Territorial disputes in the APR. Interview with Alexei Fenenko

The long-standing territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands has recently deteriorated causing a chill in the relationships between the two countries. The discord between the APR leading powers may adversely affect the situation in the region. We have asked the leading expert in the area to explain the nature of such disputes and Russia’s position in the APR.

The long-standing territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands has recently deteriorated causing a chill in the relationships between the two countries. The discord between the APR leading powers may adversely affect the situation in the region. We have asked the leading expert in the area to explain the nature of such disputes and Russia’s position in the APR.

– A number of incidents have recently occurred between China and Japan related to territorial sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands stopping short of military clashes. What are the reasons for multiple disputes in the APR? Is it possible to reduce their number in foreseeable future?

– In order to answer these questions one needs to understand the specifics of the disputes in the APR.

Firstly, the Asia-Pacific region is not an abnormality, for conflicts are to be found everywhere and in great numbers.

Secondly, in spite of the territorial claims of the APR countries to each other, the region has not suffered a single major armed conflict since 1973. Military threats are voiced, terse statements are exchanged, but there have been no wars equal to those in Bosnia, Kosovo or Libya.

Hence, a third specific feature of the APR conflicts – their suspended nature, for despite the crises, the countries, as a rule, do not reach the stage of active military actions. Two factors are at play here – their economic interdependence and the East Asian cultural tradition devoid, save for Japan, of the militarist spirit.

And finally, the fourth. We have indeed witnessed an aggravation of the APR situation in the last few years caused, however, by the actions of extra-regional players, primarily the USA. 2009 became a watershed, for it was the year when President Barak Obama reached out to China (albeit, on the US conditions), offering the Group of Two project. It was a proposal to forge a special-relationship-based partnership on the world’s key economic issues. China declined the offer and in the spring of 2010, the United Stated embarked on a new official policy of ‘deterring China’.

The updated China’s deterrence policy is four-pronged and its first component is the revival of the ANZUS military alliance (The USA, Australia and New Zealand). In November 2010, President Obama signed the Wellington Declaration with New Zealand and the Sydney Agreement with Australia on the alliance’s expansion. The leadership of the People’s Republic of China reacted negatively to the ANZUS revival as Beijing has traditionally viewed Australia and New Zealand as unfriendly states.

The second component is designing a new presence profile in Indo-China. The process of US-Vietnamese relationships normalisation started already in 1995 accelerating after a visit by the State Secretary Hillary Clinton to Hanoi on 29 October 2010. The US Congress officially supported Vietnam in July 2011 in its conflict with the People’s Republic of China in the South China Sea. This year, Leon Lanetta – the US Defense Secretary – made a visit to Vietnam on 4-6 June after which the parties started talking about a potential cooperation in the military sphere.

Construction of a US naval base in Singapore - still another component of the US strategy in Indo-China - will enable the Americans to control the Strait of Malacca – the key passage way for energy sources export to the APR.

The third element is the expansion of the military partnership with India, while the fourth is streamlining the Trans-Pacific Partnership the USA joined in 2008. It is nowadays turning into a powerful regional block aiming, among other, to destroy a consultative framework in place at the ASEAN enabling the member countries to formulate a common stance on the international arena.

Japan’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership is critical for the USA, so it will gain from any conflict between China and Japan. Should the latter join the TPP, the block will become a powerful integrating entity. In the event of Japan’s refusal, the TPP will turn into a regional coalition of the South-Pacific states of secondary importance for the world economy. In objective terms, the escalating contradictions between Japan and China are not linked to the TPP, however, they may tilt Tokyo’s choice in favour of joining the alliance on an anti-China platform. And Japan’s choice may, in its turn, affect the position of South Korea currently deliberating accession to the TPP.

China is fully aware that the USA is mounting an encirclement strategy against it. So it is trying - through demonstrations of power – to gauge how steadfast the positions of the USA as well as its allies are. For example, Beijing has managed to discover that the Japanese are not ready to make concessions – and this is critical.

Russia has no territorial disputes in the APR, except those with the USA and Japan. Washington has major claims to Russia with respect to the territories in the Far East, specifically, the Bering Sea and the delimitation of the Bering Strait continental shelf. The situation around the Chukchee Sea is not entirely clear – if the Washington claims are accommodated, then neither the USA nor Japan will recognise the Sea of Okhotsk as Russia’s internal sea.

Photo: Alexei Fenenko, PhD (History), lead
researcher,the Institute for International Security
Studies, RAS

– You have mentioned the conflicting interests of Russia and the USA. Are there any common interests and common ground to develop Russia-US cooperation in the APR? The USA has the presidential elections coming soon. So we do not know yet who US President will be. May the Russia-US relations change if Mitt Romney comes to power?

Unfortunately, Russia has relations of conflict with the USA, including those in Asia – the territorial disputes play a certain role, the Arctic Region issue as well as the support the USA provides to Japan in its territorial disputes with Russia.

A number of attempts at a breakthrough in the US-Russia relations in the Far East have been made. The first attempt to draw Russia in an economic partnership with the USA in the Far East came from the Clinton administration. To this end, the USA endorsed Russia’s accession to the APEC in 1995. Then followed a number of attempts to launch Sakhalin-1, Sakhalin-2 and Sakhalin-3 projects but nothing came of it.

In 2010, the Obama administration tried to launch a second version of the famous ASEAN Northern Alternative, that is to create a new integrating entity covering the US Pacific coast, Canada’s Pacific coast and Russia’s Far East regions and South Korea. But these efforts failed as well because implementation of the project would have posed a threat to the Russia-China Friendship and Cooperation Treaty (The Big Treaty) of 2001. If Russia had supported the US initiative, this would have provoked a sharp chill in its relations with China – and that was exactly what the Americans were pushing for. In addition, cooperation in this least-developed part of the world would have been rather problematic for there are no ports there – neither Russia nor Canada nor even the USA has any major ports to the north of the Vladivostok-Vancouver line.

Moreover, one should bear in mind that not states but economies are participants to the APEC. US colleagues note that it would make sense for Russia’s Far East to join the APEC as a member in its own right with a view to improve the investment environment there. I’d like to remind you that it is in the USA that we witness a strong nostalgia for the Far Eastern Republic of the 1920-1922 with a book series analysing the Republic’s experience published there. Fully aware of this, Russia is concerned that the USA will, at some point, try to weaken Moscow’s control over its Far Eastern regions. For this reason, Russia is even more distrustful of any US initiatives in the Far East then of those by China, South Korea and Japan.

One more US strategy lies in the space and rocket area. Over the last two years, as soon as the Americans revived the ANZUS, Australia and New Zealand have made proposals to ROSCOSMOS to activate the joint projects. This looks like a good commercial opportunity, but already in late 2010, China made it clear that it would view such efforts as an unfriendly move on Russia’s part.

The TPP is one more area. Russia has no agreements on partnership or free trade with any of the ASEAN countries. With talks on the subject currently under way with New Zealand, if an agreement is signed tomorrow, Russia will become a TPP partner in economic terms. This will naturally, elicit distrust of Russia’s policy in the ASEAN countries – and that fits well into the US doctrine of checks and balances. So we see that Russia has good reasons to distrust the US policy in the Far East.

– You mentioned in one of your articles that the APEC was an American project. Could you elaborate on this, please?

– Let us recollect how the APEC came into being and what it actually is.

By late 1980s, with an onset of economic decline in Japan and economic upturn in China, a potential partnership between China and the ASEAN appeared on the agenda. The Americans had always been concerned with China’s narrow regional integration with the ASEAN, fraught – as the then US Secretary of State James Baker put it – with new delimitation lines along the centre of the Pacific Ocean. In order to prevent this development, the Americans came up with the idea of the APEC as a Pacific Ocean Partnership.

In 1989, Australia and New Zealand, supported by the USA, initiated an idea of setting up a Trans-Pacific alliance. The Americans secured adoption of the Bogor Goals at the 1994 Bogor summit – creation of a Pacific free trade zone by 2020 and liberalisation of external trade between most developed countries of the Pacific by 2010. The idea is straightforward – as there are many countries in the Pacific from Chile and Peru to Russia, China and Japan, it will be virtually impossible to negotiate a free trade zone among them. On the other hand, the concept of setting up a free trade zone in East Asia will be diluted.

The USA has not renounced the APEC in order to continually promote the concept of a Pacific common trade zone. The idea fostered is designed to block China’s initiatives of narrow regional cooperation in the eastern part of the Pacific. The strategy is of special importance for the USA after the Chinese People’s Republic and the ASEAN set up, at long last, the SAFTA, the regional free trade block, in 2010.

Russia’s key challenge is the duality of its policy in the Pacific, for it has to combine two elements – a political partnership with China underpinning Russia’s relations in the region – and a search for alternatives to Beijing’s disproportionate economic influence in the Far East. Russia’s biggest concern is not about China developing the Far East and Siberia – the favourite topic in the West – but that the Chinese may buy up the Russian resources through arrangements with the local authorities.

Russia has failed to reach tangible economic agreements with the other APR countries, therefore no alternative has been identified so far to China’s influence in the Far East.

Let us review the results of the APEC summit in Vladivostok. I have recently written in my article, that the event was a success in tactical terms and a failure in strategic terms, for Russia had been expected to propose a programme (for example, for Asia’s energy security or a more ambitions one for the Far East development) enabling to raise investment. The Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and even the Australians are not averse to developing Russia’s Far East, but they want to do it on their terms. For this reason Russia decided against proposing a new fundamental concept for the APEC.

Russia is perceived in the region in terms of two priorities. Number one – as a source of missile technologies with China, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Brunei among the interested parties. But a free trade regime is not required to get missile technologies – a contract signed with ROSCOSMOS will do. So, Russia has been acting as a missile-technologies donor for ten yeas now.

The second priority is energy sources export. Given a pipeline construction to China (Eastern Siberia – the Pacific Ocean) Russia has got opportunities to supply energy sources to the region. Extension of the pipeline to South Korea will entail designing a new relationship framework in East Asia. If Japan’s involvement in the project is secured, this will partly change the context of the bilateral relations.

Under Dmitry Medvedev, the task was to devise a relations framework tied in with export of energy sources. The task is no longer on the agenda today, even more so since the Americans have overtaken us by creating the Trans-Pacific Partnership - after that coming up with a new project did not make sense. The discussions in East Asia currently focus on the TPP and not on hypothetical Russian initiatives.

This is precisely why I don’t think the Vladivostok summit has been a strategic success for Russia. We have come to realise what big challenge Russia’s integration with the Asia-Pacific regions will be.

Another challenge is a dangerous idea to delegate some functions of the capital city to a Far Eastern one. Moscow is already transferring part of its capital city functions to Saint Petersburg. If a Far Eastern city gets a chunk, this will re-energise discussions to re-organise Russia on confederate principles. The Americans, in my view, will eagerly support such a project and propose to accept all the contiguous okrugs (regions) first in the APEC to improve the investment environment, and later to the ASEAN Northern alternative and the TPP. I’d like to remind you that the British Empire started to disintegrate in 1942, after all its dominions - at the request of the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt - signed the UN Declaration on a par with the Empire.

Interviewed by

Daria Khaspekova, Progamme assistantv

Natalia Evtikhevich, Programme manager