Asian-Pacific Security Issues in the Post-Deng Era

William J. Perry

Asia Pacific Research Center

November, 1997

Fifty years ago, almost to this very month, as a young soldier I landed at the port of Naha on Okinawa. I and my fellow soldiers were part of the 1541st Engineer Company, which was a small part of the Army of Occupation in Japan. I shall never forget the scene of devastation I saw when our LST landed. Not a building in the city of Naha was intact. The southern half of the island was stripped bare of almost all vegetation and livestock. People were living in caves. All of this was a grim legacy of the last great battle of the Pacific war, in which 160,000 combatants and civilians were killed. This was my personal exposure to the horrors of World War II, in which 50 million people died and hundreds of millions were maimed, orphaned, or made homeless.

As the United States began to recover from World War II, we resolved that we would not make the mistakes we made after World War I, where our disengagement was followed by a new war less than one generation later. For we knew that with the emergence of nuclear weapons, a new world war would be even more horrible than the last, truly risking the annihilation of humanity. So, since that time, our primary emphasis has been on preventing and deterring, rather than fighting, a war.

The most notable example of preventive defense was the Marshall Plan, which created the economic and social conditions which converted our former enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, into friends, indeed even into allies. But Joseph Stalin rejected the Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union and the eastern European countries he dominated, and so the Cold War started, attended by a nuclear arms race. During the Cold War we kept the peace through deterrence, maintaining a strong nuclear arsenal and a large standing army. Now the Cold War is over, and we no longer face the threat once posed by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. We have reduced our nuclear arsenal and our military forces, and just fifty years after Marshall's famous speech at Harvard, we are returning to his concept of preventive defense.

DoD's program of preventive defense in Europe is highlighted by what we call the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and by the Partnership for Peace. In the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program we work cooperatively with the nuclear states of the former Soviet Union to significantly reduce the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During the last four years this program has led to the dismantlement of 4,000 nuclear weapons formerly aimed at targets in the United States, the destruction of 800 launchers, and to converting three nations which were formerly nuclear nations into non-nuclear nations.

In the Partnership for Peace, the sixteen NATO nations have joined forces with twenty-six European nations, many of them former enemies, to plan and exercise together in peacekeeping operations. Most dramatic has been the cooperation of many of these nations in Bosnia, which is not a peacekeeping exercise. It is the real thing. The security situation in the Asia Pacific region is very different from that in Europe. There is no regional alliance comparable to NATO and no nuclear deployments comparable to those that were in Europe. Therefore, our program of preventive defense has been quite different, but equally significant. And preventive defense in the Asia Pacific region has four principal components: alliances, counterproliferation programs, confidence-building programs in the region, and a program of pragmatic engagement with China.

Our alliances with Japan, Korea, and Australia remain the key to our security strategy and to regional stability. And certainly, the security alliance with Japan is the linchpin of this strategy. Last year, the terrible incident on Okinawa called into question the relevance of the U.S.-Japan alliance, with some calling it a relic of the Cold War. Indeed, many believed that this incident would be the catalyst for ending the U.S.-Japan security alliance, which was already under heavy strain because of the intense economic competition between the two countries. Remarkably, this incident had the opposite affect, resulting in a reaffirmation and a strengthening of this alliance, which is so vital to both countries, and indeed, to the entire region. This surprising reaffirmation resulted because the incident motivated both countries to reexamine from first principles what value the alliance had to them. This reexamination led both the United States and Japan to conclude that our close partnership is vital to the economic and political health of the region, indeed of the world. We both concluded that our cooperative efforts helped keep the lid on regional conflicts. They guaranteed freedom of the seas. They reduced the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. They promoted democracy, respect for human rights, and free markets. And our efforts proved that, most fundamentally, the security and stability of the region depended on our continued friendship and cooperation.

Further, when Japan considered the realistic alternatives to the alliance, either building a strong military, capable by itself of defending Japan against all conceivable threats; or, alternatively, accepting a Finland-like foreign policy, it concluded that the alliance, with all of its problems, was far preferable to either of those alternatives. Thus, Japan decided not to abandon the alliance, but to strengthen it. Specifically, we and they agreed on three principles: a commitment to the importance of strong security relations, even in the face of problems arising from economic competition; a commitment to the reexamination of the role of Japan in supporting American forces in any regional conflicts; and a commitment to fix the problems on Okinawa through a Special Action Committee which would take strong action to significantly reduce the burden of American forces on Okinawa without reducing the military readiness or capability of those forces. Notice it was easy to solve either one of those problems: either reducing the burden or maintaining the military capability. The difficulty was doing them both at once. The acceptance of these political principles and the success of the Special Action Committee in dealing with Okinawa problems led directly to the successful summit last April, highlighted by the signing by President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto of the Joint Security Declaration. No one should underestimate the cardinal importance of this agreement. In my judgment, it established the U.S.-Japan security alliance as the bedrock of secured stability in the Asia Pacific region well into the next century.

Our alliance with Korea has played a key role in achieving the second principal component of our preventive defense strategy; namely, preventing nuclear proliferation in the Asia Pacific region. In the spring of 1994, just three years ago now, North Korea announced that it was ready to reprocess plutonium from its research reactor at Yongbyon. This would have allowed North Korea to extract enough plutonium to make five or six nuclear bombs, and it threatened to do so, all the while making menacing public remarks aimed at South Korea and Japan. A group of nations, led by the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, insisted that North Korea stop its nuclear program or face severe economic sanctions. North Korea responded by stating that the imposition of sanctions would be equivalent to an act of war. And they gratuitously referred to me as a war maniac. This reference is etched indelibly in my memory as one of the great highlights of my diplomatic career. We, truly, were prepared to move ahead with those sanctions, and as we poised on the brink of imposing them, I recommended then to the president that we must increase our military deployments in South Korea. And we were in the process of doing that, but it turned out that was not necessary. It was not necessary, I believe, because of the unwavering and united position of the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. That unity and that firmness convinced North Korea to reverse course and to sign what we called the "agreed framework." This agreement froze North Korea's nuclear program, thereby drawing the region back from the brink of conflict, and we were truly at the very edge of that brink, as close as we have been at any time since 1950. We have been implementing that agreement now for more than two years. And like all efforts with North Korea, it has been fraught with complexities and frustrations. But let's keep our eye on the bottom line. And that is that North Korea has maintained the essential features of this agreement. It has kept its nuclear weapon program frozen for that entire period, and the whole region is safer as a result.

Besides our security alliances with Japan, Korea, and Australia, we have security interests shared throughout the Asia Pacific region. That is why the third component of our preventive defense strategy includes the promotion of multilateral initiatives to reduce tensions and promote peace throughout the region. We make full use of multilateral institutions in the area, such as ASEAN, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, where nations throughout the region, including the United States, China, and Japan, address our mutual interests and concerns. To advance this multilateral pillar, I invited defense delegations from thirty-four Asia Pacific nations to join me in Hawaii in 1995 for the commemorations marking the ending of World War II. And all of them did join me for that. That same weekend, which by the way was the first time that that group had ever gotten together on any issue, we cut the ribbon on a security study center in Honolulu, where civilian and military personnel from all across the region can meet and learn together. The Asia Pacific Center is a counterpart to the Marshall Center, located in Germany, which for several years now has been building personal relations across Europe in the security field. I believe that the web of security and the personal ties that these dialogues build create trust, understanding, and cooperation.

NATO began forming this web in Europe in January of 1994 with its Partnership for Peace initiative, which reaches out to the new democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia, and Russia. And in the summer of 1995, defense leaders from all thirty-three democracies of the Western Hemisphere convened the first defense ministerial conference at Williamsburg, Virginia. I believe that the time has come for the defense leaders of the Asia Pacific region to begin forming a comparable web of security ties, perhaps by convening a defense ministerial conference of the Asia Pacific region modeled after the meeting that we held in Williamsburg. Other defense ministers in the region support this idea, if the meeting includes the Chinese defense minister. However, the Chinese are not yet ready to support such a meeting, so there is a good idea which is hanging out there and will continue hanging for a while.

That unresolved situation brings me to the fourth critical component of our preventive defense strategy, what I call a pragmatic engagement with China. I emphasized the adjective before the word "engagement," and I will define what I mean by that. Engagement has been the steady policy of the United States for more than twenty years under six presidents of both parties. It will remain our steady policy because China is playing an increasingly important role in the security of the region; indeed, in the security of the world. China is already a major military power and is engaged in an ambitious program of military modernization. China is also, of course, a nuclear power and a permanent member of the Security Council. These factors lead to the inescapable conclusion that China is a power of global significance. It is also inescapable that the United States and Chinese interest will sometimes be in harmony, and sometimes be in conflict. And pragmatic engagement means that we seek to cooperate when we are in agreement and seek to reduce tensions when we are in conflict. In short, we do not choose engagement as a favor to China. We choose engagement as a favor to ourselves. It serves our own security interests. It provides an avenue to influence China to help curb, rather than exacerbate, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Engagement also provides an avenue to influence China to play a stabilizing role in unstable regions, where U.S. interests are very much at stake. Obviously, the Korean peninsula is a prime example. And engagement opens lines of communication with the People's Liberation Army. By engaging the PLA directly, we can lessen the chance of misunderstandings or incidents when our forces operate in the area where Chinese military forces are also deployed. The critics in the United States tend to say that instead of engaging China, we should contain China, much like we did the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These critics are wrong. They have the wrong vision, first of all, of what can be done; not less, what should be done. These critics see a strong growing China as an implacable threat to America's interest, and believe that we must oppose China at every turn. These critics go on to assume that since containment implies opposing China at every turn, engagement must mean accommodating or even appeasing China at every turn. This line of argument is doubly flawed. It's flawed pragmatically, because containment could actually undermine our security. It could push China to accelerate even more its defense modernization efforts, contributing to regional arms races and increasing the likelihood of military conflicts in regional hot spots. The containment argument is also flawed philosophically, because it presumes that engagement equals appeasement. That idea is dead wrong. Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement does not mean that the United States blithely acquiesces to policies or actions with which we disagree, such as China's serious and ongoing human rights violations. But we will not try to isolate China over these issues. Engagement recognizes that the best chance of changing China's policies that we do not like is through firm diplomacy and dialogue. And it recognizes that even when we strongly disagree with China, we cannot hold our entire relationship hostage to a single issue; that we still have security reasons for maintaining lines of communication. Engagement also does not preclude us from pursuing our interests with all appropriate instruments of national power.

Indeed, we are committed to engagement, but not at any price. It is important for audiences on both sides of the Pacific to understand both sides of that sentence. When China conducted missile tests and large military maneuvers off Taiwan, for example, we tried first to engage the Chinese government diplomatically to convince them that this action was wrong. But when diplomatic language did not succeed, we switched to the stronger language of military deployment. By ordering the deployment of two carrier battle groups to Taiwan, we were stating clearly that we did not believe in engagement at any price; and, more specifically, we were stating that we had vital national security interests in the Western Pacific, that we had the military means to defend those interests, and that we had the political will to defend those interests. At the same time, the United States tried very hard to send China the right diplomatic message in conjunction with the military message we were sending. We reaffirmed that we have no intention of advocating or supporting a policy of two Chinas or one China, one Taiwan. Our policy was and is a one China policy, and it rests on three legs: Washington-Beijing relations, built on pragmatic engagement; Washington-Taipei relations, which include helping Taiwan defend itself against missiles and other threats; and the promotion of healthy Beijing-Taipei dialogue and relations, which benefit us all. Beijing-Taipei relations have increased trade, investment, and other peaceful activities across the Taiwan Strait, which benefits the regional economy and unity. Ultimately, though, it is the responsibility of both Beijing and Taipei to build healthy relations, but it is in the abiding interest of all of us that these relations maintain a healthy, peaceful course without provocation or overreaction by any capital. Indeed, it is in the abiding interest of every capital throughout the Asia Pacific region to have one of the region's great powers stable and at peace.

These four preventive defense strategies have been designed and have succeeded in creating the conditions which minimize the threat of war in the Asia Pacific region. But our security does not depend solely on preventive defense. We also maintain military forces powerful enough to be a persuasive deterrent. Or, if deterrence fails, to fight and win. Past region conflicts were enormously costly in blood and in treasure, as demonstrated by the Korean War and Vietnam. Today, medium-sized countries--North Korea, Iraq, Iran--driven by virulent nationalism and armed with modern weapons, can cause enormous damage to their neighbors. And to compound the threat, these nations are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Thus, our vital interests dictate that the United States maintain its strong security presence in the Asia Pacific region. And a key part of this is the forward military presence. We maintain about a hundred thousand U.S. military personnel in the Asia Pacific region, and in the Joint Security Declaration, both the United States and Japan committed to continuing that forward deployment. We keep about 80,000 ground and air force personnel in Japan and Korea, and 20,000 to 30,000 naval personnel and a powerful fleet in the Western Pacific. This military force provides a security umbrella that protects the entire region by warning away threats posed by regional conflicts. Its presence has been a damper to regional arms races, and a damper to nuclear weapons proliferation. These forces supplement the large and competent military forces of Japan and the Republic of Korea. And any potential aggressor knows that they are backed up by large highly ready forces in the United States, along with the airlift and sealift capacity that can project this force anywhere in the world. It has been rightly said that the stability and the security that our forces provide is the oxygen that helps fuel the engine of Pacific economic growth.

A few months ago I met in Washington with the defense minister of China, Chi Haotian. It was a cordial and a useful meeting, but at one stage in our discussions he complained about the U.S.-Japan Security Declaration we had just signed the previous April, and about the continuing presence of the hundred thousand American military forces in the Western Pacific. He said that his government viewed these as a threat to the security of China. I told him that if I put myself in his shoes, I could come to exactly the opposite conclusion. I said that it was clear that this alliance, and the American deployment that supported it, actually served the security interests of China, as well as those of Japan and the United States. It was the principal reason that other nations in the region, including Japan, were not engaged in an arms buildup, which surely was in China's interest. It was an essential ingredient for the security environment which permitted the explosive economic growth in the Asia Pacific region. And if you looked around in the last ten years to see who have been the principal beneficiaries of that economic growth, China tops the list. Indeed, I said, if I were the Chinese foreign minister, a primary goal of my foreign policy would be to try to encourage the continuation of the U.S.-Japan security alliance and the continuing presence of at least a hundred thousand American troops in the Western Pacific. I am doubtful that I fully persuaded him, but I do believe that I gave him pause, and I gave him a new way of thinking about Chinese security. I hope that I have also been able to give each of you a new way to think about American security in the Western Pacific, about the primacy of preventive defense, and about our approach to security. And about the necessity of buttressing this preventive defense program with strong, ready, forward-deployed military forces and with strong alliances.