Bush and Asia: America's Evolving Relations with East Asia (Routledge Security in Asia Pacific Series)

Bush and Asia

The administration of George W. Bush has overseen a transformation in American foreign policy towards the rest of the world. Unilateralism, assertiveness and neo-conservatism have been the hallmarks of this period. Nowhere have these changes been more important than in East Asia, a region that contains some of the most economically and strategically significant countries in the world. This book brings together a number of recognized international experts to consider the impact of changes in American foreign policy on the East Asian region, as well as the evolving nature of American policy itself. Specific case studies consider America’s relations with the most important countries of the region, including China, a potential strategic rival, Japan, still the second largest economy in the world, and Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. These case studies and others are complemented with more theoretical and thematic considerations of the nature of American hegemony, its historical links to the region, security policy, economic ties and American attitudes towards emerging East Asian regionalism. As such the book provides a comprehensive introduction to, and analysis of, the Bush administration’s relations with what will be the twenty-first century’s most dynamic and strategically significant region. Mark Beeson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Queensland. His research interests centre on the political economy of East Asia. His latest book is Contemporary Southeast Asia: Regional Dynamics, National Differences.

Routledge security in Asia Pacific series Series editors Leszek Buszynski, International University of Japan, and William Tow, University of Queensland

Security issues have become more prominent in the Asia Pacific region because of the presence of global players, rising great powers, and confident middle powers, which intersect in complicated ways. This series puts forward important new work on key security issues in the region. It embraces the roles of the major actors, their defence policies and postures and their security interaction over the key issues of the region. It includes coverage of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, the Koreas, as well as the middle powers of ASEAN and South Asia. It also covers issues relating to environmental and economic security as well as transnational actors and regional groupings. 1 Bush and Asia America’s evolving relations with East Asia Edited by Mark Beeson

Bush and Asia America’s evolving relations with East Asia

Edited by Mark Beeson

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Selection and editorial matter, Mark Beeson; individual chapters, the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0–415–38333–1 (Print Edition) ISBN13: 978–0–415–38333–2

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

vii viii ix

PART I

Themes 1 American ascendancy: conceptualizing contemporary hegemony

1

3

MARK BEESON

2 Hegemonic order, September 11, and the consequences of the Bush revolution

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MICHAEL MASTANDUNO

3 US economic relations with East Asia: from hegemony to complex interdependence?

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JOHN RAVENHILL

4 The dog that didn’t bark: the Bush administration and East Asian regionalism

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MICHAEL WESLEY

5

Bush and Asia: the evolving strategic context WILLIAM TOW

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Contents

PART II

Cases

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6

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Bush’s search for absolute security and the rise of China PETER VAN NESS

7 Japan and the Bush agenda: alignment or divergence?

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AURELIA GEORGE MULGAN

8 Thailand and the United States: beyond hegemony?

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MICHAEL K. CONNORS

9 Bush and the Philippines after September 11: hegemony, mutual opportunism and democratic retreat

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BEN REID

10 The United States, Bush and Indonesia: bitter memories, new eggshells

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DAVID BOURCHIER

11 Malaysia and the United States: rejecting dominance, embracing engagement

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HELEN NESADURAI

12 The contradictions of ‘hawk engagement’: an analysis of Washington’s Korea policy

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ROLAND BLEIKER

13 With friends like these: reassessing the Australia–US relationship

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MARK BEESON

Bibliography Index

228 258

Contributors

Mark Beeson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Relations, University of Queensland. Roland Bleiker is Associate Professor in the School of Political Science and International Relations, University of Queensland. David Bourchier is Senior Lecturer in the School of Asian Studies, University of Western Australia. Michael K. Connors is Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University. Michael Mastanduno is Nelson A. Rockefeller Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. Aurelia George Mulgan is Associate Professor in the School of Politics, Australian Defence Force Academy. Helen Nesadurai is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University. John Ravenhill is Professor in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. Ben Reid is Lecturer in the Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath. William Tow is Professor in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. Peter Van Ness is Professor in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. Michael Wesley is Professor in the School of International Business and Asian Studies, Griffith University.

Acknowledgements

A number of people deserve my thanks for helping to bring this project to a successful conclusion. As Head of School at the University of Queensland, Stephen Bell was instrumental in encouraging me to organize the initial workshop that culminated in this project. Bill Tow while at Griffith University was similarly encouraging, and he and Michael Wesley provided additional material support for the project. Brendon O’Connor and Bill Case from Griffith University provided very useful commentary on a number of papers, as did Carl Ungerer from the University of Queensland. Particular thanks go the Cara Herrington and Greg Chaikin for helping to organize the actual workshop, and to Will Grant for his editorial assistance in preparing the final manuscript. General thanks to the support staff and my academic colleagues at the University of Queensland for making it such a productive and pleasant place to work. Finally, thanks to Peter Sowden for his help in bringing the project to fruition in a professional and painless manner. Mark Beeson

Introduction Mark Beeson

The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 looks set to consolidate an unprecedented transformation in American foreign policy. For a man who originally rose to power promising to make the United States a ‘humbler’ nation and concentrate on domestic issues, this is a remarkable turnaround. In retrospect, it is easy to see that September 11 changed everything. A President whose approval rates were falling and who seemed lacking in purpose and direction, seemingly found his calling in the defence of the American mainland and the prosecution of the ‘war on terror’. Foreign policy suddenly became the dominant issue for the Bush administration, producing a policy style that has been variously described as unilateral, pre-emptive, even imperial. Whatever it’s called, it’s had a profound impact on the rest of the world. Changes in American foreign policy are important in a way that no other country’s are for quite straightforward reasons: since the end of the Cold War and the apparent renaissance of the American economy in the 1990s, the United States has come to occupy an evermore dominant position in the world. Indeed, another word has emerged to describe this unprecedented power: unipolarity. At no time in human history has any country or empire enjoyed quite the dominance, reach or influence that the United States enjoys. One frequently noted indicator of American dominance is military spending, which is greater than the military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations combined, and accounts for more than 40 per cent of all defence spending world-wide (Ferguson 2004: 16). But even this does not capture the technological lead that American industry gives its military, something that gives the United States’ armed forces a range, accuracy and power that no other nation or combination of nations can hope to match. The United States simply has no conventional challengers or rivals of the sort that have existed in other periods, be they part of the sort multi-polar order that characterized nineteenth century Europe, or the bipolar global order that prevailed during the Cold War. But American power is not simply confined to military dominance. Not only does the United States remain far and away the world’s largest single economy, but even this bald fact does not capture the influence the US

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exerts over the institutions that govern the complex inter-connections that constitute an increasingly global economy. Nor does it capture the ‘structural power’ and influence of American-based financial institutions in determining the allocation of international credit and investment flows. And there is also, of course, the frequently noted impact of American culture and ‘soft power’ (Nye 2002). Whether one approves or disapproves of this, there is no escaping the reality of American movies, music, information, fast food or general ‘lifestyles’. In short, the United States has the capacity to directly and indirectly influence other parts of the world at a number of levels in a way no other country has. What really distinguishes the present Bush administration, however, is the desire to utilize this power to pursue a particular agenda. Clearly, this is true of all administrations; what sets the Bush administration apart are the purposes to which it wishes to put such power, and the particular ideas that inform such policies. The influence of ‘neoconservative’ thinking on the Bush administration has been a widely noted influence on foreign policy in particular (see Mann 2004). What is equally significant, of course, is that the geopolitical context within which the Bush administration operates makes the unilateral application of American power more feasible than it was during the Cold War when the United States was confronted by a formidable strategic competitor. The reality now is that no other country can challenge America militarily, and there is little ideological competition either. For all the criticism that is often leveled at America’s social and economic policies, there are few credible alternatives. Indeed, not only are American values and public policies enthusiastically emulated, but former alternative models, like Japan’s, have become far less attractive as a consequence of the recent, relatively poor performance of its once ‘miraculous’ economy. Not even Europe can offer a credible challenge to American ascendancy – something that influential neoconservative thinkers recognize and seek to exploit (Kagan 2003). Consequently, we live in a world that is dominated by the United States in a way that is quite unprecedented. What makes this especially significant is that we have also seen a transformation in the way this power is utilized externally, a change that has been described as nothing less than ‘revolutionary’ (Daadler and Lindsay 2003). For friends and foes everywhere, this poses major challenges, nowhere more so than East Asia which has been partly defined by American power since the Second World War. Indeed, despite America’s physical distance from East Asia, the United States has been a key player in the region since the nineteenth century, when it played a major role in opening up both Japan and China to ‘the West’. But it was the Second World War and its aftermath that made it clear just how dominant, not to say ‘hegemonic’ the United States had become. There is a good deal of debate about not only the extent and impact of American power, but of the best ways of understanding it theoretically. In

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Chapter 1, I provide an overview of the theoretical literature, which is voluminous and varied. Despite some sharp differences of opinion amongst various schools of thought, I argue that there are a number of insights that can be drawn from various traditions which help to explain the complex, multi-dimensional nature of American power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This introductory chapter helps to locate the other contributions to this collection which adopt a variety of explicit or implicit positions, and which come to some quite different conclusions about the impact, implications and future of American power and foreign policy as a consequence. This is hardly surprising: the sheer scale of America’s presence in the world means that it will inevitably have different effects dependent on the issue area or the specific geographical location. For this reason, the chapters that follow are divided into broadly thematic and country-specific case studies. For all the attention that has been given to America’s historically unparalleled dominance, Michael Mastanduno argues in Chapter 2 that its hegemonic influence in East Asia remains ‘incomplete’. September 11 has indeed had a ‘profound’ impact on American foreign policy, Mastanduno contends, and this has potentially major implications for the bilaterallyoriented strategic architecture that has dominated East Asia since the Second World War. But for all America’s military dominance, Mastanduno concludes that the foreign policy challenges the United States faces in the region look likely to become more complex, partly as a consequence of the rise of China, and partly because of its complex economic relations with the region as a whole. The question of the United States’ economic relations with the region is given extended consideration by John Ravenhill in Chapter 3. Ravenhill’s chapter highlights an interesting paradox: despite the United States undergoing a process of ‘hegemonic decline’ in its economic relations with East Asia, the sort of pro-market agenda it has assiduously promoted for a number of decades has had a lasting impact on some of the most important political elites of the region. And yet, the other crucially important point that an analysis of the political-economy of inter-regional interaction reveals is that this is something of a two-way street: certainly the United States may have exerted a long-term influence over ideas about economic policy in countries like China, but East Asians are becoming increasingly adept at using institutions like the World Trade Organization to limit American unilateralism. Moreover, there are now powerful domestic business groups in the United States that have long-term interests in East Asia that effectively constrain American foreign policy. The declining significance of the American economy to East Asia that Ravenhill details, combined with growing rates of regional economic integration within East Asia, might be expected to underpin greater interest in more exclusive, regionally-based political and economic initiatives. Such a development would have major potential implications for

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American foreign policy, and this is something that is given explicit consideration by Michael Wesley in Chapter 4. While East Asia has been something of an exception in failing to develop regionally-based institutions, the recent development of groupings like ASEAN+3, and initiatives like the ASEAN–China Free Trade Agreement, suggest that things may be changing. Wesley argues that the United States remains largely ‘sanguine’ about this prospect because the US remains at the centre of weak multilateral and stronger bilateral relations across the region, and because American policymakers believe that the ‘new regionalism’ presents little challenge to US power. Underpinning Wesley’s assessment of East Asian regionalism, is a commonly held view about the continuing importance of the US as a guarantor of East Asian security. The overall strategic context and relationship between the United States and East Asia is the central theme taken up by William Tow in Chapter 5. Tow comes to a rather different conclusion about the overall impact of America’s security posture, arguing that strategic thinking under the Bush administration is still something of a workin-progress, and one that has thus far ‘failed to shape a coherent strategic posture. . .acceptable to key forces in Asian security politics’. To support this claim Tow details the evolution of strategic thinking since the 2000 election. September 11 was clearly the pivotal event, and North Korea’s inclusion in the ‘axis of evil’ meant that its aftermath would be immediately felt in East Asia. Tow carefully details recent ‘transformations’ in regional defence policies and suggests that a measure of the success of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ will be its capacity to contain challenges to American strategic primacy in the region. Peter Van Ness’s analysis of US–China relations in Chapter 6 opens the second part of the book which is composed of explorations of the United States most important bilateral relations in East Asia. After providing a withering critique of the Bush Doctrine and what he takes to be its misguided assumptions about the nature of security, Van Ness provides an analysis of China’s responses, which he describes as ‘substantive and promising’. Such a conclusion may strike some readers as surprising, but it is indicative of the confronting nature of the Bush Doctrine that China’s recent diplomacy seems sophisticated and reassuring by comparison. Van Ness demonstrates that, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, it is in fact China that is at the centre of regionally based attempts to develop multilateral solutions to security challenges, rather than the US. In this reading, China is undertaking a highly sophisticated, non-confrontational form of ‘balancing’ that may bring about long-term changes in the region’s internal and external relations. The other regional major power is Japan, and Aurelia George Mulgan considers its relationship with the US in Chapter 7. Mulgan details the unique nature of the Japan–US relationship that developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, which helps to explain some of the

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relationship’s more distinctive features. The US has always been keen for Japan to do more ‘burden sharing’, but as Mulgan demonstrates, under the Bush administration, formal alliances are being reconfigured and ‘being displaced by temporary, informal, coalitions of cooperation’. Importantly, Mulgan details how the relationship is becoming less reciprocal, resulting in ‘a form of hegemonic excess that considerably disturbs some elements of the Japanese policy community’. In short, America’s privileging of security interests and its insistence that Japan play a part in their pursuit is placing great pressure on Japanese policymakers, pressures Mulgan feels they may be unable to resist despite some major misgivings. In Chapter 8, Michael K. Connors examines relations between Thailand and America. Connors’ chapter provides a revealing and instructive contrast with Mulgan’s analysis of Japan. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Thailand has also occupied a subordinate position in relation to the US, but it has been one that has generally been maintained through less direct means, and reflected broader historical changes in the political, economic and strategic environment. Connors details this historical backdrop, and demonstrates how the Bush administration’s preoccupation with the ‘war on terror’ has given renewed prominence to security and resource issues. Perhaps the most noteworthy and surprising development that emerges from this chapter is that, for all the Bush administration’s stress on the need to promote democracy throughout the world, Thailand appears to be moving back towards more authoritarian forms of rule, and the Bush administration appears relatively unconcerned at the prospect. The Philippines is another Southeast Asian country that has been directly affected by the aftermath of September 11. In Chapter 9, Ben Reid argues that political and social elites in the Philippines have responded ‘opportunistically’ to the ‘war on terror’ to reinforce their positions and crack down on secession movements in Mindanao. Reid details the important historical roots of American influence in the Philippines that help explain what he describes as the ‘mutual opportunism’ between the US and political elites in the Philippines following September 11. Reid sees American hegemony in class terms and emphasizes the way American support has been used to maintain the power of a traditional landed elite in the face of popular unrest and secessionist movements. Like Connors in Thailand, Reid sees the ‘remilitarization’ of the relationship between the US and the Philippines making progressive social reform increasingly unlikely. Like the Philippines, Indonesia has occupied a particularly prominent place in the ‘war on terror’ and associated discussions of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In Chapter 10 David Bourchier explains how recent events have affected Indonesia and led to a major change in the way the US is viewed there as a consequence. After putting US–Indonesia relations in historical perspective, and explaining how this facilitated Suharto’s rise to power, Bourchier explains how relations have recently gone sour. As a

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predominantly Muslim country, it was hardly surprising that Indonesia might be particularly sensitive to the way the ‘war on terror’ was conceived in the US. Paradoxically, Bourchier argues, American policy has actually reinforced support for hard-line Islamist organizations. There are striking parallels with the Thai and Philippine experiences, too, as the nascent democratic movement is threatened by the volatile security situation. In Malaysia, by contrast, as Helen Nesadurai explains in Chapter 11, US–Malaysia relations have improved significantly of late. By focusing on the importance of leadership in both the US and Malaysia, Nesadurai explains how American hegemony is mediated by contingent national circumstances that help explain shifts in policy. Interestingly, Nesadurai points out that relations improved under Bush because the ‘liberal internationalist grand strategy’ of the former Clinton administration directly threatened Malaysia’s national interests and authoritarian patterns of rule. As with the other Southeast Asian countries, the more security-oriented Bush regime is actually more accommodating of a less liberal regime. Despite some concerns about the implications of American dominance, the present Malaysian government has adopted a policy of ‘pragmatic engagement’. Malaysia’s renewed strategic importance may see it retain a degree of leverage over the US while the ‘war on terror’ continues. Korea is a divided country that has been more directly shaped by war, in this case the Cold War, rather than the ‘war on terror’. In Chapter 12, Roland Bleiker explains how American policy continues to profoundly influence development on the Korean peninsula. Rather than the standard treatment of Koran security issues, Bleiker provides an illuminating explanation of the way negative threat perceptions on the part of both North Korea and the US have led to the current impasse. Bleiker demonstrates how this has led to a particular form of ‘Hawk engagement’ on the part of the US, in which ‘rogue states’ can only be confronted with aggressive militarism. Given the Bush administration’s current preoccupation with security, and North Korea’s membership of the ‘axis of evil’, it becomes easier to understand why a resolution of the ‘Korean crisis’ is seemingly as far away as ever. Entrenched attitudes are also important elements of US–Australia relations, but with strikingly different consequences from those in Korea. As I demonstrate in Chapter 13, Australian perceptions of strategic vulnerability, and the concomitant need to cultivate powerful allies, has seen the US occupy a pivotal place in the minds of generations of Australian policymakers. I argue that this affinity and strategic dependence on the US has led Australia to adopt policies that may not necessarily be in its best ‘national interests’ – however that over-worked concept is defined. This possibility is explored in the context of the recently negotiated ‘free trade’ agreement which, I argue, is highly advantageous to the US. More importantly, perhaps, the close ties so actively pursued by the Howard govern-

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ment lock Australia into a subordinate role that forecloses autonomous policy options. Across the region countries are being forced to come to terms with and accommodate America’s dominant position and its increasingly assertive foreign policy. History and contingent contemporary circumstances mean that the precise nature of the relationships will necessarily be different. These differences are revealing and instructive and tell us something about both ends of the relationship. But whether one thinks the Bush Doctrine is having a salutary or a destructive effect, it is something East Asia and the rest of the world will have to learn to live with.

Part I

Themes

1

American ascendancy Conceptualizing contemporary hegemony1 Mark Beeson

Introduction It is hardly controversial to claim that the United States is the most powerful country on the planet. Indeed, it has become remarkably commonplace to observe that American power and influence are unprecedented, and that the only parallels for the contemporary ‘unipolar’ order are with the Roman Empire (Wohlforth 1999; Cox 2003). But when set against the global influence of present-day America, even Roman power looks modest and decidedly regional by comparison. While the language used to describe the US’s contemporary dominance of the international system can get a little overheated, it is clear that American ‘hyper-power’ is unprecedented in its scope and potential impact. As far as other countries and even regions of the world are concerned, relations with the US have come to assume an unrivalled importance as a consequence. And yet despite the apparently unambiguous nature of the contemporary American ascendancy, it is not without its paradoxes, puzzles and contradictions. For all the US’s overwhelming military dominance, for example, it has struggled to impose order in Iraq, and cannot unequivocally guarantee security within its own borders. Similarly, while US-based corporations bestride the globe and the domestic economy accounts for about one third of the world’s economic activity, there are still major doubts about the sustainability of private and public debt levels, and concern about America’s dependence on continuing inflows of capital from East Asia in particular. Even at the level of ‘soft power’,2 or the pervasive – if difficult to quantify – influence of ‘American values’ and ‘lifestyles’, perceptions of the US have generated a widespread backlash, especially in Islamic societies, and a reassertion of local identity in opposition to an American influence that is seen as corrosive and negative (Barber 2001). One of the reasons it is difficult to gauge the potential impact of American power is that it is multifaceted; much depends on the issue area, and the specific basis of American influence. Plainly, US military power is quite different in terms of its operation and impact than, say, America’s

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influence over increasingly important intergovernmental organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which have become such prominent players in the management of the international economic system. The possibility that American power and influence have different bases (and may operate in different ways as a consequence) helps to explain the variety of different theoretical perspectives that are employed to explain it. While the dominant theoretical models – realism, liberalism, Marxism and constructivism – may generally pre-date America’s recent ascendancy, they have all been deployed in an effort to make sense of the contemporary era which seems to have such unique qualities. Consequently, the American ascendancy is as much a test of the efficacy of various theoretical frameworks as it is of our capacity to unpack and gauge the empirical manifestations of the new order. This chapter critically assesses some of the most influential theoretical perspectives that have attempted to make sense of American dominance. Before embarking on this undertaking, however, I briefly review the current debate about the status of the evolving international order. Has the US become an imperial power, as much of the current literature would suggest, or is it more useful to describe America’s position as ‘hegemonic’, as I argue? The key argument I make is that the complex, multidimensional nature of American hegemony means that its effect and nature varies across, time, space and issue areas, making it difficult for any single paradigm to capture its full impact. Consequently, I argue in the final section that we need to adopt an eclectic approach to theory.

Empire vs. hegemony When so many observers routinely compare the US’s current position with that of Rome’s, it is unsurprising that American power should also be described as imperial. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that for some observers at least, this is a positive development. For generations of radicals, ‘American imperialism’ was a synonym for a range of political, economic and military relations which they saw as exploitative, repressive and responsible for many of the ills of the world – particularly the Third World. The picture now, however, looks rather different. Many of the neoconservative figures who have exerted such a powerful influence on American foreign policy under the administration of George W. Bush are unabashed advocates of American imperialism, which they see as benevolent and ‘good for a vast portion of the world’s population’ (Kagan 1998, 26).3 Before we can assess the merits of such claims, it is helpful to clarify what exactly imperialism might mean at the present juncture, and whether it is the best way of describing the US’s contemporary pre-eminence. It is worth remembering that some of the most influential theories of imperialism were developed by Marxist scholars (see Brewer 1990 [1980]), and

American ascendancy 5 their preoccupation with economic relations highlights a potentially important element of any imperial relationship. It is not necessary to subscribe to conspiracy theories or one-dimensional caricatures which claim that current American policy is ‘all about oil’ to recognize that the Middle East does have a significance that is as much geophysical as it is geopolitical (Klare 2003). The theoretical question to ask is whether the US’s relationship with the region generally and with Iraq in particular can usefully be characterized as imperial. Rather than comparing American power with Rome, I think it makes more sense to contrast it with the European imperial experience, especially in the nineteenth century. It was this period, after all, which inaugurated the contemporary ‘global’ era and the patterns of structured relationships that persist to this day (Hirst and Thompson 1996). The dynamics of European imperialism are complex and continue to be debated, but the expansion of capitalism into Africa, the Americas and Asia clearly marked the high-water mark of European power and influence. Crucially, this period helped establish the nation state and the market economy as the defining structures of the contemporary global order. While inter-imperial rivalries amongst the European powers may have provided significant ‘push’ factors, the pursuit of new markets, resources and labour created a compelling ‘pull’. This basic interaction between the developed economies of Western Europe and their far-flung imperial possessions entrenched the classic colonial relationship between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ (Hobsbawm 1987; Chase-Dunn 1998). The defining characteristic of this relationship, and the factor that raises troubling normative and administrative questions, is that it occurs between ‘unequal nations which involve effective subjugation, [and] the actual exercise of influence over behavior’ (Cohen 1974, 15, emphasis in original). One of the key distinguishing characteristics of an imperial relationship, then, is not just that it predicated on a fundamental inequality of power and influence, but that there will be ‘direct administration of different communities from an imperial centre’ (Watson 1992, 16). In the heyday of European imperialism, what Abernethy (2000, 12–22) calls the ‘triple assault’ of European power, in which a combination of imperial states, the private sector and the church undercut existent patterns of governance, economic organization and identity in the periphery, effectively paved the way for the European domination and political control of the colonies that became the ‘core feature’ of imperialism. The contrast with the US’s position in either the immediate present or the more distant past is striking: firstly, there is an inherent, historically determined and culturally entrenched aversion to the idea of imperialism in the US (Smith 1994); the US actually played a prominent role in accelerating the departure of the former European colonial powers in Southeast Asia (McMahon 1999). Indeed, the US’s conduct toward its own principal colony – the Philippines – provides a revealing insight into the nature of American as opposed to

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European power: at one level, when the US granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, it marked the first example of Western decolonization in the post-war Asia-Pacific. At another level, however, the complex web of economic, political and security relationships that have bound the Philippines to the US (see Hutchcroft 1998) illustrate the very different nature of American power and its operation in the contemporary international system – prior to the current Bush administration, at least. Consequently, America’s colonial relationship with the Philippines highlights a broader point: American power in the post-war period has not been exercised directly in the manner of the European colonial powers, but has generally been meditated by and diffused through an array of intervening, nominally independent, institutions. This is not to say that the US has not exerted a powerful influence of the course of economic and political development in the Philippines. On the contrary, it has. But it has done so not through the auspices of viceroys, consuls or governorsgeneral, but through the more diffuse mechanisms of the international political economy and a system of strategic alliances and security relations that vest formal authority and autonomy in sovereign states. In short, American power has been hegemonic, rather than imperial. Before saying anything about the way hegemony (as opposed to imperialism) actually operates, it is important to note the historical context within which both modes of rule have unfolded. It is no coincidence that the high point of imperial rule occurred in the nineteenth century, when the expansion of direct rule and the concomitant control of key economic resources that this facilitated had a certain ineluctable logic. A number of factors – the dangers of inter-imperial conflict, the emergence of new forms of economic domination and control, and the profound ideational transformation that has rendered imperialism illegitimate – have fundamentally undercut the logic of territorial expansion. This transformation is captured in the rise of the ‘trading state’, which eschews military might in favour of commercial power and which – for a moment, at least – seemed the quintessential expression of the new global capitalist order (Rosecrance 1986). Although military power remains a critical element of American power and influence, especially under the present Bush regime, Giovanni Arrighi identifies something important about the underlying logics that have historically informed state actions in the twentieth century in particular: Territorialist rulers identify power with the extent and populousness of their domains, and conceive of wealth/capital as a means or byproduct of the pursuit of territorial expansion. Capitalist rulers, in contrast, identify power with the extent of their command over scarce resources and consider territorial acquisitions as a means and a byproduct of the accumulation of capital. (Arrighi 1994, 33)

American ascendancy 7 Despite the significance some observers have attached to Iraq’s geostrategic position as a source of cheap energy supplies (Mann 2003), the Iraqi adventure is something of an anomaly and may yet prove to be the exception rather than the rule. For all America’s overwhelming military dominance – especially since the end of the Cold War – American policymakers have generally subscribed to a ‘capitalist’, as opposed to a ‘territorialist’, logic, preferring to shape an economic order in which US-based companies and economic entities can expand and compete off-shore, rather than directly seeking to control foreign territory and resources. Indeed, it is significant that in the 1990s, the economic and strategic elements of American foreign policy became more discrete as the strategic imperative appeared to decline and economic competition became the primary preoccupation of policy-makers everywhere (Mastanduno 1998). In this regard, it is important to note that in the post-September 11 environment, the former pattern of relations in which the economic and security elements of American foreign policy are intended to ‘reinforce each other in a mutually beneficial way’ has been largely reinstated (Lake 1999, 186). Indeed, the distinctive feature of the current Bush administration may have been to securitize America’s economic and foreign policies in a manner that has not been seen since the height of the Cold War (Higgott 2004). It is possible to identify a number of different foreign-policy traditions in the US (Mead 2001). When combined with competing domestic influences (Trubowitz 1998), this means that policy will always be subject to change and revision. Yet the US’s current, structurally embedded position, in which it accounts for a about a third of global GDP and an even larger proportion of spending on defence (The Economist 2002), means that engagement with the world is simply unavoidable. Isolationism is simply not an option. The only issue is about the manner of this engagement. Even if it is accepted that hegemony is potentially a better way of conceptualizing America’s pre-eminent position, it is clear that there are significantly different elements to this dominance. Most fundamentally, military power may operate and be utilized in very different ways to economic and political influence. In order to try and make sense of these distinctive, albeit increasingly reconnected, areas of activity, we need to consider the way that the idea of hegemony itself has been seen from a variety of theoretical viewpoints.

Theorizing hegemony The word hegemony is of Greek origin and originally referred to the dominance of one state over others in the international system. While this might seem an unremarkable idea, as we shall see, not all those who now employ the term think that this state-centric focus is any longer useful or appropriate. As I suggested earlier, one of the distinguishing characteristics of

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American hegemony has been the ability of policy-makers in the US to pursue ‘American interests’ through a variety of indirect means, either through the auspices of formally independent intergovernmental organizations like the IMF and the WTO, or by helping to establish the ‘rules of the game’ that govern international commerce in ways that are judged to favour American-based economic interests and actors (Beeson and Bell 2005). At one level this reflects the bifurcation between security and politicaleconomic issues noted above. But even in a more narrowly demarcated security sphere, American strategic policy is not solely reliant on the direct application of military power to achieve particular goals. American’s relationship with Japan, for example, provides a powerful illustration of the way generations of Japanese policy-makers have been influenced by an array of underlying cultural and normative influences that have shaped policy outcomes in ways that transcend simple state-to-state relations or formal diplomatic practice (Katzenstein 1996; Green 2001). Indeed, the way American policy-makers approached the countries of East Asia in the post-war period, and their concomitant preference for a bilateral regional security architecture centred on Washington, reflects a range of normative and cultural assumptions that did not apply to the US’s relations with Europe (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002). Such initial observations serve to alert us to the possibility that American power may operate in different ways, at different levels, depending on the different issue areas involved. The particular issues we choose to focus upon, combined with the theoretical lenses through which we examine them, help to account for the very different conclusions observers come to about the nature and impact of American power. Realism The most enduring tradition of scholarship seeking to explain international relations in general and hegemony in particular is, of course, realism. The major assumptions of realist scholarship are sufficiently well known to need no repetition here (see, for example, Morgenthau 1972 [1948]), but it is important to acknowledge that for all its much-criticized methodological simplifications and shortcomings, it remains both a powerful influence on the both the conduct of and (especially in the US) thinking about America’s international relations (Steve Smith 2002). Moreover, at this historical juncture, when security concerns are privileged above all else, it is a potentially important part of an explanation of American foreign policy. The economist Charles Kindleberger was largely responsible for reviving interest in the concept of hegemony during the 1970s. Despite the fact that, as we shall see, some of Kindleberger’s ideas have a distinctly ‘liberal’ quality, he is usually placed in the neo-realist camp (Hay 2002, 21), mainly

American ascendancy 9 because of his claim that it was necessary for the dominant country of an era to ‘set the standard of conduct for other countries’, thus overcoming the pitfalls of anarchy and the potentially destructive pursuit of narrow national interests (Kindleberger 1973, 28). It was the failure of the US to assume this hegemonic or leadership role in the inter-war period that caused the catastrophic economic collapse of the 1930s, according to Kindelberger. One of the things that sets Kindelberger apart from more orthodox realists with political-science backgrounds is his belief that hegemonic leadership can produce a positive sum game in which all benefit from trade-led economic expansion. Conventional realists, by contrast, are famously pessimistic about the nature of international relations. This explains the preoccupation with relative gains and the fear that other countries economic development is potentially alarming rather than mutually uplifting. As Samuel Huntington succinctly points out, economists are ‘out in left field’, theoretically speaking, ‘because they are blind to the fact that economic activity is a source of power as well as well-being’ (1993, 72). In the zero-sum universe inhabited by realists, economic power is a critical determinant of relative state power. Consequently, the rise of Japan, according to Huntington (1993, 72), was something ‘Americans have every reason to be concerned about’. More recently, other realist scholars have expressed similar alarm about the rise of China, leading one noted realist to argue that ‘the United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead’ (Mearsheimer 2001, 402). While this marks a welcome recognition of the importance of economic power, it is remarkably pessimistic and, as we shall see, sharply at odds with liberal understandings of economic development and integration. The importance of realist readings of economic development in the context of this discussion lies in its potential influence on policy: the long-standing desire to ‘contain’ China, for example, is clearly driven by realist assumptions about the inevitability of conflict as a consequence of changes in the distribution of economic weight and power. Such assumptions are prominent in the work of Robert Gilpin, one of the most influential theorists in the realist camp, and one who takes the economic dimension of international dominance and competition seriously. In Gilpin’s (1981; 1987) view, the international system is characterized by competition between the major powers of a particular era as they seek to dominate their rivals and impose their preferred vision of international order; a vision that reflects national interests, but which may produce stability until the hegemon’s position is inevitably challenged by a new rising power. In this regard, hegemonic powers are victims of their own success: the provision of the public goods they underwrite may benefit them, but it also benefits rivals and brings about a redistribution of power in the international system. The international system is consequently characterized by inevitable cyclical competition that is the product of

10 Mark Beeson underlying transformations of material power and control of key, leadingedge technologies (see Goldstein 1988; Schwartz 1994). Whatever one may think of the implicit teleology of such analyses and the relative neglect of non-material factors in determining influence in the international system,4 the military and technological pre-eminence that the US currently enjoys is plainly a crucial part of its dominance of the international system (Wohlforth 2002; Posen 2003). Given that the neoconservative advisors that have influenced policy under the Bush administration are, Lieven (2002) argues, ‘realists to the core’, it is perhaps unsurprising that American foreign policy should have assumed a more unilateral and militarized form. The key point to stress is that the logic of the ‘neocon’ approach flows directly from a realist reading of international system and America’s place in it. Consequently, the policies it generates are not only applicable to Iraq. Although the application of policy may be different, the same rationale informs policy prescriptions toward China and the desire to inhibit its growth and potential for hegemonic rivalry for as long as possible (Mearsheimer 2001). Ironically enough, however, a thoroughgoing realist reading of US–China relations suggests that it might be too late: China’s economic expansion has already established a mutual interdependency with the US in which China recycles its massive trade surplus to buy American debt (Goodman 2003). Neither side can easily disentangle itself from this mutually beneficial nexus of interdependency. Unlike Britain in the nineteenth century, America’s position as a net importer of capital severely constrains its potential foreign-policy leverage (Ferguson 2002). For all its apparent might and dominance, therefore, a realist reading of American hegemony suggests that there are structurally embedded economic weaknesses in the American position which threaten to undermine its long-term position and make Iraq-style adventures simply unsupportable (Ferguson and Kotlikoff 2003). Liberalism The sort of transnational economic engagement that increasingly characterizes US–Asia relations is generally seen as a ‘good thing’ by liberals, an inevitable corollary of greater interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1977), and a potential constraint on military conflict (Russett 1995). Although there are some important distinctions between different strands of liberal thought, especially its economic and political variants, the key point to emphasize, as Richardson (2001, 9) reminds us, is that liberals in the US invariably ‘assume that liberal norms and institutions are essentially benign and conducive to the good of peoples throughout the world’. This underlying assumption about the rectitude and potentially universal appeal of liberal ideas has provided a major impetus for the promotion of a particular world order in the period since the end of World War II, when

American ascendancy 11 America assumed a dominant, not to say, hegemonic position. Part of this dominance, as far as liberals are concerned, is derived from the inherently attractive nature of American values and the concomitant ability to ‘set the political agenda in a way that shapes the preferences of others’ (Nye 2002, 9). While it is difficult to quantify – and easy to overestimate – the impact of ‘soft power’, ‘America’ plainly was, and is, an attractive idea for many outside the US, creating a potentially important source of influence for American policy-makers and economic elites. It is an indictment of contemporary policy that attitudes towards the US have changed so dramatically (Sardar and Davies 2002), and a tacit indicator of the declining influence of liberal ideas in American policy-making circles (Higgott 2004). Yet, for much of the Cold War period, liberal ideas were the normative and programmatic bedrock of American foreign policy. The story of the creation of the post-war order and the distinctive array of institutions that emerged to govern increasingly transnational economic activities and entrench specific security relations is well known and has been detailed elsewhere (Latham 1997). What merits emphasis here is that while liberals tend to focus primarily on the political-economic and institutional aspects of hegemonic power (Keohane 1984), the post-war order that the US played such a pivotal role in creating has from the outset been profoundly shaped by a wider geo-strategic context. Not only did the confrontation with the Soviet Union determine the nature of the overarching security order within which the liberal economic order was nested, but the Cold War confrontation effectively reconstituted the American state as well (Hogan 1998). In other words, while liberals may be right to highlight the distinctive, highly institutionalized nature of the post-war economic and political order, it was created within, and largely a response to, an overarching bipolar strategic and ideological confrontation. Paradoxically, the overwhelming material power possessed by both sides meant that direct superpower conflict was unthinkable (Mueller 1989). This strategic stand-off gave a particular prominence to political and economic factors, and helps explain the focus on the institutions of governance that emerged as part of the so-called Bretton Woods regime (Eichengreen and Kenen 1994). Arguably the most important and persuasive liberal theorist of the distinctive post-war order in which intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO have assumed such prominent positions is John Ikenberry. Two aspects of Ikenberry’s understanding of American hegemony are worth emphasizing. First, and in keeping with the realist position, wars and their aftermaths provide moments in which new hegemonic orders can be established. Indeed, Ikenberry’s view of change in the international system is in accord with the state-centric, cyclical view of Giplin, who he cites approvingly. What distinguishes Ikenberry’s position, and this is the second point to

12 Mark Beeson stress, is that material power is ‘tamed’ within a constitutionalized order (Ikenberry 2000, 29). In this schema, states are bound by the ‘rules of the game’, which establish limits to the way states can act legitimately. Significantly, not only are these ‘rules’ based on ‘shared agreement’, according to Ikenberry (2000, 31), but they bind the hegemon in ways that reassure other actors. Crucially, not only is the rule-governed, institutionalized order able to overcome what realists take to be the inescapably anarchical nature of the international system, but it is system from which all benefit, creating a degree of path-dependency that only some future major crisis is likely to transform (Ikenberry 1998). As we shall see, there are striking parallels in this vision and the views of some ‘neo-Gramscian’ and constructivist scholars who are also interested in the role of ideas, institutions and power. What generally distinguishes liberals, however, is the assumption that the post-war liberal international order which American power has underpinned is normatively desirable and benign. There is often little recognition that the sorts of ‘neoliberal’, market-oriented policies that have been actively promoted in places like East Asia – where very different economic relationships and structures have developed – are not just resented, but expressions of specifically American rather than universal interests (see Wade 2001). This is especially important when we remember that one of the key claims that Ikenberry makes about the post-war order is that its apparent durability is in large part a function of its legitimacy. Now, however, when the international financial institutions (IFIs) and their relationship with the US are the subjects of trenchant criticism (Woods 2003), and when American foreign policy is systematically undermining the very basis of the multilateral order that was such a distinctive part of the post-war era, then even liberals like Ikenberry have questioned whether the specific pattern of institutionalized dominance can endure (2004c). Marxism While some may think it slightly anachronistic to devote discussion to Marxist theories of hegemony, scholars working under this broad rubric have provided some of the most important and persuasive accounts of American power. Given the central place of historical materialism in Marxist thinking, it is perhaps unsurprising that there are some similarities with realist understandings of power. However, it has been ‘neoGramscian’ scholars more influenced by Antonio Gramsci than Karl Marx that have provided some of the most innovative and important recent explanations of contemporary hegemony. The most important figure amongst the neo-Gramscians is Robert Cox, whose work links the original Marxist preoccupation with modes of production, material conditions and class forces with an interest in ideology and the role of ideas. In a seminal article published about a quarter of a

American ascendancy 13 century ago, Cox (1981) suggested how material capabilities, institutions and ideas formed a complex, reciprocal and interactive whole, in which institutions provided a way of perpetuating particular international orders. Significantly, Cox placed much emphasis on the inter-subjective, shared nature of social meaning, in ways that have subsequently been elaborated by constructivists and theorists of global governance (see Onuf 1989; Rosenau 1992). What distinguished Cox’s Marxist-derived theorization is that ideas are ultimately tied to specific historical circumstances and class relations. Hegemony may be about material power, as realists claim; it may also depend on institutions for its perpetuation, as liberals argue; but as far as Cox is concerned hegemony is ultimately about the ideological legitimation of particular class interests. Crucially, however, and in striking sympathy with Ikenberry, the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer[ing] some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful. (Cox 1987, 7) Like liberals, therefore, Cox recognizes that for hegemony to be durable there must be something in it for the dominated. Unlike liberals, though, the basis of hegemonic domination is no longer associated exclusively with a hegemonic state, but with the development of a ‘transnational managerial class’ (Cox 1987, 359–60). From the perspective of orthodox Marxism, the idea that class structures might become transnational as a consequence of the ‘globalization’ of underlying economic activity is perhaps unsurprising (Robinson and Harris 2000). What is more surprising are the implications this may have for the nature of hegemony. Although there is no consensus amongst radical scholars about quite what this might mean in the long run, the idea that we might be witnessing the emergence of a ‘global state’ and the ‘unification of core world state functions’ (Shaw 2000, 17), or that we live in an era when no state can ‘form the center of an imperialist project’ (Hardt and Negri 2001, xiv), captures something about the nature of emerging ‘post-state’ debates to which critical scholars have made significant contributions. One of the great advantages of some of the Marxist-inspired theories of hegemony is their potential capacity to escape the ‘territorial trap’, or the preoccupation with geographically delimited political boundaries and notions of state sovereignty that are central to realism and much liberal thought, too. This is especially the case in the international political economy where neoliberal policies and practices have assumed a centrality that transcends and is not exclusively dependent on nation states for their continuing dominance (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). Like liberals,

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neo-Gramscians recognize the importance institutions have in ‘locking-in’ particular ideas and practices as part of a constitutionalized world order (Gill 1998). Where they depart from liberals, of course, is in their reading of the impact of such practices, which they consider inequitable and exploitative. Whether one agrees with this interpretation of neolberalism’s impact or not, radical scholarship has cast an illuminating light on the evolution of the international political economy, and the way American-based economic interests may benefit from specific transnational regulatory orders. Where they are less convincing is in linking the geo-economic to the geo-strategic. Stephen Gill’s (2003) analysis of American ‘grand strategy’, for example, suggests that it is conducted in coordination with G7 allies, and is the consequence of the ‘calculated relation of means to the containment of large contradictions’. The nature of contemporary American unilateralism clearly presents a major problem for this sort of claim. Even in the likely event that the unilateral impulse proves unsustainable – for the sorts of mundane economic reasons radical scholars have long emphasized (Brenner 2002) – the US clearly enjoys a degree of military dominance that allows it to act in ways that are simply not possible for any other country (Bacevich 2002). Moreover, and problematically for the radical case, American foreign policy has recently had the effect of compromising and diminishing the highly institutionalized multilateral system that American-based interests have directly benefited from (Johnson 2004).5 In other words, while radical scholars can tell us a great deal about how US-based economic interests can benefit form the regulatory regime created under the auspices of American hegemony, and about the way in which a constitutionalized form of hegemony might actually work, they are less good at accounting for the recent securitization of US foreign policy. A similar problem confronts constructivists. Constructivism Constructivism ‘is about human consciousness and its role in international life’ (Ruggie 1998b, 856). While this definition has something in common with both liberal and Gramscian emphases on the role of ideas, norms and values in shaping the behaviour of states and other international actors, constructivism pushes the potential importance of the ideational a good deal further. According to Alexander Wendt, perhaps the most widely known, if not necessarily the most representative exponent of the constructivist position (see Reus-Smit 2002), ‘the most important structures in which states are embedded are made of ideas, not material forces. Ideas determine the meaning and content of power, the strategies by which states pursue their interests, and interests themselves’ (Wendt 1999, 309). The arrow of causation for constructivists points in the opposite direction than it does for both realists and Marxists, for whom ideas

American ascendancy 15 are ultimately epiphenomena and reflective of underlying material or structural forces. It is this fundamental claim about the potential that ideas have to determine both interests and the way they are pursued that underpinned Ruggie’s seminal insight into the nature of post-war American hegemony. For Ruggie what was critical about American power and the distinctive international order it helped create ‘was less the fact that of American hegemony that accounts for the explosion of multilateral arrangements than it was American hegemony’ (1993b, 568, emphasis in original). Put differently, America’s overwhelming structural power and material assets gave US policy-makers the capacity to re-shape the postwar order, but the precise form this took reflected particularly American ideas and normative preferences for a liberal, institutionalized and multilateral order. The potential importance of a constructivist reading of the administration of George W. Bush is clear. Given the widely noted influence that a relatively small coterie of influential neoconservative intellectuals have had on the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda, it is evident that ideas continue to matter (Mann 2004). Indeed, the ending of the Cold War, the demise of bipolar confrontation with the Soviet Union and America’s apparently overwhelming material dominance have created a space in which ideas may matter more than ever: freed from the constraints of superpower confrontation, policy-makers have had the opportunity to create policies that reflect more narrowly conceived ‘American’ interests – something that explains the ascendancy of geo-economics over geopolitics during the 1990s (Luttwak 1998). What is distinctive about the administration of George W. Bush, however, is the long-standing desire to apply American power unilaterally to create a particular form of international order in which the US ‘has the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them’ (Krauthammer 1990–1, 33). The subsequent retreat from multilateralism and the embrace of the doctrine of pre-emption become easier to understand in the light of this ideational shift that significantly pre-dates the ‘war on terror’. Thus far there have been surprisingly few constructivist-inspired analyses of the evolution of American foreign policy since 9/11. An important exception is Chris Reus-Smit’s American Power and World Order, which argues that for American hegemony to be sustainable it must be ‘socially embedded’ (2004, 6). In some ways the approach of constructivists like Reus-Smit is not unlike that of liberals and Gramscians, which emphasize the importance of institutionalization and ideational legitimacy in effectively constitutionalizing specific international orders (see Gill 1998; ReusSmit 1999). What is distinctive and useful about the constructivist reading of American foreign policy that Reus-Smit has recently developed, however, is the recognition of the socially constructed nature of effective and sustainable hegemony:

16 Mark Beeson Hegemony must be seen as a from of social hierarchy, based on status and recognition. It must be cemented by generally recognized procedural and substantive norms, and these norms must reflect the negotiation of the hegemon’s and other states’ identities and interests. Furthermore, the hegemon must pursue its interests in a manner consistent with these norms, or the legitimacy of its leadership will fast erode. To construct such a hegemony in a world as complex as today’s demands a quality of statesmanship as yet unapparent in the ‘gunboat’ diplomacy of the Bush administration. (2004, 102) The contrast between the contemporary expression of American hegemony and earlier forms is striking, and raises questions about the durability of hegemony under the Bush administration given the remarkable rise of anti-Americanism over the past couple of years (Sardar and Davies 2002; PRC 2004). Constructivism highlights and explains a widely noted paradox of American power (Nye 2002): despite its material dominance, American unilateralism and the concomitant decline of legitimacy this engenders significantly raises the transaction costs associated with the pursuit of foreign-policy goals. The reluctance of key allies to assist the US in its increasingly expensive and open-ended adventure in Iraq is perhaps the most telling example of this possibility (Gordon and Shapiro 2004). But the Bush administration’s capacity to alienate formerly unequivocal allies is not confined to Western Europe: in East Asia, too, the consolidation of regional relationships in response to American economic and even security policy suggests that the US no longer enjoys either the legitimacy or the authority it once did (Beeson 2003c). While this may look like the sort of ‘balancing’ realist theory has long predicted (Waltz 1993), it is important to recognize that it is not occurring in a narrowly demarcated security sphere as such analyses might lead us to expect. On the contrary, in yet another paradox of American power, the US’s military dominance is not only unlikely to directly threaten other democracies and allies, but its material ascendancy is being offset by regional collaboration, noncooperation and the construction of ‘counter-hegemonic discourses’ designed to question, if not undermine, American policy.

Conceptualizing American hegemony Trying to make sense of the construction and impact of US foreign policy and the more generalized consequences of America’s structural power and cultural influence is clearly a complex undertaking. The multi-dimensional nature of ‘America’s’ impact on the world suggests that no single paradigm is likely to provide a complete explanation of contemporary hegemony. Indeed, as Katzenstein and Okawara (2001–2, 154) argue, ‘[t]he complex links between power, interest, and norms defy analytical capture

American ascendancy 17 by any one paradigm. They are made more intelligible by drawing selectively on different paradigms – that is, by analytical eclecticism, not parsimony.’ The following attempt to conceptualize American hegemony is undertaken in this eclectic spirit and, despite the potentially incommensurable nature of the paradigms discussed earlier, draws on a number of approaches. The central claim made here is that an eclectic approach allows us to gain a clearer understanding of the multifaceted temporal and spatial dimensions of American power as it affects multiple arenas. The major justification for adopting an eclectic approach is derived from the range of issue areas affected by the US, and the sheer durability of American power – the declinist literature of the 1980s and early 1990s notwithstanding (see Keohane 1984; Kennedy 1987). While both Marxists and liberals may be right to point to potential economic vulnerabilities on the one hand (Brenner 2002), or the declining efficacy of America’s ideational influence on the other (Nye 2002–3), the military dominance realists emphasize is not just a critical element of America’s structurally embedded paramountcy, it allows the US to behave in ways that are simply impossible for any other nation. The point to emphasize at this stage is that the efficacy and importance of military (or any other form of) power varies as a consequence of the historically specific geo-political context in which it unfolds on the one hand, and the policy priorities of a particular regime on the other. This dialectical interaction between domestic factors and the US’s hegemonic role exerts a powerful influence over the international system within which American power is embedded. Barry Buzan and Richard Little (2000) have usefully suggested that the international system is constituted by a dynamic interaction between military, political, economic and societal sectors. In light of the earlier review of theories of hegemony, it is useful to consider the nature of American hegemony in these four contexts, in order to develop a clearer understanding of the nature, extent and efficacy of American power in the contemporary period, as well a sense of the relative usefulness of the various theories of hegemony. Military power One of the most distinctive aspects of America’s strategic position is its unprecedented global reach, and the huge lead the US enjoys in terms of technological sophistication and military hardware. Realists rightly draw attention to the importance of strategic considerations in understanding American dominance: American hegemony was initiated by the Second World War, and the distinctive liberal order that US hegemony helped to create in its aftermath occurred within the overarching context of the Cold War. Consequently, two temporal considerations are especially germane here. First, American actions, particularly during the early phases of the Cold War (as both liberals and Gramscians point out), enjoyed a good

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deal of legitimacy – at least amongst key allies. In other words, the specific geo-political dynamics of the Cold War constrained and gave a particular direction to American grand strategy, one that is strikingly different to the contemporary period. This leads to a second point: despite the ending of the Cold War and the beginning of an era of ‘unipolarity’, there has been little winding back of the spatial distribution or reach of American military power. On the contrary, what Chalmers Johnson (2004) describes as an ‘empire of bases’ has become a permanent, highly institutionalized part of America’s overall strategic position.6 One of the continuities of American hegemony, then, has been an accelerating pursuit of military dominance and what Bacevich (2002, 49) has described as the increasing militarization of foreign policy. The actions of the present Bush administration have dramatically highlighted the continuing importance of America’s military power, and provided a telling reminder about the importance of agency: the doctrine of pre-emption and the willingness to act unilaterally are distinctive qualities of the Bush administration and testimony to the ideational impact of the ‘neo-con’ advisors that have assumed prominent positions in the Bush administration (Mann 2004). The Bush administration also highlights the way military and economic interests can intersect within a particular administration to shape policy outcomes (Phillips 2004). Consequently, as observers like Bacevich and former National Security Advisor to the Carter administration Zbigniew Brzezinski point out, America’s promotion of global economic liberalism and pursuit of military domination are deeply interlinked elements of the US’s overall hegemonic position. Crucially, however, even arch realists like Brzezinski (2004, 143) recognize that without legitimacy both the application of military power and the larger project of liberal globalization are imperilled. Before considering this ideational dimension of American power, it is useful to highlight briefly America’s evolving strategic relationship with East Asia, which is considered in more detail elsewhere in this volume. While it is plain that America’s role in the Cold War, especially in Korea and Vietnam, profoundly affected political, economic and strategic development within East Asia, and the nature of intra-regional relations, too (Cumings 1997b), it is also clear that this is not simply a structurally determined function of the international order. Not only have American attitudes towards security issues in East Asia been sharply different from those in Western Europe (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002), but East Asians also have distinctive views about security issues that may ultimately place them at odds with the US. On the one hand, the distinctive, more allencompassing notions of security that prevail in East Asia are unlike those that prevail in ‘the West’ (Alagappa 1998); on the other, it has been argued that the historical basis of international relations in East Asia has also been very different from the Western European model that has provided the basis for most contemporary international relations theory. As

American ascendancy 19 David Kang (2003b) points out, the traditional China-centric order in East Asia was the exact opposite of what Western international relations theory would lead us to expect, and characterized by informal inequality overlaid by formal hierarchy. It is not necessary to think that East Asia is inevitably reverting to this long-standing ‘natural’ order to recognize that the seemingly inexorable rise of China in combination with a decline in American legitimacy creates a new, unpredictable environment, which our current theoretical models may find difficult to explain. While realism rightly highlights the continuing importance of American military power generally, and of its direct strategic engagement with and presence in East Asia in particular, the key point to stress is that there is nothing inevitable about the way this engagement will play out or the way East Asia will respond to it. Indeed, there is evidence of an emerging normative or ideational shift in East Asia which may presage a major reorientation in the region’s strategic posture and its relations with the US (Alagappa 2003). Political economy and hegemony Although Buzan and Little suggest that the political and economic spheres are distinct and should be considered separately, the nature of the contemporary international system generally and the impact of American hegemony in particular make this a somewhat artificial distinction. The idea that politics and economics are inseparable, mutually constitutive parts of larger social realities is well established (Polyani 1957; Strange 1994); the challenge now is to construct conceptual frameworks that capture the nature of this interaction at both a national and transnational level, while simultaneously paying attention to the wider geopolitical context within which such interactions occur. The potential importance of this claim can be seen in the context of East Asia and its interaction with the US. East Asia is characterized by famously (or infamously) close relations between government and business, which highlight just how artificial the attempted analytical separation of politics and economics actually is. However, the salient point here is that institutions like the ‘developmental state’, which Japan pioneered and which has been widely emulated to varying degrees across the region, are unlikely to have prospered in quite the way they did without the Cold War and the particular strategic priorities adopted by the Americans (Beeson 2005a). Not only did the US adopt a more tolerant attitude toward mercantilist, statist practices of which American policy-makers had little sympathy, but the creation of a liberal, dynamic international economy provided the opportunity for much of the region to develop through export-oriented industrialization. Adopting a more temporally and spatially informed approach to both the international political economy and the impact of American hegemony upon it has a number of advantages. First, it highlights both the way in

20 Mark Beeson which international economic restructuring has brought about a change in both the way economic activity is organized and coordinated (Ruigrok and van Tulder 1995), and the diversity and influence of private-sector actors in the regulation of the contemporary international system (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). One of the most important consequences of the evolving relationship between political and economic power is its increased transnationalization and the subsequent erosion of the link between geographically demarcated, immobile political communities of fate, and potentially mobile economic actors. In short, power is not exclusively political, nor is it coterminous with national boundaries (Agnew 2002). Some observers contend that the globalization of economic – and by necessity, political – activity is generating changes ‘comparable in scope to the transition from the feudal epoch to the modern Westphalian system’ (Korbin 2002, 43). What is clear, is that international restructuring is changing the way economic activity is organized, and the power of states relative to economic actors. While there is a major debate about just how far this process has gone,7 and major differences in the capacities of individual states, it is clear that the private sector is taking increasing responsibility for making authoritative decisions and influencing policy across an array of areas that were formerly the preserve of states (Cutler et al. 1999). The second advantage of taking history and geography seriously, then, is that it alerts us to the differential impact of a range of processes that are associated with and driven by American power or, more accurately, by specific interests that are able to shape US foreign and economic policy at particular moments. Marxists, or radical scholars more generally, have gone furthest in developing a framework that attempts to explain the way that the transnational economic restructuring has led to a concomitant transnationalization of political power of class forces (Cox 1987; Robinson and Harris 2000). Despite the fact that such analyses generally understate the wider geopolitical and strategic contexts within which such relationships operate, they do highlight something important about the way particular interests can shape policy and about the significance of ideational or ideological legitimacy in underpinning a particular order. The influence of financial-sector interests over recent American policy in East Asia, which continued to lobby for further liberalization despite accumulating evidence of its negative and destabilizing impact, is a telling example of the first possibility (Beeson 2003d). Similarly, the systematic discursive demolition of the legitimacy of the Asian developmental state undertaken in the aftermath of the financial crisis illustrates how predominantly US-based economic interests and ideas were mobilized to marginalize Asian alternatives to the dominant neoliberal American model (Hall 2003). The precise way that ‘American power’ has been exercised in the international political economy has, therefore, varied over time, reflecting the constraints of geopolitics, the fluctuating influence of particular economic

American ascendancy 21 interests and the position of the IFIs, which have been such an important part in promoting and enforcing neoliberalism. What is most striking at present, however, is that the renewed emphasis on security issues postSeptember 11 has changed both American foreign policy and its impact on the rest of the world. In Southeast Asia, which it is supposedly at the forefront of the ‘war on terror’, strategic cooperation is becoming a prerequisite of economic aid and trade and reconfiguring inter-state and domestic relations across the region as a consequence (Beeson 2004). But if there are echoes of the Cold War in contemporary policy, there are also important differences that highlight the ambiguous position the US occupies at the centre of the international system. Socio-cultural hegemony? The final8 element of Buzan and Little’s depiction of the international system is the societal or socio-cultural sector. Assessing the impact of something as imprecise as ‘culture’ is inevitably fraught with difficulty, but it does highlight another potentially important, if contradictory, impact of American power. At one level there is clearly a significant overlap with both liberal and Gramscian scholars who emphasize the importance of ‘soft power’ and/or ideology in promoting a particular world view or in constitutionalizing a specific set of norms and values (Gill 1998; Nye 2002). At another level, however, arguments about the potential impact of ‘cultural’ influences can be far grander and all-encompassing, and involve claims that are either insupportably teleological at worst or highly Eurocentric at best (von Laue 1987; Fukuyama 1992). While such claims may look wildly overblown and neglect the actual history of technological and economic development in which East Asia played such a prominent part (Hobson 2004), ‘the West’ generally and the US in particular clearly have had a disproportionate influence over the course of recent history and the development of the international system. Indeed, it is precisely as a consequence of this influence and the US’s unique capacity to affect the evolution of processes associated with globalization that leads Ikenberry to argue that the US ought to be uniquely qualified and positioned to take advantage of the very system it helped to create (Ikenberry 2001). And yet for all the attention that is paid to the US’s dominance of the information and entertainment sectors of the international economy, it is evident that not only is this cultural hegemony frequently resented, but its impact is at best incomplete (Barber 2001; PRC 2004). Consequently, it may be more useful to speak of world culture as a specific repertoire of institutions, practices and purposes generated and sustained by states and social systems (Boli and Thomas 1999). Such a formulation usefully directs our attention toward the complex, multi-level, multi-actor nature of contemporary processes of ‘global governance’. What we need to add to

22 Mark Beeson these approaches, however, and what emerges from a consideration of the US’s specific historical role in the development of such a system, is that hegemonic power continues to exert a powerful, sometimes decisive force on the evolving international order. This is most dramatically obvious, of course, in the security sphere, and exemplified by the US’s present doctrine of pre-emption. It is also important to recognize that the US can exert a more pervasive, comparatively subtle long-term influence at this more diffuse cultural level as it encourages the adoption of a particular set of economic practices. The persistence of varieties of capitalism should not blind us to the fact that, as Susan Strange (1997) pointed out, the differences in broadly capitalist orders are less significant than the similarities. The importance of this insight is confirmed by China’s accession to the WTO (Fewsmith 2001): the capitulation of the last significant alternative to the ubiquitous capitalist model is arguably as significant as the ending of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union.9 It is an event that the US was significantly responsible for, and from which it stands to gain enormously at a strategic, economic, political and ideational level. One of the most important manifestations of cultural hegemony is in bringing about these sorts of long-term changes in the underlying assumptions that political elites have about the most appropriate way of organizing economic and – by implication – social activity. This more diffuse, subtle and longterm consequence of American hegemony has been one of its most important. Remarkably, the recent emphasis on material power at both a theoretical and policy level means it is also one of the most underappreciated.

Concluding remarks The potential importance of America’s ideational influence and legitimacy, as well as the limits of material power, are clearly observable in Iraq. Realists may be able to explain why the US can act pre-emptively and win a rapid military victory, but they are less good at explaining why the Bush administration might want to invade Iraq in the first place, or why they are having such a difficult time suppressing opposition to their presence. They are also less convincing in accounting for the responses to American unilateralism. In Europe and East Asia there are signs of growing unease about American policy, and an erosion of American authority as a consequence (Beeson 2003c; Daalder 2003). To understand why US policy is increasingly seen as illegitimate, frequently contested and arguably far less effective than it once was we need to recognize how it has evolved over the last fifty years or so. Seen in a longer time-frame, the extent of the transformation that has occurred under the Bush administration becomes clearer – but so do some continuities. True, unilateralism, pre-emption and a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions to difficult international issues are distinctive

American ascendancy 23 qualities of the present administration. But the structurally embedded influence that flows from American military power, economic weight and political leverage pre-dates this administration, as does the commitment to liberalism and openness that characterized earlier administrations (Bacevich 2002). To capture the complex reality that is American hegemony we need to adopt an eclectic approach that draws on and synthesizes a number of approaches and theoretical frameworks. In so doing we can begin to recognize how American hegemony has evolved, its differential impact in various parts of the world, and the contingent interaction between the domestic and international aspects of American policy. Such an analysis serves as a powerful reminder of one other aspect of American power that is especially germane to a collection like this: it makes a difference who runs America. Whatever we may think of the Bush administration and its impact on Asia in particular, it serves as a salutary reminder that agency continues to matter, and the hegemonic potential can be realized in distinctive and sometimes troubling ways.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Alex Bellamy for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this chapter. The usual comments apply. 2 The idea of soft power, or the benefits that accrue from non-material, ideational and cultural influences, has been developed most fully by Nye (2002). 3 For a more detailed discussion of the emergence and influence of the ‘neocons’ see Beeson (2004). The subsequent discussion draws heavily on this paper. 4 The nature of the ‘international system’ is taken up in more detail in the final section. 5 The US’s failure to sign the Kyoto agreement, its opposition to the International Criminal Court, its unilateral abrogation of arms control treaties and the push for bilateral rather than multilateral trade agreements are some of the more important examples of this process. 6 It should be noted that at the time of writing, the US has foreshadowed a major redeployment of American forces with major reductions in Europe and East Asia. 7 There is an extensive literature which considers the role of the state and the possible impact of ‘gobalization’. 8 It should be noted that in Buzan and Little’s original formulation they also included the environmental sector, but a consideration of its significance is beyond the scope of this chapter and the competence of its author. 9 It is important to recognize the extent of the changes China’s admission to the WTO implies, including re-writing the national constition to accommodate the requirements of market-centred economic actitivty. See Fewsmith (2001).

2

Hegemonic order, September 11, and the consequences of the Bush revolution1 Michael Mastanduno

Introduction The end of the Cold War brought forth a systemic change in world politics, from an international system dominated by two superpowers to a system dominated by one. This systemic shift is profound, and implies new patterns of interaction among states. It leads states, particularly major powers, to reconsider and possibly redirect their foreign policies. Systemic change also has consequences for order and stability in key regions of the world. The defining feature of the new international system is the dominance of the United States (Ikenberry 2002). The United States faces no challengers or peer competitors in the traditional sense of great power politics. It is dominant militarily and economically, and its core ideological preferences are shared in many parts of the world. No other state can balance the United States and no effective combination of balancers is plausibly on the horizon. In this context, a key strategic priority of the United States has been to preserve its preponderant position. The United States has sought since the end of the Cold War to maintain its primacy globally and to shape international order in key regions including Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia (Mastanduno 2002). This chapter advances three main arguments. First, the United States, in response to the opportunity presented by its dominant power position, has pursued a hegemonic strategy for the maintenance of order in East Asia. A hegemonic strategy means the United States does not aspire simply to dominate other states; it seeks instead to gain the acceptance of other major states for an international order shaped by the United States and consistent with its interest and values. I argue that U.S. hegemony has provided public goods and made important contributions to East Asian order but remains incomplete in that it is accepted only partially by other major states in the region. Second, I argue that the events of September 11 have had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy. The terrorist attacks refocused the perceptions of threat and security in the United States. They have led to a U.S.

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 25 foreign policy that is more moralistic, more risk acceptant, and less wedded to particular institutional arrangements. These changes have not led the United States to abandon its hegemonic strategy. But, they have complicated significantly the application and implementation of that strategy. Although it is not the intention of the United States, the ultimate result of these foreign policy changes, in combination with other developments, may be the transformation of the East Asian security architecture that emerged during the Cold War and persisted in essentially the same shape during the initial post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. We cannot take for granted that the “hub and spoke” system, with the United States at the center of a specific set of bilateral alliances and serving as regional stabilizer, will survive in the same manner as it has for the past several decades. Third, I argue that there is a vital economic dimension to the U.S. hegemonic strategy. Economic liberalization and interdependence are key components of U.S. hegemony and regional order. I suggest, however, that the management of economic relations will become increasingly difficult. The United States has served since the 1990s as a key engine of growth for the world economy. But the strategies it has pursued since September 11 have created and will continue to generate sizable fiscal and external deficits. The stage is set for international economic conflict in the years ahead, particularly if China continues to rise and if the U.S. economy experiences a period of slower growth. Economic conflicts, in turn, will complicate further the efforts of U.S. officials to maintain the existing East Asian security order. The United States will retain its preeminent power position in the years ahead. Nonetheless, the task of maintaining and completing hegemony in East Asia will become more difficult. The United States will face the twin challenges of conducting the global war on terror while simultaneously managing the rise of China. As a consequence, the prospects for order in East Asia will remain uncertain and problematic.

U.S. hegemony in East Asia: contributions and limitations Although political scientists sometimes use the terms interchangeably, hegemony and unipolarity should be distinguished analytically. Unipolarity refers to a distribution of material capabilities – one that overwhelmingly favors a single state (Wohlforth 1999). Hegemony has both material and non-material components; it pertains both to power and social relations. Hegemony means that one actor has the power to shape the rules of international politics according to its own interests (Gilpin 1987). But it also means that there is a reasonable degree of acceptance or acquiescence on the part of other major states in the system (Cumings 1999b; Ikenberry 2000). A durable hegemonic order requires some consensus on the desirability of the dominant state’s leadership and on the social purposes that it

26

Michael Mastanduno

promotes. Hegemony, in this sense, is not simply domination but involves the legitimate exercise of power. A hegemonic order thus should also be distinguished from an empire or imperial order, which implies the direct or formal rule of one political entity over another (Doyle 1986). By the middle of the 1990s, the United States was clearly in pursuit of a hegemonic strategy in East Asia. It sought a special role for itself as the principal guarantor of regional order. After the Cold War, U.S. officials could have pursued other strategies. They could have withdrawn from the region, allowed a local balance of power to emerge, and taken on the role of “offshore balancer” (Layne 1993). They could have attempted to build multilateral security institutions as the primary foundation of regional order (Ikenberry 2000). They could have sought to organize one set of states in opposition to another by focusing on the containment of China. U.S. officials chose instead the hegemonic path, and have sought support for a U.S.-centered regional order. There are two key institutional features of the U.S. hegemonic strategy. First, the United States has relied on a set of bilateral relationships with other key states. The principal bilateral ties have been with Japan and South Korea, reflecting a U.S. preference for continuity in arrangements that developed during the Cold War. Similarly, the United States has reaffirmed its close partnership with Australia. In relations with China the United States has pursued engagement rather than containment, and the development of what President Clinton referred to as a special partnership. Despite initial misgivings, the Bush administration essentially continued the pursuit of a partnership with China. It also began to develop a closer bilateral relationship with Asia’s other emerging power, India. The overall U.S. approach to regional order is aptly described in terms of “hub and spokes,” with Washington seeking to assure key players that their relationship with the United States is primary and indispensable (Joffe 1995). U.S. officials have been receptive to multilateral security initiatives in the region, such as the Asian Regional Forum and the Northeast Asian Cooperation Dialogue. But they clearly view multilateral or minilateral arrangements as complements to, rather than as substitutes for, a primary set of bilateral relationships (Cossa 2003a). The other institutional feature of hegemony has been the forward military presence of the United States. By 1995, U.S. officials made clear their intention to maintain a political and military commitment to East Asia that would be of indefinite duration (USDoD 1995; Nye 2001). This commitment included the stabilization of the U.S. troop presence at approximately 100,000, and the maintenance of a dominant naval presence. In Northeast Asia, the U.S. naval presence is secured by alliances with South Korea and Japan. In Southeast Asia, it is secured through a series of naval agreements with states including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 27 The U.S. hegemonic strategy has provided public goods and contributed to regional order in several ways. The U.S. presence has helped to deter major powers from developing or intensifying dangerous rivalries. Japan and China, most obviously, have a history of antagonism and mutual recrimination. Negative sentiment is not far from the surface even some sixty years after the Second World War (Christensen 1999). For China, the U.S. presence effectively constrains Japan, serving as the “cork in the bottle” to suppress possible Japanese aggression (Midford 2004a). Similarly, for Japan the U.S. presence deters China from a bid for regional dominance commensurate with its growing economic power and political influence. U.S. hegemony has helped to keep the major powers at bay, and also to reassure smaller states whose security or autonomy might be threatened by larger ones. In both Northeast and Southeast Asia, smaller states must co-exist with larger ones that have geopolitical ambitions, territorial claims, and a history of conflict with each other. The United States has sufficient power to be a credible protector, and although it possesses its own geopolitical interests, it could plausibly claim – at least prior to September 11 – not to have its own territorial or revisionist ambitions in the region. U.S. officials have also worked to manage regional conflicts with the potential to escalate to local and even broader wars. The United States took the initiative throughout the 1990s to stabilize security crises through diplomacy and the implied threat of military force. The critical U.S. role was evident in the China–Taiwan crisis of 1996, the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994, and the India–Pakistan crises over Kashmir in 1998 and again in 2001. Finally, the United States has worked to discourage the nationalist economic competition that often results when states find themselves in economic distress. U.S. officials have pushed an economically troubled Japan to reform domestically and continue to open its markets. They have sought to integrate China into a globalizing world economy. After the Asian financial crisis, U.S. officials tried to discourage beggar thy neighbor responses by keeping open its own large market and assuring continued sources of global liquidity. It is important to recognize the contributions of hegemony to order, but also to note its limitations. The U.S. hegemonic strategy has sought to manage relationships and crises and avoid major conflicts. It has not sought to bring about some kind of fundamental resolution to long-standing problematic relationships such as that between China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, Japan and China, or Japan and Korea. The U.S. strategy has been more of a holding action, an effort to keep relations from deteriorating, than a progressive attempt at final resolution. U.S. hegemony is also incomplete. If hegemony requires an acceptance by other states of the dominant states’ vision for order, then the United States has been only partially successful. Japan, for example, perceives the

28 Michael Mastanduno dominant role of the United States as constructive and legitimate. This is not to say that the United States can take Japan for granted – only that to date Japan has anticipated greater benefit from cooperating with rather than challenging U.S. hegemony. The same is arguably true for Australia. China, of course, is less certain. On the one hand it desires the benefits of integration; on the other, it is uncomfortable in a world and region dominated by one power, and it may have system-shaping or region-shaping aspirations of its own. India, like China, perceives itself as a rising power with legitimate security concerns and an eventual claim to great power status. The United States made minimal effort to cultivate a meaningful relationship with India until President Clinton’s visit in 1998. The Bush administration similarly has recognized India’s importance and has sought to redress U.S. inattention. In summary, U.S. hegemony is by no means an ideal pathway to regional order. It is limited and incomplete, and to have one power so dominant makes other states uneasy. But hegemony does contribute significantly to order in what most agree is a potentially unstable region of the world (Ellings and Friedberg 2001). Other states may resent U.S. power and be critical of particular U.S. policies. But, after the first postCold War decade, most would probably have agreed that regional order was better served with the United States engaged in the region rather than withdrawn from it.

September 11 and the transformation of U.S. foreign policy The events of September 11, 2001 may not have changed the international system, but they did transform U.S. foreign policy. These massive attacks were virtually unprecedented in the U.S. experience. The comparison typically drawn has been to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor some sixty years earlier. The December 7, 1941 attack was on an American outpost, by an adversary the United States anticipated it would eventually engage in war. The September 11 attack achieved even greater surprise, involved two of America’s most important cities, and was directed at the prominent symbols of U.S. military preponderance, the Pentagon, and U.S. economic dominance, the World Trade Center in the heart of the New York financial district. Although these attacks and the U.S. response are very recent, we can begin to discern their impact on U.S. foreign policy generally (Gaddis 2004) and on the U.S. strategy for East Asia. There are five major impacts on U.S. foreign policy. First, the terrorist attacks refocused the perception of threat and the core national security concerns of the United States. U.S. foreign policy after the defeat of the Soviet Union seemed at times to be in search of the next great threat. For a short time as the Cold War ended Japan was the center of U.S. attention, for economic rather than military reasons. Then a rising China, with the long-term potential to challenge U.S. preponderance, began to attract con-

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 29 siderable interest during the 1990s. The first major foreign policy conflict of the new Bush administration in 2001 involved an aerial conflict off the coast of China. The attacks of September 11 turned the U.S. foreign policy community in a different direction. One year after the attacks, policy makers agreed that the central challenge to U.S. national security was found at the intersection of terrorism of global reach, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The perception of threat is articulated most clearly in the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of September 2002 (USNSC 2002). This document has been aptly compared to NSC-68, which played a similar role, at the outset of the Cold War, in laying out the challenges of a new world faced by the United States in the aftermath of a previous great conflict. The new cluster of threats has highlighted the importance of homeland defense as a core national security objective. The protection of the homeland, arguably always a vital interest, faded into the background after the collapse of the Soviet threat. This concern returned with a great sense of urgency after September 11. Homeland security has taken its place alongside the preservation of U.S. primacy as the central objectives of U.S. national security policy. The creation of a new institutional infrastructure, organized around the Department of Homeland Security, reflected the elevation of this renewed national security priority – just as the National Security Act of 1947 symbolized the reordering of U.S. priorities in the new era of the Cold War. Second, U.S. foreign policy after September 11 has been framed more explicitly in terms of morality. U.S. officials have cast the struggle against global terrorism in binary terms, as a struggle of good against evil. In mobilizing support for this struggle, U.S. officials stressed their view that other states are either “for us” or “against us.” President Bush’s identification of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil” served to remind that rogue states and stateless terrorists constituted a common enemy. The Bush administration recognizes the value of framing conflicts in terms of morality for the mobilization of U.S. public opinion. Ronald Reagan cast his struggle against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, and an earlier generation of U.S. leaders depicted the wartime struggle against fascism as a struggle against evil. U.S. officials have framed the moral agenda in terms of opportunity as well as threat. The National Security Strategy calls explicitly for the overseas projection of U.S. values and institutions as a national security priority. It goes as far as to assert the existence of a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise” (USNSC 2002, 1). President Bush frequently has spoken of the extension of freedom as a moral obligation on the part of the United States. Third, in the aftermath of the attacks U.S. foreign policy has become more risk acceptant. During the 1990s U.S. officials pursued hegemony

30 Michael Mastanduno cheaply and quietly. They intervened in Somalia but departed as soon as casualties mounted. They tried to avoid direct involvement in Bosnia and intervened only when the stability and viability of NATO came at stake. They intervened in Kosovo using military power at high altitudes in order to avoid even minimal casualties. The maintenance of international order and preservation of U.S. primacy were combined with risk avoidance – in part because, for an uncontested United States, most interventions were optional, and in part because U.S. officials perceived that the U.S. Congress and public would not tolerate a foreign policy that was costly in terms of American lives or resources. After the attacks, U.S. officials proved more inclined to take risks. They intervened and overthrew the Taliban despite ominous warnings that history was not kind to great powers who took on Afghanistan. The 2003 intervention in Iraq was more discretionary and considerably bolder. That war could have led to the destruction of oil fields and consequent global financial instability. It could have spilled over into a more general Arab–Israeli war, and led to political upheaval against friendly but fragile regimes in the region. These dire consequences were avoided – at least as of 2005. But the Iraq adventure has involved the United States in a politically controversial war of attrition – the most controversial since the war in Vietnam – in which the costs in terms of national treasure and military casualties have mounted significantly. The preventive, now counterinsurgent war in Iraq is precisely the type of conflict U.S. officials made sure to avoid during the 1990s. U.S. officials have accepted these risks and consequences on the presumption that rogue states with potential WMD capacity pose an unacceptable threat to U.S. security. They also perceived, ambitiously, the opportunity to use intervention in Iraq as the starting point for a more general transformation of the Middle East – a transformation that ideally would lead states and peoples in the region to embrace U.S. institutions and values. The U.S. commitment to accept greater risk is unambiguous and is captured by the provocative proclamation that the United States will be prepared to use force preemptively (more precisely, preventively) as it sees fit against its potential enemies. Fourth, the United States has become less wedded to particular institutional arrangements. It would be inaccurate to characterize this shift as one from multilateralism to unilateralism. There were strong elements of unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy before September 11, and a commitment to multilateralism in a variety of areas (e.g., international trade and finance) persists after September 11. What is different is that the United States feels less compelled than before to use or defend any particular international institution. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield’s oftquoted phrase that “the mission determines the coalition, rather than vice versa” aptly captures the shift. During the 1990s, U.S. officials turned to the United Nations as a first resort in the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, and

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 31 Bosnia, and to NATO in the absence of UN Security Council support in Kosovo. After September 11, the United States took on Afghanistan largely on its own, despite the fact that NATO took the historic step of invoking Article 5 in defense of the United States. In the Iraq war, U.S. officials went forward with an ad hoc “coalition of the willing” in defiance of strong opposition from key members of both the UN Security Council and the NATO alliance. Fifth, U.S. officials have affirmed U.S. primacy publicly and selfconsciously. During the 1990s, defenders of the Clinton administration’s more tentative foreign policy viewed it as appropriately restrained, while critics argued that U.S. policy failed to recognize and match U.S. power. President Bush, prior to September 11, emphasized that U.S. foreign policy needed to be humble and non-threatening. Initial signals from his administration suggested the United States would scale back rather than expand international commitments. After September 11, the restraints were lifted in both rhetoric and policy. In 1992, when the Pentagon’s call for the United States to discourage peer competitors was leaked to the press, the first Bush administration disavowed it. Ten years later, the second Bush administrative proudly and publicly asserted that “our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States” (USNSC 2002, 30). The pointed challenge to other states to decide whether they are for or against the United States reflects the U.S. attitude that others need the United States more than the United States needs them. The administration that warned prior to September 11 against the dangers of nation-building, afterward not only engaged in it, but sought to manage the broader transformation of one of the world’s most troubled regions. The United States, in short, after September 11 began to act as a revisionist power, with the intention of transforming international relations, rather than as a conservative power interested primarily in the perpetuation of the international status quo.

The Bush revolution and U.S. Asia strategy What impact do these broad changes have on the U.S. strategy for hegemonic order in East Asia? The best intentions of U.S. officials have been to continue the strategic approach set out in the 1990s, centered on forward defense, bilateral alliances and partnerships, and a U.S. role as regional stabilizer. Bush administration officials might even view the task as somewhat easier, because they believe that all the major powers are aligned on the same side in the war on terrorism. Ultimately, however, September 11 and the consequent changes in U.S. foreign policy will greatly complicate the U.S. hegemonic strategy that evolved during the 1990s. On the surface, the overall U.S. strategy for East Asia remains intact. What Joseph Nye termed “deep engagement” during the 1990s continues,

32 Michael Mastanduno after September 11, to characterize the fundamental thrust of U.S. strategy. Deep engagement depends on the forward deployment of U.S. land, naval, and air forces, based in friendly states in the region. U.S. officials continue to view the American presence as a stabilizing force in a part of the world characterized by unresolved historical resentments, a diversity of regime types and levels of economic development, and longstanding conflicts that could serve as flashpoints for broader regional conflict. At least in the short run, September 11 and its aftermath may have facilitated and reinforced the U.S. hegemonic strategy. U.S. strategy during the 1990s was to cultivate a series of special relationships with major regional powers, designed to reassure potential challengers of the desirability of a U.S.-centered order and the mutual benefits of cooperation with the United States. By the end of the 1990s, relations with Russia and China had deteriorated significantly. But after September 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin seized the opportunity presented by the terrorist attacks to change direction and develop a closer partnership with the United States, centered on a common response to the shared threat of terrorism. China, albeit with less enthusiasm, similarly viewed the war on terrorism as an opportunity to cooperate with rather than defy the United States. China’s motives are complicated but might include concern that the closeness of the renewed U.S.–Russian relationship might work to the detriment of China’s relationship with each of those two powers. Japan, for its part, used the September 11 crisis to reaffirm its stance as a loyal ally of the United States – one that even fights “side by side” with the United States, within the constraints and limitations imposed by Japan’s constitutional and political realities. With these limitations in mind, it is plausible to view Japan as seeking the status of special partner of the United States in the East Asian context that Britain has claimed in the European context. U.S. officials clearly welcomed this opportunity to strengthen relations with other major powers. They have gone even further, proclaiming that after September 11 the world’s major powers are “on the same side – united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” The 2002 National Security Strategy goes on to assert that the United States and other major powers – including China and Russia – are increasingly united by common values. In short, “the events of September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the context for relations between the United States and other main centers of global power, and opened vast, new opportunities” (USNSC 2002, 28). This celebration is premature. In the short term, there may be little conflict between the hegemonic strategy the United States developed for East Asia during the 1990s, and the new U.S. commitment to homeland security through the global war on terrorism. Over time, however, the continued pursuit of the war on terrorism is likely to complicate America’s East Asian strategy. September 11 refocused U.S. priorities and behavior. Yet

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 33 other states are not simply standing by as the United States turns its attention to terrorist threats and homeland security. As the changes in U.S. priorities and behavior interact with developments in the region, U.S. officials will find it even more difficult to complete their hegemonic strategy. First, the shift in core U.S. priorities necessarily has diplomatic consequences. U.S. officials gave highest priority to Europe and Northeast Asia during the first post-Cold War decade as they focused on the preservation and completion of a dominant U.S. position. Potential challengers are found in these key regions, leading U.S. officials to pay particular attention to the U.S. role as provider of regional security. September 11 deflected or distracted U.S. attention in two ways. It prompted U.S. officials to worry less about preserving preeminence, because they took both U.S. dominance and the cooperation of other great powers for granted. Equally important, September 11 shifted U.S. attention from Europe to the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia. If the war on terrorism is the principal objective, then U.S. foreign policy must give priority to where the action is. This is not to suggest the United States will abandon or ignore Northeast Asia; only that the particular concerns of order in this challenging region will compete for U.S. attention with the more pressing concerns of the war on terror. This shift is especially apparent in the allocation of U.S. military assets. The 1990s strategy of preserving preponderance created incentives to station a particular level of forces in Europe and Northeast Asia, in order to reassure other major powers and to provide a tangible signal of the U.S. commitment to regional stability. The war on terror has created a different incentive, for more flexible and mobile military assets. The movement of U.S. forces away from the South Korean central front, no matter how U.S. officials attempt to spin it, reflects this re-orientation of priorities. In the words of the U.S. Defense Department, both the United States and its allies must be prepared for “everything to move everywhere” in terms of U.S. military forces (Cossa 2003b). They must also face the simple fact that U.S. military resources, notwithstanding its position of global dominance, are not infinite. Forces tied up for the long haul in Iraq and Afghanistan necessarily imply that less will be available for the possibility of stabilizing regional conflict in Northeast Asia. Second, as a result of its new priorities, the United States may not be prepared to stabilize regional conflicts as consistently and predictably as it did during the 1990s. In the first post-Cold War decade the U.S. imposed upon itself the task of primary regional stabilizer. Its approach was fairly cautious. U.S. officials sought less to resolve regional crises, and instead tried to manage them so as to avoid immediate military conflict in the hope that over time a resolution might present itself. In other words, the United States favored the status quo and believed time was on its side. In 1994, the Clinton administration bought off a belligerent North Korea with the promise of economic concessions. In 1996, it resorted to

34 Michael Mastanduno calculated ambiguity to discourage provocative Chinese acts against Taiwan. In 1998, President Clinton relied on personal diplomacy to coax India and Pakistan from the brink of war. Whether the United States will take a similar approach to regional crises in the years ahead is questionable. The Korean situation is instructive. North Korea is a consistent practitioner of coercive diplomacy. It drives its bargaining partners to the brink, both because it does not wish to appear weak and because it believes it can extract concessions that it desperately needs, especially in the economic realm. The U.S. approach during the 1990s was essentially to placate North Korea, on the assumption that war avoidance was a prudent outcome and that time was not working in favor of the North Korean regime. As a consequence of September 11, there is likely to be greater variability and less predictability in the U.S. response to regional crises. On the one hand, the United States might be tempted to seize the initiative and, as in Iraq, try to solve intractable problems once and for all. The United States itself is more risk prone, opening the possibility that neither the United States nor North Korea will back down in deference to the other. U.S. officials are also less likely to believe that time is on their side. In their view, the marriage of rogue states and WMD poses an urgent security problem that must be solved sooner rather than later. To play for time in the hope that the situation will resolve itself is a luxury that U.S. policy makers enjoyed during the 1990s, but now might no longer believe they can afford. This thinking may lead, as in the case of Iraq, to risky military strategies of preemption or prevention. On the other hand, the United States might migrate to the other extreme and “buckpass” the management of regional conflicts. Facing more pressing problems elsewhere, U.S. officials might defer to other players in the region rather than serve as primary stabilizer themselves. China, as many observers noted, took the diplomatic initiative in 2003 in negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program. China clearly has its own reasons to engage, but it may also be filling the vacuum left by a United States that is more preoccupied elsewhere. The United States, for its part, may be more willing now than in the past to defer its leadership role to China on the assumption that the major powers are “on the same side” and share common interests. This is not to suggest that China’s contribution is necessarily unhelpful; only that the role of the United States in regional conflicts is likely to be less consistent and predictable. Diplomatic deference to China also raises questions in Asian capitals regarding the durability of the U.S. regional commitment. Third, the U.S. response to September 11 will complicate its relations with other major players in the region. During the 1990s, U.S. officials believed other states in the region, supporters as well as potential challengers, needed to be reassured that U.S. intentions were benign and that benefits would flow from participation in a U.S.-centered order (Mastan-

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 35 duno 1997). September 11, however, has created a dual problem – it has created incentives for U.S. officials to take for granted that other powers will cooperate with the United States, at precisely the moment that U.S. behavior has become less reassuring and more alarming in the international system. It would be a mistake for the United States to take for granted cooperation among the major powers, much less to assume a new great power concert is falling into place. The war on global terror has the potential to divide as well as to unite major powers. This was evident in the 2003 Iraq war, which found the United States at odds, in varying degrees, with Russia, China, France, and Germany. It is not difficult to imagine a similar outcome over how to deal with North Korea, or with Iran, depending on the course the United States feels it must take to protect its national security. The fact that the current administration is prone to view such conflicts in “for us or against us” terms makes it more difficult to finesse or paper over major power disagreements. The U.S. dispute with France and Germany over Iraq in 2003 was far more intense than most prior conflicts, with the discontent reaching deeply into the domestic politics of each side (Garton Ash 2005). The vigor with which the United States is pursuing its homeland security objective will continue to raise anxiety, in the capitals of other major powers, about the desirability of a world dominated by one unrestrained superpower. It is ironic that the United States perceives a condominium of interests at precisely the time that other states in the international system see the United States as more threatening. In a world of sovereign states, dominant powers always create anxiety for other states, even if the intentions of the dominant state appear benign. However one characterized the United States prior to September 11, it seems clear that after that event the United States appears less benign. By publicly touting its primacy, acting unilaterally, and undertaking ambitious military operations, the United States has taken on a more nationalist and “imperial” demeanor, whether intentional or not (Lieven 2004). Prior to September 11, smaller powers in East Asia could reasonably believe that the United States was a dominant power without revisionist ambitions. After September 11, they cannot be so sure. The United States attacked and made clear its plan to occupy Iraq. It placed North Korea and Iran in the same category as Iraq. It invaded Afghanistan and overthrew its regime on the presumption that terrorists and states that harbor them are essentially the same. States in the region have little choice but to question the ambitions and next steps of what has abruptly appeared to be a dominant state without restraints. Taken together, these changes in U.S. priorities and behavior must be viewed in the context of developments elsewhere in East Asia. The region is not standing still while the United States reorders its priorities and sorts out its strategies. Consider first the position of China and U.S.–Chinese relations. September 11 delayed, but did not resolve, the potential Chinese

36 Michael Mastanduno challenge to U.S. hegemony in Asia. The China challenge may have moved to the “back burner” of U.S. foreign policy, but it has not disappeared. It is instructive to recall that prior to September 11, the new Bush administration contemplated moving away from a strategy of engagement and taking a harder line in relations with China. Eventually, the question of how to deal with China will return to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy (Brzezinski and Mearsheimer 2005). China, for its part, may have some degree of common interests with the United States, but it must also confront the question of whether and how to manage a United States that has grown increasingly powerful, assertive, and confident – as China grows more powerful and confident itself. The war on terrorism has already brought a U.S. military presence into close proximity with what China considers its immediate neighborhood – Central Asia and the south Pacific. The potential for conflict is driven by the fact that the two sides have differing conceptions of their fundamental relationship. For the United States, China ideally will evolve as an important “spoke” to the U.S. “hub.” China, that is, should be a supportive partner in a U.S.-centered world order. China, however, is unlikely to be content as a spoke in another power’s wheel. China refused, during the early Cold War, to be a junior partner in the Communist order constructed by the Soviet Union. Later in the Cold War, it resisted being a “card” to be played by the United States in its efforts to balance Soviet power after the Vietnam War. As China progresses economically and militarily, and sees itself more as a great power than as a developing nation, it is all the more unlikely to be content in a subordinate role in a part of the world in which historically it has been the dominant political and cultural actor (Kang 2003a; Shambaugh 2004–5). The potential for conflict is similarly apparent in U.S. relations with South Korea. South Korea has become more advanced economically, more democratic, and more confident diplomatically. These are developments welcomed by the United States, but which nonetheless complicate the relationship. As the United States experienced with Turkey during the Iraq war, as allies become more democratic they also become more assertive of their own interests, even when those interests conflict with those of their great power ally. South Korea has become more assertive at precisely the time that its relationship with the United States has become less predictable. Put another way, for South Korea the twin alliance fears of entrapment and abandonment are on the table simultaneously. A more assertive United States might conclude its interests regarding North Korea are best served by coercive disarmament or regime change. This alarms South Korea, which fears the consequences of any North Korean collapse and prefers a longer-term strategy of economic engagement and gradual transformation. Yet, South Korea may also be alarmed by U.S. troop redeployments after

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 37 decades of a predictable U.S. presence. To the United States, troop redeployment makes good sense in terms of global strategy and does not necessarily imply a diminution of the U.S. commitment to South Korea. To South Korea, the move may reinforce the concern that for better or worse South Korea must begin to chart a foreign policy course that is more independent of the United States. The potential for conflict is least likely in U.S.–Japan relations, but still exists, and with a very different dynamic. The temptation for the United States, after September 11, is to take its durable and loyal ally in the Pacific for granted. Japan and the United States, after all, are on the same side in the war on terrorism. Japan, however, will likely expect not only some baseline level of U.S. attention, but an even deeper U.S. commitment to the bilateral relationship. The greater the uncertainty in the region, and the more preoccupied the United States outside the region, the more Japan will require tangible evidence that its relationship with the United States is indeed a special one. The risk and problem to be managed is not clash and divorce, but drift and disappointment. By 2004, Japan’s intention to transform itself into more than merely a great economic power became clear. It is increasing its military capabilities and seeking a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (Lind 2004). These changes are consistent with a more expansive and ambitious U.S.–Japan bilateral alliance. But they also provide Japan with options it did not have during the Cold War and immediately thereafter, in the event the United States turns its attention elsewhere.

The economic dimension of hegemony and order By 1990, Japan appeared to pose a formidable trade and technological challenge to the United States. U.S. officials, freed from the security burdens of the U.S.–Soviet rivalry, turned their attention to the protection of national economic interest and to neomercantilist economic competition. Both the first Bush and Clinton administrations practiced what came to be called aggressive unilateralism in an effort to pry open Japanese and other Asian markets to U.S. exports of goods, services, and capital. This effort was popular with business interests at home yet created diplomatic friction in U.S. relations with Asian trade partners. By the middle of the 1990s, U.S. foreign economic policy shifted to reinforce the U.S. security strategy of preserving a U.S.-centered international order by reassuring and integrating other major powers. Following the Korean crisis of 1994 and the Taiwan Straits crisis shortly thereafter, U.S. officials viewed the security environment in East Asia as increasingly problematic. The 1996 Clinton–Hashimoto summit signaled a shift in U.S. priorities from bilateral economic conflicts to bilateral security cooperation. The continued stagnation of the Japanese economy reinforced this U.S. shift, and led U.S. officials to the view that it was not Japan’s

38 Michael Mastanduno economic strength, but its economic weakness, that posed a greater danger to U.S. security. From the perspective of the United States the solution was then and still is to be found in the deregulation and liberalization of the Japanese domestic economy. As financial crisis spread across East Asia during the latter part of the 1990s, this same message was conveyed by the United States, working in tandem with the IMF, to Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, and Indonesia. China managed to avoid the Asian crisis, but to U.S. officials nevertheless required a similar prescription. The U.S. strategy of engagement promised China the economic benefits of integration into the capitalist world economy, on the condition that China continue to undertake meaningful economic reform, including the liberalization of trade and financial markets, the privatization of the state sector, and the transformation of the troubled Chinese banking sector. In short, the economic component of U.S. hegemonic strategy calls for East Asian states to liberalize foreign economic policies and transform domestic institutions to make them more similar to, and more compatible with, U.S. policies and institutions. The overall objective is the deepening of regional and global economic interdependence. Deeper interdependence, in turn, generates greater prosperity and, of direct relevance in the context of U.S. relations with China, creates incentives for more accommodating foreign policies. For U.S. officials, all good things go together. Economic liberalization, interdependence, prosperity, domestic stability, and cooperative foreign policies prove mutually reinforcing. This virtuous cycle serves U.S. economic interests, since the large and dynamic U.S. economy benefits most from the free movement of goods, services, capital, people, and ideas. The open world economy is also essential to U.S. security strategy. U.S. officials believe that interdependence reinforces peace, and that states which share U.S. economic institutions and values are likely to share U.S. security values and priorities as well. The 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly recognizes this economic dimension of U.S. hegemony and security. It asserts that there is now a “single sustainable model for national success,” and that model, not surprisingly, is the American model of individual liberty and free enterprise (USNSC 2002, iv). National economic success elsewhere does not pose a threat to the United States – the United States is too powerful to be threatened by advanced capitalist states, and advanced capitalist states will share U.S. security values in any event. The National Security Strategy asserts that strong economic growth in Europe and Japan is vital to U.S. national security interests. It goes on to say that “we want our allies to have strong economies for their own sake, for the sake of the global economy, and for the sake of global security.” Later, it states that “we welcome the emergence of a strong, peaceful and prosperous China” (USNSC 2002, 18, 27). The United States has positioned itself as the key player in this virtuous

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 39 cycle of liberalization, interdependence, and peace. It has led by example, and its large open market has served as an engine of global economic growth. This is especially important to export-oriented Asian economies, and all the more so to the newest Asian export tiger, China. The strength of the U.S. economy has attracted large flows of foreign capital and has encouraged others to hold U.S. dollar assets in reserve. These capital account inflows, in turn, have helped to finance U.S. current account deficits. It is not surprising that U.S. officials pushed the idea of the virtuous cycle enthusiastically during the 1990s. The U.S. economy grew rapidly in this first post-Cold War decade, and the United States was arguably among the greatest beneficiaries of globalization. The challenge for the United States will be to maintain the commitment to liberalization – at home and abroad – during a likely era of slower growth. The second decade after the Cold War poses greater challenges, both for U.S. economic strategy and for the ability of economic strategy to reinforce U.S. security strategy. A set of related problems lies ahead. First, and although the U.S. economy often defies expectation, it is reasonable to expect the U.S. economy to grow more slowly in the years ahead. The 1990s were truly extraordinary, so much so that some came to believe the United States economy had conquered the traditional business cycle. It did not, and the decade ended with the bursting of the bubble in technology spending and stock values. U.S. firms, like their Japanese counterparts a decade earlier, had over-invested in boom times. The United States may not be destined to face a decade of Japanese-style stagnation and deflation, but its economy will require time to work through the excesses of the 1990s. Not surprisingly, the U.S. economy experienced recession in 2001–2. What was surprising was how mild the recession turned out to be, in large part due to significant monetary and fiscal stimuli. But no government can stimulate indefinitely. The combination of interest rate and tax cuts – along with large increases in defense spending prompted by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – have led the United States to record fiscal and external deficits. The likely result of the eventual effort to bring these deficits under control will be slower growth (Mann 2002). Slower growth complicates U.S. international economic strategy in two ways. It makes it more difficult politically for the United States to serve as the open market of last resort. A considerable segment of the U.S. public was skeptical of free trade even during the boom years of the 1990s. The Clinton administration was consistently denied “fast track” trade promotion authority needed to advance free trade agreements. Political pressure against liberalization is likely to intensify if U.S. growth slows, and likely will be directed at U.S. trade partners in East Asia who have run up large bilateral deficits with the United States. China, for both geopolitical and economic reasons, is the obvious target. The more U.S. officials succumb to the political pressure to confront China on the economic side, the more

40 Michael Mastanduno difficult it will be to manage a cooperative partnership with China on the security side. A related consequence of slower growth is a decline in the attractiveness of dollar-denominated investment assets. By 2003, the dollar had begun a sharp decline against major currencies. A depreciating dollar means foreigners will be less likely to continue to finance U.S. current account and budget deficits, and their governments may become less inclined to hold the dollar as a reserve asset. Declining foreign investment could force the U.S. officials to raise interest rates more rapidly than anticipated, thereby slowing growth further. The more extreme and hopefully less plausible scenario – given that many currencies are tied to the dollar – is a cycle of competitive currency depreciation contributing to global deflation. The second problem arises from the fact that trilateralism is no longer a viable strategy for global economic leadership. Trilateralism emerged during the 1970s as it became apparent that the United States could no longer serve as the sole engine of global economic growth (Putnam and Bayne 1988). The solution was a collective leadership involving policy coordination among the United States, Europe, and Japan. Three engines of growth were better than one. During the 1990s a different pattern emerged. The U.S. economy grew rapidly, but European economies grew more slowly, and Japan’s economy stagnated. Structural and demographic realities in those economies suggest that European and Japanese officials will find it even harder than American officials to generate sustained economic growth in the years ahead. The problem was striking during the Asian financial crisis, as the United States more so than neighboring Japan served as the source of regional recovery. Trilateralism withered away, and the world economy in general and the Asian region in particular became overly dependent on the United States as an engine of economic growth. The rise of China will help to alleviate this problem – but will create a different one for the United States. China has grown rapidly, faster than any other economy since the 1990s. If China as expected shifts gradually from an over-reliance on export-led growth to a greater reliance on domestic demand, it will begin to serve as a regional and perhaps even global engine of growth, alongside the United States. This will be good for the world economy in that two engines of growth are better than one. But it will also complicate further U.S. security strategy. China’s economic influence will also translate into greater political influence, particularly in the East Asian region. A more economically powerful China will be a politically more assertive China, and unless U.S. and Chinese regional interests turn out to be remarkably consistent, a more assertive China will mean greater potential for conflict with a United States determined to play the dominant role in the East Asian region while it simultaneously undertakes the global war on terrorism (Goh 2005).

Hegemonic order, September 11, and Bush 41

Conclusion Some fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the striking feature of contemporary world politics continues to be the disproportionate power position of the United States. U.S. officials consider stability in East Asia to be of vital importance, and they have adopted a hegemonic strategy in an attempt to maintain order and serve U.S. economic and security interests. The hegemonic strategy is likely to persist, but U.S. officials are likely to find the management and completion of hegemony more problematic in the years ahead. U.S. power, particularly military, will remain unchallenged. But changes in U.S. foreign policy after September 11, developments in the world economy, and developments in East Asia suggest that the exercise of U.S. power and U.S. relations with states in this allimportant region of the world will become increasingly complicated and will demand more creative diplomatic efforts.

Note 1 An earlier version of this chapter originally appeared in International Relations of the Asia Pacific. We gratefully acknowledge the permission of the editors and Oxford University Press to reproduce it here.

3

US economic relations with East Asia From hegemony to complex interdependence?1 John Ravenhill As Washington prepared to begin a new administration, it is hard not to notice the legacy of America’s shrinking influence in Asia over the last four years. (Perlez 2004)

In the period immediately following the re-election of the George W. Bush administration when this chapter was written, the days when an incoming US President had been sighted reading a copy of Japan as Number One seem very far removed indeed.2 For some observers, the economic relationship between the United States and East Asia was turned on its head in the twelve years after the inauguration of the first Clinton administration. US economic weakness was transformed into strength as the productivity gains achieved in the US economy from the early 1990s onwards re-established the US lead over East Asian economies. Not only has Japan’s “lost decade” stretched into fifteen years, ensuring that the Japanese model is now widely perceived as an “anti-model”, but the selfconfidence of other Asian governments was severely shaken by the financial crises of 1997–98. Western firms were able to snap up assets in the crisis economies at fire-sale prices. Meanwhile, the intrusive policy conditionality that accompanied IMF rescue packages attempted to re-cast the crisis economies in the Anglo-American mould. Business as usual has been restored, with a resurgent US able to impose its economic agenda on its recalcitrant East Asian economic partners. The unilateralism of the Bush administration has encouraged such stylized images of the relationship between the United States and East Asia in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This chapter suggests, however, that such interpretations are inaccurate in their characterizations of US relative strength and of the evolving economic relationship between the US and East Asia. The relationship between the US and East Asia is one of continued US relative economic decline, and the economic policies of the US can be interpreted as those of a hegemon in decline. On the other hand, the literature since the financial crisis that fixated on the US imposi-

US economic relations with East Asia 43 tion of policies on vulnerable Asian governments substantially underestimates both the force of ideas (the soft side of hegemonic power) and the desire of some agencies within Asian governments to adopt the pro-liberalization agenda promoted by Washington.

Understanding the behaviour of hegemonic powers The unilateralism of the Bush administration has provoked an outpouring of books and articles on the subject of American hegemony and empire, surveyed in Mark Beeson’s introduction to this volume. Relatively few of these works examine the international economic behaviour of the US, however – perhaps hardly surprisingly given the prominence and significance of the war on terror post-September 11. And even fewer attempt to explain the bases for US unilateralism in international economic relations. The role of hegemony in international economic relations has received relatively little attention since the early 1990s. A principal reason is that hegemonic behaviour had previously been examined primarily in relationship to the stability of international economic regimes – the ‘theory of hegemonic stability’ as it was styled – and little support was found in history or in theory for this argument. Although the relationship between hegemony and the openness of international economic regimes was intuitively plausible, resting as it did, at least in Kindleberger’s (1973) original formulation, on one of the more sophisticated economic theories of political behaviour, a number of studies showed that the historical record provided little support for the idea that hegemonic states necessarily followed liberal policies. Moreover, the relative decline of the US by the 1980s had not led to the predicted instability in most major economic regimes. Approaches grounded in alternative theories suggested why states might succeed in cooperating to sustain stable regimes even in the absence of a hegemon.3 With an apparent lack of correlation between declining hegemony and growth in instability, interest in the behaviour of hegemonic powers waned. The link between hegemonic decline and the behaviour of the leading power was largely overlooked. The theory of hegemonic stability had come in two variants, which had suggested different motivations for the hegemon’s behaviour (Webb and Krasner 1989). Besides Kindleberger’s collective goods-based approach, Gilpin (1975) and Krasner (1976) presented the argument in a form that, while building on collective goods arguments, emphasized that the capacity and will of a hegemon to serve as the lender and market of last resort rested ultimately on security considerations. With the asymmetric distribution of power that accompanies hegemony, the dominant state can afford to act in the interests of the system as a whole without jeopardizing its own security; in turn, its desire to construct or maintain its own empire, formal or informal, provides it with the motivation to do so. In the popular image of hegemonic stability, based on a (selective)

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reading of the late nineteenth-century period of British hegemony and that of the US in the period following the Second World War, the assumption was that the behaviour of the hegemon would be benign, giving rise to a system in which, in Olsen’s words, “the small exploit the large”. As Ruggie (1982) noted, however, the assumption that a hegemonic power would act in the interests of the system as a whole was based on a very limited universe of Anglo-American dominance: had Nazi Germany won the Second World War, the organizing principles of international economic regimes would likely have been very different. The foreign economic policies of Nazi Germany in the inter-war period were intended to maximize the gains of the hegemon at the expense of smaller states in the system (Hirschman 1945). The logic that hegemonic powers have an incentive to pursue malevolent policies rests on an alternative theoretical approach to that presented by collective goods-based theories. Optimum tariff theory captures this logic, one of the few instances in classical and neo-classical economic theory where the imposition of tariffs is demonstrated to increase the welfare of a state that pursues protectionist policies. The theory, in its modern incarnation associated with Nicolas Kaldor but one that has its origins in the work of John Stuart Mill and Robert Torrens, illustrates how a dominant power by taxing its imports can drive down the prices received by its trading partners in world markets: similarly, by taxing its exports, it lowers the quantity supplied to world markets and thereby raises their prices. The overall effect is to improve the dominant economy’s terms of trade at the expense of other states in the system (assuming that other states are unable to retaliate effectively against the dominant economy).4 Further empirical and theoretical work suggested that support by hegemonic powers of an open and/or liberal global economy might be a relatively unusual occurrence. Both Krasner and Gilpin had noted that a hegemonic power might structure the system to work primarily in its own interest, a realist argument that was consistent with most variants of theories of dependency and imperialism. Gilpin (1981) in particular explores how a hegemon might tax other powers to pay for the collective goods provided under its auspices. In the most theoretically sophisticated study of the behaviour of hegemonic powers, one consistent with the predictions of the realist approach, Pahre (1999) suggests that the normal behaviour of a hegemonic power will be malevolent: the exception will be when its behaviour is shaped primarily by security considerations, particularly the presence of significant rivals in the system. Hence, for instance, the economic behaviour of the US in the immediate post-Second World War period was predatory: it was only when security considerations became predominant with the articulation of the Truman doctrine that the US pursued policies supportive of a liberal international system. Both variants of the theory of hegemonic stability suggest reasons why a dominant state might retreat from foreign economic policies that sustain

US economic relations with East Asia 45 an open economic system. The collective goods approach argues that as a dominant state’s share of the global economy declines so it will have less incentive (and less capacity) to pursue systemically benign policies. The realist variant of the approach suggests a change in behaviour will occur if the security imperative faced by the dominant state changes. While neither version of the theory of hegemonic stability proved correct in its predictions of the relationship between the relative decline of a dominant economy and the openness of international economic regimes, both have arguably been more successful in their predictions of the relationship between relative decline and the behaviour of the dominant state.

US hegemonic decline and East Asia The economic relationship between the United States and East Asia until the late 1960s appears to be a perfect fit with the predictions of the theory of hegemonic stability. Not only did the US provide massive amounts of aid in the first two post-war decades to support the economies of the region, especially those of South Korea and Taiwan, but the US also kept its market open to provide an outlet for the rapidly growing manufactured exports first of Japan and then the newly industrializing economies. Primarily for security reasons, US administrations were willing to tolerate East Asian states’ pursuit of mercantilist policies that promoted exports while closing off their markets to imports, and restricted foreign direct investment.5 As the record of US negotiations with Taiwan demonstrates, US administrations were frequently divided in their attitudes to the domestic and foreign economic policies of the Northeast Asian states: despite the reservations of the economic departments (USAID and Commerce), however, security considerations always won the debate. To be sure, exceptions to the benign character of US hegemony were always present – the most notable being the restrictions on exports of textiles imposed first on Japan through the Short Term Cotton Arrangement in 1961. But until the 1970s such limits on US benevolence were rare. The relative decline of the US vis-à-vis other industrialized economies produced a first major backlash in 1971 after a period in which the US had experienced severe current-account problems resulting from the simultaneous pursuit of expansionary domestic policies (Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme) and foreign policies (most notably the Vietnam War) that drained foreign reserves. These together imposed an intolerable strain on the role of the dollar as the anchor currency in the Bretton Woods gold-exchange standard and led to the Nixon administration’s unilateral breaking of the link between the dollar and gold, and to its levying of a 10 per cent import surcharge. Although the Europeans arguably had been the principal villains in weakening the international position of the dollar in the 1960s, the 1971 devaluation of the dollar and import surcharge were aimed squarely at Japan. The Nixon administration had been increasingly

46 John Ravenhill frustrated by the Japanese government’s unwillingness to restrict textile exports. Nixon himself commented that the August 1971 economic shock was designed to “stick it to Japan”. The basis for the “national emergency” that Nixon proclaimed was the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act: Nixon instructed White House representatives to publicize the use of the Act “only for textiles – i.e., Japs” (quoted in Schaller 1996). And when currencies were re-aligned at the Smithsonian Agreement in December 1971, the Japanese yen was re-valued more than any other currency (16.9 per cent compared with 13.5 per cent for the Deutsche Mark and 8.5 per cent for the franc). The administration’s hostility towards Japan was demonstrated again with its June 1973 imposition of an embargo on exports of soy beans, a move intended to lower prices for domestic consumers and an excellent example of the pursuit by a dominant supplier of an optimal tariff policy. The Nixon shocks marked the beginning of an era of less benign US economic unilateralism towards East Asian countries. Although security considerations would continue to play a role in economic relations with East Asian countries, at least until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, they now competed not always successfully with domestic economic concerns. Successive administrations would pursue US economic interests in an increasingly aggressive manner. From the early 1970s through to the present day, US hegemonic decline has been associated with action in the trade field to restrict the access of East Asian products regarded as sensitive, and to force open East Asian markets. In the financial regime the emphasis has been on inducing revaluations of East Asian currencies, and since the late 1980s on liberalizing access for US financial service exports to East Asian economies. For East Asian states, the US since 1945 has been the market of first as well as of last resort. While the literature on hegemonic stability sees provision of a market for the surplus production of other states in the system as a key attribute of a benevolent hegemon, the running of large and persistent trade deficits while arguably advantageous to domestic consumers is hardly a sign of relative strength. At some point in the 1960s (early 1970s?) the US provision of an outlet for East Asian exports moved from being a sign of relative strength to one of relative weakness. After the battles with Japan over textiles exports, culminating in the negotiation of the Multi Fibre Arrangement in 1974, attention turned to the burgeoning manufactured exports of the Northeast Asian NICs and to other sources of trade friction with Japan, most notably the automobile industry (where, by 1985, Japanese exports had captured 20 per cent of the US market, accounting for close to 60 per cent of vehicle output in Japan). With Japan in particular, it was not just the surge in exports that caused economic and political problems but also the structure of the bilateral trade relationship. Japan’s peculiar trade composition (its low levels of intra-industry trade) essentially gave its trade relations with the US a nineteenth-century look –

US economic relations with East Asia 47 the exchange of manufactures for raw materials, where the US was confined to the role of hewer of wood – and left the Japanese government vulnerable to US pressure not least because the trade structure gave it few domestic allies in trade politics in the US.6 Voluntary export restraints (VERs) were the preferred instrument for dealing with sectoral trade problems with East Asia in the early 1980s. It soon became apparent, however, that these instruments failed in their objectives in the sectors concerned (either because they were easily circumvented and/or because they had the unintended consequence of creating rents for the exporting economies and providing strong incentives for product upgrading – see Yoffie 1983). In any event, they did not address the problem of the overall trade deficits with East Asian economies, which captured the attention of Congress and increasingly that of the public, their failure to do so hardly surprising because, as all observers with some knowledge of high-school economics agreed, the macroeconomic imbalances in the US economy were primarily responsible for determining the magnitude of these deficits. The ineffectiveness of VERs prompted the Reagan administration to attempt to address the deficits with East Asian countries through other instruments: currency realignment, financial market liberalization, and measures to attempt to force East Asian partners to increase their imports from the United States. Currency realignment was effected through the 1985 Plaza Accord: following concerted intervention by the G7, the yen appreciated by 100 per cent, rising from 260 to the dollar in 1985 to 130 in 1987. US pressure on Seoul and Taipei produced appreciations of their currencies of around 45 per cent in the years after the Accord. Despite the appreciations, the US Treasury in its “Report to the Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policy”, which had been required by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, concluded that Korea and Taiwan continued to “manipulate” their exchange rates. The Treasury began negotiations with the Korean government in an attempt to promote financial market liberalization, using the agreement on access for US insurance companies as a precedent. Meanwhile, the Primary Dealers Act of 1988 (the Schumer Amendment to the Omnibus Trade Bill, aimed mainly at Japan) had required action to be taken to persuade East Asian governments to provide improved access for U.S. financial institutions through adoption of a policy of “reciprocal national treatment” (Frankel 1993). In the trade sphere, the emphasis on restricting East Asian exports was switched to one of attempting to open up East Asian markets to US exports. With Japan, this switch began in the mid-1980s with the MarketOriented Sector Selective (MOSS) talks and reached agreements that focused on Japanese trade barriers in five areas: telecommunications, electronics, pharmaceuticals/medical equipment, forestry products and auto

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parts. The two parties also negotiated agreements outside the MOSS process on a range of other products and sectors, including construction services, semiconductors and various agricultural products.7 Progress remained far slower than Congress desired, however, and in 1988 it passed section 1302 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, which amended Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, to create “Super 301”. This mandated the US Trade Representative to identify priority countries and priority trade barriers, and to estimate the amount by which US exports would increase if the barriers were removed. An initial response to the requirements of Super 301 was the Structural Impediments Initiative (SII), launched in July 1989, in which the US identified six Japanese structural barriers to US exports: the distribution system, landuse policies, the savings rate, business conglomerates (keiretsu), other exclusionary business practices and pricing policies. Although the depreciation of the Japanese yen initially reduced the US bilateral trade deficit from its peak in 1987, by the early 1990s the trade gap was again widening rapidly. The first Clinton administration, influenced by revisionist interpretations of the relations between government and private sector in Japan, and under pressure from an increasingly activist Congress, moved towards a results-oriented trade policy, a model for which was the 1986 Semiconductor Trade Agreement, with its notorious “secret” side letter that specified that US companies should gain at least a 20 per cent share of the Japanese market by the end of 1992. With the end of the Cold War, security arguments held little sway in the determination of foreign economic policies, the more internationalist perspectives of the State Department being outweighed by the economic departments.8 This brief overview of US foreign economic policies towards East Asia underlines the continuities in US unilateralism towards East Asia from the end of the 1960s to the present day. Contrary to the impression given by some commentators, US pressure on East Asian countries to liberalize their financial markets did not begin with the financial crises but had been ongoing since the second half of the 1980s (for further details, for instance, of pressure on South Korea to open up its market to US financial service providers over this period see Wade 2001). And unilateralism in the trade field – taking the forms consecutively of export restraints, pressures for market liberalization and market-sharing arrangements – had been ongoing since the late 1960s. All these actions occurred within a context of relative US decline and a changing international context that gave East Asian states less scope for playing the “security card”. For some observers, the period from the mid-1990s has been an era of US hegemonic resurgence. In turn, this US renaissance enabled the second Clinton administration and the first of the George W. Bush administrations to go further than their predecessors in acting unilaterally to impose preferred policy outcomes on East Asian countries. Despite the continuity in US unilateralism at an abstract level, significant changes have occurred

US economic relations with East Asia 49 in the capacity of the US to act unilaterally against East Asian governments. Notwithstanding the current emphasis in international relations literature on the “unipolar moment” and US material preponderance, I will suggest both that US hegemonic decline vis-à-vis East Asia, as measured by any of the conventional indicators that have been used in the study of that subject, has continued, and that the US is much less well placed today to act unilaterally on economic matters in its relations with East Asia than it was two decades ago. The primary factor in this change is the evolution of a relationship that is more equal than in the past, one that involves a greater number and variety of domestic actors especially within the US, and one that occurs within a significantly changed institutional context.

Declining US hegemony? The literature on hegemonic stability suggests a variety of indicators to determine the extent to which a country enjoys hegemonic status within the system. Here I draw primarily on the article by Webb and Krasner (1989), which provides the most comprehensive assessment of various indicators of US relative decline. Starting with the most fundamental measure, the ratio of US GDP to that of other countries, Figure 3.1 measures the combined ratio of East Asian GDP to that of the US, measured in purchasing power parity terms.9 Although a small downturn in the ratio followed the financial crises beginning in 1997, this was but a very small blip on a consistently upward trend since the mid-1970s despite the stagnation in Japan and the post-financial crisis problems in Indonesia. By 1993, the aggregate GDP of East Asia had surpassed that of the US. Measured in purchasing parity

120 110

Percentage

100 90 80 70 60 50

Figure 3.1 East Asian GDP as share of US GDP (PPP).

20 01

19 75 19 77 19 79 19 81 19 83 19 85 19 87 19 89 19 91 19 93 19 95 19 97 19 99

40

50 John Ravenhill terms, the recovery from the financial crises was quick – with the previous peak in the ratio in 1997 being equalled in 2000. The ratio has continued its upward trend in the last three years: East Asian GDP now exceeds that of the United States by more than 20 per cent. Turning to international trade, we see an even more dramatic reversal of roles in the global economy in the last forty years. Consistent with arguments about the myth of US hegemonic decline (Russett 1985; Strange 1987), the US share in global trade, while fluctuating, has actually not declined since 1980 (Figure 3.2). Relative to East Asia, however, the US share has dropped substantially. Whereas in 1980, East Asian and US shares were neck and neck at around 13 per cent of total world trade, by 1995, the East Asian share was approaching double that of the United States. East Asia’s share in global trade fell in the aftermath of the financial crisis but by 2003 had recovered to be only one percentage point below its mid-1990s peak. Data on overall trade of course include imports as well as exports and may therefore mask the relative decline of a country’s economic competitiveness. A focus solely on exports may therefore be more relevant in examining relative economic strength. The marked increase in the significance of East Asia as a global workshop is shown clearly in data on merchandise exports (Figure 3.3). In the mid-1960s these were only one half of the value of those of the United States. By 1975, East Asia had already caught up with that of the United States. By the time of the financial crisis, East Asian exports were more than double those of the US. Because these data are converted at current exchange rates, they suggest that it has taken longer for East Asian merchandise exports to recover from the crisis than did overall GDP. But even using current exchange rates, by 2003 the ratio

24 22

Percentage

20 18 16 14 12

19 8 19 0 8 19 1 8 19 2 8 19 3 8 19 4 8 19 5 8 19 6 8 19 7 8 19 8 8 19 9 9 19 0 9 19 1 9 19 2 9 19 3 9 19 4 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 0 20 2 03

10

East Asia

United States

Figure 3.2 East Asian and US share of global trade (%).

US economic relations with East Asia 51 230 210

Percentage

190 170 150 130 110 90 70

19 60 19 63 19 66 19 69 19 72 19 75 19 78 19 81 19 84 19 87 19 90 19 93 19 96 19 99 20 02

50

Figure 3.3 Ratio of East Asian to US merchandise exports (%).

had resumed its upward trend with East Asian merchandise exports currently substantially more than double those of the US. In the monetary regime, an equally dramatic increase in the ratio of East Asian assets to those of the US has occurred (Figure 3.4). In 1950, East Asian economies combined had foreign-exchange reserves (excluding gold) roughly equal to those of the United States. These increased substantially in the early 1970s, rising to close to eight times the US level. In the first half of the 1980s, they fell back to around three times the US level. In the 1990s, however, and especially since the financial crises – East Asian governments having learnt the lesson that large domestic reserves of foreign exchange can help stave off speculative attacks – East Asian

2,500

Percentage

2,000 1,500 1,000 500

19 50 19 53 19 56 19 59 19 62 19 65 19 68 19 71 19 74 19 77 19 80 19 83 19 86 19 89 19 92 19 95 19 98 20 01

0

Figure 3.4 Ratio of East Asian to US foreign-exchange reserves (%).

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John Ravenhill

reserves have expanded rapidly, fuelled in large part by outflows of US dollars. Today, East Asian holdings of foreign reserves are more than twenty times those of the United States. The US role as a market for East Asian exports has declined substantially since the peaks of the mid-1980s (Figure 3.5). The trade deficits that the US ran with East Asia in the mid-1980s might not necessarily be seen as an indicator of US strength; on the other hand, the dramatic decline in the US share of total East Asian exports to just over a quarter would be expected to weaken the leverage that Washington could exert over its East Asian trading partners. Of particular note in this context is the substantial increase in intra-regional trade in East Asia. Some might argue that these data do not capture the qualitative gap between the US and East Asian economies – and especially the technological revolution that some would suggest has enabled the US to re-establish its hegemony. One way of attempting to address this issue is by examining data on the country origin of patents lodged in the United States. Figure 3.6 shows the ratio of patents originating in East Asia to those originating from within the United States (the patents are classified by the address of the first named applicant). Again, the data show a very substantial increase in East Asian economic prowess relative to that of the US, and support arguments that the US is facing an increasing technological challenge from East Asia.10 A couple of caveats must be added to this story. First, on a few indicators, the US has significantly outperformed East Asia since the financial crisis. One is gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) (measured at current exchange rates). Whereas the ratio of GFCF in East Asia to that in the United States was more than 150 per cent on the eve of the financial crisis, by 1999 it had fallen precipitously to be less than 100 per cent (Figure 3.7).

50

Percentage

45 40 35 30 25

Figure 3.5 US share of East Asian merchandise exports (%).

20 02

20 00

19 98

19 96

19 94

19 92

19 90

19 88

19 86

19 84

19 82

19 80

20

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 19 65 19 67 19 69 19 71 19 73 19 75 19 77 19 79 19 81 19 83 19 85 19 87 19 89 19 91 19 93 19 95 19 97 19 99 20 01 20 03

Percentage

US economic relations with East Asia 53

Figure 3.6 East Asian to US patents ratio (%).

180 160

Percentage

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 19 60 19 63 19 66 19 69 19 72 19 75 19 78 19 81 19 84 19 87 19 90 19 93 19 96 19 99

0

Figure 3.7 East Asia to US ratio of gross fixed capital formation (%).

Steep declines in capital formation in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand more than offset substantial increases in China at a time when GFCF was increasing in the United States. GFCF includes, however, expenditure by households on buildings: the recent surge in GFCF in the US at least in part is a reflection of the real-estate boom rather than necessarily of more ‘productive’ investment in capital equipment. Second, the stellar aggregate performance of East Asia masks substantial variation across individual countries. Looking at per capita GDP across East Asia, measured in purchasing power parity terms, only three economies – Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore – have come close to matching that of the United States. Korea, Malaysia and Thailand before the financial crisis all made large strides towards closing the gap. Per

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John Ravenhill

capita income in other countries, despite progress in China and Vietnam, barely reaches 10 per cent of the US level. These caveats notwithstanding, the selection of data across various fields presented above provides little support for any notion that US hegemony has been re-established as a consequence of the problems faced by some East Asian economies in the 1990s, and because of the growth spurt in the US in the Clinton and George W. Bush years. Longstanding trends of relative US decline have continued. The US may currently enjoy unchallenged supremacy in the military sphere. But materiel preponderance does not automatically translate into material preponderance. Several objections might be made against this argument. One is that this analysis errs in treating East Asia as an aggregate. Despite the hype that has accompanied the foundation of the ASEAN Plus Three grouping, East Asia is far from unified and, as Ed Lincoln (2004) argues persuasively in a recent book, is unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future. Moreover, recent developments, most notably the increase in bilateral free trade negotiations, ensure that the US encounters East Asian states individually rather than as a bloc (see further discussion below). In most discussions of hegemony, however, especially those that rest on a collective goods approach, the key indicator is the share of the hegemon in the overall assets of the system rather than the resources it controls relative to those controlled by individual rival powers. In considering US hegemonic decline, it is relevant, therefore, to look at East Asia collectively as increasingly the most significant component of the “rest of the world”. A second objection is simply to assert that quantitative indicators do not capture the concept of hegemony adequately. I certainly have sympathy with elements of this argument. Control over resources does not equate with a state’s power within the system, understood in the conventional sense of a capacity to get other actors to change their behaviour. Political scientists have long recognized that control over agendas is also a significant source of power as is the role of ideas in shaping the behaviours of others.11 I will discuss these elements of hegemony in the last part of this chapter, and indeed will argue that other components of hegemonic domination – particularly the role of ideas – are the key to understanding the paradox of why the US has been able to attain its foreign economic policy goals in Asia at a time when it has been experiencing continued relative decline. The point to emphasize here, however, is the triumphalist case that suggests that the US has been able to impose its will on East Asia because of economic renewal in the years since the swearing in of the first Clinton administration finds no support in conventional indicators of hegemonic power. Moreover, the capacity of Washington to mobilize and use power resources has to be placed in a rapidly evolving international context that increasingly constrains the capacity of states to resort to unilateralism.

US economic relations with East Asia 55

Complex interdependence Besides the evidence of continued relative US decline, my argument that Washington is today less able to act effectively in a unilateral manner against East Asia than it was twenty years ago rests on changes in the nature of the relationship between the United States and East Asia, and in the institutional context in which it occurs. Japan and to a lesser extent South Korea and Taiwan were easy targets for punitive US trade sanctions because of the structure of the trade between the parties. The East Asian states’ mercantilist trade policies, with a large part of their trade controlled by domestic trading companies, coupled with governmental restrictions on inward foreign direct investment, meant that relatively few domestic economic interests in the US besides the (notoriously difficult to organize) consumer lobby and some primary product exporters came to the defence of the East Asian states when they became targets of US unilateralism. Today, the structure of trans-Pacific trade has changed dramatically, most notably because of the rise of China but also because of the further extension of production networks across the Pacific. Although the US trade deficit is currently reaching new record levels, again a function of domestic macroeconomic imbalances, the economic relationship with China, the largest single source of the deficit, is significantly different in character to those with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan of twenty years ago. China is a much more open economy than Japan has ever been, its current ratio of trade to GDP being 56 per cent (the figure for Japan is 21 per cent). It is also much more open to foreign direct investment – in 2002, its ratio of FDI to GDP was 35 per cent (up from less than 1 per cent in 1986), in contrast to that of Japan which, even after two decades of the government’s encouragement of inward FDI, was only 2 per cent (data from Hufbauer and Wong 2004, 3). Despite China’s extraordinary growth over the last twenty-five years, its share in world exports is only 6 per cent compared with the Japanese share of 10 per cent at the height of its export boom in 1986, and China’s overall trade surplus with the world is much smaller than that of Japan in the 1980s (ibid.). Again in contrast to the 1980s experience with other Northeast Asian economies, the vast majority of US exports to China are sophisticated manufactures: the largest single category is aircraft, followed by telecommunications and electronics equipment and parts. And, contrary to the previous experience with Japan and South Korea in particular, US firms handle much of the distribution of China’s burgeoning exports: Wal-Mart alone is estimated to account for one-eighth of China’s exports to the United States (Goodman and Pan 2004). China’s growth has also dramatically changed trade patterns in East Asia, with cross-border trade in components of increasing significance (with opportunities, for instance, for US subsidiaries in Southeast Asia to export components to China for assembly).

56 John Ravenhill The consequence of the structure of this relationship is that far more domestic economic interests in the US are prepared to go into bat in defence of China than was true for Japan and the Northeast Asian NICs in the 1980s. Despite rumblings in Congress about China’s trade surplus and the undervalued renminbi, it is likely to be far more difficult for Washington to undertake hostile unilateral policies against China than was the case with the other Northeast economies fifteen years ago. And some bureaucratic learning can also be anticipated to have taken place. As Kunkel (2003) records, by the start of the second Clinton administration, US trade officials had tired of the seemingly endless negotiations with Japan on bilateral trade imbalances and structural impediments that had produced at best very meagre results in the trade sphere but were increasingly perceived to have damaged broader US interests. Moreover, the context in which trade is conducted has changed significantly. To be sure, East Asian states in the past did benefit from their ability to play the security card in resisting US unilateralism. But as noted above, their capacity to do so was on the wane long before the Cold War was officially declared over. Far more significant for contemporary relations has been the legalization of trade relations with the advent of the WTO. As East Asian states have become increasingly adept at using the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanisms, so Washington has found that its capacity to resort to unilateral policies has been significantly constrained. Japan has been particularly impressive in exploiting the new rules of the game: its threat to take the dispute over auto parts to the WTO effectively headed off US recourse to unilateralism. Meanwhile, the verdict of the WTO Dispute Panel in the Fuji film case spelled the end of US efforts to use the world body to promote its agenda for removing structural impediments to its exports (see Pekkanen 2001, 2004). And where Japan has led, one can expect China to follow, even though it will be constrained for some years by the conditions attached to its accession to the WTO. Leaving aside the changing legal context, significant changes have also occurred in the bargaining positions of the key players. The diminished share of East Asian exports that the US consumes reduces its leverage against its East Asian partners. The theory of optimal tariffs assumes that other countries are not able to retaliate against the hegemon should it attempt to use its muscle by restricting their imports. And there is an implicit assumption that the leading economy will behave as a unitary actor, with no significant domestic opposition to the imposition of tariffs. These conditions certainly no longer apply in trans-Pacific trade. Consider, for instance, the Bush administration’s imposition of tariffs on steel imports. This generated opposition from domestic consumers of steel, prompted the Japanese government to retaliate by levying 100 per cent tariffs on imports of US steel and steel products, the first occasion on which Japan had retaliated in kind (BBC New Online 2002), as well as driving all of its major trading partners – including China, Japan and South

US economic relations with East Asia 57 Korea – to the WTO to seek a ruling on the legitimacy of Washington’s action. The monetary field is also characterized by increasingly complex interdependence. One of the strongest criticisms of conventional measures of hegemony asserted that arguments that rest on a comparison of states’ foreign-exchange reserves entirely misunderstand how the contemporary global financial regime works to the advantage of the US. Because the United States is uniquely capable of creating paper assets that are acceptable worldwide, it has no need to maintain large reserves of foreign exchange. The US capacity to unilaterally de-link the dollar from gold and to run balance of trade deficits for forty years is testimony not to US weakness but to US strength (Strange 1987, 569). At one level, it is difficult to argue with these assertions: the US has indeed benefited from what Strange termed “super-exorbitant” privilege in the global financial regime. On the other hand, the holdings of US Tbills by East Asian governments, and their willingness to continue to invest in them, has afforded these governments some leverage over the US. In October 2004, East Asian countries collectively held more than $1.1 trillions of US Treasury Securities.12 The financial press over the last couple of years has frequently discussed the possibility that East Asian governments may re-allocate their reserve assets away from those denominated in dollars to, for example, the euro, and how such a move could substantially weaken the dollar. Occasional statements by East Asian financial officials that they were contemplating such action have in themselves been sufficient to trigger a short-term drop in the dollar’s value. Any such move out of dollars, however, if it triggered a significant drop in the dollar’s value, would also impose significant damage on the East Asian economies themselves. This would occur, for instance, through reducing the value of their remaining dollar holdings, through the likely immediate negative impact on the US economy, which even though it has declined in aggregate importance still remains for many East Asian countries their single most important export market, and through making their own exports less competitive in the US market. The situation is very different to that in the 1960s when, for instance, the French central bank could merrily convert dollars into gold with reasonable certainty, under the one-way bet of the inflexible exchange rates of the pre-1971 financial regime, that at worst it would incur almost no damage in the process. Today, complex interdependence is the character of the global financial regime, with relationships far more costly for all parties to break.

The soft side of US hegemony To argue that the US is not well-placed either by its relative economic standing or by the changing international context to impose its will unilaterally on its East Asian partners is not to suggest that it will not achieve

58 John Ravenhill Table 3.1 Shares of global production, global population and IMF quotas

United States Japan European Union of which, the Euro zone Africa Other Asia Latin America

World production (at PPP)

Population

IMF quotas

21 7 20 16 2 26 9

4.6 2.2 6.3 4.9 7.9 53.5 8.4

17.7 6.3 30.6 23.6 5.2 9.6 7.6

Source: Williamson (2000).

many of the outcomes it desires in its relations with East Asian economies. The other two faces of hegemony identified above are critical here. First, it is certainly still the case that East Asia is under-represented (more so than any other geographical region) in the management of the global financial regime. Despite accounting for a third of global production, the region holds less than 16 per cent of all IMF quotas (Table 3.1). Moreover, Japan is the only East Asian state that is currently, by virtue of its membership of the G7, afforded a seat at the table in talks among the leading industrial countries on the management of international economic regimes. Second, and arguably far more important, is the role of ideas – the soft side of hegemony. The impression given by much of the literature on the Asian financial crises was that the United States and its Western allies were able to take advantage of East Asia’s vulnerability to impose unwanted liberalization on recalcitrant governments. In a clash of alternative varieties of capitalism, IMF and World Bank conditionality was used to attack the fundamentals of the Asian model. Richard Higgott (1998, 338), for instance, writes of the “imposed reforms of the IMF” that aimed to install a “Western model of liberalization”. To be sure, the apparent lack of sympathy from Western governments and from international financial organizations for the plight of crisisaffected economies – the contrast between the ungenerous response of the US government and its bail-out of Mexico following the 1994 crisis was particularly noted – did cause resentment on the part not just of the governments of the crisis economies but also of others in the region. It prompted a search for means of promoting closer economic cooperation among East Asian countries. And liberalization was undoubtedly unpopular in some government and private-sector circles. But to interpret the policy changes incorporated in the letters of intent that crisis economies lodged with the IMF as a simple imposition of unwanted ideas by external forces is far too simplistic a portrayal of a situation in which not just exter-

US economic relations with East Asia 59 nal actors but also domestic interests were able to use the upheavals to pursue their preferred agendas. For most of the post-war period, a battle has been fought in the economic bureaucracies of East Asian economies between “statist” and “proliberalization” elements. Over time, as more bureaucrats (and academics with close links to governments) received their training, particularly in economics, in Western universities and participated in the international financial institutions and in regional institutions such as APEC, so the proliberalization forces have gained strength. The power of socialization into particular sets of ideas is at work here. These actors have consistently used the opportunities afforded by external pressure to forward their agendas. Haggard (1990) notes, for instance, the development in the 1950s and 1960s of transnational alliances in South Korea and Taiwan between local technocrats and US advisers, and the use by domestic pro-reform elements of external pressure as a means of advancing their pro-liberalization agendas. The financial crises of 1997 thus were by no means unique in opening up opportunities for domestic pro-liberalization forces to promote their agendas. But they did represent important openings – situations of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – none more so than in South Korea where the Kim Dae-jung administration was able to use special legislative sessions between the election and his formal inauguration to pursue an agenda on, for instance, reform of the chaebol, that sections of the state bureaucracy and academia had long advocated (Haggard 2000, 101–4). Again, it was not a matter of external imposition but of an effective transnational collaboration to promote structural change. Mo and Moon (2003, 146) write: Although it appears that the IMF and World Bank played an important role in putting corporate reform on the agenda, it is debatable whether these ideas originated from the two international organizations alone . . . IMF conditionality and pressures from international lending agencies may have helped the Kim Dae-jung government in pushing for corporate reform, but its acquiescence was not grudging. The government actively sought foreign help and advice.13 In other countries, for example Thaksin’s Thailand, some private-sector interests have actively pushed an agenda of rolling back the state, not least because of their expectations of gains from the privatization of state assets (see Connors, Chapter 8 in this volume). The capacity of the US to attain its foreign economic policy objectives in East Asia has been further enhanced by the new enthusiasm of East Asian governments for bilateral trade agreements. As the single most important export market for many East Asian countries, the US is an attractive partner. Moreover, smaller economies in particular are increasingly looking to establish preferential trade relations with it both as a means of removing any economic disadvantage they suffer from the

60 John Ravenhill proliferation of US agreements with other countries (an instance of Baldwin’s (1997) “domino” effect), and as a means of ensuring that they do not become overly dependent in the future on China. A move to bilateralism, however, plays into the hands of US negotiators: economic asymmetries come to the fore. It is well-established that small states give up more than their larger partners in the negotiation of free-trade agreements, an outcome long-established in preferential relationships among unequals (whether it be the EU and its LDC partners, the United States and Mexico/Canada, or Japan and Singapore) – as the Australian government has discovered to its cost in the negotiation of the Australia–US FTA.14 American FTAs with countries in the region (negotiations are under way with Thailand and the expectation is that Malaysia will also sign on in the near future) may well be of far greater economic significance than any trade developments among East Asian countries themselves in the next fifteen years. For they are intended, and the Singapore agreement is the model here, to go far beyond current WTO agreements on matters such as government procurement, services and intellectual property rights. The agenda is driven by US domestic business interests and their associated Washington-based trade lawyers. Countries like Thailand find themselves not only faced by an economic relationship that is extremely asymmetric but by similar asymmetries in negotiating resources and capabilities. Here again, however, one should not necessarily assume that the market-opening measures are always being imposed by Washington on recalcitrant partners. To do so is simply to underestimate the importance of ideas. Moreover, it would repeat the mistake of some of the literature on the financial crises by failing to comprehend the extent of divisions within East Asian bureaucracies, and how some ministries, such as METI in Japan, are attempting to use FTAs as an instrument to accelerate the pace of domestic structural reform (Munakata 2002). The willingness of elements of East Asian bureaucracies to embrace the market is testimony to the power of ideas and in many instances to the significance of their transmission through the training of officials in economics in Western industrialized countries, not least the United States. Nowhere is the acceptance of the market more remarkable than in China. In many instances, Washington may be pushing on an open door when it comes to promoting liberalization in its East Asian partners; FTAs may be a convenient instrument that pro-liberalization elements of East Asian bureaucracies can use to further their cause.

Conclusion The consequences of the unipolar moment for US relations have attracted a great deal of academic commentary as well as journalistic discussion. The starting point for much of this analysis is the allegedly unprecedented

US economic relations with East Asia 61 strength of the US economy. Brooks and Wohlforth (2002), for instance, assert: If today’s American primacy does not constitute unipolarity, then nothing ever will . . . America’s economic dominance, meanwhile – relative to either the next several richest powers or the rest of the world combined – surpasses that of any great power in modern history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 . . . U.S. military and economic dominance, finally, is rooted in the country’s position as the world’s leading technological power.15 For writers in this vein, the “paradox of American power” is that the US is unable to turn its unprecedented material preponderance into the political outcomes that it desires (Reus-Smit 2004, 1). The contention of this chapter is that, as far as economic relations with East Asia are concerned, this argument is entirely wrong. The relative decline of US economic power vis-à-vis East Asia has been almost continuous over the last fifty years; the financial crises were but a small blip in an otherwise consistent upward trajectory. The context in which the management of economic relations with East Asia takes place has changed in a way to further constrain the unilateral exercise of this declining power. And yet the US has enjoyed considerable success in recent years in moving forward its agenda of economic liberalization in East Asia. The paradox of US power in its economic relations with East Asia is to explain how the US has achieved its objectives despite its overall relative decline. One should neither overstate US economic weakness nor East Asian strength. The US remains by far the world’s largest economy; it continues to exercise significant structural power. Nowhere is this more evident than in finance where the US still enjoys super-exorbitant privileges. As Robert Wade (2003) suggests, if one was to set out to design an international system that best suits US financial interests, it would be difficult to improve on the current regime. East Asia meanwhile remains a fragmented economic entity, currently incapable of devising common economic policies: talk of East Asian financial integration remains entirely fanciful. Despite East Asia’s impressive technological progress, significant dependencies for many of the most advanced technologies remain, not least in China where much of the export boom rests on the assembly and processing of imported components. Nonetheless, significant changes in the economic relationship between East Asia and the United States have taken place such that it is now far more accurate than two decades ago to characterize the relationship as one of complex interdependence. Washington increasingly has to be concerned about the potential leverage that East Asian governments enjoy courtesy of their holdings of Treasury bills. It is not in the interests of these governments to act precipitously in a manner that causes any

62 John Ravenhill significant damage to the US economy because this would inevitably rebound to their own disadvantage. Nonetheless, the very possibility that one or more of the larger East Asian economies may switch some of their reserves from dollars to euros imposes a constraint that was not present a decade ago. In the trade field, complex interdependence is manifested in the extension of production networks across the Pacific, particularly the incorporation of China into these networks in the last decade, with an accompanying growth of intra-industry trade and the development of new configurations of domestic interests in the US. The net effect again has been to make it more difficult for the US to resort to unilateralism in its economic relations with East Asian states. Despite the relative decline in US economic power, despite the more constraining international institutional environment, and despite the growth of complex interdependence across the Pacific, US administrations have enjoyed unprecedented success in securing their principal objectives in their foreign economic relations with East Asian countries. These can be succinctly summarized as a push for liberalization of markets – both for merchandise and for financial services. Washington has actively pursued these objectives since the the end of the 1960s. To be sure, Washington was able to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the crisis-affected economies to advance this agenda in coalition with domestic interests that favoured liberalization. The liberalization agenda, however, has also moved forward rapidly in countries not severely affected by the economic crisis (and arguably has advanced more in some of these than in the worstaffected economies: for instance, contrast China with Indonesia despite the latter continuing to draw on an IMF Extended Fund Facility up until the end of 2003). To assume that the decline in US material preponderance vis-à-vis East Asia will prevent the US from obtaining its desired outcomes in international economic relations is to adopt a naïve view of the factors that drive policy change. East Asian bureaucracies have embraced ideas of liberalization with an enthusiasm that is surprising to many. Ideas may triumph where material forces flounder.

Notes 1 I am grateful to André Broom for research assistance on this chapter. 2 Clinton had been reported to have been seen reading various works on Japan’s ascendancy immediately prior to his inauguration. 3 On the lack of historical relationship between hegemony and openness see Laitin (1982), Lawson (1983), McKeown (1983), Stein (1984), and Hobson (1997); on US decline and continuing stability in international economic regimes see Keohane (1980, 1984); for an alternative theoretical approach that demonstrates why cooperation does not require hegemony see Snidal (1985); Keohane (1997) provides an overview of the debate on hegemonic stability. 4 Humphrey (1987) discusses the origins of the theory. John Conybeare (1987) is one of the few political scientists who has examined the implications of optimal tariff theory for the foreign economic policies of large economies. Another

US economic relations with East Asia 63

5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

theoretical perspective suggests an additional reason why hegemonic behaviour may not be as benign as suggested in Kindleberger’s approach. Models of collective action typically assume that actors make decisions independently of one another: if, however, the model is changed to one of “Stackelberg” equilibrium, where actors’ moves are interdependent, then the logic of the game suggests that it will be strategic for the hegemonic power to act in a predatory manner. See Pahre (1999). By enabling companies to realize economies of scale, the policies of East Asian states were very much in accord with the prescriptions of strategic trade policy and new growth theories. See Matthews and Ravenhill (1994). On Japan’s unusual trade structure see Lawrence (1987), Lawrence (1991), Lincoln (1990), Ravenhill (1993) and Encarnation (1992); Saxonhouse (1993) provides a contrary view. To point out that the US has a long history of unilateralism in its economic relations with East Asian economies is not to suggest that US pressure on these governments to liberalize access to their markets was unwarranted: a case can be made for “justifiable disobedience” of GATT principles in these circumstances. Contrast, however, the views of Hudec (1990) on justifiable disobedience and US unilateralism under the 1974 Trade Act. Sometimes at the expense of other suppliers. See George (1984) for discussion of the negative impact of US bilateral pressure on Japan on Australian agricultural exports. Kunkel (2003) provides a comprehensive overview of the increasingly aggressive trade policies towards Japan during the Reagan and first Clinton administrations. Because of the lack of availability of data for some countries (notably Brunei, Laos and Myanmar on many indicators other than those for trade), the composition of the “East Asian” group varies from measure to measure. In this instance, the countries included in the group are: Brunei, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (DR), Rep. Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Taiwan is not included in any of these data series. For further discussion see Segal (2004). Lukes (1974) remains the classic statement of the various sources of power. The major holders were Japan ($billions 715.2), PRC (174.6), South Korea (65.6), Taiwan (57.5) and Hong Kong (49.9) (US Treasury). See also Kim (2003). On asymmetrical concessions in FTAs between large and small economies see Freund (2003). Similarly, Ikenberry (2004) notes that “Growing power – military, economic and technological – also gives the US more opportunities to control outcomes around the world.”

4

The dog that didn’t bark The Bush administration and East Asian regionalism Michael Wesley

Introduction Despite having come to power vowing to reverse what it saw as years of neglect of the Asian region in the Clinton years, the administration of President George W. Bush has attracted no shortage of critics arguing that its lack of attention to Asia is seriously damaging US and global interests. Some argue that the administration’s narrow focus on counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation, and the increasingly demanding and uncompromising tone of US foreign policy have allowed China to steal the march on Washington, especially in Southeast Asia where Beijing has made extensive diplomatic gains at the expense of American interests (see, for example, Ryan 2004). Others argue that American inattention and festering anti-American resentment among the countries of the Western Pacific are driving the development of an East Asian regionalism, perhaps leading to a ‘bipolar confrontation’ between an ‘East Asian Economic Community’ and the nascent Free Trade Area of the Americas (Bergsten, quoted in Agence France Presse 2004). The combination of clever Chinese diplomacy, lingering post-financial crisis anti-US sentiment, and the narrowly focused and at times abrasive Bush doctrine have led some to suggest that East Asia stands at the cusp of a new era, in which the formation of a cohesive regional bloc excluding the US will profoundly change the half-century-old power structures in the region (Bowles 2002). But a careful reading of the evidence suggests nothing so dramatic. Considered against the history of US policy towards especially Southeast Asia, Washington’s current ‘neglectful engagement’ does not appear greatly out of character. China’s recent regionalism is new, but it is hard to find evidence that Beijing’s growing influence has come at the expense of Washington’s in any East Asian capital. Indeed, the growing competition for regional influence among Japan, China and the US is likely to be seen by many Southeast Asian states as generating opportunities for exercising diplomatic leverage. Policy makers in Washington and Canberra seem confident that the resurgence of East Asian regionalism based on the ASEAN+3 meetings is gradualist and benign,

Bush and East Asian regionalism 65 and highly unlikely to develop into a cohesive, rigidly exclusionary and antagonistic regional bloc. But this sanguine response to the recent genuine resurgence of East Asian regionalism, when considered against a half-century of American diplomacy in Asia, appears curiously anomalous. United States foreign policy from Johnson to Clinton has consistently reacted with suspicion when moves towards regionalism have arisen in Asia, and acted either to block or shape Asian regionalism, or assure itself a prominent seat in the councils of any new institution. The Bush administration is well aware of the new East Asian regionalism, and yet has acted in none of these ways. This looks even more out of character if we consider the Bush administration’s alleged scepticism towards multilateralism (a charge I will contest in this chapter), and its strident commitment to protect and advance US preeminence and US interests whenever they are challenged. My purpose in this chapter is to explain why the dogs haven’t barked. After reviewing the evidence on the rise of a new East Asian regionalism, and recalling instances showing the ‘default setting’ of US foreign policy is to regard Asian regionalism as a threat, I attempt to explain why the Bush administration has not reacted with alarm. The standard answer is that the US is simply distracted by the ‘War on Terror’. But a careful examination of the evidence shows that critics’ charges of a ‘neglect’ of Asia by the Bush administration are unwarranted. The Bush administration has presided over a significant strengthening of bilateral relations with Japan, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore (see other chapters in this volume). It has designated the fight against terrorism in Asia as a ‘front line’ in the War on Terror. To argue that a state with the vast diplomatic, bureaucratic and intelligence resources of the US has simply ‘overlooked’ such a significant development as nascent regionalism in such a crucial area of the world seems naïve. In what follows I outline what I believe are three more compelling reasons for that sanguine US response to East Asian regionalism. First, I argue that, rather than eschewing multilateralism as many critics suggest, the Bush administration has simply adopted a more vigorously US-centric approach to multilateralism. Whereas this approach has rankled in Europe, it has proved uncontroversial in Asia. As a consequence, Asian countries have been remarkably co-operative with new US-sponsored multilateral and coalition activities in the region. The ease of US diplomacy in Asia in comparison with other regions and instances has predisposed the US towards a more benign view of diplomatic developments in Asia. Second, I argue that the US and Asian countries both have a preference for the strong bilateral and weak multilateral structures that prevail in the Asia Pacific. There is also a strong convergence of preferences between Washington and most Southeast Asian states for the de facto US security guarantee in the region. These preference convergences, plus the strengthening of bilateral relationships between the US and key Asian

66 Michael Wesley states, has made the US less concerned than its predecessors about the new Asian regionalism. Third, I suggest that during the 1990s, both sides of politics in the US have gone through a learning process about the processes and potentials of the ‘new regionalism’ that developed in many regions of the globe after the end of the Cold War (Bates 1999; Fawcett and Hurrell 1995). Whereas at the start of the decade many were inclined to see the new regionalism as a challenge to US goals and pre-eminence – perhaps even as a balancing strategy against US power (see Beeson’s Chapter 1 in this volume) – by the end of the decade, I argue, regionalism had showed itself to US policy makers to be incapable of constituting such a challenge to US power. Hence the low-key US response to the rise of the new regionalism in Asia and to the European Union’s adoption of the Euro and eastern enlargement.

The new East Asian regionalism There has undeniably been momentum gathering behind East Asian regionalism since 1998. The Asian finance crisis led to a sense of disillusionment with the lack of an effective response from existing regional institutions (Acharya 1999; Wesley 1999), and anger at the United States’ and IMF’s initial lack of concern, followed by their crusading prescription of neoliberal economic medicine. These reactions coalesced over the following years into two widely held conclusions: that East Asia needs its own crisis-response mechanisms; and that East Asia needs to be able to exercise greater influence in shaping international economic and financial institutions and structures. As a result, we have seen a flurry of regionalist initiatives. Some of these were stillborn, such as the Asian Monetary Fund. Others were largely symbolic, such as the East Asian Currency Swap arrangements. But others have steadily gained momentum: the ASEAN+3 process, the formation and reports of the East Asia Vision Group and East Asia Study Group; and the holding of several ‘breakfast meetings’ among China, Japan and the Republic of Korea on the sidelines of the ASEAN+3 meetings. The other dynamic that has been driving East Asian regionalism has been the growing regional economic integration centred on China, coupled with Beijing’s diplomatic offensive in Southeast Asia. Trade and investment flows demonstrate that China has emerged as a major driver of renewed regional economic integration.1 A range of figures demonstrates that the recent growth of regional economies from Japan to Indonesia has been largely attributable to the dynamism of the Chinese economy. As a result, even those economies that are threatened by the growth of China’s exports now have a vested interest in China’s economic health and the continued success of its economic reform process.2 Growing integration with the Chinese economy brings increased vulnerability should the Chinese economy fail. And the spreading realisation that China shares

Bush and East Asian regionalism 67 many of the resource and financial security concerns of its neighbours has begun to reinforce a collaborative attitude to regional diplomacy. By championing an ASEAN–China Free Trade Agreement, China is attempting to add a layer of institutional integration to the pre-existing market driven process. Beijing has made important diplomatic gains in the Asia Pacific region. It has particularly identified Southeast Asia as an environment in which it can demonstrate its ‘peaceful rise’ assertions while building soft power and loyalty through promoting converging interests. In return, most Southeast Asian leaders see no alternative to building strong relations with Beijing. China’s ‘early harvest’ trade commitments to the poorer members of ASEAN, its opposition to the use of external pressure to drive internal reforms, and its professed concern with non-traditional security concerns have formed a stark contrast with Washington’s perceived preoccupation with governance and hard security issues, its incessant demands and its narrow focus on those relationships that will be most helpful in prosecuting the War on Terror. In building its regional influence, China is developing and using significant soft-power resources, mainly based on widely shared perceptions about the growth potential of its economy and the seeming inevitability of its rise to regional preeminence. This has prompted among regional countries a growing sensitivity to China’s interests and a heightened awareness of any Chinese policy that appears to benefit the region. In the past four years, China’s at times abrasive regional diplomacy has been replaced by a sophisticated, nuanced and co-operative approach to building its influence around its common interests with regional states (Medeiros and Fravel 2003). China’s rapid diplomatic gains in the region have been assisted by its selective adoption of established Southeast Asian norms of co-operation, a tactic which has made China’s multilateralism appear more familiar and benign to most ASEAN members. Beginning with the negotiation of a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea, under which China and the members of ASEAN agree to jointly address common challenges while managing conflicting territorial claims cooperatively, China has adopted an approach to multilateralism centred on three principles. The first is non-intrusive relations, whereby parties refrain from criticising or commenting on each other’s affairs, and which China has extended into a ‘no-strings-attached’ approach to building relations with Southeast Asian states. The second is an instrumentalist approach which seeks to build on converging interests while quarantining competing interests and ideological or doctrinal differences. The third is an appeal for the ‘democratisation’ of international relations, meaning a championing of development and other interests of smaller states against the dominance of the US, and a commitment to multilateralism as the best way of securing democratisation (see, for example, Tang 2002). Each of these principles, in rhetoric and practice, resonates positively with the ‘ASEAN way’. Beijing also benefits from ASEAN countries’ awareness

68 Michael Wesley that China’s growing power brings with it more potential coercive levers, and that China historically has not been averse to playing hardball. China’s interest in regional multilateralism has in turn touched off a broader dynamic of institutional integration, driven partly by competition for regional influence between Japan and China. There is some evidence also that Southeast Asian states remain somewhat wary of fully entering Beijing’s embrace, and have embarked on moves to partly balance or offset China’s weight and influence. The rekindling of interest in an ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, and the presence of India, New Zealand and Australia at the November 2004 ASEAN+3 Summit in Vientiane can be read in this way. While there can be no denying that all of these strands add up to a significant push towards a new form of East Asian regionalism, there are reasons to be sceptical about whether they will result in a cohesive regional grouping any time soon. First, among many Southeast Asian states, recent memories of China’s belligerence are fresh, and it is an increasingly worrying economic competitor. Individually, the states of Southeast Asia have reacted differently to China’s overtures. At one end of the spectrum is Myanmar, which has grown closer and closer to China; at the other end is Vietnam, alarmed at China’s southward gaze, and becoming much more active in ASEAN as a way of bolstering its position against China. In between are the other Southeast Asian countries: aware of China’s growing economic and political importance but wary of becoming too beholden to Beijing. Second, a strong East Asian institution would have to include both Japan and China, but the legacy of hostility and mutual suspicion continues to overshadow substantial increases in their economic interdependence. Third, the record so far suggests that the countries of Southeast Asia have readily engaged bilaterally with China and Japan, but remain wary of closer multilateral engagement with Northeast Asia. Indeed, they have recently launched a new round of institutional integration not on an East Asian but on a Southeast Asian scale, beginning an ambitious plan to develop closer security co-operation and pushing forward with intra-ASEAN economic and financial integration and reform to compete with China for investment. And fourth, several Southeast Asian countries have moved to reinforce their bilateral ties with Washington, both in the security and the economic realms. The record of US responses to Asian regionalism Since the 1960s, US foreign policy makers have reacted with a suspicion towards new forms of Asian regionalism. This is starkly at odds with their early record of direct sponsorship of European regionalism (see Hogan 1987). The US reacted warily to the precursors of ASEAN and to the first Japanese proposals for the formation of an Asian Development Bank. It was only when the Johnson administration accepted that solidarity among

Bush and East Asian regionalism 69 the region’s non-communist states and the promotion of economic development were useful adjuncts to the containment of communism in the region that the US acquiesced in the creation of ASEAN and the ADB (Wesley 2003). Once both organisations had formed, the US became a supporter of both, though a continuing rival to Japan for pre-eminence within the Asian Development Bank. In the late 1980s, the Bush administration reacted in much the same way to the original Australian proposal for APEC, which was initially proposed only to consist of the countries of the Western Pacific. Gareth Evans, the Australian Foreign Minister at the time, recalled in a later interview that the proposal initially aired by Prime Minister Bob Hawke excluded the United States partly out of frustration at US trade diplomacy at the time, and partly because he wanted to build Western Pacific cooperation before adding trans-Pacific links.3 Evans recalled US Secretary of State James Baker’s anger at the exclusion of the US in their first meeting after Hawke’s initial APEC proposal. Soon after, the APEC proposal was modified to include the US, Canada and Mexico. Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Bush administration reacted with alarm to the proposal for an East Asian Economic Group floated by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir (Bates 2003, 191–2). A period of intense diplomatic lobbying followed, in which US pressure was placed particularly on Japan to reject the Malaysian proposal. Eventually, the states of East Asia agreed to form a much-watered down ‘East Asian Economic Caucus’ as a contact group within APEC. Finally, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the Clinton administration opposed the Japanese proposal for the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund, ostensibly because it was thought it would undermine the IMF, but ultimately because it threatened the creation of a Tokyo-led economic bloc (Garnaut 1999). In each of these cases, US opposition was based on concerns that regionalism would result in a challenge to US influence in Asia and possibly a disruption of US economic links with the region. Interestingly, the US twice acted to oppose what it saw as Japanese attempts to establish regional leadership. These examples make the sanguine reaction of the Bush administration to the burgeoning logic of East Asian regionalism a curious anomaly, particularly in light of the fact that much of the dynamism for the new East Asian regionalism is being driven by China. In the next three sections, I suggest some explanations. Bush’s multilateralism: an oxymoron? The Bush administration’s foreign policy record on arms control, climate change, trade and human rights has prompted many critics to label its entire approach as unilateralist. But a close examination of that record reveals this to be both simplistic and inaccurate. The Bush administration’s history of

70 Michael Wesley opting out of emerging agreements, bypassing multilateral endorsement or ignoring non-endorsement, and withdrawing or withholding its support, funds or presence from organisations with which it disagrees, is unremarkable when viewed in the light of nearly a century of American foreign policy. Indeed, as Stewart Patrick points out, the Bush administration’s selective use of multilateral mechanisms that enhance rather than retard its capacity to pursue its policy in any given situation is no different from that of most countries (Patrick 2002, 12). The controversy over cases of the Bush administration’s bypassing or ignoring of multilateral mechanisms has been fuelled by the stridency of its justifications for its actions. But it is also almost impossible for the US to opt out of or ignore a multilateral organisation quietly: its size and centrality to many collective enterprises leaves it open to regular charges of either dominating an institution or obstructing or undermining their operation. What does seem to have occurred in the US is a long-term attitudinal shift to political institutions in general, which have increased American impatience with the older international institutions set up at the end of the Second World War. Writers such as John Ruggie and Anne Marie Burley have argued that the US shaped the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions according to the values of Roosevelt’s New Deal: statism, economic planning, and the link between equal prosperity and social peace (Burley 1993; Ruggie 1998a). This concept has fostered around the world the growth of a liberal-internationalist vision of international relations endorsed by the left and seen by many as having reached its fullest bloom in Europe (Kagan 2002). This approach sees advances in international law, norms and institutions as transforming international relations, and achieving progress on collective problems such as human rights abuses, uneven development and environmental damage. Its proponents believe that by eliminating or mitigating problems in the international system, and strengthening collective mechanisms to address injustices, the problems of individual states and societies can be more effectively addressed (Wesley 2004). As a result, many who subscribe to the liberal-internationalist view of international relations have come to see multilateralism as a process of inclusive consultation based on equality of influence among the interested parties. This view of multilateralism as an ethical practice differs from the accepted definition in international relations of multilateralism as an institutional outcome. This latter definition is exemplified by Ruggie’s classic definition of multilateralism as ‘an institutional form that co-ordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of generalised principles of conduct’ (1993a, 11). As Ruggie and many other scholars who subscribe to his definition show, multilateralism as an institutional form is entirely compatible with the dominance of the powerful within multilateral institutions (see, for example, Martin 1992). Indeed, neoliberal scholars have argued that it is an initial large imbalance of power that permits multilat-

Bush and East Asian regionalism 71 eral institutions addressing public goods to be formed in the first place (Kindleberger 1973; Keohane 1984). The resulting multilateral institutions are formed according to the dominant power’s preferences (Ruggie 1993a). Some of the controversy over Bush’s alleged unilateralism seems to arise as a result of these diverging interpretations over the meaning of multilateralism.4 But there is another, perhaps more profound and enduring reason for the widespread anger at Bush’s foreign policy. While the liberal-internationalist vision of international relations has many American adherents, writers such as Robert Fogel and Walter Russell Mead suggest that increasing numbers of Americans are rejecting the New Deal liberal vision of politics and institutions, preferring an American revivalist vision of individual moral responsibility, populist politics and ethics, and the placing of checks on the power of institutions (Fogel 2000; Mead 2004). This appears to have flowed through to popular impatience with certain global institutions, delivering broad agreement with the views of critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick who argued that institutions such as the UN no longer advance values conducive to the US, such as procedural fairness, objectivity and effective action (Moynihan 1979; Kirkpatrick 1982). Many prominent American commentators have registered their alarm at the trend towards obligatory compliance with multilateral agreements and have cautioned that anti-Americanism and the US’s special ‘custodial role’ in world affairs unfairly exposes American soldiers and officials to punitive multilateral judgements (Patrick 2002, 17). What has emerged, in addition to the forum-shopping approach, is a new multilateralism that eschews formal agreements or any other signs of permanency, that is designed and implemented by Washington, and that is situation- and issue-dependent. Despite all of these features, however, these initiatives remain consonant with Ruggie’s definition of multilateralism as a diplomatic outcome: ‘an institutional form that co-ordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of generalised principles of conduct’ (Ruggie 1993a, 11). The coalition against terrorism, the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Container Security Initiative are all multilateral in terms of co-ordinating the actions of the US with several other states on the basis of general principles of conduct, even though at the same time having a strongly bilateralist, hub-and-spokes structure. In none of these is the US seen to be one among equals: Washington is clearly at the centre, defining the mission, leading operations and maintaining the commitment of others. Often commitment is secured through the implicit or explicit threat of incurring Washington’s displeasure. The US sets out clear guidelines on what actions are expected by all countries against terrorism, proliferation, narcotics and technology transfer, and often recommends collaboration with US forces or agencies as a good way of ensuring effective compliance.

72 Michael Wesley Bush’s new multilateralism has incurred strong criticism in a Europe committed to the traditional approach to multilateralism, where it is seen as an example of the old, power-centred approach to international relations destroying the possibilities of the new, cosmopolitan order. But in East Asia, outside of China, there has been comparatively little criticism of the damage that Bush’s foreign policy is accused of doing to global institutions.5 The main reason is that this is a form of multilateralism that is very familiar in East Asia, a region that has demonstrated its discomfort with comprehensive, permanent and legalistic multilateralism, and that has prospered under a hub-and-spokes regional security and economic structure, centred on Washington. Put simply, what appears new to Europeans about Bush’s multilateralism feels very familiar to many East Asians. As a result, the US has found Asian countries more co-operative as a whole with its counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation goals than those in other regions. This has probably predisposed the US to be more accepting of East Asia’s nascent regionalism than it would otherwise have been. Bilateralism and neglectful engagement: a perfect compromise Several writers have contrasted the US’s strongly multilateralist approach to Europe with its bilateralist approach to East Asia in the course of exploring the origins and operation of multilateralism. Authors such as Ikenberry and Hemmer and Katzenstein argue that, unlike in Europe, the US didn’t bother with multilateralism in Asia because it was so much more powerful than the states of East Asia, and had much less at stake there.6 The implication of these arguments is that multilateralism is an invariably desirable gift conferred or withheld by Washington. In Ikenberry’s argument, multilateralism allows smaller states to ‘lock in’ a US presence and restrain the use of its power, while enabling the US to ‘lock in’ the policy commitments of smaller states. However, these models are unable to explain why the US has not rushed forward with a proposal for a strong multilateral regional institution in recent years, as Asia becomes increasingly central to Washington’s security and economic calculations, as Asian states become more powerful vis-à-vis the US and as the US faces increasingly powerful challengers for regional leadership. In concentrating so strongly on US preferences, these models overlook the strong normative preference for bilateralism among East Asian states. All of the states of East Asia prefer to manage their relations with the US and each other primarily through bilateral means, and have kept regional multilateral arrangements weak, procedural and non-binding. Scholars such as Michael Antolik have argued that the most significant achievement of ASEAN, the Southeast Asia’s foundational regional organisation and the basic model for APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum, has not been in enabling effective collective action but in inculcating restraint and the habits of a ‘diplomacy of accommodation’ among the region’s states.

Bush and East Asian regionalism 73 ‘ASEAN’ refers to the successful consultative process that these states have used in managing tensions among themselves and dealing with the external environment. This process began with the ASEAN membership treaty, which these states used as an indirect non-aggression pact and has since been enhanced by the ‘spirit of ASEAN’ which represents a record of good faith and good neighbourliness. (Antolik 1990, 5) Repeatedly, East Asian states have either rejected more binding, legalistic forms of multilateralism – as in the case of APEC – or have failed to commit to what appeared at the outset to be strong multilateral agreements – as in the case of the ASEAN High Council (Caballero-Anthony 1998). Some have argued that East Asian states have relied on global multilateral institutions to lock in binding commitments and binding judgements, and that recent ASEAN moves to establish binding trade liberalisation protocols are the result of inescapable external pressures (Kahler 2000). The experience of colonialism and great power domination makes many East Asian governments sceptical of the Gulliver analogy popular in the West, whereby multilateralism allows smaller powers to restrain the actions of great powers through a network of norms and agreements. East Asian states are more likely to view strong multilateralism through a Pied Piper analogy, where the leading member can use guile to gather followers together and take them in directions possibly inimical to their interests. Many East Asian states have felt uncomfortable with the complexity of formalistic, binding multilateralism such as the APEC Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalisation scheme, and much prefer to manage issues and relationships bilaterally.7 East Asian states’ preference for bilateralism thus coincides fortuitously with the US preference for a bilateral approach in the Asia Pacific, which Franz Schurmann has suggested reflects a deep current of thought in American foreign policy which is nationalist, antiinternationalist, conservative and Asia- rather than Europe-focused (Schurmann 1974). Hence, the recent ‘Enterprise for ASEAN Initiative’ launched by the US proposes the building of a network of bilateral free trade agreements between Washington and the ASEAN states, an initiative warmly welcomed by ASEAN and its member states (Ong 2003). Neither is it the case that if the US were willing, the states of East Asia would be particularly eager to ‘lock in’ the American presence in the region through a formal multilateral mechanism. Repeatedly Southeast Asian states have demonstrated that they prefer a de facto US security guarantee based on Washington’s commitment to the regional status quo and its bilateral alliances in the region, to a formalised security relationship with all of its attendant costs and obligations.8 Indeed, the SEATO alliance should not be seen as an attempted replication of NATO, but a formalised guarantee of the regional status quo by extra-regional powers,

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and anchored by the two bilateral US alliances in the region. Though SEATO has vanished, its basic logic of an implied security guarantee by an extra-regional power has endured, prompting Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong to observe in 2000: There is a grudging acceptance that the US continues to be a stabilising factor in the region. While there are differences in how each ASEAN country sees the US security presence, there is an underlying recognition that without it, the politics of the region would be more complex and troublesome. (Goh 2000) As is the case with the mutual preferences for bilateral diplomacy, so the US shares the Asian states’ preference for its non-institutionalised security guarantee to the region. Since 2001, the Bush administration has strengthened its alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and Pakistan, and expanded its diplomatic and defence co-operation with India and Singapore. This record is remarkably positive in comparison with the Bush administration’s experiences with allies in other regions of the world, notably Europe. As it becomes increasingly impatient with the balance of contributions between itself and its allies around the world, the US has less to worry about in East Asia. Paradoxically, the relative absence of formal alliances in the region has made the US much less anxious about the cost of its commitments to East Asian security than it is about the burden it carries for European security. And its non-institutionalised security presence in the region fits comfortably with the coming shift to flexible force deployments that will result from the Global Force Posture Review. US learning and the benign prospect of regionalism So far I have discussed what might be thought of as necessary conditions for the benign response of the Bush administration to the rise of the new East Asian regionalism. The convergence of preferences between the Bush administration and key East Asian states – over hub-and-spokes style multilateralism, bilateralism and a non-institutionalised security guarantee – plus the strengthening of important bilateral relations between the US and regional countries, have taken the edge off Washington’s traditional apprehension that moves are afoot to dislodge its regional presence. The sufficient condition for explaining the sanguine Bush administration response to East Asian regionalism is, I believe, that US policy makers have learned through the 1990s that regionalism – in East Asia and elsewhere – constitutes less of a challenge to US pre-eminence than was feared at the beginning of the 1990s. The surge of institution building that followed the Cold War occurred

Bush and East Asian regionalism 75 at the same time as many commentators were predicting the relative decline of the US and the rise of new great power competitors (for example, Kennedy 1987). In the context of speculation about which candidates would join the US at the front rank of the great powers constituting a predicted new multipolar order, the surge of regional agreements appeared to constitute a direct threat to US pre-eminence. The Single European Act in particular placed in train a series of integrative moves forthrightly designed to enable Europe to play a more cohesive and prominent global role. As the faltering Uruguay Round touched off a process of trade regionalism – through the North American Free Trade Agreement, APEC and the Single European Market, some worried about an Orwellian world divided into three competing regional blocs (Thurow 1992). And as the 1990s developed, the US found itself beset by a surge in the creation of global institutions and agreements, sponsored by other countries or coalitions of countries, that came to be seen as inimical to US interests. These included the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention against Landmines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol. Little wonder the George H. W. Bush administration and the Clinton administration reacted with suspicion to new regionalism proposals in East Asia. However, by the end of the 1990s, US suspicion of regional – if not global – institution building had receded. The European Union’s membership expansions, its adoption of a common currency, and new regionalist initiatives in South America, Africa and Central Asia seemed to evince little response from Washington. The major reason for this was that US policy makers had learned from watching the progress of regional organisations for nearly a decade that the new regionalism constitutes no immediate threat to US pre-eminence. Most prominent was the case of the European Union, which began the 1990s with the avowed aim of developing a Common Foreign and Security Policy that would enable the grouping to play a more influential international role. This aspiration was challenged repeatedly as violence flared in the Balkans, exposing deep divisions among EU members on how to respond. The wars in the former Yugoslavia, far from being ‘the hour of Europe’ so confidently predicted at their outset, became a humiliating example of the EU’s inability to act decisively to end a conflict in its own backyard. After initially deferring to the EU, the US finally took decisive action on the war in Bosnia and brokered the Dayton Accords. Shortly after, in February 1996, as the US intervened to calm Greco-Turkish tensions, US Under-Secretary of State for Europe Richard Holbrooke jibed that he had been forced to act because ‘the Europeans were literally sleeping through the night, . . . [incapable] of taking decisive action in their own theater’ (in Brenner 1996). In 1999, as Kosovo descended into violence, US policy makers realised they similarly had little to fear from proposals to construct a European Defence Community, as European countries

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insisted on reviewing even tactical targeting decisions as NATO prosecuted the air war. By the end of the decade, few American commentators or policy makers seemed concerned about the rise of the EU as a great power challenger.9 The US also had direct experience with East Asian multilateral practices through its membership of APEC, and latterly the ASEAN Regional Forum. The countries of East Asia were able to hold out against early attempts to develop APEC as a more legalistic, binding institution. American policy makers and negotiators watched somewhat bemusedly as APEC developed according to the ‘Asian way’ of diplomacy, pioneering terms such as ‘concerted unilateralism’ and ‘open regionalism’. By the late 1990s, the US and other regional countries had begun to express frustration at APEC’s lack of substantive outcomes, particularly in the area of trade liberalisation. US trade negotiators began to press for a process of reciprocal sectoral trade liberalisation as a way of restoring APEC’s credibility. The resulting Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalisation process collapsed after 18 months amidst acrimonious disagreements between several regional countries (Wesley 2001). By the end of the 1990s, American policy makers had come to the view the ‘Asian way’ of lowest-common-denominator regionalism as magnifying all of the inefficiencies of more legalistic forms of multilateralism. Having laid to rest the bogeyman of ‘balancing regionalism’, US policy makers and commentators viewed the rise of the new East Asian regionalism after 1998 less in terms of its potential threat than its apparent weaknesses. And there are three powerful reasons to be sceptical about the development of a powerful East Asian institution any time soon. First, once the rhetoric is pierced, there’s much less to be worried about in the new East Asian regionalism than appears at first blush. As Edward Lincoln points out, substantive developments such as the Currency Swap agreement are largely symbolic gestures signifying regional co-operation, when in fact most regional economies are shifting towards floating their currencies (Lincoln 2004). And the ambitious agenda for the creation of an East Asia Community set out by the East Asia Vision Group and endorsed by the East Asia Study Group is deliberately slow and gradualist. These documents are also honest about the serious problems the process of regionalism faces, including how to build member states’ comfort levels with a more comprehensive regional institution and how to avoid marginalising ASEAN while at the same time giving China, Japan and the Republic of Korea a sense of ownership of the process.10 Second, despite many East Asians’ genuine feelings of anger towards the US and the IMF over their experiences of the Asian financial crisis, the economic and security interests of most regional states do not favour throwing in their lot with a regional institution. The recent growth of intraregional trade is still dwarfed by the volume of trans-Pacific trade; East Asian states’ increased trade with each other has come at the expense of their trade with other developing countries, not at the expense of trade

Bush and East Asian regionalism 77 with the US (see also Ravenhill, Chapter 3 in this volume). The US currently absorbs around 30 per cent of Japan’s and 20 per cent of other East Asian states’ exports, proportions little changed from a decade ago (Lincoln 2004, 6–7). And in the era of record and rising US debt, East Asia and the US have become more and more financially interdependent. The US is increasingly reliant on East Asian central banks financing US debt in order to drive US growth in the absence of US domestic demand; in return Asian economies continue to depend on the continued consumption of the already-too-indebted American consumer. In the words of former US Treasury official Brad Setser, East Asian finance is funding both US budget deficits and the purchases of Asian exports (quoted in Gupte 2004). The continuing importance of these trans-Pacific links have served to reassure Washington that there is no imminent threat from East Asian regionalism. Third, the continuing antagonism between Japan and China will make the construction of East Asian regionalism a fraught process. Economic linkages, not only between China and Southeast Asia and Japan and Southeast Asia but also between Japan and China, mean that a viable regional institution must include both countries. But Beijing’s and Tokyo’s regional policies have become increasingly competitive and their political relations have shown little sign of improvement. Despite their growing economic interdependence, Japan and China seem locked in a cycle of hostility. In late 2004, Japan’s defence planners for the first time named China as a strategic threat, and the two countries have become embroiled in a series of minor territorial disputes. Prime Minister Koizumi has presided over Japan’s security normalisation within the context of Tokyo’s alliance with the US, moves which have in turn antagonised China. Enduring Sino-Japanese hostility has only served to tie Japan closer to the US. In recent years, discussion of the need for ‘new thinking’ on Japan among some Chinese opinion makers has succumbed to Chinese popular hostility to Japan and the lack of a positive Japanese response. So while SinoJapanese relations may improve following the departures of Jiang Zemin and Koizumi, it is more likely that the habits of popular distrust and rivalry will keep any improvement modest in scale. Conclusion: what are the tipping points? For any international relations academic who has lived through the end of the Cold War, the ultimate piece of folk wisdom should be ‘never say never’. Seemingly immovable structures or glacial movements can shift suddenly. This makes it necessary to think about what might cause East Asian regionalism to coalesce quickly into a cohesive regional grouping. What might be the tipping points? I can see two possibilities. One is that the current ‘competitive regionalism’ between the US and China will acquire a more serious edge, and push

78 Michael Wesley both Beijing and Washington into more extreme positions vis-à-vis the states of East Asia. Growing stridency from either power may have the effect of driving most or all states into a regional arrangement with the other. In other words, if the costs of ambiguity, hedging and playing one off against the other begin to rise, East Asian states may seek the safety of a regional institution guaranteed by one or the other. The other possibility is that the current high-wire act of cross-Pacific debt and consumer financing will come to grief. Economists suggest that if these arrangements suddenly go wrong, it could have major effects on regional and global economic growth patterns. A sufficiently serious economic crisis that could be clearly blamed on US policy may act as a major stimulus to East Asian regionalism. But barring such dramatic occurrences, East Asian regionalism will probably continue to develop slowly, and gradually work out a modus vivendi between Tokyo and Beijing over time. Because of regional preferences and ongoing suspicions, however, it is likely to be a fairly weak institution, and thus meet little if any resistance from the US. This is a future scenario that Australian foreign policy makers would be well advised to begin studying.

Notes 1 Currently around 58 per cent of China’s exports go to East Asia and it receives 47 per cent of its imports from the region. 60 per cent of China’s foreign direct investment comes from East Asia, compared with only 20 per cent from the US and the EU combined. Last year, China had a US$97 billion trade deficit with East Asia compared with a US$92 billion surplus with the US and the EU. China’s total imports from the ASEAN economies have increased ten-fold since 1990. 2 Recent studies also suggest that the character and purpose of foreign business linkages is changing. Much of the rapid growth the 1990s was in procurement or joint venture relationships aimed at the export market. China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, however, has added momentum for greater levels of foreign ownership and investment aimed at accessing the domestic market. This is helping to weave US and Japanese economic interests more tightly into the fabric of the Chinese economy. 3 Gareth Evans, interview with the author, 14 November 1996. 4 My thanks to Michael Mastanduno for this observation. 5 Of course, there has been substantial criticism of specific US foreign policy actions, such as the invasion of Iraq, but remarkably little has been couched in the multilateralist language of many European critics. 6 See Ikenberry (2000) and Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002). 7 Countries such as Thailand and Indonesia found themselves unable to assess whether APEC EVSL would impact on them positively or negatively within the timeframes specified by the EVSL timetable; see Wesley (2001) and Okamoto (2004). 8 For example, when in 1987 Philippines Foreign Secretary Raul Manglapus suggested that all ASEAN states formally commit themselves to the US security presence in Southeast Asia in order to ‘spread the costs’ of the security pres-

Bush and East Asian regionalism 79 ence of the US, the suggestion was quickly scotched by Indonesian President Suharto. 9 Joseph Nye (2002) suggested that while the EU was in the front rank of a multipolar global economic order, the US remains unchallenged on the ‘chessboard’ of global strategic and diplomatic affairs. 10 See the Final Report of the East Asia Study Group, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 4 November 2002.

5

Bush and Asia The evolving strategic context William Tow

Introduction US policy approaches toward East Asia during President George W. Bush’s first term in office can best be described as reflecting the catchphrase ‘to be continued’. The administration’s early thinking about the region embraced classical realist strategy, largely focusing on power-balancing approaches towards neutralising a ‘China rising’ and confronting a growing North Korean nuclear threat. As Michael Mastanduno has noted in Chapter 2 of this volume, multilateral diplomacy was relegated to the backwater of US regional security-policy planning. The events of September 11, however, initiated a broadening of American strategic activity in areas previously viewed by Washington as less central and marginal to its core strategic interests. America’s global war on terror (GWOT) compelled US officials to redefine US strategic relationships with various Asian actors that would facilitate the integration of their global and regional security interests with America’s. In this context, selected forms of multilateralism were resuscitated as a means to project and sustain US power in Asia. However, these were still assigned secondary importance to an overriding reliance on long-standing bilateral security ties with Japan, Australia and other regional allies (Friedberg 2002; Pollack 2003). At the same time, a sweeping Global Posture Review was conducted by the US Defense Department, directed towards ‘respond[ing] to tectonic shifts in the global strategic landscape’. It was preoccupied with responding to the forces of international terrorism at a time of intensifying globalization and as the United States’ military resources were becoming increasingly stretched (IISS 2004). The results of this posture review promised to permanently and radically transform the purpose and scope of America’s postwar bilateral alliance network in Asia – the so-called ‘hub and spokes’ system that had sustained US strategic hegemony in East Asia for a half century. With President Bush’s reelection, the challenge of squaring policy intentions with strategic capabilities has emerged as the central US policy requirement and one that is likely to be increasingly contested by other regional players determined to

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resist or at least modify his vision of a world dominated by American values and wealth. This chapter will argue that the Bush administration’s strategic thinking and behaviour toward Asia, as it evolved between early 2001 and late 2004, failed to shape a coherent strategic posture that was acceptable to key forces in Asian security politics. This was not for the lack of policy alternatives emanating from Washington during that time: the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (USDoD 2001) and the president’s National Security Statement (USNSC 2002) reflected different doctrinal perspectives found within a US administration clearly divided along geopolitical and ideological lines. A majority faction, led by the so-called ‘neoconservatives’ that included Vice-President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, viewed America as a genuine ‘hegemon’ whose power in Asia and globally is legitimately underwritten by military prowess and compliant alliances. A minority faction, represented by US Secretary of State Powell and his Deputy, Richard Armitage, championed policies more visibly in line with the Clinton legacy of regional engagement. With Powell’s and Armitage’s departure before the outset of Bush’s second term, the hardline view appears set to become paramount as the favoured US strategic approach to Asia. Such strategy, however, is likely to be tempered by conceptual challenges and resource constraints (Bremmer 2004).

Searching for a posture Asia hardly constituted a focal point for foreign policy debate in the 2000 presidential election, apart the Republican Party assertion that Bill Clinton was unable to tell America’s friends and foes apart. Condoleezza Rice, destined to become President Bush’s National Security Adviser, issued a clarion call for renewed US geopolitical vigour in an article written for Foreign Affairs early in the presidential campaign. A Bush administration, she insisted, would ‘. . . renew strong and intimate relationships with allies who share American values and can thus share the burden of promoting peace, prosperity, and freedom . . .’ (2000: 47). In an Asian context, the message was clear: China was to be regarded a strategic competitor of the United States rather than as the strategic partner it had been portrayed to be under the Clinton administration’s regional engagement strategy and should be contested accordingly. Early precedents Shortly after the campaign, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) was directed to review how the United States could increase the range and striking power of US forces most likely to see combat in future Asian contingencies (Friedberg 2003). While no public version of the

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ONA’s ‘Strategy Review’ was released, it appeared to be largely predicated on an earlier, 1999 document, Asia 2025. This study was coordinated, in part, by ONA Director Andrew Marshall in conjunction with the US Naval War College and involved a number of both official and independent American experts on Asian security, assessing the policy prospects for the US maintaining regional primacy (USUSoD 1999). Asia 2025 concluded that either a strong or weak China was a threat to US strategic interests in the region: ‘A stable and powerful China will be constantly challenging the status quo in Asia. An unstable and relatively weak China could be dangerous because its leaders might try to bolster their power with foreign military adventures.’ Other key conclusions reached in this study were that India’s rise as a regional power could make India be a ‘potential partner of choice’ for the US as part of an implicit China containment strategy, that the world’s locus of power was shifting from Europe to Asia, and that US vulnerabilities in the region were accentuated by an overseas basing shortage, an inadequate force structure, and the long distances through which US power would need to be projected (USUSoD 1999). At least two other reports were influential in fashioning the incoming Bush administration’s strategic views on Asia along hegemonic lines. In 2000, a powerful conservative interest group, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), released a study entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Sources and Resources for a New Century. It argued that US grand strategy should be one of achieving and sustaining a ‘globally pre-eminent military capability, both today and in the future’. ‘Securing’ East Asia was to be an integral part in any such approach, with the report advocating that US forces should be repositioned from positions located almost exclusively in Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia to safeguard key maritime passages there. This was deemed especially important given that an increase in China’s offshore strategic presence in the South China Sea and throughout other parts of the ASEAN region was almost certain to take place (PNAC 2000). Among that report’s signatories were Paul Wolfowitz, and other analysts who later were appointed to key senior positions in the Bush administration. A second major document was the so-called ‘Nye–Armitage Report’ released by the National Defense University’s Institute of National Strategic Studies in Washington, DC. Entitled ‘The US and Japan: Advancing Toward A Mature Partnership’, this report was advertised as a ‘bipartisan assessment’ of traditional US bilateral alliances in Asia at a time of growing American engagement with China. (INSS 2000). Again, however, the Clinton administration was implicitly criticised for neglecting Japan, in particular, in favour of playing the ‘China card’. Wolfowitz and Armitage were joined in writing this study by other co-authors destined to become important national security officials in their own right: James A. Kelly (Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs); Japan

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specialist Michael Green (a member of the US National Security Council); and Torkel Paterson (the NSC’s Senior Director of Asian Affairs). The report concluded that Japan was integral to US strategic interests in the region and that the 1997 revised US–Japan Defense Guidelines should be regarded as a foundation upon which to strengthen alliance cooperation. Given the Bush administration’s strong determination to ‘revitalise’ US relations with regional allies and friends, while emphasising the uncompromising pursuit of Western-style democracies and open markets around the world, the intensification of old regional tensions and the rise of new ones was a predictable outcome. During the first half of 2001, China found itself confronting the new leadership in Washington on several key issues related to its own sovereign prerogatives, including the Chinese downing of a US EP-3 surveillance aircraft near Hainan and a statement attributed to the new president that the US would do ‘whatever it took to help Taiwan defend itself’. North Korea experienced an even greater US policy swing, engineered by a new American president that had expressed a visceral personal dislike for that country’s ‘Dear Leader’, Kim Jong-il. From hosting an American Secretary of State during President Clinton’s last months in office, the North was abruptly and openly isolated by President Bush and all negotiations related to US economic assistance or diplomatic cooperation with Pyongyang were frozen until a six-month-long policy review designed to convince President Bush that the North was worth dealing with was completed. In retrospect, this abrupt policy change had as much to do with US concerns over South Korea’s ‘Sunshine Policy’ of conciliation toward Pyongyang as over concerns about North Korea’s military prowess and its possible ‘unconventional’ weapons capabilities. QDR The administration’s preparation of a new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) during its first year in office all but designated China as the United States’ major competitor and as the most obvious target for American strategic primacy in Asia and beyond. Secretary Powell, and other moderates in the administration, sought to establish a more nuanced balance in defining the new context of Sino-American ties by pledging that his country would ‘treat China as she merits’ and by actually endorsing Clinton’s engagement strategy through Washington’s continued support of China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (Freidberg 2002; Limaye 2004b). The policy of confronting a ‘China rival’ and cultivating a ‘China market’ was not regarded as contradictory. As one analyst has since recalled, the Bush administration’s overriding logic was that ‘(b)y treating China as less pivotal to its view of Asia’s international relations, the administration was reinforcing China’s distinctiveness from America’s allies and friends while simultaneously highlighting its potential as a threat’ (Limaye 2004b).

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In geopolitical terms, the QDR extended this logic by emphasising a shift in US defence strategy from one ‘optimising for conflicts in two particular regions – Northeast and Southwest Asia – to building a portfolio of capabilities that is robust across the spectrum of possible force requirements, both functional and geographical . . .’ (USDoD 2001). The Clinton administration’s fixation of fighting and winning two major theatre wars simultaneously was replaced by a more fluid, globally predicated approach, ‘planning victory across a spectrum of possible conflict’ that may or may not involve Asian friends and adversaries. Under this planning approach, China and North Korea may or may not be viewed as initial conflict precipitates but they would need to be factored into US strategy due to their capabilities to impede US forces’ access into and operations within Northeast Asia or in East Asia-at-large. With this approach, the United States would be able to reassure its East Asian allies that ‘combat credible’ US forces would remain deployed in the region to meet a full range of contingencies. In this context, the QDR signalled a US strategy shift from the ‘threat-based’ planning that dominated the Cold War to ‘capability-based planning’ in a world of state-centric strategic rivals (McDevitt 2001). What the authors of QDR 2001 did not anticipate was the sudden emergence of international terrorism as the predominant national security threat with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Released by the Defense Department two weeks after the attacks, the QDR featured a somewhat defensive introduction by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that emphasised QDR’s applicability to the new circumstances. QDR reflected a US national security posture, he insisted, ‘that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise, a strategy premised on the idea that to be effective abroad, America must be safe at home’ (USDoD 2001). Yet this was clearly not the major focus of QDR as it had originally been intended. A 2003 RAND Report concluded that, even apart from the events of September 11, the Pentagon’s effort to reshape US strategic doctrine occurred far too early in an administration still attempting to grapple with the meaning of a post-Cold War global security environment. By emphasising force capabilities to the extent that it did, it raised more questions than it answered over how the world’s rapidly changing geopolitics could be logically reconciled with needed increases in US defence expenditures. (Schrader et al. 2003) Without answering this basic question, US allies in East Asia could hardly be expected to derive greater clarity regarding, and confidence in, American strategic intentions. National Security Strategy, 2002 The events of September 11 compelled US strategic planners to revisit their traditional assumptions regarding international security policy and

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how Asia fits. Over the following year, a more distinct ‘Bush Doctrine’ was fashioned in response to a global security environment that went against the grain of the power balancing maxims reflected in the Bush administration’s initial approach to geopolitics. What evolved between September 2001 and September 2002 was largely an adaptation of a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) document that was written by the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, and largely by then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. The original DPG draft released in February of that year argued that the US should establish uncontested global primacy against any single rival, or group of rivals, challenging it (thought at that time as most likely to be other industrial powers such as Germany or Japan) and should be prepared to take unilateral military action in the defence of its own national security interests even if allied support for such action was not always forthcoming (Tyler 1992; Layne 1993). Secretary of Defense Cheney was subsequently forced to modify the original DPG draft’s language, following its leak to an American Congress that was looking for a peace dividend rather than a hegemonic strategy. However, the unilateralist vision of an American hegemon still remained at the forefront of the neo-conservative agenda, nurtured by the Project for the New American Century. September 11 presented the neo-conservatives – now ensconced within the chambers of power – with an opportunity to resurrect the unilateralist rationale in the guise of what the administration termed strategic ‘preemption’. The National Security Strategy of the United States, released by the White House in September 2002, transformed the relatively uncontroversial idea of ‘true preemption’ – striking first against an imminent and certain attack – to a far more comprehensive and controversial concept of striking first to prevent the possibility of a longer-term threat: ‘We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries’ (USNSC 2002). Critics of this initiative were most concerned about who was precisely the object or target of such an aggressive doctrinal approach, and about what they termed the possible ‘boomerang effects’ of this posture. The Bush administration’s intent was to enlist allies to facilitate the application of US military power against sub-state threats in Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. However, the lines between traditional sovereign threats and sub-state threats hosted in specific sovereign territories by anti-Western governments can often be murky The notion of allied burden-sharing was rendered questionable if the US was reserving the right for itself to intervene unilaterally against what it deemed to be sovereign or non-sovereign threats to US national security. Bush Doctrine proponents insisted that the lines were drawn clearly enough: international terrorists and ‘rogue states’ belonging to the so-called ‘axis of evil’, such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, were the clear concerns (Muravchik 2002). But opponents insisted that the NSS provided an unmitigated blank check

86 William Tow for the administration to interpret who was a threat to US national security, going well beyond the traditional and more stable axioms represented by post-war deterrence strategy (Hanlon et al. 2002). If Washington truly reserved for itself the right to employ unilateral military action around the world, what was to prevent ‘second-order effects’ of that policy developing in such ways as to generate a ‘boomerang effect’? Or, as one observer put it: ‘Would Iraq have a justification now to strike the US “pre-emptively”? Could India be justified in striking Pakistan? What will Russia justify doing? China?’ (Corbin 2002; also see Fish et al. 2004). This doctrinal approach was translated into an Asian context in several distinct ways. First, America’s strategic presence was broadened in various parts of the region (Friedberg 2002). Most of this expansion took place in Central Asia and South Asia (including the building of basing infrastructures in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and a major increase in the tempo and scope of bilateral ties with Pakistan) and occurred, perhaps surprisingly, without major Chinese resistance. But Southeast Asia was also earmarked as a key’ second front’ in the ‘Global War on Terror’. The Philippines and Thailand became ‘major non-NATO allies’ in this context. Other ASEAN states were also designated as key GWOT participants and were visible beneficiaries of US military and logistical assistance directed toward eradicating pockets of radical Islam. This trend could be viewed as a low-key form of prevention strategy, developing allied capacity building that would neutralise the development of anti-American enclaves. However, Washington could not afford to have it be seen this way by indigenous and highly nationalist Southeast Asian polities, ever sensitive to preserving their own national identities and checking the excessive intrusion of ‘Western’ values. The extent to which the Bush Doctrine, with its emphasis on advancing freedom and American democratic principles worldwide, could co-exist with such a nuance was, at best, questionable. A second ramification of the new National Security Strategy for Asia was the transformation of existing alliance relationships from bilateral relationships primarily directed toward missions appropriate to regional containment to broader, more amorphous, missions related to changing US global strategy. Japan was a case-in-point. In October 2001, that country’s Diet passed legislation authorising its Self Defence Force to be deployed for non-combat roles in US-led counter-terrorist operations beyond Asia. This represented a major symbolic step forward from previously restricted SDF use in peacekeeping operations, and set the context for that country to begin reviewing its overall defence identities and roles. Countering ‘rogue state’ (read North Korean) weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems through participation in America’s missile defence technology programs was an easier political finesse with the Bush Doctrine’s rationales in place. So too was its dispatch of forces to Afghanistan and Iraq in support of American global strategic objectives. Australia was the other outstanding case of a traditionally close US ally in

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the Asia-Pacific complying with the new American strategic agenda. Labelled (unfairly or otherwise) as America’s ‘deputy sheriff’ or strategic proxy in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, Australian Prime Minister John Howard openly endorsed the Bush Doctrine’s rationales of preemption, committed Australian troops to Iraq notwithstanding a clear opposition by the majority of his electorate, and spearheaded efforts to neutralise Jamaah Islamiah and other Islamist movements operating in Indonesia and other ASEAN countries (Tow 2004). Australia elevated its status from a small American ally historically prone to ‘punching above its own weight’ to a core American partner, matched only by Britain, Israel and perhaps Japan, in supporting US strategy throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond (Dibb 2003). Sceptics warned that allied loyalty and allied effectiveness must be differentiated (Bandow 2001; Dibb 2003; Sugita 2004). Japan and Australia, for example, both suffer from regional identity crisis stemming from their respective histories of either contesting neighbours or excluding them. The Bush Doctrine does nothing to alleviate these legacies and thus to sharpen the credentials of the American alliance network’s Australian and Japanese ‘offshore anchors’ to work with China and ASEAN to achieve regional cohesion and stability. It remains unclear to what extent those holding power within the American foreign policy establishment are prone to distinguish Australian and Japanese initiatives to support US global strategy in the Middle East from the two countries’, at best tenuous, ability to balance growing Chinese politico-strategic influence throughout Asia. Moreover, both Japan and Australia have interests in the region that are clearly independent of US concerns. The least desirable scenario from the perspective of Australian and Japanese policy planners would be the intensification of a crisis forcing them to ‘choose’ between alliance loyalty and those national self-interests that may contradict American strategic objectives. A future Taiwan crisis is an obvious example: will Australia and Japan risk supporting US military action against China’s People’s Liberation Army when their own economies are becoming increasingly grounded in China trade and investment and when they would garner virtually no support from other regional states for supporting such any such US action? The policy drawbacks for not doing so are clear: alienating their American ally to the point of jeopardising future alliance ties and acquiescing (at least tacitly) to China’s control of key East Asian littorals through which the oil that fuels much of Northeast Asia’s industrial might must pass. The costs for supporting such an American intervention, however, are equally unpalatable: incurring China’s permanent wrath and risking their exclusion from regional economic and institutional arrangements now being formulated in the world’s most prosperous region. That Japan and Australia are now moving to establish more independent politico-security relationships as a supplement to their regularly security consultations with US officials may be a sign of their mutual determination

88 William Tow to influence Washington’s future strategic behaviour in Asia from positions other than that of merely predictable and compliant allies (Searle and Kimae 2004). The Bush Doctrine’s importance to Asia thus remains unclear. Despite its initial promise to correlate American strategy towards North Korea, regional nuclear non-proliferation and allied collaboration more fully with Washington’s global strategic thinking, little substantive integration has actually occurred. Pyongyang continues to flout international public opinion by pursuing an independent nuclear weapons capability despite such schemes as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) having been established to neutralise it. Strategic change involving greater US-allied collaboration in Asia has occurred on the margins: incremental changes in Japanese strategic behaviour, a cosmetic acceleration of US–Indian security cooperation and a slightly more intrusive US strategic presence in areas adjacent to perceived areas of regional terrorist activity. But uncertainty within Washington and between Washington and its various allies still reigns over what really constitute core regional security threats. Although only a burgeoning nuclear power, North Korea qualifies as a bona fide threat because of its refusal to accept international norms it believes Washington orchestrates and controls. China and Russia, both possessing far more formidable nuclear forces that could clearly threaten the American alliance system and who hardly endorse the American version of an acceptable ‘world order’ do not. In the absence of doctrinal precision, the Bush Doctrine has been unable to generate strategic consensus in Asia. It has underscored America’s propensity to meet a wide array of undesignated threats with an open chequebook and with a combination of advertised intelligence and combat capabilities that could be proven to be more elusive than real if actually subjected to the test. As another presidential election year unfolded in the United States, policy officials in Washington were still searching for a more coherent Asian regional security posture that would complement US global strategy.

Defence transformation: the East Asian dimension That quest culminated in August 2004 with President Bush announcing ‘the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War’ (The White House 2004a). Once more the emphasis was on enhancing US strategic capabilities with new military technologies. Defence transformation, the President argued, would achieve ‘flexibility against uncertainty’ and provide the strategic foundation for achieving combat superiority at both the regional and global levels. In this context, hundreds of American facilities overseas would be closed and about 60,000 to 70,000 uniformed personnel would be brought back to US locations. The majority of such force cuts would be imple-

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mented in NATO Europe where the prospect of a major land war is becoming increasingly remote – but elements under the Pacific Command would also be restructured to fit the new strategic approach and reduce what US officials characterised as an American ‘military footprint’ in that region (USDoS 2004a). More specifically, fixed deployments of US land forces in Northeast Asia would be reduced and restructured to conform to American global strategy. As part of an evolving Future of the ROK–US Alliance Policy Initiative (FOTA), first announced in April 2003, US forces in South Korea would be reduced from 37,500 to approximately 25,000 personnel between 2004 and 2008. Those forces that remained would be shifted away from Seoul and sites adjacent to the North Korean border and redeployed in positions south of the Han River. This decision, according to Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, the commander-in-chief of US forces in the Pacific, was designed to improve US and South Korean capabilities ‘to enhance power projection, readiness, and deterrence both on the Peninsula and regionally’. Fargo noted that the United States would redeploy troops from South Korea ‘as combined forces are modernized and the Republic of Korea assumes a greater role in its own defense’. To implement this strategy, the United States is deploying rotational bomber elements to Guam and stationing submarines there. The US would commit US$11 billion to South Korea’s ‘Cooperative Self-Reliant Defense Plan’ (USDoS 2004b). Japan would also experience some US force reductions from Okinawa on the condition that other US troops could be redeployed there from the state of Washington and earmarked for rapid deployment force duties in the Middle East. Under the guise of ‘forces realignment’, the ‘Far East clause’ of the 1960 US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty, which constrains US use of Japanese facilities to ‘the security of Japan and the maintenance of peace and security in the Far East’ would need to be revised. By facilitating and supporting such US extra-regional operations, debate will be precipitated and sharpened within Japan over its own defence role and the need to revise its ‘peace constitution’ (Alford 2004). American plans to base a second forward-based aircraft carrier strike group ‘somewhere between Hawaii and Guam’ (the USS Kitty Hawk is now headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan) are also regarded by many observers as part of the US strategy to link defence transformation strategy to more traditional deterrence missions directed against North Korea or a possible China–Taiwan military confrontation (Asahi Shimbun 2004). Notwithstanding recent differences in US–South Korea relations over how best to deal with North Korea, the adjustment of America’s force presence on the peninsula cannot be considered as a US strategy of policy revenge, implementing ‘punishment by abandonment’. What can be argued is that defence transformation in Asia reflects more comprehensive problems in overall US global strategy. These relate especially to: (a) an American global force posture stretched to the limits by United States’

90 William Tow ongoing military operations in Iraq and by the continued deployment of approximately 400,000 US forces abroad; (b) the need to streamline complicated and often redundant command structures in Hawaii, Japan and South Korea; and (c) most fundamentally how to reconcile traditional alliance politics in the region with the new emphasis on more fluid and diverse force capabilities. The first two factors will be sorted out gradually as the US and Japan continue to negotiate and shape a new regional basing framework that complies with evolving US global strategic requirements. A judicious combination of main operating bases (MOBs), forward operating sites (FOS) that host small US military contingents and prepositioned supplies that can be expanded quickly and ‘cooperative security locations’ (often deemed as ‘lily pads’ in Pentagonese jargon) is still in the preliminary stages of development but is materialising gradually. The third factor – reconciling deterrence with strategies of pre-emption, intervention and peace building – relates to how the post-war hub and spokes system of US alliances in Asia can be adjusted to realise maximum strategic reassurance between the United States and its Northeast Asian allies while simultaneously avoiding misunderstandings with possible strategic rivals in that subregion. In an alliance context, US consultations with Japan and South Korea must be sustained but this will need to be done in the broader context of the politics of deterrence and diplomacy. More obvious is that Washington cannot achieve such policy integration by unilateralist approaches often favoured by the neo-conservative camp now dominant in Bush administration circles. Apart from dealing with issues of structure and resources, steps need to be taken by the Americans to reconcile the Northeast Asian dimensions of the new US strategy with its Southeast Asian policies. This will be challenging because widely different threat perceptions are now shaping US outlooks toward these two locales: neutralising security dilemmas from the East China Sea northward and confronting agents of terrorism to the south that have loosely connected but still somewhat amorphous connections to other Islamist movements beyond the region. This dichotomy acts to brake prospects that defence transformation will usher in a radical and distinctly hegemonic approach to East Asian strategy. While the American electorate may be less than enamoured with traditional European allies, it is still firmly in line with international public opinion that the views and concerns of allies must be weighed before the United States’ manpower and resources are again committed to war. Consequently, the prospect that the US will pre-empt against North Korea and Iran as the remaining designated members of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ is low; the likelihood that it would spearhead a new Southeast Asian front in the GWOT is even more remote. American strategic restraint in Southeast Asia, moreover, could work to reinforce the sense of American caution towards North Korea and ultimately encourage Washington to broaden its pursuit of ad hoc multilateral security politics, in and beyond the Korean peninsula.

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Underlying any such moderation is a general sense of American satisfaction with the Asia-Pacific security architecture, as it currently exists (Limaye 2004b). That architecture may well be adjusted in regard to numbers, structure and location. However, US officials have been consistent in their insistence that force transformation is synonymous with strategic adjustment rather than strategic retrenchment. So, too, is their desire to make multilateral institutions such as the ARF and (increasingly) the APEC relevant to US agendas through negotiation rather than through dictat. Illustrative is the administration’s recent endorsement of the 2003 APEC security initiatives in Bangkok. Speaking at a background briefing just prior to President Bush’s trip to Chile to attend the 2004 APEC Heads-of-State summit, a senior administration official insisted that the President was determined to realise ‘concrete implementation’ of commitments made in Bangkok the previous year that ‘primarily focused on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, eliminating transnational terrorist groups, and addressing other terrorist threats’. Many of the Bangkok initiatives, it was pointed out, were ‘not American initiatives’, but rather flowed from delegations representing both Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian member-states. The United States had, however, accepted that ‘there’s now a real buy-in’ to the idea of APEC having a legitimate security mission (USDoS 2004c).

Where to from here? The Bush Doctrine was unique in American foreign policy and to those in Asia and elsewhere that were compelled to react to its implications. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual strategic survey recently observed, ‘Bush and his lieutenants had limited patience for containment, partial solutions and messy compromise.’ They preferred to look at the world in state-centric terms rather than to focus on transnational threats and stateless terrorists. September 11 did not fundamentally change that outlook; it merely reconstituted along the lines of an ‘axis of evil’ states that were determined to acquire nuclear weapons and employ international terrorist networks for ‘striking at the West in general, the US in particular’ (IISS 2004b, 65–6). To US friends and allies in Asia, the President’s warning that you ‘are actually for us or against us’ has been taken literally by America’s closest allies (Australia and Japan) and by a Pakistan whose regime depends on US power for survival. It was less accepted by South Korea, India and the ASEAN states and received sceptically, even disdainfully, by China and North Korea. The proof of the Doctrine’s material success will be how successful a second Bush administration proves to be in amalgamating most of these players into a coherent, American-led defence framework intended to constrain the rest of the world from challenging US strategic primacy. A deeper test of Washington’s strategic viability in the Asian Pacific is whether the Bush

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administration’s strategic approach, revolutionary in context as it is, proves to underwrite regional stability in an area of the world where turbulence is increasingly ignored in achieving favour of economic development. On this question, all signs point to American strategic policy reaching a major crossroads. Bush has pursued truly revolutionary initiatives in Central Asia as part of his global war on terror, but these have often played into the hand of tribal warlords or despots who oppose his vision of advancing freedom and democracy. He has moderated his initial propensity to confront China but has intensified his opposition to North Korea. Ironically, this has led to him becoming more dependent than ever on Beijing to finesse a Korean solution at a time when US global strategy predicates a lessening of America’s military presence on the peninsula. It also has necessitated the taming of a highly nationalist leadership in Taiwan (just as the Eisenhower administration needed to do the same to Chiang Kai-shek half a century ago) and his acquiescence to Japan becoming a more ‘normal power’ on its own rather than on Washington’s terms and timetable. Australia has assumed a rather quixotic position as America’s showcase ally in a region that remains unconvinced that the US grand strategy offers it the best hope for resolving security issues and fulfilling its economic destiny. Even Canberra, however, may yet recognise alliance constraints if Sino-American tensions over Taiwan or Korea revert back to trends that were predominant before September 11. Equally important in this doctrinal saga is the Bush administration’s rejection of the more cautious ‘Powell Doctrine’ initially engendered by its own Secretary of State in favour of a neo-conservative ethos. When serving as Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff under this president’s father, Colin Powell evolved a geopolitical formula predicated on asking hard questions about the national interest and strategy: ‘Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all non-violent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analysed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences? (Danner 2004b). With hindsight, it is clear these questions were answered adequately before US forces intervened in Afghanistan near the end of 2001; it is equally apparent they were either not answered or considered very effectively before the US went to war against Iraq in March 2003. Either North Korea or Taiwan could well present the next test case, involving enormous risks for Asian stability and prosperity as well as for the future security of the United States itself. The most hopeful indication that a ‘bad ending’ can be avoided in this region is that American power is only one, although a very important, aspect of modern Asian security politics and that American influence is still contingent on Washington persuading allies and rivals alike to work

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with the US rather than compelling them to accept the vagaries of American policy and power at face value. Contrary to the Bush administration’s initial expectations, multilateralism is increasing in the Asia-Pacific, partly due to China’s greater acceptance of that approach for legitimising its own interests there and partly because many Asian states have shown their desire for pursuing both bilateral and multilateral approaches to trade and security. Although the vision of an Asian security community remains a contested one, its appeal still appears strong enough at this point in time to apply a real brake to the excesses of the Bush Doctrine and to encourage the spirit of strategic restraint offered by other policy alternatives. Even American power is limited in today’s world. The Bush administration’s search for viable global allies in Northeast Asia, for effective counter-terrorism partners in Southeast Asia and for genuine stability in its relationship with China involves trade-offs that impose their own set of constraints on US policies and actions. If the lessons of history fail to register as strongly with the second Bush administration as they should to avoid new crisis and conflicts in Asia, however, the imperatives of classical geopolitics might yet prevail.

Part II

Cases

6

Bush’s search for absolute security and the rise of China1 Peter Van Ness

How should we understand the relationship between the United States and China, the world’s only remaining superpower and the country seen to be its most likely challenger? China’s rise in relative economic power (growing at 9 percent a year for the past 25 years) confronts Bush’s militant neoconservative revolution. Who is challenging whom, and how are the two governments attempting to achieve their national objectives? What is the likelihood of a major conflict between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (the PRC)? Some analysts see the Sino-American dynamic, clearly the most important strategic relationship in the Asia-Pacific, as a contest between hegemons or as a balance of power, but it is more complicated than that.2 China is not a hegemon, at least not yet. Nor is Beijing attempting to balance U.S. power (Van Ness 2002). Instead, the U.S. and China propose competing visions of Asia’s future, differing understandings about the role of war in resolving disputes among strategic adversaries, and alternative approaches for achieving international stability in the Asia-Pacific region. For more than 30 years, beginning with Richard Nixon’s accommodation with Mao Zedong in 1971–2, capitalist America and communist China have cooperated with each other, off and on, but always with very different agendas in mind. This continues today. After 9/11, the PRC sided with the U.S. in Bush’s “war on terror,” but virtually every aspect of the Bush Doctrine (e.g., unilateralism, pre-emption, and missile defense) raises serious security problems for China. Faced with this series of strategic initiatives from Washington, China is responding in an unexpected way, and has now begun to lay down step-by-step an alternative strategic design to the Bush Doctrine. How relations between the United States and China evolve will probably be decisive in determining whether there is peace or war in the region. This essay will first analyze the major strategic implications of the Bush Doctrine, then examine the PRC’s role, and finally point to key, bellwether issues for the future.

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Understanding the Bush Doctrine From the presidential election campaign of 2000 through Bush’s first months in office before the attacks of 9/11, there were strong indications of what was to come. Bush had staffed his administration with conservative Republicans, who, especially on defense and security issues, had articulated a hard-line, unilateralist position. Their strategic priorities included: missile defense; withdrawal from the ABM Treaty; creation of a high-tech, rapid-reaction military with overwhelming scope and power; and a revitalizing of the U.S. nuclear weapons industry. Their worldview was a combination of a Manichean ideology about pitting good against evil, and a Realist commitment to the construction of such overwhelming capabilities (military, economic, and technological) that no other state or coalition of states would dare to confront the United States. At first, it looked as though the Bush leadership did not understand what in International Relations theory is called the “security dilemma,” the idea that when one country builds up its military capability to enhance its defense, often an adversary will understand that buildup as an offensive threat and increase its own military capability as a result, thereby igniting a vicious circle of arms racing in which both countries become less secure. Could it be that the Bush people simply did not understand the security dilemma? Probably not. Another view holds that the Bush people may understand aspects of the security dilemma only too well. In an interview in Beijing, Yan Xuetong, a leading Chinese strategic analyst, agreed that when the power capabilities of two states are roughly equal, the security dilemma is likely to have the expected outcome: namely, that neither side benefits and everyone is likely to lose. But when one state is much stronger than the others, that state might deliberately create a security dilemma between it and its perceived adversaries in order to intimidate and to dominate them. That, Yan argued, is what the Bush administration was trying to do. Writing after 9/11 but before the invasion of Iraq, David Hendrickson further clarified the logic of the Bush Doctrine as a “quest for absolute security.” Unilateralism and a strategic doctrine of preventive war are the key elements of this futile search. Hendrickson argued that these were “momentous steps,” standing in “direct antagonism to fundamental values in our political tradition,” which threaten “to wreck an international order that has been patiently built up for 50 years, inviting a fundamental delegitimation of American power” (2002, 1–2).3 Hendrickson concluded his essay with a quote from Kissinger that sums up the basic flaw in a search for absolute security: “the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others” (2002, 7). The invasion of Iraq, for the Bush leadership, became the prototype of this search for absolute security: “regime change” by military force to

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punish any adversary that dared to stand up to American power. The overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was intended to show the world that opposition to the Bush grand design was futile. Washington would have its way, through the use of overwhelming military force if necessary, regardless of the opposition of some of its major allies. On the other side of the same coin, Libya later became a model for the Bush administration of the “rogue state” that saw the light, in the face of U.S. intimidation, and agreed to give up its “weapons of mass destruction” and submit to the hegemon. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair played his part in the coalition with the United States by welcoming Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi into the community of nations, illustrating the point that the Bush Doctrine effort to transform world politics was capable of using both carrots and sticks. But meanwhile, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued blood-letting in the Israel–Palestine conflict demonstrated that there were limits to what even the most powerful state in the world could do in imposing its will on other nations (see, for example, Boseley 2004; Rashid 2004; Wilson, J. 2004; Wilson, S. 2004). Answering questions at his first press conference after his 2004 election victory, President Bush told the world: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the – after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election – and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is – you’ve heard the agenda: social security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror. (The White House 2004b) The Bush tax and regulatory policies that favor big business and the rich are to be expected in conservative Republican administrations, but other Bush initiatives set his administration apart. To my mind, domestically as well as in foreign affairs, George W. Bush’s government has proven to be dangerously different from earlier American conservative administrations in a number of important ways. These are just some indications of their radical agenda: 1

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what Bill Moyers (2005) calls a coupling of ideology and theology, a Christian fundamentalism that connects the President and many of his top administration officials with a key fundamentalist segment of their right-wing, Republican electoral support; a culture of endless war (“the global war on terror”) combined with domestic policies to sustain a high level of public anxiety and fear of a new terrorist attack – in effect, blatant fear-mongering by the President;

100 Peter Van Ness 3

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persistent and explicit manipulation of the communication media in a variety of significant ways (for an example of their distain for the press, a Bush administration aide is reported to have commented to a journalist: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality [meaning you journalists] – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” (quoted in Borger 2005; see also Schanberg 2005); domestic security legislation, like the Patriot Act, that curtails important civil liberties; frontal attacks on the judicial system and challenges to the basic principle of separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution by leading Republican officials when the courts fail to support their extremist views – exemplified by threats of political retribution by House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom Delay against judges who supported the decision not to continue the artificial feeding of the braindamaged woman Terri Schiavo in the controversial Florida case (see, for example, New York Times 2005); attacks on academic freedom in American universities in the form of legislation to permit students to sue their professors, allegedly to counter a liberal bias in those institutions (Krugman 2005); and perhaps most important, executive decisions (as in the case of policy to authorize the torture of prisoners taken in the “war on terror”) based on a legal assumption that the President of the United States is above the law in his role as commander-in-chief during wartime (Greenberg and Dratel 2005; see also Danner 2004a; Hersh 2004; Mayer 2005).

Taken together, these features describe a radical rightist administration that appears determined to reshape both domestic and international institutions to conform to its particular design. The contrast between the situation just after 9/11, when the United States received almost worldwide concern and empathy, compared with today is both sharp and potentially calamitous. While Bush won reelection at home in 2004 with markedly improved margins of support, including clear control of both houses of Congress, world public opinion has shifted sharply against his policies. More recently, domestic public support for Bush’s policies in Iraq has also declined (Baker and VandeHei 2005; see also PRC nd). And whereas the terrorist attacks of September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted almost universal sympathy for the victims and support for the President at that time, Bush has dissipated that “capital” over the past four years through an arrogant pursuit of absolute security for the United States, contempt for international law and institutions, and disdain for any who might dare to

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disagree with him. Loss of legitimacy is one important part of the price that is being paid for the disastrous Bush policies – legitimacy and the moral dimensions of power typically little understood by the ruling neocons (Tucker and Hendrickson 2004; Sengupta and Masood 2005). It is often remarked that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer any state or group of states with the political will and material capabilities to balance U.S. power; and following the delegitimation of socialism as a developmental alternative to capitalism, there is no longer any global, ideological alternative to market economics and representative political democracy. Where does one stand intellectually, people ask, to respond to the Bush Doctrine, other than to argue that the neoconservatives are not really practicing what they preach when they say that all they are really trying to do is to bring freedom and democracy to the world? On what substantive basis can a systematic alternative to the Bush Doctrine be built? One of the most significant responses to date has been the position taken by the People’s Republic of China.

The rise of China The Chinese leadership was aware of the hard-line political views of many of the people chosen for top positions in the new administration when George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001. Typical of right-wing opinion in the United States had been both an argument that China was the most likely challenger of the U.S. position as the world’s unipolar power and that the “China threat” should be a priority concern for the new administration. Although President Bush chose to identify “rogue states” as the main danger to the United States in his early speeches on national security, many analysts inferred that the main rogue that the administration had in mind was China. When the classified Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 was leaked to the press, it specifically identified China as one of seven possible targets for nuclear attack by the United States, and a PRC–Taiwan confrontation as one of three likely scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used (see McDonough 2003; Savage 2005). Administration commitments to both missile defense and preemption or preventive war further elevated Chinese concerns (Li Bin 2004).4 Official Chinese reaction to the Bush Doctrine has gone through three distinct stages that might be called avoidance, collaboration, and strategic response. At first, Chinese policy seemed designed to avoid confrontation with the new president. As the administration set about putting its foreign and security policies in place, Beijing could see that many of the Bush initiatives clashed with PRC interests. But rather than confront the new president directly, the Chinese appeared determined to stand aside from the hard-line bulldozer if possible, hoping, for example, that the early enthusiasms for missile defense and preventive wars against “rogue states” would pass in time.

102 Peter Van Ness However, 9/11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks in the United States provided China with an opportunity to find common ground with the new administration – to collaborate in the new “war on terror.” This second stage began almost immediately after the attacks, when President Jiang Zemin telephoned Bush to offer his sympathy and support. In effect, Beijing’s message was: We have terrorists, too (among China’s ten million Muslims), and we want to work together in the struggle against terrorism (You Ji 2004). When it came to invading Iraq, however, China joined France and Russia in opposition. If the United Nations Security Council had put a second resolution on Iraq to a vote, one that proposed to endorse a U.S.-led invasion, it was unclear whether China would have joined France and Russia in vetoing that resolution. But China clearly opposed the invasion. China did not join in other U.S. undertakings such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, the multilateral attempt to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems. Meanwhile, however, the PRC had begun to take its own initiatives, step by step to implement a full-blown third stage, a strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. The focus was on Asia. The core of the Chinese alternative was a cooperative security response to Bush’s unilateralist, preventive war strategy. In contrast to the American determination to reshape the world by force, China proposed to build cooperation among different groupings of states to create new international institutions by achieving win–win solutions to common problems. For Beijing, these initiatives were unprecedented. From dynastic times to the present, China’s leaders had adopted a largely Realist view of the world, and, like the United States, they had preferred to bilateralize their foreign relations: to play “the barbarians” off against each other in the Chinese version, or to build security ties like “spokes” in an American “wheel” in the U.S. version. Moreover, both in its dynastic past and its communist present, China had been no more benevolent toward its neighbors or more hesitant to use military force in its international relations than most major powers (see, for example, Whiting 1972, 1975; Johnston 1995). For China now to found its foreign relations on a multilateral, cooperative-security design was something new and important. By the mid-1990s, some analysts had begun to identify China as a socalled responsible power, pointing to Beijing’s increasing participation in international institutions like APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and then the World Trade Organization. China won the opportunity to host the Olympics in 2008, and in many different ways, Beijing began to signal that it was aware of its growing stake in the status quo, and was prepared to help in maintaining the strategic stability that was such an important prerequisite for the continued economic prosperity of East Asia. From this beginning emerged the strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. Some called it “China’s new diplomacy” (Medeiros and Fravel 2003) but it was much more than that. Beijing followed the establishment of

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“ASEAN+3” (yearly meetings between the ten member-countries of ASEAN with China, Japan, and South Korea) with the establishment of “ASEAN+1,” just China and the ASEAN countries. China took the lead in creating the first multilateral institution in Central Asia, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan),5 and worked to demonstrate to its neighbors that both economic and security cooperation could be based on a win–win design. In the name of “non-traditional” security cooperation to deal with terrorism and other transnational crime, Beijing even normalized its relations with its former adversary India,6 and conducted unprecedented, joint naval exercises with both India and Pakistan in the East China Sea near Shanghai in late 2003. Chinese commentators emphasized the cooperativesecurity theoretical basis for these initiatives: “China has been a proponent of mutual understanding and trust through international security cooperation and opposed any military alliance directed at any other countries,” and “China won’t accept any military cooperation that is directed at other countries” (Xiao Zhou 2003, 40–1). In October 2003, China signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (the first non-ASEAN country to do so), and negotiated a “strategic partnership for peace and prosperity” with the ten ASEAN member-countries. The objective is to build an East Asian Community founded on economic, social, and security cooperation (Beijing Review 2003).7 And, finally, Beijing’s offer to host the six-party negotiations to find a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is the classic example of China’s cooperative-security strategic response to date. The key distinguishing features of the two, very different approaches to dealing with the post-Cold War world are shown in Table 6.1. This is by no means a pacifist design. For example, there is absolutely no question but

Table 6.1 American and Chinese foreign policies compared Bush

PRC

Absolute security for the U.S.

Cooperative security (seeking to work with potential adversaries, rather than to make war against them)

Unilateral

Multilateral

Preventive war and regime change

Rules-based collective action, and conflictresolution diplomacy

Zero-sum strategic games

Positive-sum strategic games, designed to achieve win–win outcomes

Disdain for international law, treaties, and institutions

International institution-building

104 Peter Van Ness that China is seeking to modernize its military capability, and giving very serious thought to exactly what kind of military would be most effective in dealing with the dangers of today’s world, including a potential U.S. threat (see Shambaugh 2002). Paul Godwin notes that “a primary objective of the PLA is to exploit perceived US vulnerabilities” (Godwin 2004; see also Murray and Antonellis 2003). But I think it would be a mistake to understand the Chinese modernization project as predicated on launching an arms race with the United States – at least not yet. To date, Chinese nuclear doctrine has focused on maintaining a “minimum nuclear deterrent” capable of launching a retaliatory strike after surviving an initial nuclear attack, rather than building huge arsenals of more and more powerful nuclear weapons (Cirincione et al. 2002, 141–64). The Chinese are well aware of the great disparity in military capabilities between China and the United States, as well as the disparity in financial and technological capacities to sustain them. They are also aware of the argument, popular in some circles, that one of the key factors that finally broke the back of the former Soviet Union was its inability to sustain the arms race with the United States. They don’t want to fall into that kind of trap. Chinese analysts have described this strategy as a design for heping jueqi or “peaceful rise,” contrary to charges that a more powerful China should be seen as a threat. Zheng Bijian, former vice-president of the Central Chinese Communist Party School, says that the “peaceful rise” initiative is prompted by the conviction that “China must seek a peaceful global environment to develop its economy even as it tries to safeguard world peace through development” (Lam 2004). Building win–win relations with all of its neighbors is a central objective of this strategy. Beijing wants to demonstrate that closer trade, investment, and even security relations with China can be beneficial to its neighbors. Eric Teo Chu Cheow has suggested that this new strategy resembles the ancient Chinese tributary system. He writes: China’s Ming/Qing tributary system was based on three cardinal points: First, China considered itself the “central heart” of the region; this tributary system assured China of its overall security environment. Second, to ensure its internal stability and prosperity, China needed a stable environment immediately surrounding the Middle Kingdom. Third, the Chinese emperor would in principle give more favors to tributary states or kingdoms than he received from them; for this generosity, the emperor obtained their respect and goodwill. (Cheow 2004) Obviously, the international relations of the twentieth century are very different from China’s imperial relations during the Ming and Qing dynasties; but the idea of establishing relations with neighboring states in terms of

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mutually beneficial economic and security ties makes sense for everyone in Asia. Meanwhile, if successful, such a concert of power (in this case, among states that are formally equals rather than dependents of China) would help to maintain the strategic stability that China needs for its economic modernization. Critics, like Cao Siyuan, argue that to be successful, the “peaceful rise” strategy must be accompanied by substantial domestic political liberalization and greater transparency with respect to China’s military posture: “Diplomacy is often the extension of domestic policy. A leadership’s commitment to global fraternity and solidarity will be called into doubt if it is so reluctant to give its own people adequate human rights” (quoted in Lam 2004). Can China practice what it has begun to preach? Beijing’s new strategy has yet to be tested. How does it fit with China’s determined global search, despite the political cost, for access to vital energy resources, which includes building friendly ties with some of the most tyranical regimes in the world in Sudan, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe? (Buckley 2005; French 2005; Kahn 2005). How well will Beijing’s commitment to cooperative security hold up when disputes with neighbors over territory or political differences reemerge? And will it also apply to crossstrait relations with Taiwan? Yet when compared with Bush’s record of making war to achieve peace in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Chinese response has a substantial appeal, especially among the ASEAN countries where cooperative security ideas have long been popular. Clearly, China wants to avoid a conflict with the United States. The Japanese journalist Funabashi Yoichi (2003) quotes one Chinese thinktank researcher as saying: “We are studying the origin of the US–Soviet Cold War. Why did it happen? Was there no way to prevent it? Some see that a US–China cold war is inevitable, but what can we do to prevent it?” China’s strategic response to the Bush Doctrine does not confront the United States, and does not require China’s Asian neighbors to choose between Beijing and Washington, something none of them wants to have to do (Acharya 2003/4; Shambaugh 2004/5). It is not actually a design for what Realists would call “balancing” the United States, yet it challenges Washington to think and to act in a very different way when trying to resolve differences in international relations.

What is to come By the end of 2004, leaders in both the U.S. and the PRC had consolidated their power: George W. Bush was re-elected president; and Hu Jintao had finally moved former president Jiang Zemin into retirement from his Central Military Commission chairmanship, and assumed the preeminent leadership of China’s party, army, and state institutions. But there the similarities end. While Beijing has been preoccupied with trying to cool down its burgeoning economy, continually growing at the astonishing rate of some

106 Peter Van Ness 9 percent a year, the United States appears stretched to the breaking point to meet its global commitments as the world’s sole remaining superpower. And despite the usual statements made by U.S. and PRC leaders about Sino-America cooperation and harmony, Qian Qichen, the former PRC vice-premier and foreign minister, published an attack on the Bush Doctrine, just before the U.S. elections, that perhaps presented a more accurate picture of Chinese leadership thinking than the official Foreign Ministry statements. Although immediately disowned as in any sense reflecting official PRC views, Qian’s article charged that the Bush Doctrine had opened a Pandora’s box, and that it advocated that the U.S. “should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force, military force in particular.” Qian went on to argue that “The Iraq War has made the United States even more unpopular in the international community than its war in Vietnam” and that the administration was practicing “the same catastrophic strategy applied by former empires in history.” Qian concluded: “it is incapable of realizing [its] goal.” In his view, “the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance” (Qian 2004). China was not without its own problems. A society of 1.3 billion people ruled by a communist party that insists on a monopoly of political power while trying to manage an increasingly open market economy is never going to be short of problems. Corruption, growing income inequality, and horrific environmental problems lead the list (Wedeman 2004; Hong Kong Standard 2005). Meanwhile, in purchasing-power parity terms (PPP), China is already the second largest economy in the world. It is also second to the U.S. in energy consumption, having shifted over the past decade from an oil exporter to an oil-importing country, now dependent for some 40 percent of its crude oil from imports, which might rise to as much as 75 percent by 2025 (Business Week 2004; Woodall 2004). China was perhaps suffering from too much exuberance, but the U.S. appeared increasingly overextended. Paul Kennedy warned long ago about the problem of what he called “imperial overstretch,” when a state’s geopolitical ambitions exceed its material capabilities to sustain such ambitions (1987, 514–15). For example, in early 2001 when Bush first took office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a federal budget surplus of $5 trillion over the next ten years; but following what The Economist has characterized as Bush’s “binge of tax-cutting and spending,” economists are now projecting instead a $5 trillion budget deficit (The Economist, 2004b; see also Foreign Affairs 2005, 194–200). Meanwhile, the burden of U.S. military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, where tours have been extended to keep sufficient troops on the ground, appears to preclude any new “pre-emptive” assaults on additional countries. China, for its part, is concerned about Japanese participation in the U.S. missile defense system, the new legislation to permit Japanese forces to

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play a larger supporting role to Bush initiatives, and the possible revision of Japan’s pacificist constitution (Tanter 2005); but except for possible miscalculation over the issue of Taiwan, there appears to be little likelihood of direct confrontation between the United States and China over other issues in the region. Beijing and Washington understand each other much better today than they did in 1995–6 when China launched its “missile exercises” in a failed effort to influence presidential elections in Taiwan, and since then, they have established a variety of communication links in order to avoid misperception and miscommunication if tensions in the Taiwan Strait should reemerge. Taiwan will continue to be an issue in Sino-American relations, but it is the “axis of evil” states (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea) that should provide the best indicators of their strategic competition. China and the United States take very different positions with respect to each of the three states demonized by President Bush as an “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union Address, and each one raises a separate kind of problem for the Bush Doctrine. The most serious and immediate case is, of course, Iraq, the administration’s intended lesson to the world about “pre-emption” or, more accurately, preventive war. China opposed the U.S. invasion and totally rejects the doctrine. The PRC, like the other major powers, fears a disruption in petroleum imports from the Middle East if the U.S. intervention fails and Iraq descends into chaos, but China clearly does not want the U.S. policy of unilateral military intervention to prevail. The nuclear programs in Iran raise a different issue, since it is unlikely that the U.S. will have the military capability in the near future to threaten an invasion of the country. It is possible that Bush might endorse at some point an Israeli air assault on the Iranian nuclear facilities, like the Israeli “surgical strike” on Iraq’s plutonium-producing Osiraq research reactor in June 1981; but rather than a site for a new preventive war, Iran is currently a test case for Under-Secretary of State John Bolton’s policy of “counterproliferation,” a kind of coercive diplomacy strategy to force Iran to give up its potential nuclear-weapons capability, with the hope that Tehran might be intimidated into opting for a Libyan future (Bolton 2004). China, like many of the European allies, rejects this approach in favor of a more conventional “arms control” or “nonproliferation” approach (Li Bin 2004). Finally, by hosting the Six Party Talks on North Korea, China directly confronts the Bush Doctrine with its own “cooperative security” approach to conflict resolution (Bleiker 2005; Van Ness 2005). China and the United States agree that it is vitally important to stop the DPRK from becoming a nuclear-weapons power. That agreement is the basis for their collaboration in the negotiations on North Korea – and their partners in the Talks (South Korea, Japan, and Russia) also agree – but they approach the problem and offer possible solutions to the crisis in very different ways.

108 Peter Van Ness For China, the DPRK is something of a recalcitrant ally which Beijing would like to help reform and sustain in power, while for the U.S., North Korea is part of the “axis of evil” and a designated potential target for attack by American nuclear weapons. The Bush administration understands the issue in classic Realist, zero-sum terms, and sees the Talks as a potential “coalition of the willing” to coerce Pyongyang into either compliance or collapse. But the coalition thus far has been unwilling, especially China and South Korea. By contrast, Beijing wants to achieve a cooperative-security solution, which includes and supports a non-nuclear DPRK, and which might serve as the foundation for new multilateral security institutions in Northeast Asia. Four years after President Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union speech in January 2002, it is still unclear whether the first priority of American policy is “regime change” or a verifiable arrangement for denuclearizing the DPRK. If in fact it is regime change, then North Korea is most unlikely to give up its nuclear programs voluntarily, and China will not help. On the other hand, if the United States were willing to demonstrate unequivocably a commitment to negotiate a peaceful solution, there is a good probability of success for the Six Party Talks.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in World Policy Journal 21:4, Winter 2004/5. 2 For several Realist assessments of the rise of China, see Bernstein and Munro (1997); Gertz (2000); Kaplan (2005). 3 Hendrickson makes an important distinction between pre-emption and preventive war. Pre-emption is the use of force against a country presenting an imminent threat, while in terms of Secretary Rumsfeld’s concept of capabilities-based threat analysis, preventive war is the use of force against a country which has the capabilities to constitute a threat. 4 Paul Godwin argues that “assuring a reliable second-strike capability in the shadow of US ballistic missile defense programs is unquestionably China’s highest priority” (Godwin 2004). 5 For the Shanghai Cooperation Organization statement on terrorism, see Beijing Review (2002). See also Chien-peng Chung (2004). 6 For agreements signed and a chronology of Sino-Indian contacts, April–June 2003, see China Report (2003). 7 China: An International Journal, published by the East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore, has taken a special interest in China’s relations with ASEAN. In each issue of this new journal, there is a final section in which a chronology of events and documents on the relationship are published.

7

Japan and the Bush agenda Alignment or divergence? Aurelia George Mulgan

Japan’s Peace Constitution and its alliance with the United States have anchored Japan securely to US policy in East Asia. Throughout the postwar period, Japan has followed a consistent strategy of bandwagoning with US power and shaping its own security policy as a major ally of the United States (Ito 2004, 21). During the Cold War, Japan occupied a key geostrategic position in US containment of the Soviet Union; in the post-Cold War period, Japan has positioned itself within the US hegemonic order in East Asia. Even when Japan’s rise to economic pre-eminence enabled it to mount a nascent challenge to US predominance in East Asia, it opted for the role of ‘supporter, not a challenger’ (Inoguchi 1986). This chapter begins by examining how Japan has benefited from integration into US strategic policy in East Asia. It then analyses the impact of the Bush administration on Japanese security policies by detailing developments in Japanese defence and clarifying their broader significance. The last section examines emerging problems in the bilateral relationship created by the logic of Bush administration policies, highlighting issues of convergence and divergence between Japanese and US security and foreign policy interests.

Japan and the postwar order in East Asia Japan’s bandwagoning strategy has served its national interests, including its security interests, in several important ways. The bilateral relationship has yielded asymmetrical security and economic benefits, furnishing not only a security guarantee but also significant economic and trade advantages. In the early postwar decades, it afforded Japan the luxury of the Yoshida Doctrine, which allotted primacy to economic advancement whilst allowing a reduced burden of national defence. US strategic policy in East Asia, of which the Japan–US security treaty system (Nichibei anzen hoshô taisei) is a key component, has also brought Japan substantial associated benefits. First, American power and presence acted as a stabilising force in the region by maintaining a balance of

110 Aurelia George Mulgan power, muting regional rivalries, containing territorial disputes and reducing security dilemmas. Second, by underwriting peace and security in the region, the United States furnished East Asian countries, including Japan, with an environment favourable to their economic growth and industrialisation, as well as to the development of intra-regional trade, aid and investment ties. Third, Japan’s subordinate role in the US security architecture facilitated its diplomatic and economic reintegration into the region by ‘ensuring other nations . . . against a revival of Japanese aggression’ (Calder 2004, 137). Japan was able to revamp its role and image in East Asia as ‘one of the bulwarks of peace and stability’ (Campbell 2000, 56). A militarily dependent Japan was much less threatening to regional states than a militarily independent Japan. The combination of an exclusively defensive posture and dependence on US forward-deployed deterrence helped to allay fears of Japan’s remilitarisation and militarism (Hughes and Fukushima 2004, 74). In particular, the notion of the security treaty being a ‘cap in the bottle’ against a ‘rearmed and resurgent Japan’1 engendered support from China for the US–Japan alliance as the foundation of the US hegemonic order in East Asia. This not only facilitated Japan’s re-engagement with China but also committed China to the strategic status quo. Lastly, under ‘cover’ of the US–Japan security relationship, Japan has been able to pursue the unspoken agenda of the postwar period: the extended and potentially tortuous process of military normalisation. Whilst militating against Japan’s full security autonomy, the alliance has acted as the main instrument of Japan’s defence normalisation and the primary instrument of change in Japan’s security policies. Japan’s obligatory responses to pressure from the United States for a greater contribution not only to its own defence but also increasingly to US regional strategy has characterised the relationship from the time of its inception. In this fashion, the US–Japan alliance has provided a framework of opportunity to extend Japan’s security role. The build-up of Japan’s defence capabilities and diversification of its defence roles have been rationalised as a contribution to the US–Japan alliance which has helped to validate Japan’s security-policy changes and rearmament process, both in the eyes of the Japanese public and in the region as a whole (Green and Cronin 1999, xiv). Rather than a forerunner of a Japanese bid for hegemony, however, Japan’s enhanced roles have been embedded within the structure of US power. Japan has chosen to cooperate rather than compete with the United States (Ito 2004, 36).

Japan’s security policy under the Bush administration The impact of the Bush administration on Japanese security policy has been to build on, extend and accelerate the evolutionary process of

Japan and the Bush agenda 111 Japan’s emergence as a regional and global military player. The process of ‘mission creep’ involving an incremental expansion and diversification of Japanese security roles has been taken further than ever before. The emerging trend is not only enhanced cooperation between Japan and the United States in the security sphere but also de facto ‘globalisation’ of the alliance, as Japanese support for the US military has extended from putative regional contingencies to actual global ones. The following section outlines Japan’s main actions and commitments under the alliance during the first Bush administration and elaborates on their significance. Japanese forces participated in the US-led ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (OEF) in Afghanistan under the October 2001 Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law, which authorised the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) to provide non-combat assistance to US and other forces engaged in the war on terrorism.2 Maritime Self-Defence Force (MSDF) vessels were dispatched to the Indian Ocean to provide rear-area logistical support, such as supplying fuel to US and British naval forces conducting operations in Afghanistan, while the Air Self-Defence Force (ASDF) transported supplies for the US military to Guam and Diego Garcia. This was the first wartime deployment of the SDF in which it provided support to parties in a conflict. The Japanese government also dispatched the Ground Self-Defence Forces (GSDF) to Iraq under the July 2003 Law Concerning the Special Measures on Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance in Iraq. Like the action under the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law, the functions of the SDF in ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ (OIF) are strictly non-combat as are their areas of deployment.3 The SDF contribution in Iraq combines peacekeeping activities (humanitarian and reconstruction assistance) with support for US strategic objectives in the international arena. In reality, it amounts to little more than a token political gesture for the sake of shoring up the alliance. On balance, the Japanese forces are a military liability rather than a strategic asset.4 The action undertaken by the SDF in both OEF and OIF falls within a new conceptual ‘grey zone’ in Japanese defence terminology called ‘security cooperation’ and ‘international cooperation’, under which support for America’s international forays is now depicted as a form of ‘international cooperation’. In line with Prime Minister Koizumi’s slogan ‘the Japan–US alliance in the world’, this development obfuscates the clear distinction maintained in the past between support for the United States in alliancebased activity and engagement in international peacekeeping, which is an arm of Japanese diplomacy. The reference to ‘international cooperation’ forges a genealogical link with Japan’s international peace cooperation activities under the 1992 Law Concerning Cooperation for UN Peace Keeping Operations (PKO) and Other Operations. Further, the Japanese government opportunistically hitched the SDF activities in OEF to a UN

112 Aurelia George Mulgan Security Council resolution, which it calculated would engender greater domestic and international legitimacy for such action. In 2004, Japan agreed to a revised Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) with the United States.5 Significantly ammunition was added to the list of goods for reciprocal provision,6 while the situations in which logistic support, supplies and services might be provided were extended to include ‘operations that are necessary for repelling armed attack against Japan in armed attack situations or situations in which armed attack is anticipated, or operations as specified in Article 6’ (emphasis added). Article 6 includes a reference to ‘operations . . . conducted by the Self-Defense Forces of Japan or the Armed Forces of the United States of America . . . to further the efforts of the international community to contribute to international peace and security, to cope with large-scale disasters, or for other purposes’ (emphasis added). In addition, the revised ACSA provides the American armed forces with access to the use of facilities, including the temporary use of buildings, land and training facilities in Japan. The new agreement puts Japan in the position of assisting the United States with military materiel in regional and international contingencies. Japan is one of only two Asian nations (the other is Singapore) to take part in the Bush administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict the illegal transfer of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In September 2003, the Japan Coast Guard participated in an exercise with Australian, French and US naval and coast guard ships in the Coral Sea, which simulated a raid on a ship transporting contraband chemicals. Senior SDF members attended only as observers because the MSDF was not legally permitted to stop and inspect ships in peacetime. In October 2004, Japan itself hosted a PSI exercise with the Japan Coast Guard, once again, playing the major role,7 interdicting and inspecting the suspect ship as well as searching and confiscating suspicious materials (Daily Yomiuri, 29 October 2004). MSDF ships remained in the background, conducting a separate, limited inspections exercise based on the ‘research’ provision of the Defence Agency Law (ibid.). In December 2004, however, it was decided that the MSDF would actually participate in the drill to be sponsored by Singapore and conducted in the Malacca Straits in mid-2005. Following a May 2003 agreement between President Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi to accelerate cooperation on missile defence (MD), the Japanese government announced in December that it would deploy a multi-layered missile defence system: the US-developed Standard Missile3 (SM-3) and the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3). Over a period of four years, four MSDF Aegis-equipped destroyers will deploy the SM-3 interceptors, while four PAC-3 systems will be deployed around Tokyo by the ASDF. This followed an earlier decision to engage in joint research with the United States on missile defence technologies, which began in 1999 and which will shift to co-development in 2006.8 In December 2004,

Japan and the Bush agenda 113 the export to the United States of MD-related weapons components developed by Japanese companies was made an exception to the 1967 ban on weapons exports. Perhaps the most significant aspect of these major developments during the first Bush administration is that each either puts Japan on the cusp of violating its own ban on collective self-defence or is in technical breach of the ban. Officially, government policy has held that the ban ‘does not allow Japan to provide military support to another state in circumstances where Japan itself is not under attack’ (Jimbo 2002, 58). However, the Japanese government’s position that its troops can provide non-combat support for the US military engaged in activities outside of the defence of Japan signifies that the official interpretation of what constitutes collective self-defence is being whittled down to accommodate new situations. For example, the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law was officially described by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) as enabling Japan to undertake ‘cooperation and support activities for the armed forces of the United States and other countries, which aim to eradicate the threat of the terrorist attacks’ (MOFA 2001, emphasis added). In comprising measures in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States (Foreign Press Center 2001), Japan could be regarded as assisting the United States in homeland defence, which ‘is technically an exercise of the right to collective defense’ (Policy Council 2004, 16). SDF participation on the fringes of the war in Afghanistan as well as its activities in Iraq and other recent policy developments including the revised ACSA suggest that only a core element of the definition of collective self-defence remains intact. This core disallows the use of force by the Japanese military in support of the United States (or other states) – including combat-zone logistical support for those using force – and quarantines the independence of the Japanese military command.9 By shifting the tripwire, the Japanese government has been able to maintain the fiction that the ban on collective self-defence has not been breached. Regional and global security developments and ensuing requests from the United States for Japanese cooperation have induced a process of ‘creative reinterpretation’ allowing the SDF to participate in de facto collective self-defence (Sato 2003, 2). Japan’s missile defence programme introduces a significant new dimension to this question. While the Japanese government insists on an independent system that defends only Japanese territory, and while the United States is primarily focused on the defence of overseas bases and the US homeland, various aspects of the programme will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Japan to avoid being drawn into the collective defence of both US forces in East Asia and the continental United States itself, despite official denials.10 In order to optimise the effectiveness of the Japanese system, some level of operational coordination with the US system will be necessary,

114 Aurelia George Mulgan involving command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (‘C4I’) and a high degree of interoperability of equipment (Jimbo 2002, 56). In some areas, US inputs will be crucial to fill the technological gaps in Japan’s system, namely its reliance on American sensor technology, including early warning satellites, to detect and track incoming ballistic missiles (Hughes 2004, 108–14; Hughes and Fukushima 2004). Japan and the United States are already in the preliminary stages of establishing data-sharing processes for the interception of ballistic missiles, which is a major step towards operational integration.11 If Japan were to provide targeting information to US forces, for example, it would constitute collective self-defence. Missile defence thus provides the bilateral technology linkages and integrated operational systems that will lead inexorably to collective self-defence by Japan. For the United States, cooperation and collaboration with Japan on missile defence is a means to ‘bind’ Japan into US regional strategy in Northeast Asia through the formation of an integrated region-wide MD system that could be deployed in event of conflict with either North Korea or China. Missile defence is also an important mechanism for reinforcing the interconnectivity of Japan to US homeland defence. If Japanese and US Aegis-based missile defence worked seamlessly together as a Navy Theatre-Wide (NTW) system in the Northwest Pacific, it would tie Japan into the defence of US territory given that the NTW system is proceeding as the Bush administration’s sea-based, mid-course programme, which aims to knock down incoming missiles heading for the United States in their mid-course phase. Although not all of the new developments in Japanese defence have been based on alliance considerations alone, each policy advance is nonetheless seen by both Japan and the United States as a constructive step towards consolidating the bilateral security relationship. The Koizumi administration went out on a political limb to support the United States in Iraq. It did so in order to strengthen the American commitment to Japanese defence in the face of the heightened North Korean threat which, given Japan’s impotence in the face of a ballistic missile attack, makes Japan singularly reliant on US deterrence.12 The 2004 draft report of the Koizumi administration’s advisory Council on National Security and Defence Capability points out: ‘It is imperative to maintain the deterrence capability based on the Japan-U.S. security arrangements.’13 Indeed, ‘strengthening deterrence’ has become the mantra of a range of government spokespersons, including Koizumi himself. From the perspective of Japan’s alliance security dilemma,14 its sense of increased vulnerability and concern that the United States might not come to its aid in the event of a targeted attack on Japan has magnified its fears of abandonment. Broader geostrategic considerations are also coming into play. Japan is increasingly committed to the maintenance of US hegemony in East Asia as a form of military power balancing against China. Although Sino-

Japan and the Bush agenda 115 Japanese regional rivalry falls short of full-scale military competition, their relationship is progressively characterised by competition at other levels, such as endeavours to consolidate their respective diplomatic and economic spheres of influence in East and Southeast Asia as well as concerns about relative gains and losses in national power. Japan is more and more determining its foreign, defence and foreign economic policies against China, particularly in the light of Chinese maritime incursions into Japan’s EEZ and territorial seas. One of the principal factors guiding the formulation of Japan’s 2004 National Defence Programme Guideline (NDPG), which will determine Japan’s military force structure, defence spending and equipment acquisition program over the next decade, is the heightened perception of China as a potential threat. Such developments amplify the prospect of a serious security dilemma emerging between Northeast Asia’s two major powers. The US–Japan security relationship has been helped along by the personal chemistry between Prime Minister Koizumi and President Bush, which is reminiscent of the Ron–Yasu (Reagan–Nakasone) relationship of the mid-1980s. At the time, favourable interpersonal dynamics between the two leaders facilitated important evolutionary developments in the US–Japan security alliance.15

Issues of alignment and divergence Koizumi’s willingness to follow Bush’s lead has given rise to several problematic issues in Japanese security and foreign policies. Differences on these issues can be discerned within the Japanese policy community, while in some areas there are intimations of a divergence between Japanese and US interests and approaches. First, changes in US strategic perceptions post-9/11 and the failure of some NATO alliance partners to provide support to the US invasion of Iraq have significantly recast the Bush administration’s attitude towards alliances in ways that are not necessarily compatible with Japan’s. The United States is placing priority on ‘coalitions of the willing’ that include alliance and non-alliance partners who contribute to security goals defined exclusively by the United States. Not only are alliance partners being submerged within larger coalitions, but alliances themselves are also undergoing transformation in US strategic perceptions ‘into ad hoc relationships of cooperation, which change their combinations and forms depending on issues’ (Policy Council 2004, 16). Such coalition arrangements are one-way streets. They are organised on American terms and contain no sense of reciprocal obligation unlike alliance arrangements. They are perceived solely as instruments to ensure US primacy. In this lack of reciprocity, and in the non-negotiability of alignment with US strategic objectives, the Bush administration appears to have shifted from open to closed hegemony by foreclosing opportunities

116 Aurelia George Mulgan ‘for partner states to influence the way hegemonic power is exercised’ (Ikenberry and Mastanduno 2003, 7). Incentives for reciprocity have been replaced by threats and sanctions to engender support for US goals. This represents a form of hegemonic excess that considerably disturbs some elements of the Japanese policy community. At the same time as the relative significance of formal alliance arrangements has declined in US strategic thinking, the demands and expectations of allies have increased. The nature of the post-9/11 world is such that alignment with US objectives, including the war on terror, is seen as a crucial measure of the health of America’s bilateral relations with other countries. Cooperation with US strategic objectives has become the price of maintaining alliances on a positive footing. In this respect, the United States has fundamentally revised the terms on which it conducts its security relations with ‘friendly’ states. A new paradigm of relations has emerged in which political commitment underpinning military and other kinds of contributions to US-led coalitions is the critical factor shaping US government attitudes. The Bush Doctrine provides no middle ground for allies; they are either ‘on board’ or not. The new standard has added tremendous political pressure to what are the normal expectations of allies in a way that can exceed their formal obligations under alliance agreements. It has certainly forced Japan to go well beyond its formal obligations under the security treaty and in fact the treaty – at least in terms of its wording – has become almost an irrelevance for the United States except as the basis for America’s claims on Japan. Second, while Japan has gone further than ever before in providing support for US strategic operations in the global arena, its contributions fall short of the kind of enhanced military cooperation that the United States desires. The key constitutional obstacle is the Japan’s long-standing official policy that exercising the right of collective self-defence is prohibited under the current interpretation of Article 9. The government’s formal position on this issue remains unchanged. US pressure on Japan to exercise its right of collective self-defence has intensified under the Bush administration. The same call is emanating from specific groups in the Japanese policy community.16 Such pressure is exacerbating Japan’s fundamental defence dilemma: it wants to become a ‘normal’ state, but it does not necessarily want a ‘normal’ alliance with the United States (George Mulgan 2005). A ‘normal’ alliance, in the current climate, would necessitate almost automatic participation alongside the US military in regional and global conflict. Given the transformative leadership of the Bush administration and its preparedness to contemplate the pre-emptive use of force, many Japanese are fearful of being drawn into conflict that is incompatible with their own security and foreign policy interests. Despite a strong relationship at the official level, Japan’s support for the Bush doctrine is equivocal and ambivalent. A prominent group in Japan’s policy community, the Japan Forum on International Relations,

Japan and the Bush agenda 117 consisting of academic, business and political leaders and journalists, has advised, ‘Japan must decide the extent to which it can share the Bush Doctrine, if the United States continues its adherence to that doctrine’ (Policy Council 2004, 16). The ban on Japanese military forces participating in collective selfdefence has until now mitigated the alliance security dilemma for Japan because it enables Japan to avoid the worst aspects of entrapment: the commitment of war-fighting troops to US-initiated conflict. Although the inherent asymmetry of the alliance leaves Japan little room to veto cooperation in specific contingencies, it has retained the right to define the nature of its contribution. The self-imposed strictures under the Japanese constitution have been a vital protective device in this regard. Japan has done what it had to do but not much more. For most Japanese, being a ‘normal’ state primarily means legitimising the status of the armed forces within the domestic polity and being able to deploy them in the full range of defensive and offensive operations in the pursuit of Japan’s own security interests.17 It does not necessarily mean being a junior partner to the United States in the pursuit of American regional and global strategy, although the alliance has been an important context in which normalisation has been advanced. The primary objective of the Japanese military and Defence Agency has been to seize various opportunities to legitimise the overseas dispatch of the SDF and to widen and diversify the nature of their international participation (Midford 2004b, 13). This is part of a broader agenda to cast off the historical legacy of World War II by restoring both the domestic and international status of the Japanese military forces. The Japanese government under the ruling LDP has sought to exploit external factors (hostile strategic developments and foreign pressure, or gaiatsu, from the United States) as the primary instrument of Japan’s military emancipation. The ascendancy of defence hawks in the Koizumi administration, which includes the expanding power of the Defence Agency at the expense of MOFA, and the political and biological death of prominent ‘doves’ in the LDP, have considerably assisted the implementation of this agenda in recent years.18 One of its near-term goals is the passage of generic legislation for sending the SDF abroad, rather than having to rely on ad hoc pieces of legislation when particular opportunities arise. However, for other important actors such as Okada Katsuya, leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its vice-president, Ozawa Ichirô, the key objective of ‘normality’ lies elsewhere. It is the ability to participate in UN-authorised collective security operations rather than US-led collective defence operations. Deliberations on constitutional reform within the wider party confirm that it envisages only collective security operations in which the Japanese military can use force under a UN mandate. The LDP’s coalition partner, the Kômei Party, is willing to allow the dispatch of the SDF to participate in multinational

118 Aurelia George Mulgan forces based on UN Security Council resolutions, but only if they do not engage in combat. Although the Nakasone government in the 1980s embarked on the road to collective self-defence by accepting roles and missions for the SDF in a joint US–Japanese defence of Japan and the Northwest Pacific against the Soviet Union, the SDF has not been configured to fight in US-led coalitions as a long-range expeditionary force, but has been structured and financed almost exclusively to defend Japanese territory (Hughes and Fukushima 2004, 76). Nor have US and Japanese command and control systems been integrated. These operate in a parallel but independent fashion (Hughes 2001, 22). Some of Japan’s most acute concerns about entrapment relate to its support for the United States in a potential conflict with China over Taiwan. Whether or not Japan will be bound into collective action against China is still moot under the 1997 revised US–Japan defence cooperation guidelines. These have clarified the nature and extent of Japanese support for the United States in regional contingencies (i.e. ‘situations in areas surrounding Japan’) and codified these specific support functions into Japanese law, but the Japanese government has never given a clear indication whether the guidelines and related laws would be invoked in a China–Taiwan conflict. Even if they were invoked, they would place severe restrictions on the nature of the Japanese participation. Operational cooperation by the SDF would be limited to non-combat functions (minesweeping, surveillance and intelligence-gathering), while other activities would involve only logistical support in rear areas. What is more, under law, any such action would have to be linked back directly to the security of Japan. ‘Situations in areas surrounding Japan’ are defined as having ‘important security implications’ for Japan. This is understood to mean ‘likely to result in a direct military attack on Japan if not responded to immediately’, making it an unequivocally Japan-centred provision (George Mulgan 2005, 67). In a contingency, the Japanese government would make an independent and autonomous decision whether any ‘situation’ impacted on Japan’s peace and security and what action it would take. In theory, the provisions leave Japan’s options open in a regional contingency involving Taiwan; a move to collective self-defence would not. Third, doubts about where the interventionism of the Bush administration might lead have played a key role in pushing some Tokyo elites towards wanting greater independence within the alliance. Such sentiments reflect concern about the nature of American actions and whether they violate international law (such as the PSI and invasion of Iraq), the greater sense of constriction within Japan itself (particularly under the Koizumi administration) that it is not possible to oppose the United States, Japan’s stubborn attachment to and faith in non-military instruments as the key to securing its regional and global interests, and fears that too close a tilt towards the United States is compromising Japan’s wider

Japan and the Bush agenda 119 foreign-policy interests. Following the Bush re-election, MOFA officials voiced their concerns about the imbalance that had crept into government policy: ‘One can only say officially that there is no contradiction between the Japan–US alliance and Japan’s foreign policy. But in reality, Japan’s tilting only toward the United States, some would argue, has narrowed the scope of Japan’s foreign policy and created an obstacle to our international cooperation’ (Mainichi Shinbun, 6 November 2004). Some Japanese commentators are calling for an ‘independent alliance management policy’ that entails Japan’s having ‘its own security policy as an independent nation’ (Policy Council 2004, 18). Others advocate a more equal alliance: ‘As an equal partner of the defense alliance, Japan should not blindly accept U.S. policy decisions’ (Keizô Nabeshima, Japan Times, 11 August 2004). Such a standpoint reflects a more assertive Japanese nationalism that has manifested in recent years (Matthews 2003), and which, in the context of the alliance, has been magnified by problems associated with US bases and a Japanese desire to revise the Status of Forces Agreement that governs the legal status of US troops in Japan. Considerable resentment has been generated by the actions of US Forces Japan (USFJ), which are regarded by many as compromising Japanese sovereignty. Anger is directed at the Japanese government’s seeming inability to deal with the US forces on the basis of equality and in a way that defends the interests of localities hosting the bases. An intra-party lobby group of ruling LDP Diet politicians has formed for the specific purpose of pressuring the government to revise the Status of Forces Agreement to create ‘a truly equal partnership’ between Japan and the United States. A key figure in the group, Shiozaki Yasuhisa, argues ‘that Tokyo should not take orders from Washington’ (Nikkei Weekly, 27 September 2004). Nationalistic sentiment is also evident in actions that provide the basis for greater autonomy in Japanese defence. Japan sees greater independence in the alliance as being attainable by building up its own capability to defend itself. US tendencies towards unilateralism and fears that Washington will not protect Japan on all issues of importance to Japan, especially regional and territorial issues that do not directly involve US interests, means that Tokyo’s security elites are pursuing a greater capability for the nation to defend itself while at the same time fortifying the alliance. Accordingly, the Japanese government has been pursuing a significant advancement in its own military posture. For example, it has taken active steps towards greater defence independence in dealing with the North Korean threat: the launching of spy satellites whose principal purpose is to give warning to Japan and to monitor North Korean preparations for a missile launch; canvassing the possibility of developing a capability to mount pre-emptive strikes against North Korean missile sites; and calls from some quarters for the government to consider the option of Japan’s possessing its own nuclear deterrent.

120 Aurelia George Mulgan Other groups have proposed that Japan should develop ‘a minimum independent self-defense capability to the Self Defense Forces in the strategic necessities of the time’ (Policy Council 2004, 18).19 Some are pushing for Japan ‘to have its own intelligence system to permit the nation to make independent decisions about the world situation’ (Policy Council 2004, 18). These developments would strengthen Japan’s independent selfdefence system (Policy Council 2004, 20) and reflect consideration of more comprehensive deterrent capabilities for itself. The DPJ’s security policy chief, Maehara Seiji, embodies this perspective: he advocates ‘a pro-active security stance and a more powerful military that can defend Japan by itself (emphasis added) (Japan Times, 19 June 2003). The discussion of such policy options represents the emergence of a Japanese hedging strategy in the event that the government decides to pursue a more independent foreign policy. While Japan has endeavoured to buttress the US commitment to the defence of Japan by offering military support to US-led conflict, it is simultaneously upgrading its own military capabilities, which, over the longer term, opens up the possibility of Japan’s pursuing a more autonomous posture, with a long-term potential for complete defence autonomy. Fourth, Japanese and US views have diverged on the importance of multilateral organisations in maintaining international security and on the value of international cooperation engendered through multilateral frameworks. As a secondary state, multilateralism is crucial for Japan, particularly as it seeks to exercise regional leadership through organisations in which it can demonstrate a preparedness to act collectively with other regional players. Japan is strongly predisposed towards using multilateral institutions and collective diplomacy to resolving tension and conflict in East Asia, especially on the North Korean issue. Even more importantly, multilateral institutions in East Asia are a venue where Japan can exercise diplomatic, financial and economic initiatives independently of the United States and even where it can use such groupings ‘to defuse, dilute, or deflect U.S. power’ (Hughes and Fukushima 2004, 56). Japan is uncomfortable with ‘the apparent U.S. disdain for multilateral treaties and institutions like the UN’ (Steinberg 2003). In contrast, it has unreservedly attached great importance to the UN, which was written into its Basic Policy for National Defence in 1957. Since the early 1990s and the passage of the 1992 PKO Law, the UN has played a vital role in the evolution of Japan’s international security role through the dispatch of the SDF overseas on UN peacekeeping missions. Indeed, Japan needs the United Nations to legitimise the international activities of the SDF. Since the 1980s, Japan’s defence normalisation has effectively followed a two-track process: the de facto collective self-defence track involving greater contributions to the alliance, and the collective security track whereby Japan dispatches the SDF on peacekeeping missions under UN auspices. Ideally, Japan would prefer to operate within a UN-led world order rather than a

Japan and the Bush agenda 121 US-led world order. Japan’s intense lobbying for a permanent seat on the Security Council is indicative of its desire to exercise global political and security leadership within a multilateral institutional framework.20 In contrast, the United States, as the regional and global hegemon, is only comfortable operating within multilateral frameworks if these organisations support US aims and objectives. It is reluctant to be part of a collective grouping if its agenda is compromised in the process of consensus formation. Under the Bush administration, the United States no longer chooses to project its power through international organisations, while President Bush barely conceals his contempt for the United Nations. He has adopted what Lindsay calls the ‘high noon syndrome’ mentality: ‘If the U.N. cannot be expected to take effective action in the face of a crisis, the U.S. must act on its own’ (Nikkei Weekly, 11 October 2004). The growing aversion towards international multilateral organisations is the flipside of American unilateralism, which a number of prominent opinion leaders in Japan have uniformly condemned from a point of principle (its disregard for international law and the UN) and from the standpoint of the potential security fall-out. DPJ leader Okada stressed in a speech that: ‘US “unilateralism” is a problem that risks harming global peace.’ (Asahi Shinbun, 17 December 2004). Former Secretary-General of the LDP, Yamasaki Taku, commented: ‘It is a problem if the United States acts as the only policeman in the world. Since there is the United Nations, an organ that deals with security issues, it is necessary for Japan, as an ally to give advice to the United States to act in compliance with it’ (Asahi Shinbun, 1 October 2002). Some Japanese groups go as far as to argue that international organisations should be used to balance American power: unilateral actions of the United States are not to be accepted in all cases. Some kind of mechanism should be built into the international system to check, limit, or halt U.S. unilateral actions if such actions lead to immediate gains solely for the United States . . . Japan should not only discuss questions of right or wrong with the United States as a friend, but should also check the United States’ running out of control in the international community, or introduce a system to balance U.S. power. That is the role of the United Nations, but Japan should put forth its proposals on what kinds of role can be assigned to that international organization. (Policy Council 2004, 11, 14) Such comments reflect the fact that many Japanese, like many Europeans, have ‘come to doubt the legitimacy of US power and global leadership’ (Robert Kagan, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 2004). Fifth, Japan and the United States differ in their attachment to the long-standing interpretation of the geographic scope of the security

122 Aurelia George Mulgan treaty. Articles 5 and 6 of the treaty refer to the defence of Japan and the maintenance of peace and security in the Far East respectively.21 However, this limited geographic focus has been under challenge from the plan to relocate US military forces in Japan as part of the Pentagon’s global military rationalisation22 designed ‘to enhance the rapid-deployment capabilities of U.S. forces to deal with terrorism and other threats’ (Keizô Nabeshima, Japan Times, 11 August 2004). Under the proposed realignment, the Bush administration sees Japan as a regional hub in a global network of bases and forward-deployed forces. The proposed restructuring has rekindled debate in Japan about the range of territory covered by the bilateral security treaty. The plan to relocate the command functionality of the 1st Army Corps headquarters from its current location in the United States to Camp Zama in Kanagawa Prefecture has been a focal point of the proposed US force realignment and the key sticking point in US discussions with Japan. The significance of the move is that the 1st Corps’ responsibility goes beyond the bounds of the Far East region (it prospectively has command over US forces in the so-called ‘arc of instability’ that stretches from Northeast Asia to the Middle East), while the security treaty restricts the operational sphere of American forces based in Japan to the Far East. Opposition to the US proposal has been spearheaded by MOFA, which advanced the line that the plan would violate the Far East clause in the treaty.23 Historically, the limited geographic scope of the security treaty has helped to protect Japan from entrapment in US military strategy (Hughes and Fukushima 2004, 66). Under Article 6 (the ‘Far East clause’), Japan was well within its rights to say ‘no’ to any contribution in the event of US military operations outside the Far East.24 This is despite the fact that the necessary precedents for the de facto expansion of the geographic and functional scope of the mutual security treaty have already been put in place. The 1996 Japan–US Joint Declaration on Security extended the geographic focus of the alliance to ‘peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region’, while the revised defence cooperation guidelines set out a much broader framework for cooperation between Japan and the United States than envisaged by the security treaty. In its negotiations with the US government on this issue, the Japanese government has successfully maintained the status quo on the Far East clause and revision of the security treaty in agreeing to accept the 1st Army Corps’ command relocation to Camp Zama. The US government offered assurances that the new command would be downscaled and its geographical scope of operational jurisdiction would be limited to the Far East. In response, the Japanese government judged that the command’s relocation to Camp Zama would not conflict with the security treaty’s Far East clause. It was unclear, however, whether the new command’s operational jurisdiction would not actually go beyond the bounds of the Far East (Asahi Shinbun, 13 April 2005).

Japan and the Bush agenda 123 The process of US force transformation affecting USFJ has been accompanied by American pressure to strengthen the bilateral alliance, including expanding the zone of military operations of the SDF beyond their traditional geographic area of deployment and raising ‘the status of the bilateral alliance to that of strategic cooperation’ (Nikkei Weekly, 8 November 2004). Plans are currently on the drawing board to widen the scope of the defence cooperation guidelines to include ‘international cooperation’, while Japan’s 2004 NDPG of December 2004 referred to the government’s determination to ‘enhance close cooperative relations with the United States’ (Japan Defence Agency 2004). The new defence plan also addressed the issue of ‘strategic dialogue’ on role-sharing in the alliance. This dialogue began in late 2004 focussing on three areas: common strategic goals, military role-sharing, improved interoperability between US and Japanese forces, and the realignment of US forces in Japan (Sankei Shinbun, 28 November 2004). Through such dialogue, the Bush administration aims to secure not only a stronger declaratory underpinning for closer relations between the SDF and US forces, but also Japan’s strategic cooperation in meeting commonly agreed threats to stability and security in the Asia Pacific. Such a framework would enable the United States more easily to call on Japan to help balance against China and to contribute forces to US-led conflict in East Asia. The subsequent ‘Joint Statement of the US–Japan Security Consultative Committee’ of February 2005 referred to the common desire of both Japan and the United States for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan problem. In a later speech in New York, Japanese Foreign Minister Machimura Nobutaka described Taiwan as being within the scope of the Japan–US security treaty. Ultimately, the United States seeks a full-scale strategic partnership with Japan along the lines of the UK model. This vision sees the United Kingdom and Japan becoming US strategic hubs in Europe and the Asia Pacific respectively. Such a transformation of the alliance would require Japan to remove constitutional obstacles to joint action by the two countries, including Article 9 and derivative policies, laws and interpretations.

Conclusion Dependency on US military protection and US market integration has locked Japan into America’s political-security order in East Asia in the post-war period. The asymmetry of the alliance and Japan’s security dependence on the United States have inevitably placed it in a subordinate position. On the other hand, the alliance has provided a context in which Japan has extended its security role, which under the Bush administration now encompasses non-combat support for US-led military operations. However, SDF activities in Iraq are strictly in the style of international peacekeeping operations, while action in the campaign in

124 Aurelia George Mulgan Afghanistan is confined to rear-area logistical support. In neither theatre of operations have Japanese forces engaged in combat. In reality, the Japanese contributions to the war on terrorism and in Iraq amount to little more than tokenistic political gestures designed to retain the US commitment to deterring threats to Japanese security. While Japan’s decision to deploy a missile defence system will bring the thorny issue of collective self-defence directly to the fore, in any regional contingency, current policies continue to maintain a stance of strategic ambiguity, which obscures Japan’s true security intentions. The Bush agenda aims to convert the US–Japan alliance into something that countenances joint action to meet commonly agreed regional and global threats as well as threats to the US homeland. According to this scenario, Japan will play a more prominent support role in US regional and global strategic planning in exchange for a continuing US commitment to the defence of Japan and the deterrence of threats to the Japanese homeland. In many respects, this trajectory is on a direct collision course with the desire of many in Japan’s security policy community to seek greater independence within the alliance, to retain constitutional constraints protecting Japan’s strategic freedom and to resist integration of the SDF with the US military. While the Koizumi government has strongly aligned itself with the Bush administration, divisions are evident within the Japanese polity and public over the international legitimacy of US leadership and policy. For the present, the Japanese government has not set a course for a full alliance partnership with the United States. The main goal is to be a ‘normal’ state not America’s ‘normal’ alliance partner.

Notes 1 These are the words of US Marine Corps commander Major General Stackpole. His full comments were: ‘No one wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan . . . so we are the cap in the bottle, if you will . . . If we were to pull out of the US–Japan Security Treaty, it would definitely be a destabilizing factor in Asia’ (Washington Post, 27 March 1990). 2 The law ‘specifies the main activities to be undertaken by the SDF as: (1) supplying US forces with fuel and food and transporting equipment; (2) providing medical care and transport for wounded US and allied forces and engaging in search-and-rescue activities; and (3) providing assistance for refugees based on requests from the United Nations or other organizations’ (Foreign Press Center 2001). 3 The definition of ‘non-combat zone’ (hisentô chiiki) has been contentious in Japanese domestic politics, particularly in the light of deteriorating security in the Samawah region of Iraq where the Japanese forces are located. 4 They require military protection, which has been provided by Dutch forces and more recently by Australian forces. 5 The original ACSA for peacetime and international peace operations was signed in April 1996. It provided for the reciprocal provision of goods such as water, oil and food. Its scope was expanded in 1999 to permit the reciprocal

Japan and the Bush agenda 125

6 7 8

9

10

provision of necessary goods and services in ‘situations in surrounding areas’ in line with the terminology of the revised defence cooperation guidelines. ‘Ammunition’ was elaborated in the Diet by Director-General Ishiba Shigeru in April 2004 to include items such as ‘rifle bullets, artillery shells, rocket munitions, bombs, detonating power’ (Record of Diet Proceedings, 22 April 2004). The other participants were the United States, France and Australia. When visiting Singapore in June 2005, Defence Agency Director-General Ôno Yoshinori stated: ‘We’re through with the stage of joint technology research. It’s time to go on to the stage of development’ (Asahi Shinbun, 6 June 2005). Japan and the United States will co-develop the next-generation SM-3 interceptor, leading ultimately to production and deployment. In the arcane debate about collective self-defence, the argument centres on the notion of ‘the use of force’ (buryoku kôshi) and support activities that are ‘integrated with the use of force’ (buryoku kôshi to no ittaika). According to the Japanese government, whether a support activity is ‘integrated with the use of force’ depends on how closely it relates to the use of force. This boils down to a distinction between support activities in a non-combat area (hisentô chiiki) and those in a combat area (sentô chiiki). The provision of support in a noncombat area does not legally constitute ‘integration with the use of force’ (personal communication, Defence Agency official, 23 December 2004). Namely, the comment by former Chief Cabinet Secretary Fukuda Yasuo about the decision that Japan would deploy a BMD system: As for the issue of the right of collective self-defense, the BMD system that the Government of Japan is introducing aims at defending Japan. It will be operated based on Japan’s independent judgment, and will not be used for the purpose of defending third countries. Therefore, it does not raise any problems with regard to the issue of the right of collective self-defense. The BMD system requires interception of missiles by Japan’s own independent judgment based on the information on the target acquired by Japan’s own sensors. (Chief Cabinet Secretary 2003)

11 A radar intelligence-sharing system will be used to detect and intercept ballistic missiles. MSDF and US Navy Aegis ships currently share radar data through a state-of-the-art system called ‘Link 16’, which allows ships that possess it to work seamlessly together. It is normally used to show enemy aircraft data, such as flying speed and direction. Missile defence intelligence could be shared through the Link 16 system, and also through the ASDF’s BADGE (base air defence ground environment) system that links ground radar and AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft. The BADGE system will be linked to Link 16 in the event of emergencies, and BADGE data will be transmitted to US forces. In addition, the US Air Force has suggested that when the ASDF Air Defence Command relocates its headquarters to the Yokota Base in Tokyo, a joint operations centre could be set up with the ASDF command. This would enable Japan and the United States to share real-time data from US early warning satellites sensing ballistic missile launches (Sankei Shinbun, 3 June 2005). 12 Prime Minister Koizumi, for example, justified his government’s actions in committing troops to Iraq by arguing that Japan must rely on US military power as ‘a deterrent to North Korea’s nuclear blackmail’ (Kamiya 2003, 21). 13 The report added, ‘the effective functioning of the US deterrence capability has prevented Japan from falling into a state of panic despite China’s possession of nuclear weapons’ (Asahi Shinbun, 3 September 2004).

126 Aurelia George Mulgan 14 This argues that allies face the dilemma of being unable to escape the simultaneous risks of entrapment (being dragged into a conflict of the ally’s making) and abandonment (the de-alignment of the ally). 15 The Nakasone administration accepted strategic missions for the SDF spelled out by the United States, which amounted to a division of defence roles. The MSDF were particularly closely aligned with US Cold War strategy (Sato 2003, 2). 16 The draft for constitutional revision of the LDP’s Research Commission on the Constitution suggests that the SDF be conditionally allowed to exercise the right of collective self-defence and to use armed force during overseas missions. The justification is that the SDF should be allowed the right of collective selfdefence in order to give priority to the alliance with the United States (Mainichi Shinbun, 18 November 2004). 17 Nakayama Tarô, LDP Chairman of the Lower House Research Commission on the Constitution, argues that being a ‘normal state’ means that Japan can exercise the right of both individual and collective self-defence (Sankei Shinbun, 27 December 2004). 18 The LDP’s coalition partner, the Kômei Party, is currently playing a surrogate role in this regard, performing the function of former dovish factions in the LDP. 19 This means going beyond the concept of a ‘Basic Defence Force’ based on the rationale of ‘possessing only minimum basic defense power as an independent nation’. The idea is being advanced that Japan should switch to ‘the concept of a ‘capability-based Defense Force’, that can flexibly assess and respond to ‘contingencies in Japan’ and any ‘situation in areas surrounding Japan’, as well as ‘new kinds of situations’ (Policy Council 2004, 19). 20 A proposed revision of the 1954 SDF Law will make overseas missions for international peace cooperation a primary task of the SDF as well as national defence. A standing force will be set up within the GSDF dedicated solely to international activities in order to ensure a quick response if the need arises. As part of the revised NDPG, the Defence Agency upgraded the SDF’s overseas activities from ‘ancillary mission’ to ‘main mission’. A new regiment of more than 1,000 troops will be established under a Central Readiness Command for overseas deployment. The troops will be used for purposes decided by the Japanese government as well as for UN peacekeeping operations (PKO). They will be engaged in security, engineering, transportation and medical services, in addition to those on standby for international emergency aid work (Tokyo Shinbun, 10 July 2005). 21 Article 6 states: ‘For the purpose of contributing to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East, the United States of America is granted the use by its land, air and naval forces of facilities and areas in Japan.’ 22 The plan involves ‘consolidating the 13th Air Force in Guam with the 5th Air Force Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo; moving the headquarters of US Army I Corps in Washington state to Camp Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture; assigning a second aircraft carrier to the 7th Fleet based at Yokosuka Naval Base, Kanagawa Prefecture; moving part of the 3rd Marine Division to mainland Japan; and transferring night takeoff/landing practice operations of carrier-based aircraft from Atsugi Naval Air Station in Kanagawa Prefecture to Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Keizô Nabeshima, Japan Times, 11 August 2004). 23 In fact, clear divisions opened up between MOFA and the Defence Agency/SDF on this issue. The ‘Foreign Ministry took the view that “the JDA is trying to expand the framework of the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty,” while

Japan and the Bush agenda 127 the JDA claimed, “The Foreign Ministry does not understand military affairs” [and they] are making a great fuss’ (Sankei Shinbun, 9 November 2004). An official of the Defence Agency was quoted as saying, ‘international cooperation will lead to the security of Japan . . . [and] that the region covered by Japan–U.S. cooperation based on the alliance should be expanded from the Asia-Pacific to the world’ (Asahi Shinbun, 16 October 2004). 24 Author interview, MOFA official, 18 November 2004.

8

Thailand and the United States Beyond hegemony?1 Michael K. Connors

Introduction This chapter explores US–Thai relations in the context of a rapidly shifting global and regional landscape since the end of the Cold War. The days when US Cold War objectives twinned with a militarised Thai state are well over. Bereft of this unifying theme, any analysis of the Thai–US relationship immediately confronts a range of seemingly contradictory phenomena. In the last several years, for example, Thailand has been declared a major non-NATO ally at the very time that it has been coy about support for US strategy in the Middle East. The Thai government initially opposed the war in Iraq, but Thailand was the first Asian nation to send troops to Iraq as part of a ‘post-conflict’ humanitarian mission. Having earlier announced that US forces would not use Thai airbases for transit to Iraq, the government cited treaty obligations to explain subsequent US access. Confronted with these inconsistencies, it is easy to see the attraction of the popular metaphoric phrase ‘bending with the wind’, which originated in the nineteenth century to describe Siam’s adaptation to evolving structures of imperial power. In the current period, a more appropriate phrase might be ‘bending US hegemony’, suggesting that Thailand has not simply glided hither and thither according to prevailing winds. Rather, it has closely associated itself with the US, while obviously seeking to pursue its own elite defined ‘national’ interests. If we understand hegemony in the manner proposed by Antonio Gramsci (1972), we are interested in the problematic of how a ruling strata is able to integrate subordinate elements into a hierarchical order on a seemingly consensual basis. Robert Cox (1987, 7) extends this problematic to the international level arguing that ‘the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful’. NeoGramscian perspectives move beyond the state as the articulator of hegemony, developing analyses of the role of transnational capitalist classes,

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and their impact on the nature of trading and investment regimes, and on the functioning of international financial institutions. For his part, Cox (1997, 60) has recognised the growing power of what he terms the ‘nebuleuse’: ‘a loose elite network of influentials and agencies, sharing a common set of ideas that collectively perform the [international] governance function.’ These include the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF, the OECD, the ADB and so on. By virtue of the structure of the global economy and US dominance, and the presence of the world’s major TNCs there, sections of the US state are powerful within these agencies. These considerations are relevant to the status of Thai–US relations. In the Gramscian perspective hegemony does not principally entail direct forms of domination under duress, nor does it indicate identical interests. The constitution of hegemony requires that over a range of crucial areas of interstate and international life (security, trade, sometimes regime form) metropolitan and peripheral elites share broad understanding of economic and security matters, and move towards similar objectives. Such understandings are mediated by the prevailing structures of economy and security, projects for change, patterns of socialisation, and by the constitution of forces within territorial states and in transnational spheres. For the most part, Thai peripheral elites have contended and cooperated in an international order structured by US hegemony. While accepting US leadership over the last half century, there have been disagreements and significant divergences in particular arenas. Divergence does not necessarily entail the end of hegemony – a threshold needs to be reached where matters of substantive difference over crucial arenas outweigh matters of agreement and compliance. The Thai state has rarely strayed from a broad subaltern position vis-à-vis the US and the nebuleuse: this is despite countervailing pressures emanating from its regional environment, and apparent Thai doubts over the 2002 US National Security Strategy. The hegemonic relationship is also sustained by the partly deterritorialised nature of the nebuleuse, which allows some elements of the internationalised Thai elite to benefit by entering its ranks and assuming a hegemonic role (a Thai national and former Finance Minister currently heads the WTO). While many economic sectors remain nationally based, the rise of international and transnational spheres blurs the line between metropole and periphery. The Thai relationship to US hegemony is historically fluid, with material, security and political elements of the relationship differing over time. This chapter explores some of the characteristics of this fluidity. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, US–Thai state elites shared strong affinities across all three elements. Between the late 1970s and 1980s these affinities weakened, although they were sufficiently robust to survive Thailand’s drift into regionalism. In the 1990s the Thai state underwent a significant process of economic and political liberalisation. This reflected both domestic forces and an increasingly transnational Thai-based nebuleuse. In

130 Michael K. Connors tune with the US’s own concerns with democratic enlargement in the postCold War era, the two states moved closer together. In the current period, commencing in 2001 with the arrival of the Bush and Thaksin administrations, the hegemonic relationship has taken on a new form, with security and resource imperatives compelling the US to extend its relationship with a Thai state that remains uneasy about US global strategy. Furthermore, the democratic convergence of the 1990s has receded, with Thailand moving towards authoritarian forms of rule. The hegemonic relationship has become strained. The rest of this chapter explores these different periods, with the spotlight on more recent times.

The historical backdrop The Thai–US relationship is, in diplomatic-speak, an historic and ‘friendly one’, originally based on the 1833 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. As Siam negotiated its way into the emerging western imperialist order of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States was seen as a disinterested interlocutor in Thai affairs, offering advice and guardianship against aggressive European powers. The US protected Thailand from war reparations demanded by the United Kingdom after the Second World War (Randolph 1986). From the 1950s onwards, the relationship between the two countries intensified, centred on Thailand acting as the hub of US operations in Southeast Asia. Thailand was viewed as a relatively stable base through which to balance, attack and defeat the state-capitalist bloc of states, conventionally described as communist. It sent troops to South Korea and Vietnam. The United States was a major player in aid provision and state-building, at times building up the power base of those known to be involved in drug distribution (see Fineman 1997). Glassman (2004a, 6) terms this the period of the ‘Thai cold war state’. The term is significant for it points to the one-sided penetrating nature of the bilateral relationship. Glassman describes the ‘internationalization’ of the Thai state, as a product of intersecting projects pursued during the Cold War by elites, domestic and foreign. Peak agencies of the Thai state were penetrated by US advisors who worked to guide the Thai elite towards both integration with the international economy and security objectives commensurate with their own – the historical residue of this relationship is felt today. The role of the US in constructing the Thai state did not determine a simple patron–client relationship; the nature of US hegemony required that peripheral elites were allowed the right to contest and were given room to manoeuvre. Cox’s (1987, 7) portrayal of hegemony as one that affords ‘some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful’ holds good here. The relationship was codified in various economic and security agreements including Thailand’s participation in the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the related Manila Pact in 1954. US National Security Council policy statements named Thailand as ‘a support

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of U.S. objectives in the area and as the focal point of U.S. covert and psychological operations in Southeast Asia’ (Randolph 1986, 19). In 1962 security relations were consolidated in the Rusk–Thanat Communiqué, which remains operative in contemporary strategic thinking. The Communiqué reaffirmed US SEATO treaty obligations to assist any member subject to ‘communist’ aggression, but noted ‘this obligation of the United States does not depend upon the prior agreement of all other parties to the Treaty, since this Treaty obligation is individual as well as collective’ (Randolph 1986, 42). By the early 1970s a significant shift in the relationship occurred when the United States pursued Vietnamisation, signalling to its regional allies the need for greater self-reliance. Likewise, the emergence of democratic and Third World nationalist politics in Thailand in the mid-1970s forced the Thai government to press for the closure of US bases. The US pull out from Thailand, never complete, was more a function of its defeat in Vietnam than a signal of profoundly estranged US–Thai elite relations.

Bending with the wind? The US departure enforced a significant shift in Thai foreign policy, ushering in a period of regional and ASEAN-centric foreign policy. Thailand used this fledgling regional organisation as a springboard for bargaining with the major powers (Uraiwan 2002, 25). Although Thai foreign policy is often described as ‘bending with the wind’ (lu tam lom), a term that reflects a realist expectation of small power pragmatism in terms of band wagoning and balancing, Uraiwan (ibid.) notes that a better description of Thai policy would be ‘tactical mitigation of the major powers’ (konlayuth nai kanphon amnat). This description is cognizant of the Thai state’s limits, but acknowledges its ability to reach out to neighbouring states as a means of alleviating external pressures. Included in this ‘mitigation’ was the establishment of full relations with China in 1975 and increased interaction between the military of both countries and, in the 1980s and 1990s, the purchase of substantial Chinese military equipment, and regional cooperation on Cambodia (Byman and Cliff 1999; Chulacheeb 2002). Yet even as it reached out to China, close relations with the United States were maintained. In 1982, Thai and US forces commenced annual joint training exercises known as Cobra Gold, enhancing US military forward presence. Relations with the US were also sustained by shared perspectives on the Cambodian question, primarily based on antagonism towards Vietnam. In short, the contemporary pattern of Thai relations with the two rival major powers in the region was set by the mid-1970s. The Thai state has had a necessarily double vision in its dealings with these powers ever since. In a speech delivered in 1985 Thai Foreign Minister Siddi Savetsila (1999, 299) emphasised that Thailand had an interest in increasing its

132 Michael K. Connors standing in the world, and, as a trading state, wanted to combat protectionism, internationally and in the region. Thailand embraced a policy of omni-directionality – a reaching out to all and sundry in pursuit of its own ends, but remained constrained by the requirements of its structural relationship with the US. In essence, the landscape confronting policy makers and practitioners in the latter period of the 1980s, and most certainly the 1990s, might be described, following Camilleri (2003, 111–36), as an era of emerging ‘competitive interdependence’ overlaid by security dilemmas of a regional nature, and US residual hegemony. Under the government of Chatchai Choonhaven (1988–91), the ‘regionalism’ of the 1980s began to take explicit shape, with the declaration that the battlefields of Indochina would become market places. These countries were deemed important in providing the rapidly growing Thai economy with markets, labour and resources. At the level of foreign policy this meant further recognition of the diminishing primacy of the US alliance. Chatchai (1999b, 4–5) argued that it was time to move towards a more independent orientation: Even though Thailand is a small country which conducts policy that bends with the wind sometimes . . . changes in the world have opened the opportunity for us to change . . . I well realise that we can not set the direction of the wind, but in the present era we are able to stipulate our desired end objectives and use the wind to our advantage in walking towards those ends. Chatchai (1999b, 2–4) recognised that he came to power in a historic transition away from military and bureaucratic rule towards parliamentary democracy, at a conjuncture that indicated a new political economy for the region. He demonstrated his fluency in the language of the ‘global village’, including human rights and liberal economics (see Chatchai 1999a, 6–9). Underlying these shifts was economic growth and the rise of an assertive capitalist class renegotiating state–business relations. From the mid-1980s, economic growth, often driven by Japanese investment, had transformed Thailand into a significant export-oriented economy. However, the increased level of Japanese operations in Thailand did not lead to extended Japanese hegemony. As Beeson (2001b) notes, ‘despite Japan’s phenomenal rise as an economic power, it has not enjoyed a concomitant political influence; unlike earlier rising powers, economic might has not translated into wider systemic or “hegemonic” influence. Japan, in short, has remained a “quasi-hegemon”.’ Glassman (2004a, 74–5) argues that the nature of Japan’s economic relations with Thailand did not require it to directly shape the nature of Thai political economy, or its foreign policy orientation, because these had already evolved in a manner that reflected Thailand’s historic relationship with the US, and which dovetailed with Japan’s own relationship to US hegemony.

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Liberal convergence in the 1990s The 1990s were characterised by an increasingly shared liberal view between Thai reformists and the US Democrat administration. However, there were many strains in the relationship. John Funston (1998, 303) notes a marked deterioration in Thai–US relations during the 1990s. Overaccommodative Thai policies to Burma and renewed relations with China certainly soured US–Thai relations. Added to this were several pressing economic disputes, and concerns for continued Thai military support to the Khmer Rouge (Tasker 1993). As a mark of the gap between US and Thailand, in 1994 the Chuan government rejected a request from President Clinton on the pre-positioning of military supply ships in the Gulf of Thailand which would enhance rapid deployment of military forces (Paarlberg 2003). The US continues to present this issue to the Thai government and is repeatedly rejected. The US also expressed concern when Chatchai’s government was overthrown in a military coup in 1991 (see Hewison 1993). Similarly, after soldiers shot democracy protestors in May 1992 the US suspended military aid and exchanges, and withdrew from Cobra Gold. By the end of the year new elections were held, owing to mass demonstrations and a new democratic realism among Thai elites. Thailand moved towards the establishment of a liberal political system (Connors 2003a, 154–82; McCargo 2002). The Democrat Party under Chuan Leekpai, which led unstable coalition governments in 1992–5 and 1997–2000, was ideologically oriented towards liberal capitalist policies, and this orientation was mirrored by the emergence of an increasingly internationalised liberal foreign policy. This was congruent with a renewed neo-liberal US Asia foreign policy centred around democratic enlargement, multilateralism and engagement with erstwhile rivals, backed by a retained US security presence intent on maintaining, but evolving, the US Cold War security architecture. Despite certain counter-tendencies during the tenure of the Banharn and Chavalit governments in 1995–7, on the whole Thai foreign-policy liberalism found expression in trade liberalism within AFTA, Thailand’s leading role in establishing ARF, its support for APEC, and its own uneven efforts to support the emergence of democratic governance in the region. During the first Chuan government, the former intelligence official Prasong Sunsuri was appointed Foreign Minister. Prasong demonstrated a keen understanding of the post-Cold War context of Thai foreign policy. In interviews and announcements Prasong painted a picture of an active Thailand pursuing economic openings in APEC and ASEAN, supporting economic growth in Indochina, and dealing with trade disputes with the US in a regulated manner. Prasong (1999, 65) expressed a common international sentiment about the possibilities of the post-Cold War order: ‘Ideological and military conflict are things of the past, The dissolution of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has the tendency to

134 Michael K. Connors create a new preference for democracy and liberal economics, which will lead authoritarian states . . . to lose power.’ While sharing the economic liberal and democratic thrust of US policy, the Thai government had different ideas on their application in its own neighbourhood, demonstrating a capacity to defy the supposed imperial overlord. Thai elites have essentially pursued a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with Burma, and sanctioned its admission into ASEAN. While the US–Thai split on Burma was most pronounced during the tenure of the Chavalit-led coalition, which nurtured close relations with Burmese generals, the second Democrat ledcoalition essentially endorsed the policy of constructive engagement and the attempt to socialise Burma into ASEAN norms. However, over time, Surin Pitsuwan, the Harvard-educated Muslim foreign minister in 1997–2000, took a more critical line towards the Burmese regime (Sukhumbhand 1999). Surin unsuccessfully proposed a shift in ASEAN away from the principle of non-interference to one of flexible engagement. While this was motivated by the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and the need for member states to more actively engage in collective economic policy measures and monitoring, Surin was also clear that ‘flexible engagement’ was to be extended to issues of governance and human rights. Its rejection by Burma and other authoritarian states in ASEAN was inevitable. In 2000, Thailand broke ranks with ASEAN and abstained from an ILO motion on labour practices in Burma (see Kavi 2001). Incipient foreign-policy liberalism accelerated after the onset of the economic crisis in 1997. Pressed by capital outflows and depreciating baht, and pressure for structural reform, the Chuan government largely implemented many of the IMF-imposed measures agreed by the Chavalit administration before its resignation in late 1997. For some within the new Democrat administration, this was a chance to push forward liberalisation and to internationalise further the Thai economy. During the crisis, the Thai state experienced high-level international penetration, with the major ministries effectively relating their programmes to IMF requirements. Among business groupings, political parties and social movements, a wave of anti-Americanism surfaced. Malaysia’s imposition of capital controls, against IMF policy, was widely applauded by nationalist Thai groups who saw the US abandoning Thailand to its fate. Indeed, the US did not simply stand by but played an active role in shaping the IMF package that forced structural reform on Thai capitalism. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and deputy Lawrence Summers played an active role in shaping the Thai IMF package, and threatened to block the rescue package if certain conditions were not met (Thanong 2001). At the governmental level, the Asian Financial Crisis ushered in a more aggressive liberal foreign-policy orientation by the Thai government under ideational hegemony of the west. Thailand moved to pronounce itself an active promoter of democracy and human rights. Surin (1999, 219–27) highlighted the significance of human rights in Thai foreign policy. Thai

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agencies embraced the developmental jargon of human security and community building in various rural projects, often funded by the World Bank-funded Social Investment Fund. While the rhetoric of human security is sometimes related to Asian conceptions of ‘comprehensive security’ and its focus on the internal conditions for security, the rise of human security concerns in Thailand represented further penetration of western developmentalism into the ideological centres of the Thai state (Connors 2003b). Surin was eager to embrace new agendas. In his efforts to promote flexible engagement (later ‘enhanced interaction’) he commented that ‘Thailand hopes to prepare ASEAN to meet the challenges of globalization that is transforming the international environment into a “world without borders” ’ (Surin 1999, 223). Noting the shared interdependencies of ASEAN, Surin recognised that the Thai promotion of human rights and democracy was out of step with other ASEAN countries, but asked that Thailand be allowed to be different. When Thailand proposed that ASEAN adopt a statement of being ‘open and caring societies’, ASEAN adopted a compromised version of this: ‘open societies consistent with their respective national identities’ (Surin 1999, 227). While the crisis pushed Thailand further into a US-centric liberal economic view, this orientation had domestic drivers – there were some among the Thai elite who were not just under the influence of the US but were part of the nebuleuse.

Economics after the fall: embracing the enemy In the aftermath of the economic crisis, a wave of anti-Americanism swept Thailand. Anger focused on the IMF bailout package. As the economy went into a tailspin a new political formation emerged around telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra. His party, Thai Rak Thai (Thai Love Thai), rode to victory on the wave of a nationalist sentiment in January 2001. The crisis imperative allowed for the unique conditions under which Thaksin could emerge with broad support from erstwhile conflictive capitalist groupings, and from rural and provincial populations (Hewison 2001; Glassman 2004b).The nationalist posturing of Thaksin was mostly a domestic affair, and has not noticeably shifted Thai orientations to the international economy. However, the new domestic constituency of the TRT party has implications for the conduct of Thai foreign policy. Economic considerations drive the government, and in part this means moving against democratic gains of the 1990s. Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai’s embrace of liberal political tendencies are rhetorical devices addressed to the international community (see Surakiart 2003, 234–9). They are belied by the revival of social conservatism at home and intimations of the Asian values position regionally (see Asda 2004; Pasuk and Baker 2004, 134–71). In this unique conjuncture, Thaksin has moved to create a massive overhaul of Thailand’s state apparatuses in order to achieve a more viable Thai capitalism, while at the same time the pro-big

136 Michael K. Connors business government has relentlessly penetrated the state bureaucracy in order to turn it into an efficient machine, and end decades of bureaucratic inefficiencies and stonewalling. Thaksin explains his economic policy thus: I am convinced that Thailand needs to pursue a ‘dual track policy’ that does not abandon the East Asia Economic Model, but which, at the same time, embraces an alternative development strategy. While continuing to welcome foreign direct investment to fuel our exports, we will not rely solely on this sector. Our second track refers to the domestic dimension. It requires the strengthening and creation of a qualitative chain for our domestic enterprises in order to build up a new generation of entrepreneurs that can serve as the backbone and stimulus of our economy . . . [which has] a considerable degree of immunity to the risks associated with globalization and increased integration into the global economic system. (Cited in The Nation 2002) As Glassman (2004b) notes, this is not a strong economic nationalist strategy, as the regime is largely supportive of ensuring the survival and extension of an already internationalised capitalist class embedded in the international trading regime. Thailand works with other trading states and through various international organisations towards the extension of the internationalised economy, while ensuring its own domestic constituency is protected, nurtured and prepared for the trading game. If nationalism is not strong in terms of the government’s external economic strategy, it has been useful for domestic consumption. In July 2003, the government finalised its last debt payment to the IMF ahead of schedule. Some critics saw this as putting ‘nationalist symbolism’ ahead of economic prudence, as the government is still servicing other debts at higher rates of interest than that required by the IMF (Thai Post, 1 August 2003). Despite the nationalist posturing, it is useful to note that the government elected to remain in the IMF’s Post Program Monitoring (WTO 2003a). While many US investors and officials were initially apprehensive that Thaksinomics would lead to a protectionist regime that placed limits on ‘foreign activity’, the US has been supportive of the new government. It might be critical of tariff protectionism for some sectors, and the average tariff of 14 per cent for MFNs, but there is much that cheers its freetrading heart. In the post-crisis period the Democrat-led coalition passed significant legislation aimed at regulating the trade regime in Thailand, and ensuring a degree of predictability and access. The Thaksin government has not repealed this, but built on it (ibid., 19). Thailand has also redoubled its efforts at attracting foreign direct investment to expand its manufacturing export sector. It has successfully diversified its export destinations, and generally moved in a liberal direction under the current government. It has been a leading liberaliser in ASEAN, seeking an

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earlier 2015 deadline (instead of 2020) for the proposed ASEAN Economic Community. It generally leads other AFTA members on trade liberalisation. In the wake of stalled multilateral trade talks – and following the US push on economic bilateralism – the government has entered into numerous FTA agreements and negotiations, including a concluded agreement with China and Australia, and commenced negotiations with Japan and the US. Seeing Thailand as a ‘small enterprise’, Thaksin (cited in Woranuj 2004) argues that FTAs allow Thailand to upgrade itself in the value chain in world trade: ‘you see today there is a global business trend towards mergers and acquisitions among international firms. M&As enable them to achieve not only the economy of scale but also the economy of speed. Similarly, a state needs to foster closer economic ties with one another. . . .’ Thaksin is above all a business player on the international trading stage, eager to use state instrumentalities to further Thai business interests in the processes of economic internationalisation. In the last several decades, economic matters have been the cause of several spats between Thailand and the US Congress. Violation of labour rights and intellectual property rights have led to heated discussion, and sometimes suspension of GSP privileges. Certainly, the officials of both states have the complex task of managing trade relations to the mutual benefit of each other, while securing absolute benefits for the accumulation regime internationally. Within this overall objective, statistically Thailand appears to be the major beneficiary of the bilateral relationship, securing major trade surpluses, which usefully balances major deficits with its other major trading partner, Japan. Indeed, the relationship looks set to expand and deepen because both share significant economic interests and ideational orientations to trade liberalisation. It is notable that for all the concern about Thaksinomics, and the possible emergence of a deviant form of capitalism, organisations such as the WTO and the US Trade Representative have painted a positive picture of the Thai trade investment regime and its efforts towards liberalisation and free trade. In many respects, officials involved in trade liberalisation in the US and Thailand are partners, and recognise each other as such. As officials in territorial states, they are required to negotiate and deal with domestic constituencies for whom trade liberalisation is not so sanguine. The disputes that arise should not overshadow the genuinely common view on Trade liberalisation shared by these internationalised sections of respective state agencies. Although Thaksin has been characterised as a root and branch reform type, it is interesting that the WTO’s (2003b, viii) Trade Review of Thailand in late 2003 argued that there had been little change in what it describes as Thailand’s ‘liberal’ trade policy since the last review in 1999. Where changes have been noted they do not significantly alter the overall enthusiastic embrace of trade liberalisation by fractions of the Thai capitalist class. Indeed the trade review noted that the rush of FTA

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negotiations should be seen as paving the way for multilateral liberalisation. This is a view shared by the Thai government which argues that FTAs are a building bloc to multilateral trade and investment liberalisation by providing a ‘gradual domestic adjustment process’ (WTO 2003a, 11). US–Thai Free Trade Negotiations commenced in mid-2004 and should be seen in this context. While there are many points of contention between the two countries (telecommunications being one) the FTA negotiations can be seen as a reward for compliance with a US-led world order. In that sense they should be viewed as having extra-economic implications. The motivations for the US offering to commence an FTA with Thailand are clearly spelled out in a paper prepared for the US Congress on the FTA: From the standpoint of U.S. foreign policy interests, the Administration views the proposed FTA as strengthening cooperation with Thailand in bilateral, regional, and multilateral fora. Bilaterally, the FTA is seen as strengthening Thailand’s position as a key military ally, particularly in the war on terrorism. Regionally, the FTA is viewed as advancing President Bush’s Enterprise for ASEAN Initiative (EAI). The goal of the EAI is to negotiate a network of bilateral trade agreements with the 10 members of ASEAN . . . An FTA could encourage Thailand to actively cooperate with the United States in supporting multilateral trade negotiations under the aegis of the Doha Development Agenda, particularly in the area of agricultural liberalization. (Ahearn and Morrison 2004, 2) For Thailand, the advantage of the FTA is to extend its relations with the world’s major economy, an economy that is of unparalleled significance for its export sector. As long as each respective state can manage domestic constituencies, the two states will continue to work towards a liberalised international trading system, with differences in specific policy and approaches being matters of degree rather than fundamental difference.

The politics of peripheral places Thailand’s close relations with the US have not precluded intensified regional relations, or even open courtship of China. The Thaksin government has continued the now generation-long focused effort to build openregionalism. It has supported discussion on expanding multilateral trade with East Asia through ASEAN+3. As one of the more developed economies in Southeast Asia, it has taken on an aid role in the region, and is supported by the US in this endeavour (Putjakan, 12 March 2004). It promotes regional development, and seeks important economic cooperation in the Greater Mekong Region, where it knows Chinese interests are

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paramount. While this continues previous efforts, the tenor of Thai regionalism has altered register. Thailand’s attempt to be a player in the shape of East Asian Regionalism through the Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) has given his government’s regionalism a new tune. The ACD has been cause for some hackneyed diplomatic lyricism; in October 2002 Thaksin (2002) explained his motives: The ACD is not just a cooperation. The ACD is not just a dialogue. But, simply, the ACD is both a cooperation and a dialogue. It is a capacity building process based on trade, economic, social and possibly political cooperation dialogues, relying upon the flexibility and a comfort level of all its participants. Driven by positive thinking, the ACD will be an evolving, informal, and non-institutionalized, open and inclusive process. The ACD, as an Asia-wide forum, will fill in the gap left by this continent’s ‘missing link’ between existing interregional groupings . . . The ACD will create synergy among bilateral, multilateral, sub-regional and regional strategic partnerships in areas of common interests. In a region said to be suffering an excess of exchanges and busy overlapping first and second track schedules, it comes as no surprise that the First Ministerial ACD meeting held in June 2002 was met with the headline ‘17 nations agree to, er, cooperate’ (The Nation 2002). The ACD represents an element of the Thaksin regime’s response to the Asian Financial Crisis, and its subsequent attempt to assert a Thai role in the regional agenda. While the ACD may prove difficult to institutionalise, it may leave one enduring outcome: a co-ordinating contribution to the evolution of the Asian Bond market (see Chiang Mai Declaration 2003). Thaksin’s key objective in the ACD is to ensure the materialisation of an efficient Asia Bond market to diminish the region’s dependence on international capital flows, and to reduce the resulting vulnerability. The ACD, of course, is not the prime mover in this area, with discussions and strategies emerging among key bank officials, the ADB, APEC and various Finance Ministries. There is no doubt that this raises a modest challenge to the region’s heavy investment in US bonds. Yet for the bond market to be successful, it will have to offer the security of western bond markets. Thus, the governance of banks and financial markets will need to undergo significant reform in terms already desired by international markets and IFIs (Pavin 2003). What initially appears to be a regional project would actually lead to further internationalisation of the region’s economy, as the mooted Asian Bond markets require standardised forms of financial governance. Clearly, Thailand’s regionalism is articulated to globalisation, and does not envisage blocism. It is the kind of regionalism that the US state and the nebuleuse find non-threatening. Clearly, regional economic developments are not necessarily directed against the US, and neither, it appears, are Sino-Thai relations. At the

140 Michael K. Connors height of its liberal foreign policy, in 1999 Thailand and China signed the Joint Statement on the Plan of Action for the 21st Century. While the statement was in part an affirmation of existing relations, it might also suggest a Thai orientation towards Chinese strategic thinking: The two sides have realized that the trend toward a multi-polar world is gaining momentum and the force for peace is growing in strength, and that it is the pressing call of our times and an inevitable trend of history to establish a new, peaceful, stable, equitable, and rational international political and economic order. (People’s Daily 1999) However, for Thai policy elites the notion of a ‘multi-polar world’ meshes with historic forms of Thai diplomacy centred on omni-directionality, the difference being that Thai perspectives remain anchored by its historic relationship with the US. Hence, the agreement need not be read as indicating shared strategic visions. On coming to office, the Thaksin government reaffirmed this agreement in a Joint Communique in 2001. In general, the Thai state has welcomed Chinese overtures on economic regionalism, and under the terms of the Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Between ASEAN and China (2002) signed with China an early harvest scheme in 2003. Thai transnationals companies are eager investors and traders in China. Thai cooperation with China is two pronged – reflecting both a global strategy of engagement with China whereby Thailand is but one state involved with the long-term process of internationalising the Chinese economy, socialising China into market norms – which is, of course, one major element of US policy on China. Second, Thailand is driven by the economic powerhouse that is China: Thai business seeks to integrate with the Chinese economy, so as not to be marginalised. Indeed, one of Thailand’s biggest conglomerates is among the leading investors in China. This economic agenda does not seem to have suffered any setback as a result of deepening Thai–US relations. Thailand continues to reaffirm strong support for One China, it has blocked visits by visiting Taiwanese parliamentary delegations and it has been silent on the question of human rights in China. It has also expressed concern about the proposed US National Missile Defence system.

Relationships of security and politics If economic relations have deepened during the Thaksin–Bush period, so have security relations. The US Ambassador to Thailand captured the high level of Thai–US interaction in a speech before Thai military personnel, noting that over 21000 Thai military officers had studied in the US under the International Military Education and Training Program

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(IMET). He paints a picture of successful socialisation such that Thais and American’s think alike: When I hosted an IMET related dinner this spring and asked for a possible guest list, I didn’t know where to start or end: the then Defense and Deputy Defense Ministers, plus almost the entire leadership of Supreme Command and the services, were once IMET participants. The current Supreme Commander Gen. Surayud is enshrined in the Ft. Leavenworth Hall of Fame, and other Thai officers before him have been similarly recognized. The value of these military education courses cannot be overestimated; US and Thai officers think alike in many ways, allowing us to work together to face mutual challenges. We study together; we train together; and yes, we occasionally fight together in common cause, as we did in Korea and Vietnam. (Johnson 2002) The Thai and US military currently engage in numerous bilateral activities, the most important of which is the annual Cobra Gold exercises. These provide joint training experiences, but also do much to ensure a degree of operational integration of relevant military, naval and air forces. The US and Thailand have recently expanded the Cobra Gold exercises to include other regional powers. Thailand has taken on a more active role in international military operations, sending troops to East Timor, technical support in Afghanistan and sending over 400 military personnel on a humanitarian mission to Iraq. In October 2003 President Bush announced Thailand’s major nonNATO Status, upgrading relations to the level of its Asian and Oceanic allies – the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and Australia (The Nation 2003b). The two states have intensified security cooperation by working together on drug trafficking and, through ASEAN, signing the United States of America–ASEAN Joint Declaration for Cooperation to Combat International Terrorism in 2002. Internally, Thailand and the US set up the Counter Terrorism Intelligence Centre (CTIC) in early 2001, which reflects renewed US intelligence and military activities within Thailand (Focus Team 2004). CTIC operations, heavily resourced by the CIA (CSIS 2003), led to the arrest of alleged JI members in June 2003 and, in August 2003, the capture of reputed al-Qaeda figure, Riduan Isamuddin (Hambali). CTIC is heavily involved in monitoring and responding (perhaps shaping?) events in several Muslim-majority provinces in the south of Thailand where an apparently revived separatist movement, reportedly under the influence of militant Islamic scholars, has led to hundreds of deaths and brutal state repression.2 This renewed presence of the US is likely to further fuel antagonism between Muslim populations in the South and the Thai state. Thailand has also allowed US warplanes transit

142 Michael K. Connors rights to Afghanistan and Iraq, citing a pre-existing agreement on mutual access to aviation facilities. Most recently, The Royal Thai Air Force has extended access to its bases to the Singaporean Air Force. For some observers this represents further entanglement in US strategy, given the close nature of the Singaporean state to the US. Indeed, the Ministry of Defence felt it necessary to issue a statement denying that the move indicated a longer-term plan of re-establishing permanent US bases in Thailand (The Nation 2004). While the official picture is one of extended ties, it is clear that significant elements within the military and foreign policy establishment are critical of these developments. This has found expression in the Thai rejection of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s suggestion that the US might deploy troops in Southeast Asia to hunt ‘terrorists’ (Baker 2004). Indeed, Thailand’s response to the Bush security agenda, centred on the ‘war on terror’ and intensified competition with China, has been somewhat uneven, suggesting some level of disquiet about its regional consequences. This concern has not found formal diplomatic expression, but close examination demonstrates significant differences between the two states. Soon after the events of September 11, 2001 Thaksin noted, ‘It is conceivable that the US will retaliate on a large scale in response to Tuesday’s attacks, but our position is to be strictly neutral.’ This was not simply a slip of the tongue; the PM’s Office Minister Thamarak Isarangura was emphatic about Thailand’s neutrality: ‘Our position is that we would not support any terrorist activities and we would not want to help the US in perpetrating a war . . .’ (The Nation 2001). In the subsequent days, the government back-pedalled on this position. Nevertheless, it remained cautious in its support of the US. In October 2001 the government rejected a renewed US request to station a supply ship in the Gulf of Thailand. On the war in Iraq, the Thai Foreign Minister was adamant that a solution be pursued through the UN. Deputy Prime Minister General Chavalit was blunt: ‘It seems, however, that the US has less consideration for other issues than its own national interest’ (The Nation 2003a). When it was clear that the US would go to war, Thaksin glumly noted that, ‘Since the United States has made the decision to go this way, we as their long-time ally . . . can only urge them to be cautious and minimise civilian casualties, targeting only military installations’ (ibid.). By mid-year Thailand was offering troops for humanitarian reconstruction in Iraq, deployed in September, and Bush announced Thailand’s major non-NATO ally status the month after. The Thai entry into Iraq was not consistent with previous announcements, and its entry must be interpreted as a consequence of increased US pressure to contribute to its troubled reconstruction effort and, by extension, accept the current administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy. The head of the military component of the mission, Colonel Nopadol Mangkalathon, was quite forthright that it was the maintenance of the US alliance that was at the forefront of Thai motivations in its deployment to Iraq (see Chaiwat 2004).

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Apart from street protests, and academic dissent, members of parliament also opposed Thai involvement in the war in Iraq. The Foreign Affairs Committee argued several points: the US was waging an offensive war in Iraq that went against international law; that the government had used an executive decree of questionable constitutional status to deploy troops; and expressed fears that it would fuel problems in the south of the country where a separatist movement, with Islamic tendencies, was operating (Jiran 2004). There were also claims that the US had leaned on Thailand. Foreign-policy analyst Khian Theravit (2004) reports on military sources who claim that the US requested Thai involvement, and that the order for deployment came from the government in line with this request. In preparation, the military sought further clarification on the threat posed by WMD to any soldiers it might deploy; the Americans reportedly responded, ‘Don’t worry’, indicating a confidence that there were none. Thailand has deepened its security cooperation with the United States and continues to play a part in US security strategy within and outside the region. It is debatable whether this represents a genuine deepening of Thailand’s role in the Bush administration’s strategy of thwarting the potential regional leadership of China, or whether it is more likely a pragmatic shift related to fitting into specific elements of US global strategy at the same time as serving its own perceived regional interests through alliance maintenance (see Tow 1999). It must also be said that the Thaksin regime may have underestimated the costs of this intensifying entanglement with the US, given that doubts remain about shared views and interests in this respect.

Conclusion The condition of hegemony requires the mediation of norms and socially embedded outlooks, and the institutional means of integration. The Cold War created a high level of articulation between US and Thai elite perspectives, which found expression in a solid alliance. The events of the 1970s and 1980s diminished the importance of the alliance, which was increasingly based on a greater deal of pragmatism and bargaining, rather than obviously shared outlooks. The 1990s witnessed a return to higher levels of ideational hegemony, driven by both domestic and international factors. However, in a few short years, it seems as if the relationship has become a lot less mediated. The early years of the twenty-first century have presented a weakening of US hegemony, even as the relationship intensifies. This reflects the US move towards a more coercive form of diplomacy that requires submission to its strategy. But even in submission, there is a pay-off – the shift towards authoritarianism under Thaksin has not attracted US executive sanction. The regime has engaged in brutal suppression of drug trafficking with the mass killing of alleged drug traffickers (over 2,000 in 2003). The regime has also engaged in a violent

144 Michael K. Connors crackdown of ‘insurgents’ and protestors in the south of Thailand, inviting international condemnation, and tense relations with Malaysia and Indonesia (Connors 2005). Such human rights abuses would have led to substantial friction in the US–Thai relationship just several years ago. While some in Congress might be critical of the Thaksin regime, Bush has embraced it because of its supporting role in the US security architecture in Southeast Asia and its willingness to join, belatedly, the US operations in Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. For the moment, the interests of the two states may appear to converge, but this would be to mistake compelling imperatives for consensus. The Bush regime has, in part, set the scene for a post-hegemonic relationship by accepting the drift towards authoritarianism by the Thai state, and away from stronger forms of ideational hegemony that characterised its relations with the US in the 1990s. As the costs of the new US strategy mount, and its regional implications become clearer in the context of a rising China, it is by no means predictable that in the near to medium future the Thai state will comply with the strategic objectives pursued by the Bush administration.

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Mark Beeson and Duncan McCargo for providing very useful feedback on an earlier draft. A La Trobe University small grant provided me with the opportunity to consult Thai sources. 2 It is difficult to be definitive about who is behind the renewed violence. Conflicting reports are issued by police, military and political agencies. It appears that at least some of the violence has been stage managed by criminalised state networks, in competition with other networks, seeking to control resources (see Connors 2005).

9

Bush and the Philippines after September 11 Hegemony, mutual opportunism and democratic retreat Ben Reid

Introduction Important alterations have occurred to the United States’ hegemonic relations with the Philippines since September 11. Two recent events, perhaps, illustrate much about what the implications of “war on terrorism” are for developing states such as the Philippines which have had long histories of direct collaboration with the United States, On the one hand, as late as October 2004 President George Bush visited the Philippines and pledged over $300 million in defence assistance to increase the “counter-terrorism” capacities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP). On the other hand, President Gloria MacapagalArroyo was forced in July to withdraw the small Philippine contingent of troops and logistics teams from Iraq. This followed a mass campaign in the Philippines calling for the withdrawal of troops after the kidnapping and ransom of Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz. While still a member of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, the Philippine government has been forced to be reticent about revealing the extent of its renewed collaboration with the United States. Overwhelmingly, there is a tendency to maintain support for the so-called “war on terror”. The extent of the commitment is limited, however, and circumscribed by the existence of popular opposition and the more immediate concerns of the Philippine state. The “collaboration” between the Philippines and the United States has a long and relatively unique history in Southeast Asia. Colonisation by the United States in 1898 prevented the victory of a plebeian and revolutionary republican movement that had largely defeated Spanish colonial forces. After independence in 1946, the United States military retained a strong presence in the Philippines until 1992. The Philippines, of course, has since the 1960s been one of the most politically unstable countries in Southeast Asia, with both long-term Maoist and secessionist insurgencies representing important challenges to the state. The latter conflict revolves around assertions for independent self-government by the predominantly Muslim Bangsamoro national minority in Western Mindanao. United

146 Ben Reid States’ military support played an important role in providing security for the Philippine state and elite against these threats. Even more so, perhaps, there has been a pattern of recurrent mass politicisation and social mobilisation over the last quarter century, symbolised by the (now three) “EDSA” revolts of 1986 and 2001.1 A significant outcome of the first EDSA revolt was the continuing social mobilisation and political debate that culminated in the Philippine Senate voting not to renew the treaty enabling permanent United States military bases in 1991. A long association developed in the 1970s and 1980s between demands for democratisation and ending the United States military presence. Arguably, what has occurred with the “war on terror” is an intensification by sections of the Philippine political elite to reverse the substantive though partial retreat of United States hegemony that occurred in the wake the EDSA revolt and return of democracy in 1986. In large part these moves appear motivated by the Philippine state elite’s desire to further suppress the Bangsamoro secessionist movement and other threats posed by subaltern class social mobilisation. While apparently in favour of a negotiated settlement with the main Bangsamoro secessionist group – the Moro-Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) – continued attempts have been made to exaggerate or invent historical links between its leaders and al-Qaeda. Military operations against the smaller and rival Abu Sayyaf kidnapping and ransom gang have been used as a pretext to increase military pressure against the MILF. A mutually opportunistic relationship has attempted to reassert itself. In keeping with history, the Philippine elite appears again to be utilising relations with the United States for its own opportunistic advantage. In turn, the United States is very much in favour of re-establishing its strategic military presence in the Philippines. How are these relationships between the Philippines and the United States to be interpreted? Doing so requires an historical approach and composite theoretical model that takes into account the various dimensions of United States hegemony and its relationship to the Philippines, through various levels of: international strategic relations; forms of capital accumulation, class formation; and the specificities of the state. In the Philippines this requires identifying how historical forms of hegemony, as defined by Cox (1997), emerged. In turn, attention is placed how United States hegemony affected the specificities of emerging national class relations and their impacts on the particular development outcomes that occurred. In doing so, and in contrast to the overly globalist focus of dependency-influenced histories (see San Juan 2000), particular attention is focused on how national processes impacted on the state and its “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995). A focus on “national-level” processes – in this time of overblown focus on globalisation – is perhaps unfashionable. Yet what this chapter argues is that in contrast to what newer analyses of global social movements often maintain, such as Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), power is still not configured predominately accord-

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ing to global “networks”. Quite the contrary, national-based social movements and contestation over state sovereignty remains an important terrain of political action, which in turn impacts of global configurations of power. The aim of the analysis is to demonstrate how a particular set of social relations emerged historically that ensured that the close linkages between Philippine elites and the United States would tend to re-occur and that mass assertions for democratic and republican sovereignty would tend to undermine these relationships. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first maps the longer history of Philippine/United States relations and ways that the hegemony of the latter was established and eventually challenged by the mass social upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s. The second part argues that what has occurred since September 11, 2001 has been an intensified attempt by the Philippine elite to reverse the partial retreat of United States hegemony and how it is being contested.

United States power and translational class alliances The historical specificity of the Philippines and its colonial relationship with the United States entails that the impacts of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” requires an analysis centred on the evolving historical relationships and spatial configurations of power. Two identifiable periods can be delineated: the advance of United States interests between 1898 and 1986 followed by a relative retreat after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. The colonial roots of hegemony In the Philippines, power has been configured spatially through a complex web of translational class relations. The broader historical relations – both military and political economic – are best understood by utilising a neoGramscian model of international interaction (Cox 1997). Such an approach emphasises how the main cross-national interactions relate to the formation of class relations within national social formations that, in turn, interact with and are conditioned by emerging global social divisions of labour. The United States’ original colonial incorporation of the Philippines occurred at a time of the increasing competition for territory that occurred between the European colonial powers. The main motivation of the United States was the establishment of a strategic presence that would enable competition with the European powers, already present in East Asia (Shafer 2003). The impact of the form of the colonial incorporation of the Philippines was important. There was limited incorporation of the Philippine economy into a process of dynamic industrialisation or resource exploitation. Rather what tended to happen was that the United States set

148 Ben Reid about cultivating alliances with and maintaining the interests of the “ilustrado” (“illustrious ones”) landowning elite through granting concessions to export agriculturalists and the non-implementation of re-distributive land reforms (Hayami et al. 1990; Ofreneo 1980; Reid 2000). Correspondingly, strong patron–client relations emerged whereby Philippine elite interests – in particular their security against internal threats (peasant and secessionist rebellions) – were maintained by the United States. The United States also colonised and incorporated the historically separate and predominantly Muslim Bangsamoro region in Mindanao into the Philippine state (Jubair 1999). The Bangsamoro became an exploited national minority. It was from amongst these educated layers of ilustrado landowners that a leadership emerged of the revolt against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines that occurred in the late nineteenth century. In keeping with Fanon’s (1962) classical observations on nationalist movements, what developed was a differentiation within the independence movement between plebeian-based Katipunan independence fighters – led by Andres Bonifacio – and the more elite-controlled sections of nationalists. The former was much less inclined to compromise on issues of national independence and republicanism. What preceded President Emilio Aguinaldo’s decision to invite United States participation in the war of independence was the assassination of Bonifacio and other radical nationalist leaders (Constanino and Constantino 1978). The occupation by the United States proceeded on the basis of strong support from landowner interests, who had willingly agreed to intervention as a safeguard against their probable expropriation by a revolutionary republican and nationalist regime. In the ensuring conflict, around one million Filipinos died during the United States-led “pacification” of the archipelago between 1898 and 1902 (Constantino 1978). United States colonial power also succeeded in formally establishing control of those regions that had resisted the Spanish, such as in Mindanao. Moreover, the ensuring coterie of social relations that emerged consolidated five important processes (amongst others). First, a strong relationship developed linking class power, the state and United States hegemony. Effectively a set of patron–client relations were established whereby landowning class power relied on the patronage of United States colonial presence for its survival. In turn, the United States maintained its strategic interests in the Philippines (and inside East Asia) on the basis of this source of support from landowning interests (Reid 2000). Second, neither substantive national independence nor democracy was ever achieved as both the formal institutions of the state and the main major political parties (the Nationalistas and the Liberals) became embedded in relationships of landowner power. United States direct administration and control of the Philippines during the first half of the twentieth century made a large imprint onto many of eventual institutions and prac-

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tices that emerged with the formation of an independent republic in 1946. The skewed levels of resource distribution and landownership that characterised the Philippines were never seriously threatened. Third, in the politico-military sphere the Philippines remained deeply embedded in the web of strategic relationship that the United States cultivated during the Cold War. United States military presence was quickly consolidated after the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945. The Philippine Government signed the Philippine–American Military Bases Agreement in March 1947, which legitimised the presence of Clark, Subic Bay and other bases and ensured a large and visible direct military presence maintained (Banlaoi 2002, 298). Fourth, a regime of “unequal treaties” facilitated the emergence of a corresponding set of political-economic relations. In 1946 the newly independent Philippine Government made two additional important agreements with the United States: the 1946 Philippine–American Treaty on General Relations and the 1946 Philippine–American Trade Act (Banlaoi 2002, 298). Both agreements institutionalised significant concessions to United States economic interests in the Philippines. These included full legal parity rights for United States-owned corporations and access to many markets in the Philippines (Constantino 1978). In return, the United States provided some strategic access to its own market for select Philippine (mostly agricultural) export commodities, such as sugar. The result was the substantial embedding of the Philippine economy with that of the United States. An average of over half of foreign direct investment between 1950 and 1975 came from the United States, while the North American market absorbed between 30 and 40 per cent of Philippine agricultural and merchandise exports (NEDA 1995). These agreements remained in place until the 1970s. Fifth and finally, politics and the state were and continue to be defined by the failure of the anti-colonial and radical republican revolution of 1896–98. United States intervention aborted the capacity for a strong independent state to emerge that was not embedded in the power relations of landowning classes. While formal democracy existed between 1946 and 1972 and after 1986, sovereignty in practice remains partially parcelised to local landholding elites. Access to resources became a function of connections to power within the state apparatus. No really independent bureaucracy existed and the existence of extreme inequalities and barriers to social mobility prevents the emergence of motivated professional layer in both private sector and the state apparatus (Evans 1995, 192). Hence the failure of the revolution and United States hegemony are intrinsically linked as the former facilitated and has continued to encourage the emergence of these relationships between state and society. It also tended to prohibit a solution to the problems in Mindanao as the Philippine elite was hostile to the notion of any loss of sovereignty over the resource-rich territory.

150 Ben Reid The United States’ hegemony therefore came to be based in deeprooted historical and social relations in the Philippines.2 Direct United States intervention prevented the victory of anti-colonial and republican forces in the Philippines in 1898 against both Spain and the local landowning elite. The United States’ main base of support remained the landowning class and hence power was allocated on the basis of a transnational class alliance with the United States as patron and the Philippines remaining a client. The latter dutifully retained neo-colonial relations with its United States patrons with independence after the Pacific war. Expanding, contracting and altering hegemony The paradoxes and contradictions of United States power, however, began to undermine these relationships and cause their further alteration by the 1970s. A new cycle of conflict emerged with the arrival of the Marcos dictatorship years (1972–86) and their aftermath. As landowning capital remained dominant in the national social formation – unlike in the East Asian newly industrialising economies – there was (and remains) little impetus towards industrial accumulation. The focus on income from land rents and tenancy-based land relations played a dual role of distorting prices and suppressing the demand in the domestic market (Reid 2000). The main period of relative exception was between 1948 and 1962 when import-substituting industrialisation and foreign exchange controls were combined with modest land redistribution policies. However, import substitution was progressively dismantled from the mid1960s and a development focus resumed based on export agriculture (Rivera 1994). In addition, there were additional external factors at play. Just as the form of United States hegemony altered from direct colonial control to (relative) independence after the Pacific War, so it altered again during the 1970s. What occurred was what Bernard (1996) has defined as a form of progressive ideological and discursive remodelling on the basis of the neo-liberal economic policy. While the high point of the process was not established until well into the 1980s and 1990s, The roots of AngloAmerican ideological hegemony over economic and development policy were established after the dismantling of import substitution-based industrialisation (Montes and Lim 1996). Globalisation’s impact on the Philippines was not so much an expression of increasing cross-border openness to trade and investment flows. Rather it was the implementation of ideological model of development. In Mindanao, a newer focus on extracting rents resource exploitation – mining and forestry in particular – added to the resentment of the Bangsamoro population and helped facilitate the rise of a secessionist movement in the late 1960s (Jubair 1999). For the most part, Ferdinand Marcos’ election as President in 1968 and declaration of martial law in 1972 were outcomes of the limits of the trans-

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national class alliance and the particular emerging social and economic crises that occurred after the end of import substituting industrialisation. On the one hand, the on-going power of landowning capital (with United States backing) had progressively succeeded in preventing any substantial measures in land reform and consolidation of capital in non-agricultural spheres, such as industry. The result was that by the early 1970s economic growth and transformation had begun to lag behind other high-growth Asian economies in the region (Reid 2000). On the other hand, the mounting the economic problems began to be combined with political crises created by social discontent generated by issues of violations of civil liberties and the Philippine’s support for the United States in Vietnam (Constantino 1978). The starkest expressions of the apparent crises were the emergence of large-scale insurgencies – led by a revived communist movement – and the growth secessionist sentiment amongst the Bangsamoro population in Mindanao. However, the Marcos era did little to alleviate these underlying problems and issues. Marcos originally assumed authoritarian power justified on the basis of rhetoric of combating communist subversion through enacting social reforms and dismantling the powers of the old elites. What actually happened was that, on the one hand, sanctions and repression were mainly meted out to Marcos rivals, while allies were rewarded with commercial benefits (Yoshihara 1988). On the other hand, the United States and multilateral development institutions gave considerable diplomatic and financial support to Marcos (Bello et al. 1982). The ensuing economic crisis and contraction and subsequent foreign-debt blow-out that emerged after 1981 helped to seriously weaken Marcos’ hold on power. By 1985–86 a cycle of anti-dictatorial social mobilisation and politicisation occurred that would entail subtle changes to the configuration of power in the Philippines and the role of the United States. First, while there were important differentiations within the democratic mass opposition, there remained an underlying resentment of the role of the United States as Marcos’ main international source of political, military and diplomatic support. While, the more mainstream sections of the opposition – such as Corozon Aquino’s Laban (struggle) party – aimed to (and ultimately won) United States support, there was increased scepticism of the role of the United States in Philippine affairs.3 The scepticism found expression in the new constitution that was adopted in 1987 (after the assumption of power by Aquino in 1986 after the EDSA uprising) that imposed restrictions on the presence of foreign military forces and ownership in strategic sectors of the Philippine economy (Lane 1990). While the constitution was not as radical as many would have hoped, it nevertheless became a major issue during the 1990s when attempts were repeatedly made to liberalise foreign investment. Second, a major outcome of the period of re-democratisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was the decision by the Philippine Congress and Senate to not renew the

152 Ben Reid Philippine–American Military Bases Agreement in 1992. A significant mass social movement forced the closure of the Clark and Subic bases. The United States was therefore deprived of its legal justification for a permanent military presence in the Philippines. Yet regardless of these changes, United States power clearly remained a substantial force. The Aquino government (and from 1994 the Ramos presidency) continued to rely on vital United States strategic support for defence and conducting anti-insurgency campaigns against the communistled New People’s Army and the Bangsamoro secessionists. Within the regime itself there were conflicting currents ranging from nationalist and democratic reformers, through to outright militarists (Lane 1990). Likewise, the broader ideological hegemony of the United States over foreign and domestic policy remained unchanged. In the economic sphere, in particular, the Philippines remained as committed as ever to United States and multilateral sponsored policies of structural adjustment, exportoriented production and debt servicing (Bello 2001). Under the Ramos government this commitment was further entrenched through the implementation of neo-liberal programmes of financial and monetary policies that undermined the policy rhetoric of aggressive industrial expansion (Reid 2000). Therefore, by the late 1990s, the hegemony of United States power in the Philippines had shifted and retreated, but only slightly. The partial revival of democratic and nationalist sentiment that occurred with redemocratisation that occurred with EDSA had limited but real effects on United States power. Constitutional changes and the revoking of the Philippine United States Military bases agreement gave some credence to the existence of a decline in United States power. Yet the hegemony of the United States continued in altered form through the on-going defence ties and presence of pro-United States supporters in the Aquino and Ramos governments and the deepening commitment of policy elites to United States-sponsored model of economic management.

Bush and mutual opportunism Having detailed the nature of United States–Philippine relationship and the context of its partial weakening in the 1990s, what has been the subsequent impact of Bush’s “war on terror”? In general both the United States and the pro-United States sections of the Philippine elite have used circumstances for their mutual benefit to reinforce their respective power and sovereignties. As such, there has been a concerted attempt – partly concealed and partly open – to roll back the democratic advances and partial growth in independence that emerged through the first EDSA uprising. The current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo attempts to strengthen links with the United States has, however, been moderately constrained by the influence of supporters from amongst the pro-

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democratic and pro-independence parts of her constituency that helped bring her to power in the second EDSA uprising in 2001. The major lever through which the rollback has occurred has been through the use of “anti-terrorism” rhetoric and increased United States aid to facilitate the periodic intensification of low-intensity warfare in Mindanao against the Bangsamoro insurgency. In return, the Philippines has maintained close diplomatic support for the United States and (quietly at first) became a member of the “coalition of the willing” in favour of Iraq’s invasion. With the partial retreat and fragmentation of the communist-led New People’s Army by the late 1990s, the biggest enduring threat to the security of the Philippine elite remained the Bangsamoro insurgency. The main security policy goal in the Philippines has been to encourage greater military collaboration with the United States to contain the threat, while alternately maintaining a veneer of encouraging attempts at a negotiated settlement. The insurgency in Mindanao has, of course, been a long running issue. Historically it was associated with the Bangsamoro resistance to Spanish and American colonisation and after independence with disputes with Malaysia over the status of Sabah (Vitug and Gloria 2000). By the 1960s, worsening poverty and social exclusion, combined with encroachments into Muslim and tribal areas by Christian settlers, created the preconditions for a renewed insurgency campaign. From 1968 an organised rebellion has occurred, calling for the secession of the majority Muslim population provinces of western Mindanao with varying degrees of open warfare with AFP. The first and largest secessionist group to emerge was the Moro National Liberation Front, led by Nur Misuari. During the Marcos years the MNLF became one of the largest threats to the dictatorship. After 1986 a series of negotiations between the Aquino government and the MNLF (the Tripoli agreement) occurred that were later resolved by President Fidel Ramos’ government. In 1996 the South Philippines Council for Peace and Development was established to oversee a peace agreement in the already established Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, which incorporated many MNLF personnel into local administration, with Misuri as Governor (Jubair 1999). By 1999, however, there was widespread disillusion with the outcome of the negotiations which resulted in renewed secessionist sentiment.4 Since 1999 the Philippine state and military’s main policy has been towards combating the influence of the principal beneficiaries of the renewed sentiment, the rival secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Both under the Estrada government and increasingly under Arroyo, the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine government has continually used operations against the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) as a cover for more extensive military activity (Cotton 2003). The MILF is a much larger group with considerable popular support. Originating as a more identifiably “Islamist” splinter from the more secular and nationalist MNLF in 1985, its leaders had established contact with and

154 Ben Reid been trained by the Mudjahadeen rebels in Afghanistan. While its principal goal is a programme of Islamisation (including the formation of an Islamic state) there is little agreement amongst leaders about the precise meaning of this (Vitug and Gloria 2000).5 The ASG is a splinter from the MILF that emerged in 1992. Throughout the 1990s it engaged in numerous acts of kidnapping for ransom, established links with al-Qaeda, and is generally identified with an extremist Wahhabi Islam (Vitug and Gloria 2000). The precise nature and depth of the ASG’s support is not clear – as the boundary between it and more general growth armed gangs are not certain (Vitug and Gloria 2000, 208). The MILF, however, has consistently condemned the group and denies any links with alQaeda or more recently the Jemaah Islamiyah (MILF 2002). The United States government has not formally considered it a terrorist organisation since 2002 (Cantal-Albasin 2002, 4). The Philippine military and government elite, however, regularly refer to all groups as “Southern Philippine Terrorists”. A discourse of anti-terrorism has, however, been actively deployed to justify re-establishment of military relations. Preceding both the Arroyo government and the September 11, 2001 attacks, moves had already been made by President Joseph Estrada to open the Philippines again to more extensive United States military involvement. In 1999 the Philippine Senate ratified the Philippine–American Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) (Moradas 2003, 232). This corresponded with a renewal of offensive military operations against the MILF. The VFA allowed for periodic visits by United States troops for training operations, but not permanent bases. One result was the re-opening of annual “Balikatan” joint exercises with United States military forces, after their suspension in 1996 by the Philippine Supreme Court (Moradas 2003, 324). Staged provocatively near MILF controlled areas in Mindanao, the initial joint exercises provided the basis for renewed collaboration in subsequent years. The Arroyo administration’s coming to power in early 2001 had contradictory though generally increased effects on the trend to added military relations with the United States. On the one hand, Arroyo came to power herself through semi-mass uprising against the Estrada government (Reid 2001). In the lead up to the uprising, though, Mindanao had become an important issue that alienated many progressive members of Estrada’s “rainbow coalition” (Reid 2001). There was, therefore, a considerable sentiment towards resolving the conflict through non-military means and for democratic reform. Arroyo’s initial response was therefore to ensure a cease-fire occurred. On the other hand, She had previously been Estrada’s Vice-President – before joining the opposition in mid 2000 – and clearly supported Estrada’s moves towards militarisation in Mindanao (Reid 2001). What was lacking was the opportunity to pursue this militarist path without provoking a response from the democratic mass movement that had brought Arroyo to power.

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The opportunity quickly came, however, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as the resulting “war on terror’ facilitated opportunities for substantial increases in relations with the United States. First, the Arroyo government responded with the formation of an All Agency Terrorism Taskforce that formulated a series of policy responses to terrorism. Central amongst these was the need for priority allocated to modernisation to the AFP and ensure parity fighting capabilities with United States forces (Arroyo 2003). The government’s main means of achieving this became clear when Arroyo visited the United States within two months of the attacks. Arroyo went to considerable lengths to emphasise the Philippine government’s support for the war on terror, including military intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Arroyo was also able to use the linkages between al-Qaeda and the ASG to emphasise the crucial role of the Philippines as a theatre of the global campaign. The government was, as a result, able to successfully obtain grants and loans of $92 million (equivalent to more than 10 per cent of the Philippine military budget) in assistance (Cotton 2003, 152). Second, and more generally, the Arroyo government increased the use of rhetoric of national security, adopting the slogan “Strong Republic’ in 2002 as a framework for its main policy proposals. A contradictory logic was used of emphasising national independence, security and poverty reduction on the one hand, with a clear subtext of the need for increased collaboration with the United States’ “war on terror” (see Pablo and Pazzibugan 2002, 1; David 2002, 7). The need to increase the counter-terrorism capacities of the Philippine military has subsequently been cited for most increases in linkages with the United States. Indeed, the extent of collaboration that occurred, in the name of modernisation, soon entailed direct involvement of United States personnel in Mindanao. The ASG’s taking of two American hostages helped to justify the presence by February 2002 of some 600 United States troops, including 160 specialist forces, in the Balikatan 02–1 exercises of that year. While present ostensibly for training purposes, they were authorised to use force in self-defence. By April the contingent had increased in size to over 6,000 troops (Cotton 2003, 153). In the ensuring “exercises” the main leading elements of the ASG were tracked down and eliminated, with the loss of several hostages’ lives. In practice, therefore, United States troops had effectively re-established their presence in the Philippines. While there certainly were linkages between the anti-ASG campaign and the broader anti-Bangsamoro insurgency campaign, they were not as immediately apparent. On the one hand, the Arroyo government had opted not to immediately launch attacks on both the MILF and the ASG. Knowing that the MILF leadership was hostile to the ASG and that it denied links to al-Qaeda, the Arroyo government instead opted to extend its initial ceasefire so as to develop and sign a “memorandum of agreement with the government to help in the campaign against terrorism and

156 Ben Reid criminality” (Cantal-Albasin 2002, 4). The MILF complied and the Arroyo government established a cease-fire with local monitoring groups to oversee relations between AFP and MILF units. The United States played a crucial role in establishing the legitimacy of the agreement with the MILF, by removing the group from its official schedule of “terrorist organisations” (Cantal-Albasin 2002, 4). The change in status of the MILF opened the possibility for negotiations between it and the Philippine Government. Getting the groups to agree to negotiations in return for placing diplomatic pressure on the United States and the European Union to not recognise them as terrorists allowed them to continue to receive funds from overseas sources and operate accounts. On the other hand, while projecting a stance of negotiations the Arroyo government simultaneously further increased the scope and intensity of its military relations with the United States. Throughout 2002 the main emphasis was placed on pursuing a joint Mutual Logistics Support Agreement. While the exact implications of the MLSA remain unclear and it appears that it largely formalises existing relationships with the United States. Nevertheless, the signing of the MLSA generated considerable controversy, not least of all within the Arroyo cabinet itself. Arroyo’s Vice-President Teofisto Guingona raised several objections to the content of the MLSA, arguing that it provided for both permanent presence of foreign military personnel in the Philippines and provisions for support of bilateral actions with the United States outside of United Nationsendorsed activities (Moradas 2003, 244–255). Arroyo and Defence Secretary Angelo Reyes claimed that the MLSA does neither (Ubac 2003, 4). Controversy remained over whether the MLSA required ratification by the Philippine Senate or whether it was a minor executive agreement subsumed by more general treaties with the United States. Regardless of the MLSA’s exact legal status it generated considerable public debate. The political debate and social mobilisation that occurred around its adoption served to emphasise the continuing resistance to United States presence within the Philippines that has endured since both the 1986 and 2001 EDSA revolts. The controversy over the adoption of the MLSA perhaps had an opposite effect and forestalled attempts by the Arroyo government to allow greater involvement with and presence of the United States military. In contrast to military and defence spheres, little has happened in terms of debate over broader issues of trade and the United States. Ongoing low growth in the manufacturing sector had already led to the Arroyo government placing a freeze on taking further measures to liberalise imports from ASEAN Free Trade Agreement partners in 2002, with the support of many of the pro-democratic non-government organisations who had brought the government to power at EDSA II. There was also considerable scepticism about the impacts of existing and the likelihood of projected World Trade Organization-negotiated multilateral agree-

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ments. Later in 2002 there were some moves made by the Department of Trade and Industry to establish bilateral agreements with the United States and Japan (Cabacungan 2002, 1). Despite some lobbying and prompting from United States-based business lobbyists, little moves have occurred towards a formal free-trade agreement, apart from limited feasibility studies. With a considerable sentiment in favour of delaying further trade liberalisation within the government, the focus of relations with the United States has therefore primarily been aimed at securing greater military assistance. Moreover, the divisions and hesitations around trade were also apparent in the Arroyo government’s stance on the so-called second stage of the “war on terror”: United States intervention in Iraq. A similar stance emerged as to Arroyo’s dual posture in Mindanao of combining intensifying United States militarisation with negotiations. Initially, and in keeping with other Southeast Asian regimes, the Arroyo government maintained a stance of opposing unilateral action by the United States against Iraq (Moradas 2003, 252). Yet it became clear that Arroyo was effectively supporting the Iraq invasion and part of the “coalition of willing”. Colin Powell even listed the Philippines as one of the forty-five member states, and while the government did explicitly state it was a member neither did it rebuke Bush or Powell (Pazzibugan 2003a, 1). More substantially, Arroyo expressed her support for the United States campaign through allowing overflights by and use of re-fuelling facilities for military aircraft in the Philippines. While offering this support she maintained that the main focus of the Philippines’ contribution to the coalition would be to contributing logistics for reconstruction and troops after the end of formal hostilities (Pazzibugan 2003b, 1). A small force of seventy-five military and police were subsequently sent to Iraq to help with “reconstruction and peace-keeping” (David 2003, 9). By mid-2003 the Arroyo government was definitely supporting the Iraq campaign, although the level of its commitment was relatively limited and confined to so-called post-hostilities operations. However, even the limited direct commitment was eventually reversed following the kidnap and release of Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz. While the military presence in Iraq was slight, there were a considerable number of Filipino contract workers in Iraq by mid-2004. De la Cruz was subsequently abducted by Iraqi resistance fighters in July, who in turn demanded ransom and the withdrawal of Filipino forces. Faced with a considerable mass movement in favour of withdrawal and divisions within her own government over the role of the Philippines, Arroyo acquiesced and agreed to withdraw Filipino forces (The Economist 2004a, 43). De la Cruz was released and returned to the Philippines. Predictably, there was much consternation over the Philippine’s alleged “capitulation to terror”, with conservative American think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation castigating Arroyo as “weak” (Doronila 2004, A1). In practice though the

158 Ben Reid commitment of the Arroyo government was always constrained by the considerable political opposition to deployment in the Philippines. Subsequently, United States–Philippines relations have tended to continue along a similar trajectory of careful increases in military cooperation combined with measures to placate the sceptical Filipino opposition. On the one hand, Arroyo has maintained an official policy of promoting negotiation, as well of social and democratic reforms in Mindanao to resolve the Bangsamoro conflict. By 2003 renewed diplomatic pressure from Malaysia had pushed the Arroyo government into resuming direct talks with the MILF (Nawal 2003, 14). For its part the United States – through its ambassador in Manila – has stated its support for the peace process (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2004, A17). On the other hand, relations with the United States have continued to strengthen despite the withdrawal from Iraq by the Philippines, with most recently a visit by Bush to the Philippines in October 2004. The Philippines was upgraded to the status of major non-NATO Defence Partner by the United States. Modernisation of Philippine defences has continued under the framework of a Joint Defence Agreement committing the Philippines to maintaining technological and capacity parity with American forces (OPP 2004a). To this end, the United States announced a further military assistance package of $352 million, including the supply of thirty-three combat helicopters for operation in Mindanao (OPP 2004b). A dual strategy of negotiations, used in tandem with simultaneous increases in military capacity and United States involvement, has been used therefore to deflect criticism within the Philippines. Bush’s “war on terror”, therefore, has been regarded as fortuitous for the majority sections of the Filipino elite who have traditionally relied on United States support for their defence and security. The adoption of the goals of anti-terrorism by the Arroyo government has enabled it to make some partial reversals of the increased independence the Philippines secured after the 1986 EDSA revolt and the expiration of the United States military bases agreement in 1991. Arroyo (and Estrada before her) has effectively used activity of the ASG and links to global terror organisations to increase military assistance in order to increase the pressure against the mainstream Bangsamoro secessionists. Arroyo, however, coming to power herself through a popular uprising, has had to make considerable concessions to the pro-independence and pro-democratic forces in Philippine society and within her government. Her drive to militarisation has, therefore, been undertaken simultaneously with an appearance of an attitude to openness to negotiations with the MILF. Likewise, while clearly in support of the Iraq invasion, the Arroyo government has been discreet about its direct involvement and reduced this when faced with mass public pressure following the kidnapping of Angelo de al Cruz.

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Transnational class alliances and democratic advances/retreats How has Bush’s “war on terror” impacted on the historically important relationship of United States hegemony over the Philippines? The aim of the above analysis has been to demonstrate how a particular set of social relations emerged historically that ensured close linkages between Philippine elites and the United States. These relations, however, have tended to come into conflict with aspirations for democratic and republican sovereignty. United States hegemony over the Philippines emerged historically and had important impacts on the forms of development that occurred within the national social formation. Intervention following the victory of the independence in forces over Spain in 1898 – with the collaboration of the Philippine ilustrado elite – ensured the defeat of the prominently radical republican plebeian movement. United States colonial authority, in turn, consolidated the power of these landholding elites and the historical role of the hacienda-based system of plantation agriculture. After establishing control of the newly independent state in 1946, these landowning classes came to rely on the United States for investment, markets and security against internal and external threats to the state. The relative autonomy in national development, granted by the United States in response to threats of Chinese expansionism in the 1950s, allowed for some level of industrialisation. The power of the landowning elites ultimately prevented this industrialisation from expanding and the outcome of the ensuing social crisis was descent into dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos’ support from the United States, combined with the emerging re-subordination of the Philippines to United States hegemony in issues of economic management and counter-insurgency measures against revolutionary and secessionist movements, resulted in the widespread reemergence of a mood of scepticism towards American power. Demands for re-democratisation were often linked to assertions of national independence and a reduction of the extent of collaboration with the United States. After the mass EDSA uprising in 1986 and the return of republican democracy, military relations with the United States were scaled back, with permanent bases were closed by 1992. Other areas of hegemony – such as concerning economic and development policy – were intensified. The post-September 11 “war on terror” has, however, resulted in increased attempts by the Philippine elite to re-establish closer relationships with the United States. This process had already commenced with the establishment of the Visiting Forces Agreement in 1999 and President Joseph Estrada’s military campaign against the MILF in Mindanao. On the one hand, the Arroyo government – which itself came to power after a mass uprising against Estrada government in 2001 – has continued and intensified the trend. Military operations with the involvement of United

160 Ben Reid States personnel have continued against the ASG as a pretext for future action against the mainstream MILF. Both the activities of the ASG and constant allegations of MILF leader’s links to terrorist organisations have been used to justify a gradual and United State’s supported military build up to resolve the long-standing Bangsamoro secessionist conflict through repression. New agreements such as the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement and increased military aid from the United States have emerged and threaten to facilitate the re-emergence of a permanent foreign military presence in the Philippines. On the other hand, the existence of substantial opposition to a closer relationship with the United States, both within Philippine society and Arroyo’s government itself, has continued to counter the consistent trend to militarisation. First, while the United State’s initial stage of the “war on terror” received considerable support in the Philippines there was still opposition to the presence of United States troops. Second, the Philippine government eventually committed itself to be part of the “coalition of the willing”, but it was reluctant to commit forces directly to the Iraq invasion, although it did allow the flyovers and use of re-fuelling facilities by the United States Air Force. Its small contingent was quickly removed from Iraq in response to mass opposition that emerged with the kidnapping of a Philippine national by the Iraqi resistance. Third, while increased military aid from the United States has been used to put more pressure on the MILF secessionists, the Philippine government has publicly had to commit to peace talks (for now). While the re-establishment of military relations has continued it is checked by opposition in the form of divisions in the government and mass democratic social movements. The hegemony of the United States has, therefore, had and continues to have major impacts on the Philippines, although opposition forces recurrently contest it. American hegemony helped facilitate the emergence of certain class relations and the state in the Philippines. The main elite classes have tended to be based on landownership and resisted attempts at land reform and industrialisation. A focus on agriculture was later supplemented by the extraction of rents from natural-resource exploitation. The resulting somewhat tardy development outcomes of the Philippines have, however, resulted in continually re-occurring social conflicts and crises. Important examples of the latter include the emergence of both revolutionary and democratic social movements and Bangsamoro secessionism. Ultimately, the Philippine elite has consequently relied on the assistance of the United States to contain these threats. On the other hand, the plebeian radical republican sentiments that were suppressed in 1898 have periodically reasserted themselves. In particular, after the United States’ consistent support for the Marcos dictatorship, there have been increasing linkages between demands for democratic rule and independence from foreign powers, especially within social movements based amongst subsaltern social classes. Likewise, political reform has been linked to senti-

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ments for social reform, land reform and the facilitation of stronger national-based industries. All these sentiments were expressed in the political changes and democratic advances that occurred after the EDSA rebellion of 1986. What has tended to happen since is that the Philippine elite and the United States have attempted to mutually and opportunistically exploit the reactions to the September 11 attacks to reverse the democratic advances and measures of independence achieved by the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s. The outcomes of the process will in part be determined by how both internationally and nationally based social movements respond to the specious rationale being offered for re-militarisation and if they successfully defend the democratic gains of EDSA.

Notes 1 EDSA is the acronym for the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue “Expressway” in Metro-Manila. The EDSA and Ayala Avenue junction/overpass became an important site of mass protests after the anti-Marcos uprising of 1986. A second EDSA uprising removed President Joseph Estrada from power in 2001. On 1 May of that year pro-Estrada groups staged their own unsuccessful EDSA revolt against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. 2 There is in addition an entire set of socio-cultural relations that could be discussed concerning the construction of identity in the Philippines. This is for reasons of space outside the scope of this chapter. See Constantino and Constantino (1978). 3 This was clearly expressed in the differences, for instance, between the more radical Bayan (National Alliance) sections of the movements with its stock slogans of “End the United States–Marcos dictatorship” and the more moderate sections that omitted “United States” from the demand. 4 Misuri’s regional government became embroiled in corruption and mismanagement. His removal in 2000 prompted a rebellion by him and his remaining supporters in the MNLF. He is currently detained in a maximum-security prison. 5 Generally the most favoured model is the Shi-ite inspired Iranian state.

10 The United States, Bush and Indonesia Bitter memories, new eggshells David Bourchier

Introduction For policy makers in Washington, one of the most alarming findings of the 2003 Pew Global Attitudes survey was the degree of antipathy that the United States the Bush administration’s “war on terror” had fuelled across the world. The greatest swings were recorded in Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, but in Asia by far the sharpest fall was in Indonesia, where the approval rating for the United States plummeted from 75 per cent in 2000 to only 15 per cent in mid-2003 (PRC 2003). The depth of anti-US sentiment in Indonesia is sometimes explained with reference to the fact that Indonesia is the country with the world’s largest Muslim population and that Indonesian Muslims therefore feel more keenly the injustices done to their brothers and sisters in the Middle East than most other communities in Asia. There is some truth in this, but it is only part of the picture. I want to focus here on how Indonesia’s engagement with the US over the past half a century has left a residue of suspicion and resentment that is never far from the surface. In doing so I will look at the nature of US interests in Indonesia and how they have been defended by various governments, sometimes successfully, sometimes very clumsily. In the second part of the chapter I concentrate on the Bush ascendency and attempt to explain the various ways in which Indonesians have responded to the US-led war on terror.

The geopolitical context In the spirit of theoretical eclecticism, let me start with a realist perspective and look at naked geopolitics. Lawrence Griswold wrote in the official journal of the Navy League of the United States in 1973 that “Indonesia is endowed with what is probably the most strategically authoritative geographic location on earth” (in Klare 1975, 271). It commands – theoretically at least – key sea lanes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and therefore all seaborne trade between Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Australia and the

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industrial powerhouses of East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan). More than a thousand billion dollars of trade goes though Indonesian waters each year, including practically all the oil, gas and coal that Japan and China imports from the Gulf States and Australia.1 Going the other way are almost all of the Toyotas and other manufactured goods that Europe, the subcontinent, the Middle East and Australia buys from East Asia. With more than half the world’s merchant fleet capacity sailing through the Indonesian waters each year, it is obvious that the global economy, within which the US is the dominant player, is heavily dependent on access to the key waterways of Indonesia, especially the Malacca Straits.2 Indonesia also sits in the middle of the US Pacific Command, the military region that stretches from the west coast of the US to the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa. Nuclear armed ships and submarines from the Japan-based Seventh Fleet are continually passing though Indonesia. The Ombai-Wetar Strait just to the north of Timor and the Lombok Strait are especially important as they are the only routes used for nuclear-powered and armed submarines between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans.3 Unimpeded access to these deep-water channels was vital to the United States’ nuclear strategy during the Cold War and remains significant as the US attempts to constrain China, its major new competitor for strategic influence in East and Southeast Asia. As a piece of real estate, then, Indonesia – or let us say the islands currently known as Indonesia – have enormous strategic value to the world’s dominant trading and maritime power. The US has long recognised Indonesia as a treasure house of strategic natural resources as well, including oil, gas, rubber and palm oil. In 1940 the US took 30 per cent of all exports from the then Netherlands East Indies, and Caltex and Stanvac had extensive investments in oil. Supplies were resumed after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 and it became a crucial objective of US in Southeast Asia to maintain them. In 1953, US President Dwight Eisenhower defended his administration’s $400 million of military aid to the French in Indochina saying that if Vietnam and Malaysia were “lost” there would be no way for the “free world [to] hold the rich empire of Indonesia”. Several years later the future President Nixon (1967) famously added that “With its 100 million people and its 3,000 mile arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia constitutes the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.” As a trading partner, Indonesia is these days significant but not huge. Largely due to competition from China, Indonesia’s share of the US market is shrinking rapidly. In 2001 it was the eleventh largest supplier of US imports – mainly footwear, clothing and textiles – while it is now twenty-first, behind Thailand and the Philippines (NCUSIR 2003, 27).4 Nevertheless, the US is a major investor, especially in the oil and gas sector. The majority of direct foreign investment between 1967 and 1984 came from the US (Hill 1996, 270), and US firms currently have about $25

164 David Bourchier billion invested in Indonesia (NCUSIR 2003, 14). Some 300 major US firms are represented there, including Texaco, Chevron and Mobil. US mining interests are also active in Indonesia, with Freeport McMoran operating the largest gold and copper mine in the world at Grasberg, high in the mountains of West Papua. The US also acknowledges Indonesia’s significance as a political player in the region. With 235 million people it is by far the largest country in Southeast Asia and one that has played a dominant role within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southeast Asia’s pre-eminent political grouping. If Indonesia were to collapse it could well affect the stability of the entire region. That is why a 2003 report by The National Commission on US–Indonesian Relations referred to Indonesia as “the pivotal state in Southeast Asia” (NCUSIR 2003, 14) and why the Americans have a powerful interest in maintaining a government that is both stable and accommodating to the wishes of the United States. Before turning to the history of the relationship, it is important to note first that since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 Indonesia has assumed a new significance and visibility in Washington. There are two main reasons for this. First, despite Indonesia’s multiple failures of governance, it is one of the few Muslim-majority democracies. Together with Malaysia, it is regarded as a “model of moderation” in the Islamic world. As Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it in a talk on Indonesia, positive examples of successful Muslim democracies are as important as efforts to track down and eliminate terrorists (Miles 2004). The second reason Indonesia attracted the special attention of the Bush administration – and one that remains in constant tension with the first – was as a source of terrorism. This had been a concern of the US even under Clinton, but obviously became a much greater concern after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York and especially after the series of bombings of western targets in Indonesia, including the Bali nightclubs in 2002 and 2005. Indonesia, together with the Philippines, is routinely spoken about in Washington as a frontline state in the war on terror. So, having argued that Indonesia is strategically and symbolically important to the US, how has the US handled its relationship with Indonesia and how has this shaped Indonesian perceptions of and responses to US policy?

Domestic politics in Indonesia The priority of the Americans in the immediate aftermath of World War II was to halt the spread of communism in Europe. They were initially content to allow the French and Dutch colonial powers to reclaim their colonies in Asia and gave them the “modern weaponry, troop transport and massive financial assistance” to do so (Kahin 1994, 63). Indonesian nationalists recognised that although their physical fight was with the

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Dutch, it was the US that they had to impress if they were to win their struggle. As Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir put it in November 1945, “Indonesia is geographically situated within the sphere of influence of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism. Accordingly Indonesia’s fate ultimately depends on Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism” (Sjahrir 1968, 24). The need to play to the American court greatly strengthened the hand of the anti-communist elements of the Indonesian nationalist leadership during the revolution and, as George Kahin (1994, 64) has argued, certainly stymied the impulse of the Republic’s leaders – almost all of whom were socialists of some stripe – to espouse radical socio-economic programmes. What eventually convinced the US that the Indonesian leadership would make reliable allies was the crushing of a communist uprising in Madiun, in East Java in 1948. Within weeks of this bloody and still obscure event the US began training Indonesian police and soon afterwards tipped the balance in the United Nations that led to the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch in December 1949 (Leifer 1983, 15–26). While Indonesia largely owed its independence to the intervention of the Americans, the perception of almost all those involved in the struggle was that independence was won despite the US rather than because of it. The US was widely perceived to have come on side only when it became clear that the Dutch were incapable of restoring order in Indonesia and only out of calculated self-interest. Indonesia’s experience during the revolution instilled in the political class an enduring suspicion that outside powers, especially the nascent superpowers, were interested in manipulating Indonesia for their own purposes. Frustration with the polarising international environment and a sense that Indonesia deserved a place on the international stage led Mohammad Hatta to ask “Have the Indonesian people fighting for their freedom no other course of action open to them than to choose between being pro Russian or pro American?” (Leifer 1983, 20). This sentiment was later articulated in the principle that Indonesia should always follow an “active and independent” foreign policy. Sukarno subsequently became a founder and leading spokesperson of the Non-Aligned Movement, hosting the historic Asia–Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955. Non-alignment has remained central to Indonesia’s image of itself and remains important to the present. It is an unwritten rule that Indonesia does not enter into military pacts with foreign powers and does not allow foreign bases on its soil. Sukarno tried to be even-handed in his praise and condemnation of the superpowers, but his understanding of the world system was strongly informed by Marxist ideas and through his speeches he helped instil in a generation of Indonesians the notion that capitalism and imperialism were intrinsically linked – a view that continues to infuse Indonesian political thinking and feed a suspicion of the overtly capitalist United States. The real and lasting damage to the image of the United States was done

166 David Bourchier in the late 1950s, though, when President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who feared that Sukarno’s neutral stance was giving too many opportunities to the communists, authorised the covert supply of US weapons and military personnel to anti-communist rebels in Sulawesi and Sumatra (where most US oil interests happened to be located). Their aim was to “hold Sukarno’s feet to the fire” and, if necessary, break up Indonesia. The logic here was that Truman had made a strategic mistake in trying to keep China unified and that it would have been better for the anti-communist cause if they had allowed it to fragment (Kahin 1993, 65). The Americans’ cover was dramatically blown when in May 1958 Indonesian forces shot down an American civilian pilot who was on a bombing raid over Ambon in support of the rebels (Ricklefs 1981, 251). This illegal and utterly counterproductive intervention caused a civil war and left deep scars in Indonesian society. It was a major factor in killing off parliamentary democracy and led to the banning of the largest moderate Muslim party (Masjumi) while greatly strengthening Sukarno, his generals and the Communist Party (Kahin and Kahin 1995, 217–220). Even though it happened almost fifty years ago, the episode looms over the US-Indonesian relationship and is often referred to as evidence of the bad faith and arrogance of the US. President Sukarno and the Indonesian political classes more generally, including most of the military, drew the conclusion that the Americans were insincere in their rhetoric about anti-colonialism and self determination (Weinstein 1971). Indonesia’s military defeated the regional rebellions decisively but Sukarno was soon faced with new pressures from the US which grew increasingly worried as his government drew closer to the Communist Party of Indonesia and to communist China in the early 1960s. Sometimes Sukarno was able to manipulate Cold War rivalry to his advantage. He accepted large-scale military aid from both Russia and the US, for example, and also managed to cajole the US into supporting Indonesia in its dispute with the Netherlands over the future of West Papua in 1963. Kennedy’s administration decided to appease Sukarno on Papua rather than risk a military conflict that it feared would only benefit the communists (Lagerberg 1979, 87). But Sukarno’s attempt to chart a path inimical to US interests was ultimately punished, and punished severely. In 1963 multilateral lending institutions dominated by the US threatened to cut off development loans to Indonesia. Sukarno pre-empted this, telling them to “Go to hell with your aid!” and later withdrew from the World Bank, the IMF and the United Nations. This move was disastrous for Indonesia’s economy and led to its isolation internationally. It was, however, popular among nationalists who saw the US and other “neo-colonial” powers as attempting to deny Indonesia’s right to determine its own future. Telling foreign powers to “go to hell” was to became an recurring theme in Indonesian political discourse and is still a popular slogan in anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations today.

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At the same time as it tried to assert its power through financial institutions, the US concentrated on building up a relationship with the Indonesian army. US support to the Indonesian Army led to the Civic Action Program and the Indonesian Army’s increasing role in local politics, a development that was later to find expression in the army’s doctrine of “dwifungsi” that justified military involvement in “socio-political” affairs (Evans 1989). The US also operated a substantial programme of officer training, producing several hundred graduates by 1965. This gave the US a crucial toehold which it capitalised on when MajorGeneral Soeharto took effective power from Sukarno in March 1966. Soeharto had launched a major pogrom against the Indonesian Communist Party following the assassination of five leading generals in October 1965, leading to the death of between 300,000 and a million suspected communists. While the US role in the events that bought Soeharto to power remains unclear, it was no secret that Washington was delighted that its “army friends” had dealt communism, both on the domestic front and internationally, a major blow. Soeharto reintegrated Indonesia with the global capitalist system and radically realigned its foreign policy. He quickly ended Sukarno’s confrontation with Malaysia, broke off diplomatic ties with China and committed Indonesia to a much more low-key and pro-Western foreign policy. The emphasis for the next three decades would be on enforcing stability and economic development domestically and building ties with capitalist Southeast Asia. In 1967 Indonesia spearheaded the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an ostensibly economic organisation which came to double as an anti-communist alliance. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, Washington and its key Asian ally Japan greatly appreciated Indonesia’s reverse course and rewarded it with political support and large flows of development assistance. Indonesia under Soeharto did not always act the way that Americans would have liked. Although Soeharto’s key economic advisors were USeducated technocrats aligned with the neo-liberal approach of the IMF and the World Bank, the US was often irritated by the influence exercised by economic nationalists, especially after the OPEC oil-price hikes in the early 1970s. Washington also vigorously opposed Indonesia’s support for ZOPFAN, an initiative to prevent the interference of outside powers in Southeast Asia and to keep the region free of nuclear weapons.5 Soeharto also led a dictatorship which held tens of thousands of political prisoners without trial in deplorable conditions. Yet Indonesia under his regime achieved high rates of economic growth and was seen in Washington as the best guarantor of domestic and regional stability. Therefore, even though voices were raised in Congress about the regime’s terrible human rights record, the US gave it considerable leeway, remaining its key supplier of arms and in 1975 authorising its bloody invasion of East Timor. With the ending of the Cold War, however, and the wave of democratic

168 David Bourchier transitions that it presaged, the Soeharto regime was increasingly seen in Washington as anachronistic. Soeharto’s value as an anti-communist stalwart faded and human rights abuses began to be taken more seriously. When British documentary maker Max Stahl filmed Indonesia troops shooting dead scores of civilians in East Timor in November 1991, for instance, the US took the novel step of suspending the International Military Education and Training programme under which Indonesian officers were trained in the US. It was also becoming increasingly difficult for the US to ignore the rampant corruption of the Soeharto family and its cronies that was not only skewing the national economy but also generating high levels of opposition from pro-democracy groups. Indonesia’s response was part accommodation, part pugnacity. In 1989 Soeharto announced a policy of “openness” that saw an easing of media restrictions and in 1993 established a National Commission on Human Rights that enjoyed some genuine independence. At the same time the regime became increasingly critical of the linking of aid to human rights. In 1992 it created a sensation by refusing Dutch official aid because of sharp comments about Soeharto’s policies on workers, the environment, human rights and poverty made by Jan Pronk, the minister responsible for Dutch international development assistance, who simultaneously headed IGGI, Indonesia’s primary donor consortium. Soeharto’s rare flash of Sukarnoesque flamboyance in publicly repudiating Dutch aid and chastising IGGI was popular in Indonesia and reflected the growing confidence that years of rapid economic growth had brought about.6 It was the same sense of confidence mixed with resentment, especially at US criticism, that saw the Indonesian government join Malaysia and Singapore in articulating an explicitly anti-liberal ideological position that came to be known as Asian Values.7 The tide turned in 1997 with the Asian economic crisis. Beeson (1998) has analysed how the Clinton administration, acting largely through the agency of the IMF, took advantage of Indonesia’s dire financial predicament to bring the Soeharto regime to its knees. While there was general jubilation in Indonesia at the resignation of Soeharto on 21 May 1998, there was little gratitude for the role of the US. On the contrary, the US was widely perceived as having caused the crisis in the first place, benefited from it and then imposed draconian measures, including the slashing of subsidies on basic foodstuffs, in an attempt to correct it. Nationalist sensitivities were also piqued, paradoxically enough, by the public humiliation of President Soeharto as he was photographed signing a “memorandum of economic and financial policies” on 16 January 1998 watched over by IMF director Michel Camdessus looking for all the world like an impatient schoolmaster (Bresnan 1999, 93). Indonesia’s moment of euphoria, then, came in the midst of the wreckage of the national economy, mass unemployment and a dramatic fall in living standards. At no time since 1966 was the country more at the mercy

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of the US and the multilateral financial agencies. And yet while the US had a great deal of bargaining power, it was very unclear who it could effectively bargain with. The collapse of the Soeharto regime triggered a collapse in state capacity that made it extremely difficult for the new president, B.J. Habibie, to control much at all. Under Habibie the economy sank deeper into crisis and the regional bureaucracies that had long been tied to Jakarta through rank and patronage started to make their own demands. In the face of unprecedented popular pressure for reform, Habibie adopted the mantle of democrat, legalising political parties, removing restrictions on the media and introducing sweeping decentralisation laws. While the US was less than comfortable with Habibie’s economic performance, they praised his democratic reforms and the alacrity with which his government organised Indonesia’s first democratic election for over forty years. The Clinton administration also threw its weight behind Habibie’s surprise initiative to give the East Timorese the option of independence – much to the dismay of the Indonesian military. Freedom for Indonesians also meant freedom to demonstrate against the US, and there was no shortage of issues. The most prominent one was America’s continuing support for Israel against the Palestinians. It is important to recognise that this is not a peripheral issue in Indonesia. There is a widely shared perception that the state of Israel is a US project and that the US is complicit in every act of violence by the Israeli armed forces. The emergence of several militant Muslim organisations after 1998 saw a number of large anti-US/Israel demonstrations in Jakarta and elsewhere during 1999 and 2000, especially after the killing of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza in October 2000. The flavour of such rallies is evident in the wording of the banners: “Banish the US from Indonesia”, “Muslims of the World Unite” and “Destroy Israel” (Rakyat Merdeka 2000). The US embassy became seriously concerned about threats to the embassy and to US citizens in Indonesia by militant Islamic organisations and repeatedly called on the Indonesian government to crack down on groups and individuals it regarded as linked to terrorist organisations. Such requests, especially when conveyed by Clinton’s abrasive ambassador Robert S. Gelbard, went down badly with the Indonesian media and public, as did the series of travel advisories warning Americans to stay away from Indonesia. Another source of anger in some quarters was Clinton’s support for the intervention of foreign military forces in East Timor to restrain the military-backed militias following the historic, and for many unbelievable, vote for independence in the referendum of 30 August 1999. Not only was the US seen as having “betrayed” Indonesia after having supported the invasion, it then added insult to injury by insisting that the government arrest and try the officers responsible for coordinating the violence against independence supporters. To enforce the US demand that the East Timor

170 David Bourchier violence be accounted for and that the military be made more accountable generally, Congress agreed to pass an amendment to the Foreign Appropriations Act sponsored by Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy extending the previous ban on training Indonesian military officers and initiating an punishing embargo on arms and spare parts for US made weapons, military vehicles and aircraft (ICG 2001). This ban was a constant source of tension after 1999, with the Indonesian government claiming that serious shortages of spare parts prevented the military from containing outbreaks of separatist violence in various parts of the archipelago and hamstrung the military in its fight against terrorist groups.

George W. Bush and the September 11 attacks After years of what was seen as relentless meddling in Indonesian domestic affairs by Clinton’s administration, the Jakarta political elite and media were enthusiastic about the prospect of a victory by George W. Bush in 2000. Bush looked good because he was initially seen as more of an isolationist, concentrating on trade and commerce, not human rights and humanitarian interventions (Cipto 2000). Ironically, Paul Wolfowitz’s prominence in the Bush camp was also seen as a promising sign. Wolfowitz had been responsible for the Asia Pacific region at the State Department from 1982 to 1986 and enjoyed good relations with a range of Indonesians during his tenure as Reagan’s ambassador to Jakarta in the late 1980s. He had a deep interest in US policy on Indonesia and retained close links with many members of the business and political elite, including Abdurrahman Wahid who had been elected president in October 1999. Bush though, did little that pleased Indonesia. He was not successful in his efforts to convince Congress to lift the arms embargo, and Indonesians were not impressed by Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol and several other environmental and arms control agreements. Sharon’s election in February 2001 made things worse, with television stations exposing Indonesians nightly to the Likud government’s crushing of the second intifada and reoccupation of Palestinian areas, leading eventually to the house arrest of Yasser Arafat. The US also continued to take what many saw as an unhealthy interest in Indonesia’s domestic politics. Having earlier openly backed President Abdurrahman Wahid in his stand-off with the military, the US administration turned against him in favour of his more conservative vice president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who took over the presidency in July 2001 (see, e.g., Koran Tempo 2001). The Bush administration’s pronouncement of a “war on terror” following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon greatly intensified US interest in Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and southern Thailand were soon being referred to as the war’s “second front”. The overall aim of the US in Southeast Asia was to secure the cooperation of governments in its counter-terrorist strategy. Using a

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combination of threats and inducements – mainly involving increased military assistance – the US quickly managed to bring onside Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.8 Indonesia, though, was a different story. While Megawati expressed her heartfelt condolences to President Bush in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington, and pledged to “cooperate with the international community in combating terrorism”,9 she was acutely aware of the political dangers inherent in explicitly aligning Indonesia with the US war on terror. This had to do largely with the precarious position of her government in the face of determined efforts by hardline Islamists and some elements of the military to undermine her. The immediacy of the danger was highlighted when her own vice-president, Hamzah Haz, the leader of the Islamist United Development Party (PPP), qualified his condolences to the US with the comment that he hoped the attacks would help “expiate its sins” (Hefner 2001). Such statements – and there were plenty of others by Muslim politicians – were clearly an attempt to capitalise on a widely shared sentiment in society that, tragic as the attacks were for the individuals involved, America had got its comeuppance.10 Some senior American officials with a good knowledge of Indonesia were aware of Megawati’s dilemma and of the extreme delicacy with which the US government would have to handle the situation in Indonesia if a backlash was to be averted. In the days and weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, however, concern for the sensitivities of faraway countries like Indonesia was drowned out by the rhetoric of war. It was during this early phase that Bush offended many in Indonesia and across the Muslim world with his declaration that the war on terror was a “crusade” and that “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”11 United States officials quoted by the New York Times in October 2001 also explicitly mentioned Indonesia as a likely site of “future covert and overt American actions” (Weiner 2001). But it was the haste with which the Americans blamed Islamic militants and prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan that provoked most initial outrage. Not only was Afghanistan one of the poorest countries in the world, it held a special place in the imagination of many fundamentalist Muslims in Indonesia as a living example, under the Taliban, of a pure Islamic society – the very antithesis of the United States. During September and October 2001 Jakarta saw a series of large demonstrations against the war attended by thousands of young men and women, the women almost all in white headscarves (hijab). The demonstrations were typically peaceful and well organised, a testament to the mobilisational capacity of the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), the new but extraordinarily well-run Islamist party that secured seven seats in parliament in the 1999 elections (rising to 45 in 2004). Other more rowdy rallies were staged in front of the US embassy by militant groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), often ending in confrontations with

172 David Bourchier police.12 One striking feature of the demonstrations was the prominence of posters and slogans hailing Osama bin Laden as a hero. While it would be wrong to interpret this as genuine devotion to bin Laden’s teachings, it was hardly a promising sign for the Americans to see their nemesis glorified so openly in the streets of Jakarta. Neither was it comforting to see normally more moderate Islamic groups drawn into the fray. The government-sponsored Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI), for instance, issued a declaration stating that “if the United States attacked Afghanistan, all Muslims were obliged to join the jihad against the US” (Hefner 2001). A common demand of the demonstrators and of media commentators – including former ambassador to Washington Hasnan Habib – was that Megawati take a tougher line against the war in Afghanistan. On 14 October 2001 Megawati had said that “attacks on another country were not acceptable, even in pursuit of terrorists”, but it was later clarified that her comments did not represent a change in the government’s official position, which was simply that it was “concerned about the events taking place” (Jakarta Post 2001). Sensitivities notwithstanding, the US became increasingly frustrated by Indonesia’s lukewarm support for its war on terror and its lack of action against domestic groups suspected of terrorism, especially in the light of the speedy arrests of suspected terrorists by the governments of Malaysia and Singapore. The US was particularly interested in Jema’ah Islamiyah (JI), an elusive group described as being at the centre of an al Qaedalinked Islamic terror network that threatened the Southeast Asian region. JI’s supposed spiritual godfather was the preacher Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, best known to Indonesians as the head of the Islamist political organisation the Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI). The US were eager to see him detained after Omar Al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti arrested in Indonesia, had described under interrogation in Afghanistan Ba’asyir’s collaboration with al-Qaeda operatives and his role in authorising terror attacks.13 Yet there was deep scepticism in Indonesia about the claims the Americans were making about JI – Jema’ah Islamiyah simply means ‘Islamic community’ – and the elderly and soft spoken Ba’asyir.14 Vice-President Hamzah Haz again thumbed his nose at the US by visiting Ba’asyir at his pesantren (religious school) in Central Java in May 2002 and denied that there were terrorists operating in Indonesia (Marshall 2002). If the US administration was frustrated with the Indonesians, it was also frustrated with the continuing arms embargo on Indonesia imposed by Congress. Although high-level contacts between the US and Indonesian militaries were resumed after Megawati’s visit to Washington in September 2001 and the ban on providing spare parts was eased, the US was still prevented from directly training and arming the army or its Special Forces (Kopassus) anti-terror unit (ICG 2003). Instead it lifted the ban on nonlethal commercial arms sales and concentrated on building up the counter-

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terrorist capacity of the Indonesian police, which had taken over official responsibility for internal security in April 2000. Bush also committed US$400,000 to training civilians in security studies under the International Military and Education Training (IMET) programme, but to the exasperation of the Indonesian government this was denied by Congress pending “credible and honest answers” about an incident in August 2002 in which two American teachers were ambushed and shot near the Freeport mine in Papua, apparently by Kopassus troops (Siboro 2003).

Implications of the “war on terror” The bombing of two Bali nightclubs on 12 October 2002 was a shocking wake-up call for Indonesia. With 202 people killed, most of them western tourists, it was the world’s largest terrorist attack since the attacks in the US a year, a month and a day earlier. Megawati was aware that she was in new territory and that she had to take, and be seen to be taking, much more active measures against domestic terrorism. First, she broke with tradition and welcomed international cooperation in investigating the bombings. Help came principally from the Federal Police force in Australia, a country Megawati had largely shunned since its 1999 intervention in East Timor. Next, she issued provisional anti-terrorism regulations and declared terrorism one of her government’s top priorities. The Indonesian police surprised everyone by quickly tracking down several of the main culprits and making a well-publicised and convincing case for their conviction. One effect of this was to demonstrate to the Indonesian public that there were indeed home-grown terrorists operating in Indonesia and that they had links with regional if not global jihadi organisations.15 The Bali bombing and its aftermath were vitally important in neutralising the influence of militant Islamic groups in the broader and overwhelmingly moderate Muslim population. Laskar Jihad, for instance, one of the most active paramilitary Islamist groups that had been dispatched from Java to fight alongside Muslims during sectarian conflict in the Moluccas and Sulawesi, was disbanded immediately after the Bali bombing. The US welcomed the change of heart in Indonesia, but the slight improvement in relations was soon overshadowed by the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq. The Iraq war once again triggered large antiUS demonstrations and this time the government was in complete agreement with public sentiment. Indonesia had long opposed sanctions on Iraq, and on the question of weapons of mass destruction was openly critical of the claims put forward by the US to justify the war. Indonesian diplomats rallied the Non-Aligned Movement to oppose the war and Megawati herself issued a statement “strongly deploring unilateral action against Iraq”, describing it as “an act of aggression, which is in contravention of international law”.16 The government’s reaction was motivated in part by a genuine indignation at the way the Americans bypassed the UN,

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stirring fears that it may set a precedent for further “pre-emptive” violations of national sovereignty, either by the US or its allies, including Australia.17 The Megawati government’s strong response was also an attempt to pre-empt popular anger, both against itself for having made concessions to US demands, and against foreigners and non-Muslim communities in Indonesia. While many groups in Indonesia did (and continue to) see the war on terror as a war on Islam, the government, helped by the leaders of the two largest Islamic organisations Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah and by televised images of the mass anti-war demonstrations in the West, was largely successful in persuading the population to view the war in Iraq as a political struggle rather than as a religious one (Smith 2003, 462). By mid-2003, when the Pew poll referred to at the start of this chapter was taken, there were few issues capable of uniting 85 per cent of the Indonesian population like opposition to the US. As well as issues relating directly to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Indonesians were riled by tight visa and immigration restrictions imposed by the US, stories of mistreatment of Indonesian citizens in what many saw as the hostile stance of the US embassy in Jakarta with its continued warnings about security in Indonesia and its advice to US business not to invest until conditions improved.18 The Bush administration’s narrow interpretation of the US national interest also opened up a wide gap between its conduct and its rhetoric, leading to frequent charges of hypocrisy. The refusal of the US to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice at the same time as threatening international war crimes trials for Indonesian military figures implicated in the East Timor violence was a case in point. Its insistence on transparency and the rule of law at the same time as encouraging Indonesia to arrest key terror suspects regardless of legal niceties was another. Perhaps most glaring, though, was the credibility gap on human rights exposed by the killing of civilians by US forces in the Middle East and the abuses committed by US forces in Abu Ghraib prison, both presented in graphic detail to Indonesian audiences by feeds from Al-Jazeera. Following the release of the annual State Department Human Rights Report in 2004 sharply critical of Indonesia, Foreign Ministry official Marty Natalegawa declared, “the US, as Indonesia has consistently stated, and especially since the horrific disclosures on Abu Ghraib, does not have the moral authority to assume the role of judge and jury on matters of human rights” (Jakarta Post 2004). The precariousness of US cooperation with Indonesia on the war on terror came again to the fore in April 2004 when Admiral Thomas Fargo, the Chief of the US Pacific Command, said that as part of the Bush administration’s Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI) – in turn part of the global Proliferation Security Initiative – US marines and special forces would be sent to patrol the waters of the Malacca Straits. This initiative, aimed at interdicting ships suspected of transporting unlicensed weapons

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of mass destruction, was strongly supported by Singapore but opposed by Indonesia and Malaysia. Indonesian navy chief of staff Admiral Bernard Kent Sondakh played down the threat of piracy in the straits and claimed that there may be a conspiracy by outside powers to control the waterway and justify international intervention (ABC Asia Pacific 2004). Despite the Malacca Straits being one of the most vulnerable chokepoints in the world, and Indonesia’s poor record in combating piracy, the US backed off, limiting their role to intelligence sharing and building the capacity of regional powers “to face the threat themselves” (Richard Baker 2004, 77). Nesaduri in this volume argues that the US was willing to compromise with Malaysia on the RMSI in recognition of its significant cooperation in the war on terror and its value as an example of a Muslim democracy. In the case of Indonesia these were considerations, but it was more a matter of the US not wanting to upset what Richard Baker (2004, 68) described as a “complicated and troubled” relationship any further.

Current issues and future prospects The election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on 20 September 2004 was greeted with far more warmth in Washington than was George W. Bush’s re-election six weeks afterwards in Jakarta. As Minister for Mines and Energy and then as Coordinating Minister for Politics and Security under presidents Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati, Yudhoyono had impressed the Americans. He had studied in the US on several occasions, and liaised closely with the Americans on issues of international security and terrorism. The main worry of the Americans was that his narrow support base in parliament would require him to negotiate and compromise with a range of political factions. Popular opinion and media comment in Indonesia, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly pro-Kerry, which was hardly surprising after the mess that Bush had made of relations with Indonesia. Veteran foreign-policy analyst Jusuf Wanandi praised the Democratic candidate as a “consensus builder” who was likely to pursue a less unilateralist agenda in East Asia, reducing the chance of a confrontation with China or North Korea. Kerry was also expected to be more appreciative of “nuance and finesse”, factors that were of “critical importance in her fight against global and regional terrorism” (Wanandi 2004). In an attempt to shore up Indonesian spirits after the Bush win, Washington’s new ambassador to Indonesia B. Lynn Pascoe told the media on 23 December 2004 that because Asia was “increasingly poised to become the new strategic centre of gravity in global politics”, the Bush administration was going to give Indonesia “a much better place in its foreign policy calculations” during its second term (Anjaiah 2004). Whatever this pledge meant, or may still mean, it was quickly eclipsed by the catastrophic tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people in Aceh. Several large US Navy ships were quickly on the scene, and, after Yudhoyono had changed

176 David Bourchier Aceh’s status as a closed military zone, US sailors and marines began airlifting relief supplies to Aceh and the devastated regions on the west coast. Due to sensitivities about the presence of US military personnel on Indonesian soil, less than 3 per cent of the 8,000 sailors and marines were allowed to come ashore, but the logistical help was vital and much appreciated in Aceh. The US has followed up with about $550 million for humanitarian assistance and to support the rehabilitation of areas hit by the tsunamis (US Embassy Press Release 2005). How it is used by the local military authorities and how it will affect the future of the conflict in Aceh remains to be seen. While US and Indonesian officials have been upbeat about the unusual level of cooperation and goodwill between the two sides in the wake of the tsunami, the old issues linger on. Internationally, differences with the US over Palestine, Iraq, unilateralism and the relevance of the United Nations remain key obstacles. On the domestic front the critical issues for the Americans remain cooperation on terrorism, improving the general level of security and reforming the structures of governance, particularly Indonesia’s corruption-ridden administrative and legal systems. Long-term programmes administered by USAID are under way to address issues in these broad areas, as well, most recently and controversially, in the education sector.19 The US has been particularly concerned to see the sanctity of contracts upheld, and is unlikely to encourage US companies to invest in Indonesia until there is some guarantee of this. It has also been consistently critical of the lack of protection for intellectual property rights in Indonesia as well as a range of tariffs. The US would like a bilateral freetrade agreement but has criticised Indonesia for “not being serious” about negotiating one (Hakim 2004). The deadlock over military aid to Indonesia is also set to continue despite the Republicans gaining control over the Senate. Some of the strongest supporters of a January 2004 amendment strengthening a ban on the Bush administration from funding military training to Indonesians were Republican senators. A subsequent decision by a Jakarta appeals court to dismiss all pending cases against Indonesian officers indicted for crimes against humanity in East Timor, as well as continuing human rights violations by the military in Aceh, West Papua and elsewhere make a fullscale resumption unlikely for the foreseeable future, especially as many US lawmakers are reportedly concerned about evidence of Islamic radicalism in the army itself (Shorrock 2004). It is possible, though, that the Bush administration, with active backing of influential groups such as the United States Indonesia Society, will chip away at the ban, paving the way for an expanded range of spare parts and non-lethal training to be provided to the Indonesian military. In the meantime, Indonesia is looking to Russia and China for its arms. Megawati organised a deal to buy four Sukhoi fighter planes and two MI35 helicopters from Russia in 2003 and the government has recently estab-

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lished military cooperation agreements with both Russia and China (Republika 2004). Whether or not the US acts to prevent Indonesia becoming dependent on Chinese arms, the reality is that extremely rapid growth in trade and investment in the past few years has already bound the two countries together in ways that were unimaginable even in 2000. Indonesia is now a major supplier of China’s energy needs and the Chinese have made clear their wish to develop closer military and political ties with the resource-rich archipelago. Soon after becoming president, Yudhoyono met Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao where they announced a “Sino-Indonesian strategic partnership”, described by the Chinese Premier as a “new type of state-to-state relationship of non-alliance, nonconfrontation and non-targeting any third party” (People’s Daily 2004). The “third party” referred to here is China’s major strategic competitor in the region, the United States. How successfully the US and the Chinese manage their economic and military rivalry will have a major bearing on the future of the US Indonesia relationship. To conclude, the American relationship with Indonesia is fraught with sensitivities that regularly burst to the surface. Indonesia’s proud history of anti-imperialist struggle, its rich civilisation, its sense of destiny, its huge population and its geographical stretch give it a sense of entitlement that sits awkwardly with its current lack of status in the international system. America, in contrast, is a proud nation at the height of its power, led by a group of neo-conservatives determined to assert US economic, political and, if necessary, military primacy around the globe. Bush’s clumsy handling of the war on terror and democracy promotion has damaged both causes in Indonesia and sowed the seeds of suspicion and resentment in a new generation.

Notes 1 80 per cent of Japan’s energy sources come through the South China Sea and the waters of Southeast Asia. 2 Malacca Straits alone sees more than 200 ships per day (compared with 38 in the Panama Canal and 40 in Suez). 3 There is a parallel between the British domination of the seas in the nineteenth century and the US domination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The ways in which the Hawaii-based Commander in Chief, Pacific, and the Seventh Fleet exert US influence in peacetime in the East and Southeast Asian region deserves much closer scrutiny by political observers. 4 For Indonesia, Japan is more important economically. Not only is Japan the largest aid donor, it is also Indonesia’s number one investor and trading partner for both imports and exports. 5 Indonesia supported ASEAN’s 1971 ZOPFAN Declaration that recognised Southeast Asia as a Zone of Peace Freedom and Neutrality “free from any form or manner of interference by outside powers”. The first major component of the ZOPFAN pursued by ASEAN was the establishment of a South-East Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (EASNWFZ), signed in Bangkok on 15 December 1995 (MINT 2000).

178 David Bourchier 6 It is a measure of Indonesia’s significance that IGGI, the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia, was immediately replaced by a new donor consortium, the Consultative Group on Indonesia, led by the World Bank. 7 I have noted elsewhere (Bourchier 1998) that the communitarian philosophies espoused internationally by Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia in fact stemmed primarily from domestic political imperatives. 8 As Connors, Reid and Nesadurai in this volume emphasise, the cooperation of Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia with the US was always negotiated and never complete. 9 Joint Statement between the United States of America and the Republic of Indonesia, 19 September 2001 accessed via the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs website www.deplu.go.id. 10 Graphic examples of this sentiment are to be found in Jakarta’s bookshops. See, for example, Abdul Halim Mahally’s Membongkar Ambisi Global AS (“Demolishing the Global Ambitions of the US”), depicting the WTC attack on its cover, and Mohammad bin Saud Al-Basyar’s Amerika di Ambang Keruntuhan (“America on the Verge of Collapse”), showing a dramatically shrinking Statue of Liberty. 11 See Ford (2001), CNN (2001). 12 For an account of early protests against US interests see Indonesian Observer (2001). 13 Williams (2003, 90–91). An official interpreter for Clinton and Bush, Frederick Burks, revealed in January 2005 that the US president sent a special envoy to Jakarta in early October 2002 who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Megawati to capture and ‘render’ Ba’asyir to the Americans for interrogation (The Age 2005). 14 One theory, widely propagated in the mainstream press, was that the Americans has simply invented JI to discredit Islam and bring Indonesia into line with the dictates of the US. See, e.g., Maulani (2004). 15 For a summary of the evidence emerging from the arrests of JI suspects in the wake of the Bali and Marriott Hotel bombings see ICG (2003). 16 Smith (2003, 461) and LaMoshi (2003). Note that after complaints from the US, subsequent public statements by Megawati and Indonesian foreign affairs officials were milder. 17 Indonesia had taken strong exception to Prime Minister John Howard’s comments to the media that he would not hesitate to take pre-emptive action in other countries if Australia were threatened (Sydney Morning Herald 2002). 18 Unlike any other Southeast Asian nationals, Indonesian non-immigrant males over 16 living in the US are required to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed under oath (Alatas 2004). See also Jakarta Post (2003). 19 In 2004 the US government earmarked $157 million over six years to “support Indonesian teachers and students in promoting tolerance, countering extremism” (Huhtala 2004). The controversy arose because some of the money will be spent on Islamic schools.

11 Malaysia and the United States Rejecting dominance, embracing engagement Helen Nesadurai

Introduction Relations between Malaysia and the United States have been highly charged under Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003. The most serious of these differences were over trade policy, Washington’s push for human rights and democratisation, the US liberalisation agenda for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and Washington’s dismissal of Mahathir’s preferred alternative, the East Asian Economic Grouping (EAEG), US and IMF responses to the Asian financial crisis, the Palestine–Israel issue and, more recently, the US ‘War on Terror’. Although the present Abdullah Badawi administration continues to be critical over Washington’s prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’, US–Malaysia relations have proceeded far more smoothly in the last year than at anytime during the previous 24 years (Baker 2004, 70). It would be misleading, however, to account for Malaysia’s tense relations with the US primarily in terms of the combative personality of Mahathir. Closer examination reveals that Malaysia–US relations during the Mahathir administration were, in fact, characterised by a ‘combination of criticism and cooperation’, which continues to date under Abdullah Badawi though without the ‘edge’ that was evident during Mahathir’s watch (Baker 2004, 70). Amidst the factiousness, Malaysia under Mahathir maintained fairly strong economic and defence/security ties with the US. Despite the current Prime Minister’s wish for better ties, and the marked reduction in combative rhetoric, criticism of the US continues, particularly with respect to the ‘War on Terror’. Extensive bilateral cooperation continues, however. This account of Malaysia’s relations with the US raises three questions. First, what explains the dualism in relations, characterised on the one hand by pragmatic engagement on economic, security and defence matters while maintaining, on the other hand, highly critical views of US policies and actions on a number of significant global, regional and bilateral issues. Second, and perhaps the prior question, is whether such criticism of the US represents mere rhetoric on the part of Malaysia’s leaders, especially

180 Helen Nesadurai Mahathir, or is there any basis, based on Malaysian national interests, for the highly charged polemics? A third question is the extent to which Malaysia has translated its criticisms of the US into more concrete actions that challenge US policy initiatives more specifically, and its hegemony more broadly. This chapter addresses these questions by comparing the Malaysian government’s relations with the US under the Clinton (1992–2000) and the first George W. Bush administrations (2001–04). Although this book focuses on the Bush period, a ‘comparative’ analysis offers useful insight into the continuities and shifts in relations between the two countries given that these two US Presidents presided over two different foreignpolicy postures derived from distinct ‘grand strategies’. The chapter also argues that any explanation of Malaysia’s responses to the US requires an examination of how US foreign-policy postures derived from its grand strategy interacts with the imperatives of Malaysian domestic politics and the political economy. While leaders’ personality and their subjective worldviews matter, particularly in the case of Mahathir, no Malaysian leader has ever been immune from the domestic political and economic realities of a multi-ethnic developing state, not even Mahathir despite his personalised control over the country’s institutions and commanding rule over its polity. However, leadership matters to the extent that a leader enunciates particular strategic directions for the country that may be either facilitated or obstructed by external developments (Liow 2001). Following this introduction, the next section outlines key features of Malaysian politics and its political economy, highlighting the central role played by the economy and Islam in legitimating the government and the Malay-centred political order. Consequently, economics and Islam have become central elements in Malaysian foreign policy, shaping also Malaysia’s relations with the US. The third and fourth sections respectively examine Malaysia–US relations during the Clinton and the first George W. Bush administrations. The discussion explores Malaysia’s responses to the US in terms of: (a) instances of cooperation and noncooperation on key US policy initiatives; (b) pursuit of alternative economic and defence/security relationships; and (c) construction of counter-hegemonic discourses and coalitions aimed at questioning or undermining US policy initiatives more specifically and its hegemony more generally. The analysis reveals that the Malaysian government responded more positively to the US during the first two years of the Bush administration compared to the previous Clinton administration. The Malaysian government’s tense relations with the US under Clinton were largely due to the latter’s ‘liberal internationalist’ grand strategy when the spread of liberal democracy, human rights and open markets directly threatened the Malaysian model of political and economic governance, unlike the early Bush administration’s realist foreign policy that eschewed interfering in

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the domestic affairs of other countries. Relations dramatically improved after the September 11 attacks on the US, with the resulting crackdown on global terrorism lending Mahathir legitimacy at home and abroad. Internationally, it affirmed Mahathir as a leader who had dealt severely with domestic Islamic terrorists, while it also vindicated his government’s use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) that allows for indefinite detention without trial. However, the Bush administration’s eventual embrace of a grand strategy of ‘primacy’ based on neo-conservative thinking led to shifts in US foreign policy, particularly the emphasis on ‘pre-emption’ and ‘regime change’, which once again placed Malaysia and the US on a collision course. The Malaysian government was especially concerned with how the ‘War on Terror’ was being prosecuted, notably the invasion of Iraq, the attitude to Islam and Muslim communities, and regional initiatives against maritime terrorism. In both periods, Malaysia offered views contrary to those of the US, and attempted to build like-minded coalitions to challenge US initiatives. During the Clinton period this took the form of championing an East Asian regionalism distinct from APEC as well as articulating a notion of ‘Asian Values’ distinct from and superior to ‘western’ values. More significantly, Mahathir’s heterodox approach to addressing the Asian financial crisis, notably the capital controls policy, demonstrated the viability of alternative approaches to crisis management and economic governance distinct from the neoliberal orthodoxy promoted by the IMF and the US. On the other hand, the government’s attempt during 2003 to steer the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) to challenge the legitimacy of the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council was unsuccessful, due largely to the dominant presence of the US in the Arab Middle East that made it difficult to galvanise a united Arab position against Washington. Despite Malaysia’s inability to challenge the US agenda elsewhere and its overall hegemony, the Malaysian government has, nevertheless, stood firm in rejecting US initiatives and actions when they impinged directly on Malaysia’s national interests. Interestingly, the US under the Bush administration moved towards Malaysia’s position on some of these issues, most notably over US patrols in the Malacca Straits, largely because of the value placed on Malaysia’s cooperation in fighting terrorism. Moreover, there are mutual gains to be had from cooperation in economics, defence and anti-narcotics activities, with both countries maintaining good working relations in these areas, discussed in the fifth section. The final section anticipates the future course of relations given the November 2004 election triumph of the incumbent President.

Domestic politics and Malaysian foreign policy Any discussion of Malaysian responses to US hegemony and Washington’s foreign-policy postures must take into account the interests of dominant

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domestic groups and political coalitions in Malaysia, social and cultural (including religious) ideas, as well as prevailing domestic economic and political constraints.1 Three features are salient in this regard, providing the domestic structural context within which leaders and policy-makers operate. First, the Malaysian political order after the May 1969 race riots has been based on Malay political dominance, upheld by UMNO, the dominant Malay political party in the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN or National Front) multi-ethnic, multi-party coalition that has ruled Malaysia since independence (initially as the Alliance Party until 1969).2 Nevertheless, a degree of political accommodation takes place between the leaders of the three principal ethnic groups in the country – the Malays, Chinese and Indians – that helps maintain the Malay-centred political order while securing the key interests of the other ethnic groups.3 Aside from interethnic elite bargaining and the use of coercive legislation, political stability depends also on the responsiveness of the ruling coalition to popular societal interests and demands of the Malaysian electorate including but also going beyond the majority Malay, Muslim community. While a key task for UMNO leaders is to advance the interests, status and the political and economic power of the dominant ethnic Malay community that comprises 55 per cent of the population, the ruling elite has also to ensure that it builds support and legitimacy among the other ethnic groups.4 Both the economy and Islam have become central to these tasks, though in different ways. Political legitimacy and the politics-economics interface The Malaysian government has always had to strike a balance between what are sometimes competing economic policies – interventionist policies to ensure Malay economic development and political consolidation on the one hand, and liberal economic policies to ensure sustained economic growth on the other hand. Both sets of policies are important in securing legitimacy for the incumbent government and especially for UMNO. While growth provides economic opportunities for all Malaysians, interventionist economic policies enable the government to selectively allocate economic opportunities in ways that help meet Malay equity goals and cement elite coalitions. During the 1990s, interventionist policies also helped meet the broader nationalist goals of Prime Minister Mahathir to take Malaysia into the ranks of developed countries (Khoo 2000, 214). Despite considerable liberalisation of the Malaysian economy during the 1990s, interventionist policies remain salient to meet Malay equity goals (Nesadurai 2004). The government, consequently, values its domestic policy autonomy, which allows it to maintain interventionist economic policies if these are deemed necessary to address domestic socio-political priorities.

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Political legitimacy, Islam and Malay politics Like economics, Islam is also central to Malay politics. Because of its role in providing the Malay community with a focus for its identity and for social solidarity, Islam has become politicised, with both UMNO and the opposition Islamic party, PAS (Partai Islam Se-Malaysia), engaged in a struggle to establish their respective Islamic credentials and through that secure their legitimacy amongst the Malay, Muslim population.5 These credentials may be earned in a number of ways. Since the 1980s, the UMNOled government has adopted Islamic values and practices in government as well as established the International Islamic University and Islamic banking in an effort to gain endorsement among the Malay community (Khoo 1995, 174–81). Interestingly, the Islamic credentials of current Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi played a key role in helping UMNO regain support among the Malays that it had lost to PAS following the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and the crisis sparked by the sacking, arrest, trial and imprisonment of Mahathir’s Deputy, Anwar Ibrahim.6 A second way that UMNO and PAS earn their Islamic credentials is by taking a stand on issues that are salient to the worldwide Muslim ummah (or community), especially with regard to developments perceived to be hostile to Islam and Muslim communities worldwide. The most notable of these events are the Palestinian problem and the post-September 11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The government’s official position on these issues is driven both by the country’s identity as a majority Muslim nation and to reinforce the Islamic credentials of the ruling regime (Nair 1997, 267–90). The primacy of economics and Islam in foreign policy Economics and Islam became central elements in Malaysia’s foreign policy after Mahathir took office in 1981. Before this, foreign policy had been markedly anti-communist and pro-western during the 1960s, then based on non-alignment, neutrality and peaceful co-existence during the 1970s. With the 1975 US defeat in Vietnam and the 1976 Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (now Cambodia), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) assumed greater importance in the country’s foreign policy.7 Malaysia, however, emphasised continued ties with western powers, including the US, in order to augment its security and to buttress the counter-insurgency capabilities of its armed forces given that it continued to take seriously the threat of domestic communism and remained suspicious of China’s relations with the Communist Party of Malaya (Liow 2001, 131–3). This approach continued into the first decade of the Mahathir administration. Despite the personal antipathy of Mahathir towards any external, including US, involvement in the security of Southeast Asia, the Prime Minister recognised that the US was vital in

184 Helen Nesadurai confronting what was then regarded as Malaysia’s primary external threat – China (Liow 2001, 131). A more fundamental shift in foreign policy under Mahathir was the emphasis placed on economics. This was not simply to serve economic purposes; it was also to meet the domestic socio-political imperatives highlighted in the preceding discussion, with the economy also made a central element in national security thinking. Under the doctrine of comprehensive security, ‘national security is inseparable from political stability, economic success and social harmony’ (Mahathir 1986). In short, the economy had become a key means to empower and secure the state and regime, with foreign economic policy aimed at ensuring continued access to foreign direct investment (FDI), technology and export markets to sustain economic growth. The continued salience of interventionist policies, however, also meant that the government sought to minimise external encroachments into domestic economic and political governance. As for Islam, Malaysia had already begun to identify itself as a ‘Muslim’ nation by 1970, becoming a founding member of the OIC in 1969 with Malaysia’s first Prime Minister appointed its first Secretary-General. Under Mahathir, an Islam-oriented foreign policy became even more pivotal for Malaysia’s identity as a majority Muslim nation as well as to enhance the Islamic credentials of the UMNO-led government in its domestic political struggle with PAS for Malay hearts and minds (Nair 1997, 83). Islamic diplomacy, based on strengthening ties with Muslim countries and in championing Islamic causes in world politics allowed Malay voters to ‘know that government policies are approved of by Muslims outside the country’ (Milne and Mauzy 1999, 143). Aside from bilateral visits to the Arab world, Mahathir fully embraced the Palestinian cause, an issue that resonated strongly with the Malay community, and increasingly with other Malaysians (Liow 2001). Malaysia’s Islamic diplomacy continues to date, and the cause of worldwide Islamic unity remains a central element of Malaysian foreign policy. Malaysia, incidentally, is the current Chair of the OIC (as well as the Chair of the Non-Aligned Movement). How these domestic imperatives have mediated the manner in which Malaysia has responded to the foreign policies and actions of the US under two different US administrations is addressed in the rest of the chapter.

Responding to the liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration In the immediate post-Cold War decade of the 1990s, particularly under the Clinton administration, the operative US grand strategy is best defined as one of ‘liberal internationalism’, which favoured an Americanised world order characterised by the spread of liberal democracy and free-market

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capitalism (Dueck 2004, 516). Key officials and scholars believed that the policy of ‘enlargement’, or the expansion of the worldwide community of market democracies, was a prerequisite for a safer and more prosperous world (Alagappa 1994, 4–6). Washington, consequently, adopted multilateral, regional and bilateral policies in support of democratisation, human rights and open markets. In this regard, three specific policy positions of the Clinton administration directly threatened the Malaysian interventionist and semi-democratic governance model8 that the country’s ruling elite believed was appropriate and necessary to the domestic context: (a) the attempt to embed liberal economic norms within APEC and turn it into a regional mechanism to liberalise trade and investment; (b) the push to implement universal human rights practices; and (c) the move during the Asian financial crisis to use the IMF to dismantle the statist developmental model. Contesting APEC, championing East Asian regionalism Mahathir’s opposition to APEC was primarily based on concern that the US would use APEC as a ‘Trojan Horse’ through which to remake East Asian economies, including Malaysia, in the image of US-style liberal market capitalism as well as to impose liberal political and social norms (Lim 2001, 62). Although Malaysia was, by this time, a fairly open economy, an APEC designed along US preferences threatened to undermine the ability of the ‘ethnic state’ in Malaysia to selectively allocate economic resources in accordance with domestically derived priorities, including for patronage purposes (Lim 2001, 67). There were further concerns that the premature liberalisation of the economy would undermine the strategic development of domestic industrial and technological capabilities. To counter these possibilities, the Malaysian Prime Minister proposed an alternative, exclusively Asian regional grouping comprising the ASEAN states, China, Japan and South Korea whilst excluding APEC’s western members – the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Mahathir had three aims in mind for the EAEG: (a) develop East Asian market power through enhancing intra-East Asian trade and investment, which would then balance the market power of North America and the European Community; (b) sustain state-centric approaches to economic development then common in East Asia; and (c) minimise clashes over domestic political arrangements that departed from the liberal democratic model (Lim 2001, 68). The EAEG was never formally realised for various reasons, including hefty opposition by the US although a modified version, the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) was endorsed by ASEAN, largely as a gesture to Malaysia. Notwithstanding the defeat of its EAEG initiative, the Malaysian foreign-policy establishment continued to champion the idea of East Asian regionalism throughout the 1990s,9 while

186 Helen Nesadurai resisting a formal trade liberalisation role for APEC (Ravenhill 2001, 110–11). ‘Asian Values’ as a counter-hegemonic discourse Mahathir was also a key exponent of ‘Asian Values’, a debate that emerged in the early to mid-1990s that was mainly aimed at rejecting western political and economic norms in favour of what was regarded as a superior Asian version of political governance based on strong leadership, respect for consensus and social harmony, and concern with socioeconomic well-being rather than civil liberties and human rights (Khoo 2002, 51–3). The Asian Values discourse was partly triggered by the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 in Vienna, where delegates from Asia and Africa challenged US delegates over the definition of human rights and what constitutes its abuses (Verma 2002, 170). The Clinton administration’s push for democratisation and human rights worldwide challenged key features of political governance in Malaysia. Although Malaysia has adhered to the formal tenets of democracy, selective restrictions on democratic practice exist, notably through laws restricting freedom of speech and assembly, as well as the Internal Security Act (ISA) that allows for detention without trial for indefinite periods; hence, Malaysia’s characterisation as a ‘semi-democracy’. The political elite argued that these restrictions were necessary to preserve social and political order in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. The ‘Asian Values’ counter-discourse, thus, sought to ideologically delegitimise American, or western models and practices of human rights and liberal democracy, while it also helped to legitimate the interventionist approach to economic development based on communitarian end-goals. The region’s economic success story, at least until the financial crisis, seemed to validate the ‘Asian Values’ message. The financial crisis, however, undermined the notion of a superior East Asian approach to political and economic governance. Nonetheless, it has not ended the values debate. Other counter-discourses have emerged in the region, some of which reiterate liberal western norms and practices, but others promote indigenist and, in Malaysia and Indonesia, articulate Islamic approaches to political and economic governance. The PAS challenge to UMNO involves one such counter-discourse, with Islam gaining ground amongst the Malay community in providing precepts for an alternative model of economic, social and political organisation (Hilley 2001). Financial crisis: bucking the trend As with the APEC/EAEG issue, the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis (AFC) highlights a similar point of tension in Malaysia’s relationship with the Clinton administration, namely over Washington’s attempt to dismantle

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the Asian developmental state through the IMF. The Malaysian government rejected the official Washington and IMF explanation that the crisis was caused by lack of good governance and transparency, ‘crony capitalism’ and a flawed development model, with Mahathir insisting, on the contrary, that the unregulated power of global financial players was the primary cause of the crisis and had undermined the development success of Malaysia and the region (Nesadurai 2000). The Prime Minister responded with counter-narratives and by mobilising domestic financial resources and the government’s administrative and technical capacity to craft a home-grown recovery strategy that eventually included selective capital controls, and all this without unduly alarming real-sector investors in Malaysia and undermining the economy. Although the Malaysian heterodox experiment was initially castigated, prominent economists soon began questioning the orthodox wisdom and suggested that capital controls might be sensible for emerging markets under certain circumstances (Mastanduno 2000, 502). Germain (2001, 13) argues that the Malaysian experiment not only undermined the IMF standard prescription for development and crisis-management, it has also ‘helped to shift the consensus view on the merits of unfettered capital mobility’ and ‘challenges the way in which capital-account liberalisation can be held out as a panacea to financial crisis and development’. Although the emerging global financial architecture does not, at this point, seem to depart radically from the neoliberal framework of capital mobility, transparency and good governance, the AFC and Malaysia’s capital controls strategy, nonetheless, have re-opened political debate on what was once considered long-settled questions about global financial governance. The very rapid US move to quash the Japanese proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) to provide liquidity to crisis-affected states led to further tensions between the US and Malaysia, which had actively promoted the need for such a fund independent from an IMF seen to be an American tool (Mahathir 2002a, 39–40, 102). Despite the failure to establish the AMF, the ASEAN states and their three Northeast Asian neighbours of Japan, South Korea and China came together to establish the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) forum, which was effectively an East Asian self-help mechanism to help avert future crises (Ba 2005). The APT’s most notable project to date is the Chiang Mai Initiative, a network of bilateral swap arrangements aimed at providing liquidity to its members in the event of a future crisis, while an Asian Bond Market initiative is in the pipeline. In many ways, then, the APT represents the ‘de facto realisation’ of Mahathir’s EAEG (Beeson 2002, 197). It also signals a closer engagement between Malaysia and China, with Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi recently proposing an official East Asian Summit to be hosted by Malaysia in 2005, one that would be outside an ASEAN-centred, APT framework.10 To help the process along, the Malaysian government organised an East

188 Helen Nesadurai Asian Conference in December 2004, inviting senior government officials, former leaders and businesspersons from East Asian states to debate concrete steps to be taken to make an East Asian Community a reality rather than remain ‘a theoretical construct’ (New Straits Times 2004). The Anwar crisis and the US A far more serious challenge to US–Malaysia relations came from Washington’s response to the sacking, arrest, trial and imprisonment of Mahathir’s former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, on charges of sexual misconduct and corruption, charges that Anwar maintains were fabricated. At the personal level, Mahathir was incensed at the blatant snub delivered by Vice-President Al Gore who walked out of a dinner hosted by Mahathir on the eve of the 1998 APEC Leaders’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur, but not before praising the call for Reformasi (reformation) by Anwar supporters and other Malaysians. More seriously, the US under Clinton regarded the Anwar affair as a human rights issue, while a resolution (H. Res 658) tabled in the US House of Representatives in October 2000 warned the Malaysian government that relations between the two governments might be harmed as a result.11 The Congressional move led to some concerns in the Malaysian government that economic sanctions and the suspension of defence assistance might result (New Straits Times 2000). Although relations were never downgraded, the episode represented yet another point of tension between the Malaysian government and the Clinton administration, this time more ominous because it constituted a direct attack on Mahathir’s authority and on the country’s institutions, which were already being challenged by Malaysian citizens. Unsurprisingly, Mahathir did not cherish the prospect of an Al Gore victory at the 2000 US Presidential elections (Ahmad 2000).

Malaysia and the George W. Bush administration (2001–04) The Malaysian government’s positive response to the incoming George W. Bush administration was a marked contrast to Malaysia’s strained relations with the outgoing Clinton administration (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2001). While Mahathir’s personal dislike of Al Gore was certainly a factor here, this is only part of the story. The Malaysian government felt less threatened by the realist grand strategy of the early Bush administration that refocused foreign policy on core US national interests and away from concerns with democracy and human rights.12 Although there was some disquiet with the new administration’s characterisation of China as a threat, its endorsement of theatre missile defence and its sceptical approach to multilateral institutions, the Malaysiam government, nevertheless, indicated to US officials its desire for improved relations (Ahmad 2001).

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September 11 and the upsurge in Malaysia–US relations It was the September 11 attacks on the US that marked a crucial turning point in US–Malaysia relations, and took them to new heights. Mahathir had not only unequivocally condemned the attacks, which the US appreciated, but Washington was also aware of the Malaysian government’s arrests of suspected Islamic militants even before September 11 (Mak 2004a, 149–50). These arrests were, in fact, conducted in a series beginning in August 2000 against the militant group Al Maunah,13 alleged to have stolen weapons from military depots in order to topple the government, and a year later by the arrests of alleged members of another suspected militant group, the KMM (Kumpulan Militan Malaysia). These detentions, under the ISA, had led to accusations domestically and abroad that the arrests were politically motivated, especially since among those arrested were members of the Muslim opposition that had made political inroads in a number of Malay constituencies at the expense of UMNO in the 1999 general elections. September 11 thus proved to be a turning point for the ruling elite. It helped to vindicate Mahathir and his government, especially internationally, with respect to the ISA and of the detentions of suspected militants. Further arrests were made after September 11 of individuals with alleged ties to the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiah (JI). Detentions under the ISA have continued under the Abdullah Badawi administration, with 15 suspected JI members arrested between November 2003 and January 2004, although many detainees have also been released (Suaram n.d.). Washington has ceased questioning the use of preventive detentions, unlike previously. The upsurge in relations culminated in an official working visit by Mahathir to the US in May 2002. From a country very recently regarded as something of an outcast for introducing capital controls and for its treatment of Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia went to being a ‘modern, moderate and prosperous Islamic state’ that was an important example to Southeast Asia and the rest of the world, in the words of George W. Bush (quoted in Hardev Kaur 2002). While Malaysia’s star seemed to be rising in the US, political analysts warned that Malaysia’s warming relations with the US had the potential to undermine the Mahathir government domestically, particularly from segments of the Malay Muslim population that had reservations about the government’s close cooperation with the US. September 11, however, proved costly to the Islamic opposition in Malaysia, especially when PAS declared a jihad against the US following the attack on Afghanistan and gave its members permission to fight alongside the Taliban forces. This led to condemnation of PAS by other opposition figures and by the Malaysian public, Malays included. September 11 thus proved a turning point not only in Malaysia–US relations, but also enhanced the domestic fortunes of Mahathir and UMNO that had suffered due to the financial crisis and the Anwar Ibrahim affair.

190 Helen Nesadurai Divergent paths: neo-conservative ideology, the Iraqi invasion and pre-emption Despite the warm relations between Malaysia and the US, Malaysia’s position on terrorism was at odds with that of the Bush administration. The Malaysian government took the view that the key to addressing the global terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda was to work towards resolving the Israel–Palestine issue, which contributes to the ‘bitterness and anger’ of Muslims that al-Qaeda exploits (Mahathir 2002b). Moreover, Mahathir defined terrorism as acts of violence consciously committed against civilians by any actor, including states, which thus required firm US condemnation of both Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israeli civilians and Israeli security forces targeting Palestinian civilians (ibid.). It was the Bush response to Iraq, however, that sent relations back into a downward spiral. For the post-September 11 Bush administration, a ‘realist’ grand strategy was gradually exchanged for one based on a neo-conservative inspired ideology of ‘American primacy’ with two new controversial themes, namely ‘regime change’ and ‘pre-emption’ (Dueck 2004, 527–34). For the neo-conservatives, the worldwide promotion of democracy, including by force, was necessary in order to make the world safer for Americans. Moreover, pre-emptive attacks were part of the new US security strategy aimed at ‘rogue’ states harbouring or sponsoring terrorists and to prevent WMDs from being transferred to terrorists (Bush 2002c). The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was justified in precisely such terms. The Malaysian government was concerned on two counts. First, it saw the Iraq invasion as undermining key norms of international politics, and second, it saw it as a Muslim issue, as an attack on a Muslim society notwithstanding the rhetoric about getting rid of the dictator Saddam Hussein. Thus, by early 2003, tensions between Malaysia and the US had flared up once again. Later, the Prime Minister went on to describe the invasion and the US in very hostile terms (Far Eastern Economic Review 2003), which provoked the US Ambassador to Malaysia, Marie T. Huhtala, to warn that bilateral ties might suffer (Huhtala 2003). Ties were further strained by Mahathir’s opening speech to the Tenth Session of the OIC in October 2003 when portions of his speech that dealt with how Muslims could unite to help themselves and defeat their enemies were seen as highly provocative (Simon 2004a, 69). That part of the speech where Mahathir castigated Muslims for their hasty recourse to violence at every turn was, however, missed by the critics (Mahathir 2003a). The speech invited condemnation from the western world, including the Bush administration (Simon 2004a, 69). Malaysia’s relationship with the US seemed to be at a very low ebb, worsened by US immigration and visa restrictions that had placed Malaysia on a watch list of 26 predominantly Muslim countries targeted for stringent immigration scrutiny. This had led to a growing impression in

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Malaysia that the US was waging a war on Islam and Muslims (Simon 2002, 29). Limaye (2004a, 80) notes that ‘unfortunate wording used at times by the administration’ gave credence to the perception that the US was ‘casting the struggle against terrorism as a struggle against Islam’. Malaysia also regarded the strategy of ‘pre-emption’ to be highly threatening to its sovereignty, because that meant the US might be tempted to intervene in any way it saw fit if the Malaysian government was seen to be incapable of acting against terrorists and other actors who threaten US security. This concern became very real in April 2004 when US Pacific Command Chief Admiral Thomas Fargo remarked without prior consultation that US marines and special forces would patrol the Straits of Malacca to reduce the threat of maritime terrorism (Mak 2004b). The US proposal for patrols in the Malacca Straits was part of its Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI) aimed at addressing terrorist threats in the region. The Malaysian authorities emphatically rejected the suggestion for US patrols in the Straits (Mak 2004b). The US later claimed the Admiral had been misquoted. The US appears to have drawn back on this issue, at least for the present. In June 2004, Admiral Fargo emphasised that US involvement in the Straits would only take place in consultation with the littoral states, Malaysia included, and would be confined to financial and technical assistance and intelligence sharing (Richard Baker 2004, 76). A month earlier, Assistant US Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, James Kelly, had emphasised that Indonesia and Malaysia were more than capable of safeguarding the Straits (Richard Baker 2004, 75). A similar accommodative stance was taken towards Malaysia when the US discovered that a Malaysian firm, Scomi Precision Engineering, had manufactured and shipped high-quality centrifuge components destined for Libya. Senior US administration officials initially rejected the claims by Scomi officials and the Malaysian government that they were in the dark about the final use of the centrifuge components, with Bush even citing the Malaysian link when he described the clandestine nuclear network of Pakistani scientist Dr A.Q. Khan in a February speech to the US National Defence University (Simon 2004b, 60). The Malaysian government protested against the allegations, claiming Malaysia was unfairly accused because it was a Muslim country. Soon after, US Undersecretary of State John Bolton absolved the Malaysian authorities of any official involvement in Khan’s ‘rogue’ nuclear network. The government has, however, refused to further tighten export controls and accede to the Proliferation Security Initiative (Simon 2004b, 60–6). The interesting point about these two episodes is the apparent shift by Washington from its initial position on these two matters. Why would the US shift its position on two issues that it regards as vital to its national security in a post-9/11 world, maritime terrorism and non-proliferation?

192 Helen Nesadurai Malaysia – an exemplar Muslim nation and valued US ‘ally’? The most plausible answer is that Malaysia, despite being a thorn in the side of the US, is valuable in Washington’s fight against terrorism, irrespective of whether Mahathir or Abdullah Badawi is at the helm. First, Malaysia conforms to the model that the US wishes to see for other Muslim societies, especially in the Middle East (Simon 2004a, 72). More importantly, however, Malaysia has cooperated extremely closely, if quietly, with the US on anti-terrorism activities, as its arrests of suspected Islamic militants and JI members attest, including the May 2004 arrest of the central figure in the Khan nuclear network. Malaysia had also agreed to a US suggestion in 2002 to host a regional counter-terrorism centre in Kuala Lumpur to be run jointly by the US and Malaysia. Although the Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-Terrorism that was launched on 1 July 2003 was placed under the purview of the Malaysian Foreign Ministry, the Centre works closely with foreign security agencies on a range of activities, including information exchange (Syed Hamid Albar 2003). A number of its programmes have been organised in collaboration with the US (Syed Hamid Albar 2004). James Kelly affirmed the value of Malaysia’s cooperation on terrorism at a June 2004 Senate hearing on US policy in East Asia and the Pacific, emphasising also the government’s ‘helpful’ role in brokering a peace deal between the Philippine government and Muslim separatists in southern Philippines that ‘will cut back the Jemaah Islamiyah . . . and the Abu Sayyaf’.14 Kelly also assured the hearing that Malaysia’s strong opposition to the Iraq war had not prevented its government from cooperating actively with the US on a variety of efforts, even under Mahathir. He further noted that while cooperation continues under the new Malaysian leadership, Malaysia remains ‘a respectful critic’.15 In fact, Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Defence Secretary, had already acknowledged the high value placed by the US on cooperation with Malaysia a year earlier in 2003, a time when relations were extremely tense (Limaye 2004a, 82). Notwithstanding the active cooperation with the US on terrorism, the Malaysian government also sought to develop stronger coalitions, particularly in the Muslim world, to challenge US actions in the Middle East. It tried to do this through the OIC, whose chair Malaysia would assume for three years from October 2003 (see Mahathir 2003b). However, Malaysia’s stand on a number of key issues was not adopted by the organisation. In particular, Malaysia’s very strong position that the Iraqi Governing Council (GC) should not attend the Tenth OIC Summit to be hosted by Malaysia in October 2003 as the official Iraqi representative was rejected (Associated Press 2003). Arab League members who had recently accepted the Iraqi GC into the League clearly did not share Malaysia’s position that inviting the interim government to the OIC Summit would be tantamount to legitimising the US occupation (New Straits Times 2003).

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Malaysia’s inability to forge a Muslim coalition against the US is not surprising, given the geo-political realities in the Middle East where the US maintains military operation centres in a number of states and close ties with many Arab governments.

Malaysia and the US: functional cooperation continues unimpeded Despite its highly critical opposition to many US initiatives, Malaysia has continued to maintain active defence ties with the US as well as robust economic and business links under both the Mahathir and the present Abdullah Badawi administrations. For Malaysia, the US is a highly valuable export market and a source of FDI and high technology, key sources of growth for the Malaysian economy and a means to achieve its goal of reaching developed country status. As highlighted in the second section, securing access to key sources of growth is a constant preoccupation of Malaysia’s leaders. Concerted efforts by the government to diversify Malaysia’s economic relations, especially with its Northeast Asian neighbours and the developing South, has not altered the continued dominant role of the US in Malaysia’s economy. The US has remained among the top three export markets for Malaysia, receiving close to a fifth of Malaysia’s exports, with the trade balance consistently in Malaysia’s favour since 1992.16 Since the 1990s, the US has remained among the top four investors in Malaysia, while the US is also an important site for Malaysian investors going abroad, becoming the largest host economy in 2000–01 (Tham 2004, 38–44). Moreover, American corporate figures and scientists play a key advisory role in Mahathir’s flagship project, the Multimedia Super-Corridor (MSC), that is aimed at building an advanced information technology hub in the country. For the US, the economic/business relationship with Malaysia is significant, with Malaysia currently the tenth largest trading partner of the US, up from twelfth position, with 200,000 export-related jobs created from trade with Malaysia (LaFleur 2004). That the US–ASEAN Business Council lobbied the US government to conclude a trade and investment framework agreement (TIFA) with Malaysia as a precursor to a US–Malaysia free-trade agreement attests to the value placed by the American business community on economic relations with Malaysia (Bernama 2003a). In fact, Malaysia and the US successfully concluded their initial negotiations on the TIFA during the period when relations were at their worst, in mid2003 under the Mahathir administration (Bernama 2003b). The TIFA itself was formally signed during Abdullah Badawi’s official visit to the US in May 2004. Interestingly, despite the importance accorded to government procurement in Washington’s TIFAs with other countries, the US has agreed to exclude this issue area from the Malaysian TIFA, another instance of Washington’s accommodation to Malaysian interests

194 Helen Nesadurai (US–ASEAN Business Council n.d.). Because government procurement is an important instrument to achieve Malay equity goals, the Malaysian government consistently rejects its inclusion in any international trade agreement. Aside from economics, the two countries also maintain extensive cooperation in defence, despite the fact that Malaysian defence planning since 1986 has been based on a ‘no external threat’ scenario (Mak 2004a). Nevertheless, contingency planning made defence cooperation with the US valuable to buttress the capabilities of the Malaysian Armed Forces. Despite not being a formal defence ally of the US, defence cooperation takes place through the US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) credit programme, the International Military Education Training (IMET) programme, bilateral military training exercises, access for US naval vessels to the Lumut naval dockyard in Malaysia for repair and maintenance, US military ship visits (more than 75 since 2002) and US military overflights in Malaysian airspace (with permission, and averaging over 1,000 annually, increased since 9/11), training for US Navy SEALs in Malaysia (biannually) and military equipment purchases. Thus far, Washington has not turned down any Malaysian request for weapons purchases, while the US has excellent access to Malaysian intelligence (Mak 2004a, 148). For the US, Malaysia forms a crucial link in Washington’s web of bilateral defence relationships in East Asia as well as in America’s anti-narcotics operations in Southeast Asia, in addition to Malaysia’s role in Washington’s fight against terrorism. For Malaysia, US cooperation in these areas helps enhance capabilities in defence, security and policing.

Conclusion The Malaysian government’s responses to the US can be summed up in the phrase ‘rejecting dominance, embracing engagement’, evident during both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. Despite the structural power of the US, the government has stood its ground especially when Malaysian national interests were threatened. The US, on its part, has also accommodated itself to Malaysia’s positions on a number of occasions, particularly since September 11, reflecting Malaysia’s valuable role in Washington’s fight against terrorism. There is certainly disquiet on the part of the Malaysian government over unrivalled US hegemony, and the purposes to which its preponderant power is put (or not), particularly in the global and regional arenas. Malaysia has even attempted to develop counter-hegemonic discourses and like-minded coalitions to challenge US initiatives that either directly threatened national interests or that the government felt were counterproductive to regional, global and/or Muslim interests, though with differing degrees of success. The government, nevertheless, has maintained pragmatic engagement with the US in a range of cooperative endeavours,

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including economics, defence and transnational crime. Both parties draw benefits from these efforts. Hence, the pragmatic engagement between the two countries will continue during the second Bush term. However, both the Malaysian government and the opposition hope for a more consultative US over the next four years, and especially to move away from policies of ‘regime change’ and ‘pre-emption’. Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has called on the US to listen to and work with other leaders and organisations such as the NAM, the OIC and the UN, especially on matters involving Iraq and Palestine (Berita Harian 2004). Whatever the global policy posture of the second Bush term, the Malaysian government will continue to reject US initiatives and actions that directly threaten the national interest. With Malaysia a key player in the fight against terrorism in the Southeast Asian theatre, the US may not be too inclined to alienate Malaysia in this regard, especially since the ‘war’ against terrorism has become Washington’s primary security concern.

Notes 1 See Jacobsen (1996) on the role of domestic dynamics in mediating policymakers’ interpretations of and responses to external events. 2 UMNO is the United Malays National Organisation, formed in 1946. 3 See Crouch (1996) and Hwang (2003). 4 The Chinese and Indian communities, considered to be immigrant communities in Malaysia, constitute respectively 27 per cent and 7 per cent of the population, while other indigenous groups make up the remaining population. The Malays are regarded as part of the indigenous population. 5 UMNO champions a version of Islam considered to be moderate/progressive, while PAS has been associated with a more traditionalist and, increasingly, a hardline version of Islam. 6 These credentials place Abdullah in the ‘modernist’ or ‘progressive’ camp (Yang Razali, 2004). 7 See ‘Malaysia’s Foreign Policy’, a document of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed from www.kln.gov.my/english/foreignaffairs/foreignpolicy/myforeign.htm on 8 October 2004. 8 In a semi-democratic system, electoral contestation involving opposition parties regularly takes place although the restrictive measures in place limit their role in national political life despite their ability to mobilise reasonable levels of popular support (Case, 1996). 9 See Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (n.d.). 10 The call was made during the November 2004 ASEAN Summit (see International Herald Tribune 2004). 11 The Resolution is available at www.freeanwar.net/news/hres658ih.html. (accessed 12 November 2004). 12 See Dueck (2004: 523) on the shift in US grand strategy. 13 See Suhakam (2001). 14 See the official transcript, ‘US Policy in East Asia and the Pacific’ (Serial No. 108–24), p. 21, available at www.house.gov/international_relations. 15 Ibid. 16 Data from the Malaysian External Trade Development Corporation (www.matrade.gov.my/economy-trade/bilateral-archives/usa.htm).

12 The contradictions of ‘hawkengagement’ An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy1 Roland Bleiker Introduction We’ll kill every son of a bitch north of the forward edge of the battle area, and we won’t retreat one inch. US Lieutenant General Games F. Hollingsworth, at the Korean Demilitarised Zone, 19742 We’re a peaceful people . . . travelling south on that road, the people of the North would see not a threat, but a miracle of peaceful development. US President George W. Bush, at the Korean Demilitarised Zone, 2002 (Bush 2002a, 183; 2002d, 173) Dealing with Communist North Korea has become one of the most difficult challenges in global politics today. Totalitarian and reclusive, ideologically isolated and economically ruined, it is the inherent ‘other’ in a globalised and neo-liberal world order. And yet, North Korea keeps surviving, not least because its leaders periodically rely on threats, such as nuclear brinkmanship, as a last resort to gain concessions from the international community. The latest substantial round of such brinkmanship tactics started to emerge in the autumn of 2002, when Pyongyang admitted to a secret nuclear weapons program and subsequently withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. From then on the situation rapidly deteriorated. By early 2003 both the US and North Korea were threatening each other with outright war. Even Japan, in its most militaristic posture in decades, publicly contemplated the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against North Korea (Struck 2003, 28). The dangers of North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship are evident. Miscalculations or a sudden escalation could precipitate a human disaster at any moment. Equally dangerous, although much less evident, are the confrontational and militaristic attitudes with which some of the key regional and global players seek to contain the situation. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of the US in the

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 197 North Korean nuclear crisis. I draw particular attention to the problematic dimensions of what is sometimes called ‘hawk engagement’: the assumption that the crisis around North Korea’s nuclear ambitions can best be contained by combining the projection of military threats with a willingness to engage in dialogue (Cha 2002a). President George W. Bush (2002b) stressed: ‘I believe this is not a military showndown. This is a diplomatic showdown.’ Much has been made about the difference between this tolerant approach and the far more aggressive opposition to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, where war was presented as the only possibility of preventing a dangerous escalation. The situation was particularly paradoxical since Pyongyang publicly admitted to its nuclear ambition and asked inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to leave the country. Baghdad, by contrast, denied possessing weapons of mass destruction and permitted inspectors to verify its claims (Buchsteiner 2002; Gordon 2003; Koydl 2003, 2). The reluctance to use force against North Korea obscures the fact that US foreign policy is guided by a largely consistent approach towards the phenomena of so-called ‘rogue’ states. The fact that war was not advocated in North Korea is a reflection of diplomatic constraints and, above all, strategic limitations. South Korea’s then newly elected president, Roh Moo-hyun, strongly opposed a military solution to the problem. Perhaps even more importantly, the consequences of an escalation in Korea would be hard to contain. One of the world’s biggest cities, Seoul, is only fifty kilometres away from the heavily militarised Demilitarised Zone. Even if pre-emptive strikes were to neutralise North Korea’s possible nuclear arsenal, they would not be able to destroy all its conventional weapons. The latter alone could easily trigger a second Korean war with disastrous consequences on all sides. Examining the role of the United States in the Korean nuclear crisis is essential, for nothing about the past and present dilemmas on the peninsula can be addressed or even understood without recourse to the US. This is why China repeatedly stressed that the latest nuclear crisis is primarily an issue between North Korea and the United States (Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2003). Kim Dae-jung, in his final speech as South Korea’s president, reiterated the same theme: ‘more than anything, dialogue between North Korea and the United States is the important key to a solution’ (cited in French 2003). A solution is, however, far from reach. Both the US and North Korea see each other as a threat. And each has good reasons for doing so. But each is also implicated in the production of this threat. The problem is that these interactive dynamics are hard to see, for the West tends to project a very one-sided image of North Korea – one that sees it solely as a rogue outlaw, and thus a source of danger and instability. Nicolas Eberstadt, for instance, stresses that ‘North Korean policies and practices have accounted for most of the volatility within the Northeast Asian region since the end of the Cold War’ (2001, 135). Very

198 Roland Bleiker few policy makers, security analysts and journalists ever make the effort to imagine how threats are perceived from the North Korean perspective, and how these perceptions are part of an interactive security dilemma in which the West, and US foreign policy in particular, is as much implicated as the vilified regime in Pyongyang. The central argument of this chapter is that the image of North Korea as a rogue state, which lies at the heart of hawk engagement, severely hinders both an adequate understanding and possible resolution of the crisis. The rhetoric of rogues states is indicative of how US foreign policy continues to be driven by dualistic and militaristic Cold War thinking patterns. The ‘Evil Empire’ may be gone, but not the underlying need to define safety and security with reference to an external threat that must be warded off at any cost. Rogues are among the new threat images that serve to demarcate the line between good and evil. As during the Cold War, military means are considered the key means through which this line is to be defended. In the absence of a global power that matches the US, this militaristic attitude has, if anything, even intensified. Look at Washington’s recent promulgation of a pre-emptive strike policy against rogue states. The consequences of this posture are particularly fateful in Korea, for it reinforces half a century of explicit and repeated nuclear threats against the government in Pyongyang. The impact of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical and specialised language of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea’s actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive. A brief disclaimer is in order before the chapter can proceed. I offer neither a comprehensive take on the Korean security situation nor a detailed analysis of the latest events. Instead, I identify broad patterns of conflict and embark on a conceptual engagement with some of the ensuing dilemmas. Focusing on underlying trends inevitably entails glancing over nuances at times. For instance, there are heated debates within Washington’s policy circles. Hard-line realist positions have thus alternated with periods during which softer and more liberal policies prevailed. But the persistent pattern of seeing North Korea as a rogue state is far more striking, and in many ways far more significant, than the strategic policy manoeuvring that takes place within these patterns. Focusing on the big picture also entails departing from some of the conventions that prevail in the field of strategic and security studies. Contrary to most treatments of the subject I do not discuss the technical aspects of nuclear and other weapons, except to show, as indicated above, how these very discussions, jargon-ridden and inaccessible as they are to non-military experts, often serve to stifle debate about some of the underlying political and ethical issues.3

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 199

Patterns of action and reaction: the first nuclear crisis The first nuclear crisis in Korea started to emerge in the early 1990s. Although Pyongyang had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1985, it seemed to have retained its ambition to develop a nuclear programme. Or so at least indicated US intelligence reports, which detected a plutonium processing plant in Yongbyon. Various negotiation rounds followed. In 1992 North Korea agreed to have its nuclear facility inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But only a few months later disagreements over inspections increased and in March 1993 North Korea declared its intention to withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty. Although Pyongyang agreed a few weeks later to suspend its withdrawal, an intense crisis soon emerged on the peninsula. William Perry, then US Secretary of Defense, considered the subsequent escalation the only time during his tenure when he ‘believed that the US was in serious danger of a major war’ (2000, 121). As a result of various interventions, such as a semiprivate visit to Pyongyang by former US President Jimmy Carter, a deal was reached. In an Agreement signed in October 1994 Pyongyang consented to freeze its nuclear programme. In return, the US promised a number of compensations, including the delivery of aid, heating oil and the eventual construction of two light-water nuclear reactors that would provide North Korea with energy sources. One of the most revealing interpretations of the dynamics that led to the crisis and its resolution was conducted by Leon Sigal. In a counterreading of US nuclear diplomacy towards North Korea in the years leading up to the crisis, Sigal documents how coercive diplomacy brought North Korea to the brink of war. He writes of a US foreign-policy pattern that discouraged co-operation and, instead, promoted a ‘crime-andpunishment approach’ which constituted North Korea above all as a threatening rogue state. While acknowledging the numerous instances that would, indeed, give rise to such an image, Sigal also deals with the interactive nature of the conflict. In a crucial passage he asks why, if North Korea was allegedly so keen on developing nuclear weapons and had numerous opportunities to do so, did it not simply go ahead and build bombs? Sigal’s answers highlight Washington’s inability to recognise that North Korea was playing ‘tit-for-tat in nuclear diplomacy’ (1998, 13, 125). Some of Sigal’s arguments have become controversial. He has, for instance, been accused of downplaying North Korea’s failure to uphold its obligations. That may well be the case, but at a more fundamental level Sigal is nevertheless able to reveal a striking empirical pattern: each time the US used an aggressive policy to pressure North Korea into concessions, the latter became more recalcitrant. By contrast, when Washington relied on a more co-operative attitude Pyongyang usually responded with concessions. Tension on the Korean peninsula thus only decreased once the US adopted a ‘give-and-take’ diplomacy that recognised how Pyongyang’s

200 Roland Bleiker recalcitrance can, and should, be read as a bargaining tactic to get something in return for giving up the nuclear option (ibid., 21).

From détente to the second nuclear crisis Once the nuclear crisis of 1994 was solved all parties concerned embarked on a more co-operative route. The inauguration of Kim Dae-jung as South Korea’s president in early 1998 signalled the advent of a policy that was more conciliatory, or at last more willing to engage the archenemy across the dividing line. The US administration under President Clinton was strongly supportive of this approach. Of particular significance here is an official policy review, conducted by now former Defense Secretary Perry. In some respects the report advocated little new, for it called for a realist approach based on ‘a hard-headed understanding of military realities’. Translated into practice this meant no changes to Washington’s ‘strong deterrent posture towards the Korean Peninsula’. Not surprisingly, the Perry Report located the main threat in North Korea’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons or to develop, test and deploy long-range missiles. ‘The United States must, therefore, have as its objective ending these activities’ (1999, 5, 6, 10, 12). At the same time, though, the Perry Report called for a fundamental review of US policy towards Pyongyang, advocating a position that rests not only on military deterrence, but also on a ‘new, comprehensive and integrated approach’ to negotiations with North Korea (ibid., 8). In some sense the report sought to implement the very tit-for-tat approach that Sigal found missing during the early days of the Clinton administration. The new policy still revolved around a strong defensive posture and an inherent distrust of North Korea, but it also foresaw the possibility of rewarding Pyongyang for concessions. In this sense the Perry Report signified a remarkable departure from the US position of viewing rogue states as inherently evil, irrational and incapable of compromising. The more nuanced policy attitudes in Washington and Seoul soon led to several breakthroughs, including the lifting of restrictions on trade with, investment in and travel to North Korea. Pyongyang responded in turn with a variety of gestures, such as a gradual (although still very timid) opening of its borders, agreements on family exchanges with the South and a tuning down of its hostile rhetoric. The process of détente culminated in June 2000 with a historic summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, Kim Jong-il (North) and Kim Dae-jung (South). The symbolic significance of this meeting cannot be overestimated. Bruce Cumings goes as far as arguing that ‘Bill Clinton and the two Korean leaders did more to lessen tensions in Korea than all the heads of state going back to the country’s division in 1945’ (1999a, xiv). Others would undoubtedly disagree, interpreting Clinton’s approach to North Korea as a dangerous policy of appeasement, which needed to be rectified with a return to a more principled form of realpolitik. Be it as it may, détente in

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 201 Korea did indeed not last long. It was soon replaced with a return to familiar Cold War thinking patterns and conflict-prone behaviour. According to conventional media and policy accounts, the second nuclear crisis suddenly emerged in the autumn of 2002. The official and largely accepted story-line is perfectly captured by a passage in one of Europe’s leading news magazines. Writing in February 2003 the author presents the crisis as follows: The dispute over Pyongyang’s nuclear program began in October last year. North Korea admitted that it had secretly pursued plans for enriching uranium. Then the government threw international inspectors out of the country and withdrew from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. (Der Spiegel 2003) North Korea’s admission came as a shock to the international community. It was described as ‘the mother of all confessions’ (Hiebert et al. 2002). Fears increased dramatically a few months later, when Pyongyang officially announced that it would restart its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. US intelligence assessment concluded that North Korea may be able to turn out enough plutonium to produce five nuclear weapons by the summer (Kristof 2003b). Add to this a renewed intensification of North Korea’s hostile rhetoric, including threats to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’, and you have a full-blown crisis on the peninsula. The overall verdict thus seemed clear: ‘Pyongyang is responsible for the crisis that has ensued because it broke the earlier agreement to scrap its nuclear program in return for energy assistance’ (White 2003). Or so goes the prevalent interpretation of events. But one could, and indeed should, stress exactly the same as Sigal already did with respect to the first nuclear crisis: ‘the standard account is wrong’ (1998, 6). This is not to say that the above events did not occur, or that North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme does not pose a serious threat to regional and world peace. Rather, the point is that the official account is, at minimum, a onesided and highly inadequate portrayal of events. The crisis neither emerged out of the blue in October 2002, nor can it be attributed solely to North Korea’s actions, highly problematic as they undoubtedly are. Like any crisis, this one too resulted from a sustained interaction of threat perceptions, actions and reactions to them. It was rooted in entrenched antagonisms and established conflict patterns, involving a variety of different actors, each playing their role in constituting the crisis. Before going on it must be stressed that the task of this chapter is not to engage the role of these perceptions in detail. There is already an extensive literature on the subject (most notably Jervis 1976). Applying this body of knowledge to the Korean peninsula would go far beyond what is possible in an essay-length exposé. I will thus examine threat perceptions

202 Roland Bleiker only as far as it is necessary to demonstrate that the rhetoric of rogue states obstructs an adequate understanding of the security situation in Korea.

The role of American nuclear threats Lets us, for the sake of understanding the interactive dimensions of the crisis, contemplate for a moment how the crisis must have appeared from the vantage point of North Korea’s decision makers. The first and undoubtedly most striking feature to notice from Pyongyang would be the long and unbroken period of American nuclear hegemony in Asia. Equally obvious and understandable is that this hegemonic practice must have been – and indeed was – interpreted as a clear threat to North Korea’s security. The US remains the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons in a combat situation, and this in very close proximity to Korea, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Korean War the US entertained employing nuclear weapons against North Korea and China as part of its ‘massive retaliation’ doctrine. General Douglas MacArthur specifically requested permission to use twenty-six nuclear bombs to attack specifically designated targets. His successor, General Matthew Ridgeway, renewed the request. In the end no nuclear weapons were used, although the newly inaugurated president, Dwight Eisenhower, hinted in 1953 that the US would employ them in case the armistice negotiations failed to make progress (Oberdorfer 1998, 252). Soon after the Korean War, in January 1958, the US introduced ground-based nuclear weapons to South Korea, which constituted a direct violation of the Armistice Agreement.4 This move did not occur in response to a specific North Korean threat, but was part of a more general world-wide reorganisation of American military strategy (Hayes 1988, 356). The weapons were kept close to the border with the North. Don Oberdorfer even reported that ‘nuclear warheads had been flown by helicopter almost routinely to the edge of the DMZ in training exercises’ (1998, 257). The very nature of these excises was a public threat to North Korea. Consider, for instance, how the yearly joint manoeuvres between the US and South Korea, termed ‘Team Spirit’, revolved around an unnecessarily aggressive north-bound scenario. They stressed, as Moon Chung-in puts it, ‘bold and vigorous strikes into the enemy’s rear’ as part of an overall ‘offensive military strategy’ (1996, 68, 260). American nuclear weapons were withdrawn from South Korea in the early 1990s. Analyses differ on the exact reasons for this withdrawal. Donald Gregg, then US ambassador to South Korea, suggests that it was a gesture of goodwill designed to facilitate negotiations with North Korea (as cited in Oberdorfer 1998, 258). Other US officials indicate that it was a more tactical move, linked to experiences in the first Gulf War that sug-

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 203 gested high-yield conventional weapons may actually be more useful than nuclear ones in the context of a controllable regional battlefield (Cumings 1997a, 481–2). Be it as it may, the withdrawal of American nuclear warheads from South Korean soil hardly removed the nuclear threat from the peninsula. Long-range US nuclear missiles could still easily reach North Korea – a fact that Pyongyang was frequently reminded of, in implicit and not-so-implicit manners.

The interactive dynamic of the nuclear crisis American nuclear threats towards Pyongyang intensified again when Washington’s North Korea policy became more hawkish with the inauguration president George W. Bush. In his State of the Union Address of February 2002 Bush singled out North Korea as one of three nations belonging to an ‘axis of evil’, citing as evidence Pyongyang’s export of ballistic missile technology and its lingering ambition to become a nuclear power (2002c). This sudden turnaround in American foreign policy, which sharply reversed the more conciliatory approach pursued during the Clinton administration, can just as well be seen as the origin of the present nuclear crisis in North Korea. In June 2002 details of a Nuclear Posture Review became public, according to which the new US strategic doctrine relied on the possibility to pre-emptive nuclear strikes against terrorists and rogue states. North Korea was explicitly cited with regard to two possible scenarios: countering an attack on the South and halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Mention was made, for instance, of ‘using tactical nuclear weapons to neutralise hardened artillery positions aimed at Seoul, the South Korean capital’ (Gehriger 2002, 3; Kristof 2003b). A few months later Washington made its threats official. The new National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, outlined in detail how pre-emptive strikes are legitimate and would be employed as a way to ‘stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States’ (USNSC 2002; see in particular chapter V). Faced with a sudden intensification of American nuclear threats it is hardly surprising that Pyongyang reacted angrily and called Washington officials ‘nuclear lunatics’ (Kim 2002). Neither is it surprising that Pyongyang is reluctant to give up its nuclear option, for it could serve as a credible deterrent against a US attack. Indeed, the desire for such a deterrent only mirrors the attitude and behaviour of the US. Declassified intelligence documents, which became available after the collapse of communist regimes in eastern Europe, do indeed reveal that from the 1980s on North Korea perceived itself as increasingly weak and vulnerable to external attacks (Suh 1995, 394–8). This is why the prime objective of the government in Pyongyang has moved, as many commentators now recognise, from forcefully unifying the peninsula to the simple task of regime-survival

204 Roland Bleiker (Cha 2002b, 216–19). But very few Western decision makers have the sensitivity to recognise these factors and take them into account when formulating their policies. Donald Gregg (2002) is one of the rare senior American diplomats who acknowledges that ‘the US scares North Korea’. But even he could make such an admission in public only once he had retired from all his official functions. The point is not to attribute responsibility for the re-emergence of a nuclear crisis on the peninsula. Both the US and North Korea have contributed a great deal to fuel each other’s fears. But decision-makers in Washington have clearly not been sufficiently aware of their own role in generating fears and counter-reactions. Nor have they learned much from the lesson of the first nuclear crisis. Consider, for instance, how the US has quickly forgotten, or ignored, a number of rather striking concessions that Pyongyang made in the period leading up to the second crisis. North Korea started to open up its borders: it accommodated several hundred representatives of foreign aid organisations, increased co-operation with (capitalist) Russia, sought to normalise talks with Japan and entered into diplomatic relations with a dozen Western countries. There were steps towards domestic reform, such as the introduction of quasi-market principles and the opening of special economic zones. There was also progress towards a rapprochement with the South, most notably in domains such as family exchanges, business contacts and cultural exchanges. Pyongyang started to clear mines in the DMZ and worked towards establishing road and railway links with the South. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, even publicly agreed to a continuous deployment of US troops in South Korea. He stressed that their presence is only a threat as long as relationship between North Korea and the US remains hostile (Sigal 2001, 96; see also Tow 2001, 87). This in itself could be seen as the ‘mother of all concessions’, for the removal of US troops had been one of North Korea’s key demands for decades (Kim 1974, 8). North Korea’s worry began to grow with President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech earlier that year, in February. An official North Korean spokesperson, Kim Myong Chol, then told a New York Times journalist, Nicholas Kristof, that he foresaw ‘a crisis beginning in the latter half of this year’. North Korea, he mentioned, ‘will respond to the breakdown of the nuclear deal . . . by starting its nuclear program and resuming its missiles tests’ (as cited in Kristof 2002, A27). That is, of course, precisely what happened eight months later. It is striking how North Korea’s approach in 2002/3 paralleled its behaviour during the crisis of 1993/4. Pyongyang most likely assumed, as it did a decade earlier, that a hard-line US administration would not engage in serious dialogue until North Korea threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty. Scott Snyder, in an extensive study of Pyongyang’s approach during the first crisis, speaks of a ‘crisis-oriented negotiation style’ that is rooted in North Korea’s particular historical experience, most

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 205 notably its partisan guerrilla legacy. Snyder writes of a remarkably rational and entirely consistent approach – one that relies on ‘threats, bluff, and forms of blackmail to extract maximal concession from a negotiating counterpart’ (1999, 43, 66, 70). Even the dramatic language that shocked the world media in early 2003 was entirely predictable. The apocalyptic threat of turning Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’, for instance, was literally a rehearsed metaphor from the first crisis (Kristof 2003a; Sydney Morning Herald 2003). It is part of an all-too-predictable emotional vocabulary that has prevailed in North Korea’s press for decades. Once translated into standard English it is not much different from the more rationally expressed US threat of pre-emptive nuclear strikes. One can agree or disagree with North Korea’s dramatic brinkmanship tactic, but one cannot ignore its deeply entrenched existence. Doing so may lead to dangerous miscalculations. At minimum, it prevents us from recognising how Pyongyang may be using its last bargaining chip, its nuclear potential, as a way of entering into dialogue with the US. In case this was not clear from North Korea’s behaviour during the first crisis, Kim Myong Chol stressed the same point again in the above mentioned conversation with Nicholas Kristof. In February 2002, several months before the crisis escalated, Kim pointed out that ‘North Korea cannot kill the heavy-weight champion, the U.S. But it can maim one of his limbs, and so the heavyweight champion will not want to fight. That is the North Korean logic’ (cited in Kristof, 2002, A27). The logic may be flawed, as Kristof notes, but it is entirely consistent with Pyongyang’s attitude during the first crisis. It demonstrates that Pyongyang had no interest in a military confrontation with the US. Indeed, North Korea’s press repeatedly stressed that the first nuclear crisis ‘was settled through negotiations’ and that this proves the present issue can be solved in this manner as well (KCNA Bulletin 2003). Pyongyang wanted guarantees and concessions. And it is not even that its demands were particularly outrageous. For years Pyongyang has requested a non-aggression pact as well as one-on-one negotiations with the US, leading to a normalisation of the relationship between the two countries, or at least to a recognition of each other’s sovereignty (for the latest articulation of this demand, see Green 2003). The US, by contrast, has always preferred multilateral negotiations and demanded North Korean disarmament prior to a normalisation of relations. Despite numerous and obvious signs, and despite detailed and insightful studies of North Korea’s previous negotiation behaviour, the US decision-makers repeated exactly the same mistakes they committed during the first crisis: they believed that by demonising North Korea as an evil rogue state they could force Pyongyang into concessions. Whether this policy resulted from ignorance or specific design remains open to debate. The bottom line is that the US position was firm: ‘America and the world will not be blackmailed,’ stressed President Bush in his 2003 State of the

206 Roland Bleiker Union Address (Bush 2003). The result was predictable: Pyongyang became more recalcitrant. A new nuclear crisis started to take hold of the Korean peninsula.

Mutual crisis diplomacy, or the contradictions of hawk engagement The conflict pattern had been set long before the latest crisis unfolded. Several scholars, most notably Bruce Cumings (1999a) and Hazel Smith (2000, 594–6), have for years drawn attention to Washington’s inability to see North Korea as anything but a dangerous and unpredictable rogue state. A look at the deeply embedded nature of this policy attitude is thus in order, even if it entails a brief detour from the immediate issue of Korean security. Central here is the transition from the Cold War to a new world order. While the global Cold War power structures collapsed like a house of cards, the mindsets that these structures produced turned out to be far more resilient. Cold War thinking patterns remain deeply entrenched in US foreign policy, not least because virtually all of its influential architects rose to power or passed their formative political years during the Cold War. As a result, security has in essence remained a dualistic affair: an effort to protect a safe inside from a threatening outside. Once the danger of Communism had vanished, security had to be articulated with reference to a new ‘Feindbild’, a new threatening other that could provide a sense of identity, order and safety at home. ‘I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains,’ said US General Colin Powell in 1991. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung’ (Powell, admittedly taken somewhat out of context, as cited in Newsweek, 22 April 1991 and reproduced in Cumings 1999a, 139). Rogue states were among the new threat images that rose to prominence when Cold War ideological schism gave way to a more blurred picture of global politics (Derrida 2003). And North Korea became the rogue par excellence: the totalitarian state that disrespects human rights and aspires to possess weapons of mass destruction; the one that lies outside the sphere of good and is to be watched, contained and controlled. But there is far more to this practice of ‘othering’ than meets the eye. Robert Dujarric hits the nail on its head when identifying why some of the key rogue states, such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran or Libya, are constituted as rogue by the US. It cannot be their authoritarian nature and their human rights violations alone, for many other states, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have an equally appalling record. Neither can it be that they possess or aspire to possess weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise states like India, Pakistan or Israel would be constituted as rogues too. Dujarric stresses that rogue states above all share one common characteristic: ‘they are small or medium nations that have achieved some success in thwarting American policy’ (2001, 467).

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 207 The tendency to demonise rogue states considerably intensified following the terrorist attack on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001. For some policy makers and political commentators the American reaction to these events signified a fundamentally new approach to foreign policy. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld heralds the arrival of ‘new ways of thinking and new ways of fighting’ (2002, 21). Stephen Walt, likewise, speaks of ‘the most rapid and dramatic change in the history of U.S. foreign policy’ (2001/2). Significant changes did, indeed, take place. The inclusion of a preventive first-strike option, for instance, is a radical departure from previous approaches, which revolved around a more defence-oriented military policy. But at a more fundamental, conceptual level, there is far more continuity than change in the US position. Indeed, one can clearly detect a strong desire to return to the reassuring familiarity of dualistic and militaristic thinking patterns that dominated foreign policy during the Cold War. The new US foreign policy re-established the sense of order and certitude that had existed during the Cold War: an inside/outside world in which, according to the words of President George W. Bush (2001), ‘you are either with us or against us’. Once again, the world is divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and once again military means occupy a key, if not the only, role in protecting the former against the latter. ‘The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable’, Allan Bloom already noted at the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It is a question of principles, and thus ‘a cause of war’ (1987, 142). Expressed in other words, the rhetoric of evil moves the phenomena of rogue states into the realm of irrationality. Evil is in essence a term of condemnation for a phenomena that can neither be fully comprehended nor addressed, except through militaristic forms of dissuasion and retaliation. This is why various commentators believe that the rhetoric of evil is an ‘analytical cul de sac’ that prevents, rather than encourages, understanding. Some go as far as arguing that a rhetoric of evil entails an ‘evasion of accountability’, for the normative connotations of the term inevitably leads to policy positions that ‘deny negotiations and compromise’ (Euben 2002, 4; Klusmeyer and Suhrke 2002, 27, 29, 35–7). How is it, indeed, possible to negotiate with evil without being implicated in it, without getting sucked into its problematic vortex? The contradictions between the rhetoric of evil and the requirements for dialogue have become particularly evident during the most recent nuclear crisis in Korea. All top US officials publicly stressed one common theme: that ‘there is no reason why discussion about confidence-building measures cannot take place with Pyongyang’ (Hubbard 2002). At the very same time, though, the projection of threats towards North Korea was carefully maintained, even intensified. ‘All options are on the table’, including military action, stressed President Bush (Dao 2003). Powell, likewise, underlined that ‘no military option’s been taken off the table’ (Stout 2003). The assumption behind this approach is that including North Korea

208 Roland Bleiker in an ‘axis of evil’ does not necessarily preclude the possibility of engaging it in dialogue. Indeed, the assumption is that threats will induce dialogue. William Safire expresses this strategy in blunt but entirely appropriate words: ‘We make clear to weapons traders in the North that their illicit nuclear production is vulnerable to air attack from a nation soon to show its disarmament bona fides in Baghdad . . . That readiness will bring about what diplomats call “fruitful, regional, multilateral negotiation” ’ (2003). ‘Hawk engagement’ has emerged as a term to describe the new and much tougher US stance (Cha 2002a). It is striking how much this policy position resembles North Korea’s vilified nuclear brinkmanship tactic. Just as Pyongyang does, Washington explicitly threatens the opponent it allegedly wants to engage in dialogue. And it advances policies that intentionally create a crisis in order to win concessions from its arch-enemy. As a result, it is not surprising that the few contacts which took place between the US and North Korea can hardly be called negotiations, yet alone fruitful ones. Consider the meanwhile famous encounter that took place in Pyongyang in October 2002, during which North Korean officials made the ‘mother of all confessions’. Led by US envoy James Kelly, this was the most senior team of US officials to visit North Korea since the inauguration of President Bush and his adoption of a more confrontational policy. Pyongyang was clearly hoping for a resumption of dialogue, but instead encountered a US team acting in what they perceived was a highly ‘arrogant manner’. Even Western diplomats who observed the events agreed. ‘These were not negotiations’, stressed one of them. ‘Kelly immediately started with accusations’ (cited in Bork 2003, 2). The next day North Korean officials predictably returned to their own well-practised crisis diplomacy. They upped the ante and admitted to a nuclear weapons programme, fictive or not.

The concealing power of security expertise Why is it so difficult to deal with, or even recognise, the interactive dynamics of security dilemmas? Why is it still possible to present as rational and credible the view that North Korea alone is responsible for yet another nuclear crisis on the peninsula? And why have militaristic approaches to security come to be seen as the only realistic way of warding off the respective threat, even though they are quite obviously implicated in the very dynamic that has led to its emergence in the first place? Answers to these complex questions are, of course, not easy to find. I certainly do not pretend to offer them here. But at least some aspects can be understood by observing the central role that defence analysis plays in the articulation of security policy. The latter has in essence been reduced to discussions about military issues which, in turn, are presented in a highly technical manner. A fundamental paradox emerges. On the one hand an array of abstract acronyms and metaphors has removed our

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 209 understanding of security issues further and further away from the realities of conflict and war. On the other hand we have become used to these distorting metaphors to the point that the language of defence analysis has become the most accepted – and by definition most credible and rational – way of assessing issues of security. The ensuing construction of common sense provides experts – those fluent in the techno-strategic language of abstraction – not only with the knowledge, but also with the moral authority to comment on issues of defence (Cohn 1989, 334–7). Experts on military technologies have been essential in constructing North Korea as a threat and in reducing or eliminating from our purview the threat that emanates from the US and South Korea towards the North. The political debate over each side’s weapons potential, for instance, is articulated in highly technical terms. Even if non-experts manage to decipher the jargon-packed language with which defence issues are presented, they often lack the technical expertise to verify the so-advanced claims, even though the latter are used to legitimise important political decisions. As a result, the techno-strategic language of defence analysis has managed to place many important security issues beyond the point of political and moral discussions. Consider how, for decades, the US and South Korea have argued that the military balance on the peninsula represents one of the most severe imbalances in military power anywhere in the world (Jo 1986, 259). During the late 1980s, for instance, North Korean troops were said to outnumber South Koreans by 840,000 to 650,000, with the North enjoying an even greater advantage in tanks, aircraft and navel forces (Lho 1988, 38). The South Korean Defense White Paper at the time argued that its military power is only 65 per cent of North Korea’s, and that a military balance will not be reached until after the year 2000 (as cited in McBeth 1989). But in the year 2000 the refrain remained exactly the same. The Defense White Paper still insists that ‘North Korea has the quantitative upper hand in troops and weaponry, and it possesses strong capabilities of conducting mobile warfare designed to succeed in a shortterm blitzkrieg’ (1999, 59). Virtually all official defence statistics present a seemingly alarming North Korean presence. They juxtapose, for instance, North Korea’s 1,170,000 standing forces against the 690,000 of the South, its seventy-eight brigades against the nineteen, its 23,001 armoured vehicles against the 2,400, its fifty submarines against six, and so on (‘Comparison of North–South Korean Military Capabilities’, Appendix 6 to Defense White Paper 2000; Strategic Balance in Northeast Asia 2001, 294–304). Articulated from the privileged vantage-point of the state, the strategic studies discourse acquires a degree of political and moral authority that goes far beyond its empirically sustainable claims. For years scholars have questioned the accuracy of the respective calculations and the political conclusions derived from them. Already in the 1980s, critics pointed out that the official statistics compare quantity, not quality, and that in terms of the latter the South enjoys a clear strategic advantage over the North,

210 Roland Bleiker even without including American nuclear and other weapons stationed in or (possibly) directed towards the Korean peninsula (Cumings 1988, 112–13; McBeth 1989, 34). These critiques have intensified in recent years. In a detailed study of the subject, Moon Chung-in argues that even without US nuclear support ‘South Korea is far superior to the North in military capacity’, citing major quality differences in such realms as communication, intelligence, electronic warfare and cutting-edge offensive weapons systems (1996, 262, 56–66, 132–5). Sigal, likewise, points out that the much feared one-million man North Korean army is largely a fiction. About half of them, he estimates, are either untrained or soldier-workers engaged in civil construction. Much of North Korea’s tanks and aircraft are obsolescent, leaving its ‘ground forces and lines of supply vulnerable to attack from the air’ (1998, 21). Humanitarian workers, who have gained access to much of North Korea’s territory over the last few years, paint a similar picture. They stress, for instance, that ‘the few tanks seen on the road cannot get from one village to the next without breaking down or running out of fuel’ (H. Smith 2002). The political manipulation of defence expenditure statistics perfectly illustrates how technical data are used to project threats in a particular manner. Policy makers and security experts keep drawing attention to North Korea’s excessive military expenditures. And excessive they are, indeed, averaging 27.5 per cent of the GDP over the last few years, even reaching a staggering 37.9 per cent in 1998, at a time when the country was being devastated by a famine (‘North Korea’s Military Expenditures’, Appendix 5 to Defense White Paper 2000). Seoul’s defensive needs seem much more modest in comparison, located at a mere 3.5 per cent of the GDP. But when one compares the respective expenditures in absolute terms, which is hardly ever done in official statistics, then the picture all of a sudden looks very different. Given its superior economy, the 3.5 per cent that Seoul spends on its military amounts to more than twice as much than the North Korean expenses, no matter how excessive the latter appear in terms of percentage of the GDP (Kim 1996, 259; Moller 2001, 42–3). One does not need to be fluent in the techno-strategic language of security analysis to realise that over the years this unequal pattern of defence spending has created a qualitative misbalance of military capacities on the peninsula. And yet, the myth of the strong North Korean army, of ‘the world’s third largest military capability’, is as prevalent and as hyped-up as ever (Strategic Balance in Northeast Asia 2001, 294).

Conclusion This chapter has examined the role of United States security policy towards Korea, focusing in particular on Washington’s entanglement in the underlying patterns that shaped the two Korean nuclear crises of the last decade. In each case, in 1993/4 and in 2002/3, the crisis allegedly

An analysis of Washington’s Korea policy 211 emerged suddenly. It was largely attributed to North Korea’s problematic behaviour, most notably to its nuclear brinkmanship tactic. But a more thorough analysis of the events reveals a far more intricate picture. Given the deeply entrenched antagonistic Cold War atmosphere on the peninsula the most recent crisis comes hardly as a surprise. Indeed, a crisis is always already present: the question is simply when and how it is being perceived and represented as such. Responsibility for the nuclear crisis is an equally blurred affair. North Korea undoubtedly bears a big part of it. Pyongyang has demonstrated repeatedly that it does not shy away from generating tension to promote its own interests, particularly when its survival is at stake. Even a primitive North Korean nuclear programme poses a grave threat to the region, not least because it could unleash a new nuclear arms race. But Pyongyang’s actions have not taken place in a vacuum. They occurred in response to both internal as well as external circumstances. Central here is to keep in mind that North Korea has been subject to over half a century of clear and repeated American nuclear threats. Few decision makers and defence analysts realise the extent to which these threats have shaped the security dilemmas on the peninsula. If one steps back from the immediate and highly emotional ideological context that still dominates security interactions on the peninsula, then the attitude and behaviour of North Korea and the US bear striking similarities. Both have contributed a great deal to fuel each other’s fears. Both have also used their fears to justify aggressive military postures. And both rely on a strikingly similar form of crisis diplomacy. But the ensuing interactive dynamics are largely hidden behind a rationalised security policy that presents threats only in a one-dimensional manner. The image of North Korea as an evil and unpredictable rogue state is so deeply entrenched that any crisis can easily be attributed to Pyongyang’s problematic actions, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Keeping up this image, and the threat projections that are associated with it, requires constant work. The specialised discourse on security and national defence contributes its share to the respective task. It presents threats in a highly technical manner and through a jargon-ridden language that is inaccessible to all but a few military experts. As a result, a very subjective and largely one-sided interpretation of security dilemmas has come to be accepted as real, even common-sensical. Creating greater awareness of these problematic factors is essential for the promotion of policy approaches that can contribute to a more peaceful environment on the Korean peninsula.

Notes 1 This is a revised and updated version of an essay that originally appeared in International Affairs (Bleiker 2003). 2 Commander South Korean/US I Corps, as reported by Donald Gregg, then CIA chief in Seoul, and cited in Oberdorfer (1998, 62).

212 Roland Bleiker 3 For the same reason I am employing the terms North Korea and South Korea, rather than the official Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and Republic of Korea (ROK). I have opted for the informal terms, even though I am fully aware that North Korea insists on being called the DPRK – a choice that seems as much political as semantic. 4 Article 2d obliged the parties to ‘cease the introduction into Korea of reinforcing combat aircraft, armored vehicles, weapons, and ammunition’ (Armistice Agreement, 27 July 1953, as reprinted in Kim (2001, 246)). North Korea did not, of course, abide by this agreement either.

13 With friends like these Reassessing the Australia–US relationship Mark Beeson

Introduction For more than 50 years Australia’s alliance with the United States has been the generally uncontroversial mainstay of Australia’s strategic and foreign policy. In the aftermath of September 11, however, and partly as a consequence of Australia’s prominent position in the ‘coalition of the willing’ that invaded Iraq, the alliance has been subjected to more critical scrutiny. For the first time in recent history, clear divisions have opened up between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal–National coalition government of John Howard. Nor has debate been confined to the merits of the strategic dimensions of the relationship: the ‘free trade’ agreement negotiated between the US and Australia also had the effect of subjecting the economic side of the relationship to new, unaccustomed criticism. In short, and despite continuing bipartisan affirmation of the continuing importance of relationship, bilateral ties have become more controversial, and their merits more contested than ever before. Although Australia is not strictly part of East Asia,1 it provides an illuminating counterpoint to the Asian case studies in this volume. The Australian case highlights a number of issues that are pertinent to the more broadly conceived ‘Asia-Pacific’ region, which includes the US, Australia and East Asia. Indeed, one of the things that a consideration of the Australia–US bilateral relationship in a regional context reveals is that bilateral relations have implications for other relationships and need to be seen in a broader context. This is especially true of a ‘middle power’ like Australia, which finds itself caught between strategic obligations toward its hegemonic ally on the one hand, and the reality of its regionally determined economic future on the other. In such circumstances, balancing possibly competing regional and bilateral ties, as well as economic and strategic imperatives, has proved a major challenge; it is not one that has always been handled well. The discussion of US–Australia relations is organized in the following way. First, I briefly sketch the historical evolution of the relationship and the assumptions that have generally made it a sacrosanct part of

214 Mark Beeson Australian foreign policy. Next, I detail the quite distinct but interconnected debates that have revolved around the strategic and economic dimensions of the relationship. In the course of this discussion I consider the different positions that have emerged towards the relationship since September 11, and the impact of recent events on Australia’s relationship with its Asian neighbours and with the US itself. The point that emerges from this analysis is that in the evolving, post-Cold War environment in which global and regional processes are helping to redefine ‘national interests’, it is no longer clear that ‘Australian’ interests are as closely bound up with or served by a close, uncritical relationship with an increasingly assertive, unilateral hegemonic power.

Great and powerful friends All nations are different, of course, but Australia’s history and particular geo-political environment give it an especially distinctive place in the international scheme of things. Australia’s origins as a settler society and an artifact of European colonialism meant that it has, from its relatively recent outset, been something of an alien outpost of westernization and whiteness. The looming mass of ‘Asia’ and its pullulating populations to Australia’s north, when combined with the formidable distance from the ‘mother country’, meant that isolation, vulnerability and anxiety were the dominant themes of Australia’s early domestic and foreign policies (Walker 1999). It is, perhaps, unsurprising, therefore, that political elites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might have been preoccupied with security and determined to maintain close relations with Britain; Britain provided the bulk of migrants to Australia and it was the hegemonic power of the era. What is more surprising is the extent and durability of this basic approach to international relations: not only did Australians not even take responsibility for their own foreign policy until the exigencies of World War II compelled it, but the tradition of cultivating good relations with the ‘great and powerful friend’ of the time persisted. World War II made it unambiguously clear that Britain was no longer capable or interested in underwriting Australia’s security. The ALP’s wartime premier, John Curtin, had no hesitation in abruptly transferring the country’s primary strategic allegiance to the United States, which had assumed Britain’s former hegemonic mantle (Millar 1978). Such pragmatism, as we shall see, remains a hallmark of the present government’s foreign policy, and is rhetorically invoked to legitimate what has on occasion been a controversial relationship. The underlying rationale also remains the same: Australia is situated in a potentially unstable part of the world and incapable of defending itself on its own; without the support of the most powerful country in the world, Australia can neither afford nor guarantee its own defence, the conventional wisdom has it. While this

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 215 argument may have been compelling at the height of World War II when the Japanese appeared capable of invading Australia, it is less clear that the same logic or imperatives obtain in the current post-Cold War environment. Nevertheless, as far as the strategic element of the relationship is concerned, it continues to enjoy largely uncritical bipartisan support. The benefits and importance of the economic relationship with the US have been even less clear, especially when seen in historical context. Indeed, one of the central dilemmas of Australian foreign policy since the Second World War has been reconciling its potentially contradictory economic and strategic goals. Whether Australian policy-makers have liked it or not, the inescapable economic reality and consequence of the ‘Asian miracle’ and the concomitant rapid industrialization to Australia’s north has been to profoundly reconfigure Australia’s economic relations (Tweedie 1994). When Japan eclipsed Britain as Australia’s largest export market in 1967, it symbolized a new economic order in which ‘Asia’ had become a major economic opportunity, rather than a poorly understood, distrusted threat. Even though the US has recently become Australia’s largest single economic partner, it is important to recognize that Australia’s most important export markets are located in Northeast Asia, and that the seemingly unstoppable rise of China promises to underpin Australia’s economic well-being in the 2000s in much the same way that Japan did for much of the post-war period (Walters 2004). In such circumstances, the way in which Australia’s potentially quite different strategic and economic imperatives are managed will be a crucial foreign-policy challenge, and one that requires as much flexibility and room for manoeuvre as a peripheral, medium-size economy can muster. The alliance with the US has always placed a constraint on Australian foreign policy; in the aftermath of September 11 and the Howard government’s enthusiastic, openended support of American foreign policy, it may lock Australia into policies that are not necessarily in the long-term ‘national interest’, however that overworked, imprecise concept is defined.

The strategic calculus The strategic alliance with the US has been the central pillar of Australia’s security posture for more than half a century. Given Australia’s history and the US’s dominance of the post-World War II order this was entirely predictable. The principal formal expression of this relationship was the ANZUS Treaty of 1951. Despite the fact that generations of Australian politicians have routinely stressed its importance to Australia, as has been widely noted, the Treaty in fact commits the partners to do nothing more than ‘consult’ in the event of one side being attacked. Revealingly, the rather vague provisions of the Treaty were never actually activated until John Howard invoked it in the aftermath of September 11. In doing so he

216 Mark Beeson ‘assumed the greatest foreign policy risk of any Australian government in living memory’, according to one leading observer of the alliance (Tow 2004). At first blush, there is something slightly preposterous about Australia coming to the aid of the world’s most powerful nation, but it was an action that highlighted a number of underlying strategic realities and assumptions about the bilateral relationship and its purported benefits. First, Australian politicians have always been willing – even enthusiastic – supporters of the alliance and taken pains to demonstrate their sincerity and loyalty. The premium for this insurance policy has generally been costly, however. In Korea, Vietnam and both conflicts with Iraq, Australia has assumed a prominent position amongst America’s allies. While the merits of all of these conflicts are debatable, the significant point to emphasize is that Australia participated despite the absence of a direct threat to Australia itself. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the current head of Australia’s armed forces, General Peter Cosgrove, now considers Australia’s contribution to the conflict in Vietnam not to have been ‘sensible’ (cited in Beeson 2003a, 394). What merits emphasis more generally, however, is that Australia’s essentially uncritical support for American foreign policy has repeatedly necessitated its participation in conflicts that pose little direct threat to ‘Australian interests’. On the contrary, not only have close relations with the US occasionally complicated the pursuit of exclusively Australian interests, but Australia’s prominent position in both the Cold War and more recent conflicts has arguably made Australia less secure than it otherwise might have been.2 The second initial point to make, therefore, is that Australia’s and America’s ‘national interests’ are not necessarily or inevitably congruent. In the Manichean atmosphere of the Cold War when the bipolar strategic order discouraged a more nuanced calculation or understanding of national interests and differences, this was predictable enough, perhaps. What is more remarkable is that in the post-Cold War environment many of the old assumptions about the nature of the purported security threats Australia faces – and the concomitant necessity for great and powerful friends – have undergone little change. As a series of policy documents for and by the government have made clear,3 though, there are no direct, conventional threats to Australia on the foreseeable horizon. And yet, not only have Australian policy-makers continued to align themselves uncritically to American foreign policy despite any obvious benefits for Australia’s overall security position but, as we shall see, the alliance may have actually made Australia less secure – and at considerable cost. The contemporary debate The current debate about the value of the military alliance with the US has primarily revolved around Australia’s participation in the war in Iraq. Not only is the strategic value of Australian participation questionable,

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 217 but it has highlighted a number of domestic failings, questionable assumptions and the increasingly politicized nature of the bilateral relationship itself. One of the reasons that the Iraq conflict has proved so contentious, both in Australia and elsewhere, is because the underlying rationale used to justify it has been shown to have been inaccurate at best, deliberatively deceitful at worst. There is no intention of subjecting the US’s motivations for invading Iraq to detailed scrutiny, as exhaustive analyses of this topic have now been developed elsewhere (see, for example, Clarke 2004; Woodward 2004). The point to emphasize here is that the Australian government’s rapid, unequivocal and open-ended commitment to the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11 not only locked it into support of American policy before it even knew what it might be, but it revealed major shortcomings in the capacity and independence of Australia’s intelligence agencies. This is an especially important consideration given that one of the major justifications for a close strategic alliance with the US has been the purported intelligence benefits that flow from such a relationship, and the advantages this offers in terms of cost savings and security (Ball 2001). Neither of these arguments looked terribly robust as the ‘war on terror’ gathered pace. At the very least it was clear that the intelligence capacities of both the US and Australia were inadequate: not only were they unable to provide appropriate intelligence about the long-term rise or short-term tactics of Islamic militants, but they provided faulty and tendentious intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes that were the justification for the invasion of Iraq. More troubling from an Australian perspective was the fact that the government’s uncritical, politically driven attitude to security issues generally and to the alliance in particular has led to a significant politicization of the intelligence-gathering agencies in Australia. It is important to stress that criticisms of both government policy and of the politicization and quality of intelligence were not confined to some sort of mindlessly anti-American radical fringe – as it was frequently depicted (Sheridan 2004). On the contrary, a number of conservative figures from the security and foreign-policy establishment drew attention to both the dangers of aligning foreign policy too closely with the US (Harries 2004), and of creating a highly politicized intelligence service that was incapable of providing impartial advice (Dibb 2004). The central points these critics made was that not just that Australia’s reflexive, unequivocal support for American policy meant that it gave up potential leverage or influence as a consequence, but that political rather than strategic imperatives were determining the nature of advice from Australia’s intelligence agencies. Even Philip Flood’s limited investigation into Australia’s security services made it clear that, as Paul Kelly (2004a) put it, ‘our public service was intimidated by its belief that Howard was going to war and that this shaped the tone, scope and content of its policy advice’.

218 Mark Beeson It was not just the intelligence services that were being politicized as a consequence of the war in Iraq, however: the alliance assumed a prominence and contentiousness in Australia’s domestic politics that it had not had since the Vietnam era. At its heart, this debate revolved around the costs and benefits that flowed from the alliance, and the question of whether it actually contributed to Australia’s overall security. Again, it is important to emphasize that many of the critics, like the so-called ‘group of 43’, which issued a statement criticizing the Howard government’s approach to both the alliance and the conduct of domestic security policy, were former pillars of Australia’s defence and foreign-policy establishment (see Karvelas 2004). The politicization of the alliance Breaking ranks in this way is a significant departure from the normally uniform support for the alliance. Even the ALP’s recent criticism of the US has been the historical exception rather than the rule. Despite newly appointed ALP leader Mark Latham’s record as a strident critic of the American alliance generally and the competence of George W. Bush in particular (Beeson 2003b), it is striking that this position is at odds with the overwhelming bipartisan support that has usually characterized attitudes toward the alliance. What is of greatest significance here is that the alliance was no longer portrayed as the uncontroversial bedrock of Australia’s overall security posture, but as an increasingly politicized potential liability that was influencing Australia’s domestic politics and raising questions about its contribution to national security. The focus for many of these tensions and differences centred on Latham’s pledge to withdraw Australia’s troops from Iraq. Given that Australia had less that 1,000 personnel in Iraq, their withdrawal would have had no material bearing on the outcome of the conflict. Indeed, it is important to recognize that Australian troops have never been decisively militarily; their primary significance has always been symbolic and designed to internationalize and legitimate American foreign policy. In such circumstances, and in the aftermath of Spain’s withdrawal from the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, Australia’s departure would be highly damaging for the US. It was against this background that the alliance relationship became even more partisan and led to the direct intervention of senior members of the Bush administration in Australia’s domestic politics.4 Following President Bush’s depiction of Latham’s commitment to pull out of Iraq as ‘disastrous’ and his fulsome endorsement of John Howard’s leadership, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage followed up with a detailed critique of the ALP’s position, arguing that it threatened to undermine the entire conflict in Iraq (Kelly 2004b). All of this came on top of the highly partisan interventions of the US ambassador to Australia, Tom Scheiffer, who had publicly called for the ALP to reconsider its policies at the start

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 219 of a domestic election campaign. Somewhat surprisingly, given the Australian electorate’s normal lack of interest in foreign affairs and the high levels of support usually evinced for the alliance, a majority thought Bush was wrong to directly intervene in Australian politics. Equally significantly, Australians were almost equally divided between those who thought the relationship with the US was ‘too close’, and those who thought it was ‘about right’ (Metherell and Allard 2004). What this suggests is that the war in Iraq in particular, and the high-profile, unilateralist policies of the Bush administration more generally, have had the same sort of impact in Australia as they have in other former stalwart allies and admirers of America across the world, namely a diminution in support for, and the legitimacy of, American foreign policy (PRC 2004). The increasingly politicized nature of Australia–US relations tended to obscure other, arguably more fundamental, questions about the strategic costs and benefits of the alliance. As noted earlier, no serious analyst of Australia’s strategic position, including the government itself, thought there was any credible conventional danger to Australia from other states. And yet Australia’s defence spending continued to rise significantly as a direct consequence of its close alliance with the US and its commitment to fill a ‘niche role’ in any US-led military coalition (Brown 2004). The purchase of Abrams tanks, air-warfare destroyers designed to operate with US carrier groups and an associated commitment to join the US in the development of an unproven, highly expensive ‘missile shield’ were major initiatives that were undertaken with remarkably little public debate. Not only were the technical merits of and rationale for these acquisitions debatable, but they had the potential to complicate relations with Australia’s more immediate neighbours. Indonesia expressed concern about the implications of Australia’s participation in the missile defence scheme and its stated intention to acquire cruise missiles – an issue of particular sensitivity given the Howard government’s emulation of a US-style doctrine of pre-emption in Southeast Asia (Fickling 2002). The question of whether Australia’s close alliance with the US had damaged relations with the East Asian region more generally was unclear. While the Howard government eventually repudiated any characterization of itself as America’s ‘deputy sheriff’ in the region, some of Australia’s traditional opponents in the region had been able to make diplomatic life difficult for Australia by highlighting its ambivalent position in the region (see Beeson 2001a). But the departure of Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed from the regional political stage clearly removed a major obstacle to closer regional ties as far as Australia was concerned, a possibility that was manifest in improved relations with both Malaysia and the ASEAN countries (Milner 2004). Similarly, the Howard government trumpeted improved ties with China and the signing of a long-term agreement to supply natural gas to China as evidence of the effectiveness of its ‘pragmatic’ approach to the region (Murphy and McBeth 2002). And yet the dramatic expansion of

220 Mark Beeson the Chinese economy highlighted an inescapable economic reality: East Asia remained an area of critical importance as far as Australia’s future economic development was concerned. The only question was how the economic relationships with the region would be managed. It is clear that balancing potentially competing ties with the rising regional power of China and the extant global power of the US would be the defining foreign-policy challenge of the twenty-first century for Australia. It would also be difficult to finesse – as Alexander Downer’s illjudged remarks about Australia’s supposedly neutral policy stance in the event of a clash between the US and China over Taiwan served to demonstrate (Armitage 2004). While Downer may have inadvertently given some insight into government thinking about Australia’s ‘nightmare scenario’, everything the Howard government had done since taking office in 1996 suggested that, in extremis, Australia would fall into line with the US. Indeed, what distinguished the Howard government from their more Asia-centric predecessors in the Hawke–Keating ALP governments was their determination from the outset to ‘revitalize’ the relationship with the US, and rebalance relations with the region as a consequence. While the Howard government may have benefited from the rise of China and the demise of Mahathir, the privileging of relations with the US – both strategically and economically – inevitably meant that this critical bilateral relationship would be expected to deliver tangible strategic and material benefits. As we have seen, the strategic benefits are questionable; the economic benefits are even less compelling.

The economic calculus If Australia’s participation in the war in Iraq threw the costs and benefits of the strategic aspects of close bilateral ties with the US into sharp relief, the negotiation of a bilateral ‘free trade’ agreement did the same for the economic dimension of the relationship. To understand why the bilateral deal is so controversial and its merits so contested, it is useful to place it in the context of Australia’s recent diplomatic and economic history. The first point to make is that, as noted above, Australia’s major trading partners are located in East Asia. True, the US has recently become Australia’s single biggest trade partner, but it is important to note that, first, Australia is one of a handful of countries that actually runs a trade deficit with the US, and, second, that this does not offset the overwhelming importance of the East Asian region when taken as a whole. Six of Australia’s top ten export destinations are in the region – seven if we include India. In other words, the initial rationale for making the US the target of a bilateral trade deal is questionable given the nature of Australia’s economic ties – even if we put aside the specifics of the deal for a moment. The point to emphasize at the outset is that the possibly unfavourable terms of the bilateral deal are arguably less important than

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 221 the longer-term damage the agreement has done to Australia’s position as a champion of a multilateral economic order that is arguably more in Australia’s long-term national interests. In this regard it is striking just what a departure the Howard government has made from its predecessors. Whereas the Hawke–Keating governments had championed a multilateral international economic order predicated on non-discriminatory trade liberalization as part of a thoroughgoing process that also incorporated major domestic reform (Beeson and Firth 1998), from the outset the Howard government has emphasized the importance of bilateral agreements. While it is possible to question how realistic the expectations that accompanied high-profile trade initiatives like the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum that Australia assiduously promoted actually were (Ravenhill 2001), what is significant is that the Howard government has moved away from the sort of multilateral, non-discriminatory approach APEC embodies. Two additional points are worth emphasizing in this context: first, the Howard government’s lack of enthusiasm about APEC-style strategies is in accord with America’s. Indeed, the US’s ambivalence about APEC in particular has seriously undermined that organization’s effectiveness and credibility. The second point to make is that the US can use its immense economic leverage to achieve favourable deals with smaller partners but, as we shall see, Australia has no such capacity. Ann Capling (2001) has persuasively demonstrated that Australia has only ever achieved favourable trade deals and outcomes when it has operated through multilateral auspices to construct regulatory frameworks that actually discourage powerful countries from acting unilaterally or in ways that disadvantage smaller players. Moreover, Australia’s effective leadership of innovative lobby groups like the ‘Cairns Group’ of agricultural trading nations has been compromised and diminished by its switch to bilateralism. While it may be possible to argue that this is a ‘pragmatic’ coming to terms with the evolution of the international trading order, it may in fact be helping to entrench an order from which Australia is less likely to benefit in the long run – as the agreement with the US demonstrates. It is also important to recognize that for a small country like Australia with limited diplomatic resources the capacity to negotiate endless bilateral agreements is limited (see Ravenhill 2003). Of even greater concern is the possibility that, even when Australia’s trade negotiators are exhaustively deployed, their advice may be compromised by political imperatives and the necessity of delivering an economic benefit to match Australia’s strategic commitment. Before considering the broader implications of this possibility and the overall impact of close ties with the US, it is useful to consider the free-trade deal in more detail.

222 Mark Beeson The ‘free trade’ deal While the Howard government’s preference for bilateralism pre-dates the inauguration of George W. Bush’s administration, the latter’s ascendancy provided the opportunity for a recalibration of Australian foreign policy. Bush’s chief trade advisor, Robert Zoellick, was an advocate of a sort of bilaterally focused ‘hub and spokes’ strategy that had historically characterized American security policy in Asia (Calder 2004). The motivation from an American perspective was clear enough, as John Ikenberry (2004b, 628) points out: Rather than operate within multilateral frameworks, the United States forges a ‘hub and spoke’ array of ‘special relationships’ around the world. Countries that cooperate with the United States and accept its leadership receive special bilateral security and economic favours. More so than multilateral arrangements, ‘hub and spoke’ bilateral agreements allow the United States to more fully translate its power advantages into immediate and tangible concessions from other states – and do so without giving up policy autonomy. Significantly, Zoellick wanted to use the US’s superior leverage to marry strategic and economic goals (Capling 2004). It was within this environment that the Howard government decided to try and obtain a free-trade deal with a more ideologically sympathetic US administration. The potential confluence of strategic and economic objectives was reinforced by the events of September 11. From the outset there was great scepticism about Australia’s ability to obtain a genuine free-trade deal given the existence of powerful lobby groups in the US, and the American government’s record of subsidizing and protecting key economic sectors. The passage of the 2002 Farm Bill, which included US$180 billion in agricultural subsidies for domestic agriculture, suggested this pattern was unlikely to change (Eccleston 2002). This was an issue of particular sensitivity given the Howard government’s traditional support base in rural Australia. In reality, the US’s chief trade negotiator openly boasted of his ability to protect American beef, dairy and sugar producers (Eccleston 2004). The eventual agreement confirmed this claim, completely excluding sugar, and providing a number of protections and safeguards for other agricultural sectors. Yet the nature of Australia’s trading relationship with the US meant that any hopes of turning around Australia’s entrenched trade deficit – over A$10 billion in 2003–4 (CoA 2003) – rested on opening up those sectors of the American economy, like agriculture and the fast ferry industry, where Australia enjoyed a significant competitive advantage. Given the US’s history of flouting the rule-based multilateral order when it has judged it in its national interest to do so (Bhagwati 1990;

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 223 Tussie and Woods 2000), it was entirely predictable that the eventual agreement would reflect the enduring political and economic realities that distinguish the relationship and Australia’s marginal place in America’s economic scheme of things.5 What is more surprising, perhaps, is that given that the proposed deal had been explicitly linked to Australia’s support of the ‘war on terror’ in particular, and the US’s increasingly unilateral foreign policy more generally (Hartcher 2002), Australia’s trade negotiators were unable to extract any advantage or leverage as a consequence (Wallace 2004). On the contrary, and entirely predictably given the asymmetrical nature of bargaining processes between large and small players, the eventual agreement overwhelmingly locked in the preferences of the American side. In return for partial and interminably drawn-out access to the American market, Australia’s negotiators offered immediate access to Australia’s manufacturing and service sectors (in which the US is especially strong), agreed to compromise Australia’s quarantine requirements, and committed Australia to ‘harmonizing’ its regulatory environment – something that threatened to affect Australia’s distinctive Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) (Weiss et al. 2004). Revealingly, the only point of contention generated by the Australian side emerged in the midst of an Australian election in which new ALP leader Mark Latham sought to differentiate himself from the coalition. Although a series of reports from supporters and opponents of the Agreement had made claim and counter-claim about the purported merits of the deal,6 most concern had revolved around its impact on the PBS and the capacity of American pharmaceutical companies to push up drug prices in a less regulated environment (Uren 2004). Despite the ALP’s limited obduracy, what is most significant is that for both parties walking away from what most independent observers took to be a bad deal was not an option. Despite the fact that the government’s own analysis of an agrement that excluded sugar suggested it might actually be economically negative for Australia, and despite the apparent reluctance of Australia’s negotiators to endorse the deal, Howard was politically committed to a deal that provided legitimation for the entire bilateral relationship more generally (Costello 2004). As Ann Capling (2004) puts it: there was one reason above all why Howard was never going to allow Australia’s negotiators to return home empty-handed. Australia’s pursuit of the trade-agreement was driven by Howard’s desire to strengthen Australia’s political and strategic links with the United States, an objective that had assumed even greater importance with the ‘war on terror’ . . . As a result, Australia has been lumbered with a trade agreement that is clearly a dud. Howard’s conviction that Australian foreign policy was ‘unbalanced’ and too ‘preoccupied’ with its immediate region led to him to pursue a closer

224 Mark Beeson relationship with the US. The US was Australia’s single most important relationship not simply because of its ‘strategic, economic and diplomatic power’, but ‘of equal, if not more significance [because of] the values and aspirations we share’ (Howard 2001). For a government that took pride in its hard-nosed calculation and pursuit of ‘the national interest’, the willingness to subordinate Australia’s economic welfare, to say nothing of heightening the immediate security threat to Australia, was a remarkable indication of just how high a price Howard was prepared to pay to secure such supposedly common values and aspirations. The question of whether it is a price worth paying is taken up in the concluding section.

Concluding remarks: hegemonic, national and other interests The key assumption underpinning the Howard government’s approach to foreign policy generally and the bilateral relationship with the US in particular is that Australian and American interests are essentially congruent. The key assumption is that, while there may be short-term costs associated with demonstrating a continuing commitment to that relationship as far as Australia is concerned, the long-term pay-offs justify such sacrifices. Strikingly, this is a position that has generally enjoyed fairly uncritical, bilateral support in Australia, and despite Mark Latham’s recent, much publicized criticisms of both American foreign policy and George W. Bush, this has not changed – as the ALP has been at pains to emphasize (Rudd 2003). And yet, as we have seen, in both key areas of the bilateral relationship – security and economic relations – the merits of the deal for ‘Australia’ are debatable at best. At one level, this is a consequence of deciding precisely what the ‘national interest’ actually is in an era of cross-border economic integration, and potentially competing domestically and externally oriented economic interests. The potential conflicts such enduring, structurally entrenched economic realities generate were clearly revealed in both the effectiveness of powerful sectoral interests to lobby the Bush administration and the similar difficulty the Howard government faced in achieving a deal that satisfied all producer groups and industry lobbies in Australia. In the end, of course, given that a genuine free-trade deal was impossible, the government chose to compensate directly some of the squeakier wheels in the agricultural sector.7 Yet even if the Howard government was able to buy off disaffected domestic interests, the benefits of the deal remain highly contentious when seen in the context of Australia’s broader foreign and economic policies. At the very least, the fact that the US was unwilling to make even minor concessions to one of its closest allies and supporters should have alerted the Howard government to the dangers of negotiating bilaterally with a far more powerful partner, especially one that is especially responsive to its

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 225 own domestic pressure groups and sectoral interests. More fundamentally, though, Australia’s limited diplomatic capacities, and its historical reliance on a rules-based international trading regime that actually discouraged the powerful from exploiting the weak, ought to have given pause about the long-term implications of an increasingly bilateral international order. Not only had Australia effectively compromised its surprisingly effective, highprofile leadership role as a champion of multilateralism and trade liberalization, but some argued it also threatened to further alienate Australia from its immediate regional neighbours (Garnaut 2003). As noted earlier, Australia’s closer alignment with the US has proved far from fatal for regional relations, partly as a consequence of Mahathir’s disappearance, and partly because other regional leaders are pragmatically seeking closer ties with an American power that remains a decisive force in the region’s wider strategic calculations. And yet it is not clear that the Howard government’s good fortune will hold. In the event of the US taking a more aggressive attitude towards North Korea, the regional ‘war on terror’ or – even more consequentially – China, it is not clear how Australia should react, or how its ‘national interest’ would be served or defined. China has rapidly becoming the mainstay of Australia’s recent economic expansion, and any conflict between China and the US would present Australia with an invidious choice between the apparent guarantors of its economic and military security. Not only would such a situation highlight potentially quite different Australian and American interests, but it would (or ought to) raise the question of whether the alliance was actually a reliable and cost-effective basis for Australia’s domestic security. It is worth remembering that Australia has faced no direct threat (other than the remote prospect of a nuclear strike against the joint facilities during the Cold War) since the Second World War. And yet despite enjoying what is arguably the most strategically benign position in the world, generations of Australian leaders have felt compelled to fight alongside the US in conflicts that pose no immediate danger to Australia. This pattern continues with Australia’s participation in the war in Iraq. The only significant consequence of this conflict for Australia appears to have been a heightened consciousness of Australia as a potential target in the minds of international terrorists (Goodsir 2003). The contrast with New Zealand, which has not been threatened with terrorist attacks (or invasion) since being expelled from the American security umbrella, is striking. None of this is to suggest that threats to international stability do not need to be confronted, or that Australia has no part to play in such efforts. The question is how such threats are to addressed. It is not necessary to carry out a detailed analysis of the logic behind the invasion of Iraq or the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ to realize, that on the one hand, egregious mistakes and miscalculations have been made, and that, on the other, the Bush administration has been pursuing what it takes to be in its national

226 Mark Beeson interests, with little consideration of its impact on the wider international system. It remains to be seen whether the doctrine of pre-emption which the US has developed – and which Australia has supported and echoed in a regional context – will continue to be pursued in the Bush administration’s second term, or whether the high-water mark of unilateralism has already been passed (Ikenberry 2004a). Either way, and despite Australia’s inability to ever materially influence the outcome of the conflicts it participates in on such a regular basis, its uncritical, open-ended support has clearly played a small but important role in legitimating American actions and its concomitant repudiation of multilateralism. Given that both the legitimacy and efficacy of America’s recent foreign policy have become deeply intertwined parts of an increasingly contentious whole (Tucker and Hendrickson 2004), Australia’s uncritical support in encouraging what have proved to be ill-judged adventures on dubious bases is all the more noteworthy. It is possible to argue that a less uncritical position on Australia’s part may have given the US a moment’s pause for thought, although it is difficult to imagine that the US would have acted otherwise given the long-held desire of the Bush administration to effect regime change in Iraq (Mann 2004). Notwithstanding Australia’s limited capacity to influence the actions of the world’s only superpower, the crucial question for countries like Australia is what sort of international order best suits their long-term national interests, however they are perceived. Australia, like the majority of the countries of East Asia, has prospered under the multilateral order that the US was instrumental in creating in the aftermath of the Second World War. The contemporary order is very different and promises to exert very different regional and bilateral effects (Beeson 2005b). To judge from Australia’s recent experience, the benefits of the new order are contentious at best. To calculate the ‘national interest’ on the basis of politicized intelligence, questionable economic and strategic assumptions, and the pursuit of values that are not necessarily widely shared internationally or even with Australia itself is to risk replicating an historical pattern that has limited Australian autonomy and locked it into commitments that are subsequently seen as unwise. It is also to risk politicizing a bilateral relationship that clearly remains Australia’s most important, but one that is in need of less reflexive, more dispassionate management.

Notes 1 Interestingly, this is despite the best efforts of former foreign minister Gareth Evans who, at the height of the ALP’s pursuit of ‘engagement’ with Asia, argued that Australia should be considered part of an East Asian hemisphere. See Far Eastern Economic Review, August 17, 1995: 26. 2 The ‘joint facilities’ at Pine Gap and elsewhere in Australia were a key part of the US’s strategic posture and clearly made Australia a nuclear target during the Cold War. See Ball 1980.

Reassessing the Australia–US relationship 227 3 There have been numerous reviews and inquiries into Australia’s defence polices. One of the common features has been that Australia does not face any serious, credible conventional threat of invasion or direct attack in the foreseeable future. See, for example, CoA (2000). 4 Significantly, Howard returned the favour for Bush, endorsing his presidency during the US elections and potentially compromising Australia’s relationship with any Kerry administration. See Allard (2004). 5 Australia is the US’s 14th biggest export market, representing 1.8 per cent of overall exports, and its 30th biggest source of imports, at only 0.5 per cent of total imports. See CoA (2003). 6 The tendentious nature of the reports was highlighted by the fact that the Howard government’s preferred economic modeller – the Centre for International Economics – made unrealistic assumptions about the possibility of achieving completely free trade in agriculture and an unchanged regulatory environment in Australia to support its claims about the alleged benefits of the deal. Neither of these claims is plausible and according to a Senate inquiry report the benefit looks to be in the order of A$53 million – ‘a tiny harvest from a major political and bureaucratic endeavour’, according to the report’s author (quoted in Capling 2004). 7 The Howard government offered $444 million (about $70,000 for each producer) to Australia’s sugar producers to compensate them for their exclusion from the deal. See Capling (2004).

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Index

Abernethy, David B. 5 Abu Bakar Ba’asyir 172 Abu Ghraib 174 Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) 153, 154, 155, 158, 160 Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) 112, 113, 124 Afghanistan, and war in history prior to September 11 30, 154; and Indonesia 172, 174; and Japan 113, 124; and Malaysia 183, 189; and the Philippines 155; and Thailand 141, 142; US military tied down 33, 39, 99, 105, 106; war on terror 30, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 86, 92, 105, 111, 113, 124, 141, 155, 171, 172, 174, 183, 189 Africa 5, 58, 75, 85, 163, 165, 186 Aguinaldo, Emilio 148 Al Maunah 189 Al-Jazeera 174 alliances: as key to US hegemony 6, 25, 31, 59, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90; politics of 36, 87, 90, 92, 115; US– Australia 213, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 225; US–Japan 37, 77, 109–16, 118, 119, 120, 122; US–the Philippines 150, 151; US-South Korea 36, 89; US–Thailand 132, 142, 143; See also hub and spoke system al-Qaddafi, Muammar 99 Al-Qaeda 141, 146, 154, 155, 172, 190 America, see United States of America American primacy, 24, 29, 30, 31, 35, 61, 82, 83, 85, 91, 115,132, 177, 181, 190; see also hegemony, US Americas, the 5, 64 anti-Americanism 16, 64, 71, 86, 134, 135, 162, 166, 169, 217 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) 98

anti-communism 165, 166, 167, 168, 183 anti-imperialism 177 anti-narcotics 181, 194 Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law 111, 113 Antolik, Michael 72 Anwar Ibrahim 183, 188, 189 ANZUS Treaty 215 Aquino, Corozon, and Government of 151, 152, 153 Arab League 192 Arab world 184 Armistice Agreement 202 Armitage, Richard L. 81, 82, 218 Arrighi, Giovanni 6 Arroyo, Gloria see Macapagal-Arroyo, Gloria Asia 27, 34, 39; decolonization, 6; developmental state model 20, 187; and rise of China 40, 55, 67, 78, 81, 82, 97, 102, 114; under European imperialism 5, 164; and US, economic relationship 3, 10, 23, 37, 40, 215; and US, security relationship 23, 26, 33, 74, 80–93, 97, 103, 133, 202, 222; war on terror 36, 64, 65, 80, 86, 87, 90, 112, 128, 162, 170, 214; see also East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Northeast Asia, Southwest Asia Asia–Africa Conference 165 Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) 139 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 59, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 91, 102, 133, 139, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188, 221 Asia-Pacific 6, 41, 65, 67, 73, 87, 91, 93, 97, 122, 123, 127, 170, 175, 179, 213, 221; see also East Asia

Index Asian Bond Market initiative 187 Asian Development Bank (ADB) 68, 69 Asian financial crisis 27, 38, 40, 66, 69, 76, 134, 183, 185, 186 ‘Asian miracle’ 215 Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) 66, 69, 187 ‘Asian Values’ 135, 168, 181, 186 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 69, 73, 131, 134, 167, 183, 185; ASEAN+1 103; ASEAN+3 (APT) 54, 64, 66, 68, 103, 138, 187; ASEAN–Australia– New Zealand relationship 68; ASEAN–China relationship 67, 68, 82, 105, 140; ASEAN Economic Community 68, 135, 137; ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) 133, 137, 138, 156; ASEAN reform 136; ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) 72, 76, 91, 102, 133; ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation 103; ASEAN–US relationship 69, 73, 74, 87, 91, 141, 193, 194; ASEAN way 67 Australia 213–27; and ASEAN 68, 137, 163, 173, 185, 219; and China 163; foreign policy 69, 78, 214–15, 222, 223; and Japan 112, 163; perception in Asia-Pacific region 87, 92; and US, economic relationship 60, 69, 213–27; and US, free trade agreement 222; and US, military relationship 26, 28, 74, 80, 86–87, 91, 92, 112, 213–27; and US, politics of relationship 218–220; war on terror 87, 112, 173, 174, 217; WWII 214–15 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 213, 214, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226 ‘axis of evil’ 29, 85, 90, 107, 108, 203, 204, 208 Bacevich, Andrew J. 18 Badawi, Abdullah, Government of 179, 183, 187, 189, 192, 193, 195; see also Malaysia Baker, James 69 Baker, Richard W. 175 balancing 16, 24, 26, 36, 57, 66, 68, 74, 76, 80, 83, 85, 87, 97, 101, 105, 109, 111, 114, 121, 123, 130, 131, 137, 165, 182, 185, 193, 209, 210, 213, 220 Baldwin, Richard E. 60

259

Bali 164, 173, 178 Balikatan 154, 155 bandwagoning 109, 131 Bangsamoro secessionist movement 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 160 Banharn Silapa-Archa, Government of 133 Barisan Nasional (BN) 182 Basic Policy for National Defence 120 Beeson, Mark 23n3, 43, 132, 168 ‘bending with the wind’ 128, 131 Bernard, M. 150 bilateralism 80, 82, 86, 109, 116, 139, 185, 223, 224, 225, 226; military benefits 114, 122, 141, 156, 190, 194, 216; preference for 8, 23, 25, 26, 31, 37, 60, 65, 71, 72–4, 102, 123, 130, 138, 176, 179, 217; trade relationship 37, 39, 46, 48, 54, 56, 59, 60, 68, 137, 157, 187, 213, 220–2; see also hub and spoke system, alliances bin Laden, Osama 172 bipolar world order 11, 15, 64, 216; see also Cold War Blair, Tony 99 Bolton, John 107, 191 Bosnia 30, 31, 75 Bretton Woods institutions 11, 45, 70 Britain 10, 32, 87, 111; former hegemony of 10, 44, 177n3, 214, 215; see also European Imperialism Brooks, Stephen G. 61 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 18 Burley, Anne Marie 70 Burma 133, 134 Bush Doctrine 64, 116 Bush, George H. W., and administration of 75 Bush, George W., and administration of 6, 42, 69, 91, 170, 180, 188, 224; approach to economic policy 56; approach to foreign policy 7, 15, 16, 29, 48, 65, 69, 70, 118, 135, 219, 224; goals 26, 65, 83, 85, 93, 98, 114, 123, 144, 226; and hegemony 16, 82, 100, 115; impact of 109, 113, 116, 124, 147, 162, 173, 180, 194, 218; influences on 10, 18, 23, 82, 90, 115, 176; strategic thinking 18, 22, 29, 31, 42, 43, 74, 81, 82, 83, 85, 92, 108, 112, 121, 122, 143, 173, 174, 181, 188, 190, 225 Buzan, Barry 17, 19, 21, 23

260 Index C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) 114 Cairns Group 221 Cambodia 63, 79, 131, 183 Camdessus, Michel 168 Camilleri, J. 132 Camp Zama 122, 126 Canada 60, 69, 185 Cao Siyuan 105 capitalism 5, 22, 58, 101, 134, 135, 137, 165, 185 capitalist system 6, 7, 22, 38, 97, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 165, 167, 204 Capling, Ann 221, 223 Carter, Jimmy, and administration of 18, 199 Central Asia 36, 75, 85, 86, 92, 103 Chatchai Choonhaven, Government of 132 Chavalit Yongjaiudh, Government of 133, 134, 142 Chemical Weapons Convention (CBC) 75 Cheney, Richard B. (Dick), 81, 85; see also Bush, George W. Chiang Kai-shek 92 Chiang Mai Initiative 187 China: and region, economic relationship 38, 55, 60, 66, 67, 69, 76, 77, 137, 138, 163, 177, 185, 187, 215, 219, 220; and region, security relationship (incl. China–Taiwan, North Korea) 27, 34, 64, 77, 87, 89, 103, 106, 107, 108, 110, 114, 115, 118, 131, 133, 140, 143, 159, 166, 167, 176, 177, 183, 184, 197, 202; rise of 9, 19, 22, 25, 28, 36, 40, 53, 54, 55, 61, 68, 80, 97–108, 144, 163, 215; traditional strategic position 19, 27, 68, 104; and US, economic relationship 9, 22, 25, 26, 38, 40, 55, 56, 62, 69, 106; and US, security relationship 10, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 64, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 93, 97–108, 118, 123, 142, 163, 166, 175, 177, 188, 197, 202, 220, 225; and war on terror 32, 35, 64, 65, 86, 92, 102, 107, 108, 142 Christian fundamentalism 99 Chuan Leekpai 133 Civic Action Program 167 Clinton, William J. (Bill), administration of, 54, 64, 164, 180,

181, 194; and China 26, 82, 83; foreign policy 31, 65, 75, 81, 84, 133, 169, 170, 184–6, 188, 203; and India 28, 34; and Japan 37, 48, 56, 69, 82; and North Korea 33, 83, 200, 203; and Pakistan 34; trade policy 37, 39, 42, 54, 56, 69, 168 Clinton–Hashimoto summit 37 coalition of the willing 31, 108, 145, 153, 218 Cobra Gold 131, 133, 141 Cold War 7, 17, 18, 21, 29, 36, 37; and Non-Aligned Movement 166; outcome of 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 39, 41, 48, 56, 66, 74, 77, 130, 149, 167, 206; US economic policy 19, 130; US foreign policy 11; US security architecture 18, 19, 25, 29, 109, 126, 130, 133, 163, 198, 201, 207, 216, 225; see also bipolar world order colonialism 5, 6, 73, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 159, 164, 166, 214; see also Europe, imperialism, decolonization Common Foreign and Security Policy (EU) 75 communism 36, 69, 97, 102, 104, 106, 130, 131, 133, 151, 152, 153, 164, 165, 166, 167, 183, 196, 203, 206 Communist Party of Indonesia 166, 167 Communist Party of Malaya 183 competitive interdependence 132 comprehensive security 135, 184 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 75 constructivism 4, 12, 14, 15, 16 Container Security Initiative 71 containment 14, 26, 69, 82, 86, 91, 109 Convention against Landmines 75 Cooperative Self-Reliant Defense Plan 89 core/periphery relations 5, 10, 13, 24, 28, 29, 33, 80, 87, 88, 102, 113, 129, 188 Cosgrove, Peter 216 Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI) 172 Counter Terrorism Intelligence Centre (CTIC) 141 counter-hegemonic discourse 16, 180, 194 counterproliferation 107 counter-terrorism 64, 72, 93, 145, 155, 192 Cox, Robert W. 12, 13, 128, 129, 130, 146

Index ‘creative reinterpretation’ 113 crony capitalism 187 Cumings, Bruce 200, 206 Curtin, John, Government of 214 Dayton Accords 75 decolonization 6 defence spending 39, 115, 219 Delay, Tom 100 Demilitarised Zone 196, 197, 202, 204; see also South Korea, North Korea Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) 117, 120, 121 democratisation 67, 146, 151, 159, 179, 185, 186 ‘deputy sheriff’ 87, 219 détente 200 deterrence 86, 89, 90, 110, 114, 124, 125, 200 ‘developmental state’ model 19, 20, 187 discourse 154, 166, 186, 209, 211 Downer, Alexander J.G. 220 Dujarric, Robert 206 Dulles, John Foster 166 Dwifungsi 167 Early Voluntary Sectoral Liberalisation, 73 East Asia: decolonization 147; regionalism 64–78, 103, 138, 139, 181, 185, 188; security climate 120, 135; traditional order 19, 34, 36, 105; under European imperialism 147; and US, economic relationship 3, 8, 12, 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 42–62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 78, 163, 185, 220; and US, security relationship 18, 22, 24–6, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 48, 65, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80–93, 109, 110, 113, 114, 122, 123, 175, 194, 219, 226; and war on terror 16, 28, 35, 65, 79, 80, 108, 192, 195; see also Asia, Asia-Pacific, Southeast Asia East Asia Economic Model 136 East Asia Study Group 66, 76, 79 East Asia Vision Group 66, 76 East Asian Currency Swap 66 East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) 64, 69, 185 East Asian Economic Group (EAEG) 69, 179, 185, 186, 187 East Timor 141, 167, 168, 169, 174, 176 Eberstadt, Nicolas 197 EDSA revolts 146, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 161

261

Eisenhower, Dwight D., and administration of 92, 163, 166, 202 ‘embedded autonomy’ 146 empire 3, 4, 18, 26, 43, 100, 163; see also hegemony, colonialism Enterprise for ASEAN Initiative (EAI) 73, 138 Eric Teo Chu Cheow 104 Estrada, Joseph, Government of 153, 154, 158, 159, 161 Europe: and Asia, economic relationship 162, 163, 185; and Asia, security relationship 75, 130, 156; imperialism of 5, 6, 130, 147, 214; and US, economic relationship 38, 40, 45, 70, 185; and US, security relationship 8, 16, 18, 22, 24, 32, 33, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 82, 89, 90, 107, 121, 123, 130, 164; and war on terror 33 European Union (EU) 60, 75, 76, 78, 79 Evans, Gareth 69, 78, 226 ‘evil empire’ 29, 198 exports: as driver of growth 19, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 61, 66, 132, 136, 138, 148, 152, 184, 193, 215; restrictions on 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 149, 191 Far East clause 122 Fargo, Thomas B. 89, 174, 191 Farm Bill 222 Feindbild 206 Flood, Philip 217 Fogel, Robert W. 71 Foreign Appropriations Act 170 foreign direct investment (FDI) 55, 136, 149, 184, 193 foreign-exchange reserves 51, 57 ‘forward military presence’ 26 Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Between ASEAN and China 140 France 35, 57, 64, 102, 105, 112, 125, 163, 164, 197 free trade agreements 39, 60, 63, 137, 138 Freeport McMoran 164, 173 Funabashi Yoichi 105 Funston, John 133 Future of the ROK–US Alliance Policy Initiative 89 G7 14, 47, 58

262 Index Gelbard, Robert S. 169 Germany 35, 85 Gill, Stephen 14 Gilpin, Robert 9, 43, 44 Glassman, J. 130, 132, 136 Global Force Posture Review 74 global governance 13, 21 ‘global village’ 132 globalization 13, 18, 20, 21, 39, 80, 111, 135, 136, 139, 146, 150 good governance 187 Gore, Albert A. Jr. 188 governance 5, 11, 67, 129, 133, 134, 139, 164, 176, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187 Gramsci, Antonio 12, 128 Gramscian theories 12, 14, 21, 128, 129, 147 grand strategy 14, 18, 82, 92, 180, 181, 184, 188, 190, 195 Great Society programme 45 Green, Michael 83 Gregg, Donald 202, 204, 211 Griswold, Lawrence 162 Habibie, B.J., Government of 169 Hambali 141 Hamzah Haz 171, 172 Hardt, Michael 146 ‘hawk engagement’ 197, 198, 208 Hawke, Robert J.L. (Bob), Government of 69, 220, 221 hegemonic state 13, 43 hegemony: British 10, 44, 177n3, 214, 215; Bush administration 31, 54, 80, 81, 82, 85, 99, 115, 130, 144, 159; cyclical nature of 10, 16, 36, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 97; institutionalized conceptions of 12, 14, 15, 21; 132, 144, 146; military power 17, 132, 202; political economy 11, 19–21, 37–40, 56, 57, 132; resistance to 16, 180, 186, 194; response to 109, 128, 129, 130, 145, 213; and September 11, 24, 28, 32, 145; socio-cultural 21–22, 43, 58, 134, 150, 152; theories of 7–16, 24–6, 45, 46, 54, 116, 129, 143; US 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 41, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 80, 81, 90, 109, 110, 115, 121, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 160, 180, 181, 194, 202, 224; versus empire 4, 6, 43, 147 Hemmer, Christopher 72, 78 Hendrickson, David C. 98, 108 Hiroshima 202

Holbrooke, Richard C. 75 Hollingsworth, Games F. 196 Howard, John W., Government of 87, 178, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227 Hu Jintao, administration of 105 hub and spoke system 25, 26, 36, 71, 72, 74, 80, 90, 102, 122, 130, 193, 222; see also alliances Huhtala, Marie T. 190 human rights 69, 70, 105, 132, 134, 135, 144, 168, 170, 174, 176, 179, 180, 185, 186, 188, 206 human security 135 Huntington, Samuel 9 ideas, role of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 38, 43, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 105, 129, 165, 182 ideology 12, 21, 98, 99, 190 Ikenberry, G. John 11, 12, 13, 21, 63, 72, 78, 222 ‘ilustrado’ 148, 159 IMF Extended Fund Facility 62 immigration 174, 178, 190 imperialism 4, 5, 6, 13, 44, 130, 165 India: and East Asia 68, 82, 103, 220; nuclear weapons 206; and Pakistan 27, 34, 86, 103; rise of 28, 82; and US 26, 27, 28, 34, 74, 88, 91, 206 Indonesia: decolonization 164, 165, 166; democratization 167, 168, 169; human rights 168; and region, economic relationship 53, 62, 66, 163, 168, 186; and region, security relationship 144, 164, 166, 167, 177, 191, 219; role of Islam 162, 164; tsunami 175–176; and US, economic relationship 38, 49, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 175; and US, security relationship 26, 87, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 191; and war on terror 87, 162, 164, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 intelligence 65, 88, 114, 118, 120, 125, 133, 141, 175, 191, 194, 199, 201, 203, 210, 217, 218, 226 interdependence 10, 25, 38, 39, 42, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 68, 77 Internal Security Act 181, 186, 189 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 197, 199 International Criminal Court (ICC) 23, 75

Index international financial institutions (IFIs) 12, 21, 129, 139 International Labour Organization (ILO) 134 International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) 140, 141, 168, 173, 194 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 4, 8, 11, 38, 42, 58, 59, 62, 66, 69, 76, 129, 134, 135, 136, 166, 167, 168, 179, 181, 185, 187 international political economy 14, 19 International Security Act (ISA) 181, 186, 189 interventionist policies 182, 184, 185, 186 Iran, 29, 35, 85, 90, 107, 161, 206; see also ‘axis of evil’ Iraq: ‘axis of evil’ 29, 85, 107, 197, 206; diplomatic resistance to Iraq war 35, 102, 128, 173, 181, 183, 190, 192, 195; Iraq war 3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 22, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 86, 90, 92, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 115, 128, 142, 143, 144, 173, 174, 176, 190, 192, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226; non-US contributions to Iraq war 87, 111, 113, 114, 118, 123, 124, 128, 141, 142, 145, 153, 157, 158, 160, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225 Iraqi Governing Council (GC) 181, 192 Islam 134, 141, 145, 148, 153, 162, 164, 166, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194 Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) 171 Islamic diplomacy 184 Islamism 86, 87, 90, 153, 154, 171, 172, 173, 181, 189, 192, 217 Islamist United Development Party (PPP) 171 Israel 30, 87, 99, 107, 166, 169, 179, 190, 206 Israel-Palestine conflict 99, 169, 179, 183, 190 Japan: developmental state 19, 20, 187; legacy of WWII 27, 28, 110, 117, 149, 163, 215; military normalisation 37, 92, 111, 117, 120, 123, 124, 196; ‘peace constitution’ 107, 109, 117, 122; and region, economic relationship 49, 53, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 76, 77, 103, 157, 163, 185, 187; and region, security relationship 27, 103, 106, 110,

263

112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 123, 132, 137, 196, 204; rise of Japan 9, 109; and US, economic relationship 27, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 55, 56, 77, 109, 110, 132; and US, security relationship 8, 26, 27, 28, 32, 37, 65, 74, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 109–24, 141, 163, 167 Japan Forum on International Relations 116 jargon 90, 135, 198, 209, 211 Jemaah Islamiah 87, 141, 154, 172, 178, 189, 192 Jiang Zemin, administration of 77, 102, 105 Johnson, Chalmers 18 Johnson, Lyndon B., and administration of 45, 65, 68 joint facilities 225, 226 Joint Statement of the US–Japan Security Consultative Committee 123 Jordan 162 Kahin, George 165 Kaldor, Nicolas 44 Kang, David 19 Kashmir 27 Katzenstein, Peter J. 16, 72, 78 Kazakhstan 103 Kelly, James A. 82, 191, 192, 208 Kelly, Paul 217 Kennedy, John F., administration of 166 Kennedy, Paul 106 Khan, A.Q. 191, 192 Khian Theravit 143 Khmer Rouge 133 Kim Dae-jung, Government of 59, 197, 200 Kim Jong-il 83, 200, 204 Kim Myong Chol 204, 205 Kindleberger, Charles 8, 43, 63 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne J. 71 Kissinger, Henry A. 98 Koizumi, Junichiro, Government of 77, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124, 125 Kômei Party 117, 126 Kopassus 172, 173 Korea, see South Korea, North Korea Korean war 18, 88, 141, 197, 202, 212, 216 Kosovo 30, 31, 75 Kristof, Nicholas D. 204, 205 Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) 189

264 Index Kyoto Protocol 75, 170 Kyrgyzstan 86, 103 language 3, 78, 85, 132, 198, 205, 209, 210, 211 Laskar Jihad 173 Latham, Mark 11, 218, 223, 224 Leahy, Patrick 170 legitimacy: and hegemonic order 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, 57, 81, 101, 112, 121, 124, 192, 203, 219, 226; sources of domestic legitimacy 20, 117, 156, 181, 182, 183, 186, 214, 218, 226 Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP), 117, 119, 121, 126 liberalism: institutionalism 11, 12, 15, 23; liberal democracy 184, 186; liberal internationalism 180, 184; liberal world order 17, 18, 19, 43, 44, 100, 135, 180, 184; political and economic liberalization 20, 25, 38, 39, 43, 46, 47, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73, 76, 105, 129, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 151, 156, 157, 179, 182, 185, 186, 187, 221, 225; as theory 4, 8, 9, 10–12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 23, 70, 71, 140, 198 Liberal Party–National Party coalition 213 Libya 99, 191, 206 Limaye, Satu P. 191 Lincoln, Edward J. 54, 63, 76 Little, Richard 17, 19, 21, 23 Lumut naval dockyard 194 Macapagal-Arroyo, Gloria, Government of 145, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 MacArthur, Douglas 202 Machimura Nobutaka 123 Madiun 165 Maehara Seiji 120 Mahathir bin Mohamad, and Government of 69, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 219, 220, 225; and East Asian Economic Group/Caucus 69, 179, 185, 187; ‘Asian Values’ 186; personal style 179, 180, 188, 219 Malacca Straits 112, 163, 174, 175, 177, 181, 191 Malay community 182, 183, 184, 186 Malaysia 179–95; ‘Asian Values’ 168, 186; borders of 144, 153, 167, 191; colonial era 163; and East Asian

Economic Group/Caucus 69, 185; economy of 53, 182, 183; financial crisis 38, 53, 134, 186–8; and Islam 158, 164, 183–4, 192; Non-Aligned Movement 184; politics of 179, 180, 181–4, 186, 191; and region, relationship with 158, 167, 175, 185–6, 219; and US, economic relationship 38, 60, 69, 179–95, 184–5, 187, 193; and US, security relationship 26, 170–1, 175, 179–95, 188–91, 194; and war on terror 170–1, 172, 175, 188–95 Manila Pact 130 Mao Zedong 97 Maoism 145 Marcos, Ferdinand, Government of 147, 150, 151, 153, 159, 160, 161 maritime terrorism 181, 191 market democracies 185 Market-Oriented Selector Selective talks (MOSS) 47, 48 Marshall, Andrew 82 Marx, Karl 12 Marxism 4, 12, 13, 165 Masjumi 166 massive retaliation 202 Mead, Walter Russell 71 Megawati Sukarnoputri, Government of 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 (Greater) Mekong Region 138 Mexico 58, 60, 69 Middle East: and East Asian, security relationship 89, 107, 128, 163; and Islam 162, 181, 192, 193; oil 5; and US, security relationship 5, 24, 30, 33, 85, 87, 89, 107, 122, 128, 174, 181, 192, 193 ‘middle power’ 213 Mill, John Stuart 44 Mindanao 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 113, 117, 119, 122, 126, 127 missile defense 97, 98, 101, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 124, 219 ‘missile shield’ 219 mission creep 111 Misuari, Nur 153 Mohammad Hatta 165 Moon Chung-in 202, 210 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) 146, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160

Index Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) 153, 161 Moyers, Bill 99 Moynihan, Daniel P. 71 Mudjahadeen 154 Muhammadiyah 174 multilateral economic order 221 multilateral institutions 70, 71, 73, 91, 103, 120, 121, 188 multilateralism 12, 14, 15, 23, 26, 30, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 90, 91, 93, 102, 103, 108, 120, 121, 133, 137, 138, 139, 151, 152, 156, 166, 169, 185, 188, 205, 208, 221, 222, 225, 226 Multimedia Super-Corridor (MSC) 193 Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) 156, 160 Nagasaki 202 Nahdlatul Ulama 174 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, Government of 115, 118, 126 Natalegawa, Marty 174 National Commission on Human Rights (Indonesia) 168 National Defence Programme Guideline 115, 123, 126 ‘national interest’ 9, 92, 109, 142, 174, 180, 181, 188, 194, 195, 214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226; see also realism, Bush, George W. national security 28, 29, 35, 38, 82, 84, 85, 86, 101, 155, 184, 191, 218 National Security Act of 1947, 29 National Security Strategy (US, USNsC 2002) 29, 32, 38, 84, 85, 86, 129, 203 Nationalistas, The 148 Nazi Germany 44 ‘nebuleuse’ 129, 135, 139 Negri, Antonio 146 neo-colonialism 150, 166 neoconservatives 4, 10, 15, 18, 23, 81, 85, 90, 92, 97, 101, 177, 181, 190; see also Bush, George W. neo-Gramscian theory 12, 14 neoliberalism 12, 13, 20, 21, 66, 70, 133, 150, 152, 167, 181, 187, 196 neomercantilist 37 neo-realism 8, Nesaduri, Helen 175 The Netherlands, and Netherlands East Indies 163, 166 New Deal 70, 71

265

New Zealand 68, 185, 225 Nixon, Richard M., and administration of 45, 46, 97, 163 Non-Aligned Movement 165, 173, 183, 184, 195 ‘non-NATO allies’ 86, 128, 142, 158 non-proliferation 88, 107, 191, 196, 199, 201, 204; see also Proliferation Security Initiative, Counterproliferation, Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty ‘normalisation’ 77, 103, 110, 117, 120, 204, 205 norms 10, 14, 16, 21, 67, 70, 73, 88, 134, 140, 143, 185, 186, 190 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 30, 31, 73, 76, 89, 115, 141 North Korea (DPRK): as ‘rogue’ state 29, 35, 85, 86, 90, 107, 108, 197, 198, 203, 206, 211; and China 84, 92, 107, 108; and Japan 114, 119, 120, 196, 202; nuclear weapons 27, 34, 37, 80, 88, 103, 107, 114, 119, 125, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211; and South Korea 27, 36, 83, 197, 200, 209, 210; and US 33, 34, 35, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 108, 114, 175, 196–212, 225; see also ‘rogue states’, ‘axis of evil’ ‘North Korean logic’ 205 Northeast Asia 26, 33, 45, 46, 56, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 108, 114, 115, 122, 187, 193, 197, 209, 210, 215 Northeast Asian Cooperation Dialogue 26 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) 196, 199, 201 nuclear weapons 88, 98, 104, 163, 198, 199, 200; brinkmanship 196, 208, 211; hegemony 202; non-proliferation 88, 167, 177, 196; programs 27, 34, 80, 88, 91, 98, 103, 107, 119, 125, 191, 192, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201–8, 211; strategy 101, 104, 108, 125, 163, 196, 197, 201–8, 210, 225 Nye, Joseph S. 23n1, 31, 79n9, 82 Oberdorfer, Don 202, 211 Office of Net Assessment (ONA) 81, 82 oil 5, 30, 87, 106, 124, 163, 166, 167, 199, 203 Okada, Katsuya 117, 121 Okawara, Nobuo 16 Olympic Games, The 102

266 Index Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act 48 Omnibus Trade Bill 47 open regionalism 76 Operation Enduring Freedom 111 Operation Iraqi Freedom 111 Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 129 Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) 181, 184, 190, 192, 195 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, (OPEC) 167 Ozawa Ichirô 117 Pakistan 27, 34, 74, 86, 91, 103, 191, 206; and India 27, 34, 86, 103 Palestinian Authority 99, 162, 176, 179, 190, 195 ‘paradox of American power’ 16, 54, 61 Partai Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) 183, 184, 186, 189, 195 Pascoe, B. Lynn 175 Paterson, Torkel 83 ‘path-dependency’ 12 Patrick, Stewart 70 Patriot Act (USA PATRIOT Act) 100 peace constitution (Japan) 32, 89, 107, 109, 116, 123, 124 ‘peaceful rise’ 67, 104 Pearl Harbor 28 ‘periphery’ 5, 129, 130, 138, 169, 215 Perry, William J. 199, 200 Perry Report 200 Persian Gulf War (1991) 30, 202 Pew Global Attitudes survey 162 Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) 223 Philippine–American Military Bases Agreement 149, 152 Philippine–American Trade Act 149 Philippine–American Treaty on General Relations 149 Philippine–American Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) 154 Philippines: and region, security relationship 192; and US, as colonial power 5, 6, 145, 146, 147–9; and US, economic relationship 6, 146, 149, 150, 151, 163; and US, security relationship 6, 26, 65, 74, 86, 141, 145–61, 164, 170–1, 192; war on terror 65, 86, 141, 152–61, 164, 170–1, 192

piracy 112, 163, 174, 175, 177, 181, 191 Plaza Accord 47 post-Cold War era 25, 33, 39, 84, 103, 109, 133, 184, 214, 215, 216 post-war international order 6, 8, 11, 12, 15, 45, 59, 80, 86, 90, 109, 110, 123, 215; see also Cold War, bipolar world order Powell, Colin L. 81, 83, 92, 157, 206, 207 Powell Doctrine 92 power 6, 25, 26, 128, 147; economic 9, 19–21, 27, 37, 61, 62, 85, 97, 132, 140, 163, 182, 185; hegemonic 43, 44, 54, 71, 73, 81, 116, 146, 194, 214; material 10, 11, 12, 13, 22; military 3, 6, 7, 8, 17–19, 23, 30, 81, 82, 85, 88, 107, 114, 120, 125, 163, 203, 209; soft 3, 11, 21–2, 43, 57, 58, 67, 198; US 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 35, 38, 41, 43, 54, 61, 62, 66, 72, 80, 81, 82, 85, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 109, 110, 120, 121, 147, 148, 150, 152, 159, 166, 177, 194, 198, 220, 222, 225, 226; US, paradox of 16, 54, 61 pragmatism 143, 179, 194, 195, 219, 221 Prasong Sunsuri 133 pre-emption 15, 18, 22, 86, 90, 97, 106, 107, 108, 116, 119, 174, 178, 181, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 203, 205, 219, 226 Project for the New American Century (PNAC) 82, 85 pro-liberalization 43, 59, 60 Proliferation Security Initiative 71, 88, 102, 112, 118, 174 Pronk, Jan 168 protectionism 132, 136 Putin, Vladimir, administration of 32 Pyongyang 83, 88, 108, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211 Qian Qichen 106 Quadrennial Defense Review 81, 83 ‘quasi-hegemon’ 132 Ramos, Fidel V., Government of 152, 153 RAND 84 Ravenhill, John 63n5, 63n6 Reagan, Ronald W., and administration of 29, 47, 63, 115, 170, 207 realism 4, 14, 17, 19, 22, 80, 98, 102, 105,

Index 108, 131, 133, 162, 198, 200; contrast with constructivism 16; contrast with liberalism 9; contrast with Marxism 12, 13; influence on Bush administration 18, 22, 80, 98, 108, 180, 188, 190, 198; and theories of hegemony 8–10, 11, 44, 45, 80, 105 realpolitik 200 reformation 188 ‘regime change’ 36, 98, 103, 108, 181, 190, 195, 226 Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI) 174, 175, 191 Regionalism 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 129, 132, 138, 139, 140, 181, 185 Reid, Ben 178n8 Republican Party 81, 98, 99, 100, 176; see also Bush, George W. Reus-Smit, Chris 15 revival of Japanese aggression 110 Reyes, Angelo 156 rhetoric 31, 67, 76, 135, 151, 152, 153, 155, 166, 171, 174, 179, 190, 198, 200, 201, 202, 207 Rice, Condoleezza 81 Ridgeway, Matthew 202 Riduan Isamuddin 141 ‘rogue states’ 29, 30, 34, 85, 101, 200, 203, 206, 207; as rhetorical term 198, 202, 207 Roh Moo-hyun 197 Roosevelt, Franklin D., and administration of 70 Ruggie, John G. 15, 44, 70, 71 Rumsfeld, Donald H. 81, 84, 108, 142, 207 Russia 32, 35, 86, 88, 102, 103, 107, 165, 166, 176, 177, 204 Saddam Hussein 99 Safire, William 208 Scheiffer, Tom 218 Schumer Amendment 47 Schurmann, Franz 73 Security Council 83, 102, 112, 121, 130 security dilemma 90, 98, 110, 114, 115, 117, 132, 198, 208, 211 Self-Defence Forces (SDF) 86, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120, 123, 124, 126 Semiconductor Trade Agreement 48 Seoul 47, 89, 197, 200, 201, 203, 205, 210, 211 September 11 terrorist attacks 7, 21, 24,

267

25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 80, 84, 85, 91, 92, 142, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 170, 181, 183, 189, 190, 194, 207, 213, 214, 215, 217, 222; see also war on terror Setser, Bra 77 Sharon, Ariel 170 Shiozaki Yasuhisa 119 Short Term Cotton Arrangement 45 Siddi Savetsila 131 Sigal, Leon V. 199, 200, 201, 210 Singapore, 26, 53, 60, 63, 65, 74, 108, 112, 125, 168, 172, 175, 178 Single European Act 75 Sino-American dynamic 83, 92, 97, 106, 107 Six Party Talks on North Korea 107 Smith, Hazel 206 Soeharto 167, 168, 169 ‘soft power’ 3, 11, 21–2, 43, 57, 58, 67, 198 Somalia 30 Sondakh, Bernard K. 175 South America 75; see also Americas, the South China Sea 67, 82, 177 South Korea (ROK): and Japan 27; and North Korea 27, 36, 83, 197, 200, 209, 210; and region, economic relationship 53, 66, 76, 103, 163, 185, 187; and US, economic relationship 36, 38, 45, 47, 48, 53, 55, 57, 59; and US, security relationship 26, 33, 36, 37, 74, 83, 89, 90, 91, 130, 141, 196–212 South Korean Defense White Paper, 209 South Pacific, 87 Southeast Asia: and China 64, 66, 67, 68, 77, 91, 138, 163, 167; and colonialism 5; economy 72, 91, 138, 167; and Japan 64, 77, 91, 115, 163; security 27, 65, 67, 164, 189; and US, economic relationship 5, 55, 64, 68, 72, 130; and US, security relationship 5, 21, 26, 27, 33, 65, 68, 73, 82, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 130, 131, 142, 144, 145, 157, 163, 170, 172, 183, 189, 195, 219; and war on terror 21, 33, 86, 87, 90, 93, 142, 144, 157, 170, 172, 192, 194, 195; see also ASEAN Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-Terrorism 192

268 Index Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) 73, 74, 130, 131 Southwest Asia 33, 84 Soviet Union 11, 15, 22, 28, 29, 36, 37, 101, 104, 105, 109, 118, 133 Special Measures on Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance in Iraq, Japanese law 111 Stahl, Max 168 statism 19, 59, 185 Status of Forces Agreement 119 Straits of Malacca 191 Strange, Susan 22, 50, 57 Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) 48 Subic Bay 149 Sudan 105 suicide bombers 190 Sukarno, administration of 165, 166, 167, 168 Summers, Lawrence 134 Sunshine Diplomacy 83 Super 301 48 Surakiart Sathirathai 135 Surin Pitsuwan 134 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono 175 Sutan Sjahrir 165 Taipei 47 Taiwan: and China 27, 34, 37, 83, 87, 89, 101, 105, 107, 118, 123, 140, 220; and region, economic relationship 47, 163; and region, security relationship 107, 140; and US, economic relationship 45, 47, 55, 59; and US, security relationship 27, 34, 37, 45, 83, 87, 89, 92, 101, 105, 107, 118, 123, 220 ‘Taiwan problem’ 123 Tajikistan 103 Taliban 30, 155, 171, 189 ‘Team Spirit’ 202 technology 39, 71, 86, 114, 125, 184, 193, 203 Teofisto Guingona 156 Terri Schiavo 100 territorial trap 13 Texaco 164 Thai Rak Thai (TRT) 135 Thailand: economic policy 59, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139; and region, economic relationship 38, 53, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140; and region, security relationship 132, 141, 142; and US,

economic relationship 38, 53, 60, 128, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 163; and US, security relationship 65, 74, 86, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 170–1; and war on terror 65, 74, 86, 142, 143, 144, 170–1 Thaksin, Shinawatra, Government of 59, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144 Thaksinomics 136, 137 Thamarak Isarangura 142 theatre missile defense 188 theoretical eclecticism 162 ‘tit-for-tat’ 199, 200 Tong, Goh Chok 74 Torrens, Robert 44 totalitarianism 196, 206 Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) 193 trade deficit 46, 47, 52, 55, 57, 78, 220, 222 trading state 6, 132, 136 Trading with the Enemy Act 46 transnational crime 103, 195 transparency 105, 174, 187 Treasury, US 47, 57, 61, 63, 77, 134 Treasury bills 61 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1833) 130 trilateralism 40 ‘triple assault’ the 5 Tripoli agreement 153 Truman, Harry S., and administration of 44, 166 UN Security Council 31, 37, 83, 102, 112, 118, 121, 130 unilateralism 69, 85, 90, 98, 102, 175, 219 ‘unipolar moment’ 49, 60 United Kingdom (UK) 99, 130, 123, see also Britain United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), 182, 183, 184, 186, 189, 195 United Nations (UN) 30, 31, 37, 70, 71, 102, 111, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124, 126, 142, 156, 165, 173, 176, 195 United States of America: and Afghanistan 30, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 86, 92, 105, 111, 113, 124, 141, 155, 171, 172, 174, 183, 189; alliance system 6, 25, 31, 59, 73, 74, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90; and Asia, economic relationship 3, 10, 23, 37, 40, 215; and

Index Asia, security relationship 23, 26, 33, 74, 80–93, 97, 103, 133, 202, 222; and ASEAN 69, 73, 74, 87, 91, 141, 193, 194; and Australia, economic relationship 60, 69, 213–27; and Australia, security relationship, 26, 28, 74, 80, 86–7, 91, 92, 112, 213–227; Bush Doctrine, 64, 116; and China, economic relationshp 9, 22, 25, 26, 38, 40, 55, 56, 62, 69, 106; and China, security relationship 10, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 64, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 93, 97–108, 118, 123, 142, 163, 166, 175, 177, 188, 197, 202, 220, 225; and ‘coalition of the willing’ 31, 108, 145, 153, 218; Cold War economic policy 19, 130; Cold War foreign policy 11; Cold War security architecture 18, 19, 25, 29, 109, 126, 130, 133, 163, 198, 201, 207, 216, 225; and East Asia, economic relationship 3, 8, 12, 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 42–62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 78, 163, 185, 220; and East Asia, security relationship 18, 22, 24–26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 48, 65, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80–93, 109, 110, 113, 114, 122, 123, 175, 194, 219, 226; and Europe, economic relationship 38, 40, 45, 70, 185; and Europe, security relationship 8, 16, 18, 22, 24, 32, 33, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 82, 89, 90, 107, 121, 123, 130, 164; hegemony of 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 41, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 80, 81, 90, 109, 110, 115, 121, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 160, 180, 181, 194, 202, 224; and India 26, 27, 28, 34, 74, 88, 91, 206; and Indonesia, economic relationship 38, 49, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 175; and Indonesia, security relationship 26, 87, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 191; and Iraq war 3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 22, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 86, 90, 92, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 115, 128, 142,143, 144, 173, 174, 176, 190, 192, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226; and Japan, economic relationship 27, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 55, 56, 77, 109, 110, 132; and Japan, security relationship 8, 26, 27, 28, 32, 37, 65, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 109–24, 141, 163, 167; and Malaysia 26, 170–1, 175, 179, 195; and

269

the Middle East 5, 24, 30, 33, 85, 87, 89, 107, 122, 128, 174, 181, 192, 193; and missile defense 97, 98, 101, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 124, 219; and NATO 30, 31, 73, 76, 89, 115, 141; and North Korea 33, 34, 35, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 108, 114, 175, 196–212, 225; and the Philippines, economic relationship 6, 146, 149, 150, 151, 163; and the Philippines, security relationship 6, 26, 65, 74, 86, 141, 145–61, 164, 170–1, 192; power of 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 35, 38, 41, 43, 54, 61, 62, 66, 72, 80, 81, 82, 85, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 109, 110, 120, 121, 147, 148, 150, 152, 159, 166, 177, 194, 198, 220, 222, 225, 226; and South Korea, economic relationship 36, 38, 45, 47, 48, 53, 55, 57, 59; and South Korea, security relationship 26, 33, 36, 37, 74, 83, 89, 90, 91, 130, 141, 196–212; and Southeast Asia, economic relationship 5, 55, 64, 68, 72, 130; and Southeast Asia, security relationship 5, 21, 26, 27, 33, 65, 68, 73, 82, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 130, 131, 142, 144, 145, 157, 163, 170, 172, 183, 189, 195, 219; and Taiwan, economic relationship 45, 47, 55, 59; and Taiwan, security relationship 27, 34, 37, 45, 83, 87, 89, 92, 101, 105, 107, 118, 123, 220; and Thailand, economic relationship 38, 53, 60, 128, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 163; and Thailand, security relationship 65, 74, 86, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 170–1; and Vietnam war 18, 30, 36, 45, 106, 130, 131, 141, 151, 163, 167, 183, 216, 218; and war on terror 15, 25, 29, 31, 37, 40, 43, 64, 65, 67, 84, 92, 97, 99, 100, 116, 147, 152, 158, 174, 207, 217; see also Bush, George W. United States Indonesia Society 176 United States military bases 146 US–ASEAN Business Council 193, 194 US Forces Japan (USFJ) 119, 123 US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) credit programme 194 US hegemony 17, 45, 49, 54, 57, 114, 128, 129, 130, 132, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 159, 181, 194 US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty 89

270 Index US–Japan alliance 110, 124 US primacy 24, 29, 30, 31, 35, 61, 82, 83, 85, 91, 115,132, 177, 181, 190 Uzbekistan 86, 103, 105 Vietnam 54, 63, 68, 131, 183 Vietnam War 18, 30, 36, 45, 106, 130, 131, 141, 151, 163, 167, 183, 216, 218 ‘Vietnamisation’ 131 Visiting Forces Agreement 154, 159 Voluntary Export Restraints (VERs) 47 Wahid, Abdurrahman, Goverrnment of 170, 175 Walt, Stephen M. 207 Wanandi, Jusuf 175 war on terror 15, 25, 29, 31, 37, 40, 43, 64, 65, 67, 84, 92, 97, 99, 100, 116, 147, 152, 158, 174, 207, 217; Afghanistan 33, 35, 111, 124; Iraq 33, 35, 85, 124, 144, 157, 225; responses to 31, 32, 35, 36, 71, 102, 103, 113, 124, 138, 141, 146, 155, 171, 173, 175, 179, 181, 190, 223; Southeast Asia 21, 33, 36, 65, 72, 80, 86, 90, 93, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 164, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 181, 192, 194, 195, 225; see also Iraq War, September 11 terrorist attacks Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) 29, 30, 34, 86, 91, 99, 102, 112, 143, 173, 190, 197, 203, 206, 217; see also nuclear weapons

Wen Jiabao 177 Wendt, Alexander 14 West Papua 164, 166, 176 Wohlforth, William C. 61 Wolfowitz, Paul D. 81, 82, 85, 164, 170, 192 World Bank 11, 58, 59, 129, 166, 167, 178 World Conference on Human Rights 186 World Economic Forum (WEF) 129 World Trade Center, 28, 100, 164, 170; see also September 11 terrorist attacks World Trade Organization (WTO) 8, 11, 22, 23, 56, 57, 60, 78, 83, 102, 129, 136, 137, 138, 156 World War II 10, 27, 44, 70, 117, 150, 214, 215, 225, 226 Yamasaki Taku 121 Yan Xuetong 98 Yasser Arafat 170 yen 46, 47, 48 Yongbyon 199, 201 Yoshida Doctrine 109 Yugoslavia 75 Zoellick, Robert 222 Zone Of Peace, Freedom And Neutrality (ZOPFAN) 167, 177

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