Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World: Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?
The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It
established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899
and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and
the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it
armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most
powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of
military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service
personnel.
It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence
and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast
Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic
and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation.
And
the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by
a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.
Tomgram: John Feffer, The End of America's Pacific Century
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Usually it’s the giant stories that catch your eye. The wars, the
uproars, the Arab Spring -- the things you can’t miss. But every now and
then, news stories about easily overlooked subjects somehow manage to
shine the strongest light on a changing world.
The Cohn sisters, Claribel and Etta, from a wealthy Baltimore family, arrived in Paris
in 1905, spent time with Gertrude Stein, and soon began buying the work
of unknown artists with names like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for
a song. Before they were done, they had amassed a remarkable
collection of modern art (and artistic objects from around the world),
now lodged permanently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. They were art admirers, collectors, and at heart early global shoppers par excellence.
It was, of course, the beginning of what would soon enough be known as
the American Century and American writers, artists, and shoppers, too,
were flocking to the Old World for solace, refuge, and kicks.
They have their surprising equivalents today, the New York Times reported recently,
even if the newest shoppers to hit Paris en masse evidently aren’t
buying the art of obscure painters. We’re talking here about Chinese
tourism (rising in the French capital at a 15% clip annually). The
latest round of tourists to climb the Eiffel Tower are spending, on
average, $1,800 each on shopping. The money is mainly going for luxury
brand products, often at large department stores like Galeries
Lafayette, which now have Chinese-language briefings, “Chinese-speaking
personal shoppers, and Chinese public-address announcements.”
China’s Atlantic Century? Crazier things have happened in history.
American Publisher Henry Luce announced the coming of the American Century in Life,
his own magazine, in 1941. Americans, he wrote, were to “accept
wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see
fit.” Luce, the son of American missionaries born in China, had no
doubt that it would be a Pacific Century. In those years, Americans, in
fact, liked to refer to the Pacific as an “American Lake,” and in
World War II we did indeed take ownership of it. (As a Tin Pan Alley
song title of the era put it, “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific.”)
Seventy years later, TomDispatch regular and co-director of the website Foreign Policy in Focus John Feffer suggests that, despite all our military bases in the region,
the Pacific is now anything but an American lake and -- just in case
we hadn’t noticed -- election year 2012 will make that so much clearer
to us. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in
which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Why 2012 Will Shake Up Asia and the World:
Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?
by John Feffer
Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans,
Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese
Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over
from President Hu Jintao. He will be the man expected to preside over
the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the
global economy.
But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of
change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far
changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has
trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk,
or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang
now has to deliver somehow on that promise -- at a time of food
shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty.
This
dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into
diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous
opportunities for key Pacific powers.
Washington, which has focused for years on North Korea's small but
developing nuclear arsenal, has barely been paying attention to the
larger developments in Asia. Nor will Asia's looming transformation be a
hot topic in our own presidential election next year. We’ll be arguing
about jobs, health care, and whether the president is a socialist or his
Republican challenger a nutcase. Aside from some ritual China-bashing,
Asia will merit little mention.
President Obama, anxious about giving ammunition to his opponent,
will be loath to fiddle with Asia policy, which is already on autopilot.
So while others scramble to remake East Asia, the United States will be
suffering from its own peculiar form of continental drift.
Pyongyang Turns on the Charm
On April 15, 1912, in an obscure spot in the Japanese empire, a baby
was born to a Christian family proud of its Korean heritage. The 100th
anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder and
dynastic leader, is coming up next year. Ordinarily, such an event would
be of little importance to anyone other than 24 million North Koreans
and a scattering of Koreans elsewhere. But this centennial also marks
the date by which the North Korean regime has promised to finally turn
things around.
Despite its pretensions to self-reliance, Pyongyang has amply proven
that it can only get by with a lot of help from its friends. Until
recently, however, North Korea was not exactly playing well with others.
It responded in a particularly hardline fashion, for instance, to the
more hawkish policies adopted by new South Korean President Lee Myung
Bak, when he took office in February 2008. The shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Kumgang resort that July, the sinking of the South Korean naval ship the Cheonan in March 2010 (Pyongyang still claims it was not the culprit), and the shelling
of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island later that year all accelerated a
tailspin in north-south relations. During this period, the North tested a
second nuclear device, prompting even its closest ally, China, to react
in disgust and support a U.N. declaration of condemnation. Pyongyang
also managed to further alienate Washington by revealing in 2010 that it
was indeed pursuing a program to produce highly enriched, weapons-grade
uranium, something it had long denied.
These actions had painful economic consequences. South Korea
cancelled almost all forms of cooperation. The North’s second nuclear
test scotched any incipient economic rapprochement with the United
States. (The Bush administration had removed North Korea from its
terrorism list, and there had been hints that other longstanding
sanctions might sooner or later be dropped as part of a warming in
relations.)
Only the North’s relationship with China was unaffected, largely
because Beijing is gobbling up significant quantities of valuable
minerals and securing access to ports in exchange for just enough food
and energy to keep the country on life support and the regime afloat.
Between 2006 and 2009, an already anemic North Korean economy contracted, and chronic food shortages again became acute.
To these economic travails must be added political ones. The
country’s leadership is long past retirement, with 70-year-old leader
Kim Jong Il younger than most of the rest of the ruling elite. He has
designated his youngest son, Kim Jeong Eun, as his successor, but the
only thing that this mystery boy seems to have going for him is his
resemblance to his grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
Still, North Korea seems no closer to full-scale collapse today than
during previous crises -- like the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. A
thoroughly repressive state and zero civil society seem to insure that
no color revolution or “Pyongyang Spring” is in the offing. Waiting for
the North Korean regime to go gently into the night is like waiting for
Godot.
But that doesn’t mean change isn’t in the air. To jumpstart its
bedraggled economy and provide a political boost for the next leader in
the year of kangsong taeguk, North Korea is suddenly in a let's-make-a-deal mode.
Kim
Jong Il’s recent visit to Siberia to meet Russian President Dmitri
Medvedev, for instance, raised a few knowledgeable eyebrows. Conferring
at a Russian military base near Lake Baikal, for the first time in a
long while the North Korean leader even raised the possibility of a
moratorium on nuclear weapons production and testing. More
substantially, he concluded a preliminary agreement on a natural gas
pipeline that could in itself begin to transform the politics of the
region. It would transfer gas from the energy-rich Russian Far East
through North Korea to economically booming but energy-hungry South
Korea. The deal could net Pyongyang as much as $100 million a year.
The North’s new charm offensive wouldn’t have a hope in hell of
succeeding if a similar change of heart weren’t also underway in the
South.
The Bulldozer's Miscalculation
On taking office, the conservative South Korean president Lee Myung
Bak, known as "the Bulldozer" when he headed up Hyundai’s engineering
division, promised to put Korean relations on a new footing. Ten years
of “engagement policy” with the North had, according to Lee, produced an
asymmetrical relationship. The South, he insisted, was providing all
the cash, and the North was doing very little in exchange. Lee promised a
relationship based only on quid pro quos.
What he got instead was tit for tat: harsher rhetoric and military
action. Ultimately, although the North made no friends below the 38th
parallel that way, the new era of hostility didn’t help the Lee
administration either. South Koreans generally watched in horror as a
relatively peaceful relationship veered dangerously close to military
conflict.
Lee's ruling party suffered a loss in last April's by-elections, and in August, he replaced
his hardline “unification” minister with a more conciliatory fellow.
Still insisting on an apology for the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong
shelling, the ruling party is nevertheless looking for ways
to restore commercial ties and again provide humanitarian assistance to
the North. Since the summer, representatives from North and South have
met twice to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Although the two sides
haven’t made substantial progress, the stage is set for the resumption
of the Six Party Talks between the two Koreas, Russia, Japan, China, and
the United States that broke off in 2007.
Even if the opposition party doesn't sweep the conservatives out of
power in the 2012 elections, South Korea will likely abandon Lee's
tough-guy approach. In September, his likely successor as the ruling
party candidate in 2012, Park Geun-Hye, openly criticized Lee’s approach
in an article in Foreign Affairs that called instead for "trustpolitik."
One project Park singled out for mention is an inter-Korean railroad
line that would "perhaps transform the Korean Peninsula into a conduit
for regional trade." That's an understatement. Restoring the line and
hooking it up to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad would connect the
Korean peninsula to Europe, reduce the shipment time of goods from one
end of Eurasia to the other by about two weeks, and save South Korea
up to $34 to $50 per ton in shipping costs. Meanwhile, the natural gas
pipeline, which South Korea approved at the end of September, could
reduce its gas costs by as much as 30%. For the world's second largest natural gas importer, this would be a major savings.
Serious economic steps toward Korean reunification are not just a
dream, in other words, but good business, too. Even in the worst moments
of the recent period of disengagement, it’s notable that the two
countries managed to preserve the Kaesong industrial complex located
just north of the Demilitarized Zone. Run by South Korean managers and
employing more than 45,000 North Koreans, the business zone is a boon to
both sides. It helps South Korean enterprises facing competition from
China, even as it provides hard currency and well-paying jobs to the
North. The railroad and the pipeline would offer similar mutual
benefits.
According to conventional wisdom, North Korea has a single bargaining
chip, its small nuclear arsenal, which it will never give up. But a
real estate agent would look at the situation differently. What North
Korea really has is "location, location, location," and it finally seems
ready to cash in on its critical position at the heart of the world's
most vital economic region.
The train line would bind the world's two biggest economic regions
into a huge Eurasian market. And the pipeline, coupled with green energy
projects in China, South Korea, and Japan, might begin to wean East
Asia from its dependency on Middle Eastern oil and thus on the U.S.
military to secure access and protect shipping routes.
Thought of another way, these projects and others like them lurking
in the Eurasian future are significant not just for what they connect,
but what they leave out: the United States.
Out in the Cold
The Bush administration anticipated Lee Myung Bak’s approach to North
Korea by chucking the carrot and waving the stick. By 2006, however,
Washington had made a U-turn and was beginning to engage Pyongyang
seriously. The Obama administration took another tack, eventually
adopting a policy of "strategic patience," a euphemism for ignoring
North Korea and hoping it wouldn’t throw a tantrum.
It hasn't worked. North Korea has plunged full speed ahead with its
nuclear program. The U.S./NATO air campaign against Libya’s Muammar
Gaddafi, who had given up his nuclear program to secure better relations
with the West, only reinforced Pyongyang's belief that nukes are the
ultimate guarantor of its security. The Obama administration continues
to insist that the regime show its seriousness about denuclearization as
a precondition for resuming talks. Even though Washington recently sent
a small amount of flood relief, it refuses
to offer any serious food assistance. Indeed, in June, the House of
Representatives passed an amendment to the agriculture bill that
prohibited all food aid to the country, regardless of need.
Though the administration will likely send envoy Stephen Bosworth to
North Korea later this year, no one expects major changes in policy or
relations to result. With a presidential election year already looming,
the Obama administration isn’t likely to spend political capital on
North Korea -- not when Republicans would undoubtedly label any new
moves as "appeasement" of a “terrorist state.”
Obama came into office with a desire to shift U.S. policy
away from its Middle Eastern focus and reassert America's importance as
a Pacific power, particularly in light of China's growing regional
influence. But the president has invested more in drones
than in diplomacy, sustaining the war on terror at the expense of the
sort of bolder engagement of adversaries that Obama hinted at as a
candidate. In the meantime, the administration is prepared to just wait
it out until the next elections are history -- and by then, it might
already be too late to catch up with regional developments.
After all, Washington has watched China become the top trading
partner of nearly every Asian country. Similarly, the economic links
between China and Taiwan have deepened considerably, a reality to which
even that island’s opposition party must bow.
The Obama administration's recent decision not to upset Beijing too
much by selling advanced F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, opting instead for
a mere upgrade of the F-16s it bought in the 1990s, is a clear sign of relative U.S. decline in the region, suggests big-picture analyst Robert Kaplan.
Then there's the sheer cost of the U.S. military presence in the
Pacific, which looks like a juicy target to budget cutters in
Washington. Key members of Congress like Senators John McCain and Carl
Levin have already signaled their anxiety
about the high price tag of a planned “strategic realignment” in Asia
that involves, among other things, an expansion of the U.S. military
base in Guam and an upgrading of facilities in Okinawa. In response to a
question about potential military cuts, new Deputy Secretary of Defense
Ashton Carter has confirmed that reducing U.S. troops and bases
overseas is "on the table."
The future of East Asia is hardly a given, nor is an economic boom
and regional integration the only possible scenario. Virtually every
country in the region has hiked its military spending. Tension points
abound, particularly in potentially energy-rich waters that various
countries claim as their own. China's staggering economic growth is not
likely to be sustainable in the long term. And North Korea could
ultimately decide to make do as an economically destitute but adequately
strong military power.
Still, the trend lines for 2012 and after point to greater engagement
on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and between Asia and
Europe. Right now, the United States, for all of its military clout, is
not really part of this emerging picture. Isn’t it time for America to
gracefully acknowledge that its years as the Pacific superpower are over
and think creatively about how to be a pacific partner instead?
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website.
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 John Feffer
