Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade by Bill Emmott, ($26, Harcourt, 2008).
Last fall, Steve Forbes invited me to a tea he was hosting for Roni Bar-On, Israel’s brilliant Minister of Finance. The talk turned to Palestine and the Palestinians, so I asked him if he had any sort of strategy for building some kind of peaceful condominium with those people within Israel’s midst who seemed bent on bringing down the entire Jewish state.
He said he had just such a plan–to build the economic infrastructure and the standard of living for the Palestinian communities to the point where their residents could see some hope of attaining a lifestyle comparable to their Israeli neighbors. In short, his goal was to give them hope for the kind of life they saw enjoyed by the people they shared their nation with–a way of life possible without resorting to violence in the streets. In this fashion, they would have a stake in a peaceful, prosperous future for themselves and their children.
This is precisely Bill Emmott’s prescription for Asia in Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. Inequality and imbalance is the stuff that wars are made of–indeed, have been made of from time immemorial. One nation, one people covets the more fertile land, the more open access to the seas, the gold, oil, coal, iron or other mineral resource, the more advanced industry, of its neighbors. Suddenly, war breaks out.
Asia, as Emmott’s title suggests, is riven by rivalries which have the potential on the one hand for enormously fast-paced growth and prosperity for all if they can only hang together–or it has the potential for armed conflict, lethal for the entire planet, if they all hang (or are hanged, as the saying goes) separately.
Bill Emmott is a bona fide, 24-carat Old Asia Hand, particularly an Old Japan Hand, whose service as Tokyo bureau chief of The Economist in the 1980s he parlayed into one of the most singularly brilliant examinations of Japan and its competitive position, The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan’s Economic Power. This work, in turn, catapulted him into the editorship of The Economist, a post he served with distinction for some 13 years. Now, he’s taken advantage of what passes for retirement in an individual of such enviable talent and energy to give us Rivals–an expansion of his theories across the Asian continent, and, in perhaps the most valuable portion of the book (if heeded, which they certainly should be) his prescriptions for a peaceful and prosperous future in that region of the world, which may ultimately hold the future of mankind in the balance.
“As long as any of the three Asia powers [China, India and Japan] feels that it does not have an appropriate status in world affairs, and the appropriate opportunities to voice its ideas and concerns, then resentment will build up,” Emmott writes. “And as long as the three Asian powers have different levels of status in world affairs, resentment, mistrust and suspicion will be engendered between the three.”
He offers up quite a radical prescription for neutralizing these powerful emotions. First, there’s an end to the G-8 or at least its restructuring (at a minimum, showing the likes of Italy and Canada the door, welcoming China and India). Then Emmott moves on to giving India and Japan permanent member veto status on the United Nations Security Council.
Emmott’s fear of the potentially lethal consequences of these Asian superpowers continually left on the outside of the global system is, perhaps, a trifle exaggerated. Still, he is quite right in observing that often in the past hostilities on the fringes of empires escalated into major conflicts that engulfed superpowers (an assassination in Sarajevo, for goodness’ sake, touching off the single bloodiest war in history that all but wiped out a generation of young men in Britain, France and Germany). The stakes today are even higher.
The mechanism that Emmott proposes is quite intriguing–an Asian analog to the European economic and security mechanisms consisting of the European Union and NATO. He’d like to see an Asian counterpart for each.
An economic union would be constructed around the East Asian Summit–broad enough to include all three major Asian powers, but not so broad as to make agreements impractical, and which above all should drop the idea that America must always be at the table when topics such as trade are discussed (though Brits often forget that with a 7,623-mile long western coastline, America is very much a Pacific power).
Next, there would be a security pact based on the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forum, which would morph into an organization that would impose greater obligations on its members and where in this case America would play a key role as guarantor.
“Just as America plays no role in the European Union but is a pivotal element in NATO, a similar division of labor is required in Asia,” Emmott concludes.
All worthy, original and actionable ideas. Unfortunately, it takes nearly 300 pages to get there, much of the material familiar territory for anyone who’s paid even passing attention to the very pages of The Economist that Emmott so brilliantly edited for so many years. Indeed, the first six chapters are quite bloodless, focusing as they do on the economic disparities (considerable) and prospects (equally daunting, but not unfamiliar) facing each of these three nations.
Indeed there have been innumerable, some quite worthy works, on each of these countries individually, and even a considerable literature on neighbors India and China together–today’s two real engines of economic growth and development in the world. Bringing Japan into the mix is at times a stretch. Instead of Chindia, we’d have, what–Chindipan?
More compelling would have been to hear more of the changes in the textures and lifestyles, the nature and pace of development beyond the bald statistics, observed by an Old Asia Hand like Emmott. How have the people in these nations–their prospects and aspirations–changed in recent decades as their economies awakened and their perspectives turned outward, joining the world economic, social and geo-political systems?
I’d also have liked to see a broader, more nuanced exploration of the scenarios that are likely to face our planet when the vast, undeveloped interiors of China and India emerge from what are still effectively subsistence economies onto the world stage. Right now, barely a third of China is a part of the oil-consuming First or Second World–a narrow strip of coastal crescent from Shanghai down through Hong Kong. But what about the rest of China, much of which is just emerging from a millennia of subsistence economics?
Earlier this week, I heard a senior Chinese official promise to bring this three-quarters of a billion people online in the next few decades. It would be tantamount to dragging two more United Stateses into the world economy in a historical blink of an eye; all of them driving automobiles, consuming oil and gas and with aspirations–vast aspirations indeed.
In short, I’d love to hear Bill Emmott’s take on what could well prove to be the world’s Armageddon–when America, even Europe, winds up on the outer fringe, much as Turkistan and Mongolia are today. His next book, perhaps!
David A. Andelman is executive editor of Forbes.com and the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.