivals, Britain, France, and Japan, in order to freely implement the “open door” doctrine towards China. The doctrine advocated the territorial integrity of Chinese state provided that the Chinese markets become open to all great powers for their industries and equal trade competition among them. American refined market imperialism was in sharp contrast to the hitherto rigid exploitative policies of European powers and Japan, whose imperial status was guaranteed by the power of their military capabilities and the territorial division of China into spheres of influence.
Nevertheless, the U.S. managed to achieve one of its most prominent diplomatic victories at the Washington Naval Conference. The key to American success proved to be Britain, whose delegation very quickly agreed on all the proposals. After World War I, Britain was economically broken and exhausted, with the debt to the U.S. of approximately five billion dollars. By agreeing to general disarmament, it would keep the highest quality fleet and relieve itself financially. Also, the American model of trade imperialism was not foreign to English imperial elites. They were aware that the real power rests not in the military occupation of territories, but in organizations such as the newly formed Chinese consortium, an international banking cartel for the financial exploitation of China. In the consortium, the dominant position was held together by the American group led by J. P. Morgan and the British group led by the Hong Kong and Shanghai banks.
However, it was not only the objective circumstances of the British position that favored the Americans. In his Twenty-Years’ Crisis of 1939, Edward Carr revealed the essence of British motives. His observations are as relevant today as when he wrote them: “Most contemporary Englishmen are aware that the conditions which secured the overwhelming ascendancy of Great Britain in the 19th century no longer exist. But they sometimes console themselves with the dream that the British supremacy, instead of passing altogether away, will be transmuted into the higher and more effective form of an ascendancy of English-speaking people. The pax Britannica will be put into commission and become pax Anglo-Saxonica, under which the British dominions standing half way between mother county and the United States, will be cunningly woven into the fabric of Anglo-American cooperation.” According to Carr, the British concessions to all American proposals at the Washington Naval Conference unequivocally point to a conscious bid for an equal partnership in world governance. Thus emerged the political orientation of Britain that in a continuity of a hundred years led to today’s exclusive Anglo-Saxon alliance AUKUS.
The only real challenge to the American designs for Pacific at the time was Japan, an aggressive militaristic empire with open hegemonic ambitions. The key obstacle to the American delegation was the Japanese ultimatum of 1915 to China, the so-called Twenty-one Demands. Japan had in fact demanded China to become its protectorate and give up the control over its finances, economy, police and almost all public affairs. To completely reject the Twenty-one Demands was not possible, so the American delegation made concessions. Japan was admitted to powerful Chinese consortium, and in return had to give up only those Demands that were not in accordance with the principles of the “open door” doctrine. Following the conclusion of the Washington Naval Conference in February 1922, President Warren Harding declared that the reached agreements on the disarmament represent the victory of “peace” and a shining example of how “humanity” should act.
Thus, Washington Naval Conference represents the victory of the foreign policy doctrine of Wilsonism, the American type of liberal idealism that was famously articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points. Indeed, the debacle of the Wilsonian project after the Paris Peace Conference contributed to disparaging attitude of the imperialist powers towards American “naive idealistic” diplomacy. But Wilsonism was not defeated in Paris in 1919 solely because of sheer naivety, but because Wilson’s global ambitions violated a fundamental principle of American exceptionalism – the Monroe Doctrine, which since 1823 guaranteed that European powers would not colonize or intervene in the Western Hemisphere. The collective security under the League of Nations precisely meant to allow European powers to interfere in the American sphere of interest. It was the true cause of isolationist movement to object and prevent U.S.’s entry into the League of Nations.
Isolationism is not just a political program. It is also a moral image of the New World of freedom and peace, which is to be isolated from the corrupt European world of frequent wars, corrupt secret diplomacy, and the infamous balance of power. While the Atlantic is in principle the established border separating the two worlds, the “West” in the collective image of America did not stop on the west coast of the U.S. The space where Eastern belligerent imperialism and Western humanitarian pacifism meet is China. When Secretary of State John Hay articulated the “open door” doctrine towards China around 1890, it was a plan not only to balance European powers on the American western flank, but also to finally demarcate the Old and New Worlds. Between China and the U.S. stretches the Pacific, an area that naturally belongs to the American sphere of interest and special importance, destined to be modeled by American liberal values.
In the hundred years since the Washington Naval Conference, the U.S. has made a full circle and returned to its underlying foreign policy positions. What used to be isolationism, today resembles the strategy which realists denote as retrenchment. Isolationism was aimed at withdrawal from building the post-war world order, while today’s retrenchment is aimed at military withdrawal from Central Asia and the Middle East, as well as cutting the financial contributions to NATO alliance. In no way do these principally related doctrines imply giving up the Pacific. The accusation that Trump’s nationalism revived isolationist tendencies was based on the fallacy that the America First presumed military withdrawal to the borders of U.S. In fact, Trump’s foreign policy continued in accordance with Obama’s Pivot to Asia. The trade war with China was nothing but an attempt to “open the door” to the American corporate world. Hopes that the current Biden administration will revitalize the Atlantic Alliance are beginning to wane with the creation of AUKUS. The interest of this alliance is unequivocal: “The future of each of our nations – and indeed the world – depends on a free and open Indo-Pacific enduring and flourishing in the decades ahead” Biden said on the occasion of the signing of the agreement.
History repeats with second-rate powers like France. By signing AUKUS, Australia canceled a purchasing contract of French submarines worth 65 billion euros. This not only caused financial damage that thwarted France’s strategic plans in the Pacific. The way the treaty was unilaterally canceled represents an insult – just like the humiliation of Prime Minister Aristide Briand at the Washington Naval Conference, who did not find his seat at the main negotiating table and had to sit on the side. Just as Japan used to be a major rival to the U.S., today it is China. As the regional order established in 1922 gradually collapsed and finally crumbled with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the key question arises as to whether a conflict between China and the U.S. is inevitable? At the Washington Naval Conference, the U.S. obliged rivals to destroy 2 million tons of ships. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 2009 and 2019, U.S. defense spending fell by 15% while the Chinese increased by 85%. Imbalance in military capabilities and arms race suggests that a kind of a new Washington conference on disarmament issues is out of the question. Thus, military alliances and the liberal idealism in American discourse are the only options, accompanied by a continuous increase in tensions that will not cease until China’s “door is closed”.
