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The great failing of U.S. in post-WWII Asia has been an inability to develop a multilateral security system like the North Atlantic Alliance.
John Foster Dulles saw the necessity and attempted it with South East Asia Treaty Organization, to extend the NATO cordon across the Eastern Hemisphere. It failed, although one might argue, it metamorphised into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN]. Now that has failed because Indonesia, its first among equals, has spiraled down into near political and economic chaos.
The Bush II Administration, recognizes the greatest threat to American security, lies in the instability of east and south Asia. But siren songs are played in Washington, not the least the always nagging call of domestic trivia as well as criticial issues.
The Bush II Asian initiative seems to shaping up as four elements:
1] To formally transfer American focus to Asia from a Europe that — despite its ragtail Balkans conflicts and its stumbling effort to integrate former Central Europe politically and economically — does not pose a threat to American security.
2] To meet the challenge of an aggressive, and presumably growing power to the status quo, of China, whether it be outright aggression or an effort to use its huge population and enticing markets to seduce its neighbors.
3] To put together some sort of multilateral defensive arrangement including America’s principle bilateral allies in the area, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
4] To solve the problem of nuclear endangerment and add to the anti-China security bulwark by engaging in a “strategic alliance” with India.
It is going to be one helluva job.
Japan, the cornerstone of any arrangement, is struggling with fundamental rennovation of “the1958 model”. That was the paradigm which has been so successful: Japan would rely on U.S. security guarantees while it rebuilt its economy along the lines of the pre-WWII period state capitalist model. It was so successful that it reached its apotheosis in 1990 and since then has been idling while Japan decided what its new encapsulation would be.
Australia has been living in a fool’s paradise, having accepted as doctrine that it had no natural enemies and that it could through commerce and politics buy itself a place in a new Asia of escalating economies and with a new openness to Asian immigration. It now finds a near chaotic situation in the Near North [Indonesia] which could, if it continues to deteriorate, send an avalanche of refugees if nothing more.
South Korea, having achieved incredible economic progress in the post Korean War environment, through in large part its bilateral alliance with the U.S., is seeking to reunite the country and move onto a higher plane of security and international status. President Kim Dae Jung launched an ambitious reunification effort to begin with the bankrupt and always mysterious North. But the effort has failed due to Pyongyang’s intransigence and what appears its certain knowledge that an opening to the South will bring its collapse on the model of the European Communist regimes. Both Koreans are retreating to play all sides against the middle — from cultivating a weak and vacillating Russia to the traditional suzerain China. But as so often happens, a generation which knew personally Japanese repression during the half century brutal occupation, has given way to a new generation even more embittered and looking for a scapegoat for failures: contemporary Japan.
It is this inability to solve the problem of a multilateral alliance among the U.S., Japan, and South Korea which is at the heart of the problem now facing American strategists.
Japan remains the very center of any American security system in Asia, whether on a bialteral basis or, preferably, assuming an expanded role in a multilateral structure. Washington’s first priority will have to be to somehow overcome this antagonism, much as was done between France and Germany , or even Greece and Turkey, in the NATO context.
The South Asian scene is another order. Unfortunately, rank amateurs who know little of the area are falling down the Clinton path toward a perceived accommodation with India. It will fail. India, for all its professions of understanding the post-Cold War world, remains glued to Russian armaments. Its tit-for-tat policy toward Pakistan, a neighbor of more intimacy than any other relationship in the modern world [except the U.S. and Canada], threatens to push that fragile entity into chaos or Islamic fanaticism. To suggest that India can be a cat’s paw for the U.S. with China, is to fail to recognize the fragility of a Westminister system tottering on failure.
As so often happens, events and personalities rather than stategic planning may well dictate where the Bush II Administration goes in Asia.
There is not likely to be a road to an Asian NATO but a very bumpy ride ahead of U.S. policymakers to an unkniown destination.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.