The Big Four Alliance

Now, the editorialists of the New York Times have discovered: The Bush administration has been going out of its way to build up its military ties with countries surrounding China. India and Japan are the two most troubling examples. Washington has pressed ahead with an ill-advised initiative to share civilian nuclear technology with India, despite that country’s refusal to abide by the restrictions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And it has actively encouraged an already worrisomely nationalist Japanese government to shed postwar restraints on its military and embrace more ambitious regional security goals. Washington has also taken steps to strengthen military cooperation with Vietnam and Indonesia. Mr. Bush’s stopover in Mongolia [was] likewise . . . aimed at cementing a new security partnership.[1] The reactionary Left is shocked, but there has been an even larger pattern of alliance-building that has been going on out of sight of the newsrooms of the mainstream media. Indeed, far from maintaining a unilateralist approach to American security, the Bush administration has been cementing a globe-spanning structure of strategic partnerships that has the potential not only to “contain” China, but also to sustain and enhance the liberal international order of the post-Soviet era. You might call this emerging set of alliances the “four-by-four” strategy. It is built around four great powers--the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and India--who share four basic strategic principles--that the dangers of radicalism, failing despotic governments, and nuclear proliferation in the greater Middle East are too great to ignore; that the growing military strength and political ambitions of Beijing’s autocrats make it far from certain that China’s “rise” will be a peaceful one; that the spread of representative forms of government will increase the prospects for a durable peace; and that military force remains a useful and legitimate tool of national statecraft. It is no accident that the four pillars of this emerging alliance stand in roughly similar geostrategic position relative to the Eurasian landmass. In the nomenclature of international relations theorists, the United States, Britain, Japan, and India fit the traditional profile of “offshore balancers”--powers apart from, but with vital interests in, Eurasia. In India’s case, the Himalayas’ ranges give, albeit less perfectly, the separation that the English Channel, the Sea of Japan, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have given to others, but the basic relationships are the same. To view the page in your web browser, visit http://www.aei.org/publication23524. To learn more about AEI, visit http://www.aei.org/about.

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