Strategic Asia 2007-08: Domestic Political Change and Grand Strategy

Domestic Politics and Grand Strategy in Asia

executive summary This chapter looks at domestic political developments in Asia and their implications for international relations and grand strategy in the region. main argument: Nearly all the major countries of Asia are undergoing important domestic political transitions that are affecting their governments. At the same time globalization, modernization, and a changing global balance of power are transforming the international environment. Understanding how internal developments shape regime responses to this shifting external environment is essential to properly assess changing strategies in the region. Responding effectively to any of these developments will necessitate responding to the underlying domestic political factors that are driving state behavior. policy implications: • Economic change is driving the behavior of many critical Asian states, such as China, India, and Russia. Where maintaining economic success is a primary objective, grand strategies can in some ways be best understood as components of broader economic policies. • Internal political transformations are drivers of international behavior in some other Asian states, such as Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Where democratization has deepened, political leaders more responsive to popular opinion have emerged to chart more assertive security approaches. • The challenges of building institutions or arresting their decay dominate the agendas of still other Asian states, such as those in South and Central Asia. The informal social groups and militaries that control a growing share of political power in these countries define their grand strategies primarily in terms of maintaining regime survival and stability. • Changing domestic political factors are also relevant in the pursuit by Iran of nuclear weapons, the growing plausibility of an Asian regional security architecture, and the increasing challenges posed to Asian countries by regional environmental problems. Overview Domestic Politics and Grand Strategy in Asia Ashley J. Tellis Domestic politics has long been viewed as a critical driver of a nation’s grand strategy. From Thucydides in the west to Kautilya in the east, the character of a state’s domestic politics—understood as encompassing everything from its history, ideology, economic arrangements, and governing institutions—was perceived to be the principal determinant of its national goals. To the degree that these goals could be realized only in reference to the objectives of other states—which, in turn, were conditioned by their own history, ideology, economic arrangements, and governing institutions— domestic politics was seen to shape the character of the international system as well. This articulation was masterfully sketched out in Thucydides’ great work, The Peloponnesian War. Because of its assertion that “the real cause” of the conflict between Athens and Sparta was “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon,” this opus is often viewed as the acme of “systemic” realism. Yet, often overlooked is that Thucydides, despite having provided the most celebrated “structural” explanation for this collision, discerned its causes in the core conditions of domestic politics, in particular, the spiritedness of Athens and the passivity of Sparta. These internal characteristics defined the “grand strategies” of the two states and, together, created conditions for the combustive struggle that Thucydides would describe “as a war like no other.”1 1 For an analysis of Thucydides’ explanation of the Peloponnesian War from the perspective of social science, see Ashley J. Tellis, “Reconstructing Political Realism: The Long March to Scientific Theory,” in “Roots of Realism,” ed. Benjamin Frankel, special issue, Security Studies 5, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 3–100. Ashley J. Tellis is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Research Director of the Strategic Asia Program at NBR. He can be reached at . 4 • Strategic Asia 2007–08 This approach to understanding international relations and grand strategy as outcomes of domestic politics has been part of a long tradition of political inquiry that, until the advent of neo-realism, was the dominant mode of explaining the actions of states. After Thucydides, a long and distinguished list of Western political theorists—such as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, and Burke—and Eastern theorists such as Kautilya all in different ways argued that domestic and international political life cannot be understood except through the prism of the “regime.” The regime writ large—meaning the values and structures associated with the distribution of power within a country—provided the medium for human nature to express itself.2 This human expression invariably found a distinctive manifestation in the country’s “grand strategy,” which could be understood as the device by which statesmen organize...