The Implications of U.S. Interests and Policies in East Asia
Wade L. Huntley
The following is an extract from the longer paper “Blind Ambitions: U.S. Interests and Policies in East Asia,” which was written for the conference “The Challenge of Hiroshima. Alternatives to Nuclear Weapons, Missiles, Missile Defenses, and Space Weaponization in a Northeast Asian Context” organized by INESAP and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on October 8-11, 2004, in Hiroshima, Japan.
The re-orientation of U.S. global strategy toward anti-terrorism after the terrorist attacks at September 11, 2001, has had a transformational effect on world politics, due to the two historically unusual circumstances: the rapidity with which the U.S. has reoriented its global security priorities in the wake of the attacks and the likely impact of this re-orientation due to U.S. global stature. Other countries throughout the world, to varying degrees, came to face a metamorphosed set of constraints and opportunities.
In East Asia, Russia, China, the two Koreas, and Japan all have had to re-define their own policy orientations in response to the new U.S. posture. In the particularly interdependent security environment of the region, the responses of each of these countries have become further impetus of change in the region.
The multifaceted dynamics set in motion by U.S. policy transformations are complex. For the purposes and scope of this paper, the following discussion focuses on implications in two specific issue-areas: missile defense and nuclear proliferation.
Missile Defense: Accommodation with Russia and China
Prior to September 11, President Bush had made an ambitious program of missile defense into a cornerstone of his administration’s defense policy. Shortly after taking office, President Bush outlined a sweeping vision of a dramatic new U.S. strategic posture: “Cold War deterrence is no longer enough to maintain peace, to protect our citizens and our own allies and friends. We must seek security based on more than the grim premise that we can destroy those who seek to destroy us.”[1] This speech expressed the Bush administration’s intent to break from the Cold War predication of the inescapability of “mutually assured destruction” through deep U.S. cuts in offensive nuclear weapons in tandem with expansive missile defense deployment, underscoring the central role of strategic defense in the administration’s security outlook. This ambition to reformulate U.S. nuclear deterrence policy was driven by the administration’s fervent desire to escape the shackles of bilateral and multilateral arms control, particularly the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty’s constraints on expansive missile defense research, development and deployment.
Through the course of the summer of 2001, the U.S. commitment to abandon the ABM Treaty overshadowed its evolving relations with both Russia and China. Despite considerable activity in U.S.-Russia relations, the unwillingness of the Bush administration to show any signs of compromise on the missile defense issue and the increasing sense of inevitability of U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty by year’s end threatened to undermine President Putin’s strategy of building a solid U.S.-Russia relationship.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration had brought to high level positions many policy-makers pre-occupied with a ‘rising China,’ fervently advocating missile defense in part due to concerns that Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles are a latent and growing threat.[2] In the months following the administration’s ascension to power, U.S.-China relations were in sharp decline, highlighted by the initial tensions created by the collision of a Chinese fighter and a U.S. surveillance plane near Hainan Island.[3]
Russia and China responded by tightening their relationship, strengthening bilateral ties under a new “Good Neighborly Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation” and reaffirming their commitment to the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” Some observers perceived these developments as expressions of other underlying factors pushing Russia and China closer, including leadership initiative, opportunities for defense cooperation, and shared desires to resist U.S. power and retain a ‘multipolar’ world, and hence as a possible harbinger of an eventual anti-U.S. alliance.[4]
September 11 changed these dynamics. In re-directing the core U.S. security focus onto anti-terrorism, the Bush administration made its missile defense ambitions more contingent on that larger imperative. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the administration actually said very little about missile defense. Eventually, in his first press conference following the attacks, President Bush reiterated the administration’s commitment to missile defense, suggesting that the September 11 attacks demonstrated the need to increase U.S. security against attacks by missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction. Nevertheless, the tone of this support is evidently more muted and the administration appears much more to see missile defense as an element within a larger set of concerns, rather than as a singular goal.
This change of emphasis dramatically shifted the tenor of U.S.-Russia relations. President Putin’s early decision to allow U.S. planes to use Russian airspace for military and humanitarian missions in Afghanistan, his endorsement of the deployment of U.S. forces at military bases in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and his sharing of Russian intelligence information garnered during its years of war in Afghanistan, all suggested Russia’s fulsome commitment to the U.S. cause. Many U.S. officials have come to view Russia’s post-September 11 role as a watershed in U.S.-Russia relations.
Improvement of U.S.-China relations in the post-September 11 world is in some ways even more dramatic. In exchange for diplomatic support and intelligence sharing, China has moved from “strategic competitor” to anti-terrorism “partner” in the Bush administration’s eyes. However, starting at a lower point, improvement in U.S.-China relations has not reached the level of U.S.-Russia relations.[5] The reason China’s star has risen less than Russia’s in America’s post-September 11 eyes is simple: China has less to offer in support of the new U.S. prioritization of its antiterrorism campaign.
Thus, while the Bush administration has muted its human rights criticisms of China (in particular Chinese suppression of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Province) and has dropped its other provocative rhetoric, many in the administration remain deeply distrustful of Beijing’s intentions. The Bush administration has remained resistant to any significant concessions to China on defense issues and did not modify its commitment to defend Taiwan with the use of force.[6]
As we know, this improvement of relations with Russia and China did not stop the United States from withdrawing from the ABM Treaty. However, the important point is that September 11 made the U.S. withdrawal less important to both countries, especially Russia. The U.S. decision to postpone an October 2001 missile defense test that could have been interpreted as violation of the ABM Treaty was tangible evidence that the Bush administration was prioritizing its relationship with Russia in the context of the anti-terrorism campaign.[7] More importantly, the shifted priorities in Washington subsequently enabled the Bush administration to accede to Russia’s desire that the United States and Russia enshrine in treaty form their agreement to make substantial cuts in their nuclear arsenals.
Taken together, then, the September 11 attacks have catalyzed improved U.S. relations with both Russia and China, which has muted the impact that U.S. development of missile defenses and other nuclear policy initiatives was otherwise generating. The desire to enlist Russian and Chinese support for the priority “war on terrorism” has impelled the Bush administration to soften (at least rhetorically) its stands on previously divisive issues. At the same time, the Bush administration’s emphasis on the “war on terrorism” as the centerpiece of its global security strategy has mitigated the implications that U.S. missile defense deployment signified to China and Russia prior to September 11, offering them a basis, despite the Bush administration’s absolute commitment to missile defenses, to foster good relations with the United States – at least for the time being.[8]
Nuclear Proliferation: U.S. Policy Impacts on the Korean Peninsula
On the Korean peninsula, the impact of the post-September 11 transformation of U.S. strategic policy has been less sanguine. Here, the convergence of two factors – the Bush administration’s nuclear policy initiatives and its policy of coercive confrontation of North Korea – have combined to provide Pyongyang with the opportunity (some argue the necessity) to resume its program to acquire its own nuclear weapons.
The Bush Administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) billed itself as providing a major change in U.S. strategic policy to fit the new demands of the post Cold War and post-9/11 world.[9] However, the NPR does not call for a reduced reliance on deterrence per se. Rather, the “new triad” – the core innovation in the NPR – envisions supplementing deterrence with “new concepts” (such as counterproliferation), “active defenses” (principally meaning missile defense), and “responsive infrastructure” (principally meaning a reconstituted nuclear weapons production capability).
The NPR acknowledges that the dissolution of the Soviet Union eliminated the need to maintain a sizable nuclear force, and accordingly the Bush Administration is proceeding with plans, anticipated in the NPR, to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal by 2012 to an estimated 6000 warheads, of which strategically deployed warheads would number about 2200.[10] However, the NPR also envisions greatly diversifying the types of nuclear weapons in the arsenal, including production of new low-yield, earth-penetrating, and damage-limiting nuclear weapons suitable for tactical, first strike missions against types of targets far different than those in the Cold War, such as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities in small “rogue” states like North Korea.[11]
More crucially but less noticed, the NPR also calls for greater reliance on an “adaptive planning” approach explicitly blending conventional and nuclear capabilities as interchangeable options, selection between which would be determined solely on the basis of the contingency at hand. This vision for broadening tactical nuclear weapons use options is complemented with a call for increasing non-nuclear “strategic strike” capability, to create a seamless integration of capabilities erasing the view of nuclear weapons use as a qualitatively distinct option with additional unique consequences.
The Bush administration’s embrace of a wide range of tactical capabilities and first use options reaching well beyond deterrence breaks dramatically from U.S. Cold War policy by casting off deterrence as the central justification for U.S. nuclear armament. The administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy section dealing with WMD threats lays out the justification for this move, arguing not only that new dire threats to U.S. security have emerged, but also that an adequate response to these threats requires an unprecedented offensive expansion of U.S. nuclear policy.[12] The administration’s subsequent Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction expands this rationale, not only extending nuclear deterrence to cover chemical, biological, and radiological weapons threats, but also conveying the intention to enable the United States to threaten use of nuclear weapons for non-deterrence purposes and to expand U.S. flexibility to follow through on these threats and use its own nuclear weapons in non-retaliatory missions if it deems this necessary.[13]
Underlying this rationale for aggressive U.S. nuclear policy is an assumption, underscored in all these documents, that deterrence of WMD use by “irrational” rogue states is much more likely to fail than was deterrence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[14] However, this proposition is highly debatable. In fact, Iraq, North Korea, and other “rogues” have been quite “rationally” cautious, never using WMD capabilities in any context in which retaliation was possible and a deterrent threat applied.[15] These states in fact are more easily deterred than was the Soviet Union because they are both conventionally and strategically weak; U.S. force capabilities obviously dominate at every level. These countries’ pursuit of WMD capabilities likely has been motivated not by an irrational desire to attack the U.S. despite the consequences, but by the very rational motivation to deter U.S. attack upon themselves.[16] North Korea, for example, may be pursuing its nuclear weapons option in recognition of its growing conventional inferiority to the U.S. and forces of the Republic of Korea aligned against it.[17]
On the basis of these flawed assumptions and rationales, however, the Bush administration undertook to leverage its nuclear policy initiatives as part of its intent to formulate a much more confrontational posture toward North Korea than had the preceding Clinton administration. Many Bush Administration officials brought with them to power the harder-line viewpoint that sustained U.S. confrontation of North Korea would eventually compel the regime to capitulate to U.S. wishes – or simply to collapse. Thus, officials routinely characterized North Korea as an irredeemable threat to U.S. interests and made clear that development of new tactical nuclear weapons, expansion of nuclear use policy, embrace of pre-emptive strikes, and other strategic innovations were being developed to thwart exactly the kind of nuclear ambitions that the administration viewed North Korea to be undertaking. In addition to the expansion of potential nuclear weapons use evident in the public version of the Nuclear Posture Review (noted above), a leaked version of the classified portions of the review lists North Korea among a small number of countries specifically targeted with nuclear weapons.[18]
Following the September 11 attacks, the administration embedded U.S. policy toward North Korea within the broader, newly declared “war on terror,” famously linking North Korea to Iraq and Iran in the “axis of evil.” This linkage reflected the expectation that assertive U.S. actions, including military operations already underway in Afghanistan and under consideration in the Middle East, would also intimidate North Korea by implicitly signaling that it could become subject to the same type of pressure. Subsequently, as the Bush administration began heating up its confrontation with Iraq, Bush officials undoubtedly expected that the subjugation of Saddam Hussein, by choice or by force, would also serve to intimidate Kim Jong-il by implicitly signaling that North Korea could become subject to the same type of pressure.
The Bush administration’s confrontational approach climaxed at the end of 2002, beginning with U.S. charges in October 2002 that North Korea had developed a covert uranium enrichment program separate from the plutonium-based program frozen under the 1994 U.S.-North Korea “Agreed Framework.” This revelation triggered a cascading breakdown of the Agreed Framework structure: by the end of December 2002, North Korea had completely “unfrozen” its plutonium-based nuclear program, expelling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, removing IAEA seals and surveillance equipment throughout its Yongbyon nuclear complex, and announcing plans to reprocess the stored spent fuel.[19] U.S. officials estimate North Korea now has “at least eight” functional nuclear weapons, and with both its plutonium and uranium programs unfettered it will likely be able to produce between 29-56 weapons per year, yielding between 120 and 250 nuclear weapons by the end of the decade.[20]
Thus, the Bush administration’s confrontational policies toward North Korea, accelerated in the wake of the September 11 attacks, backfired spectacularly. Whereas the Agreed Framework restrained North Korea’s plutonium-based nuclear program for nearly a decade, North Korea’s progress in increasing its stocks of fissile materials and becoming armed with nuclear weapons has now remained unleashed for two years.
The failure of the Bush administration’s approach to North Korea rests squarely on the fundamentally flawed assumptions and rationales that underpin the administration’s overarching strategic policies (and its nuclear policies particularly), combined with the shortsighted, often neglectful and clearly simplistic manner in which the administration sought to leverage that strategy to coerce Pyongyang into desired ’behavior.’ This strategy holds out the hope that U.S. capabilities and preemptive threats will themselves be sufficient to deter states like North Korea not only from using WMD capabilities but even from acquiring them in the first place.[21] However, it is neither empirically nor logically clear that threats of pre-emptive attack to deter an adversary’s acquisition of WMD are as inherently credible as threats of retaliatory attack to deter an adversary’s use of WMD. his significant distinction between “acquisition deterrence” and “use deterrence” is obfuscated in the most recent NPR. In fact, the opposite effect is more likely: whatever weak acquisition deterrence might accrue from counter-proliferation threats would be more than offset by U.S. adversaries’ increased motivations to obtain capabilities to deter U.S. preemptive action, fueled by the general undermining of non-nuclear use and non-proliferation norms that re-dedicated U.S. reliance on nuclear threats could foster.[22]
In this manner, the Bush administration’s hostile posture toward North Korea appears to have fueled Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions by challenging its confidence that its conventional threat against South Korea would prove sufficient to deter a U.S. attack. U.S. hostility also may have served to reinforce Kim Jong Il’s internal legitimacy, validating government propaganda focused on the U.S. threat and thereby serving to retard greater openness of the regime. The U.S. invasion of Iraq amplified this effect, providing Pyongyang with a ready justification for its nuclear ambitions: “The Iraq war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent.”[23]
Thus, the Bush administration’s posture toward North Korea also fostered the conditions under which the uranium program’s revelation quickly precipitated a new crisis in U.S.-North Korea relations. Indeed, Kim Jong Il may have seen U.S. revelation of the uranium-based nuclear program as not a trap, but a “window of opportunity.” With the United States preparing for a major war against Iraq, U.S. threats to resort to the same kind of coercion of North Korea simultaneously were far less credible. Thus, Kim may have determined not only that avoiding Iraq’s pending fate required an active nuclear program but also that the crisis over the exposure of the uranium program offered an opportunity to resume that program at precisely the moment that a forceful U.S. response would be hampered by its resource and attention commitments in Iraq. Whether or not North Korea will ever be willing to negotiate away its nuclear program, clearly Pyongyang saw opportunities as well as dangers in escalating the confrontation with the United States precipitated by the Bush administration’s posture and policies.[24]
Conclusion
For many in Washington, the principal lesson of the Cold War is that U.S. military power eventually compelled an odious regime into submission and collapse. Even if this diagnosis were true,[25] to apply it to the post-Cold War era would be classically to “fight the previous war.” The U.S. position today is fundamentally different than during the Cold War, in the most obvious fact of U.S. military, political, and even cultural pre-eminence. If this pre-eminence were not evident enough before September 11, it certainly is now: no other country could have, through unilateral change in policy direction, shifted the terrain of international politics so fundamentally.
This pre-eminence confers to the United States an unprecedented role of world leadership. The U.S. has overtly assumed this leadership on the issue of terrorism. However, the U.S. also exercises this leadership on other strategic issues, including nuclear weapons non-proliferation and arms control, whether it seeks to do so or not. Crucially, even in the context of a “war on terrorism,” the United States still has in its hands a host of choices on current strategic issues. Just as on the issue of terrorism, the choices the U.S. makes on these issues will decisively influence the reactions of many other states.
Ironically, the “war on terrorism” opened certain new opportunities in this regard. The need to enlist support of like-minded states and – more importantly – global civil society in a campaign against terrorism to a small extent did soften the Bush administration’s previous disavowal of multilateral approaches to security issues. However, the Bush administration gives no ground to critics who claim that the September 11 attacks demonstrate that spending billions of dollars on new nuclear weapons and missile defense will waste precious resources on the wrong kinds of threats.
The source of this retrenchment in the face of policy collapse is the conviction, shared among many Bush Administration policy-makers, that dramatic U.S. re-armament and a new aggressive posture are required in order to re-orient the purposes of U.S. military strength away from defending against threats and toward more proactive idealistically-driven international ambitions. The National Security Strategy articulated these ambitions, embracing the unprecedented fact of unequaled U.S. power and influence and determining to maintain this position indefinitely in order to promote freedom throughout the rest of the world.[26]
This vision harkens to a peculiarly American nineteenth-century idealist internationalism, underpinned by the security of broad oceans, which rejected the requisites of routine European style international diplomacy, sometimes in favor of reconstituting international society on ethical terms (e.g. “the war to end all wars”), but other times in favor of pure power (e.g. “speak softly and carry a big stick”). The Cold War suspended this idealism by forcing the United States to confront indefinite vulnerability to an intractable adversary of equal power that, due to the advent of nuclear weapons, could not be met decisively on the battlefield. The end of the Cold War restored the image of American unassailability and liberated its long-dormant idealism.
Now, the Bush administration has brought the more aggressive and messianic variant of that idealism to the center of the U.S. posture in the world. This vision, articulated by neoconservative strategists in and out of the administration, seeks at its core to cement the Reaganesque vision of American unassailability and mission to deliver a safer world through virtuous exercise of American power:
“[W]e do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom… We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent… The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.”[27]
This vision represents a triumph of sorts for idealists over realists within the more militaristic side of the U.S. political spectrum. Put another way, it represents the ascendance of unilateral militaristic idealism over liberal international idealism. Although John Lewis Gaddis depicts Bush’s National Security Strategy as rekindling Woodrow Wilson’s mission to make the world “safe for democracy,”[28] in fact the casting of “terrorists and tyrants” as an “evil” to be vanquished through the global spread of U.S.-like political orders resonates more of Theodore Roosevelt.[29] Restoring the sense of American unassailability, the deepest purpose and motivation for the Bush administration’s strategic policy imperatives (especially missile defense), is a prerequisite to carrying forth this vision.
But this vision, always part myth, is more illusory today than ever before.
As the Bush administration’s own Strategy for Combating Terrorism recognizes in its pyramidal “Structure of Terrorism,”[30] the September 11 attacks emerged from an ever more integrating globalization – the very globalization that U.S. political, economic, and social power now leads and from which it draws its strength. Pursuit of “Fortress America” offers false promise instead of real preparation for the next terrorist attack, and risks distracting attention and resources from the practical efforts that might successfully prevent that attack.[31] Moreover, other states inevitably take military buildups that go beyond meeting clear and present dangers as signals of more aggressive intentions – this is basic international realism. Such behavior by the world’s most powerful state, backed by a military budget exceeding that of all other nations combined, cannot help but be threatening to other countries. America’s traditionally strongest allies already have trepidations about current U.S. intentions. Adversaries will respond in kind, to the extent that they are able, and new adversaries will emerge. As Michael May notes, “that lines will be drawn and enforced, with or without U.S. forethought, must be accepted as inevitable.”[32] Disregard of these realities in pursuit of an impossible unassailability is more likely instead to exacerbate the security threats America already faces.
The tragedy is that an alternative vision of the U.S. role in the world, based on the variant of traditional American idealism seeking to constitute international society on ethical grounds, would also be more aptly responsive to the challenges of a globalizing world (of which the threat of transnational terrorism is one expression). If the September 11 attacks could be made to encourage U.S. policy-makers and analysts to think more holistically about vital strategic choices, such forward thinking could spark a new era in U.S. global leadership. This new era would be marked by a coupling of the campaign against terrorism with a genuine effort push for improvements in the conditions of repression and poverty throughout the world that fuel so many global problems, including terrorist extremism.
In Northeast Asia, such a change of U.S. posture would be salutary. The United States could take the initiative to break the impasse with North Korea by providing North Korea with its muchwanted security guarantee through a joint U.S.-China-Japan-Russia guarantee of security to the entire Korean Peninsula, rather than holding this prospect as a bargaining benefit to induce Pyongyang’s abandonment of its nuclear programs.[33] More sweepingly, the United States could unilaterally initiate diplomatic relations and lift economic sanctions as well.[34] Such a U.S. initiative would reassure Japan and South Korea of the U.S. desire to solve the Korean crisis peacefully, if at all possible, while simultaneously sustaining the U.S. security commitment to those countries. With skillful diplomacy, the U.S. could also gain the support of Russia, China, and European allies to forge the kind of unified international consensus on dealing with North Korea that was conspicuous in its absence with respect to Iraq. Such actions would satisfy North Korea’s own “criteria for judging that the U.S. has given up its hostile policy,”[35] and in so doing they would put North Korea to the test: it could no longer hide behind its current justifications for its nuclear program or other military excesses.”[36]
More broadly, in this new era the United States would take the lead not only in a “war on terrorism,” but also in construction of the peace that must follow any war. Building this peace would require the U.S. to promote new conceptions of a global order better informed by the multilateral and non-military features defining the twenty-first century world. Taking on such a role would not only promote global peace and stability, but also serve more effectively than military defense alone to protect U.S. security against the new threats that the September 11 attacks revealed.
© 2004 Wade L. Huntley
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 Simons CentreThe Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research is an independent policy research centre and a joint undertaking of The Simons Foundation and the University of British Columbia. The centre is dedicated to addressing a more peaceful world through three pillars of disarmament: military threats to human security, demilitarization and global governance, and the development of a legal and political framework to ensure human security. Research includes weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missile defence, weaponization of space, trade in small arms, and United Nations Reform. Initiatives include undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral research programs, graduate level courses, a Diplomat-in-Residence program, conferences, and community outreach. Recently, the centre, sponsored by the Simons Foundation, hosted the third meeting of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, which has been launched by the Swedish Government in December 2003. In March 2004, Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research co-sponsored a workshop hosted by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research on “Safeguarding Space for All: Security and Peaceful Uses”.
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