Asian triangles may not prove eternal

With the very welcome announcement by US President Barack Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice of separate state-visit invitations to the leaders of China and Japan, the much-discussed but so far amorphous US "pivot to Asia" policy looks to be taking on the shape of a triangle.

But triangles, a common plot device of romantic novelists, can make for stormy and unstable relationships. Japan and China both now have strong leaders. The US' conduct in Asia has not always been consistent and is sometimes indifferent. Each might wish for the US to choose between them, but with a long-abiding security treaty with Japan and economic ties to China that are historically unprecedented, they both figure America will try to play both sides of the street.

And despite the tension and everything that come with it, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will accept a shared relationship with Washington as preferable to any other geometry of tension and uncertainty. Two of the three triangle points are nuclear powers, and a rapid deterioration in East Asian security could produce a third all too quickly. In this regard, the triangle does appear to be a better arrangement than any other conceivable configuration.

The geopolitical expanse of the vast landmass that Asia buoyantly bodes to support more than one triangle combination. Go past China and Japan, and you run into the Republic of Korea (with which too the US has a security treaty), into Indonesia (the world's fourth-most populous country) and into India (second in terms of population but gaining on China). Rice's surprise White House "Asia pivot" announcement included news of proposed visits this year by Indonesian President Joko Widodo and ROK President Park Geun-hye as well. One also notes that all this diplomatic activity came in the wake of Obama's recent state visit to India, artfully dressed up as all bubbly and celebratory of the new government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The US, we see, has a number of ways to triangulate its Asia policy. The unveiling of the Obama administration's updated National Security Strategy claimed to set out ways to "advance our rebalance to Asia and the Pacific ... The United States has been and will remain a Pacific power. Over the next five years, nearly half of all growth outside the United States is expected to come from Asia." It thus welcomes the rise of a "stable, peaceful and prosperous China. While there will be competition, we reject the inevitability of confrontation."

In fact, it would be a fool's errand to try to contain, much less confront, China. On the contrary, a truly inspired and strategic American diplomacy would relentlessly seek out areas of cooperation, work to deepen and broaden them, and aim to smooth out differences to the maximum degree possible, even losing an argument or two here and there.

Triangles aside, George Yeo, the highly regarded former Singapore foreign minister, views today's world as profoundly altered by China's rise. He recommends viewing the new world order as a solar system with two suns, no longer with just the US as one. This transformative development forces the countries of Asia to reconfigure their diplomatic orbits so as to take into account the new pull from Beijing.

As Yeo has said: "This is a new planetary dance giving new orbital freedoms to everyone, new possibilities but also new dangers." So what about India? Yeo wryly says: "Yes, India is like a Jupiter with growing pull." But it is no way yet the third sun. And any new triangulation will take time.

The author, Tom Plate, is the distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.