Hostages? So much for America as globocop. Those who imagine that Washington emerged from Kosovo as the enforcer of world peace haven’t been watching Asia. Crises are brewing in Taiwan, the Koreas and South Asia, and U.S. mediators are finding the tensions more intractable than ever. Despite plying Pyongyang with offers of food and civilian nuclear assistance, U.S. officials have all but given up hope that they can avert North Korea’s test-firing of a long-range missile. That move, which will send shivers through Tokyo and Seoul, is expected any week now. To the south, neither Taipei nor Beijing looks eager to heed Washington’s pleas for a standdown from their war of words since Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s incendiary comments in early July, when he seemed to edge the province toward independence. The Asians “realize they live in a really ugly neighborhood. Everybody is pursuing increasingly sophisticated hedging strategies against uncertainty,” says Manning, a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. “The first uncertainty is China. And the second is the U.S.”
So far in 1999, Asia’s most dangerous borders have seen some of the heaviest tension in decades. India and Pakistan have fought an undeclared war in the Himalayas, with hundreds dead, and the Koreas have clashed in a bloody Yellow Sea naval battle. William Perry, a special U.S. presidential envoy, was so alarmed at North Korea’s militaristic rhetoric after his last trip in June that he briefly considered asking President Clinton to raise the “defcon” level, or the state of U.S. strategic readiness. Chinese leaders, according to a Beijing diplomat, are taking part in a “frenzied internal debate” over Taiwan. Meanwhile Washington is praying the crisis will just go away. One senior U.S. official describes the confrontation as increasingly “stylized,” with Taiwanese and Chinese fighter patrols in the Taiwan Strait flying on alternate days so as not to encounter each other.
Both the Americans and Asians have a newly chastened sense of Washington’s ability to shape events. Clinton plans to visit Pakistan and India early next year–but no longer links his trip to a demand that the two nations sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. “We’re not going to sanction either country into doing those things we would like them to do,” a senior official says. The alternative? Using “our powers of persuasion,” he says. Sure, Asia’s two new nuclear powers appear to be backing down now, thanks in part to Washington’s diplomatic intervention, but the U.S. official says that “it’s only a matter of time before [there’s] another” Kashmir crisis–“one that we may not be as successful” in ending.
American officials once spoke grandly of Washington’s role as the “ultimate guarantor” of peace, but they are more circumspect today. There’s been no sea change in power alignments–Washington remains tied by treaty or law to defending Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. But in East Asia the balance of power “will increasingly be triangular”–a tricky dance of diplomacy between the United States, Japan and China, says former assistant Defense secretary Joseph Nye, now head of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Already, some Asian nations are edging toward something resembling independent thinking. Last week, in a triumph of mutual fear (of North Korea) over mutual enmity, onetime rivals Japan and South Korea conducted joint naval exercises, their first ever without U.S. participation.
Washington is welcoming any help it can get. Increasingly, the Asians realize, the U.S. military posture around the world is badly stretched, thanks to force reductions since 1991. While Clinton sent a carrier to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 as a warning to Beijing after it fired missiles toward Taiwan, such a move might not be so automatic today. “If we had to respond [at the same time] today to events in North Korea and the Taiwan Strait,” a U.S. admiral told NEWSWEEK, “we couldn’t do it.”
One recent example illustrates the danger: In February, the United States redeployed the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf, temporarily replacing a ship ordered to the Adriatic as Kosovo was heating up. That left the U.S. Navy without a carrier in Asia. Coincidentally or not, North Korea chose that moment “to pull a few things,” including sending two disguised naval vessels into Japanese waters, says the admiral. U.S. officials also worry that while China is at least a decade away from challenging U.S. forces conventionally, it might employ what some jokingly call the “poor man’s strategic force”–missile batteries that could target U.S. carriers, forcing the ships to stay far out to sea in a conflict.
Though there’s been no formal review, U.S. officials are also beginning to quietly rethink troop levels in Asia. Some in the administration now regret that Clinton has committed himself to keeping 100,000 troops in Asia, including 37,000 in Korea and 47,000 in Japan–a level reaffirmed by a Pentagon review in late 1998. Others, like Nye, even suggest that was never a rock-solid figure. “We now have capacity to engage in long-range bombing with pinpoint accuracy, with virtually zero chance of losing a plane,” says one U.S. official. “That makes up for a lot.”
But any force reduction would exacerbate Asia’s insecurities, and some Clinton critics say the administration has only itself to blame. On Capitol Hill, Republicans have savaged the administration for what they say is a mindless policy of engagement with China at the expense of other relationships, especially with allies like Japan and South Korea. The administration may also be suffering an ironic backlash from Kosovo. After the war ended in early June with Milosevic’s surrender of the Balkan province, the administration said it had taught rogue powers to beware. But some experts worry that the Asians absorbed other lessons. First, NATO’s policy of “immaculate coercion” in Kosovo could suggest to America’s friends that the United States is less willing to risk casualties. Second, potential U.S. enemies may also now view weapons of mass destruction–which Milosevic lacks –as the best way to counter U.S. might. “When Bill Perry went to North Korea, the response was ‘We don’t want to be Yugoslavia’,’’ says Manning. “If you don’t have missiles and WMD, the U.S. will attack you.”
There may have been yet another unintended lesson from Kosovo: make enough noise about your plight, as the Kosovar Albanians did, and the Americans will come. Su Ge, a leading Chinese expert on Sino-Taiwanese issues, believes that Kosovo may have led Lee Teng-hui to believe the U.S. would rush to Taiwan’s aid in the name of human rights. He warns that the troubles now are far more serious than the last strait confrontation in 1996, and “unlike any other crisis so far.” A similar appraisal can be made, unfortunately, of the tensions elsewhere. Asia, once seen as a bulwark of global stability in Washington, may now be Bill Clinton’s biggest headache.
