STRENGTH THROUGH COOPERATION
         Military Forces in the  Asia-Pacific Region

PART IV  
Military-to-Military Cooperation

MILITARY-TO-MILITARY COOPERATION:  Pacific Community Issues
     Ramesh Thakur  

It is easy to say that "war solves nothing." While this may be true objectively, it is nonsense from the point of view of the many instances of violent conflict occurring all the time. Enough people believe that force is the solution to some of their problems for war to remain a common feature of international relations. The end of the Cold War brought forth many expectations of significant changes to the very basis of international relations and world order. However, the idea and possibility of war have not been eliminated from international relations. Human societies are still divided by disputes over beliefs and interests and, as long as there are organized polities prepared to support rival groups, war cannot be ruled out.

National power is inherent in the system of independent states, and military force is inherent in national power. Military power has been, is, and will remain the arbiter of the destiny of nations: their classification as great powers or minor states, rise and fall, territorial boundaries, even their very emergence and extinction.  As the determinant of great powers, force is the decisive element in the structure of any given international system. Those who fail to look after their own military risk becoming the victims of others. For all these reasons, military power will remain a dominant feature of international relations.

Dr. Ramesh Thakur is Professor and Head of the Peace Research Center at the Australian National University in Canberra.  He is a member of the National Consultative Committee on Peace and Disarmament in Australia and previously was a member of the Public Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament in New Zealand.

There is the very real risk, however, that the pursuit of national security through the strategy of self-help will produce outcomes of regional and international insecurity through the process of competitive rivalry and arms buildups. Military-to-military cooperation (MTMC) can help to lessen the acuteness of the dilemma, because it is a form of multilateral diplomacy corresponding to the continuation of defense by other means. It has been at its most institutionalized in NATO. The allied military organization created and sustained the environment of military security, political stability, and intensive economic cooperation among the great historic enemies of Europe. Without NATO, could the European Community have been formed and endured?

Collective security is all inclusive and internally directed. It offers protection to all members against whoever commits aggression. Resting on the premise that peace is indivisible and that an act of aggression anywhere is a threat everywhere, it is the analogue of the familiar adage, "All for one and one for all." However, plans cannot be made in advance by a coalition of states for defense against a potential aggressor, for the latter cannot be known in advance. Because collective security rests on the theory of the indeterminate aggressor, it impedes the development of a sense of community. Collective defense, resting on a determinate aggressor, does permit community- building activities. The former Soviet Union played this role for the Western alliance in Europe. Can China play the same role for the Asia-Pacific area? No other country can do so in the foreseeable future. Can others build close military relations among themselves on the assumption that China will be the enemy? The risk in this is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

NATO had two complementary core functions.  The first was a defense alliance, with every member committed to defend the others against external attack from the Soviet bloc enemy. The second was internal peace management among the 16 member states. This was done through sharing defense plans and budgets. The defense alliance kept the peace between Europe and the Soviet Union. Peace management kept peace among NATO members.³⁰ The challenge for NATO after the end of the Cold War was how to preserve the defense function while expanding its peace management ability in order to stabilize central and eastern Europe. The answer was the Partnership for Peace (PFP) program, whereby 27 non-NATO European states took part in joint exercises and joint peacekeeping and were educated on NATO standards. But NATO was careful under the PFP not to extend the mutual defense commitment beyond the core 16 members. The idea was to preserve NATO as a military community with core values and tasks, while simultaneously extending it eastward as a much looser political grouping. NATO enlargement threatens to put both core functions at risk by transforming the world's preeminent security organization into a miniature United Nations.  

Meaning of Community  

A regional or international system can be said to exist when two or more constituent units are in such regular and substantial interaction that the behavior of one affects and becomes a necessary element in the calculations of the other(s). A regional or international society implies the consciousness of certain common interests and norms that make states agree to being bound by a common set of rules (for example, nonuse of force to settle disputes, noninterference in one another's internal affairs, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction) and institutions (ASEAN, ARF, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), KEDO, etc.).  In addition to the interdependence of states to make up a system, there is a sense of common identity to constitute a society. A community is more intimate still, resting on shared values. A system is functional and implies a regular pattern of interaction; a society implies that the units are bound together and that their interaction is governed by common rules; a community implies a core of values that underpins social relations. A society is a rule-governed system; a community is a value-governed social system.

Is there a Pacific community in this sense, of shared values and institutions, common political goals and social aspirations? As a minimum, this would include open nationalism (as distinct from chauvinism, analogous to open regionalism), regional cohabitation, and a forward-looking regional vision. The APEC forum might be thought of as containing the seeds of an economic community, based on the principles (core values) of open regionalism and the vision of free trade in goods, services, and capital (but not labor). In this case a common vision and action plan for trade and investment liberalization around the Pacific Rim were forged with surprising speed by quite diverse governments. As well, or alternatively, is there a Pacific security community, in the sense in which we speak of the scholarly community? The core values of the latter are the production, dissemination, and communication of knowledge through research, publication and teaching. What might the analogous core values be that could underpin a Pacific security community?

A starting point for the cluster of shared values and common goals of a Pacific-wide community might be nine of the ten principles of conditional engagement of China produced by the Asia Project of the Council on Foreign Relations:  

• No unilateral use of offensive military force

• Freedom of navigation

• Moderation in defense forces buildup

• Transparency of military force

• Nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems

• Respect for national sovereignty

• Peaceful resolution of territorial disputes

• Market access for trade and investment

• Cooperative solutions for transnational problems

• Respect for human rights.³¹  

Military forces are centrally involved in the first five and are the instrument of last resort for ensuring the sixth through national means. The military is the institution trained and organized to wage war as its primary function. Armed forces are also the sharp end of the realist approach to world politics and the hard instrument for the defense of national sovereignty. How then might the military serve to build a Pacific community, to replace the elusive search for a "Pacific balance of power" throughout this century with a "Pacific community of power" in the next?

The realist paradigm rejects the possibility of anything but power-as-might as the basic determinant of international relations. The overriding characteristic of the global diplomatic milieu is anarchy. The lawlessness resulting from the absence of effective international government is rescued from chaos by a system of balance of power. The only effective check to the overly powerful is countervailing power. Regional institutions, far from being aloof, are integral elements of the ubiquitous struggle for power. The task of regional organizations and forums is to enhance the stability of the balance of power; to improve the mechanisms for calibrating and adjusting the shifting power relationships, perhaps to check runaway military growths through multilaterally negotiated arms control agreements, and to underpin the exercise of power in ways that preserve the delicate fabric of regional and world order. In the realist perspective on U.S. foreign policy, therefore, an organization like NATO becomes the vehicle for multilateralizing U.S. national interest, serving both as a conduit for U.S. power projection to transatlantic troublespots and as a moral framework for legitimizing the exercise of U.S. power. The replacement of the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia by the Implementation Force and the Stabilization Force is a good example.

This may contain a clue as to why the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization failed. The realist assumptions do not sit comfortably with the Asian methods of regional diplomacy. On the one hand, there is no "Asian way"; the phrase is a convenient label used by politicians to short-circuit serious debate and mobilize emotional support. Asia is far too big and diverse geographically, socially, religiously, culturally, politically, and economically for there to be much coherence or content in the concept. Even east Asia has major cultural dividing lines among Confucians, Muslims, and Buddhists.

On the other hand, there is an ASEAN way, which is process, not outcome, driven. It stresses informality and organizational minimalism, inclusiveness, intensive consultations leading to consensus, and sensitivity to sovereignty concerns. It is suspicious of outside solutions to regional problems. Its core comprises personal relationships, carefully nurtured over several years, among the heads of governments. Elite socialization is more important than formal institutions. Because of the importance attached to consensus, progress can be slow so that all members are comfortable with the pace. This contrasts with the EU way of formal institutions with the power to make decisions that are legally binding on member states, even on those who may have opposed the measures.

On the security side, the most notable feature of the ASEAN approach is the idea of comprehensive security, which emphasizes links across the several dimensions of security (military, political, economic, societal, cultural, and environmental). The key element is national resilience, which puts the internal and external stability of states at the center of security concerns.  

The establishment of regional and international organizations is made necessary by the problems created by power politics. But between the realist paradigm that denies the possibility of regional organizations as autonomous actors, and a revolutionary paradigm that seeks to replace state actors with a moral community embracing all states within one universally accepted conception of human welfare, lies the ASEAN vision of a moral order based on state compliance with regional norms. Unlike the revolutionist, the ASEAN preference is to repair, not rebuild, regional and world order. Unlike the realist, the ASEAN approach does believe in the efficacy of regional institutions in moderating and taming the unrelenting struggle for power. Regional institutions are the means for circumventing war and mobilizing the collective will of an incipient Asia-Pacific community to deter aggressors by delegitimizing aggression in regional relations.

Europe is the font of the modern states system as we know it. Supranational institutions first emerged in Europe, too, but only some three centuries after the inauguration of the Westphalian system. By contrast, most of the Asian countries came into independent statehood only at about the time that the pillars of the supranational European community were being established by the former colonial powers in their home continent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Asian nations should be far more jealous of their sovereignty. In these circumstances, confronting sensitive issues of sovereignty through formal institution building is more likely to divide than unite the inchoate and incipient Asia-Pacific community. The search for common principles, frameworks, and values to underpin a "community" will be elusive as well as divisive.³²

Asia-Pacific international relations are already covered by many bilateral, regional, and international agreements, declarations, and instruments that incorporate most of these principles.³³ It is difficult to see more than a handful of countries coming together in a more tightly knit Pacific community. Four that come to mind are Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States, natural trans-Pacific friends and allies as the four full-fledged industrial, liberal democracies in the Asia-Pacific region. (New Zealand was part of this community until the ANZUS split in 1985.) Japan and Australia are the northern and southern anchors of the Western alliance system. All four allies pursue "good international citizenship" in human rights, foreign aid, international peacekeeping, and so on. And they tend to support each other: at the United Nations, in the APEC forum, and in encouraging a greater Japanese and continuing U.S. military role in the region.  

Strategic Complexity and Uncertainty

The astonishing diversity of the Asia-Pacific region is matched by complexity (because of the large number and variety of actors and interactions) and uncertainty (due to lack of reliable knowledge and information).  The Asia-Pacific region has undergone revolutionary changes over the past generation. It is likely to do as well over the next generation.³⁴ In some cases these will follow straight-line projections of past patterns. In other cases they will represent radical departures from past and present trends, but we cannot know ahead of time which group of countries will fall into which category. With this caveat in mind, by 2020 the three principal powers of the Asia-Pacific area are likely to be the United States, China, and Japan. The middle powers will probably be India, Indonesia, united Korea, and Malaysia. Russia could fall into the first, second, or neither of the first two categories. There will thus be a more complex, multipolar constellation whose precise elements and movements we cannot accurately estimate, but whose impact on the international relations of the region will be profound.  

The framework for world order resting on superpower rivalry was adopted at Yalta in 1945. Reflecting the two theaters of the Second World War, that order had two geographical components: Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The Yalta-based order for Europe has crumbled, but not for the latter. International relations in the Asia-Pacific arena have lacked the institutional structures that have absorbed periodic stresses across the Atlantic and helped to stabilize relations there. The multilateral structure across the Atlantic also firmly anchored an American presence in Europe. The strategic rationale for U.S. presence in the Pacific has never been as stark and simple as in Europe, and the cultural and political divides across the Asia-Pacific region are deeper and more variegated. As the shroud of the Cold War lifted from the Asia-Pacific area, the compact symmetry of the binary divide gave way to more complex regional confrontations. The most likely source of interstate conflict in Asia-Pacific states will be the maritime environment, the result of disputed maritime boundaries, increased competition for offshore marine resources, greatly increased shipping, continuing acts of piracy, rising sensitivity to environmental abuse by neighbors, and contested points of view on the merits of extending maritime regulatory regimes.

The Asia-Pacific area is undergoing major transformations.³⁵ Some countries are characterized by socioeconomic fragility and regime brittleness, some by enduring insurgencies, and some by territorial disputes. Many economies are growing at an explosive pace, raising doubts about the ability of governments to control them and their social and political consequences and doubts about the ability of resources and the environment to sustain them. The population is growing bigger and older, straining social structures as well as infrastructures. As citizens prosper, they put pressure on their governments to broaden political participation, thus creating stress in political structures too. The security order of the region is caught between an anachronistic Cold War framework and embryonic, untested regional approaches. And in some key countries like China, Indonesia, India, and Russia, leadership transitions are in train that make it difficult for them to make important long-term decisions and for outsiders to assess future courses of actions.

Europe is a continental landmass, the Asia-Pacific region mainly oceanic. The Pacific Ocean can create a sense of community in the same way in which the continental landmass has created the idea of Europe. In Europe and the Americas, land unites and seas divide. In the Pacific, oceans are a main source of livelihood and food for many communities, an important means of communication, and the principal means of linking small territories scattered across a vast seascape. All regional countries attach great importance to sovereign rights in littoral waters. The absence of clear and universally accepted legal regimes governing these rights, especially exclusive economic zone rights, compounds the strategic uncertainty of the region.  

The Asia-Pacific region is witnessing a relative shift in security concerns from internal to external threats. This is reflected in arms acquisitions programs³⁶ that will enable limited medium-range power projection. Short-range intercept aircraft are being supplemented or replaced by airspace control and medium-range interdiction, specialized maritime surveillance aircraft, aerial refueling capabilities, and in a few cases, airborne early-warning and control aircraft. Regional navies are being transformed from riverine and coastal patrol fleets by adding submarines, frigates, and naval aviation capabilities. Communications, command, control, computer and intelligence (C⁴I) systems are being upgraded and modernized through state-of-the-art technical facilities. In part this fits the profile of defense capabilities increasing to match economic strength; in part it is a result of force modernization.  Changing force structures in turn reflect fundamental shifts in defense tasks, but upgraded defense forces will also enable regional governments to assert and exercise commensurate political and strategic influence.

Seapower had been "a neglected dimension in the defense calculations of regional states";³⁷ it re-emerged in importance by the end of the 1980s. Even as the former naval powers Russia and the United States scale down their naval activity, overall naval activity might increase owing to the buildup of China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and India. The increasing congestion of naval traffic in the relatively confined waters of Asia raises the risks of incidents between maritime forces, and increases the need for clear lines of command, open channels of communication, and efficient command and control systems for controlling the risks and managing any incidents. At a relatively simple level, countries can exchange information on planned naval exercises and acquisition of new capabilities. At a more complex level, they can enter into regional maritime surveillance and safety, or avoidance of incidents at sea arrangements. The requirement for the latter is less urgent in the Asia-Pacific area because regional navies do not engage in close quarters surveillance of each other's activities, as was the case with the NATO and Soviet navies. At both levels, maritime MTMC would both reflect and deepen a sense of community.

Arms buildups reflect the existence of more multiple sources of threat to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region than to Europe. The kaleidoscope of Asia-Pacific cultures, cleavages, and conflicts does not permit a simple intercontinental transposition of the European security architecture. These include bilateral rivalry between India and Pakistan, China and India, Vietnam and China, China and Russia, Russia and Japan, Japan and Korea, etc.  In the South China Sea, six nations assert conflicting claims over different parts of the Spratly and Paracel Islands, and maritime boundaries are unresolved. In other words, there are many potentially volatile relationships that intersect with one another.  

Major Players in the Security Order

United States  

The United States is the most formidable military power ever in human history. Military forces give the United States the ability to conduct major war, to deter enemies without having to go to war, and to engage in a range of military requirements in peacetime. General Carl E. Vuono noted that in peacetime, "Conventional forces are the bedrock of America's military-to-military contacts with the forces of over 130 nations."³⁸ In one form or another, he writes, the United States provides military training to 75 percent of the world's armed forces³⁹ to assist in the successful assimilation of new weapons, tactics, and doctrines by friendly forces. The stationing of ground forces overseas is the strongest possible commitment of U.S. resolve to defend an ally. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps can project military power at great speed in a tangible demonstration of U.S. concern at a deteriorating security environment. U.S. air power, with an unmatched surge capacity through heavy sealift and airlift capabilities, underscores the credibility of U.S. involvement while increasing its ability to punish the aggressor.⁴⁰ Taking these together, what better demonstration of the U.S. sense of community with allies than its willingness to put the U.S. soldier on the lineCthe fellowship and ties of blood?

Even the United States cannot undertake such commitments on its own. As the drawdown of its military forces continues,⁴¹ it will have to rely crucially on forward basing in critical areas in order to retain the capacity to concentrate power rapidly there, and on pre-positioning of supplies, equipment, and infra-structure (adequate seaports and air bases). The military efficiency and effectiveness of this would be diminished without MTMC in peacetime. Alliances will be supplanted in operational contexts with ad hoc security coalitions. Their precise membership might differ from one locale to another, but the core will consist of the United States, NATO, Japan, Australia, and other like-minded democracies. The Gulf War demonstrated and Bosnia confirmed two truths: the United States will not lead without followers, and the other Western powers will not follow without U.S. leadership.

The metaphor that suits U.S. perceptions and preferences is that of the balancing wheel. Washington is the hub with spokes running to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea in northeast Asia; the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand in Southeast Asia; and Australia in the southwest Pacific. South Korea's economic success has helped to transform a narrow military protector-client relationship into a more genuinely equal and multidimensional partnership. The United States has treaty-based relations with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand. While it has had to withdraw from bases in the Philippines, the United States maintains a range of security links and relations with a number of countries. If allies are prepared to accept responsibility for the defense of home territories to the best of their abilities against the backdrop of a strategic "over-the-horizon" U.S. military presence, then a continued U.S. commitment to the peace and security of Asia-Pacific will meet the interests and the disposition of the United States. Most regional governments do acknowledge that the Pacific security framework established by the United States has been an important shield behind which they have pursued their search for peace and prosperity. In their view, the continued strategic engagement of the United States will remain the cornerstone of Asia-Pacific security.  

Japan

The anchor of Asia-Pacific security architecture is the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. Japan and the United States are vital to the Asia-Pacific region and indeed to the world, for between them the two biggest economies account for almost 40 percent of the world's GNP. The United States is the biggest, richest, most productive, most innovative, and probably the best balanced economy in the world. Japan is the world's largest single source of surplus savings, the world's biggest capital investor, and probably the world's leader in the organization and technology of manufacturing. America is the most universal and Japan the most singular of modern societies.

Japanese participation in regional security arrangements is viewed with equanimity in Western capitals around the Pacific Rim, but not in all others. Racially homogeneous and not generally welcoming of foreigners, Japan has had little participation or cultural link with many countries in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of multilateral agreements. A militarily resurgent Japan would send ripples of anxiety around the region even in the absence of any indications of hostile intent.  

An independent Japanese security role is difficult to visualize, however, unless there is a breakdown in the bilateral security relationship between Tokyo and Washington. An independent Japanese security role in the Asia-Pacific arena would set off so many alarm bells around the Pacific Rim and provoke such a dangerous backlash from China, South Korea, and others that it is difficult to visualize policymakers allowing the U.S.-Japan security relationship to lapse. Aware of the sentiments that it arouses in many parts of Asia, Japan is unlikely to seek to convert economic power and political influence into military muscle. Its security relationship with the United States will therefore remain a cornerstone of its foreign policy, despite increasing independence within that framework.

Dr. Kurt Campbell, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and the Pacific, testifying before Congress on April 15, 1997,⁴² described the U.S.-Japan security relationship as "the single most important pillar of peace and stability in the Asia Pacific region" in a period of change and uncertainty. Because the regional environment was so dynamic, a static and backward looking bilateral alliance would be incapable of providing stability. Hence the U.S. decision to review and strengthen the alliance, beginning with the 1995 East Asian Strategic Report commitment to maintaining around 100,000 U.S. troops in the region. Campbell outlined five key elements of the evolving U.S.-Japan security cooperation:  

• Building a deep and profound partnership on regional security issues

• Continued U.S. military engagement and presence in Asia-Pacific, including the maintenance of current U.S. force levels in Japan for the indefinite future

• Enhancement of the operational credibility and effectiveness of U.S.-Japan defense cooperation in order to deter crises in the region and to operate from Japan should crises occur

• Expansion of bilateral cooperation on technology and interoperability

• Easing the burden of U.S. deployments in Japan on the Japanese without reducing overall U.S. capabilities or presence.  

Dr. Campbell acknowledged Chinese concerns at the perceived "expansion" of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the Clinton-Hashimoto Declaration of April 1996. (These concerns were heightened by the "reinvigoration" of the Australia-U.S. alliance in July.) However, he said, the enhanced U.S.-Japan security cooperation represented "a commitment to stability, transparency, and dialogue that threatens no one." Instead, it provided the underpinning to the strategy for integrating China into the region, moving toward a lasting peace in Korea, and defending and promoting U.S. interests all the way to the Persian Gulf.  

China  

In the case of Singapore, even national preparedness entails close MTMC with other nations. Through a network of bilateral arrangements, Singapore follows one of the most extensive programs of overseas military training of any country. An unnamed Western diplomat estimates that one-third of Singapore's air training is conducted overseas, and the proportion could reach one-half within 2 years if plans to open new training bases in Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and elsewhere come to fruition.⁴⁶ The rationale for Singapore's overseas military training is twofold. First, Singapore simply lacks airspace to train its air force personnel. Once its jets take off, they reach Malaysian airspace within seconds. Second, overseas training is a confidence-building measure, enhancing military transparency and assuaging neighboring concerns about military modernization. Force structure scattered overseas is less threatening than force structure concentrated at home.  

Multilateral Arrangements

Multilateral frameworks can be extremely useful in nesting major power security interests collaboratively.⁴⁷ For example, unease about Japan playing a prominent offshore military role remains a fact of regional political life. Active participation in multilateral peacekeeping missions and in the ARF setting gives Japan the opportunity to assuage regional concerns about a new leadership role in international affairs. China could signal a willingness to engage with the region in a nonhegemonic and constructive manner by active participation in regional security forums. This would also promote greater transparency about China's military capabilities and intentions. For the United States, multilateral forums offer the opportunity to ease anxieties about the extent of the U.S. military drawdown and its impact on regional security. And, much more so than bilateral arrangements, multilateral forums contribute directly to fostering a sense of regional identity and community.

Combined exercises and personnel exchanges are common and extensive throughout Asia-Pacific. Examples of the former include RIMPAC (conducted by the U.S. Navy with allied participation off Hawaii or the U.S. west coast), FPDA, ANZUS, and ANZAC exercises. Examples of personnel exchanges include secondments, instructor exchanges, and enrolments in regional staff and training schools and colleges. In Australia, regional military participants can be found in the single services staff college, the Joint Services Staff College (JSSC) in Canberra, the Peacekeeping Centre of the Australian Defense Force in Williamtown, and the Australian College of Defense and Strategic Studies (ACDSS) in Canberra.⁴⁸ For example, in its first 3 years of operation, the ACDSS had officers and officials from the following countries, most annually: Brunei, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Joint exercises might be held to be prerequisites and contributions to community building. The exercises themselves give depth and resilience to MTMC; in turn, the smoothness of their operation rests upon contact and understanding among the participating personnel and units. They are preceded and followed by briefing and evaluation sessions. Countries that exercise together regularly benefit by producing joint exercise manuals, perhaps even joint doctrine.

The Five Power Defense Agreement (FPDA) was concluded in 1971 by Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. All partners are agreed that the FPDA, which at first blush might appear to be a postcolonial Commonwealth anachronism, provides a valuable basis for the three Western allies to contribute to regional security. The FPDA has become increasingly useful as a training organization. It contributes to the maintenance of interoperability by regular combined exercises. The FPDA is also useful as a medium for dialogue between the partners. The FPDA defense ministers' meeting in Malaysia in April 1997 included discussions on the Taiwan Strait, the Korean peninsula, and the conflicting sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.  

Malaysia and Singapore value the FPDA partly for the sense of security it provides, especially with the air of uncertainty hanging over the U.S. role in the region after the pullout from the Philippines, and partly for the opportunities to exercise with the more sophisticated Western defense forces. For Britain, the arrangements are the last remaining formal mechanism for demonstrating continued engagement in the Pacific after handing over Hong Kong to China. The Flying Fish FPDA exercises in April 1997 involved 12,000 personnel from the five FPDA defense forces in the flotilla of 35 warships (including an aircraft carrier and two submarines) and 140 aircraft.  At the same time, defense ministers welcomed the continuing U.S. security presence in Asia and Britain's commitment to deploy its navy more frequently in the region after returning Hong Kong to China.  Singapore's Defense Minister Dr. Tony Tan said that the FPDA was more relevant in 1997 than when first formed. It was part of the region's political landscape, and its loss would create a sense of insecurity and instability. Unlike other defense arrangements, he added, the FPDA is an operational scheme where five countries combine together and conduct regular exercises.⁴⁹

The joint exercises and personnel exchanges serve many purposes. They promote professional bonding and build personal relationships and trust; facilitate networking and foster cooperation among officers of similar rank from many different countries; promote transparency and interoperability, including enhanced supply and system support; permit benchmarking and measurement; facilitate skills development; and help to create and sustain mutual confidence.

Combined exercises and personnel exchanges are not cost free. They require considerable financial outlays; problems arise because of differences in equipment and procedures; the personnel selected must have the requisite language skills; and the host country has to accept the risk of foreign military personnel gaining access to some of its information and workings.

Nevertheless, there are tangible benefits.  They increase mutual understanding and confidence and facilitate political contacts; they lead to cross-cultural professional exposure and to the fostering of a cross-national professional military culture; and perhaps most importantly, certainly for the purposes of this paper, they produce better understanding of the political system, defense perspectives, and culture of the host country. That is, they create the "infrastructure" that will be needed to build a community.

If organized in tandem with support for alliance partners, they can serve still more purposes through intelligence and information exchange programs, foreign military sales programs, and the like. Alliance programs create a formal medium of cooperation. They demonstrate a minimum level of commitment and can promote nation building. According to General Vuono, the U.S. Army actively supports nation building all over the world, by assisting with the development of infrastructure.⁵⁰ And they can help to avoid unintended engagement.

Two-Track Diplomacy  

The quasi-diplomatic second-track channel of dialogue and discussion is one of the striking features of contemporary Asia-Pacific activity. The formula of allowing officials to participate in their private/personal capacity gives them the latitude to deal with pressing issues a little more creatively than would be possible entirely within the constraints of official positions. While officials try to shed some inhibitions on free dialogue, academics try to address problems with a greater sense of awareness of the real world of policy choices facing decisionmakers. Track Two is the medium for the dialectic between cutting edge thought and best practice.

The Asia-Pacific region has only one regionwide Track One framework, ARF. The Forum is unusual in that those in charge of its establishment, agenda, and management are not the major powers. The ARF is unusual also in that while the driving seat is occupied by ASEAN, the primary focus of security concerns is northeast Asia. In combination with the Council for Security Cooperation in Asia-Pacific (CSCAP) and the regional network of Institutes of Strategic and International Studies, this places ASEAN at the hub of Asia-Pacific governmental and second-track security dialogue and confidence-building and preventive diplomacy activities.

Like Track One, Track Two activities, too, are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Consolidation of existing frameworks and forums may be more pressing a need than multiplying them still further; otherwise we risk stretching resources and attention spans to beyond the point of sustainability or sensible returns.

Military officers and defense officials, retired as well as serving, take part in Track Two activities, the largest of which is probably the Asia-Pacific Roundtable, organized in Kuala Lumpur by Malaysia's Institute for Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) since 1986. They are to be found also in CSCAP, which predates ARF by 1 year. But, as a general rule, defense officers and officials do not make their voices heard as loudly and often as they should. Nevertheless, the networking opportunities provided by the Track Two schedule do allow defense personnel from the different countries around the Pacific Rim to interact with one another informally and perhaps to lay the foundation for a Pacific community. Greater and more public participation by those charged with waging wars is important to preserving peace.

ARF sceptics describe it as little more than an optimistic illusion and the Track Two channels as a self-contained cosy network of think-tank specialists. ARF has failed to make any progress on any of the regional conflicts on the Korean peninsula, in the Taiwan Strait, or in the South China Sea. ASEAN countries are less suspicious of the United Nations than regional institutions' encroachments on their sovereignty in such matters as peacekeeping and arms registration.

The scepticism is difficult to fathom. ARF, still in its infancy, is ideally well placed to serve as the consolidating and legitimating instrument for regional security initiatives and confidence-building measures. It is on public record as supporting such measures as the U.N. arms register, exchanges of unclassified military information, maritime security cooperation, regional peacekeeping, preventive diplomacy, and nonproliferation. ARF is also trying to integrate Track One and Two. In 1996, for example, it gave formal blessing to a Track Two seminar on nonproliferation under the combined sponsorship of Australia, Germany, and the European Union (EU). The seminar, held in Jakarta on December 6-7, 1996, was attended by more than 50 academics and officials in their personal capacities, including representation from every ARF member.⁵¹  

In their discussions, seminar participants were guided by the vision of a world eventually free of all weapons of mass destruction. The stability and prosperity of Asia-Pacific were acknowledged to have flowed in part from the widespread adherence by regional countries to the global nonproliferation norms and regimes, the centrepiece of which is the NPT. Consultation and cooperation have also become established norms in the region, as exemplified in ARF and CSCAP in official and Track Two channels, respectively.

The organizers tried, without success, to encourage governments to send defense officers and officials to the Jakarta seminar. Yet direct participation of the military is unavoidable if progress is to be achieved on a number of institution and confidence-building measures in the region. The establishment of maritime safety, surveillance, and security regimes is of central relevance in Asia-Pacific's oceanic geostrategic environment; implementation is not practicable without direct and detailed involvement by the maritime defense forces of the region.

Similarly, we all seem to favor greater military transparency in the region, including the publication of defense white papers. These are products of different policy formulation processes and are aimed at different constituencies. Sometimes they seek to provide information and rationales to domestic groups. At other times they are meant to reassure friends and allies or caution potential adversaries. To be meaningful, the papers will have to be standardized. Participation by the military in the process of producing national white papers on defense is taken for granted. Their involvement in establishing a cross-national uniform standard for the region would also seem to be fundamental. They need to come to agreement on a standard table of contents, common budget components, costing methodology and units of measurement, common force structure elements, consistent definitions of threat perceptions, the acceptable balance between too detailed, technical, and inadequate information, and so on.  

Obstacles to a Pacific Community

The first obstacle to the development of a Pacific community is the size, diversity, and differing historical experiences of the area. The intimacy of ASEAN would be difficult to carry over into the larger and more varied group of countries around the Pacific Rim. The mix of Asian and European settler societies is matched by uneven levels of economic development and different degrees of state formation.

A second obstacle is the great diversity around the Pacific even within the military sector of societies. The defense forces and higher defense organizations have different social status in their respective countries. In those countries where their social status is high and their role in government is prominent, conventional forces provide the United States "an indispensable avenue of influence and a source of positive change."⁵² The organization and division of responsibility among the different services and between the services and intelligence agencies, the military and the police, the uniformed services and the civilian bureaucracy, and the defense-military wing and the government vary from country to country. This is an especially acute problem for the Asia-Pacific area because of its maritime environment and the contrasting roles of defense and civilian agencies for coastal and maritime surveillance, policing, and enforcement activities.  

Third, there are different conceptions of peace and security and different approaches to conflict resolution. By and large, Western countries still operate within the framework of traditional, military security. Asian governments seem to favor a conception of comprehensive security. The Anglo-U.S. tradition of adversarial proceedings through the legal system differs markedly from Asian preferences for nonadversarial approaches to conflict resolution. The working assumption of Asians is that a dispute does not involve simply one issue but a network of controversies; each disputant presents only one side of the dispute; all disputants must continue to coexist within the community; and therefore any settlement must satisfy both sides through a compromise solution. The adversarial approach is quite the opposite in its assumption that the one issue at dispute can be isolated from the context of wider controversies (so China can be censured for human rights violations but still be expected to cooperate with Western efforts to abort North Korea's nuclear weapons program); the evidence presented is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; in each isolated dispute one party is right and the other wrong in accordance with law or precedent; and the court (including the court of world public opinion, for example the U.N. Human Rights Commission) is duty bound to sift through the facts and find accordingly. Many Asians tend to view the adversarial approach as a method of conflict aggravation, not resolution.

The geographical point of intersection of the Pacific balance of power is northeast Asia. As noted above, the balance has been fluid and unsettled for all this century. Three of the world's five nuclear-weapons states are involved in the Northeast Asian power equation. The fourth obstacle is that there are no security (nor economic) multilateral institutions, although KEDO might arguably be said to be one. Its Executive Committee comprises the United States, Japan, and South Korea; its membership includes: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Finland, Indonesia, New Zealand, and most recently, the European Union. Its purpose is to enable North Korea to eschew the nuclear weapons option in return for help in developing nuclear energy for peaceful use.⁵³ Other than this, however, North Korea has been notably and frustratingly resistant to taking part in regional forums, even those under ASEAN auspices. Unlike Southeast Asia, there is no comfort level with multilateral discussion, no habit and practice of intensive consultations among the security elite (policy makers and intellectuals) based on personalized relationships and underpinned by a language like English used as the common medium of dialogue by the elite.

The fifth obstacle is the difficulty of multinational cooperation in the types of maritime activities in which regional forces are engaged. Multinational MTMC in NATO Europe was facilitated by the known enemy and the resulting sense of common purpose. The major NATO powers operate blue water navies with sea- assertion capabilities and can cooperate, for example, in such multinational operations as protection of sea lanes of control. In the Asia-Pacific region, by contrast, the navies are tasked with "brown" or "green" water sovereignty protection and sea denial. These focus on national security and are less amenable to multinational cooperation.⁵⁴

A sixth problem is how best to involve China in regional forums and dialogue. Its preferred approach seems to be to make unilateral statements of principle to complement bilateral channels for negotiation.⁵⁵ Considering the critical role of China in all outstanding issues of dispute-Korea, Taiwan and the South China Sea-its reluctance to participate in multilateral forums is a major drawback. In April 1997, China gave a stunning demonstration of market power and diplomatic bullying in successfully suppressing any debate of its human rights record in the UN Human Rights Commission. The key to its diplomatic strategy was to bilateralize the politics of decisionmaking in the multilateral forum and so divide and conquer.

The contrasting prescriptions for dealing with China reflect the ambivalent interpretations of its emergence as a major power. They range from appeasement and containment at the two extremes, to enmeshment or engagement (using economic incentives and disincentives to reward and punish) and constrainment in between.⁵⁶

Two sets of paired observations form the basis of such divergence. First, China has no history of territorial expansion and forcible conquest of foreign people, but neither is it prepared to renounce existing territorial claims or ready to use force to defend them. Second, for the first time in 200 years, the world has to cope with a united and powerful China. But so, too, does China have to come to terms with its status as the emerging superpower. Unfortunately, China has no historical, philosophical, or literary tradition of diplomatic intercourse as a great power in a system of great powers. Its inheritance is that of the Middle Kingdom. In this world view, even Australia and Indonesia are reduced to the status of peripheral countries. The legacy may be conducive, nevertheless, to socializing China into a de facto concert system for managing regional order, where stability is largely the outcome of interactions among the major Asia-Pacific powers.

In Track Two, CSCAP has faced reconciling the participation of both China and Taiwan. At most, China has been prepared to permit individuals from Taiwan to attend as observers in CSCAP working groups. If China's condition is rejected, the Council is fatally weakened in membership: no security dialogue on the Asia-Pacific states can be meaningful without Chinese participation. But if China is permitted to join CSCAP on its terms, then the raison d'être of CSCAP is fatally weakened: the major power in the region will have been facilitated in blackballing a smaller neighbor.⁵⁷

Peace cannot be maintained in Asia without accommodating China's interests, but nor will it be durable if based on appeasement. The trick is to strike the right balance between containment and appeasement. The policy of constructive engagement has exposed the people of China to international influences and facilitated the development of a large market-oriented sector in parts of China's economy. Asia-Pacific governments remain keen on integrating China more fully into open regional and global trading arrangements, to "domesticate" them into the Asian family of nations.

A seventh potential obstacle is the vexed issue of sovereignty concerns. MTMC could facilitate common, coordinated, regionwide attempts to solve the problems of new security: drugs trafficking, piracy, trafficking in humans for illegal migration and prostitution, etc. In the United States, for instance, as one element in a comprehensive counternarcotics strategy, military units help law enforcement agencies detect and defeat drug trafficking. Mobile U.S. training teams advise the agencies of drug-producing countries, and the U.S. military provides equipment, maintenance support, and training to the agencies as well.⁵⁸ There would seem to be no insurmountable operational obstacles to the military forces of different Asia-Pacific countries launching a coordinated campaign to combat the new threats to regional security.

Yet all these have the potential to raise delicate sovereignty issues. Thailand, for example, might be unduly sensitive on the subject of piracy in Southeast Asia because of the adverse reflection on its political and physical capacity to control offshore activities by its citizens. If incidents occur within territorial jurisdictions, countries would be reluctant to cede control to joint as opposed to national law enforcement authorities. Cooperative regimes can also be affected by historical baggage, in the form of memories of colonialism when efforts to impose law and order by the major Western maritime powers led to colonization.

The final difficulty is that of practicalities. Specifically, most military budgets are operating under tight fiscal discipline these days, certainly tighter than used to be the case in previous decades. Community-building activities like combined exercises, personnel exchanges, and reciprocal staff college secondments are expensive programs. From this point of view, multilateral exercises give better value for money. This in turn poses a dilemma to regional governments. Military efficiency and interoperability with allies might be better promoted through bilateral programs. The more clearly political goal of building a Pacific community might be better pursued through multilateral channels. The United States and other Western allies rely increasingly on maintaining a technological edge to compensate for reductions in the size of their defense forces. The more sophisticated Western forces have strict restrictions on the release of classified material beyond the close circle of reliable, traditional allies. And all defense forces are sensitive about the intelligence gathering opportunities by potential adversaries through combined activity.

  Conclusion

Military-to-military cooperation leading to the creation of a Pacific community could adopt the building-block approach,⁵⁹ with many subregional arrangements dealing with security issues in parallel, building incrementally on the extensive range of bilateral and limited arrangements already in place, progressively expanding the latter by membership and scope and type of activity, and so addressing the security concerns held in common around the region. The creation of a Pacific military community would signal the attainment of a stable regional security environment. If we do get to that destination, then ASEAN, ARF, CSCAP, the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (comprising Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the ASEAN navies, China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States), workshops, conferences, and the extensive network of joint exercises and personnel exchanges are likely to have played crucial roles along the way.  

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Notes  

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