CIAO DATE: 04/02

Asian Alliances and American Politics

The domestic politics of our Asian alliances is like the story of the dog that didn't bark. Though our defense ties with Japan and Korea were forged in the Cold War, nearly ten years after the Berlin Wall came down, few voices are being raised to amend, let alone terminate, either the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan or the U.S.-Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. Although large numbers of U.S. troops remain in both countries, congressional criticisms of allied "free riding" are rarely heard. Our alliances with Japan and Korea provoke little discernible opposition from the Congress, the press, or the general public. Polling data suggests that public support for the alliances and for forward deployments in both countries remains high. And no prominent leaders of the Congress are threatening to link security concerns to outstanding economic issues with the Japanese or South Koreans– a tactic frequently utilized a decade ago.

The tranquillity surrounding our security ties in Northeast Asia is in some respects surprising. Alliances with Japan and South Korea reflected Cold War "trade-offs." In the early 1950s the United States extended to Tokyo–and subsequently to Seoul–unilateral strategic guarantees and wholesale indulgence of mercantilist trade policies in return for Japanese and South Korean political support of our containment strategy and flexible access to military bases on their territory. Many Americans doubted these arrangements would outlive the Cold War.

In fact, in the late 1980s and early 1990s U.S. administrations exhibited less readiness to subordinate commercial interests to larger strategic concerns; and Japanese officials displayed less willingness to take their diplomatic cues from Washington. We adopted tougher trade tactics; Tokyo hinted at "Asianizing" its foreign policy. During the Gulf War frictions over trade issues and burden-sharing disputes even threatened to contaminate our bilateral defense cooperation. Worse yet, in August 1995 widespread Japanese doubts about the future of its alliance with the United States surfaced in response to a brutal rape incident in Okinawa. Yet, by April 1996 Washington and Tokyo had reaffirmed their resolve to preserve the alliance indefinitely. The Clinton administration pledged to retain current force levels well into the next century, the Japanese to sustain high levels of host-nation support and define more robust guidelines for defense cooperation with the United States.

U.S.-Korean defense cooperation has likewise experienced its ups and downs over the years. The greatest difficulties followed in the wake of the Nixon administration's proclamation of the Guam Doctrine, the Carter administration's announcement of its intent to withdraw an Army division from the South, and the Clinton administration's initiation of a bilateral dialogue with Pyongyang. Yet the U.S.-ROK alliance still rests on a firm political foundation. President Kim Dae Jung's June 1998 state visit to Washington evoked effusive expressions of bipartisan support for the U.S.-Korean alliance, as did President Clinton's return visit to Seoul in November. President Kim has even expressed publicly his hope that U.S. troops will remain on the peninsula after Korea is reunified.

This is not what most analysts would have expected of our Asian alliances in the wake of the Soviet Union's disintegration, the atrophy of Russian power, South Korea's decisive victory in its political/economic competition with the North, and substantial Chinese progress in implementing market-oriented economic reforms.

One purpose of this paper is to account for the continuity of domestic American political support for our Asian alliances in a rapidly changing post-Cold War environment. Another is to anticipate domestic and regional developments which could significantly alter or undermine that support in the future.

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