Introduction: Rebalancing of power is a crucial study of strategic geography which helps the

policy makers to shape mental map for the formulation of grand strategy on the basis their states

interests, commitments and vulnerabilities within an imagined space. In the response of strategic

position of a country within the strategic geography, a country has to rebalance its foreign and

defense policy depending on different strategic important bloc. In the early 2011, United States

(US) formulated its foreign and defense policy emphasizing on the Iraq and Afghanistan. But in

the late 2011 and early 2012, a raising geopolitical importance of Asia gave, American

administration, a signal that American policy had become imbalanced by its heavy dependency on

Iraq and Afghanistan, and that it required to recalibrate its approach to better expose the long-term

character of America’s interests and seismic geopolitical changes occurring in Asia. Besides

because of the rising of India and China as hegemonic and economic power in Asia and Asia

pacific region, the America has been rethinking about its foreign, security and defense policy

focusing on the ‘Indo-Asia-pacific’ without confining in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This assignment is divided into five parts. In the first part defining the concept I want to outline

the origination USA’s rebalancing policy. The second part of the assignment tries to mention some

rational aspects in favor of it and the third part tries to sketch out a framework for USA’s

rebalancing Asia policy. The fourth part of this assignment critically evaluated the rebalancing

Asia policy of USA and the fifth part of this assignment concluded with the concluding remark.

Conceptual framework and Origins of the USA’s rebalancing Asia policy:

Beginning in the fall of 2011, the Obama administration has issued a series of announcements and

taken a series of steps to expand and intensify the already significant role of the United States in

the Asia-Pacific region. Explicitly identifying the Asia-Pacific region as a geostrategic priority for

the United States, the Obama administration is paying a higher level of attention to the region

across a wide range of issue areas. This represents a significant shift in U.S. policy.

However, the story of the rebalance is not a story of U.S. disengagement and then re-engagement

in Asia. Instead, it is a matter of emphasis and priority, building on an elaborate foundation of

U.S.-Asia relations that was already in place. The United States has had powerful national interests

in the Asia-Pacific region since World War II and was deeply engaged in the region – militarily,

economically, and diplomatically – throughout the Cold War. The post-Cold War administrations

of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were actively engaged in Asia.

The Obama administration’s policy toward the Asia-Pacific region has evolved over time and has

gone through two distinct phases. When the policy was first rolled out in 2011-12, much of the

emphasis was placed on military initiatives in the region. China disapproved of these initiatives,

and Beijing took steps to demonstrate its power in maritime territorial disputes with U.S. allies.

The Obama administration adjusted its approach in late 2012, playing down the significance of

military initiatives, emphasizing economic and diplomatic elements, and calling for closer U.S.

engagement with China.

USA’s rebalancing Asia policy at a glance: The main aspects of the rebalancing Asia

policy are in the following.

The rebalance demonstrates that the Obama administration is giving priority attention to

the Asia-Pacific region following U.S. pullbacks from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The military elements of the new policy signal the administration’s determination to

maintain force levels and military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region despite substantial

cutbacks in overall U.S. defense spending.

The administration’s military steps will generate more widely-dispersed U.S. forces and

basing/deployment arrangements. This reflects the rising importance of Southeast Asia,

South Asia, and the Indian Ocean, along with the longstanding U.S. emphasis on Northeast

Asia.

The dispersal of U.S. forces and the development of the new Air-Sea Battle concept are

designed to counter growing “Anti-Access/Area Denial” efforts in the Asia-Pacific region,

mainly by China in the Taiwan area and along the Chinese maritime rim (but also by Iran

in and around the Gulf). The U.S. rebalance includes an array of economic initiatives. This reflects the recognition in

the United States that Asia is and will continue to be a vital economic region for decades to

come. Close American economic interaction and integration with Asia’s growing economies

and its burgeoning economic multilateral groupings will be essential for the health of the U.S.

economy.

Rationale for the Rebalance: USA’s rebalancing Asia policy is a strategic policy to

perpetuate is hegemonic power and influence over others and behind this policy it has some

rationales that are given below.

Afraid of transforming Asia’s strategic setting: Advocates of an Indo-Pacific reorientation of

American grand strategy see such changes as an essential response to three key developments that

are apparently transforming Asia’s strategic setting. These key developments are the following.

Possibility of China and India as a rising power: The rise of China and India as a hegemonic

power was the main fear of USA. Despite unsettled rivalry between the two giants, China and

India’s immediate rise is regarded as generating a major shift in regional security dynamics. India’s

post-1991 economic liberalization and its embrace of a ‘look-East’ foreign policy has, however,

led to sustained growth and fostered a more extroverted strategic posture. China’s prodigious

economic expansion and increasing independence on resources from the middle East, Africa and

north-west Australia to sustain its rise, meanwhile, have seen Beijing take a keen interest in ‘far

sea defense’ in the Indian ocean. For some, such as Robert Kaplan, the supposedly inevitable

maritime competition between these two already acrimonious purported great powers will draw

the United States much more directly into the Indian Ocean.1

The growing strategic importance of sea lines of communication: The growing strategic

importance of the sea lines of communication, according to American policy makers, is also

1 Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian ocean and the Future of American Power

another cause of transforming Asia’s strategic setting because Karl Haushofer have recognized the

importance of the ‘Indo-Pacific space’ as a vital channel for Asian maritime traffic.2 The explosive

growth of Asian demand for energy-especially Middle Eastern oil and gas increases the importance

of Indian Ocean. The Strait of Malacca, being the main corridor between the Indian Ocean and the

South China Sea, has as many as 220 ship movements in both directions per day at present, and

would have 275 ship movements by the year 2000. ''About 26 tankers, including three fully loaded

supertankers heading for Asian ports, pass through the strait daily3.”Thus the emergence of an

Indian Ocean-centered resource and energy superhighway linking Asian manufacturing to global

resource centers is a powerful centripetal force; the sea line of communications linking East-Asia

and the Indian Ocean region are often seen as inexorably pulling once separate threats into an

integrated strategic space.

The growth of intra-Asian trade and interconnectivity: The growth of intra-Asian trade and

interconnectivity is also another cause of generating American grand strategy for rebalancing Asia

policy. It is also creating an integrated Asia which is called by scholars such as Anthony Bubalo

and Malcolm Cook have called ‘horizontal Asia’: a spreading spider web of railways, ports and

highways tying Eurasia into ever tighter bonds of economic interdependence.4 Besides thickening

commercial ties between America and Western Europe, and between the states of East Asia and

Pacific Rim, drew together the North Atlantic and Asia-Pacific regions respectively, the economic

blood pumping through the channels of the Indo-Pacific emerges to some analysts to be creating a

new strategic domain. Thus the Indo-Pacific becomes a geo-economic and geostrategic concept,

with growing commercial integration purportedly driving trans-Asian security.

Strategic reassurance of USA’s hegemony: The new U.S. policy is also based on the need –

widely felt throughout most of the Asia-Pacific region – for strategic reassurance in the face of a

rising and increasingly assertive China and India. The rebalance is also driven by a desire to

reassure U.S. allies, friends, and other countries in the region that the United States has not been

exhausted after a decade of war, that it has not been weakened by economic and political problems

at home, and that it is not going to disengage from Asia-Pacific affairs.

Prescription for Rebalance: To rebalance Asia policy, USA must have to implement a grand

strategy in Asia. Since 1945 although East Asia security concerns have imposed on Washington’s

assessment of its vital national interests in many ways, four primary interests have guided

America’s grand strategy in Asia. These are given below.

Preventing the rising of peer competitors: Since the Second World War, American grand

strategy has been framed by the overriding imperative of preventing the rise of antagonistic peer

competitor’ capable of dominating Eurasia’s core industrial centers of military and economic

2 David Scott, ‘the Indo-pacific’-new regional formulations and new maritime frameworks for US-India strategic convergence’, Asia-pacific review, vol-19, No-2,2012, p.88 3 Sumihiko Kawamura, ''Shipping and Regional Trade: Regional Security Interests'', in Sam Bateman and Stephen Bates ed., Shipping and Regional Security, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defense No.129, Australian National University, 1998, p.16. 4 http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=804

power.5 USA ensures this principle through the parallel efforts to contain the Soviet Union and

People’s Republic of China during the cold war and deploying the military personnel in Asia after

1945. After the 1972, China is trying to influence the wider Asia keeping free from hegemonic

challenge for the better part of two decades. China’s post cold war rise and the growing importance

of East and South China seas has revived US concerns about the emergence of a regional peer

competitor which has most strongly informed the ongoing US rebalance towards Asia.

Destabilizing conventional armed conflict: The United States has also pursued a second vital

interest in mitigating local security dilemmas among Asia’s power to prevent the emergence of a

prospective hegemonic challenger in Eurasia through preventing their rise into system-

destabilizing conventional armed conflict. At the immediate of post war period, the United States

sought to integrate a disarmed Japan into a US dominated security and trading order preventing

the revival of Japanese militarism. Similarly the United States’ bilateral alliances from the outset

viewed in part as ‘pacts of restraint’ that aimed at not only to reassure junior allies of the reliability

of Washington’s security guarantees, but also to restrain them from unilaterally escalating local

rivalries in the ways that might prove inimical to US interest.6

Binding the local power to US-dominated trading and financial order: USA always tries to

make a kind of grand strategy which helps them to stabilize regional rivalries by binding local

powers to US-dominated liberal trading and financial order. USA gives the all kinds of trading and

financial opportunity to Asian countries known as ‘Open Door Policy’ emphasizing on the Asia’s

growing dependence on commodities from the Middle East, Africa and Australia to ensure their

maritime access in Asia because Asia’s access to these resources threats the USA’s sustaining

broader ambition of preserving an open Asia-Pacific economic order. Since at least as far as back

Washington’s advocacy of an Open Door Policy towards China in the late 1890’s, United States

has regarded Asia’s incorporation into such an order as being vital to US prosperity and security.7

Thus the USA rebalances Asia through the trade and finance.

Tackling the non-traditional threats: Preventing the emergence of a genuine peer competitor;

mitigating local security dilemma, USA’ grand strategy has been made to tackle the nontraditional

threats. To ensure this goal, USA outlined the above tangible goal cultivating a regional order in

which behavior follows accepted norms and principles, in line with international law. Basically

during the post 9/11 period USA sought to grand strategy to strengthen cooperation by increasing

involvement in both bilateral and multilateral regional security cooperation to address the

nontraditional threats such as terrorism, piracy and state failure. Thus the USA has been trying to

rebalance Asia policy.

Evolution of the USA’s rebalancing Asia policy: Given the rise of Asia, the U.S.

rebalance toward Asia is a reasonable reflection of changing geostrategic realities; it makes

5 Christopher Layne, the Peace of illusion: American grand strategy from 1940 to the present. 6 http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/isec.2010.34.3.158 7 Michael Mann, the sources of social power: Global empires and revolution, voume.3, p.92

strategic sense. But many scholars look the USA’s rebalancing policy as US-China centric narrow

strategic policy but it is not a narrow strategic policy. Because,

The rebalance is not a fundamentally new departure. It builds on longstanding U.S. interests

and the policies of previous administrations.

The rebalance is not limited to Northeast Asia, the traditional focus of U.S. policy in Asia. The

new policy links that vital area with newly emphasized U.S. concerns in Southeast Asia, South

Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean, creating a region-wide initiative of

extraordinary breadth.

The rebalance is not just a military strategy. It is multidimensional – comprised of several sets

of security, economic, and diplomatic initiatives.

The new U.S. policy is not static. The rebalance has gone through two phases and continues to

evolve, shaped by the fluid dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region and changing circumstances

in the United States.

The rebalance is not a containment strategy with respect to China. Although the United States

and China will inevitably compete economically and perhaps diplomatically and militarily, the

Obama administration understands that a new Cold War is not in the U.S. national interest.

President Obama has been explicit in stating: “We welcome the peaceful rise of China. It is in

America’s interest to see China succeed.” These are powerful, positive statements about the

U.S. view of its relationship with China.

The Obama administration is not forcing other countries in the Asia-Pacific region to choose

between the United States and China. The administration recognizes that every country in the

region wants to maintain good relations with both the United States and China. Many key

countries in the Asia-Pacific region have taken significant steps toward the United States in

recent years, but they have done so voluntarily and often with considerable enthusiasm. It

might be more accurate to say that China is engaging in self-containing behavior.

Besides above mentioned evaluations it has also some critical matters which are given in the

following.

Some U.S. foreign policy specialists worry that the rebalance will prompt China to react

negatively, leading to a downward spiral in relations and greater confrontation with a danger

of conflict, including possibly military conflict. A few experts argue that Washington has

exaggerated recent Chinese assertiveness and reacted in strong ways that are likely to prompt

even stronger Chinese measures. They warn of a U.S.-China “action-reaction” dynamic that

could destabilize the Asia-Pacific region.8

Some analysts argue that the rebalance is unrealistic because plans to restructure U.S. military

deployments in Asia will run up against unavoidable budget constraints. As many governments

in Asia monitor Washington’s ability to sustain its costly military structure in the region, a

8 Robert Ross, “The Problem with the Pivot,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 6, (November/December 2012), pp. 70-82

critical issue in the debate over the Obama rebalancing initiatives is whether long-term

procurement trends will support a level of investment spending in new weapons systems and

other requirements sufficient to back planned naval and other force levels in the Pacific and

elsewhere. For example, there is considerable concern that long-term Navy budgets will not

sustain a Navy of 313 ships, as called for in recent plans; the U.S Navy now has about 280

ships. The ongoing sequestration process entails significant and precipitous reductions in

military end-strength, and operational and training funds, as well as delays in investments. The

cuts in spending are particularly disruptive to defense planning. Even if future cuts are more

rationally allocated, additional reductions might well entail further decline in the size of U.S.

military forces.

Some analysts in Washington have privately suggested that President Obama and his close

associates are not particularly committed to the Asia-Pacific. For one thing, the rebalance is

said to have been a tactic not a strategic change; it has been a useful political tool to show the

American people and international audiences strong evidence of American international

resolve at a time of retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. The president and his aides may have

judged that initiatives like the rebalance were desirable, but budget realities and more pressing

concerns at home and abroad are said to be sapping and will continue to undermine the

administration’s commitment to the stated goals of the government’s rebalancing policy.

Conclusion: At last it can be said that USA is a hegemonic country. As a hegemonic country, to

perpetuate its hegemonic status it can do anything. Before 2011, USA has formulated its foreign

and security policy emphasizing on the Middle East countries especially depend on Iraq and

Afghanistan which makes its policy very much imbalance. But after 2011 it turns back its looking

at the Asia-pacific region because they think that Asia region is a rising possible hub of their

economy for the growing importance sea line of communication. The growing importance of

Indian Ocean as corridor of USA’s sea line of communication was also made the USA considerate

about their balance of power as well. As the fuel problem is increasing in the present time over the

world, the USA has to rethink over it. And that is why America is formulating its foreign policy

on the basis of energy power though not solely. The Indian Ocean is the arch route of energy power

supply so the USA will try it best to ensure that there is no problem in the ocean route. USA is

also afraid of transnational terrorism and intra trade connectivity among different Asian countries.

In the light of these consideration, USA wishes to rebalance Asia policy which helps USA to

perpetuate their trading interest as well as hegemonic power.

References

1. Bisley, Nick and Phillips, Andrew; A Rebalance to Where?: US Strategic Geography in

Asia, December 11, 2013

2. Panetta, Leon; America’s Pacific Rebalance; Project Syndicate; December 31, 2012.

3. Sumihiko Kawamura, ''Shipping and Regional Trade: Regional Security Interests'', in Sam

Bateman and Stephen Bates ed., Shipping and Regional Security, Canberra Papers on

Strategy and Defense No.129, Australian National University, 1998

4. Sutter, Robert G. & Brown, Michael E.; Balancing Acts: The U.S. Rebalance and Asia-

Pacific Stability; August 2013

5. Mearsheimer, John J.; The Gathering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia,

2010

6. Professor Ji Guoxing; SLOC Security in the Asia Pacific

7. Gordon, Bernard, “Trading Up in Asia: Why the United States Needs the Trans-Pacific

Partnership,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 91, No. 4, (July/August 2012)

8. Carter, Ashton, “The U.S. Defense Rebalance to Asia,” Speech at the Center for Strategic

and International Studies, Washington, D.C., April 8, 2013.

Prepared by:

Md. Ashraful Alam

Department of Political Science

University of Dhaka