 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IIEA webinar. We're delighted to be joined today by Dr. Michael R. Oslin, a writer, policy analyst, historian and scholar of Asia, who has been generous enough to take time out of his busy schedule to speak to us. Dr. Oslin will speak for about 20 minutes or so and then we will have a Q&A session with our audience. You will be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screens. Please feel free to send in your questions throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them once Dr. Oslin has finished his presentation. And please be sure to include your name and affiliation with your question. You can also join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. So let me now introduce our guest speaker today. Dr. Oslin is the inaugural Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Senior Advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. And he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018. He's the author of half a dozen books, among them Asia's New Geopolitics, essays on reshaping the Indo-Pacific, which was published by Hoover Institution Press in 2020. So I know we're all looking forward very much to hearing his presentation and without any further ado, I will give him the floor. So Dr. Oslin, over to you. Ambassador Neary, thank you very much for that kind introduction and to you and to IIEA for welcoming me this morning and letting me talk with you a little bit about Asia and the competition between the United States and China, the role of alliances and partners and really to honestly to have a discussion with you as opposed to me just pontificating for an hour. So I'm going to try to keep my remarks fairly short and then open it up to what I hope will be a robust and interesting discussion. Despite the lovely background behind me, I'm actually speaking to you from Washington, D.C. So my comments are very much with a Washington-based perspective. It's where I am located and where I do my work. So the US view obviously is one that informs the type of research and talks that I do. But I think it's critically important for Washington, for the US to talk with partners and allies and interested parties around the globe about what I think is the most critical issue of the day, which is the growing and worrisome competition and adversarial competition between the United States and China. Let me start off by actually backing away from that to say that I think one of the big problems that we in the United States have in dealing with Asia, there are two of them. One is that over the past decade or decade and a half, we've really made the issue in Asia about China as opposed to Asia or the Indo-Pacific or whichever rubric you prefer, whatever boundaries you decide to draw. But we've sort of been sucked into a black hole of thinking only or primarily about China and then thinking about the rest of the Indo-Pacific in a reactive sense. I think that's a big mistake. Secondly, we've made it a long-term, I would say decades-long mistake in sort of trying to go it alone. Now I don't mean go it alone without partners in Asia. We have partners in the United States. We have five treaty allies. But unlike Europe, for example, we've always sort of thought about Asia as a one-on-one type of proposition, either bilaterally with China or bilaterally with Japan or bilaterally with Australia or any number of partners. And only recently have we begun to break out of that mold. But I would say the decades-long pull of thinking that the United States is really going to be going it alone in Asia without a broad set of partners even from outside the region has been something that's also hampered our efficiency and our effectiveness. So it's no surprise. I mean, you all know as well as I do, it's no surprise that the United States and China are in what I think can best be termed an adversarial relationship. We still sometimes call it a competition. But compared to 10 years ago or so, almost no one calls it a partnership anymore. It's actually quite striking to think how quickly our own verbiage has changed over the past decade from, decade, decade, decade and a half, let's say, from talking about China as a strategic partner, as a potential G2, as a country that ultimately, if hesitantly was going to not only be more cooperative in the world, but also liberalize eventually thanks to being included in global trade and political networks, we've moved dramatically away from that. Almost to where everyone who was on one side of the boat in Washington has now rushed over to the other side of the boat. And if the boat was somewhat unbalanced beforehand, thinking, I think, in a somewhat naive and too optimistic, polyannish sense that China was going to be a constructive partner, now I almost worry that it's everyone's on the other side of the deck and that it's tilted the other way, which is that everyone thinks that China is an enemy. Now to put my cards on the table, I will say that I think China is, if not an enemy and if not an adversary, it is clearly not and I don't think ever will be a friend of the United States or the liberal world, so that would mean the EU, European and liberal Asian nations as well. I don't think China has any interest in that and when I talk about China, I'm talking in terms of policy about the CCP, about the Chinese Communist Party, but I also want to make clear that I am of the belief that the CCP has an enormous amount of support within China. It's become somewhat de rigueur these days to say, well, let's be clear, we're talking about China and not the Chinese people. I think we're, we have to accept and quite honestly, I think we're a little bit afraid to accept that a great amount, number, percentage of the Chinese people actually support the CCP. Even if they're not party members, they support it because it is a party that has brought wealth, stature, power and influence to China and in the lifetime, in the living memory of hundreds of millions of people. So when I say that China is not a friend of the United States, I don't mean that individual Chinese may or let's say the liberal world in Europe, I don't mean that they necessarily hate us or that they want to invade us certainly or even maybe supplant us, but I think it is very clear that China and especially the younger Chinese who are much more nationalistic do not see themselves in many ways as connected with the liberal world that we like to think of. Of course, they may study in our universities, they may come and work in our cities, but they do not see themselves unlike so many other groups around the world who come to our societies that there is anything for them in it. And this I think both reflects policy but then also influences policy. I think there is clearly, I don't think this is earth shattering news, a competition between China and the United States. It's not a competition where I think there's any risk of China attempting to invade the United States. I don't really think there's a risk of China attempting to invade Japan, for example, but for Beijing to be the dominant power in Asia I think is without question its overall goal. I think it wants to be dominant economically, I think it wants to be dominant politically and militarily and to the extent that it can outside Asia have the same type of influence and the same type of power. Again, not necessarily, I would argue to change our systems but to ensure that our system does not change the Chinese system, that our system does not change the CCP and risk the CCP's hold on power or to as the party has put it now for a decade to bring Western notions of liberalism and democracy and civil rights and the like into China which would be seen as undermining traditional Chinese culture and society. If anything we need to grasp something and I think we're getting better at it right now but to grasp something that for decades quite frankly since the end of the Cold War we did not want to engage with which is the idea that ideology is important. For years you could hear in our capitals and in our financial markets that the Chinese, they're not really communist they don't really believe in it they're not really a Marxist-Leninist system. The fact is they are but they are also a Chinese system they are a Confucian system they are a legalist system all of these different strands have come together and mixed together along with a very hard Marxism-Leninism of the party to create a non-reformist one party state and one that believes in its ideology it may not be the same ideology quite that Marx or Lenin or Stalin would have articulated but it believes very strongly in this ideology it's what it tells itself it's what it tells its people now I don't think that Xi Jinping or anyone in Beijing expects us to accept their ideology but they are making a clear division a clear marking between themselves and us in terms of how they view the world how they view the role of the state how they view the role of individuals and the like and that we have to take that seriously there's the old quip of Irving Crystal the political thinker and father of what's often called neoconservatism that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality well I think that a China hawk or a China realist is a China dove who's been mugged by reality that those who for 50 years hoped and thought and worked towards a more cooperative relationship with China are finally recognizing that despite their best efforts quite frankly despite the good idea of the good intentions that the attempt to make China a more cooperative and even liberalized power was a good thing to try that it has failed and we do ourselves not only a disservice but we put ourselves at risk if we don't accept this now there is still a debate going on in this my country and I would argue in countries that are not the best about the United States you know historians like me will look back eventually and try to figure out when this shift occurred was it 2017 with Donald Trump was it you know 2015 with Barack Obama and the militarization of the South China Sea you know when exactly was the shift starting in Washington and that's important because we're in still to move past a 40-year period essentially a 40-year era of engagement with China that started when relations were normalized in 1979 even stretched back a little earlier of course to the Nixon outreach in 1972 but we're beginning to move past that and yet what we are moving towards is not yet fully clear we don't yet know and yet there is still a struggle here with the Chinese who believe in a much harder line against China and I would include the Biden administration in that and those who remain committed to engagement particularly scholars those in the academy certainly the business community Wall Street and like London let's say who believe that we must engage with China primarily for their self-interest either their access or for their business because they think that that remains the only way to really ensure that we can attempt to have any influence over Beijing I mean I really think that those days of influence are over I think that's very clear you know depending on what type of policy tools you want to use days of coercion might still be ahead of us certainly on both sides but days of coercion days of attempting to have the best of a bad situation but the idea of engagement to me at least is one that I fully understand the impulse and I understand why so many would argue that we need to continue to do that but in reality that there is very little chance quite frankly that the type of engagement that we both had with China and the type of engagement that we thought we would have in the future and I think that's a very important question can ever be achieved so that leaves this question of what do we do and how do we do it and I think one of the big problems is we haven't decided what we want to do ultimately right you can't have policy without a strategy and you can't have a strategy without a goal in mind and that may sound nonetheless important to recognize that I don't think we yet know what we really want to see at the end of whatever this process is in Asia and the Indo-Pacific and with China the current phrase the phrase that is used by the Biden administration was used by the Trump administration is a free and open Indo-Pacific it actually comes from the formulation and that formulation but it's actually something that goes all the way back to the beginnings of American involvement with Asia back in the 1840s when we were a weak nation that couldn't bring to bear for example the power of the Royal Navy or the British we asked and expected both of the Chinese who were the primary target of our trading and missionary activities but also of the Europeans that we be allowed to trade in the region it was an impulse that we maintained throughout the 19th century up to the open door notes when the United States made the same demands and expectations on the European colonial powers that China would be kept whole and open of course for us to trade as much as they were it was the same impulse ultimately that manifested but the larger idea that no hegemon and aggressive hegemon would be able to dominate the Indo-Pacific such as Japan was why we got involved in World War II and the Pacific War and then afterwards in 1945 and onward why we maintained alliances and troops in the region was to maintain the openness of the system so the free and open Indo-Pacific is not anything new and goal I mean what is free and open actually mean I don't think we've ultimately determined that though there are some common sense ideas to it but more importantly does it mean that all of Asia is free well certainly China is not free and Laos is not particularly free North Korea is not free sadly it looks like Burma remains unfree or has gone back to being unfree so what do we mean by free and open Indo-Pacific there's largest trading partners even after covid in fact after covid Chinese exports in the United States have increased they haven't decreased there's been none of the real decoupling that everyone talked about maybe we'll decouple a little bit on semiconductor chips but if you're talking about openness we're just as open in terms of trading with the Pacific and the Indo-Pacific as we were 10 years ago or 5 years ago or 30 years ago and Indo-Pacific so I think that we really don't know what we in the United States want and I'm not sure that our partners know what they want either let me offer a historical analogy or maybe a historical reference that I've been thinking about that may it doesn't give us an answer but I think it may help us think about what we face we often hear the terms balance of power obviously we've heard that in Europe now for several centuries my mentor in graduate school his name was Paul Schrader was probably the eminent US diplomatic historian of the late 18th and early 19th centuries argued that what we usually talk about is a balance of power we use the term all the time balance of power after Napoleon there was a balance of power so on and so forth what we think of as the balance of power really wasn't a balance of power the balance of power was what Europe endured during the 17th century and much of the 18th century which was a series of endemic wars the Anglo-French wars the Anglo-Dutch wars Russian wars in its near abroad and the like the Napoleonic wars that was what a balance of power really was it meant that all states were trying to balance against any neighbor or any of the other states that were attempting to become hegemons that there was a whole series of actions and policies that were undertaken for quite frankly close to a century and a half to balance out power of other nations what we think of commonly or popularly as a balance of power after Napoleon my mentor Professor Schrader argued was really better described as a political equilibrium now the words are close balance and equilibrium and the way they were used particularly in the French language it was very close but the French language also was very clear that after Napoleon where all parties agreed to the status quo they all felt that the post-Napoleonic settlement and this includes France but critically includes Austria and Prussia as well as the UK and Russia felt that the system was legitimate that it looked out for their interests that there were two benign hegemons the UK and Russia and yet the smaller states Prussia, the Italian states Austria, France all were assured of their rights their territorial integrity their sovereignty and that their voice would be listened to and that's what made for well over a generation that system so successful so why do I bring it all up other than as a historian I think it's interesting and I like it I bring it up because I think that clarifying between a political equilibrium and a balance of power is the two different strategies that the United States and China have followed now just to be pedantic for a second when Professor Schrader was talking about this he was talking about them as international systems there was a system of a balance of power and then there was a system of political equilibrium I'm talking about them as strategies what I think China's strategy is very clear has been a balance of power strategy to balance against the United States to chip away at the United States influence power if we want to call it post 1945 hegemony to set up its own institutions when it could such as its own development bank its own international institutions its own pan Asian initiatives such as the one belt and one road in essence not to see the post 1945 system is legitimate conversely what has the United States been doing since 1945 and particularly let me say since 1991 in the end of the Cold War I think what the United States has been doing has been pursuing a political equilibrium strategy meaning we thought once the Soviet Union had collapsed once the Cold War was over that there was a political equilibrium now it was obviously a liberal equilibrium in our favor where unlike in Europe in the 19th century there was not there were not two hegemons in the United States which viewed itself as a liberal benign hegemony so everything that it tried to do was to maintain the political equilibrium which is why it didn't challenge China because to do so would have been to revert to balance of power so for example just yesterday just to give a quick example new very high resolution very detailed photographs of China's South China Sea artificial islands and military bases were released you can go online and look at them it was in a bunch of the headlines today so when these islands were starting to be built in the mid 2010s the Obama administration did nothing about it the United States was still much more powerful than China there was always the fear that these islands could be used to upend what we might call a balance of power in the South China Sea but we were more worried about engaging in risky actions against China because we thought what we were really doing was trying to defend this equilibrium and what was that equilibrium well it was open trade it was open political engagement it was free flow of people and ideas across borders we thought for many years and particularly after 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union and the second phase when the Chinese were formed under Deng Xiaoping which started in 1992 we thought that well of course China supports this political equilibrium why because it benefits from it because it gets as much access to the world as any nation it's going to become rich and wealthy it's going to grow a middle class and that middle class ultimately will demand some level of political liberalization so what we thought we were doing as we did when in reality I think Beijing was playing a balance of power game which is why today we can now talk about a militarized South China Sea it's why we talk about cyber warfare and regular cyber attacks against the United States and allies and probably Ireland as well I'm sure as a feature not a bug of Chinese security policy of why the influence of the United States on the nation and just now just this week Britain is confirming that it will shut down for example the Confucius Institutes which are state funded often though not always but often propaganda outlets on university campuses why the propaganda campaigns of Beijing were so successful we can also understand why it was that China did not do anything in the initial days of the COVID outbreak so that we could have done a much better job hopefully we'll never know at capping off the pandemic because China sees itself in opposition to the liberal world to the western world it sees it as a threat to the party the party's way of life it sees itself as balancing against chipping away against an illegitimate system that it is trying to reform so let me wrap up so we can get to questions I don't have a full set of answers I have ideas about what we should do although many of them are things we're already doing but I think if we articulate the idea that we really are in a balance of power system as opposed to or balance of power dynamic as opposed to a political equilibrium dynamic then we can be more realistic about the China challenge what is to wrap up then the best I think short term policy well this may shock many of you many of you may drop the call at this point but I think it was actually what the Trump administration was trying to do at least what they articulated doing even if they didn't fully do it and since they only had one term we'll never know how much they actually could have carried it through but we do see that the Biden administration has actually adopted most of the Trump policies not all of them are strategic or selective decoupling so the reciprocity is something again I'm sure in Ireland's history and in European history but certainly in American history is a time-honored tactic and strategy that goes back centuries in fact in our country goes back to George Washington who used reciprocity to force the British to recognize diplomatically the United States and open trade with them after the revolution and after independence it's something that I think the Trump administration was trying to do saying that it has to be a level playing field meaning giving up the idealism that you're going to change China and instead accepting that what you need if you want to engage with China is a level and fair playing field on things such as Confucius Institutes versus American Centers the number of Chinese reporters in the country versus American reporters in China certainly trade issues right that was we forget launched a trade war against China the most of those tariffs in fact I think all of those tariffs are still in place in the Biden administration which keeps talking about dropping some of them has not yet done so so reciprocity as the first part of the policy the second part of the policy strategic decoupling I think we haven't gone nearly far enough I think we have to go much farther the focus that we've made is on semiconductors which are critical I think we've gone enough on that and I can talk about some of those specifics but more broadly the question of access to American high-tech research institutes access to American cultural institutions and organizations again because we're talking about the influence campaigns again the question which is a tough one for universities about the number of Chinese students that should be allowed in and should we be for example of different questions of selective decoupling that we should be thinking about certainly protecting our supply chains which goes way beyond semiconductors it gets to rare earths and electronic components and rubber for the tires of our trucks and the like it gets to the question of which is both one of reciprocity but I think more importantly of strategic decoupling of Chinese investment in the United States is the degree of investment but obviously it also is the decoupling on the telecommunication side of banning Huawei and ZTE from our telecommunications networks so a lot of that's being done but I think we haven't gone far enough and I think we haven't gone far enough because we still for example pushed by Wall Street or pushed by many academics believe that we can engage with China because ultimately China agrees in the legitimacy in the legitimacy of the system that we set up i.e. these advocates still believe in political equilibrium whereas I think Xi Jinping has made it beyond evidently clear that he is pursuing a balance a traditional balance of power strategy to reduce American power to reduce liberal power and to chip away at the system and the network that we created after 1945 and particularly after 1991 which reflects our values reflects liberal interests and quite frankly has brought with all of its imperfections brought more overall wealth and more opportunity to more people than any other though it certainly could be more perfected and become better so let me end there I've talked for about a half an hour and I know we should be getting to questions so thank you.