Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (36 page)

ASIA

A
s in Europe, so in Asia the United States is finding a new coolness in its relations with old friends while seeming to achieve better relations with old antagonists. Particularly striking, however, is the surprising similarity of perceptions of the United States throughout Asia. Whether in Tokyo, Beijing, or Jakarta, the analysis of U.S. objectives and motives is sharply at odds with the standard American rationale.

To begin, all believe the United States thinks of itself as the bearer of universal standards of morality, political philosophy, and organization, or, as one commentator put it, ‘the apotheosis and arbiter of civilized international conduct.’
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They see a United States bent on imposing and enforcing its brand of western values through hegemonic dominance as well as multilateral institutions. Moreover, allies and antagonists alike see a sharp difference between the individualism and materialism they believe lie at the core of U.S. values and their own more communal and hierarchical Asian values. They believe the American military is in Asia largely to assure U.S. dominance in the region and to prevent the rise of any competing power. In their view, the United States wants a strong and prosperous Asia-Pacific community but strictly on its own terms – economically sound, politically stable and democratic, and accepting of American leadership. They also believe the United States has a perhaps unconscious need for enemies to provide a justification for its large, high-tech forces and to serve as the focus of its geopolitical strategy. This, they believe, is why, with the end of the Cold War, the United States began to emphasize the concept of ‘rogue nations’ and the need for ‘stability.’ They also believe the Bush administration was preparing to put China in the ‘enemy’ category when Osama bin Laden conveniently made himself a better target.

The United States is also seen as exempting itself from the restraints that govern others because of its self-image as a benign hegemon. Thus, it explains its forward deployment of military forces as unthreatening, while it frequently cites as threats, justifying ever-greater U.S. defense expenditures, the far more limited deployments of other countries. Again, wherever I go in Asia I find extreme sensitivity to perceived double standards, particularly with regard to weaponry like nuclear arms that are seen as acceptable to the United States when owned by Britain or France or Israel, but as unacceptable in the hands of Asians.

None of these views should be taken to mean that Asians dislike America. Indeed, the Pew polls show generally positive attitudes and great admiration on a number of scales. Moreover, like others, Asians make a firm distinction between Americans, whom they overwhelmingly like, and America, whose policies and actions they find frequently baffling and odious. But there is a vast gap between the Asian view of what America is doing in the region and Americas view of it. To understand the nuances and implications of this gap, let’s take a tour, beginning with Korea, where the strains are most evident.

Korea

I have already noted in Chapter 7 the growing estrangement between the United States and South Korea, which culminated – to great annoyance in Washington – in the election in December 2002 of Roh Moo-hyun as President of Korea to succeed Kim Dae-jung. Washington had been devoutly hoping for Roh’s opponent, longtime U.S. friend Lee Hoi-chang to win on his platform of reversing Kim’s Sunshine Policy toward the North.

And Roh not only won, he won with an overwhelming percentage of the vote of young people. His election coincided with the further escalation of tension between North Korea and the United States, as North Korea not only revealed a previously clandestine uranium enrichment program but expelled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors and began preparations to restart its Yongbyon reactor. From this facility it would extract plutonium that could be used to make nuclear bombs, in violation of the non-proliferation treaty as well as of agreements with the United States. While Washington insisted it would not negotiate with North Korea until it halted these threatening activities, Roh announced that he both would continue the Sunshine Policy and undertake his own negotiations with the North. Behind this breach lies a view of the Korean situation that is never heard in Washington. It could, of course, be wrong, but it is important for Americans to understand it as one of South Korea’s top negotiators explained it to me recently.

Americans know that the United States has no intention to invade North Korea, but North Korea doesn’t know that. There has never been a peace treaty to end the Korean War. The United States has kept nearly forty thousand troops in South Korea as well as wartime command of the South Korean army for fifty years, and the obvious U.S. intention of attacking Iraq combined with North Korea’s inclusion in the ‘Axis of Evil’ leads the North to see the United States as a threat to its security. Fundamental to the American view is the conviction that North Korea cannot be trusted to honor any bilateral or multilateral commitments. That it initiated the uranium enrichment program in violation of the agreements it made with the United States in the Agreed Framework of 1994 is typically cited in support of this view. Yet the specific provisions of the 1994 agreement were for the suspension of the North’s plutonium production facilities, and those provisions have been honored.
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Moreover, the United States itself has failed to honor key provisions of the deal. The promised installation of 2,000 megawatts of nuclear powered electric generating capacity by 2003 has not been delivered, nor has the ‘full normalization of political and economic relations,’
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nor have the ‘formal assurances against the threat or the use of nuclear weapons by the United States’
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been made. Thus in the eyes of the North Koreans, while the United States got what it wanted up front – namely, the suspension of the North Korean plutonium program – North Korea got mostly unfulfilled promises.

Moreover, when confronted with U.S. knowledge of the enriched uranium program by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly during his visit to Pyongyang in October 2002, the North Koreans offered to shut down the program in return for a U.S. commitment not to attack and to go ahead with the promised normalization of relations. But Kelly told them they had to halt the program, period, and that there would be no negotiations. What North Korea wants most, according to South Korea’s negotiators, is U.S. recognition and a non-aggression treaty to end the war. The South doesn’t see why that is so difficult in view of the fact that virtually every country in the world, except for the United States, Japan, and France, recognizes North Korea. The South Koreans believe Washington’s policy is driven by hard-line ideological hawks who want to bring about the collapse of the North and maintain hostility in order to justify broader U.S. deployment in the Pacific. Thus, in the view of many South Koreans, the United States is as much an obstacle to resolution as the North.

Beyond this, South Koreans resent what they see as Washington’s highhanded approach. Recently it has come out that the Clinton administration seriously considered launching air strikes to destroy the North’s nuclear plants in 1994. Ultimately it did not do so and instead negotiated the Agreed Framework that resulted in the shutdown of the plant. But South Koreans were shocked to find that their government was only informed of the attack plan at the last moment, when the government vigorously objected. Given that South Korea’s capital, Seoul, is only about 17 miles south of the border and that North Korea has it targeted by the heaviest concentration of artillery in the world, any such attack would almost certainly have resulted in the leveling of Seoul. It was a real blow to Koreans not to be asked, by a supposedly staunch ally, what they thought about the destruction of their own capital.

Nor did anyone in Washington consult the South Koreans about including North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’ or about undermining the South’s sunshine policy with an American hard line. In short, the South Koreans think we take them for granted, and they resent it like hell. Ironically, this sentiment is driven by the newly ascendant democratic ideals of thousands of young people and business people who studied and worked in the United States and came back wanting Koreans to have the same rights as their American friends. The Koreans, like many Europeans, feel a sense of betrayal when America does not live up to its own ideals.

An interesting twist is that South Korea has begun to send missionaries to the United States. Having become a Christian country over the past fifty years, with a predominance of Protestant and especially Presbyterian churches, many Koreans have begun to see the United States as increasingly in need of spiritual rejuvenation.

Another important dynamic is the rise of the Chinese economy. China has become a major importer of Korean products, so much so that Korea can foresee the day when its exports to China will outstrip those to the United States. This has resulted in much discussion in Korea of a regional trade strategy and of regionalization generally. Along with this has come public debate over the status of U.S. troops in South Korea. For fifty years, Americans have been saying the troops are there to protect South Korea. Of course, Defense Secretary Cohen’s 1997 comment that U.S. troops would stay even if Korea reunited let the cat out of the bag. The fact is, the United States has those troops there as part of its overall projection of power into Asia. Now, insensitivity and ideologically driven policy may undermine exactly the status of forces the United States has been trying to preserve.

Japan

Across the straits from Korea, in Japan, is a much more complex and slowly developing situation, but with similar characteristics. Japan is truly in crisis, even if it is a quiet and largely invisible crisis. If you walk through Tokyo or travel through Japan, all appears quite normal. The traffic is impossible. Restaurants are crowded. The trains run exactly on time and the subway stops right in front of the door-opening marker. Construction cranes are everywhere, and even the tiniest villages are serviced by expressways and fast trains. And that is the clue. Despite the outward sheen, Japan’s economy is on the edge of disaster and its politics are rotten at the core, and the evidence of both is all those construction cranes and expressways and trains to nowhere.

Japan has been governed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for all but about two of the past fifty-odd years. The party built its power on an iron triangle of support that includes farmers and rural residents, construction companies and their employees and related activities, and small business people and shopkeepers. The political system is rigged with rotten boroughs just like those of nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Because of the way votes are counted, a farmer’s vote in Japan is worth about 2.2 votes from urban area residents. The LDP maintains this iron triangle by heavily subsidizing and protecting it. Farmers are protected from imports by some of the highest tariffs in the world. They are also heavily subsidized so that the domestic price of rice, for example, is ten times what it is on the world market. Small business is also subsidized in various ways and, best of all, pays virtually nothing in taxes. Construction lives on huge handouts from government contracts for roads that go to those farm villages and bridges that connect them. The result is that construction spending accounts for about 10 percent of the entire Japanese economy, about double the figure for the United States.

Beyond this, most of the Japanese economy has been highly protected for years both from imports and from foreign investors. After World War II, Japan adopted an export-led development strategy under which the government enforced high savings that were channeled through the banking system into mass production manufacturing industries like autos, electronics, and steel. Enormous production capacity was created, and much production was exported while the home market was reserved mainly for Japanese production. The system worked so well that by the mid-1980
s
, Japan was exporting so much and importing so little that the value of the yen was forced to rise in the 1985 Plaza Accord. The export strategy should have been changed, but it was hard to turn away from such a successful formula. Instead the government pumped money into the economy to offset the impact of a stronger yen and keep Japanese exporters competitive despite the stronger yen. The result was a classic bubble that burst in 1991-1992, leaving many companies virtually bankrupt and many banks with large non-performing loans. But many of these companies were construction companies and banks closely tied to the LDP. Rather than aggressively clean things up, the LDP for the past ten years has been shoveling out more and more in subsidies. Meanwhile, the economy has stagnated because banks, already carrying too much bad debt, lend mostly to keep zombie companies alive, thereby further increasing their bad debts. Japan’s national debt is now the highest in the world and rising. It is caught in a threatening deflationary spiral for which the only solutions are substantial inflation, something likely to erode household wealth, or a 1930
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-style depression that will do the same.

Where does the United States come into this? The LDP is a creature of the United States. Alfred C. Ulmer, Jr., CIA operations chief for East Asia 1955-1958; Roger Hilsman, head of intelligence and research in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; and U. Alexis Johnson, Ambassador to Japan 1966-1969, have all acknowledged making payoffs to the LDP from 1955 to 1972.
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Moreover, there were close connections between the CIA, the LDP, and the Yakuza or Japanese Mafia.
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From the end of the Japanese Occupation to the present, Washington has favored the LDP in Japan because it has been anti-Communist, has provided bases, and has followed the American lead in foreign policy. There has long been a deal. The United States takes care of security and has use of bases in Japan, and in return the United States supports, or at least accepts, Japan’s economic policies. In recent years, it has been a matter not so much of accepting as of having become so structurally and financially intertwined with Japan as to have little ability to do much about it. But the point is that the United States has been an important factor (but far from the only one or even the greatest one) in Japan’s ills and particularly in the suppression of a true democracy.