Salzburg Global Fellow Yeseul Woo discusses how the United States should strengthen its global alliances
This op-ed piece is part of a series, written by Fellows of the Salzburg Global Seminar program "Democracy on the Front Lines: Polarization, Culture and Resilience in America and the World."
A fragmented international system with great power rivalry between the United States and China, and the United States and Russia has arrived. This hegemonic competition has accelerated recently across trade, energy, 5G, artificial intelligence and other new technologies. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many experts predict that conflict could happen in Asia.
In this situation, more American leadership is desperately needed. The United States should reinvigorate its alliance framework. If China’s Belt and Road Initiative clashes with the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy in Asia, the United States should focus more on its Asian partners: Australia, India Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These are key countries that can help lower regional tensions and these are all traditional middle powers.
The era of one-on-one great power competition is over. Now it’s a team versus team competition. Therefore, the United States needs to afford the regional middle powers more attention and responsibilities; that is, the United States needs to think about how to actively utilize middle powers to preserve common values through a strong partnership.
How can the United States best cooperate with its partners to resolve the strategic risks that its partners face in Asia?
The United States has tried to cooperate with its alliance countries on all aspects to respond to this geopolitical and energy and security crisis under American leadership. However, against the backdrop of increasing fragmentation of the international systems and the added complication of deep economic linkages between China and key U.S. allies, the United States should now give more room to middle power allies to play their role; that is, to give them more opportunities to exercise agency, take on responsibilities to build on synergies between middle powers. Middle powers can assume greater responsibilities in the U.S. alliance system and induce more solid cooperation with the United States. Furthermore the United States should deepen its partnership with regional middle powers through a multilateral dialogue.
Cooperating more closely going forward, for instance through joint enterprises in all major fields, should allow the United States to leverage the power of middle powers to compete with China more effectively. While middle powers on their own have limited traction in great-power competition, a coalition of middle powers could add significant weight to U.S. balancing efforts against China. Reshaping the alliance framework in this way, would build a bulwark of democracies against authoritarian systems.
Yeseul Woo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. She is the Della Ratta Fellow at the Partnership for Global Security. Her research focuses on nuclear energy security, nonproliferation, and nuclear policy issues, especially in Northeast Asia. Previously, she was a developing scholar at the Hudson Institute, a resident Lloyd and Lilian Vasey fellow at the Pacific Forum, and an Asia-Pacific leadership fellow at the East West Center. She further worked as a journalist for media outlets in the U.S. and South Korea.
