Strategic Asia 2008-09: Challenges and Choices

The United States and Asia

executive summary This chapter evaluates U.S. policy toward Asia and suggests policy options for the next administration. main argument: • A new president will inevitably focus first on the Middle East and the war on terrorism and second on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, but relations with major powers in Asia are ultimately more important. • The future of Chinese power is the overriding issue for the U.S., yet policymakers remain ambivalent over optimistic and pessimistic models that stress economic interests and the balance of military power, respectively. • The constant pressure to address immediate concerns in North Korea and Pakistan will challenge the development of long-term strategy in Asia. policy implications: There is no need for immediate major revision of strategies toward Asia, but a few changes of course could buffer policy against long-term risks: • Washington would benefit from maintaining the U.S.-Japan alliance and expanding security relations with India while remaining mindful of the need for Pakistani cooperation against the Taliban and al Qaeda. • Revising U.S. military strategy to rely on air power in the early phase of a war on the Korean Peninsula would allow removal of the U.S. ground forces that provoke negative public sentiment and undercut the basis of the alliance. • Toning down pressure on Moscow and reducing U.S. involvement in Central Asia may assist in discouraging strategic Russian-Chinese cooperation against Washington. • Clarifying but limiting plans for defense of Taiwan could reduce chances of Chinese miscalculation in a crisis and limit U.S. liability. United States Richard K. Betts is the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor and Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He can be reached at . The United States and Asia Richard K. Betts The biggest challenges facing the United States in Asia are in the longer term and will come from evolving conditions in the balance of power. The principal unresolved question here is whether (and how) the United States will accommodate the rise of China or strive to keep the prerogatives of primacy in East Asia to which Washington has become accustomed. Although U.S. political leaders may not be forced to confront the question directly for a long time, trends could bring the issue to the fore in the 2013 presidential term—or a catalytic event could do so even sooner. With few exceptions, the immediate strategic issues are not pressing and can be managed more or less without significant departures from long-standing policies. The exceptions, the two pressing strategic questions on Asia, come from the fringes of the continent: North Korea in the east, where a weak, poor country manages to exert tremendous leverage on the world’s only superpower, and Pakistan in the west, where Asia bleeds into the maelstrom of the Middle East. These two nations will inevitably preoccupy official strategists, given that dealing with near-term problems always crowds out long-term planning. As long as nuclear weapons use in these peripheral areas can be prevented, however, relations with the major powers in Asia are ultimately more important. U.S. strategy for managing the national security aspects of the relationship with Japan—one of the United States’ most important allies— does not need revision. A firm U.S. commitment to defend Japan, and Tokyo’s subsidization of the basing costs for doing so, should remain the essence of the strategy. The main challenge is to fend off demands that Japan do more to share U.S. military burdens in Asia. Such calls might have made 42 • Strategic Asia 2008–09 sense during the Cold War, given the magnitude of the Soviet threat. Today, however, the material benefits would be outweighed by the political and diplomatic disruption that would follow were Japan to become a militarily “normal” country. Given its size and new economic dynamism, India should naturally be moreimportanttotheUnitedStatesthanithasbeeninthepast.Washington’s approach to dealing with New Delhi also requires no drastic change. Moves to improve relations with India face fewer complications as U.S. relations with Pakistan have worsened. The awkward but viable triangular relationship Washington maintained with New Delhi and Islamabad during the Musharraf government’s cooperation in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban will become less complicated if the new Pakistani government makes a separate peace with those enemies. In the more hopeful eventuality that Islamabad continues to cooperate on counterterrorism with the United States, there is...