Thread by @EvanFeigenbaum

1: Long thread follows … A lot of the commentary on RCEP today, some of which disses it as a minimalist trade deal, misses the point. If you’re American, you can’t just look at it while ignoring the larger context of 25 years of change in Asia.

2. The problem, especially for the American strategic class (of which I am a card-carrying member), is threefold:

3: The first strategic problem is that American power in this region has been premised on both security and economic pillars ...

4: The US was, for decades, the principal provider of both security-related public goods and of economic-related public goods and other benefits—as a demand-driver and also as a standard-setter ...

5. But as I and others have argued for years, the American role in this economic dimension may be rising in absolute terms but it is declining in relative terms. Pull that thread out 10-15 years and the US will not be the kind of demand driver it was in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s …

6: So that makes the other pillar of American economic leadership imperative—to be a standard-setting nation and a driver of liberalization. Yet, the US is walking away from that role—and doing the walking away against the backdrop of a shrinking relative economic role overall.

7: So that leaves the United States overweighted as a security provider and underweighted as an economic rule and standard setter. Bluntly put, the US should not want to end up as the “Hessians" of Asia, as I jokingly put it.
(You Revolutionary War aficionados know the Hessians)

8: And this isn’t about business, or companies, or this or that example of FDI. It is about rules, norms, standards, and, above all, strategic momentum. American firms will be active in the region even if Washington is not. But they will adapt to someone else’s rules.

9: But we in the American strategic class continue to focus disproportionately on the US role in the region through the security lens. And that misunderstands power by missing how much the region changed between two bookends: the 1997-98 Asian crisis and the 2008 global crisis.

10: I’ve been warning about this in a lot of writing over a long period of time. One old chestnut is my 2012 essay in @ForeignPolicy with @Rmanning4, which contrasted “Security Asia” with “Economic Asia” and starkly warned Washington about the trendline: foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/31/a-t…

11: Another is my 2015 essay in @ForeignAffairs on how a region that is becoming more “Asian” and less “Pacific” is problematic for Washington strategically. Yet sadly, America seems more interested in trying to rewind the clock than in adapting to change: foreignaffairs.com/articles/east-…

12: That brings us to a second strategic problem: we in the US strategic class seem to think that everything in Asia is a China problem—refracting every relationship, issue, and initiative in Asia through the prism of Beijing. Yes, China is a whopping strategic challenge. But ...

13: This “Sinification of everything” misunderstands the deep roots and long branches of pan-Asian ideas, institutions, and ideologies—as I warned with @RManning4, in this 2009 monograph for @CFR_org: cfr.org/report/united-…

14: But it also misunderstands the degree to which third players in the region are also driving the play. It is a mistake to view everything, as President Obama argued when talking about TPP, through the prism of “US rules” vs. “Chinese rules.” Fragmentation is much more likely.

15: So as I argued in this recent overview essay for @CarnegieEndow, the region’s likely future will be *neither* Sinocentric *nor* US-centric but fragmented, built on a discombobulated patchwork where function drives form, not the other way around: carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/09/asi…

16: Thus the problem. The US continues to view most everything in the region through the prism of Beijing—as if a more “Asian” Asia would be peachy fine for US interests just so long as it isn’t “Sinocentric.” But one lesson of CPTPP and RCEP is that this is really not the case.

17: That brings us to a third strategic problem: the presumption of “Indo-Pacific” as our strategic guidepost. I love Indo-Pacific as a geographic construct. It captures something I've argued for 15 years: Asia should not be broken down into ahistorical Cold War geographies.

18: My 2011 essay in @TWQgw on “Why America No Longer Gets Asia” made this point starkly at a time when the Belt and Road didn’t exist and Xi Jinping wasn’t in power. A more connected Asia is a less American-centric Asia. But the US *still* doesn't get it: csis.org/analysis/twq-w…

19. And if you want “Indo-Pacific” to be a policy construct, not just a geographic one, then you need to reckon with what just happened—because now the region’s two megadeals, CPTPP and RCEP, do not include the largest economies in the “Indo” or across the “Pacific.” That's bad.

20: I'll end with this: My @CarnegieEndow business card says, “Vice President, Asia-Pacific.” In Moscow last year, a senior Russian official eyed it, squinted at me, and then joked that I was a “very brave American” to retain the term “Asia” instead of “Indo-Pacific” in my title.

21: Might I bluntly suggest that, if this trendline on American power and lack of adaptation holds, we need to start thinking and talking seriously about “Asia” again. We need to weigh the implications of a more "Asian" Asia for American interests, power, strategy, and policy.

22: I wrote this almost a decade ago: Gradually, but inexorably, the region is becoming more Asian than ‘‘Asia-Pacific,’’ especially as Asian economies look to one another, not just the trans-Atlantic West, for new economic and financial arrangements ...

23: ... It is becoming more continental than sub-continental, as East and South Asia become more closely intertwined ...

24: ... And, in its continental west, it is becoming more Central *Asian* than *Eurasian*, as China develops its western regions and five former Soviet countries rediscover their Asian roots. Have written on that one at length in the context of some writing on Central Asia ...

25: The last of the six sections in this 2017 essay I wrote hopefully captures at least part of the problem. The US should stop trying to rewind the clock and start being more adaptive: carnegieendowment.org/2018/04/27/rel…

26: And I know there are no easy strategic or policy answers here. None. And I certainly don't have all the answers. My point is just this: along the three strategic dimensions I refer to in this thread, we need to have a more complex, uncomfortable, and self-reflective debate.

27: And while we're at it, we will be (much) better positioned to deal with the adverse effects of the rise of Chinese power for US interests in the context of a broader Asia strategy rather than the other way around.

28: End of thread. Hope it was useful. Went way beyond what RCEP merits or deserves. The point is not to hype RCEP or dismiss RCEP. It is, rather, to be careful not to look only at RCEP (or CPTPP for that matter). There's a broader set of trends that's worth eyeballing again.