Security with Asian characteristics
By Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON - The United States, which has 100,000 troops based in Northeast Asia, has expended huge amounts of diplomatic energy in recent months trying to resolve a nuclear standoff with North Korea that threatens to undermine US concepts of regional peace and security.

But despite its enormous political and military clout, the United States has found itself on the defensive in the crisis and recently bowed to pressure from South Korea, China and others to find a solution that conforms to the regional momentum toward engagement with North Korea and supporting Pyongyang's efforts to end its isolation.

That tension between US power and regional realities, a group of scholars says, underscores a deeper truth about Asia.

Despite decades of US dominance, several destructive wars and lingering tensions over the future of Korea and Taiwan, the nations of East Asia are lurching toward their own system of political and economic order that could be more stable and offer greater opportunities for long-term interdependence than the Pax Americana of the past 50 years.

"Asia is not an unstable, unpredictable place," said Muthiah Alagappa, the director of the East-West Center office in Washington and the editor of a new book, Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features, which makes the case that a home-grown security environment is gradually emerging in the region. "Order in Asia doesn't rest only on the shoulders of the United States".

Speaking to a seminar about his book sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Alagappa argued that the political order in Asia is not static, but instead a mixture of three competing models.

The first one, he said, is based on US concepts of "hegemony with liberal features" centered on bilateral alliances and expansion of a market-based free-trade system.

The second is based on China's desire for a balance of power where the key role is played by global institutions such as the United Nations, where Beijing has a vote.

And the third is based on what Alagappa called the "multilateral institutionalism" of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which emphasizes the non-use of force and the importance of sovereignty.

The Chinese and ASEAN concepts, he said, emerged in the late 1990s as an alternative to US dominance of Asia. Their popularity underscores the fact that "the United States has not been able to impose its concept of order on the region", Alagappa said. "It has a negative veto but doesn't have the power to write the rules by itself."

That view stands in contrast to the establishment view in Washington, said G John Ikenberry, professor of global justice at Georgetown University and an expert on Asian politics. "We tend to see East Asia as an immature region," he said. "It's actually quite stable even if you diminish the US role."

Ming Wan, an associate professor at George Mason University and a contributor to Alagappa's volume, argued that the wide acceptance of open markets and the stress placed by Asian governments on economic performance as a source of political legitimacy have been major contributors to regional stability.

"In a way, we're seeing the triumph of capitalism in the region," he said, noting that both South Korea and Taiwan experienced democratic transitions while their economies were expanding.

While China still has a long way to go on that path, Wan pointed out that Chinese authorities are permitting "limited democratic reform" in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, where some of that country's market reforms were first implemented.

The half-century of peace on the Korean Peninsula illustrates the relative stability of East Asia compared to other parts of the world, said David Kang, an associate professor at Dartmouth College, also a contributor to the book. "We're coming up on 50 years that the Korean powder keg hasn't blown up," he said. "Is it just luck? Or does Asia provide more stability than we care to admit?"

Answering his own question, Kang argued that all countries in the region "know how bad it would be to go into a war. Everybody is aware of the cost and potential damage." As a result, the "potential for war is much, much lower than it was at the height of the Cold War".

Both Wan and Kang described South Korea's emphasis on dialogue with North Korea as a sign of Asia's independence from Washington's traditional Cold War approach to conflict in Korea. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and his successor, President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, believe that "confrontation hasn't worked", said Wan. "That's a powerful and logical argument, so the Bush administration has little choice" but to talk to the North.

Recent anti-American demonstrations in South Korea, suggested Kang, are "not just an emotional response" to the recent deaths of two schoolgirls who were struck by a US military vehicle but an expression that "engagement has worked and strides are being made. Maybe here in America we don't see those gains."

Alagappa said the US emphasis on the war on terrorism has obscured its understanding of events in Asia. "It's easy in Washington, DC, to see terrorism as a primary threat," he said. "But it doesn't feature in Asia like the Cold War dynamic did. Most of the dynamics were there before the terrorist threat."

The Malaysian scholar cautioned US analysts against assuming that a US military withdrawal from Asia would automatically mean that Japan would become a military power.

"That's not a given," he said, noting the recent changes in Sino-Japanese relations. Many Chinese officials, he said, believe that in the long term they will have to "accept Japan becoming a normal power. Gradually the major players in Asia will accommodate" to that development.

"It's a disservice to say that America is keeping the cork in the bottle," Alagappa said. "The United States deters war, but it also prevents solutions. The US presence carries positives and negatives. There's beginning to be a movement [in Asia] to put relationships on a different footing despite the role of the United States."

(Inter Press Service)