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12-June-2009
EAST ASIA STRATEGIC CALCULUS: THE CHINA-NORTH KOREA THREAT
By Dr. Subhash Kapila
Introductory Observations
East Asia’s strategic fragility is best evident from the recent underground nuclear tests and test firings of long range missiles carried out by North Korea. That these tests were carried out by North Korea in blatant and provocative defiance of United States warnings to the contrary, indicates the loss of strategic control of the United States in the North-West quadrant of the Pacific or North East Asia.
North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests could not have been carried out without China’s concurrence or strategic permissiveness. This assertion is irrefutable in terms of all objective strategic analysis. North Korea has no other major power to strategically bank on other than China, not even Russia.
The United States global image as the world’s predominant power gets seriously dented when rogue nations like North Korea can indulge in strategic defiance the United States regional image as the security guarantor of South Korea and Japan gets even more severely dented. More significantly the nuclear umbrella that the United Sates provides to South Korea and Japan, to face China's and North Korea’s nuclear and missiles arsenal, begins to look leaky.
East Asia’s strategic calculus henceforth can no longer confine itself to the consideration of the China threat only. East Asia’s strategic calculus now needs to incorporate a combined China-North Korea threat to regional peace and stability. Significantly both have nuclear weapons and long range missiles capabilities.
Obliviousness to a combined China-North Korea threat can tend to seriously distort the strategic and political formulations of the United States and its main allies Japan and South Korea. Even Australia with its military alliance relationship with the United States cannot ignore this new emerging threat in East Asia.
If China claims that it has no strategic or political control over North Korea and it should not be held accountable for North Korea’s defiant strategic transgressions, would China then join the United States and the international community in disciplining North Korea militarily?
With such strategic developments, the question that plagues any analytical strategic mind is as to why the United States has allowed such a situation to incubate in East Asia. Has the United States policy establishment forgotten their own line of strategic thinking that postulates that China’s end-game in East Asia is ultimately to bring about a strategic exit of United States military presence from East Asia and the Western Pacific?
Some of the issues that this Paper intends to examine in this light in terms of East Asia’s strategic calculus are as follows:
East Asia’s Conflictual Flash Points: The China Factor.
United States Strategic Ambivalence Towards China
New Strategic Architecture for East Asia: The Centrality of Vietnam.
East Asia’s Conflictual Flash Points: The China Factor
East Asia in one sense can be termed as the most confictually explosive region, even more than the Middle East. The United States NATO and Israel with their combined military weight can neutralise any challenges to their security. arising in this region. China as an aspiring superpower presently lacks force projection capabilities in the Middle East. In terms of nuclear and missile arsenals one can count on USA, France, Britain and Israel.
East Asia contrastingly presents China as an aspiring superpower ready to flex its strategic muscle against the United States most effectively. In East Asia, excluding the United States, nuclear and missiles arsenals are only with China and North Korea.
United States allies in East Asia are non-nuclear states relying solely on the US nuclear umbrella The United States is left single handedly to face the combined nuclear and missiles arsenals of China and North Korea. NATO is too far away to assist USA in crisis situations.
Against such a strategic backdrop in East Asia the conflictual flash points extend from the Korean Peninsula in the North, to the Taiwan Straits and to the South China Sea territorial disputes in which Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia are pitted against China’s irredentist claims to garner the energy deposits that abound in the South China Sea area. Not to be forgotten is the Chinese dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.
The China factor is common in all these four East Asian conflictual flash points. China went to war with the United States on the Korean Peninsula in 1950. Presently, North Korea as the military adventurist rogue nation ally of China can with its brinkmanship trigger an international conflagration here.
In the other conflictual East Asian flash points, China emerges as the main and provocative actor over the Senkaku Islands dispute with Japan, the coercive confrontation with Taiwan and its coercive and strategically arrogant stances on the South China Sea issues.
The United States is militarily committed directly to assist Japan and Taiwan against China. However it has no direct military commitment with any countries to defend against China’s military waywardness in the South China Sea area.
What makes things more complicated is China’s propensity to use force to settle territorial disputes which creates strategic concerns in countries like Vietnam.
China could be made more restrained and its conflictual propensities arrested provided the United States did not give ambivalent signals on China in its policy formulations and strategic outlook.
United States Strategic Ambivalence Towards China
East Asia would have been a far more safer and stable region had the United States not adopted ambivalent postures towards China, Such ambivalence not only confuses United States allies in East Asia, but others too who may be inclined to participate in East Asian security architecture e.g. India and Vietnam.
One has witnessed a number of strands in United States policy attitudes towards China. At the regional level particularly with its East Asian allies, the United States makes a strong emphasis on China’s military expansion and upgradation of China’s strategic capabilities. Probably this approach provides the glue to hold the US-led security architecture in East Asia.
Contrastingly, at the global level or in its direct approaches to China, the United States adopts not only conciliatory approaches but at times even deferential approaches to China. This does not go unnoticed in East Asia.
In the 1970s and 1980s, strategic analysts would apply to China the label of “Swing Strategy” in strategically oscillating between the United States and the Former Soviet Union.
Today it would be more true to apply this label to the United States in that it tends to oscillate towards proximity to China at the expense of its allies, whenever Democratic Administrations assume power in Washington.
Such American ambivalence probably led to South Korea to move closer to China and could induce Japan similarly in the future. Such American ambivalence could have possibly contributed towards the unraveling of the “Strategic Trilateral” and the “Strategic Quadrilateral” in which India had begun to participate.
The moral of the story is that the United States cannot adopt dichotomous ambivalence in its approaches to China. If the United States wishes unwavering commitment from its military allies or prospective strategic partners in East Asian security then it has to first set an exemplary manifestation of “no US-Specific China compromise” in its policy approaches.
New Strategic Architecture in East Asia: The Centrality of Vietnam
The United States so far has relied on its Cold War security architecture in East Asia. There is a stratus-quo in its spider-web of bilateral mutual security pacts with South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The United States has made no attempt to enlarge the security architecture in East Asia.
The United States on its own, for various reasons, has in the last couple of years, reassessed the China threat. In the process it carried out a re-configuration of US Forces deployments in the Western Pacific from Japan and South Korea to Guam. It is a Southward shift.
If such be the Southern tilt in the re-configuration of US forces deployment in East Asia, then there should be also a US quest for new allies in the South West quadrant of the Pacific. Here one would like to point out Vietnam and Indonesia.
Vietnam has a more distinctive centrality in United States security architecture for East Asia.
The strategic significance of Vietnam in the US strategic calculus stands analyzed in detail in this Author’s Paper "VIETNAM ’S RENEWED SIGNIFICANCE IN UNITED STATES STRATEGIC CALCULUS" (SAAG Paper No. 1796 dated 10th May, 2006).
Based on that analysis, one would like to assert that the United States and its allies, especially Japan and Australia should make concerted and deliberate overtures to draw Vietnam into strategic partnerships with them.
Vietnam today faces complex foreign policy challenges in that strategically it has to sit on the fence between China and the US-led East Asian Security architecture.
Vietnam ha no strategic incentives to tilt towards China with which has a long history of conflicts and presently its South China Sea dispute over the Spratly Islands etc. Vietnam has a singular distinction of having beaten back China’s aggression successfully in 1979.
Vietnam on the other hand has not been given any incentives by USA, Australia and Japan in terms of strategic assurances that they would welcome Vietnam in their East Asian security architecture.
When this Author questioned an Australian diplomat a couple of months back as to why Australia had not made such overtures to Vietnam, his answer was surprising. He asserted that because Vietnam was not a democratic country. He had no answer as to how Pakistan and Saudi Arabia qualified as democratic countries.
East Asian security architecture as configured by USA, Japan and Australia is basically directed to cater for the potential China threat. In such an architecture, Vietnam enjoys a strategic centrality which no other country in East Asia can offer to the United States by virtue of its pivotal geo-strategic location.
Contemporarily, it is a strategically opportune time for the United States to co-opt Vietnam in its East Asian strategic architecture. This is an opportune time as Vietnam has developed strategic concerns over China prompting it to order six submarines and advanced fighter aircraft form Russia
Concluding observations
East Asia’s strategic fragility contemporarily arises from China’s strategic ambitions in East Asia primarily directed at engineering the strategic exit of the United States from East Asia or the Western Pacific.
East Asia’s strategic fragility would be lessened had the United States not adopted ambivalent policies towards China. Such American ambivalence in its approaches towards China tempts China to adopt coercive policies in East Asia against its comparatively weaker neighbors.
The United State to safeguard its global predominance and ensure the regional security in East Asia needs to dispense with its ambivalence towards China.
Further the United States needs to bring in a multilateral security architecture in East Asia to counter-act China’s bid to bring in multilateral economic integration in the region as a strategic counterfoil to United States present bilateral pattern of military alliances in East Asia.
(The author is an International Relations and Strategic Affairs analyst. He is the Consultant, Strategic Affairs with South Asia Analysis Group. Email:drsubhashkapila.007@gmail.com)
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