STRENGTH THROUGH COOPERATION
         Military Forces in the  Asia-Pacific Region

ASIA-PACIFIC MILITARY POWER IN THE 21ST CENTURY
      Colin S. Gray  

Sooner or later, if present trends continue without change, war is probable in Asia.¹

 

Arthur Waldron

  Interesting Times

"May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse.  If some of the journalists who write about the Asia-Pacific region are to be believed, that curse is performing overtime today.  We are barely recovered from the message conveyed in the unsubtle titling of George Friedman and Meredith Lebard's book, The Coming War with Japan (1991)Ca message aided and abetted by Tom Clancy in his novel,  Debt of Honor (1994)Cthan we are assailed, no less bluntly, by books with such titles as, The Coming Conflict with China (1997) and Dragon Strike:  The Millenium War (1997).²  As a defense professional I bow to none in my willingness  to consider menaces to national and international security, but the discovery in such quick succession of two all- but-peer competitors with the United States is a little hard to digest.

Of course, it is wonderfully convenient to settle upon a single dominant threat as a basis for defense planning.   Bearing in mind the significantly maritime nature of the Asia-Pacific region, it is highly relevant to my topic as well as rather commonplace to observe that flexibility and adaptability are prominent among the more characteristic qualities of naval forces.   Nonetheless, requirements for flexibility and adaptability cannot suffice as guidance for force planning, or defense planning more broadly.  If flexible and adaptable naval forces are an important part of the security answer, as must be true, we need first to define the security question or questions.  What are the missions that need to be performed flexibly?

Dr. Colin S. Gray is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Centre for Security Studies at Hull University, England.  From 1981 until 1993, Dr. Gray was founding president of the National Institute for Public Policy, a defense-oriented think tank in Washington.

Apart from the fact that an exciting title helps to sell a book, identification of a single, central security problem is of inestimable value as organizer of otherwise chaotic and ambiguous facts and possible facts.  In the wise words of economic philosopher F. A. Hayek, "Without a theory the facts are silent."³  The Asia-Pacific region poses such a variety of state players, relationships between and among them, and security issues as to threaten to paralyze thought, policy, and strategy for reason of its very complexity.  In the Asia-Pacific region, as in Europe at present, when you are not sure about the security question, it is difficult to be confident about the answer.⁴  I suggest that there are some noteworthy parallel uncertainties of  focus at both ends of the Eurasian bicontinent or "World-Island."⁵  I suggest, also, that much of that uncertainty in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe is avoidable and unnecessary, if only we apply in a disciplined way the lessons of strategic history to the challenges of today.

It is open season on "whither Asia-Pacific," and particularly on "whither China" as the principal influence upon the course of future strategic history in the region.  However, statecraft and strategy must operate without benefit of navigational assistance by a reliable crystal ball.  We do not, and cannot, know-really know, that is-the strategic future of the Asia-Pacific region.  But, we do know how statecraft and strategy "work"; we know how best  to plan prudently against uncertainty;⁶ and we know a great deal about the structure of the security problem or problems in the Asia-Pacific region.  The challenge today is not the herculean one of  trying to pick accurately "the right China" of 2010 or 2020;  that would be an impossible, hence  foolish, enterprise.  What we can do is pick an approach to the provision of security in the Asia-Pacific region that is likely to leave us with the fewest regrets about matters of wide and deep consequence.  The ambition of this paper, therefore, is not so much to paint a plausible picture of the future strategic landscape and seascape of the Asia-Pacific arena as to suggest an approach to statecraft and security for the region that should yield a minimum of regret for paths not taken and that will be tolerant of errors over matters of detail.  

It is conventional to argue that detail matters more than broad trends, just as many people believe, not unreasonably, that tactics matter more than strategy.  As a strategist, I am obliged to reject that argument.  It is better to fight the right war poorly, though hopefully still well enough, rather than the wrong war very well.  If you do not believe me, compare British with German strategic history in this century.  We cannot possibly know exactly how capable the U.S. Armed Forces will need to be for deterrence and defense in the Asia-Pacific region 20 years from now.  Similarly, we cannot know exactly when, with what precise means, or even "if" the PRC will seek a definitive military solution to the standing challenge posed by the continuing de facto independence of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan.  The task for responsible statecraft and strategy is to provide prudently in a fault-tolerant manner against some major threats in the future.

History, even modern history, tells us that bad times do have a way of returning.  The "worst case" strategic scenario for the British Empire in the early 1930s was understood to be simultaneous hostilities against an enemy in northern Europe, an enemy in the Mediterranean, and an enemy in the Asia- Pacific region.  Ten years later that scenario came true, though it came true in the beneficial circumstances of Britain having a new great continental ally in the Soviet Union, and a great maritime ally in the United States.  Truly the worst case for Britain would have been a context wherein Nazi Germany defeated the Soviet Union, and the Empire of Japan had decided wisely to avoid attacking the United States in its southward rampage.  In their nature, structure, and purpose, though not in the detail of their character and conduct, we understand a great deal about the future.  Throughout history, statecraft, strategy, and war have not altered in their nature, composition, and mutual relations.

By way of a roadmap, we need to identify and analyze the many pieces of the puzzle that, viewed holistically, comprise our subject.  After identification of the pieces on the board of Asia-Pacific security, some propositions about statecraft and  military power are suggested that should meet the need for security in the region.  

Insecurity in Asia-Pacific:  Pieces of the Puzzle

Surely too much of the plot is not revealed when it is mentioned that the current debate about Asia-Pacific security has come to focus upon the intentions and prospective capabilities of the PRC.⁷  Nonetheless, central though China is, and must be, for our deliberations, everything relates to everything else in broad matters of security, and we should not rush to reduce the complexity of Asia-Pacific regional security to a simple focus upon a particular prediction about China.  Also, even if China is identified as the dominant problem for security in east Asia, that identification may not carry self-evident implications.  With respect to the United States, for example, even if the argument that an aggressive nationalistic China is coming is judged plausible, the question Aso what" still has to be posed and answered.  What perils could a China increasingly hegemonic in east Asia pose to the interests of a United States that is nuclear armed, has the world's greatest navy, and is a very wide ocean distant from the region in question?  Lest there be any misunderstanding, there is a continuing key role for the United States in the structure of security in east Asia.  However, U.S. policy and strategy do need to be related clearly to some principles for regional and global security that are more persuasive than vague ideas about "engagement."

Arguments, hypotheses, theories, and predictions abound concerning the security problems of the Asia-Pacific region.  While recognizing that every piece of the puzzle connects, ultimately, with every other piece, as well as with the world beyond Asia-Pacific, we can approach security for the region usefully by distinguishing between primary and secondary pieces of the puzzle.  This is not an attempt to list like strictly with like, or to rank order for relative importance within each of the two categories.  The purpose here simply is to answer the general question:  "What are the pieces, or players, that constitute the security problem, or problems, of the Asia-Pacific region?"  

Primary Pieces

Power Vacuum.  The collapse of the Soviet Union created power vacuums in east central Europe and in northeast Asia.⁸  China is promoted by the weakness of the new Russia, which may well prove to be a persisting condition.  China is no longer strategically diverted from the wider world by major continental insecurities;  elimination of the principal regional foe promoted China instantly into a higher league;  and the absence of a Soviet menace apparently lowers the intensity of U.S. national interest in the region.  Scholars are not entirely of one mind on the danger in vacuums of power, or even on the subject of whether or not the absence of any obvious balance of power structure has to translate as a vacuum, but nonetheless there is general respect for the prudential view that Henry Kissinger advances.  Writing about the lessons of the Suez crisis of 1956, Kissinger plausibly claims, "Suez turned out to be America's initiation into the realities of global power, one of the lessons of which is that vacuums always get filled and that the principal issue is not whether, but by whom."⁹ 

The ongoing new Russian revolution has taken a principal piece off the board of Asia-Pacific security for a while.  That removal happens to coincide with a period of remarkable sustained economic growth in China and understandably, if unhappily, has left the United States more than a little unfocussed in its security policy in the area.  NATO enlargement in Europe is in part a response to anxieties raised by a power-vacuum theory, and it is raising some of the same objections and triggering the same questions that soon will be familiar from the debate over security in east Asia.  Can a presumption of hegemonic ambition, which we take as a license preventively to organize a balance (or healthy friendly imbalance) of power, help create the very peril it is supposed to answer?  Whatever your general theoretical preference, the fact remains that the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union as a strategic "pole" for security and insecurity in the Asia-Pacific area seems to open opportunities to other players-perhaps for China to advance, and perhaps for the United States to sail and fly away.

Chinese opportunities, ambitions, and capabilities.  China today is not a serious problem for international security, but China 15 years from now could pose a severe menace indeed.  David Shamburgh is persuasive when he writes:  

Whether China will become a military threat to its neighbors, an adversary of the United States, a systemic challenge to the global order, or a cultural-ideological challenge to the West remain open questions.  But China's sheer size and growing power are already altering the contours of Asian security, international commerce, and the global balance of power.¹⁰  

The problem is that many people have come to believe that China (PRC) soon will be the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific region and that that dominant, or hegemonic, status will not be challenged effectively either from within the region or by the dominant power of today, the United States.  Perception and anticipation can assume a somewhat malign reality as a false dawn.  There has been no power transition from a regional order in Asia-Pacific underwritten by the United States, to a successor order organized by, and for the principal benefit of, the PRC.  Furthermore, it is not certain that such an international transition will occur.  In the 1930s and the 1950s, Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union were promoted in public perception of their power, especially their military power, far ahead of  military reality.¹¹  So it is today with China. There is no question that China, one day, could be a worthy peer competitor to the United States, or indeed to almost any foe or combination of foes.  But, China is not a plausible peer competitor in the 1990s, notwithstanding the probable fact of an average annual rate of economic growth of 9 percent from 1979 until the present.

One needs to take preventive measures.  Today this argument applies, indeed is being applied by sundry alleged experts, in both Europe and east Asia.  Should NATO enlarge modestly into Catholic east central Europe, being careful to retain its character as a collective defense organization, so as to fill preventively a significant fraction of the security vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet empire?  Does, or will, China need to be contained lest it assume a hegemonic position in east Asia?  Would the organization of the containment of China create the hostile dragon of our fears, or is that hostile dragon already extant?  Unfortunately for statespeople and defense planners, those questions are not really researchable.  The future has not happened, and we are in the realm of guesswork.  Are Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro correct when they write:  

China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to dominate Asia, not by invading and occupying neighboring nations, but by being so much more powerful than they are that nothing will be allowed to happen in east Asia without China's at least tacit consent.¹²  

In case that was not clear enough, Bernstein and Munro proceed to advise:  

Our argument is that China during the past decade or so has set goals for itself that are directly contrary to American interests, the most important of those goals being to replace the United States as the preeminent power in Asia, to reduce American influence, to prevent Japan and the United States from creating a kind of "contain China" front, and to extend its power into the South China and East China Seas so that it controls the region's essential sea-lanes.  China aims at achieving a kind of hegemony.¹³  

Bernstein and Munro are probably correct.  Their reading of current official Chinese ambition is certainly plausible and is consistent enough with the known facts as not to jar.  However, many countries have entertained grand visions of national greatness.  With reference to this particular case of China in the 21st century, the vision of China as the coming east Asian hegemon needs to be tempered, at least, by the possibility, even probability, that hegemony could be denied for three sets of reasons:  (1) the Chinese economic miracle could become much less miraculous, and not only because of  adverse economic developments;  (2)  the United States could continue to stand in its way; and (3) some other, necessarily Japanese-led, antihegemonic power or coalition could frustrate China.  

So, the problem today is that we are confined to debate what China might become 15 and more years into the future.  Even if one is strongly disinclined to believe in an aggressive China that would be willing to risk its growing economic prosperity for the intangible qualities of ever greater awe and respect, still there is no denying that there are ample grounds for anxiety.  In China today we see an insecure leadership exploiting national feeling for domestic stability;  we see a country in monumental transition in its domestic economy and society, yet with an atavistic and unresponsive governmental structure;  we see cultural arrogance; and we see the confidence born of protracted economic success.  In addition, we see acute sensitivity to matters of sovereignty, broadly of political "face" and geostrategically to what amounts to a demand for the "security  space" of a  great power.  Also, in China we see a country with unresolved problems of national unification over Taiwan and with irridentist difficulties, major and minor, on virtually all its complicated continental and maritime frontiers.  Considered overall, to understand what is motivating Chinese statecraft and strategy today, you could do a lot worse than to read the speech that Thucydides ascribes to the Athenian envoys to Sparta in 432 B.C. on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.  The Athenians explained to the Spartans that the Athenian motives for empire were of the strongest and could be summarized as "fear, honor, and interest."¹⁴

With Russia as a contemporary player in east Asian security, primarily as a source of arms supply and military expertise, with a widespread-if inaccurate-perception of declining U.S. interest in security in the region and with no robust security structures extant in Asia-Pacific, it is scarcely surprising that China, in effect, is pushing opportunistically upon what, ironically, we can identify as an "open door."  Without wishing to suggest ideological affinity between the two, nonetheless one cannot help noticing that the reason for much of China's international success today is not unlike the reason for the early successes of Nazi Germany.  Bluntly stated, one's policy and strategy are apt to be flattered if no one tries hard to stop you.

Distant thunder.  Democracies typically respond well to clear and present danger.  The good news that there is no clear and present danger today either in Europe or east Asia is offset somewhat by the bad news that the absence of such unambiguous danger is wont to leave democracies rudderless for policy and strategy.  Without the stern discipline provided by contemporary danger, democracies are apt to indulge in fantasies about perpetual peace and, generally, allow their noble aspirations to overwhelm an historically educated prudence. There is a single, dominant center of gravity to the myriad security problems in the Asia-Pacific region; it comprises the ambitions and dynamic capabilities of the PRC.  China is, in effect, Athe organizing problem" for security and insecurity in the region.  This is not to claim that the PRC is a direct player in every local dispute, far from it.  But it is to say that, even today, far ahead of mature realization of China's long-term drive  for military modernization, there is a China connection to just about every regional security issue in east Asia.  Even though today there is a lack of clear focus to policy toward China on the part of the United States and Japan (among others), already we are beginning to treat the China problem as the organizer, the discriminator, the provider of most meaning, for much of what is happening in and around east Asia.  This condition has crept up on us.  No one has decided, as yet, to "contain" China-to pick a concept not entirely at random-notwithstanding Chinese claims to the contrary, but we are now some way along the road of relating everything that happens, or that might happen, in the region, to what can be called "the looming menace" of China.

Today we face the classic intelligence conundrum.  There is little room for argument about PRC military programs, especially its programs for quite distant power projection.  Even the mysteries of the PRC military budget are not that hard to unravel, albeit with a  notable measure of uncertainty.  The difficulty lies not so much with information, but rather with understanding.¹⁵  The rapid rise in the level of China's defense effort is comparatively recent, dating, not coincidentally, only from the Tiananmen Square year of 1989.  China's  defense behavior and military acquisitions can be explained by theories that need cause scant alarm to the United States and Japan, only minor alarm to the smaller neighbors of the PRC, and major alarm only to the Republic of China on Taiwan.  Alas, a similar argument could have been, indeed was, made for Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, and for Imperial Germany at the turn of the century. In all these cases, the relevant question is not so much what is China (or Germany) doing, but rather why is China (or Germany) doing it?  As much to the point is the question of whether or not the path and pace of Chinese (or German) high policy can be altered significantly for the better by the rough discipline of timely international opposition.

From Woody Island in the Paracels, to Mischief Reef in the Spratlys, to coercive missile diplomacy over and into the international waters of the Taiwan Strait, China has provided convincing evidence of national determination. But determination to achieve what-to recover control of "her own backyard," as was said of Hitler's reoccupation of the  Rhineland in 1936;  or to demarcate an expansive definition of her security space, effecting forceful unilateral settlement of past wrongs and unfinished business of national sovereignty and honor; or to become as hegemonic in the area as opportunity allows?

To  repeat, our difficulty today lies in the essential ambiguity of Chinese behavior and defense efforts, and in a widespread and understandable reluctance to believe, if not the worst, at least bad things about China as an intending hegemon.  Our difficulty is compounded by the force of the argument that the organization of a more explicitly anti-Chinese front in east Asia will provide exactly the structured confrontation of a new Cold War that we should strive to avoid.   Prudential arguments for the modest enlargement of NATO in Europe are ambushed by exactly the same structure of objection.  Specifically, to organize ahead of unambiguous appearance of a clear and present danger from either a Russia returning from the depths, or a China seeking hegemony in east Asia, invites the objection that such efforts of timely and preventative security organization on our part actually will provoke the appearance of the clear and present danger from Russia or China.  In principle, the solution to this difficulty lies in the education of attentive publics in the realities of world politics and strategic history.  In practice, popular democracies repeatedly have failed to cope with the problem of "distant thunder," of possible and probable peril that is years away from plausible reality.

Japan and the Japanese-American alliance.  The Japanese-American alliance long has been the centerpiece of the security architecture-such as it has been-of the Asia-Pacific region. Until quite recently, at least, Japan has declined seriously to consider China as a probable major threat to her interests.¹⁶  Similarly, again until quite recently, Japan also has declined to think very seriously about the full range of her potential security problems.  Notwithstanding the steady acquisition of impressively modern armed forces, Japan has not procured the kind or mass of military power that would be most plausibly consistent with the interests of a very great maritime trading nation located in an exceedingly heavily armed region.

A Japan that was not a little resentful over the lack of appreciation showed by the U.S.-led Grand Coalition for its heavy financial contribution to the funding of the Gulf War ($13 billion, or 20 percent of the total cost)-a Japan undereducated as to the necessity for an effort de sang as a condition for respect-finds itself with a perilously one-dimensional character.  With some exaggeration the case can be argued that Japan today is strategically akin to ancient Carthage.  In common  with Carthage,  Japan today is an intensely  commercial society that allows her military security (and hence every other type) to be provided at a critical level by another country (if you will, by mercenaries); that faces a rising power inherently stronger,  over time, at least, that is implacable over matters of honor and political interest; and that is utterly ruthless in willingness to use force.¹⁷ The analogies between Carthage and Japan, and Rome and modern China, are far from perfect, but they do serve the primary value of history for policy:  they "isolate things that need thinking about."¹⁸

From an American perspective, can the security baton of chief organizer and provider of security for the Asia-Pacific region be passed safely to Japan?  If Japan is to be the leading antihegemonic power vis-a-vis tomorrow's China, such a Japan, at the very least, would have to be nuclear armed and require air-sea and amphibious capabilities suitable to contest sea-lane security throughout Asia, to include south Asian waters.  But, in American as well as Japanese perspectives, would the evolution of Japan from security ward of the United States to truly great regional power create more difficulties than it would solve?  What would be the residual U.S. security  role, or roles, in the region?  While Japan's traditional friends in ASEAN probably would welcome the emergence of a militarily  greater Japan, what would be the effects upon developments on the Korean peninsula, where Japan is less admired, and-above all else-in Beijing?

It is all very well to argue, as do Bernstein and Munro, that a "weak Japan benefits only China, which wants not a stabilizing balance of power in Asia but Chinese hegemony, under which Japan would be little more than China's most useful tributary state,"¹⁹ but there would be problems with a militarily  strong Japan also.  The structure of the problem is plain enough to see.  If you believe that China needs to be firmly balanced, if not actually "contained", then some country, or countries, has to do it.  The practical choices are limited.  Preeminently, the choices reduce to:  

• A U.S.-led informal coalition to  oppose China, including continuation of a Japanese relationship of security dependency on the United States

• A joint U.S.-Japanese led informal coalition to oppose China, wherein Japan is an ever- more significant true military partner

• A (nuclear-armed) Japanese-led informal coalition to oppose China. 

The United States can restrain China, the United States and Japan together certainly can restrain China, and Japan effectively alone might just possibly be able to restrain China.  That, however, exhausts the possibilities.  If you do not like this line of argument, then you are obliged to argue either that the coming China will not need to be opposed, or that the coming China can safely be allowed to assume a hegemonic position in Asia-Pacific because it will not matter to values that we care about deeply.  Personally, while granting the force of all of the many sources of irritation in Japanese-American relations, I have considerable difficulty with the proposition that Japan purposefully would choose to live with a preponderant China, rather than with the current U.S. military protection system.

U.S. policy, good intentions, erratic performance.  It is somewhat unfair to criticize U.S. policy toward security in east Asia.  An analogy that springs to mind is the case of blaming a householder rather than a burglar, when an open window would seem to have invited the commitment of a crime.  U.S. policy for the Asia-Pacific region, although occasionally effectively robust, as with the bold naval deployment into the Taiwan Strait in 1996, is severely hampered by a lack of definition and focus.  This is scarcely surprising.  America's China watchers are approximately as confused and ambiguous as are America's  policy makers toward the Asia-Pacific region.  We all agree, more or less, on current trends in the Asia-Pacific area, we all agree on the menace that China could pose 15 to 20 years from now.  But we do not all agree either on "which China" actually will emerge in the future or on how that China will choose to behave.  This context is not analogous to 1945-48, a period wherein the case for enemy identification vis-a-vis the Soviet Union was well nigh cumulatively self-evident.  The context today, rather, is reminiscent of the early to mid-1930s, when it was not at all obvious that the odious regime in question really would attempt to (mis)behave along lines long signaled rhetorically.  As late as winter 1938-39, at least in the immediate aftermath of the Munich Agreement, British and French statesmen believed that they could do business with Nazi Germany.  Today, there  are several apparently quite compelling reasons for  believing that the new emerging great-power China can be integrated into the international security system as a generally reasonable, if not overly cooperative, partner.  There may not be a cooperative and, in our terms, reasonable great-power China in our future, but the evidence for that conviction is by no means definitive at present.

An aspect to U.S. policy toward China that needs emphasis is the inherent difficulty of accommodating a rising power.  A historical analogy with the newly unified and exceedingly dynamic Imperial Germany of the 1890s and 1900s is all too persuasive.²⁰  Because of its rapidly increasing economic strength, including the size of its population, married to its geography and political and strategic cultures, it is more likely than not that China will become the dominant power in east Asia, even if it has no particular geostrategic ambition for that status and role.  Anglo-Americans are rather prone to indulge hypocritically in pious moralisms about international politics, but the plain geostrategic fact is that all great powers, including Britain in her glory days and the United States today, require their "security space."  Britain nominally went to war on August 4, 1914, because Imperial Germany had violated the neutrality of poor little Belgium.  The truth was that Britain went to war to protect its "security space" by keeping the port of Antwerp out of potential enemy and a coast of continental Europe clear of control by a  dominant continental power.  World War III nearly occurred in October 1962, not because Nikita Khrushchev menaced the extant nuclear balance with his insertion of missiles into Cuba, but rather because he violated America's "security space" its own backyard, in the Caribbean.  Another case is contemporary Russian perceptions of their "near abroad."

The point is that the long-lapsed, but now returning, great-power China necessarily will strive, as do all great powers, to be the dominant influence over its "security space."  Always assuming that the mismatch between the Chinese economy and the Chinese system of government, probably aided and abetted by a severe economic downturn, does not produce yet another period of domestic chaos, the policy issue for the United States, Japan, and everyone else is simply how best to cope with a new great-power China.  Great powers do not behave like medium or small powers.  I suspect that China would like to be just as great, or greatly influential, as the external world permits.  The questions for everyone else are both what to contest with respect to China's demands for "security space" and who  is to do most of the contesting?

Two points are of central relevance for U.S. policy.  First, the emerging great-power China does need to be treated with the respect that is proper to a great power.  Second, no great power can be permitted alone to define its "security space" and security roles.  Because Russia, for example, is not "just another country," we recognize in NATO that Russia's interests have to be treated with unusual respect.  However, that unusual respect most emphatically does not extend to a license to Moscow to define whatever measure of influence it alone would prefer over its close neighbors.  The same argument must apply to China: respect and  understanding for the reasonable ambitions  and expectations of a great power-yes; acquiescence in an ever- expanding sequence of demands for advantage over neighbors and beyond-no.

Of recent date, U.S. policy toward the PRC has revealed an unhappy blend of realism and idealism.  Occasional American courage, including military demonstrations, has been offset in its effect by moralistic finger-wagging, empty threats over economic misbehavior, and the like.  What we and the Chinese see, is, alas, the truth.  U.S. policy, in common with America's Asian experts, is undecided about its objectives in the Asia-Pacific region.  This is less than startling, because when you cannot decide upon the definition of the problem, it is extraordinarily  difficult to identify a workable answer.  Do we engage with China?  Is China truly engageable?  If China's rising power needs to be balanced, who should do most of the balancing?  If Japan is, as it were, elected by default as the leading balancer in an antihegemonic coalition, could she do the job adequately, and how comfortable would Americans be with the emerging reality of a superpower Japan? 

Secondary Pieces

The primary pieces of the puzzle that represent security and insecurity in the Asia Pacific region have just been identified as: a post-Cold War power vacuum (and a potential power vacuum, should the United States lose interest in organizing security in the region); a China on the rise, if not as yet truly in the ascendant;  an absence of danger that is unmistakably clear and unquestionably present; a  geostrategically still quite modest Japan; and a United States that has yet to settle upon a coherent China policy.  Recall the assertion that  everything about Asia-Pacific security is apt to relate to everything else.  The total puzzle that is the security problem of the region may have no individual pieces that are entirely only of the most local significance.  A quarrel in the Balkans in 1914 set in train a process of conflict that generated two world wars.  The problem in Europe in 1914 was not so much the interlocking, rival alliance ties, rather it was the strategic logic that those alliance ties expressed.  A poverty in formal security architecture in east Asia does not mean a poverty of connections among disparate polities and issues.  Great conflicts are likely to have great causes, but not great triggering events.  The disparate pieces of the puzzle that will be identified as secondary are not necessarily of minor significance when regarded in their full contexts.

An absence of structure for security.  For reasons of history and geography there is an almost remarkable absence of formal security architecture in east Asia.  The United States has bilateral security ties with Japan, South Korea, Australia (through ANZUS), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan (tacitly), and there is an obvious military sense in which U.S. forward-based military presence binds the region together.  Nonetheless, the Asia-Pacific region stands in the sharpest of contrasts with Europe with reference to organization for collective defense.  In effect, there is no organizational focus for collective defense in the region.  In Southeast Asia there is ASEAN, and there is now ARF for the discussion of security issues.  If there were to be a multilateral regional alternative to the unipolarity of U.S. provision of security, then ASEAN and ARF would be its most obvious and only alternative.  ASEAN members generally have cooperative relations with Japan, though it is difficult to see how ASEAN as a serious organization for collective defense could cope with the unique difficulties posed by its functional antihegemonic allies on Taiwan and on the Korean peninsula.  Needless to say, perhaps, the PRC is very anxious that the current absence of  robust multilateral defense organization in the region, which is to say in its region, should remain  a permanent condition.  Whatever may be said, and justly said, in praise of an informal "Asian way" in security discussion and cooperation,²¹ it is geostrategically convenient for China that no multilateral security architecture exist that bears even a distant promise of being able to shoulder serious balance-of-power traffic.

Neighbors and foes.  A plethora of bilateral antagonisms comprises one important reason why multilateral organization for common  security missions has yet to mature in east Asia.   Although almost every polity in the region-with the exception of Myanmar and the geographically somewhat distant exception of Pakistan-shares some anxiety about and feelings of hostility toward the PRC, these polities, aside from Taiwan and possibly Vietnam, also are at least as anxious about one or several of their other neighbors.  If anything, ASEAN members tend to see clear and present danger more in their own ranks than they do in the Chinese giant to the North.²²  China, Japan, and the United States overshadow the whole region in that their policies unilaterally, and certainly their interrelations, can have implications for all.  But, lurking around and in corners of the big geopolitical picture are a host of bilateral rivalries and antagonisms.  In addition to the more obvious of potentially lethal bilateral antagonisms between the PRC and the ROC and between the two Koreas, virtually every other state player in the region has one or several distinctive quarrels with one or more of its neighbors.

Resource and trade rivalries.  The Asia-Pacific region is driven with competition for trade and resources.  Moreover, the economic rivalry among east Asian politics is certain to acquire a sharper edge as China's economic progress, on which will depend her political stability, requires the importation of an ever larger quantity of oil from the Middle East.²³  Whether or not exploitation of the seabed of the South China Sea ever will prove to hold the key to energy  security for the exploiter,²⁴ it is certain, for the time being at least, that the economic security of much of east Asia must rest upon the military security of the sea lanes to and from the Persian Gulf.  The several continental stories concerning China's energy future that have some "bonanza" potential are all too expensive to compete seriously with oil from overseas.  Notwithstanding, indeed in part because of, the scale of its domestic market, and despite its substantially geostrategically continental character, China is going to be extremely vulnerable to pressure on her maritime trade routes.  As a strategic competitor, China has the potential to be far more formidable at sea than was the Soviet Union, let alone the new much reduced Russia; however, China will also be more at risk to hostile maritime action.

New and weak states.  The Asia-Pacific region is heavily populated with states whose recent provenance renders them especially sensitive to real or apparent challenges to a fragile national sovereignty.  The new postcolonial polities of east Asia typically have some disputed borders, have problems of political legitimacy with an ethnically mixed society, and generally are not eager to surrender to outside bodies any hard-won national prerogatives over security.  Plainly, this extreme sensitivity to national rights is not conducive to the kind of cooperative behavior that truly multilateral defense endeavors would require.  If Chinese power needs to be balanced in east Asia, the successor states to the British, French, Dutch, and even American empires do not exactly constitute ideal political material.  Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and nowhere more so than in the PRC,  security problems are influenced by the burgeoning consequences of the uneven processes of change among the economy, civil society, and the state.

Wealth and arms.  There is neither a general arms competition in east Asia, nor (with the arguable exception of the PRC and the ROC) are there bilateral arms competitions.  (I decline to use the emotive and unhelpful concept of "arms race."²⁵)  There is, however, a widespread modernization in armed forces across the whole region,  a process which in this  decade has come to focus most heavily upon maritime and air environments.  Countries do not fight because they are well armed, but they  seek to be well armed when they have the political and economic anxieties familiar today in the Asia-Pacific region, and when they have the taxable wealth that these expanding economies are generating.  In a distinctly maritime region, some states are acquiring the ability to do damage to their neighbors at sea.  There is no post-Cold War "peace dividend" evident in the Asia-Pacific region in the 1990s.

The Russian arms bazaar.  In the long run (an abstract concept often discounted by politicians), the country that has the most reason to be anxious about the emergence of a Chinese super-state is Russia.  In the short term, though, both by private initiative and courtesy of state policy, Russia is functioning as an all-purpose armorer to China (among others).  From submarines through heavy airlift, even including ICBM technology, it appears that little in the Russian arms bazaar is not up for sale or rent.  It is true that much of the Russian arsenal is less than state of the art by American standards, but nonetheless it is a great improvement upon current Chinese manufacture, and, we should not forget that not all China's foes are Americans.  China cannot become militarily competitive with the United States, even just in the Asia-Pacific region, let alone globally, simply through the exploitation of greedy, shortsighted, or financially desperate Russians.  But, the acquisition of Kilo class submarines, SU-27 fighters, and IL-76 air transports, in the context of steady domestic progress in military technologies and of purchases and industrial espionage elsewhere, hastens the process of acceleration toward genuine strategic competitiveness.

America: A question of perception.  Countries behave according to how they perceive reality.  If politicians in east Asia perceive a decline in the willingness of the United States to act in protection of its interests in the region, or a U.S. demotion of those interests, they will respond accordingly.  Fundamentally, they will need to decide whether to bandwagon with an emerging, at least predicted, Chinese super state, or whether to try and balance that super state, albeit with little expectation of reliable assistance from the United States.  Misperception of interest is a hardy perennial ingredient that makes for the outbreak of war by miscalculation.²⁶  Countries educate and miseducate each other with the historical evidence of  strategic experience that they provide.  It may be unwise for the security of Americans to be held hostage in the Taiwan Strait to the statecraft and strategic performance of the PRC and the ROC.  Nonetheless, the U.S. naval deployment in the missile test crisis of 1996 sent a potent symbolic message of political determination.  It is less helpful when the U.S. Government declares that it will hold Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status for the PRC hostage to the Chinese record on human rights, and then surrenders abjectly to Chinese economic blackmail, as happened with the Clinton administration in May 1994. 

If the United States intends to play either the leading or a strong supporting role in the security of the Asia-Pacific region, then it needs to be careful of its reputation.  Perception in the region that the United States is unreliable as a protecting power, or at least erratic, would be as likely to fuel a mood of accommodation toward Beijing as a determination to seek a genuinely regional balance of power.  Herman Kahn was fond of saying, "The best way to look determined is to be determined."  Whether the leading policy preference leans toward cooperative engagement,  soft containment, or  hard containment, there is no substitute for the United States adopting a coherent approach to the principal piece in the Asia-Pacific security puzzle-an emerging China.

Nuclear weapons meet the information age.  It should not escape notice that several of the potential conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region have a nontrivial nuclear dimension.  U.S. Armed Forces have long been thoroughly disenchanted with nuclear weapons, as indeed one would expect of a military structure that wields the world's sharpest "conventional" sword.  Other polities, however, are not at present so well endowed with information-led military prowess and find some shreds of strategic comfort in the brute-force promise of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).²⁷  Today there are three nuclear players in the game of nations in northeast Asia:  the PRC, Russia, and the United States.  Within a few years that number could double.  Understandably, when Americans see merit for the countering of proliferation in their strategic role as protector of Japan, South Korea, and the ROC on Taiwan, they need to remember that that virtuous and valuable role carries large (potentially very large) risks to their country at home as well as to their forward-deployed forces.

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Notes

Author's note:  I  am grateful to Eric Grove, Tim Huxley, and Dale Walton, colleagues of mine in the University of Hull's Department of Politics and Asian Studies, for their valuable contributions to this paper.