Asia’s Dangerous Divide

Beijing and Washington are building new alliances throughout the continent. Is it a good or bad news for Cambodia?

Later this month, the navies of the United States, India, Japan, Australia and Singapore will get together in the Bay of Bengal for one of the largest peacetime joint military exercises ever. Dubbed Malabar 07, the exercise stems in part from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent push to strengthen ties with India and other Asian democracies.

His motivation for the move isn't hard to understand. Around the same time Abe was in India, 6,500 troops from Russia, China and four Central Asian countries converged on the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk to show off their own armed prowess. The "Peace Mission 07" exercise was held under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Yet the underlying message was clear enough. Taken together, the Malabar and Peace Mission exercises point to a potentially dangerous reality taking shape: the emergence of two competing security camps in Asia. On the one hand stands the United States, still the area's dominant military power; traditional allies such as Japan and Australia; and a few new friends, such as Mongolia and, potentially, India. On the other stands China, which is using its rapid economic growth and accelerating defense spending, as well as close ties to Russia, Pakistan, the Central Asian states, Burma, and Cambodia, to raise its own profile and to develop a sphere of influence. As the competition accelerates, more and more states are finding themselves forced to choose sides.

This is unlikely to result in a stark new cold war; for economic reasons, especially, countries in both spheres should remain more integrated than the Soviet and U.S. blocs were during the second half of the 20th century. And a number of states—including South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam—seem determined to sit on the fence. Still, the security situation is growing increasingly tense as the sides jockey for influence. Apart from anti-Western ire, another powerful glue binding the Chinese camp is energy security. Both the U.S. and China are driven increasingly by a fight for energy supplies (vital ports and strategic routes).

Despite the many warning signs, however, some scholars advise against gloomy predictions. They argue that the SCO, for example, shouldn't be taken seriously, since its members, while sharing some interests, are divided by others. Economic interconnections also greatly complicate the picture. China is integrated into the West and the global economy in ways that the Soviet Union never was. India is also very eager to do business with China, and signed an economic-cooperation and border agreement with its giant neighbor in 2005. Economic factors also help explain why a number of states have refused to align with either security camp. South Korea, once a stalwart U.S. ally, has lately seemed to be tilting toward China, which—here again—recently became Seoul's pre-eminent business partner.

"Everybody has concerns about China, but the closer you are to China the less you're able to articulate them out loud," says the CSIS's Glosserman. "I think everyone is hedging in every direction." And it will probably be some time before China and its new friends pose a serious military threat to the United States and its camp. But they're trying—and if trends continue in the current direction, they may well someday succeed.