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US vs Pyongyang: Watch
Rumsfeld
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG KONG - As talks finally get under way
between the United States and North Korea, the latter,
which has made obstinacy and diplomatic misbehavior an
art form, would do well to keep in mind the growing
influence and staying power in Washington of Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
With the US victory
in Iraq all but declared, barely a year after a previous
triumph in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld's influence has
increased by several notches. Together with other
neo-conservatives who urged the Iraq war, "Rummy", as he
is affectionately known in Washington, is on a roll.
His plan to develop agile US forces, where
marines and special forces are used in tandem with
massive military power on four platforms (air, space,
navy and army), is gaining in momentum. It appears that
the Bush Doctrine of preventive war (against terrorism)
has found a military equivalent.
Underpinning
Rumsfeld's strategic belief is the efficacious mix of
local and US forces to perform "3 Ds" missions: degrade,
disrupt and destroy. Indeed, it was the shock of
September 11, 2001, that caused a major shift in US
thinking on how a "war on terror" would best be fought.
Although Rumsfeld warned in 1996 of the imminent threat
of a missile attack on the United States, in a report
co-authored with Senator Warren Rudman, his insistence
that the US should create a missile shield has since
been played down.
The power of Rumsfeld is all
the more interesting granted that he was considered a
peripheral figure prior to the wafer-thin electoral
victory of President George W Bush. Although the notion
of the proverbial revolving door is a truism in
Washington, where top figures who leave government are
usually not to be heard from again for 10 years or more,
this does not seem to apply to Rumsfeld. If anything,
Rumsfeld, who left the Gerald Ford administration in
1975 as its defense secretary, has enjoyed a remarkable
resurgence.
One could nevertheless point to the
role of Vice President Dick Cheney in resuscitating
Rumsfeld's career. Cheney was very close to the Bush
family. Rumsfeld was also Cheney's superior when the
latter was a chief of staff in the Ford administration.
But Cheney would not have been able to redeem
Rumsfeld singlehandedly. Rumsfeld's ideology, clothed as
it was in what Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national
security advisor, called "new realism", also proved a
plus. New realism, a doctrine that was put out by Rice
in Foreign Affairs a few months before the presidential
victory of Bush, spoke of the importance of using
considerable US power to prevent the rise of peer
competitors. This doctrine has guided Bush's thinking as
much as it has reinforced Rumsfeld's own position in the
administration.
Now that Rumsfeld is at the
helm, the time has come for Asia to understand his
mental universe lest there be any miscalculation. None
is more important than Rumsfeld's view on US forces in
South Korea.
Contrary to the belief that the
United States will not pull out of Asia, a conventional
wisdom that is going around in the region as a
geopolitical fact, there is every reason to worry that
the US might do just that when it comes to the Korean
Peninsula. The aim is to prevent the US from being an
open target of North Korea should a war break out.
Some US specialists have also begun arguing that
North Korea's constant blackmail can be countered by
moving US forces away from fixed, immobile bases. This
would strengthen the United States' negotiation with
North Korea, as US forces would no longer be sitting
ducks.
Indeed, Andrew Marshall, key strategic
analyst at Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, has been
toying with the idea of creating huge buoyant platforms
that can double as the launch pads and runways of US
warplanes. This idea has been well received by Rumsfeld,
as he has long accepted Marshall's strategic advice.
Furthermore, with the democratization of South
Korea in the 1980s, anti-American sentiment has been
growing more salient by the day. While the US tend to
refer to these anti-American groups as "dissidents" or
North Korean sympathizers, the fact is their influence
and respectability in Korean society is growing, not
waning.
To be
sure, Rumsfeld is not one to believe in the importance
of bases, seeing them as a huge liability on US
flexibility, both militarily and diplomatically. US and
South Korean military officials have already discussed
ways to consider a major shift in US forces on the
Korean Peninsula that would give the South Korean army
the primary role in defending the historic invasion
routes to Seoul, 50 kilometers south of the North Korean
border. This opens up the prospect of redeploying the
16,000-strong US 2nd Infantry Division from bases near
the Demilitarized Zone to positions south of Seoul, well
out of the way of any immediate threat from North Korean
forces.
If Bush is re-elected next year,
there is every likelihood that Rumsfeld will be retained
in his present capacity as the secretary of defense. If
North Korea continues to subject the United States,
South Korea and Japan to repeated taunts, there is every
reason to believe that, under the guidance of Rumsfeld,
the US and its allies will seek to revolutionize the way
Asian security has been arranged regarding North Korea.
Inevitably, Rumsfeld would be in a better
position than anyone else to "re-engineer" Asian
security - better even than Colin Powell, the current
secretary of state. This is because Rumsfeld will have
had two major war victories under his belt in the span
of a few years. Possibly the only thing that can
dethrone Rumsfeld is a public scandal. But this does not
appear likely, as unlike Cheney, who is occasionally
tarred as having special ties to the energy industry in
the United States, Rumsfeld has none.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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