It is by now widely acknowledged that the Asia-Pacific region is poised to become the new center of gravity in international politics in the twenty-first century. This transformation is truly momentous. For most of the modern era, the continent has subsisted mainly as an arena for Western exploitation and dominance — as the "object" rather than as the "subject" of power. Not only Asia’s political order, but oftentimes even the region’s eidetic image of itself has been a product of the acts and beliefs of others.
Clearly, this was not always the case. Prior to modernity — which for practical purposes might be dated to 1492 — and right through its early stages, the Asian continent hosted perhaps the most important concentrations of political power since the fall of Rome. These centers of power — the Ming dynasty in China, the Mughal empire in India, and the Persian Empire in the Near East — nonetheless failed to survive military contacts with the new rising states of Europe (and, later, the Americas). This failure, whose reasons are still debated in the scholarly literature, resulted in the demise of Asia as an autonomous international agent, a situation which more or less persisted until the end of World War II.
In the second half of the twentieth century, however, Asian economic power dramatically resurged, and with it the gradual emergence of significant Asian power centers in international politics. These new powers, like Japan, China, and India, have acquired large conventional military capabilities and, in the latter two cases, weapons of mass destruction (wmd) as well. In addition, several other Asian countries — Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Iraq, and Syria — either possess different kinds of weapons of mass destruction or are proceeding to acquire them. Their successes and failures will influence a second and perhaps more consequential wave of proliferation over time as countries that have currently forgone wmd, like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, are forced to revisit their current policy choices.
By now, the likelihood of the further spread of these technologies has become a matter of great concern. What makes this concern more acute is that the growing attractiveness of weapons of mass destruction in Asia has materialized amidst continuing regional suspicions and animosities, varying degrees of distrust of the United States, and gradual changes in the regional balance of power.
All these issues provide a rich backdrop for an interesting recent book by Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (HarperCollins, 1999), which seeks to describe the problem of wmd proliferation in Asia and its consequences for the United States. Bracken’s message is clear and succinct: The second nuclear age will in all probability turn out to be riskier than the first. While the United States is by no means weaker than it was in the first epoch, the growth of Asian military power, symbolized primarily (but not entirely) by the marriage of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, implies that the U.S. homeland and its bases abroad will be increasingly subjected to new kinds of threats. These threats will inevitably weaken American hegemony and circumscribe its freedom of action, first in Asia and perhaps, later on, over the globe.
While such a conclusion flows seamlessly from the evidence mustered by Bracken about the increasing Asian investments in "disruptive technologies" like ballistic and cruise missiles and nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry, his point goes further still. The West in general, Bracken argues — and the United States in particular — risks missing the real consequences of the second nuclear age: not only that the old barriers of time, distance, and terrain have lost their meaning in the face of wmd-tipped missilery, but also that the technological superiority the U.S. relies upon to sustain its regional hegemony has also been neutered as a result of such capabilities in the hands of many potential foes. At the very least, therefore, the dispersal of disruptive technologies in Asia implies that the traditional American strategy of relying upon a small number of large fixed bases along the periphery — in order to sustain a forward deployed military — will turn out to be an increasingly costly way of sustaining U.S. preeminence in Asia.
The issues raised by such an argument for American defense planning are profound. To understand why, we must begin by returning to first principles: to explain, first, how Asia’s economic rise and consequent patterns of militarization were created by the success of U.S. grand strategy during the Cold War; and next to explore how the United States might respond to this dispersal of disruptive technologies in light of enduring American interests in the region.
The Asian miracle revisited
Three factors in the postwar period laid the basis for the resurgence of at least parts of Asia and, by implication, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The first factor was simply the demise of the colonial order. By resulting in the birth of dozens of new states, that demise created the possibility of new autonomous centers in international politics outside of Europe and the Americas. As part of this process, several large entities, like China, India, and Indonesia, were either restored to independent status or reincarnated in modern form. Thus was the stage set for a rekindling of nationalism throughout the continent.
Yet while the demise of colonialism made the rise of Asia possible, what made that same rise inevitable were two other factors: the international order created and sustained by American preeminence in the postwar period, and the presence of national elites in some Asian countries embarking on specific national economic strategies that would produce sustained growth over time. Where these two factors did not obtain — in Southwest Asia and, to a lesser degree, in South Asia — the pressures of local security competition ensured that the regional states would seek to increase their security, power, and influence by other than economic means. This, in turn, inevitably meant weapons of mass destruction; for the other strategic alternatives, like advanced and effective conventional forces, turned out to be highly costly and difficult to obtain, the more so for governments in which poor economic performance and ineffective national leadership were the rule.
In general, though, those sub-regions of Asia that were able to avoid the temptations of disruptive technologies were those that secured the full fruits of American regional hegemony. This hegemony, in fact, provided two complementary benefits — opportunities for wealth and assured security — which increased the national power capabilities of several states to produce various kinds of critical technologies, even as it simply obviated the need for acquiring any disruptive technologies on the part of these states, at least in the near term.
To begin with, U.S. regional hegemony offered a structured opportunity for a variety of nations — war-torn states like Japan, smaller countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, even late industrializers like China — to benefit from a stable and open international trading regime. The relatively unfettered access enjoyed by these states to the international market, especially the gigantic consuming economies of North America and Western Europe, provided them an opportunity to specialize in accordance with their relative advantages (and thereby to secure all the gains from trade that liberal economists have written about since the days of David Ricardo). In fact, the effective gains that accrued to these Asian states in the postwar period were even larger than the standard neoclassical models of free trade would have predicted. This was because the United States, confident about its preeminent economic power in the early postwar period, chose not to institute a truly "free" trade system. Rather, Washington opened its own markets to various Asian products without insisting on a symmetrical openness on the part of Asian exporters.
This strategy was essentially driven by power-political considerations associated with the Cold War. The fierce competition during this period, along with the thin margins of safety that the Western allies were seen to possess, convinced Washington that strengthening the economic capabilities of its Asian allies and the neutral states in the international system was in America’s larger interests. Toward that end, a large international aid program, coupled with the development of a less-than-perfectly-free trading system, turned out to be a useful solution. It enabled the allies to reinvigorate their capabilities and thereby contribute to the American-led effort at joint resistance of the Soviet Union, while allowing the neutral states to strengthen themselves sufficiently to resist both Soviet lures and potential penetration efforts that might be mounted by Moscow.
While this somewhat asymmetrical international economic order was hardly the kind of global institutional structure that would have satisfied a classical liberal, it did provide the United States with a cost-effective means of containing the Soviet Union. It rapidly strengthened the allied and neutral states, thus minimizing the need for nuclear weapons, at least on the part of the former, even as it allowed them to garner significant increases in economic power and conventional military strength under American alliance management. These twin consequences had the effect of denying Moscow the opportunity of preying upon the relatively weak and vulnerable nations of Asia, while simultaneously enlarging the domain of power and influence enjoyed by the United States.
This strategy of encouraging the Asian states, among others, to participate in, and perhaps even exploit, the liberal international economic order was of course not embarked upon for altruistic reasons. Washington’s calculations were aimed at preserving and maintaining American preeminence. For this reason, the open international trading order was complemented by the institution of an international political order as well. This political order was built on the foundations of multilateral security alliances in Europe and an interlocking network of bilateral alliances in Asia. In both cases, the object of these alliances was the same, at least in the first instance: to contain the Soviet Union (and, initially, China as well) and to preserve Western security and autonomy. In the final instance, however, this alliance system had other equally useful effects. By providing an overarching defensive umbrella, the alliance structure served both to obviate destructive local security competition between the protected states (the bane of regional politics for the past several centuries) as well as to prevent these client entities from developing the kinds of disruptive technologies that could one day directly threaten the United States or its extended interests.
This lopsided security relationship was visible in its purest form in East Asia, where the United States committed itself to guaranteeing allied security without requiring the protected states to make any comparable commitments in return. Even those states that were not directly protected, like China, were shielded just the same, thanks to American deterrence of the Soviet Union. As a result of such arrangements, the U.S., in effect, provided the Asian states with guaranteed security in tandem with providing them the opportunities to procure significant gains from trade with minimal reciprocity, at least as far as comparable access to their own markets was concerned. The interaction of these two elements following the end of the colonial period would lay the foundations for creating an East Asian success story.
The possibility of profitably participating in the open trading regime, however, required something more than simply an international regime and the security structures that protected it. It required enlightened national elites in Asia itself — elites who not only would recognize the opportunities provided by the U.S.-led international order, but were also capable of developing the requisite domestic economic strategies that would help their states get the most out of their participation in the international economic system. Such elites were present along substantial portions of the East Asian periphery — in contrast to the general muddling that characterized the westerly peripheries of the continent.
The national elites in East Asia contributed to the economic miracle in three ways: first, by developing specific national economic strategies which allowed their states to maximize external benefits from the international trading order; second, by developing the appropriate national institutions that allowed for the possibility of constantly "shared growth" rather than repeated, divisive struggles over redistribution (see Jose Edgardo Campos and Hilton L. Root, The Key to the Asian Miracle, 1996); and third, by keeping defense expenditures low but nonetheless focusing on the mastery of key technologies that would allow them to lay the foundations for increased military power should that become necessary in the future. The national economic strategies devised by East Asia’s ruling elites centered substantially on maintaining highly regulated domestic market structures — with American acquiescence — which penalized consumption in order to force higher rates of saving. These accumulated savings were then directed to make advantageous production of more sophisticated goods even more advantageous. As a result of this process, Asian economies that began their "export-led" growth strategies by producing highly labor-intensive goods — small and medium-scale light industries like garments, footwear, plastics, and toys — slowly shifted their attention and resources to produce the electronics, computers, and automobiles which are synonymous with East Asia today.
The structuring of national institutions to allow for "shared growth" reflected the corporatist approach to state-society relations that distinguishes many East Asian states from their Southwestern and South Asian as well as their Western counterparts. This approach, in effect, relied on the state (as a benign Leviathan) to institute procedural arrangements with critical groups in civil society, including big business. These arrangements, in turn, helped to integrate weaker but more numerous sections of the populace through the development of relatively stable institutions, rules, and procedures that both limited the capriciousness of the state in matters of economic policy and encouraged rapid private economic growth. As part of these structural arrangements, political liberties (in the Western sense) were often traded off for economic rewards; these rewards were distributed not in the form of simple, transitory entitlements, but rather in the more durable form of expanding avenues for mass upward mobility and the opportunities to reap long-term, lasting benefits from the resulting economic expansion.
Finally, the decisions to keep defense expenditures as low as possible allowed the East Asian states to avoid ruinous forms of destructive local security competition. These decisions, however, did not imply either a neglect of conventional military capabilities or an inattention to the key building blocks of modern military power. Instead, even as effective conventional forces were developed and subordinated to alliance interests, they also concentrated on mastering key technological processes that would allow them to develop a wide variety of effective disruptive technologies if they needed to over time.
As long as an Asian state, therefore, had a rational and calculating political leadership and responsive economic institutions, its ability not only to survive but actually to thrive was almost a certainty under the international economic and political regimes created with the intent of maintaining American preeminence and checking Soviet influence.
Three problems, three sets of states
The american "grand strategy" succeeded brilliantly, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reinvigoration of U.S. allies and important neutral states. But it also produced other less desirable effects over time: the relative decline of American power, at least in comparison to the new growth centers in East Asia, coupled with the emergence of various other states — states which, lacking economic prowess and/or effective foreign allies, began to view the acquisition of disruptive technologies as critical to their national security.
By the end of the Cold War, U.S. grand strategy in Asia was therefore confronted by three sets of states. The first consisted of formal American allies, like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia, which benefited greatly from both the liberal international economic order and American protection and as a result chose to forgo the option of developing weapons of mass destruction for ensuring their security. Each of these states used its close relations with the United States to build up fairly formidable conventional military forces, which however relied upon the U.S. nuclear umbrella for strategic cover. The second set of states consisted of powers like China, India, and Pakistan, which chose to develop weapons of mass destruction in order to resolve local security dilemmas. As late entrants into the liberal international economic order, they were not able to scale the heights of prosperity as countries in the first set did. And not being real allies of either superpower, they found in weapons of mass destruction an attractive solution to their immediate security threats, for neither prosperity nor alliances alone were viewed as sufficient. The third set of states, like North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, turned out to be those that missed the economic revolution occurring in other parts of Asia entirely (though for different reasons in each case). Unable to develop either effective political or conventional military solutions to their immediate security problems, these states settled on the acquisition of disruptive technologies as the preferred instruments for generating security and influence.
This demarcation clearly suggests how the spread of disruptive technologies in Asia has been affected by the reach and success of American grand strategy during the Cold War. Clearly, had this strategy failed, it is likely that many more Asian states would have opted for weapons of mass destruction — including very rich and capable states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. In fact, some of these countries actually toyed with the idea of developing nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and all of them currently possess the technical and economic wherewithal to produce various kinds of disruptive technologies fairly quickly should they choose to do so.
Unfortunately, the benefits of U.S. protection — which were so conspicuously manifest in East Asia — did not extend throughout the continent. In part, this was because coping with the communist threat was so pressing a challenge that any effort to extend U.S. deterrence guarantees to counter even local security competition in Asia would have led to an unacceptable, perhaps fatal, overextension of U.S. power. It was tried nonetheless — for example, through the cento and seato treaties — but these efforts failed mostly because many of the regional partners had national objectives that varied substantially from those of the United States. Whatever the reason for failure in each case, the net result was that many Asian states increasingly came to see their survival and national interests as dependent on the possession of weapons of mass destruction. In some cases, this dependence was less an issue of national survival than one of regime survival, but the outcome turned out to be the same.
The strategic challenge facing the United States from the perspective of managing disruptive technologies today, therefore, takes the form of a three-sided problem that must be resolved simultaneously: First, how can the states in the first category — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia — be effectively defended against wmd threats so as to preempt them from acquiring comparable capabilities of their own over time? Second, how can the states in the second category — China, India, and Pakistan — be prevented from distending their wmd capabilities, even as their growing links with the liberal international economic order enable them to generate the resources to acquire additional disruptive technologies? Finally, how can the states in the third category — North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria — be weaned away from their addiction to disruptive technologies at a time when they perceive unchallenged American hegemony to be among the principal threats to their security?
Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions here. One can argue, for example, that manipulating, even constraining, access to the U.S.-led liberal international economic order could help to constrain neutral and antagonistic proliferants: i.e., that constraining the economic growth of states in the second and third categories will restrain by implication their ability to invest extensively in disruptive technologies. The success of this solution, however, is contingent on how integrated such states are with the global economy. Some states like China are highly integrated, others like India and Pakistan less so, and still others like North Korea and Syria are virtually unconnected. Thus, even if constraining growth rates could work as a solution in some cases, this instrument may not be optimal after all for several reasons. First, disruptive technologies are relatively cheap to acquire compared to other kinds of strategic technologies, so it is not clear that reducing the overall growth rates even in those countries that are integrated into the global market would make a big difference to their wmd programs (obviously, countries that are not so integrated are exempt from such pressures to begin with). Second, any kind of manipulation of access to the liberal economic order not only penalizes U.S. economic interests and reduces the gains accruing to American consumers, but also violates the core premises underlying the creation and perpetuation of the liberal order that has served both the U.S. and its allies well over time. Finally, the policy of economic constraint reduces whatever pacifying benefits do obtain from the spread of trade and commerce in goods and ideas; it undermines the viability of both those domestic constituencies in the proliferant countries that have a stake in greater international integration (as opposed to narrowly nationalistic ambitions) and those ideas which affirm the belief that competition for absolute gains is preferable to self-defeating struggles about relative gains. At the very least, therefore, the unwillingness (and perhaps inability) of the United States to manipulate access to international markets for some or all these reasons implies a geopolitical fact: Whether countries grow rapidly or slowly, some kinds of economic instruments may be relatively inefficient to prevent the further diffusion of disruptive technologies.
All that may be left in the tool kit, then, as Bracken notes with dismay in Fire in the East, are the standard instruments of technology denial, focused economic sanctions, arms control, and the like. Despite their historical shortcomings, these do turn out to be the only generic instruments left, particularly if more aggressive and risky options like preventative war or disarming strikes are ruled out as either inappropriate or infeasible in all but a very few cases.
This reality is understandably disconcerting to most strategic analysts, and Bracken’s book is no exception. How one copes with the problem of wmd diffusion remains the weakest part of his otherwise lucid work. But his core observation about the consequences of the militarization of Asia is important and bears careful reflection: The gradual diffusion of wmd instruments does indeed imply that significant portions of the Asian continent will gradually become immune to the easy application of U.S. military power. The very presence of wmd, especially in the nuclear variant, implies that American hegemony, however potent otherwise, cannot be directed against the core interests of any proliferant without provoking a highly damaging response. In effect, then, as Bracken notes, the diffusion of disruptive technologies implies the progressive diminution of American hegemony as new portions of the Asian strategic landscape become immune to the persuasion embodied by U.S. military power.
In this judgement, Bracken is correct. But this only makes American hegemony more and more akin to the British hegemony of a previous era. The most conspicuous characteristic of British hegemony, unlike that of Rome, was Great Britain’s general inability to dominate the heartlands of its principal competitors. In fact, this inability is precisely what drove Great Britain from the metropolitan center of Europe and compelled it to create an empire built around the domination of mostly peripheral states. Even at the height of British hegemony, the European continent remained more or less beyond the easy reach of English arms. To the degree that U.S. power is forced in a similar direction in the future, it is likely to simply replicate what must be the future of all hegemonies in the nuclear age. In fact, it is possible to argue that the United States is no stranger to this phenomenon at all, since even in the first nuclear age — the Cold War — U.S. military power could not be applied with impunity against the Soviet heartland or within the sphere of acknowledged Soviet influence.
With the growing militarization of Asia, this immunity will now extend to new pockets of the continent. While the progressive expansion of such a sanctuary no doubt implies a further constriction of U.S. freedom of action, it is important not to overstate this implication. After all, American military power, like British military power before it, is unlikely to be directed ordinarily against the core interests of any emerging competitors. Rather, most applications of U.S. military power, as far as can be envisaged, are likely to be directed either at the interstices of competing interests or in defense of some long-established (and by now well-recognized) security obligations in Asia. With the exception of defending Taiwan, which China has for its own reasons defined as a core interest, almost every other application of U.S. power that can be imagined is oriented towards defending objectives that are only extrinsically rather than intrinsically valuable from the viewpoint of emerging proliferators. Thus, the U.S. could wage war against Iraq to recapture Kuwait; can contemplate the defense of South Korea against the North; and can patrol the sea lanes in the Gulf in the face of Iranian hostility, because in the final analysis neither Kuwait nor South Korea nor evicting U.S. naval presence in the Gulf could be considered to be intrinsically valuable interests from the viewpoint of Baghdad, Pyongyang, and Tehran respectively.
If, in fact, a different valuation of these interests obtained in these three capitals, then the United States would be faced with a situation of "absolute" conflict, like Great Britain was during the two earlier world wars, during which it would have no choice but to press every resource it had under its command to win the war — including nuclear war — that would be forced upon it if deterrence failed. A situation like this could of course occur in the future if the United States, for example, attempted to enforce its writ in a way that ran counter to the recognized core interests of any nuclear-armed adversary. Such exercises of armed suasion, however, are unlikely — or at least would be avoided in favor of some other alternative. The American responses to North Korean nuclearization more or less confirmed this approach, but even if local wars were to materialize, the relative — even though not absolute — superiority enjoyed by the United States in multiple dimensions of power would make a real difference to its ability to minimize all the tactical, operational, strategic, and geopolitical hardships that would flow out of an adversary’s decisions to use his disruptive technologies against the United States. This implies that even if U.S. freedom of action gradually diminishes in Asia because of the gradual diffusion of weapons of mass destruction, it still pays Washington to play the role of a hegemonic supplier of security to those Asian states threatened by this phenomenon so long as such a strategic relationship enables the kinds of productive economic relations that over time help to defray the burdens of providing security and help to preempt the rise of even more significant and consequential threats to U.S. interests in the future.
When viewed from amidst the spectrum of possibilities, the United States therefore may have little choice but to maintain its preeminent power in Asia — through forward deployment if necessary. The other alternatives — encouraging a multipolarity in the hope of generating a stabilizing local balance of power, or more or less disengaging from the region in order to minimize the threats to its interests — leave Washington worse off in comparison to all the inconveniences that must necessarily be suffered as a result of the commitment to sustain U.S. regional preeminence. This is the critical question that lies at the heart of any debate about America’s future in Asia: Once this grand strategic issue is resolved, the derivative problems about what operational adjustments in the U.S. military posture ought to be engineered or what technical antidotes ought to be developed in order to cope with the growth of Asian military power can be resolved relatively simply.
The case for staying put
I believe that the commitment to U.S. regional preeminence remains the best solution to our multiple national security interests in Asia. The relative merits of pursuing the maintenance of preeminence as a grand strategy — as opposed to settling for a local multipolar balance of power or slowly disengaging from the region — can be best demonstrated by testing the consequences of each of these alternatives against the multiple goals pursued by the United States in Asia.
The United States has, arguably, several critical interests in Asia. The list here is in decreasing order of importance:
The first critical interest consists of preventing, deterring, and reducing the threat of attack on the continental United States and its extended territorial possessions. In the simplest sense, this interest has two components. The first and most important involves preserving the continental United States (conus) and its possessions from threats posed by weapons of mass destruction in Asia. These weapons are important because of the extensive damage they can inflict in relatively compressed time frames. Equally important, as Bracken points out, are the challenges posed by sophisticated delivery systems, like ballistic and cruise missiles and advanced attack aircraft, currently deployed by the wmd-capable states as well as prospective delivery systems that may be acquired by other Asian states over time. This includes both spin-off technologies emerging from space and commercial aviation programs as well as other kinds of non-traditional, covert delivery systems.
The other component of this national objective involves protecting the conus and its possessions from conventional attack. Because of the vast distances involved in the Asia-Pacific region, the critical variables here are battlespace denial and power-projection capabilities — both sea- and air-based — that may be acquired by one or more Asian states. Given the changes in technology, these capabilities must be expanded to include other, newer, approaches to conventional war-fighting like strategic information warfare and the technologies and operational practices associated with the "revolution in military affairs." In all instances, U.S. interests suggest the following preference ordering: preventing potential adversaries from acquiring such capabilities; if prevention is impossible, deterring their use becomes the next logical objective; and, if even deterrence is unsuccessful, attenuating their worst effects through either extended counterforce options or effective defensive measures finally becomes necessary.
It is immediately obvious that disengaging from Asia in any significant way does little to minimize the threats posed by the spread of both wmd and other strategic technologies. Only if highly robust forms of strategic defense become available in the future does the disengagement option become viable, and even then it may not necessarily be preferable, if it implies the inability to influence the wmd procurement and deployment decisions of the Asian states. Disengagement, moreover, has other corrosive effects: It would certainly compel many current American allies to acquire disruptive technologies in order to compensate for American absence, and these responses would only generate a regional arms race that would lead to the further diffusion of such capabilities.
It is highly doubtful that encouraging a multipolar balance of power, requiring the controlled diffusion of wmd and strategic capabilities, is the solution either. There is simply no assurance that the "grooming" of multipolarity can be successfully calibrated (either by the United States or others). Moreover, once solutions such as these are pursued, there is no guarantee that other countries in other parts of the world will want to maintain any of their current restraints. A multipolarity based on the gradual emergence of new wmd powers may become a reality over time, but it cannot represent a future that the U.S. ought to desire or encourage, at least as a general principle. There may be areas where exceptions to this rule are tolerated, but such exceptionalism requires additional tests before it is enshrined as a matter of policy. In any event, when U.S. extended deterrence is available to a state, it ought to be offered in the form of security guarantees as a strategy of diminishing the attractiveness of disruptive technologies. In the matter of defending its first critical interest in Asia, therefore, a hegemonic strategy, whereby the U.S. continues to provide local security, remains the best strategy — not because it is by any means risk-free but because it is better than all the alternatives.
The second critical interest consists of preventing the rise of a hegemonic state in Asia. Any hegemonic state capable of dominating the Asian land mass and the line of communications, both internal and external, represents an unacceptable challenge to the safety, prosperity, and relative power position of the United States. For reasons well understood by geopoliticians since Sir Halford Mackinder, Asia’s great wealth and resources would privilege its possessors considerably in the struggles endemic to international politics. If the region’s wealth and resources were to be secured by any single state (or some combination of states acting in unison), it would enable this entity to threaten American assets not only in Asia but in other areas as well — Europe and Africa, for example — and finally perhaps to challenge the United States itself at a global level. This entity, using the continent’s vast resources and economic capabilities, could then effectively interdict the links that currently connect the United States with Asia and the rest of the world and, in the limiting case, menace the U.S. territory itself through a combination of both wmd and conventional instruments.
Besides being a threat to American safety, a hegemonic domination of Asia by one of the region’s powers would threaten American prosperity as well, if the consequence of such domination included denying the United States access to the continent’s markets, goods, capital, and technology. In combination, this threat to American safety and prosperity would have the inevitable effect of threatening the relative power position of the United States in international politics.
This interest in preventing the rise of a hegemonic state inevitably involves paying close attention to the possible power transitions currently occurring in the region, especially those relating to China in the near to medium term and to Japan, Russia, and possibly India over the long run. It requires developing an appropriate set of policy responses — which may range from prevention at one end through containment in the middle to appeasement at the other — designed to prevent the rise of any hegemony that breaks American connections with Asia. Plainly, a strategy of disengagement would be unable to assure this objective, and may actually entice the larger Asian states to contemplate mounting just such a challenge. Even if such efforts were to arouse local balancing, there is no assurance that they could be checkmated without the assistance of the United States. And, if such balancing ultimately requires U.S. military presence and assistance for its success, it is still not clear what the benefits of a multipolar solution would be since the current division of labor already accepts not only American presence but also American preeminence. This is not to say that further adjustments in the U.S. regional posture ought to be ruled out, but that any adjustments that presage a true devolution towards multipolarity — the spread of wmd capabilities to American allies and acquiescing to their acquisition of power projection capabilities — have not yet been shown to be in the U.S. interest.
The third critical interest consists of ensuring the survival of American allies. The first and most obvious reason for this objective is that the United States has treaty obligations to three important Asian states — Japan, South Korea, and Australia — and political commitments to another, namely Taiwan. While meeting these obligations is certainly important to maintain the credibility of the United States in the international arena, it is also consequential for directly substantive reasons that go right to the heart of Bracken’s book: controlling the leakage of disruptive technologies in Asia.
In at least two of these three instances, the assurance of U.S. protection has resulted in important implicit bargains that are indispensable to the American conception of stable international order. Thanks to American security guarantees, South Korea and Japan have both enjoyed the luxury of eschewing nuclear weapons as guarantors of security. Should American protective pledges be seen as weakening, the temptation to resurrect the nuclear option on the part of both states will increase — to the consequent detriment of America’s global antiproliferation policy. Equally significant, however, is that Japan, and possibly South Korea as well, would of necessity have to embark on a significant conventional buildup, especially of missile, maritime and air forces. The resulting force posture would in practice be indistinguishable from a long-range power projection capability possessing an offensive orientation. Even if such forces are developed primarily for defensive purposes, they will certainly give rise to new security dilemmas region-wide — which, in turn, would lead to an intense arms race, growing suspicions, and possibly war.
Finally, even the least troublesome of these possibilities would result in the destruction of the East Asian zone of prosperity. While such an outcome would certainly affect the strategic prospects of the East Asian region, the United States would not by any means be immune to its extended consequences. Since a considerable portion of American growth is directly tied to the vitality of the international trading system in general and this region in particular, the enervation of the East Asian economic regime would eventually lead to a diminution of American growth rates and, by implication, the quality of life enjoyed by its citizenry. For all these reasons, ensuring the survival of American allies in Asia through a continuation of the current guarantees represents a vital interest to the United States grounded not in altruistic considerations but in the hard realities of self-interest.
Neither disengagement nor multipolarity would allow the United States to discharge its obligations to its allies effectively. The latter alternative would change the character of those obligations entirely, and it is far from obvious that a truly multipolar system — which brings in its trail problems like buck-passing, increased coordination costs, and enhanced uncertainty about allied intentions and objective — would actually be an improvement over the current arrangements in the realm of security. Neither of these two solutions fares well in the realm of economics, either. U.S. disengagement could lead quickly to the destruction of regional free trade practices, since such practices could hardly survive, let alone thrive, in the face of acute security competition. More likely, the current trading order would quickly evolve into relatively closed trading blocs, with each regional pole attempting to derive whatever benefits it could from open trading among its own allies while simultaneously seeking to deny such benefits to its major competitors.
The fourth critical American interest in Asia is sustaining the political stability of key regional countries and promoting democratization whenever possible. There is a compelling argument to be made for focusing American attention, resources, and support on a few "pivotal states," rather than on whole swaths of territory indiscriminately. Pivotal states, as Robert S. Chase defined them in "Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy" in the January/February 1996 issue of Foreign Affairs, are those "whose fate is uncertain and whose future will profoundly affect their surrounding regions." By this definition, it is clear that the Asian continent already hosts the largest number of pivotal states. These would include Russia, China, and Japan among the more developed countries and India, Pakistan, and Indonesia among the developing tier. Those in the former category are important for obvious reasons: Russia continues to be a nuclear power of consequence; China is a rising state that not only possesses nuclear weapons but will probably be the world’s largest economic power sometime in the next century; and Japan is not only an American ally but a significant trading state, the center for technological innovation in Asia, and the fulcrum for any policy of effectively managing a rising China.
The developing pivotal states are important for less well understood reasons. Pakistan and India are both nuclear capable states: While the former may affect the global balance if only by collapsing, the latter stands poised to become the world’s fourth largest economy early in the next century. Indonesia is not only a large and populous state whose stability is linked to the fate of all of Southeast Asia, but it also lies astride the choke points controlling transit from the oil-rich Southwest Asian states to the energy-hungry economies of East Asia. Every one of these states — in both categories — faces an uncertain future, yet each is in different ways "so important regionally that its collapse would spell trans-boundary mayhem" on one hand, while "its progress and stability would bolster its region’s economic vitality and political soundness" on the other, as Chase writes.
The issue of promoting democratization both in these states and outside them remains dear to the United States. This objective cannot be effectively pursued, however, if U.S. geopolitical preeminence or its regional presence steadily erode or if the United States settles for grand strategies that acquiesce in the rise of genuine peer competitors. As Samuel P. Huntington argued a long time ago, the robustness of American power clearly conditions the ability of the United States to achieve what might sometimes be considered as derivative objectives with respect to American security: democratization, human rights, and the rule of law. An America that either disengaged from Asia or was reduced to becoming just another power within it would inexorably lose its ability to influence any change with respect to these issues throughout Asia. It would have to settle for rhetorical flourishes as a substitute for policy.
Of prevention, carrots, and sticks
The multifaceted nature of these interests — preserving the safety of the U.S. homeland and that of its allies, preserving the liberal economic order in Asia on which American prosperity is increasingly dependent, and preserving the possibilities of an Asian democratic zone of peace — suggests that the problem of the diffusion of disruptive technologies in Asia represents just one subset of the much larger challenge of maintaining good regional order. U.S. regional policy, thus far, has been appreciative of this fact. The analysis above suggests why the larger grand strategy of maintaining U.S. primacy — as encoded, for example, in successive versions of the Pentagon’s East Asia Strategic Initiative — offers the best possibilities for meeting the challenges posed by the spread of disruptive technologies while simultaneously satisfying the other economic, strategic, and political demands made on U.S. presence.
Since this presence will continue to rely on a forward posture — which remains the best solution despite all the threats posed to it — the real task facing policy makers consists of mitigating the threats to that posture.
First and foremost is the issue of what can be done preventively. Most U.S. efforts thus far have focused on the tactical level, which consists of creating a variety of global regimes aimed at denying critical technologies to emerging proliferators. Much can be done to further tighten the multilateral controls that the U.S. has attempted to maintain since the beginning of the Cold War.
Yet though such efforts are under way (and have been for a while), the critical challenges at the strategic level have not been addressed effectively. These challenges emerge principally from the fact that many of the great powers, who are nominally part of the antiproliferation regime, have increasingly found it in their self-interest to assist the diffusion of disruptive technologies to emerging proliferators for their own strategic ends. Sometimes such assistance is driven by economic pressures, and it is unfortunate that despite much research on this question — for example, see the suggestions in the 1994 rand report by Kenneth Watman et al., "Controlling Conventional Arms Transfers" — United States has been unable to craft a better policy that integrates some "carrots" into a tool kit which otherwise consists mostly of sticks.
More important, however, the diffusion of disruptive technologies by various great powers is often sensitive to the exercise of U.S. hegemony: There is, in many cases, a clear correlation between U.S. policies that are perceived to be insensitive or hostile by the other great powers, and their willingness to transfer disruptive technologies to emerging proliferators. In some cases, there is little the United States can do to avoid such responses, but in many other instances there is much: Thus far, unfortunately, the U.S. has not demonstrated the kind of sensitivity that key suppliers — Russia, for example — would demand. The unipolar moment would be squandered if the United States succeeded in convincing other competitors, by means of ill-considered policies, that they had no choice but to "get even" with this overbearing power either by direct opposition or by strategies based on subterfuge.
The bottom line is that if the emerging proliferators were the sole problem, they could be dealt with rather easily on their own terms: The current tactics centered on various forms of technology denial would be quite effective, not necessarily at "total" prevention but at least to buy the requisite time to develop political, technical, and operational antidotes necessary for coping with these relatively localized problems. Coping with the threat posed by other great powers who choose to assist the diffusion of disruptive technologies is another matter altogether. It is this dimension of prevention that, being most difficult and often becoming competitive with other U.S. grand strategic interests, has received inadequate attention. To the degree that the U.S. either cannot or will not be solicitous of the core grand strategic interests of these states, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction is only likely to fail further.
Second, because U.S. efforts to prevent the further diffusion of disruptive technologies are likely to be less than successful in many instances, the principal fallback objective must be deterrence. This is in fact the strategy that the U.S. successfully employed throughout the Cold War, and there is little reason to think it could not work again. Countries that acquire disruptive technologies will not necessarily use them. In many instances, the capabilities of emerging proliferators are still relatively small. Therefore, however effective the presence of disruptive technologies may be from the point of levying threats, they could be quite unusable as warfighting instruments, particularly if these bluffs are actually called by superior powers like the United States.
It must be remembered that most state managers in Asia who preside over various inventories of disruptive technologies value these small assets precisely because they are the "crown jewels" that help to cement their political control, within the state or the region or both. They are simply unlikely to risk these assets by entering into unwinnable contests with superior adversaries, especially over issues that are at best extrinsically valuable. Consequently, so long as their own local power and survival are unchallenged, actual use of their disruptive technologies can be deterred, even in the context of a localized war involving such states. How exactly such deterrence ought to be cemented here remains an open issue. Though the United States continues to enjoy unparalleled "escalation dominance" at a technical level, thanks to the size, diversity, and sophistication of its nuclear arsenal, there remains the question of how these capabilities ought to be used if deterrence fails in the context of a regional dispute. The role of future U.S. nuclear doctrine and the possibility of dealing with limited wmd use through conventional forms of retaliation alone — as was considered for example during the Gulf War — are still unresolved policy questions.
Finally, because deterrence could fail in some circumstances, the United States has spent a great deal of time and attention on issues of defense. Broadly speaking, the challenges of defense can be broken down into two sets of problems. First, how can the United States defend its homeland in the context of threats emerging as a result of distant localized disputes? Solutions to this problem converge in one way or another around strategic defense, understood as a thin bubble of protection over both the continental United States and the territories of its principal allies. A derivative solution here also includes preparing for homeland defense against catastrophic terrorism. The main problems here today are still technical feasibility and bureaucratic inefficiency, though it is likely that both could be resolved so as to assure a satisfactory defense against (essentially) "limited" attacks.
The second problem may be phrased as follows: How can the United States defend its forward operating assets in the context of immediate threats arising out of militarized disputes in the theater? The principal challenge implicit here — which Bracken rightly identifies — is this: Though a forward presence is essential, if the grand strategy of regional preeminence is to be sustained, it cannot be a static presence as it was in the past.
The good news is that all the nation’s armed services recognize this problem. The bad news is that r&d, acquisitions, and funding programs have not always cohered with this insight. In essence, the reach of American tactical warfighting assets, especially aircraft, is becoming shorter and shorter, even as the fixed forward facilities that are necessary to sustain these capabilities are under greater and greater threat. This is true, for example, even of naval aviation, whose strike fighters today have shorter legs than those possessed during the Cold War. The consequence, therefore, will be increased efforts at defending U.S. fixed bases along the rim lands against wmd threats in order to allow our short-legged tactical assets to operate effectively. While preparing for operations in a wmd environment is no doubt important, unless other solutions — like increasing the size and capability of the U.S. bomber force and inducting long-range stealth attack capabilities into naval aviation — are progressively invested in, the United States military will be ill-prepared for operations in the face of the new disruptive technologies surfacing in Asia.
Strategic déjà vu
As bracken points out in Fire in the East, such efforts will no doubt be expensive and cumbersome. But such is the price that the United States must pay in order to maintain its regional preeminence — and one it ought to be willing to pay, given that all the alternatives to preeminence are fraught with even higher costs.
In one sense, the United States is no stranger to this situation. During the Cold War, Washington mustered the resolve and the resources to develop the requisite capabilities that enabled it to stay securely ensconced in the European promontory, despite all the threats posed by the large inventory of disruptive technologies possessed by the Soviet Union. At that moment in time, Europe was the great prize, and defending it through the assertion of American power was judged to be preferable to either disengagement or the nurturing of a regional multipolarity which would justify U.S. retrenchment or offshore balancing.
The situation in Asia today is much the same. The Asian continent will become the great geopolitical prize, if it has not already; and the United States will be confronted with the same grand strategic choices it once faced in Europe, if indeed it does not confront them yet. The key difference, of course, is that there is no Soviet Union in Asia — yet. That, however, could change. The best way to preempt such change (and to cope with it if it does materialize) is to preserve American regional preeminence in the form of potent forward deployed — and forward deployable — forces capable of dealing with contingencies ranging from local disruptions all the way to the rise of a peer competitor.
This is no doubt the worst strategy imaginable, except for all the others. Fortunately, the U.S. already enjoys many advantages that make such a strategy quite sustainable: The Asian allies demand such a presence and have been willing historically to support it in both political and financial terms; both the current threats and those on the horizon, though nasty in absolute terms, are still puny in comparison to the Soviet challenge, which was itself mastered by the United States; and, finally, America continues to enjoy comprehensive power-political advantages — reflected in technological, financial, military, and ideological terms — that few of its current and emerging competitors, even with their unidimensional capabilities in disruptive technologies, can hope to match. Used wisely, these resources can douse the "Fire in the East" and preserve American preeminence there — an outcome that wins on strategic points and utilitarian ones as well.
