U.S. Strategy in the AsiaPacific（美国在亚太地区的战略）.pdfVIP

Report U.S. Strategy in the Asia-Pacific Brahma Chellaney* Al Jazeera Centre for Studies Tel: +974 15 February 2012 jcforstudies-en@ /en/ The Asia-Pacific is the world’s most economically dynamic region, where the specter of a power imbalance looms large. The new U.S. strategy — part of President Barack Obama’s 2012 strategic guidance for the Pentagon — calls for “rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific.” (1) This “rebalancing” is already under way, as is apparent from America’s warming relationships with India and Vietnam, policy shift toward Burma (Myanmar), and planned deployment of 2,500 Marines at a new forward-staging base in Darwin, Australia, that is to serve as a launch pad for Southeast Asia. The United States is also building up forces on its territory of Guam, a key strategic enclave in the Pacific much like the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The fundamental U.S. strategic objective in the Asia-Pacific remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power. The security thrust of America’s Asia policy also is unlikely to change. The United States has been, and will continue to be, the leading security player in Asia, building and maintaining strategic ties and arrangements with more Asian states than any other player. For the past century, or at least since the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack (which was partly prompted by a U.S.-British-Dutch oil embargo against Japan), the United States has clearly signaled that American security begins not off the coast of California but at the western rim of the Pacific Ocean and beyond. As British economic historian Niall Ferguson has written, even “when the