Is America winning in Asia?

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In an earlier article in this space I wrote that President Joe Biden, having been distracted by the war in Ukraine, had finally turned his attention to Asia. But the way Biden’s Washington defined Asia excluded Pakistan. A great deal of attention was being given to India. The main reason for this was the growing competition between China and the United States — now the world’s two largest economies. Some analysts believe that even with a significant slowdown in the rate of growth of the Chinese economy, China will overtake the United States in terms of the size of its economy in a decade or two. Would this happen without an open conflict between the two nations? President Biden has said that “the United States won’t stand by and let China win the 21^st century.”

This sentiment was in line with the thinking of Thucydides, the Greek sage-historian who studied the conflict between Athens and Sparta and argued that conflict is inevitable when a rising power challenges the one that has been in command for a long time. The Harvard University political scientist Graham T Allison coined the term ‘Thucydides Trap’ in an article published in The Financial Times in 2012 to describe the likely conflict between a rising and an established power. He used the term to describe the growing tension between the United States and China and feared that America may go to war to prevent China from becoming the dominant world power.

According to Susannah Patton who researches Indo-Pacific strategy at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and is the director of the Asia Power Index, her data show that the United States leverage has declined in terms of regional power dynamics. Twenty years ago, 5 per cent of exports from Southeast Asia went to China and 16 per cent to the United States. By 2020, they were both around 15 per cent. China’s increasing economic dominance was shown by the trends in regional trade. It does around two and half times more volume in the region than the United States. China is now the largest trading partner of almost every Asian country. The situation would turn even more in favour of China when the enormous amount of investment it was making in what President Xi Jinping has called the Belt and Road Initiative or BRI. Two countri