Is America Going Back to the Past in Asia?

In his Senate confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said, “I intend to give new focus to our security relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Beyond the near-term threat from North Korea, our interests are potentially jeopardized by the danger of instability and rivalry among major regional powers. . . . The United States should not only maintain its troop presence in Asia, but also expand our security engagement in the region.”

The Pentagon, however, is one of the United States’ most important trade agencies. It is by far the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions, with annual sales on the order of $12 billion. And the United States is actively promoting arms sales throughout the region while claiming that its forces are there to minimize the threat of armed conflict. This playing both arsonist and fire department is the real cause of the arms race in the region.

The United States has just agreed to sell Thailand its most deadly air-to-air missile, the AMRAAM (an acronym for “advanced medium range air-to-air missile”), which can shoot down an airplane from 30 miles away. The Pentagon promoted its sale to Thailand as part of a package deal that also included McDonnell Douglas F-18 fighters. As a result, Thailand’s neighbor, Malaysia, now wants to balance the Thai missiles with purchases of its own from Russia. Neither Thailand nor Malaysia faces any form of external military threat, nor are they hostile toward each other, both being members of ASEAN. But according to a New York Times report on the same day as the Cohen hearing, “It is business, not ideology, that is driving sales.”

The Defense Department contends that security and stability in East Asia were created by the presence of an American military expeditionary force of at least 100,000 troops and that future security and stability in the area depend on its remaining there. The problem with such assertions is that the United States has not used military force victoriously in East Asia since 1945. Most Asians believe that peace and stability prevail in their region because foreign colonialists have been driven out and economic prosperity on the model of Japan is the norm even in China.

Meanwhile, places like South Korea and Okinawa, unwilling hosts to the American forces and their dependents, pay the price of American myopia and profiteering. This past September, a large majority of Okinawans voted to ask the Americans to go home, and anti-Americanism has become common in Korea. Cohen may well end up presiding over a crisis in which the Japanese and Koreans throw the Americans out, just as the Filipinos did in 1992.

The security of East Asia would be much better served by reducing Asian arms purchases, by continued economic prosperity and by a regional security system that does not rely on Americans to put out every fire. It is absurd to imagine that the United States is going to go to war over who owns some uninhabited rocks in the seas bordering China, Korea or Japan, much less that U.S. military forces control the ultimate resolutions of the Chinese and Korean civil wars. If Cohen doesn’t already know this, he’ll find out when he asks the American people to support his unrealistic policies.