US Pivot to Asia, from a Filipino Perspective

During her stint as the former US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton stated that the US motivation to accrue its forces to Asia-Pacific region is to ensure that democracy is maintained and human rights are preserved in the region, which they believed to be threatened by China’s expanding authoritarian capitalism.

The incessant growth of China’s economy and consequently of its military prowess will enable China to export its brand of capitalism to south east Asia and the rest of the pacific, a brand that is hardly consistent with the western style free market economy. Basically, the contrast lies into who controls the economy. China’s economy is influenced by the state, while in the free market economy the market forces are dictated by the transnational private companies owned by a few elite. The foregoing anxiety is the proclaimed motivation behind the US re-balancing of forces in Asia which from a historical perspective can be viewed as a cliché now as it was before when communism was the term for China's ideology. It may be noted that the US has ties with Cambodia, Singapore and Vietnam which has a notoriously authoritarian system of government that is indistinguishable with that of China when it comes to the aspect of human rights. The inconsistency  rendered the declared motivation for the US pivot incredulous in substance. Time and again, the US also declared that its main concern is the freedom of navigation (of the United States) at the South China Sea which in this perspective is a little more credible since it has more than one meaning than meet’s the eye. If China could gain control of the South China Sea, the US can be denied access and utilization of that body of water for its commercial shipping and military activities. These could lead to the lost of whatever control and access the US may already have over Southeast Asia’s resources and market. More so, amid the power vacuum, introduction of trade pacts by China with its ASEAN neighbors may prove that economic progress can be achieved, other than through the western brand of capitalism as attested to by China's economic success. The possible economic progress of the ASEAN countries in the scenario that it accepted the Chinese economic system even at least at the level of trade accords could provide the contrast that may unpopularized the western styled free market economy. The latter could result to the western transnational companies having little access or none at all to ASEAN natural resources and consumers. The implication of  these scenarios could be an adverse impact on US and western economy and security, since what will necessarily follow is the realignment of  and re-balancing of  political, economic and military forces between east and west with the latter losing the eastern hemisphere economically and politically and the former dominating Asia and possibly the Pacific, thus reducing the US into a western power rather than a world power. The US pivot to re-balance its forces is to counter the weight of China's growing geopolitical influence and to regain control of what has been lost in the West, in Africa and the Middle East or conservatively to further the gain in other regions, by shifting its grip to the Pacific and Asia as well as in some parts of Africa. It is a race… a run for the money.