00:00:31 Nico Luchsinger

Then we had leaders who were forced out of office. In Bangladesh by public anger, in Thailand by a court.

00:00:39 Nico Luchsinger

The Japanese Prime Minister has announced that he would resign, Vietnam’s party chairman has died in office and meanwhile in Europe the UK has a new government, a new Prime Minister. The EU has a new Commission, albeit with the same president. And of course, we're heading towards the US presidential election which will yield a new US President. So today I want to talk about what some of these changes in Asia mean and how the incoming governments in the West should and could respond. 

00:01:08 Nico Luchsinger

And here to discuss with me is James Crabtree, who, of course, is the TOY senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and Asia Society Switzerland. He's also a senior fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations, former director of IISS Asia, author and journalist and speaker at our upcoming flagship conference State of Asia on November 7 in Zurich. 

00:01:31 Nico Luchsinger

James, welcome back to the podcast. So let's just start somewhere. Of all these changes in leadership that we've seen so far this year. Which one do you believe has had or will have the most profound impact? And I'm excluding here the, the presidential elections in the US which haven't happened yet and might probably be the most impactful. Of the others that we've seen in Asia, which is the one that you believe will have the most lasting impact?

00:01:34 James Crabtree

Thanks. Nice to be here. I think you split apart the events very nicely in your introduction. So what you saw in the earlier elections this year, so Taiwan, India, Indonesia, some of the ones that people were really looking to at the beginning of the year, we didn't see too many surprises in the sense that everybody who was expected to win did win. But I think I would point to India as the one that is the most significant. I mean it's the biggest country.

00:02:24 James Crabtree

The most important and although Prime Minister Narendra Modi did win, the fact that he won by much less than was expected

00:02:34 James Crabtree

basically takes off the table to an important degree, a future for India, which a lot of people had feared, namely the gradual drift slash, you know, the deliberate pushing of changing India's nature from a secular

00:02:53 James Crabtree

republic, as it was founded in the middle of the last century to a much more religious ethnic democracy that it could have been by the middle of this century, if Mr. Modi had been returned with

00:03:07 James Crabtree

another comparable third majority then I think it was pretty clear that his supporters were going to push forward towards that goal. So given India is 1.4 billion people, the most populous country in the world and Asia's second rising superpower, the one that is likely to take that status by roughly mid-century, I would say that's a very significant change. 

00:03:28 Nico Luchsinger

Let's stick with India for a little bit because the result of the election, while affirming Modi as the Prime Minister and the majority for the coalition that his BJP leads, on the other hand, we're now back to a coalition government in India and those in the past have been, shall we say, rather less effective. Is there a risk that we sort of are now faced with the trade-off which India would have averted

00:03:54 Nico Luchsinger

in terms of the risk of becoming less democratic.

00:03:57 Nico Luchsinger

but now may just have a less efficient and effective government, which may hamper its economic development and its influence on the global stage?

00:04:05 James Crabtree

A lot of people think exactly the way that you do. A lot of investors in particular in the business community. People equate a big majority with efficiency and it makes perfect sense. You know, you can get more done if you have a big majority, but it's not necessarily the case that that is true, particularly when it comes to

00:04:23 James Crabtree

big structural reforms. Modi, in his second term when he had a very large majority in the Indian lower house and nearly a majority in the upper house, did try to push through a few structural reforms, for instance, in areas like agriculture, and found that it was impossible. The pushback was simply too great and therefore there is at least a

00:04:44 James Crabtree

theory which says that sometimes, these big structural reforms

00:04:48 James Crabtree

are better achieved through a coalition, because then you have to do the patient, but you know rather difficult work of building a cross-party coalition across regions, across caste. You know, India is such a big and diverse country that even when you're a politician with the stature of Narendra Modi and a party of the power of the BJP

00:05:09 James Crabtree

it's difficult simply to rule by dictate. You know you have to try and build a coalition which takes the rest of the country with you. 

00:05:15 James Crabtree

So, I think the best that you can say is it's not an open and shut case that Modi having a smaller majority, makes it less likely that he will be able to achieve some of these big structural reforms that a lot of people think you need to do to move the country forward in areas like labor market regulation, energy, agriculture and factor markets. So, I think there's at least room for optimism.

00:05:41 James Crabtree

And we'll have to see. 

00:05:42 Nico Luchsinger

You said at the top of the conversation, you know that many of these elections that we've seen throughout this year so far in Asia were not surprising. They produced the winners that everybody predicted they would produce. And the bigger and more prominent elections in Asia, largely, we've seen a picture of continuity. Voters in Taiwan have voted for the same party 

00:06:03 Nico Luchsinger

that has been in power the last two terms. Indonesia has voted for the person who's been endorsed by the outgoing President, who has a stratospheric approval rating of like 85 per cent.

00:06:14 Nico Luchsinger

And again, India has returned Narendra Modi as Prime Minister for the third time. Is it fair to say that these electorates, at least in these Asian countries, are happier with the way that they're being led than Western electorates, which I think in most cases that we've seen so far this year have actually unanimously voted for change and loudly so? 

00:06:36 James Crabtree

That's a very complicated question. It is fair to say that there is a certain strand of democratically elected leader in Asia that have proved

00:06:45 James Crabtree

recently, to be much more popular than their western equivalents. So, if you look at basic polling evidence you mentioned that Kishida-san, the Japanese Prime Minister, just resigned, I think he was the least popular of the Democrat, the G7 leaders. But it was a pretty close-run thing for a while. You had Rishi Sunak in the United Kingdom.

00:07:05 James Crabtree

Desperately unpopular.

00:07:06 James Crabtree

Chancellor Schultz in Germany. Terribly unpopular. I mean, in the United States, all politicians generally, it seemed to be very unpopular. So, you have a very dissatisfied public and then you look at Asia and you see the Narendra Modi, who polls generally suggest he's pretty popular. You had Duterte and then President Marcos in the Philippines, you now have Prabowo in Indonesia. 

00:07:27 James Crabtree

So, in some of the emerging markets leaders seem to be a bit more popular. I think you've had perhaps 2 contrary things happening later in this year. Firstly, you know, sometimes those opinion polls look like they're a little bit soft. So ,Modi didn't do as well as expected. Has, you know, he did, he did well, he won a strong election

00:07:50 James Crabtree

victory, but subsequently there are some protests and issues about the way that his incoming administration, he's not even president yet, but the way that the outgoing

00:08:00 James Crabtree

administration of Jokowi and the one that he will inherit are managing the country. President Marcos of the Philippines is a little bit less popular than he was. So you see that even these popular Asian Democrats can run into difficulties and then as you said then you have the fact that you know you're dealing with a region that is still predominantly emerging markets and emerging markets

00:08:22 James Crabtree

do suffer from political instability, as we have seen in Pakistan, with the aftermath of

00:08:30 James Crabtree

the defeat of Imran Khan, which was controversial and then most recently with Sheikh Hassina’s  dramatic exit from Bangladesh. So I think it's a complicated picture, but yes, at a basic level, democratically elected leaders in Asia with opinion polls suggest are much, much more popular with the general public than their western peers. 

00:08:50 Nico Luchsinger

Now we have in the West incoming administrations as well. You've mentioned the new UK Government, there's going to be a new US administration as well, a new EU Commission. 

00:09:01 Nico Luchsinger

If you had to brief any of these on a very high level on some of the fundamental developments in the Pacific or the Asia Pacific region over the last 9 to 12 months, is it possible to kind of like tease out some broader developments that we've seen instead of talk about how they are, how they're relevant for these incoming administrations in the West?

00:09:21 James Crabtree

I mean, I think the big thing that has happened this year is in the sense the dog that didn't bark, which is that we have had a relatively quiet period in terms of geopolitical competition between the United States and China that remains overwhelmingly the most important geopolitical fault

00:09:36 James Crabtree

line in the region and beyond and in for a whole host of reasons to do with the US presidential election on the US side and the Chinese economy on the Chinese side and some very patient, very gradual diplomacy on both sides this year has been quiet when it comes to US-China

00:09:57 James Crabtree

competition, particularly in an international arena that is still dominated by Russia, Ukraine and Gaza, and we should be thankful for that. The fact that you know you have seen some minor tensions over second Thomas Shoal in the Philippines

00:10:13 James Crabtree

and a few other areas, but nothing, nothing like the kind of drama that you saw at the end of 2022, for instance, when Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan or in early 2023, when you saw the balloon incident. I think the main thing that I would say is don't expect this to continue forever as in

00:10:32 James Crabtree

the very minimal rapprochement between the US and China seems to me to be on a very temporary basis, and the odds are that at least as we get through the US presidential election and into next year

00:10:46 James Crabtree

there is a reasonable risk of a return to business and as usual, in which that goes back to becoming the major fault line in the world, particularly if you have the second Trump presidency and you've seen an array of things that the US is moving through the system in an attempt to cement some of what the Biden administration team views

00:11:07 James Crabtree

as its achievements in the Indo Pacific, so one example would be a recent set of agreements with Japan which included the setting up of a

00:11:15 James Crabtree

new command center for the US military, which would be localized in Japan as opposed to being in Hawaii. The whole range of things like this, where what the US calls its allies and partners agenda in the region where Biden and team are worried that if Trump comes in, that Trump may unpick or undo some of these things and therefore they try and get as much of it

00:11:37 James Crabtree

done as they can. So it's not just

00:11:40 James Crabtree

trying to get things done on US-China so that the relationship is in you know as good a health as it can be in the event of a Trump presidency or even a Harris Presidency where she's a little bit more of an unknown quantity. It's also true with the US and what it's trying to do with others in the region that they have objectives that they want to achieve

00:12:00 James Crabtree

in foreign policy and you know in the last two or three months in office.

00:12:04 James Crabtree

And they're trying to get those through. 

00:12:06 Nico Luchsinger

I want to talk about an idea that I think was sort of best framed by in a column by our friend Raja Mohan in New Delhi and he basically said that Europe is a little bit stuck in this idea of seeing Asia as an arena or a theater and you know, it used to be an arena for great power competition, maybe now it's more an arena for

00:12:25 Nico Luchsinger

economic development and selling products or manufacturing things.

00:12:29 Nico Luchsinger

And it kind of overlooks that Asia has become very much an actor, not just in Asia but in Europe as well. That Asia actually plays an active role in European geopolitics and that's somewhat of a reversal of kind of what we're used to. Can you talk a little bit about  how you see that influence playing out and where you would sort of expect it to increase in the future?

00:12:49 James Crabtree

Raja Moha is an excellent Asia Society colleague. He was making a kind of broad point, I think, about the way that in the original Cold War there was lots of European influence in Asia, and that goes back through the colonial era. So, it's something that we have been used to increasingly that isn't really the case as

00:13:08 James Crabtree

there are no European countries that meaningfully affect the balance of power. What you're beginning to see is a very early stages of something different, which is that Asian countries are beginning to affect the balance of power in Europe. And so, when Raja was writing about this, he was thinking specifically about Russia, Ukraine, and so the examples

00:13:28 James Crabtree

would be principally China and North Korea supporting Russia materially in terms of the war. You saw one of the

00:13:36 James Crabtree

more interesting developments this year, perhaps one of the most important, was Putin's trip to Pyongyang and the fact that there is now something that looks very much like an alliance or a or a real security partnership between Russia and North Korea. But in which North Korea is providing a lot of the

00:13:56 James Crabtree

basic ammunitions that Russia needs to fight its war.

00:14:00 James Crabtree

And China also is providing you know what it would describe as kind of non-military technical assistance in various different ways. So, you see a strategic military influence. But in China's case you also see an increasingly large economic influence. So, if you look over the last year, then one of the big discussion points

00:14:20 James Crabtree

in the West, in European capitals, in Washington, in Northeast Asia, has been the effect of what people call Chinas overcapacity, its investment

00:14:29 James Crabtree

in high-tech manufacturing and exports, in order to try and rebalance and restructure its own economy. And that means that China is having a big effect or is perceived to be having a big effect on Europe's economic future through industrial policy and economic competition. And then you see, you know, on the other side

00:14:49 James Crabtree

an increasing engagement from some of the more Western Allied Powers: Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand attended the NATO summit, the 50th anniversary in the summer, and are increasingly involved with NATO, albeit not in the way that perhaps Chinese critics would allege. And 

00:15:12 James Crabtree

other countries like South Korea, for instance, are now very significant arms suppliers to countries like Poland and potentially in the future also to Ukraine, although they haven't shown any signs of doing that quite yet. So, I think you see you see a lot of evidence of

00:15:29 James Crabtree

what people noted in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine conflict, which is that there's a lot of interrelation between the Indo Pacific and the Euro Atlantic, and this is, of course a big tension in the future of American foreign policy, where you have a real discussion going on in Washington as to the extent to which the next American President

00:15:51 James Crabtree

should continue to try and focus on Europe, or whether it should really draw down its focus on Europe. Let the Europeans focus on managing Russia to the best that they're able and really focus the US's efforts on great power competition with China. The protection of Taiwan and all that flows from that. 

00:16:09 Nico Luchsinger

My sense is that this kind of US pivot to Asia is a bit of a policy that keeps getting announced, but they're never it's never quite getting there, right? Sometimes because the US doesn't want to, sometimes because events interfere. Obviously, if there's, if there's a war in Europe that will draw the US's attention.

00:16:25 Nico Luchsinger

It seems it's a worry in Europe that the US will turn away. Is it really realistic that the US moves from being an Atlantic power to a Pacific power? 

00:16:33 James Crabtree

It is true that overtime the US is most likely to deliver belatedly on the promise of the pivot to Asia, and you know, there's a remarkable amount of agreement within the US system that China is the main challenge that it faces,

00:16:51 James Crabtree

The main strategic competitor. The question is how you respond to that and how quickly. But yes, I mean, I think the Europeans who are worried about the fact that the US will refocus more of its energy on Asia are right to do so. The US patience

00:17:05 James Crabtree

with Ukraine is limited. I mean, even under a Democrat administration, it's not at all clear that there would be another big round of funding for Ukraine, and certainly not under Trump. So, the clock is ticking on that quite quickly. On the other hand, I mean, I suppose the thing that you can say if you were an anxious

00:17:25 James Crabtree

European worried about abandonment is, you know, the US has been saying that it wanted to get itself out of wars in the Middle East for the longest

00:17:33 James Crabtree

time and hasn't done so, and the reason it hasn't done so is it has critical strategic interests in the region from, you know, the general balance of power to support to Israel to, you know, to energy, to stopping Chinese encroachment. And so, the same would be true in Europe. It is definitely right for Europeans to worry about this. The US

00:17:54 James Crabtree

is not going to be capable given the changing balance of power around the world to have the single position in which it is the dominant player in all theaters that it had over

00:18:05 James Crabtree

the last 20 or 30 years and the logic of it spending more time thinking about the Indo Pacific and putting more resources there is very clear. 

00:18:14 Nico Luchsinger

And in a way, you're going back to what you said before. If Europe becomes more of a place where great power competition happens and versus of Asian powers engaged, whether it's militarily or economically, that would probably make it even less likely for the US to turn away. Right. So then Europe is Europe is the Fiat or that maybe.

00:18:34 Nico Luchsinger

Asia used to be. It's probably not a good place for Europe to be and not something to aspire to, but it's also not irrelevant.

00:18:40 James Crabtree

Europe is right to be setting itself on a path in which European security is increasingly the business of Europeans, and in which the Europeans have to plug some of the big gaps, you know the things that they can't do militarily or economically without US help. But I also think that it's undeniable

00:19:02 James Crabtree

that there's only so much that Europe is going to be able to do if the US does less because it's focusing elsewhere, then the general capacity of the European countries to manage their own security environment will be lessened without the US and all of the capabilities that it brings. So I think that creates some real long-term challenges for European security.

00:19:21 James Crabtree

Europe needs to step up to those challenges, and indeed it has been. It's notable, for instance, that if you look back to 2018, when President Trump had his famous NATO summit, in which he read the riot act to his European partners, at that point only a tiny minority of them were meeting the NATO defense budget targets.

00:19:40 James Crabtree

So there you know there has been a change, but

00:19:44 James Crabtree

aso, a war going on in Europe and the balance of power in Asia is shifting against the US and so the US has more to do that I think Europeans are right to be worried about this and I think you know Asian powers are also as they're growing more powerful

00:20:00 James Crabtree

spending more time thinking about the role that they can play in Europe.

00:20:05 Nico Luchsinger

To pick up on what you said there at the very end, as Asian powers think a lot more and spend a lot more time and also energy and presumably money on how they want to influence on the world stage and kind of like how they want to shape the world. Is there something like an Asian approach to this, anything resembling sort of political, if not unity, then at least

00:20:25 Nico Luchsinger

convergence in Asia with this sort of Asia as a region then can sort of make up its mind instead and act as one that will also then translate into obviously even bigger global power is that more of a pipe dream? 

00:20:31 James Crabtree

Yeah, I think the opposite of what you're saying is true, which is that China will occasionally talk about in, in its diplomacy, the fact that you should have Asian solutions to Asian problems. This is a kind of language that goes back to the

00:20:52 James Crabtree

imperial Japanese notion of an Asian co-prosperity sphere.

00:20:56 James Crabtree

Rather, and you, you see it, for instance, my old friend Kishore Mahbubani in Singapore, where I lived until recently , his books I do sometimes talk about the fact that you know what, when Asia is rid of the the meddling Europeans and the te kind of the heritage of colonialism and sees its own destiny,

00:21:17 James Crabtree

the Asian century will be bright because Asians can cooperate with one another. I think it's much more likely that actually what you're seeing at the moment are increasing divisions within Asia, which is obviously a very big place.

00:21:30 James Crabtree

Divisions between India and China divisions potentially between the US partners in Asia and the non-US partners, divisions with those parts of Asia which would, you know, be lumped in with the global South. What I do think is that as Asian countries become more economically powerful,

00:21:50 James Crabtree

ranging from the very large superpowers in the making,

00:21:54 James Crabtree

China and India, through to the more established rich industrial democracies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, as their relative weight in the international system increases, then they'll want to have a greater say over how that operates and that creates potential tensions and conflicts. So, I think you'll see that as Asia

00:22:15 James Crabtree

Becomes the center, to the extent that it hasn't already, becomes the

00:22:20 James Crabtree

central decision-making area of the world, the most important economic center, but also the place in which the future rules of the

00:22:27 James Crabtree

road are written,

00:22:29 James Crabtree

that that will create divisions between the countries of Asia, as would be natural. You know, different countries will have different interests and therefore they will have to work those out in an environment

00:22:40 James Crabtree

where you know, Asia doesn't have an Asia as a whole writ large, doesn't have a natural way of making these kind of decisions. So no, I don't think it's very likely that you have some, unfortunately. I mean it would be nice if it did,

00:22:52 James Crabtree

but I don't think that it's very likely that there's a kind of very peaceful and balanced future. That's not to say that the rise of Asia need be as destructive and bloody for the world as the rise of Europe was. But that is obviously the  risk and the historical parallel that people need to keep in mind.

00:23:14 James Crabtree

That when you had the rise of the European countries in the latter part of the 19th and the early 20th century, then that had an enormously destructive effect on the entire world and Asia, as it assumes this position of leadership needs to work very carefully to ensure that its own rise, while not entirely united, isn't destructive.

00:23:33 Nico Luchsinger

You've lived in different parts of Asia for the better part of 15 years now, and you've just literally just gotten back to London. How does it feel to be back on the old continent? Do you feel you've come back to Europe and literally nothing has changed, or have there been changes that you've noticed now that you're back again here, it's interesting to be back at the.

00:23:54 James Crabtree

A particular time because in a strange way, Europe has become more geopolitically relevant than it has been in the last 30 years, as in the long period of peace and prosperity that you and I enjoyed in the early part of our careers. After the end of the Cold War, the major events in the world were happening elsewhere. They were happening, you know, in the Middle East.

00:24:14 James Crabtree

For instance, now as Europe is a much more pronounced center of geopolitical conflict. So for those of us who are interested in that, then it is interesting to be back here. But on the other hand, you do, you know, you arrive back in Europe with a very clear sense that the dynamic engine of

00:24:30 James Crabtree

the future of the world for

00:24:32 James Crabtree

the first time in 500 years is somewhere else.

00:24:37 James Crabtree

This is the State of Asia podcast, and you and I listened to Adam Tooze, one of our speakers at State of Asia, the conference that you are running in Zurich, in November. He made this point at a talk in Singapore that whether it's geopolitics or, for instance, an area like climate change,

00:24:53 James Crabtree

European countries certainly no longer have the power to shape the future of the world on their own, and maybe they don't even have the power to do that in accordance with their closest allies in bodies like the G7. And so I suppose I feel like I'm quite lucky to have spent such a long time living in and learning about

00:25:15 James Crabtree

Asia because it means that I have, you know, connections and perspectives

00:25:20 James Crabtree

on the part of the world that will really shape the future, whether that's in geopolitical, climate or other terms.

00:25:27 Nico Luchsinger

There's definitely a place at our State of Asia conference to continue that conversation. For now, thank you very much, James Crabtree, for having been a returning guest on the podcast. And I'll see you soon.

00:25:37 James Crabtree

Thank you, Nico.