North Korea’s Nuclear Test and Pacific Geopolitics
By Nate Jones on 15 December 2006
Notwithstanding the flurry of intense media coverage of Mr. Kim's October surprise — which wasn’t actually very surprising — North Korea’s nuclear test should not be seen just as an opportunity for the U.S. to fret over proliferation and to re-use the “axis of evil” rhetoric. Rather we should take a step back and reflect on ongoing shifts in the network of alliances that have defined the geopolitical architecture of the Pacific Rim since World War II.
Granted, Mr. Kim played his nuclear ace with fiendish calculation, striking Washington's trans-Pacific alliance network in the midst of a Japanese leadership transition and as the Bush administration's international influence reached a new nadir. Meanwhile, at the UN, news of the North's test arrived just as that international body was preparing to elect its first Secretary General from South Korea.
While proponents of Mr. Kim's sanity may point to the resultant international confusion and milk-toothed UN resolution as evidence of brilliant Northern brinkmanship, it is more useful to consider the structural factors that underpinned the weak response of the trans-Pacific alliance.
While it's clear that Mr. Kim's careful timing allowed the North to catch Washington's alliance system at an awkward moment, the geopolitics of the Pacific Rim have been progressively straining Washington's relationships there for decades. Indeed, North Korea's success as a rogue state is arguably conditioned on its exploitation of these long-term strains. These widening cracks in the American alliance system stem from an official blindness toward the dramatically changing reality of Asian geopolitics, which bears little resemblance to the post-World War II status quo still encoded in Washington's Pacific Rim relationships.
In all likelihood, the end of World War II saw the historical apogee of America's global influence. The American navy sailed the seven seas unchallenged and American arms had just ended a global war in Washington's favor for the second time in 30 years. Just as the Bretton-Woods economic system crystallized America's interests in economic stability and its prime position in the global economy, Washington's relationships in the Pacific were re-constructed to reflect the new empire's strength across the Pacific.
As in Europe, the new architects of Washington's Asian alliances sought to simultaneously preserve America's unquestioned military and economic dominance and contain the increasing strength of the Soviet Union. Following this blueprint, Washington embarked on a series of relationships that would allow the US to keep an eye on communist activities throughout mainland Asia through a series of island outposts along the Pacific Rim. These naval and army bases in the Philippines, Guam and Japan capitalized on the dominant global position of the American navy. Washington also hoped to keep a foothold on the mainland through bases in decolonized Korea, a peninsula also coveted by Moscow.
Washington's suspicion of engagements in mainland Asia was confirmed by the strategically meaningless Korean War, which spent 50,000 American lives for a minor readjustment of the Korean border along the 38th parallel. After the Korean ceasefire, the US preserved its military toehold in South Korea and continued to rely on its alliances with the Philippines and Japan to sustain the influence of the US navy across the Pacific.
Although communist infiltration of South Vietnam drew the US into another costly war on the mainland, Washington's nightmare domino theory never took place, hinting that the underlying assumptions of Pentagon policy-makers regarding both the Pacific Rim and the mainland were seriously flawed. Even as China began the lengthy process of reclaiming its mantle of Asian leadership and as nationalist movements produced relatively strong states in decolonized Southeast Asia, Beltway policy-makers continued to view Asia from a post-World War perspective, in which America had unquestioned domination of Asia's Pacific coast and faced the possibility of a rolling tide of uniform, Moscow-style communism.
As Asia's geopolitical realities began to shift from the 1960s, American policy-makers persisted in viewing new nationalist developments through a Cold War lens, exercising a tunnel vision that easily justified continued American commitments along the Pacific Rim. By twist of logic, Washington's Asian commitments were extended beyond the end of the Cold War to form the basis of American economic influence in the region.
After glasnost and perestroika, Washington analysts found that the bugbear of communist China constituted a convenient justification for ongoing American military commitments in Asia. Simultaneously, of course, the remarkable economic resurgence of Beijing complemented ongoing economic “miracles” in Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea and defined the Pacific Rim as a field of primarily economic interest for the United States. State Department officials traveling to Asia carefully erased communist rhetoric from their vocabulary and talked instead of free-market hopes and dreams.
Despite this surface re-orientation of American policy, however, Washington's commitments along the Pacific Rim remained inevitably entangled in the geopolitical architecture of the post-World War era. Just as the IMF spent the 1990s officially ignoring the global power shifts accompanying the changing economic realities of the Pacific Rim and other regions of the Global South, so Washington continued to ignore the signs that the nature of its involvement in the Pacific Rim no longer matched the fundamental geopolitical realities of the region.
The successful emergence of North Korea as a rogue state under Kim Il-Sung and ultimately Kim Jong-Il was dependent upon the North's astute exploitation of these contradictions. In particular, the rising military and economic power of China as well as a resurgent Japanese military and democratization of the Philippines and South Korea led regional leaders to reevaluate their position in the regional hierarchy and their relationships with Washington.
During the Cold War, Washington's key allies along the Pacific Rim, including Indonesia, Thailand the Philippines, Japan and South Korea were all plagued by an over-centralization of power that produced, at best, flawed democratic governments. Rhetoric aside, the lack of democratic debate regarding foreign policy options proved convenient for the United States. Centralization of power in these states meant that Washington had a freer hand negotiating basing agreements and responding to regional problems.
While Washington's allies generally had independent foreign policy interests even during the Cold War, these interests were carefully managed around the American relationship. As the end of the Cold War and the Asian economic crisis brought increasing popular demands for truly democratic governments, Washington's allies were gradually forced to construct a more open and accountable foreign policy.
The rise of China as a regional power has also rearranged the geopolitical chess board. Yet Washington does not yet seem to have a realistic picture of the global game. Most US policy analysts concerned with rising Chinese influence have churned out doom-and-gloom books on the supposed Chinese menace. For these thinkers, Chinese influence is primarily viewed in light of its potential effect on American security or American economic involvement in China. When they consider America's Asian allies, these prophets of woe tend to advise continued American military commitment to the Pacific Rim in order to protect our allies and guarantee American economic interests.
Ultimately, few in Washington are willing to reconcile themselves to the fact that American influence has been slowly decreasing across the globe since World War II. In the end, American determination to foster global economic growth facilitated the resurgence of traditional regional powers across the globe, including Japan, China, Germany, and France. Increasingly, these regional powers are unwilling to take a back seat to Washington's leadership. Persistently, Washington is unwilling to share its mantle of global leadership with these allies. This politely tense clash of national ambitions and interests has produced clear cracks in the post-World War global architecture and has enabled North Korea to survive as a rogue state, playing off the competing national interests of various Asian powers and the United States.
The natural geography of Asia dictates that the Asian side of the Pacific Rim should be dominated by an Asian power. The extraordinary influence of the American navy since World War II has been more an historical anomaly than an inevitability. In the end, America's persistent presence in Asia is the result of imperial Japanese overstretch during the 1930s rather than a calculated national interest. The gap between Washington's expectations and those of its allies is nowhere more apparent than with regards to the North Korea crisis.
In this matter, Japan and South Korea have seen their national interests align with those of Beijing, since all three countries have little use for a nuclear strike in their regional backyard. Far away Washington, not facing a direct nuclear threat from North Korea, has dramatically different priorities focused mainly on proliferation issues. Whether or not Beltway policy-makers admit it, the geography of Asia coupled with the reemergence of Asia's traditional powers has effectively sidelined the United States on the North Korea issue. In the end, Washington would do well to take the lessons of the North Korea issue to heart, downsizing the global architecture of its post-World War empire to better reflect the realities of its global influence. In that case, North Korea might find it less useful to publicly bait the United States and be forced instead to confront the importance of its relationships with Japan, China and South Korea.
Last updated 12 January 2009