Avoiding World War III in Asia

Democratic peace theory is both inspirational and aspirational—but at this moment in history it is of limited applicability.

World War II still hasn’t ended, yet World War III already looms. When China and Japan agreed to normalize relations in 1945, it was stipulated that the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (a string of uninhabited rocks equidistant from Japan, China and Taiwan) would not be militarized and the dispute would be put off for future generations. That future is here. The recent discovery of large oil and gas reserves under the islands has heated up the situation dramatically, with military budgets surging, and warships, coast guards and fighter jets scrambling to assert control over the commons.

Meanwhile, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have drastically escalated into the world’s most dangerous flashpoint over the past seven decades precisely because the Korean War itself was never formally ended in 1953. Despite the recent summit between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, neither South nor North Korea has yet to formally recognize the other’s existence, each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the entire Korean Peninsula. Similarly, the unresolved status of the princely state of Kashmir at the time of the partition of South Asia into independent India and Pakistan in 1947 has been the direct or proximate cause of three major wars and a near nuclear standoff in 2001 between the postcolonial cousins.

These three major Asian fault lines are a reminder that the biggest risk of conflict in the twenty-first century stems from unsettled conflicts of the twentieth century. Asia is awash in other still-disputed territories and boundaries such as Arunachal Pradesh (between India and China, which Beijing calls “South Tibet”), the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea (claimed by numerous Asian countries) and the southern Kuril Islands (where there is Russo-Japanese friction, with Tokyo calling them the “Northern Territories”).

The world has been lucky that deterrence, economic integration and a shared distaste for the past two centuries of Western domination have prevented Asia’s major powers from crossing the Rubicon. But rather than simply hope luck does not run out, the solution to these tensions is to immediately seek permanent settlement on peaceful terms.

Ending interminably hot or cold wars requires a different approach to diplomatic mediation than the ad hoc crisis management that has been the norm in these and other conflicts. Indeed, there is a significant leap from traditional mediation to outright settlement. Mediating conflict without a settlement is like turning down the temperature on a pressure cooker without switching it off: the food inside will eventually burn and rot. The temperature can also be turned back up, causing the top to eventually blow off. By contrast, settling a conflict is like turning the stove off, removing the pressure cooker and getting on with sharing the meal. Strategists focused on alliance management and force posture would be well served to take a step back and remember that military maneuvering is not an end in itself. More fundamental than preparing for war is eliminating the need for it in the first place.

In the 1990s, as Western scholars celebrated the “end of history,” a number of scholars advanced the idea that democratic societies do not wage war against each other—what came to be known as “democratic peace theory.” Drawing inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s On Perpetual Peace, which advocated a world of liberal republics, scholars like Michael Doyle, Bruce Russett, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and others demonstrated this significant historical correlation over time.

Democratic peace theory is both inspirational and aspirational: we should seek to build a world of peace among liberal regimes and societies. But at this moment in history, the theory is of limited applicability. Our purpose is not to test for peace among mature Western democracies but to generate peace among unlike regimes from dissimilar cultures—factors which further complicate strategic communication. We do not live in a liberal global order but a multipolar and multicivilizational one. Adversarial states do not view each other as democratic or peaceful. The structural landscape today lacks the cultural affinities of a world led by Western societies—which did, despite their shared roots, produce two World Wars. Additionally, absent are the domestic institutional constraints of checks and balances that have tended to slow democratic countries from going to war. There is an exception for nondemocracies since democracies declare war on them rather enthusiastically—the 2003 Iraq War just one recent case of how neoconservative values can belligerently weaponize ideas. Simply put: democratic peace theory helps explain why some countries enjoy peace but is not a route to peace.

If we want global peace, then, we need a more culturally neutral and hard-headed approach that I call “technocratic peace theory”: a hypothesis that independent arbitration is better suited to resolving last century’s conflicts among hostile states. This is not, of course, a predictive model. The underlying suggestion, however, is that in a world of diverse regimes, conflicting interests and rising tensions, the best safeguard against war is direct diplomatic negotiations aimed at lasting settlement—not a blind faith that either political evolution or American military balancing will forestall conflict in perpetuity.

Technocratic negotiations must be held away from public scrutiny, even though publics (democratic and otherwise) may be fully aware they are occurring. Furthermore, they must include not only credible official representatives from disputant parties but also neutral international mediators. The solutions they conclude must be considered formal and binding on all parties.

Direct bilateral negotiations of this kind have resolved numerous boundary disputes since the end of the Cold War. In the early 1990s, China settled a half-dozen border demarcations with ex-Soviet neighbors (often in their favor) as a precursor to launching shared institutions with them such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Norway and Russia, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia, also resolved longstanding tensions over resource-rich bodies of water through bilateral agreements involving joint exploration and extraction.

The Balkans also provide an important precedent for the virtues of technocratic peacemaking. The fragmentation of Yugoslavia and wars between its republics—combined with the proxy civil war in the rump Bosnian state—were prolonged by the nationalist democratic politics in Serbia and Croatia. As Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder argued in an important 1995 essay titled “Democratization and the Dangers of War,” immature transition democracies mixed with authoritarian politics can give rise to belligerent behavior, as was certainly the case in the Balkans of the early 1990s. Only with the multinational Dayton process, spearheaded by Richard Holbrooke, were the warring parties cajoled into ceasefire and settlements that gave the region its present political formation. The former Yugoslav republics—now that boundaries have been settled and recognized—have forged a customs union and each has joined, or is on the cusp of joining, the European Union. If every collective agreement had to be subject to national referenda, the Balkans might still have found itself in unending cycles of conflict, remission and relapse. This is the likely fate for the many so-called “frozen” conflicts from Palestine to Nagorno-Karabakh to Kashmir unless more decisive diplomacy is undertaken.

Why is a technocratic peace approach possible now among suspicious major powers?

First, Asia’s leaders have rarely if ever been so strong at the same time. Xi Jinping, Shinzo Abe, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and other regional heads of state are more or less at the top of their games. They are riding high domestically and have political capital to spend. At the same time, none can unilaterally dominate their adversaries (either materially or ideologically), as each pursues an equally nationalistic program aimed at restoring historical greatness. Last summer’s standoff between New Delhi and Beijing on Doklam, a small plateau between China and Bhutan, is a case in point: it was China, not nominally weaker India, that blinked first. Rather than escalate further, Xi and Modi met face-to-face for two days in late April to resume a range of bilateral cooperative mechanisms (including between their militaries) and discuss a framework for resolving their disputed boundaries.

This is also a reminder of the prevailing pragmatism among Asia’s leaders. The political psychology of Asian leaders is not well understood; they are referred to as authoritarians or strongmen, but what they share with even democratically elected leaders, such as Donald Trump, is a survival instinct. Even as they probe for advantages, they are not suicidally aggressive like Hitler or Saddam. In addition to their positive economic interdependence, they all have more important domestic reform programs underway that a costly international conflict might derail.

The fact that many Asian countries have leaders who enjoy high public trust, such as Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, should play in favor of conflict settlement, for they more or less hold public opinion in their hands. Very often, the excuse for not pushing for outright conflict resolution is the lack of political will or unprepared public—or each used as an excuse for the other. Today neither excuse is valid in Asia. To the contrary, what Asians now have in common is a desire to prove that they can resolve their own disputes without foreign intervention. What has been missing is a process suited to taking advantage of these propitious conditions.

What might a technocratic peace process look like? As with any structured negotiation, each party goes in with a firm sense of what it will not accept, what it is willing to concede and what it seeks to gain. In devising a solution accepted by all sides, each will be able to claim certain victories and point to others’ concessions. While each national leader’s reputation will be no doubt be affected by domestic perceptions of the outcome, the locus of attention—whether praise or blame—will lie with the independent process. Leaders, meanwhile, will craft their domestic narrative to elevate their status as statesmen who have seized the moral high ground in having taken the path of compromise over conflict.

Another important virtue of a technocratic approach is that it is not biased towards legal conventions or frameworks not all parties view as legitimate. In the border dispute between India and China, as well as over the South China Sea, boundary demarcations have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial-era conventions, and parties do not accept as final the map of the world at the time of the United Nations’ founding in 1945. Similarly, the complicated status of Crimea has its origins in political and demographic ties between the Soviet-era Russian and Ukrainian republics, hence Moscow does not accept the notion that Crimea’s status should be based strictly on the boundaries set in 1991. These conflicts, then, are effectively prelegal with respect to contemporary international law. Until sovereignty is settled, how is the law of nations to apply? When Western diplomats speak of the need for a rules-based international order, they need to understand that in many of these conflict formations, the rules have yet to be agreed in the first place. The legal clock can only legitimately start ticking after these disputes are resolved, not before.

In technocratic negotiations, the autonomy and confidentiality of deliberations, even the anonymity of individual participants’ views, is essential to ensuring the consensus nature of outcomes. As the political psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued, too much transparency into decisionmaking inhibits participants from making apolitical judgments in the long-term public interest. Extended to the realm of diplomacy, this means negotiators must be freed from the fear of backlash from often ignorant publics unfamiliar with the complexity of the issues. Recall how, after four years of private negotiations between the Colombian government and rebel farc militia, a peace agreement aimed at ending fifty years of civil war was signed in late 2016, only to be narrowly rejected in a national referendum full of “fake news”—but then accepted two months later.

As the parties come close to settlement, parliamentarians and other national political figures can be briefed on the contours of the agreement to prepare to sell it at home. For example, South Koreans strongly favor reunification, and youth across China, Japan and South Korea are more favorably predisposed towards each other than the elderly who have wartime memories. The younger generation, by contrast, is actively learning each other’s languages and studying abroad on each other’s campuses. They are a very important propeace constituency and should be utilized as such. But while a democratic process is important in ratifying solutions, it is not necessarily effective in finding them in the first place.

Modern diplomacy has its origins in the Renaissance era, with ambassadors converging in capitals far from home and forming an independent caste of like-minded professionals. As much as they were tasked with representing the “national interest,” they developed a common worldview distinct from any one state, a higher-order obligation to international peace. The seeming paradox of an “independent diplomat” is precisely what is needed again, reminding us that just because states have interests does not mean that those interests exist in a zero-sum relationship with those of others.

Secret diplomacy has a rich history. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved through back-channel communications during which it was agreed that the Soviet Union would remove missiles from Cuba and the United States would not invade it (and separately, the United States would remove nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey as well). The secret diplomacy between the Nixon administration and Beijing is considered one of the great breakthroughs in changing the global structure of power, formalizing China’s break from the Soviet Union and setting the stage for a multipolar Eurasia. Given the sensitivities of trying to pry two authoritarian allies apart at the height of Cold War, few (if any) in retrospect deny the importance of secrecy in this diplomatic episode. America’s participation in the Vietnam War was also ended through secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, resulting in a Nobel Prize for Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. In none of these cases was the long-term outcome guaranteed given unpredictable shifts in the international and regional environments, but these processes can be said to have brought stability to unstable situations. More recently, secret channels were crucial in achieving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between the United States, European allies and Iran—with Switzerland and Oman playing host to direct talks between high-level American and Iranian officials.

There is a justified caution about major diplomatic initiatives being conducted entirely in secret. The gilded rooms of the nineteenth century perpetuated divide-and-rule colonialism. Problems lingered into the twentieth century as great powers carved up countries, all too often with the lines drawn in the wrong places—or drawn where they should not have been drawn at all. But there is ontological difference between imperial negotiations to subjugate far-off lands and peace settlements aimed at deescalating civil and international conflicts.

The United Nations has been involved in peacemaking activities since its founding—from arbitrating an end to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949 to managing dozens of peacekeeping operations around the globe to hosting nuclear disarmament talks between the United States and Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. During the 2000s, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission sought under UN auspices to independently demarcate a volatile section of the two African countries’ disputed border. Ethiopia, however, rejected the awarding of the town of Badme to Eritrea, and sporadic clashes continue to this day. Currently, the UN is facilitating the negotiations between Greece and Turkey over the divided island of Cyprus. But neither here nor in other situations today is the UN empowered to propose solutions and set deadlines. Not surprisingly, then, the past few months have witnessed military flights over disputed islands in the eastern Mediterranean, once again pushing Greece and Turkey to the brink of conflict.

Independently managed negotiations provide a novel precedent worthy of emulation. In 2017, after a conciliation process under the auspices of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Australia and East Timor accepted a package of proposals offered by a five-person commission that provided for maritime boundary delineation and revenue sharing from a large gas field straddling their respective territories. Former Singaporean foreign minister Tommy Koh, one of the architects of UNCLOS, points out that such conciliation processes have the advantage of not being adversarial legal proceedings—such as at the International Court of Justice. Rather, they are inclusive of two representatives from each side plus an agreed upon independent commissioner. Rather than drawn out legal proceedings with appeals, the Australia–East Timor conciliation set a deadline of one year to reach a settlement—and did so.

Without prescribing any specific end states, an independent conciliation approach lends itself extremely well to situations like Kashmir, Ukraine, Cyprus, the South China Sea, Palestine, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and other conflict formations. After all, most leaders know that the same back-of-a-napkin approach that caused so many of today’s territorial tensions can also be used to resolve them.

Today’s backrooms don’t have to be as opaque as a century ago. Instead of brandy and cigars, negotiators can enjoy pomegranate juice and sugar-free chewing gum. Either way, high stakes and a long shadow of the future should be sufficient to concentrate the mind on moving beyond a “business-as-usual approach”—that has become wobblier with each passing year.

This brings us to the current developments on the Korean Peninsula. Recall that the Six-Party Talks have been going on for two decades, with some even calling for them to be institutionalized as a set of ongoing confidence-building measures. Such timid thinking has been superseded overnight by the decision of South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in to meet face-to-face with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to discuss reunification and denuclearization. The former process was content to mediate endlessly; the latter has its sights set on settlement, with clear benchmarks such as North Korean mothballing its nuclear sites and a joint formal declaration ending the Korean War.

As with the Koreas, the potential for a similar process between China and Japan would be enough to significantly reduce bilateral tensions and ease markets. Even if talks are initially inconclusive, they may well contribute to reducing the threat perception in that all parties entered the negotiation in good faith. In the aftermath, they are more likely to commit to further talks than to resorting to arms.

The American “X factor” looms across all these scenarios. With moderates Rex Tillerson and H. R. McMaster ousted from President Trump’s inner circle, Asian powers are weary of the more hawkish duo of National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Asian leaders who want to guard against excessive American interference in their regional affairs—which is all Asians, even American allies such as Japan—would be well served to undertake serious dispute resolution processes. Now more than ever, Asians almost universally prefer solutions that reflect a vision of cross-border stability in the absence of artificial strategic crutches provided by foreign powers such as the United States.

Even parties negotiating from a position of strength should know better than to presume circumstances will always favor their present advantages. Due to the overwhelming power asymmetry between China and Taiwan, Beijing has shown signs of de-escalating—despite the election of a nationalist government in Taipei. But to China’s great annoyance, Donald Trump has stoked tensions with the “Taiwan Travel Act,” promoting official exchanges with the Republic of China and—perhaps more significantly—granting a license to sell advanced submarines to Taiwan. Then there is the Israel-Palestine dispute, where it would appear Israel holds all the cards given Arab disarray and Trump’s strong support for Netanyahu. But just recently Hamas has been able to set off another uprising in Gaza, and the long-term demographic trends of Arabs in Israel paint a worrying picture for the Israeli leadership.

Therefore, one cannot be glib about Asia’s conflict formations: they are never “frozen” but rather constantly corroding from within. Many of these disputes could quickly escalate, ricochet or spillover, sparking broader and more complex conflagrations from the Arabian Sea to Northeast Asia. Until they are formally settled, they are very much unsettled.

Few of today’s outstanding conflicts are likely to end on their own, even if some don’t pose existential risks to global stability. The island dispute between Moscow and Tokyo, for example, has not inhibited substantial Russo-Japanese trade, cooperation in developing Russia’s Far East infrastructure or even joint military exercises. But it has certainly prevented them from developing the deeper level of strategic trust needed to ensure East Asia remains multipolar—which is in both of their interests.

A multipolar world can be an unstable landscape of security dilemmas and proxy competitions à la Europe before World War I, or it can be a stable balance of power in which sufficient distance among poles and respect for their spheres of influence generates a dynamic equilibrium. If we want this kind of lasting global stability, we must permit technocrats to make the peace first.

Parag Khanna is a Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016) and the forthcoming Our Asian Future: Global Order in the 21st Century (2019).

This article was originally published in The National Interest by Parag Khanna.