Table of Contents
What remains unchanged transcending all changes is benevolence. Knowing only what is changing without knowing what remains unchanged, the humankind will never enjoy peace.
—Xong Shili (1884–1968), Chinese philosopher
The East Asian region is in a grand transitional period. Its economic importance to world prosperity and its potential contribution to global peace are increasing. Nevertheless, the region, especially Northeast Asia, is not only the most militarised region in the world, but is also a region to date lacking any single regional organisation through which conflicts can be handled.[1] Economic cooperation and military hedging between major powers enhances simultaneously. The deviation of economy and security is not in the interest of lasting peace and prosperity and the fundamental interests of all concerned countries.
Whether it is in accord with the expectation of East Asian countries and their internal political groups or not, the United States will be the cornerstone of any meaningful and feasible future security architecture for East Asia. What is not certain is whether the United States will fulfil this role in a hegemonic security architecture or a harmonious one. There are sets of factors, internal and external to the United States, together with interactions between the major powers, which will shape the role of the United States in the future security architecture of East Asia. The direction, pace and structure of such an architecture will depend on the synergistic effects of these factors and interactions.
China is the strategic focus of the US East Asia security policy. In a major bi-partisan effort to devise a new national security strategy in 2005, the final report of a Princeton University study pointed out that the rise of China is one of the most important events in the early twenty-first century, and viewed China as one example of a major threat and challenge.[2] The US security community is watchful of China’s military development. The Pentagon’s annual report on the topic is but the tip of the iceberg. China-US military relations are pivotal for East Asian security. They will determine the outlook and nature of the future security architecture in the region. Unfortunately, because of asymmetric US information and influence, the term and logic for an East Asian security architecture has been largely defined in an American way, shaping international perceptions on Chinese military issues and on the China-US military-to-military relationship.[3] It is in the interest of all concerned parties and of future generations in the Asia-Pacific region to understand the root dynamics of this relationship and its impact on any future regional security architecture.
As the extension of the US national will, interest, power and strategy, its security policy and posture toward East Asia and China is inevitably influenced directly or indirectly by the same internal factors that shape its overall power and policy. To make sense of the US role in East Asia security, we have to consider these internal factors. Graham Allison’s framework of rational actor model, organisational behaviour model, and governmental politics model is an elegant conceptual guide for an explanation and prediction of US foreign policy.[4] In addition to Graham Allison’s models, the author would argue that a military–economy synergy model should be considered for a comprehensive understanding on the root cause of US behaviour.
The starting point for all rational actors is their political objective. Since the end of the Cold War, the US strategic community has been seeking a new grand design or architecture to guide the planning of future forces; that is, a successor to ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union. In essence, this process seeks to reconfirm US strategic objectives. The distinctive character of current US strategic objectives can be summarised as the following three points.
The first aspect is freedom of action. In former US President George W. Bush’s words, ‘the U.S. needs no permission slip from the United Nations or anybody else to act’.[5] This view of its options, including military objectives, is the most important difference between the United States and almost all other countries. Freedom of action is the organising thread of the US national security, defence, and military strategy, as well as its national space policy. Freedom of action in reality is the capability to create events, make rules—‘the authority to set the global agenda’.[6]
The second aspect is peerless military advantages. Freedom of action is impossible without ‘military supremacy’. ‘At their core, both liberty and law must be backed up by force.’[7] The United States takes military supremacy as the core pillar of its world status, and wants to keep it permanently. Thus, redefining war on American terms (as Bush described it in February 2001),[8] to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities, has become the objective itself.
The final aspect is to prevent any other country from dominating Eurasia. This point will be discussed later in the chapter.
To help define these objectives, the worst-case scenario is widely used, indeed over used, in US strategic planning. As the classical military planning method, worst-case scenario is not without merit. However, if the history of the Cold War told us anything, it should be that the so-called realistic mindset plus worst-case scenario led to an unnecessary and dangerous arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The benefit of worst-case scenario cannot make up for its inherent cost and risk. Closer observation suggests that worst-case scenario and threat exaggeration is a means to mobilise internal resources rather than a rational assessment of the external environment. As the leading military power today, if the United States can find reasons to use a worst-case scenario, other countries have far more reason to do so. In fact, in the author’s opinion, since the end of the Second World War, the United States has taken the lead in both the use of worst-case scenario, and in creating security dilemmas.
David R. Obey, former chairman of the US Congress House Appropriations Committee, has said that the way Congress reviews the Pentagon ‘has certainly become dysfunctional. Congress, instead of being the watchdog, is the dog that has to be watched. … The Congress committees entrusted to oversee the Pentagon budgets act like “a pork machine”’. He termed it ‘outrageous’ for the US Air Force to assert that
the reason we have to build the F-22 in the first place is because we sold so many F-16s around the world that we have to keep a qualitative edge over them. So when we say we will put a limit on your ability to sell the F-16s abroad, they say, You can’t do that because it costs jobs.[9]
Obey’s words illustrate the impact of US Congress ‘pork-barrel politics’ on military policy. Internal political consideration, military service parochialism, and interest-seeking defence industries combine to form a Political–Military–Industrial Complex, which plays ‘the art of the possible’ in respect of the defence budget. Former US Defense Secretary James Schlesinger said that it was not easy to ‘keep the DOD a relatively harmonious whole’. He went on to say that ‘many possible decisions, which would seem logically sound, will nonetheless be avoided, simply for the purpose of maintaining peace within the family. … The net result is the creation of side payments for almost everybody’.[10] RAND Corporation-based expert Kevin N. Lewis pointed out that
as a result of political influences, externally generated demands, and organizational inertia, even if we had an agreed long-range defense program, the odds of seeing it through to fruition would be poor. This effect, which I called discipline gap in planning, can have serious consequences.[11]
These ‘serious consequences’ were and are not merely within the United States. In fact, US scholar Gordon R. Mitchell believes that the Cold War arms race came from an internal American arms race: ‘The Soviet Union was less an instigator of the arms race and more the straggling follower of a massive unilateral American military buildup.’[12]
The net results of ‘rational actor, governmental politics and organisational behaviour’ are grave and dangerous, which include but are not limited to the habit of threat exaggeration and huge defence expenditure. The United States had ‘a tendency throughout the Cold War to exaggerate the threat’; and this tendency persists into the post Cold War era. On the myth of the ‘missile gap’ in the early 1960s, one US scholar has observed that ‘Soviet force levels were a factor in the Pentagon’s calculations, but were not the most important by any manner of means. In other words, U.S. deployment followed its own logic, and that implied a prior strategy’.[13] Meanwhile, Robert H. Johnson has said that ‘the interaction between psychology, politics, and changes in the international environment are the keys to the explanation of U.S. conceptions of the threat and of the tendency of those conceptions to overstate the threat’.[14] As Columbia University history professor Carol Gluck pointed out, ‘without some way to transcend our differences we are doomed to reenact the hostilities toward others that seem to lodge so deeply in our political unconscious’. The Working Group on Relative Threat Assessment of the Princeton Project on National Security noted that, ‘in practice, bureaucratic and commercial incentives have a strong influence on the threats that are considered and treated seriously by the U.S.’[15] The habit and skills of threat exaggeration, internal political process, and armed services’ inertia, have serious implications for the future security architecture for East Asia.
How to explain the uniqueness of US strategic objectives? In almost all other countries, military policy and defence experts take the following three points as basic presumptions: the aim of the military is to defend; the military is the tool of foreign policy; and military expenditure is a burden to economy. Even though many US experts share this perspective, US national policy can be described as its obverse: the aim of the military is freedom of action; foreign policy can be the tool of the military; and military expenditure can be the catalyst for the economy and an important source of core economic competence for the next generation. Richard R. Nelson, a US expert on national innovation, points out that defence expenditure is one of the two most important factors in understanding the US national innovation system.[16]
According to US scholar Diane Kunz, ‘the US built its Cold War hegemony on the base created by the World War II production miracle. Washington then converted the bipolar geopolitical confrontation into fuel that powered its domestic economy. This synergy proved crucial’.[17] A RAND Corporation report echoes Kunz’s observation by saying that
national power is ultimately a product of the interaction of two components: a country’s ability to dominate the cycles of economic innovation at a given point in time and, thereafter, to utilize the fruits of this domination to produce effective military capabilities that, in turn, reinforce existing economic advantages while producing a stable political order.[18]
The military–economy synergy manifests itself as a chain of cause and effect relations:
Whoever controls space, therefore, will control the world’s oceans. Whoever controls the oceans will control the patterns of global commerce. Whoever controls the patterns of global commerce will be the wealthiest power in the world. Whoever is the wealthiest power in the world will be able to control space.[19]
Put another way, it is a military–market nexus:
(1) Look for resources and ye shall find, but … (2) no stability, no market; (3) no growth, no stability; (4) no resources, no growth; (5) no infrastructure, no resources; (6) no money, no infrastructure; (7) no rules, no money; (8) no security, no rules; (9) no Leviathan, no security; (10) no (American) will, no Leviathan. Understanding the military–market link is not just good business, it is good national security strategy.[20]
All empires enjoyed strong linkages between their military and the other sources of national power. The link could be military–land, military–commerce, military–industry, or military–finance. The United States is no exception. The only difference in its case is that it has compresses all these links into some 230 years rather than thousands of years. Kunz accurately points out that, in 1946, George Kennan explained in his ‘long telegram’ that, for domestic reasons, ‘the Soviet Union needed a permanent enemy’:
Soviet leaders are driven by necessities of their own past and present position to put forth a dogma which depicts the outside world as evil, hostile and menacing. … [Kennan] was right—not only about the Soviet Union but about the United States as well.[21]
[1] Niklas Swanström, Mikael Weissman and Emma Björnehed, ‘Introduction’, in Niklas Swanström (ed.), Conflict Prevention and Conflict Management in Northeast Asia, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, John Hopkins University, Washington, DC, 2005, p. 9, available at <http://www.isdp.eu/node/1153>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[2] Forging a world of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security Strategy for the 21st Century, Final Report of Princeton Project on National Security, Princeton University, Princeton, 2006, available at <http://www.princeton.edu/~ppns/report/FinalReport.pdf>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[3] Some China scholars, deeply influenced by US international relations and strategy theories, talk and write in US terms and logic, even when sometimes criticising US security policy. The terms and logic include, but are far from limited to, ‘realist’, ‘nationalism’, ‘soft power’, ‘ China-US structural, strategic contradiction’, and ‘the relation of established superpower and superpower candidate’. It is the author’s opinion that this kind of influence would distort rather than facilitate a healthy understanding of China-US relations and the true issues of Asian security.
[4] Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, ‘Introduction’ in Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edition, Longman, Reading, MA, 1999.
[5] Former US President George W. Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address, 20 January 2004, available at <http://whitehouse.georgewbush.org/news/2004/012004-SOTU.asp>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[6] Ron Huisken, The Road to War on Iraq, Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence no.148, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, 2003, p. 55.
[7] Forging a world of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security Strategy for the 21st Century, p. 8.
[8] George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President to the troops and Personnel’, Norfolk Naval Air Station, Norfolk, VA, 13 February 2001, available at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20010213-1.html>, accessed 5 May 2008.
[9] George C. Wilson, This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars, CQ Press, Washington, DC, 2000, pp. 115–17.
[10] Peter L. Hays (ed.), American Defense Policy, 7th edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997, pp. 103 and 107.
[11] Paul K. Davis (ed.), New Challenges for Defense Planning: Rethinking How Much Is Enough, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, 1994, p. 102, available at <http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR400/>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[12] Gordon R. Mitchell, Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science, and Politics in Missile Defense Advocacy, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2000, p. 31.
[13] Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997, p. 332.
[14] Robert H. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and after, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1997, p. 2.
[15] Forging a world of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security Strategy for the 21st Century, p. 8.
[16] Richard R. Nelson, National Innovation System: A Comparative Analysis, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 29–30.
[17] Diane B. Kunz, Butter and Guns: America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy, The Free Press, New York, 1997, p. 2.
[18] Ashley J. Tellis, Janice Bially, Christopher Layne, Melissa McPherson and Jerry M. Sollinger, Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age: Analyst’s Handbook, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, 2000, p. 4, available at <http://rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1110.1/>, accessed 17 June 2009.
[19] George Friedman and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century, Crown Publishers, New York, 1996, p. 411.
[20] Thomas P.M. Barnett, ‘Glossary’ in Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, G.P. Putnam & Sons, New York, 2005, p. xvii.
[21] Kunz, Butter and Guns: America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy, p. 328. Similar observations can be found in other materials. In 1999, Samuel Huntington noted: ‘At a 1997 Harvard conference, scholars reported that the elites of countries comprising at least two-thirds of the world’s people—Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, and Africans—see the United States as the single greatest threat to their societies. They do not regard the United States as a military threat, but as a menace to their integrity, autonomy, prosperity, and freedom of action. They view it as intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical, and applying double standards, engaging in what they label ‘financial imperialism’ and ‘intellectual colonialism’, with a foreign policy driven overwhelmingly by domestic politics.’ (Huntington quoted in Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight, Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, Public Affairs, New York, 2001, p. 52)