East Asian Security: The Pentagon's Ossified Strategy

Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 4,071 words total.

Summary:  The Defense Department's new report on East Asia reads as if the Cold War is ongoing. For Japan, the report signals U.S. acceptance of its ruinous trade deficits. For other Asian nations, it signals the hollowness of American superpower pretensions. The report masks the failure of the Clinton administration's trade policy. By insisting Japan remain a U.S. protectorate, Washington encourages Tokyo's reactionaries. The real threat to Asian security is not China but U.S. distrust of Japan as a true ally. Cold War military power is irrelevant to the economic challenges posed by East Asia's dynamism. Someone should tell the Pentagon.

Chalmers Johnson is President of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of Japan:Who Governs? (W. W. Norton, 1995). E. B. Keehn is University Lecturer in Japanese Politics at the Japan Research Centre, Cambridge University.

American troops are still in South Korea 45 years after the outbreak of the Korean War, five years after the end of the Cold War, and five years after Russia and China--South Korea's former aggressors--gave it official recognition. But is the American military, deployed largely as it was during the Cold War, still needed in East Asia today?

The Department of Defense answered that question in a report, supervised by Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and released in February, entitled United States Security Strategy for the East Asia?Pacific Region. In a cover letter, Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that the DOD strategy reports of 1990 and 1992 "envisioned post--Cold War troop reductions in the region through the end of the decade. This year's report, by contrast, reaffirms our commitment to maintain a stable forward presence in the region, at the existing level of about 100,000 troops, for the foreseeable future."

The Department of Defense, in effect, has declared that nothing essential has changed in East Asia and that U.S. policy should be to freeze relations in the Pacific indefinitely. To many East Asians, such a policy shows that Americans do not comprehend how hollow their superpower pretensions are and that Japan and China have a few years to consolidate their ascendancy before telling the Americans that they are no longer even marginally useful. The dod report also ignores the profound shifting around the world, particularly in East Asia, from military to economic power. Moreover, the maintenance of U.S. troops in Japan and South Korea at a cost of more than $35 billion a year is a politically potent issue in America, where many believe both Asian nations have the economic resources to build and maintain sufficient defense forces.

Nye's opening metaphor has been picked up by officials throughout the administration. "Security is like oxygen," the report begins. "You do not tend to notice it until you begin to lose it. The American security presence has helped provide this `oxygen' for East Asian development." The report then postulates:

--For the security and prosperity of today to be maintained for the next 20 years, the United States must remain engaged in Asia, committed to peace in the region, and dedicated to strengthening alliances and friendships.

--A continuing United States security presence is viewed by almost every country in the region as a stabilizing force.

--Japan and the Republic of Korea contribute to regional as well as their own security when they provide generous host?nation support for United States forces.

--United States interests in the region are mutually reinforcing: security and growth make it more likely that human rights will be honored and democracy will emerge, and democratization makes international conflict less likely because democracies are unlikely to fight one another.

--In thinking about the Asia?Pacific region, security comes first, and a committed United States military presence will continue to serve as a bedrock for America's security role in this dynamic area of the world.

--The Pacific Rim ...

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