U.s. Foreign Policy And Asian-pacific Security

A Transregional Approach

William T Tow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000009972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Reagan administration has indicated clearly that the United States will reassert its strategic presence in Asia and the Pacific at levels not equalled since the close of the Vietnam conflict. The implications of this policy bear careful examination in light of the growing divergence between U.S. security perceptions and those of our European an

1
Introduction

William T. Tow William R. Feeney

The United States has reached an important policy crossroads in the maintenance of its European and Asian collective defense arrangements. Increasingly, Western strategists are urging the Reagan administration to reexamine the purposes and structure of America's alliance systems which originated largely during the Cold War years to determine their current relevance and utility. Many of these analysts advocate the merging of such postwar alliances into a more comprehensive and integrated global arrangement.¹ Such a structure might incorporate not only a myriad of non-communist actors but could tacitly include the People's Republic of China, Yugoslavia, and/or other communist powers which share strategic perceptions and objectives similar to those held by the West and/or non-communist Third World nations. The rationales and designs of this macro-security framework would extend beyond the regional context within which current collective defense treaties operate to those reminiscent of the approach which was unsuccessfully attempted after the Versailles Conference by a League of Nations deprived of an American presence. Widespread concern over the emerging strategic capabilities of the Soviet Union, it is thought by those who now advocate a global collective security system, would lend a more unifying, effective, and enduring sense of purpose to this updated arrangement.

Ironically, appeals for the United States to adopt this strategy are being advanced at the very time when its European NATO allies are questioning American policy directions and military resolve for underwriting their own security in much the same way that Japan and the ASEAN* states pondered the credibility of the U.S. strategic commitment immediately following the Vietnam War in 1975-76. Consequently, many of Washington's allies are demanding that greater deference be accorded to their own national economic and security priorities. In addition, each ally is expecting the Americans to adopt a more sensitive outlook to its individual interests even at the possible expense of other U.S. defense partners (e.g. Greece versus Turkey in NATO or Israel versus Egypt in the Middle East). The conceptual dilemma between the desirability of alliance expansion and the realities of alliance discontinuity are all too obvious. U.S. decision-makers might well be justified in reviewing the maxims of those earlier diplomatic historians who, when observing the strains and complexities of postwar alliance building predicated upon an American linchpin, concluded that an alliance of any size remains viable only so long as its geographic purview, the common threat, and its historical relevance are all well understood by those who constitute its membership.²

U.S. Alliances in the Asian-Pacific Region: Geographic Factors

The Asian-Pacific alliance system devised by the United States was initiated with the signing of the Japanese Peace Treaty at San Francisco in September 1951 and pacts with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS) and the Philippines. These actions extended the American strategic deterrent already in place throughout postwar Western Europe to a region which spans a land and sea mass covering half of the world, and provided a Western military buttress to the imminent process of regional decolonization. China and Japan, as the two major powers in East Asia, were both regarded by Washington and its European and Asian associates as becoming increasingly susceptible to postwar Soviet geostrategic influence, concerns magnified by the victory of the Chinese Communists in October 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War the following June. Since decolonization, these newer nations in Southeast Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand (which straddle the littorals of two major oceans) remained apprehensive of any Japanese economic recovery which might allow Tokyo once more to establish military predominance over the region's indigenous, if embryonic, political and economic institutions. Also feared was Communist Chinese backing for Asian guerrilla "wars of national liberation." Prior to the Korean War, an expanded American containment strategy as prescribed in NSC-68 was applied to Asia by Secretary of State Acheson in an ill-fated attempt to define Asian-Pacific "perimeters of defense." Though the exclusion of South Korea has often been cited as a contributory cause of the North Korean attack, the process of constructing formal alliances as lines of defense was adopted by Acheson's successor, John Foster Dulles. The Eisenhower administration sponsored a series of collective defense treaties with Asian-Pacific partners as part of an overall design to ring the Eurasian land mass with American and allied military power. However, the Vietnam experience and the process of implied American strategic retrenchment in Asia as outlined by the 1969 Nixon Doctrine sharply altered the geographic configuration of Washington's strategic priorities during the 1970s "era of detente." Indeed, the emergence of the Sino-Soviet rift seemed to seal the deterioration of Dulles' once formidable containment foundation. In 1976, the Asian members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) requested the termination of that organization. And in place of the formal collective defense approach, most Asian states, including the PRC and Japan, backed the concept of a Southeast Asian Zone for Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) devoid of Great Power presence but backed by their collective guarantees.

While the ideal of a neutral Asian-Pacific region remains appealing, the realities of current resource politics obstruct its realization. In fact, the geographic purview of American security concerns in the region has been reinforced and extended by Washington's preoccupations over maintaining Western access to critical oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. To safeguard these interests, the United States is now fashioning at least rudimentary "extra-peripheral" military force capabilities in the form of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) with such supporting logistical dimensions as the Prepositioned Overseas Material Configured to Unit Sets (POMCUS) in order to respond effectively to future unconventional warfare contingencies. The dependence of the West on fossil fuels, minerals, and metals from the Third World is increasing sharply despite energy conservation programs. As the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff asserted in their FY 1982 Military Posture Statement, the Asian-Pacific region constitutes part of an interlocking system of "strategic zones" ranging from North American and Western Europe to Southwest and Northeast Asia. The Joint Chiefs concluded that in today's world, "...it is no longer practical to design autonomous regional strategies, for a threat in one strategic zone will almost certainly have a serious impact on the security of others."³ Under such circumstances, the missions of the U.S. Pacific Command have become integral to fulfilling the new transregional security challenge and, as caretaker for the largest U.S. theater of military operations, its missions in the Asian-Pacific region have become vital to the dynamics of world power.⁴

U.S. Threat Perceptions for the Asian-Pacific Region

The Reagan administration has identified the Soviet Union as the primary security threat to Asian-Pacific states in a manner reminscent of the containment approach championed by Dulles. Unlike the former Secretary of State, however, the current administration faces a situation of theater force military parity with the Soviet Union. Thus, the hardline rhetoric now emanating from the U.S. State and Defense departments may be regarded by Washington's traditional Asian-Pacific allies as lacking credibility if not backed by requisite levels of military power. Notwithstanding the status of U.S. forces within the Asian-Pacific military balance, Reagan administration officials clearly have set a tone for geopolitical competition with the Soviets over the security of East Asia. In a major address on U.S. policy priorities in Asia delivered in April 1981, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Walter J. Stoessel Jr., declared that current American regional behavior is "...related to our larger task of coping with the strategic challenge posed by our principal adversary, the Soviet Union..."⁵ in Congressional testimony, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs John H. Holdridge noted that "...our concern with Vietnam is a function of the threat which Vietnam poses to ASEAN through its aggression in Kampuchea and through its relationship with the Soviet Union..."⁶ In short, the Soviets are regarded by the Reagan administration as maximizing their pursuit of strategic opportunity in the Asian-Pacific area by expanding their regional military capabilities and by supporting proxy wars which serve to disrupt any political status quo advantageous to the West.

The course of Sino-Japanese relations will play a critical role in determining the success or failure of Washington's confrontation politics against the perceived Soviet threat. The emergence of a China-Japan security consortium over time might provide a power pole which could attract lesser Asian powers as an alternative to superpower alignment. Such an outcome would enhance rather than detract from President Reagan's anti-Soviet posture, because the PRC regards the Soviet Union as potentially the most disruptive factor impeding its own efforts to influence Asian neighbors and to promote an "anti-hegemony" campaign against Moscow. Similarly, Japan's Northern Territories dispute with the Russians continues to preclude any real movement toward a Soviet-Japanese Peace Treaty, still unsigned nearly four decades after the end of the Second World War.

As Robert Scalapino has observed, however, Japan and China could well move further apart during the 1980s, thereby complicating the power equilibrium now envisioned by American policy architects. He perceptively concludes that "...(d)espite Deng Xiaoping's exhortations, the Japanese do not relish being point-men in an anti-Soviet front."⁷ In such a context, Sino-Japanese security cooperation will depend on both U.S. and Soviet decisions which, in turn, will impact decisively on defense perceptions formed and entertained by the leaderships in Beijing and Tokyo. Future U.S. arms sales policies towards the PRC and especially Taiwan is one such critical issue. And the Sino-Japanese Treaty of August 1978 was certainly interpreted by the Soviet Union as a potentially fateful Japanese decision to align itself with China at the expense of legitimizing the Soviets' "Asian collective security strategy."⁸ Consequently, the Soviet Union entered into its own Friendship and Security Treaty with Vietnam (October 1978) in order to divide and weaken Chinese strategic resources, and, as importantly, to compromise Japanese "omni-directional diplomacy," which is designed to mollify Asian and Middle East nations which serve as Tokyo's resource base while still permitting the maintenance of the U.S.-Japanese bilateral security treaty. In fact, in this case Japan was forced by Moscow to show its hand and was eventually pressured by the ASEAN nations and the -United States to cut off its economic assistance programs to Vietnam.

While Japanese perceptions of the Soviet military threat generally parallel those of its senior security partner, it remains to be seen how compatable Tokyo and Washington will be in responding to it. Japan does subscribe to NATO's growing conviction that the current security problems faced by the industrial democracies (IDs) must be viewed from a global perspective. The Japanese delegate to the North Atlantic Assembly's annual session held in Munich, West Germany during October 1981 observed that since U.S. military superiority was, at present, less obvious in East Asia as well as in Europe, a redefinition of allied roles was needed in a situation where the IDs had become increasingly inter-dependent.⁹ Officials of the Japanese Self Defense Forces increasingly have drawn attention to the fact that the Soviet Union is the only nation that has the potential will and power to invade Japan, and the Japan Defense Agency's August 1981 Defense "White Paper" acknowledged that Soviet deployments in the Northern Territories and in other Asian-Pacific locales were "...a matter of grave concern to Japan's national security and is considered to pose an increasing threat (to Japan)."¹⁰

But the development of a national consensus for levels of Japanese rearmament sufficient to deter unilaterally Soviet nuclear and conventional power in the region seems highly improbable. As one Japanese analyst recently noted in regard to national attitudes toward defense: "...a strong desire for peace exists among the Japanese people, rooted in the experiences of defeat in World War II and in particular the suffering of two atomic bombs. The idea that Japan must defend Article 9 is deeply fixed in the national consciousness. .."¹¹ At present, although Japan seems to prefer a continuation of primary U.S. responsibility for Asian-Pacific regional security, it has increased its joint operational planning and combined military exercises with U.S. forces under the auspices of the "National Defense Program Outline" and the "Midterm Service Estimate," particularly since 1979.¹² Perhaps the best summary of Japan's response to the Soviet threat and to other currently perceived security challenges is the Japanese Government's 1980 Report on Comprehensive National Security which emphasized the need for safeguarding vital imported energy and food supplies, shrewd application of economic development assistance to the ASEAN states and to other Third World nations, and the adoption of a more "self-confident" political posture toward the Soviet Union. Such an approach would eschew acquisition or deployment of advanced or exotic weapons systems which would provoke increased tensions with the Soviets and various ASEAN countries and yet one which would permit the improvement of Japan's deterrent forces at subnuclear levels. Japanese nuclear weapons would not be required because of the nuclear deterrent implicit in the defense relationship with the United States, Japan's limited territorial base, and the nation's continuing historical "nuclear allergy."¹³ It is over the issue of nuclear politics that U.S.-Japanese security relations concerning the Soviet threat might become most strained as evidenced by recent disclosures of the entry of U.S. nuclear-armed warships allegedly in violation of longterm understandings between Washington and Tokyo prohibiting such occurrences.

In response to differences between tne united States and Japan arising from Tokyo's large bilateral trade surplus, argument...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. U.S. ALLIANCE POLICIES AND ASIAN-PACIFIC SECURITY: A TRANSREGIONAL APPROACH
• 3. NORTHEAST ASIA IN AMERICAN SECURITY POLICY
• 4. SOUTHEAST ASIAN SECURITY IN THE 1980s: AN INTRAREGIONAL PERSPECTIVE
• 5. U.S. SECURITY INTERESTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
• 6. THE U.S. SECURITY ALLIANCE SYSTEM IN THE SOUTHWEST PACIFIC
• 7. THE PACIFIC BASING SYSTEM AND U.S. SECURITY
• 8. TRANSREGIONALISM IN THE ASIAN-PACIFIC: FUTURE DIRECTIONS
• INDEX