U.S. Asia-Pacific Hegemony and Possibilities of Popular Solidarity
Dr. Joseph Gerson
Director of Programs
American Friends Service Committee
Fresh Look: Re-examining the role and impact of US bases in Asia-Pacific
Seoul, South Korea, June 26-27, 1999
It is a privilege to join you in this gathering. Many here have taken
extraordinary and courageous actions so that people may live with
security, freedom and dignity. You are my teachers, and in some cases I am
privileged to say, my friends. I want to thank Focus on Global South, Green
Korea United, and the Korean Committee for US Military Bases Return for
your initiatives and efforts in bringing us together.
Hope builds movement. It gives people the confidence to risk and to break
with the status quo. But, hope based on false promises and assumptions
leads to failure , disillusionment, and worse. For these reasons my report
will be less than fully encouraging. This should come as no surprise, given
that the US is the dominant hegemon, reinforced in significant measure by
its culture and the economic privileges enjoyed by most of its people.
Initiatives for the withdrawal of US and other foreign military bases must
begin and have their strongest foundations amongst peoples struggling for
freedom from the "abuses and usurpations" of foreign military troops and
bases (as the U.S. Declaration of Independence described it.)
Reinforcing U.S. Asia-Pacific Hegemony:
Because many here did not attend last year’s Conference on Alternative
Security in Manila, I want to quickly summarize several of the points I
made there to serve as the foundation for my remarks today.
For several years, the U.S. elite has been clear that this is an era of
U.S. hegemony. In the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. is enforcing its 21st
century "Open Door" policy by means of the IMF, the World Bank, APEC, bases
and forward deployments, the Seventh Fleet, and its nuclear arsenal as it
seeks to simultaneously contain and engage China, to dominate the sea lanes
and straits through which the region’s trade and supplies of oil must
travel (the "jugular vein" of Asia Pacific economies), and to "cap"
Japanese militarism and nationalism.
Since 1951, the hub of this strategic architecture has been the Mutual
Security Treaty with Japan (MST.) During the Clinton years, the MST has
been "redefined" to reconsolidate U.S., and to a lesser extent, Japanese,
power. The expanded alliance is also serving as the coercive foundation for
integrating China’s rising power into the U.S.-Japanese dominated system.
Ideally, the U.S. seeks a hierarchical U.S.-Japanese-Chinese condominium,
with Japan and China competing for the privilege of being the United
States’ "number one" regional partner. Failing that, Washington will use
either nation to isolate and contain the other.
There is another strategic concept at work in U.S. Asia-Pacific policy.
This is the goal of maintaining and increasing U.S. power and advantage in
the region while not repeating failures to integrate rising powers –
Germany and Japan – into the dominant system earlier in this century.
Trilateralists and their successors are seeking to integrate China’s
emerging power into the U.S.-Japanese regional system and into the
IMF-WTO-TNC global economic system on U.S. and, to a lesser extent,
Japanese terms. These "enlightened" imperialists have powerful opponents in
the Republican-controlled Congress, the Taiwan lobby, and some sectors of
the human rights movement.
Numerous U.S. officials, beginning with President Clinton and Secretary of
State Albright, and moving down the chain of command, have reiterated that
the U.S.-Japan alliance "is the foundation for stability in the
Asia-Pacific" and that it is "the cornerstone of our Strategic policy in
Asia." In 1995, before the massive wave of Okinawan and Japanese protest
in response to the Marine abduction and rape of an Okinawan school girl,
Washington knew it faced two major impediments to continued Japanese
support of the MST. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the alliance
lacked a credible enemy, and Japanese – especially Okinawans – were
increasingly intolerant of the dangers and disruptions they had suffered
during fifty years of formal and informal U.S. military occupation.
To address these faults in the alliance, we had the "Nye Initiative" which
called for U.S. and Japanese officials to "identify common security
interests for the post-Cold War era, the develop a new public rationale for
the alliance, and to deepen personal relationships between senior U.S.
leaders and their Japanese counterparts. This was followed by the "US-Japan
Joint Declaration on Security Alliance for the 21st Century" proclaimed at
what then Defense (War) Secretary Perry described as the "most significant"
summit of the Post-Cold War era. During the summit, President Clinton and
Prime Minister Hashimoto named the alliance’s new enemies and "public
rationales": tensions and instability on the Korean Peninsula, China’s
nuclear arsenal, and territorial disputes with China. They also announced
the "Review of the 1978 Joint Defense Guidelines.
To put things in their proper perspective, you should be aware that
several months ago Joe Nye conceded that if Beijing continues its military
build up at its current pace, in twenty years it will have the military
capabilities of a mid-level NATO nation of "forty years ago." Even as he
made this concession, he and Ezra Vogel -- his colleague at Harvard and in
shaping U.S. Asia-Pacific foreign and military policies -- have been
representing the U.S. in "non-governmental" meetings with Japanese and
Chinese "non-governmental" representatives (including a former Japanese
ambassador to Washington) to explore the possible creation of a
U.S.-Japanese-Chinese "security forum." During an interview, Ezra Vogel
told me that his goal in these meetings is to negotiate a "grad bargain"
with China. How? By threatening China with the deployment of Theater
Missile Defenses which could theoretically neutralize all of China’s
missile forces, and then by offering to forego the TMD deployments in
exchange for a Chinese commitment not to deploy weapons with greater
aggressive potential than are already in Beijing’s arsenals and not to
adopt military doctrines more aggressive than those of current Chinese
policy. Of course, such an agreement would leave the Mutual Security Treaty
with Japan, the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the 7th fleet and other
forward-deployed U.S. forces, and the U.S. Space Command in place for
continued "containment" of China.
As I learned in China last summer and more recently, Chinese policy makers
and strategic analysis are preoccupied by the threatened TMD deployments
which they see as a "shield to reinforce the U.S. sword." They are clear
that if the U.S. and Japan deploy TMD, it will result in a new and
dangerous arms race. China will build as many missiles as it can afford in
order to overwhelm TMD.
And then there is Taiwan, the most likely trigger for U.S.-Chinese nuclear
confrontation and war.
A Wider View of U.S. Hegemony:
As I turn to a wider view of recent developments, I want to quote two
lessons taught by the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign
Service when Bill Clinton and I were students there in the mid-1960s. They
illuminate two foundations of US foreign policy which are subconsciously
recognized, but rarely articulated within the United States. When we were
second year students, Professor Ello began his course on international
relations by saying that "the study of international relations is akin to
studying the rules of the game among Mafia families." And, in our last
year, international law Professor O'Brien repeatedly emphasized that
"International law is what those who have the power to impose it say it is."
Since some here met in Manila a year ago, we have witnessed the US and
lesser powers brutally struggling to reorder regional and global structures
of hegemony, privilege, and violence for the post Cold War era in the
traditions described by professors Ello and O'Brien. In the Asia-Pacific
region, the US-Chinese "strategic partnership," celebrated during Bill
Clinton's carefully choreographed tour of China, has disintegrated into
renewed diplomatic and military rivalry as a result of Washington's
deepening commitment to "containing" China and to its increasing arrogance
as global hegemon. Accelerating preparations to deploy Theater Missile
Defenses around China, sensationalized and unproved allegations of Chinese
nuclear spying ridiculous claims Chinese nuclear parity with the US, the
humiliating rejection of Zhu Rongji's concessions to gain entry the World
Trade Organization, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and
Congressional encouragements of Taiwan's independence have brought us to
the brink of a new and extremely dangerous Cold War.
Across the region G.E. Capital and other US-based transnational
corporations have been taking advantage of the Asian economic crisis and
Japan's prolonged recession to increase access to, to challenge, and to
dominate East Asian economies. In the US, Tom Friedman, the New York Times
leading foreign policy columnist, has been propounding that without
McDonnell Douglas and the US marines to guarantee their markets and to
defend their interests, there can be no security for McDonalds, for
Microsoft, and for globalizing capitalism led by the US. The U.S.
presidential campaign, which has already begun, holds little promise of
improving the situation and could seriously exacerbate tensions in various
parts of the Asia-Pacific, especially here in Korea and with China.
Collaborating with the US, Japanese nationalists and militarists have
ratified the deepening and globalization of the US-Japan military alliance.
The "collateral damage" of this restructuring includes the people Okinawa
and other communities on which US bases and military installations are
imposed, Japan's peace constitution, and regional security.
To the south, as Walden Bello predicted almost a decade ago, Washington is
regaining access to ports and bases throughout the Philippines by means of
the recently ratified access agreement marketed in Orwellian terms as a
"Visiting Forces Agreement." And, at the same time that senior White House
officials emphasize that "the most dangerous place on earth is not downtown
Pristina [Kosovo] but the Korean border", considerable attention is also
being devoted to Indonesia, lest the US lose access to its natural
resources, markets, and its domination of strategically important straits.
This is not to say that the US is the sole source of insecurity, injustice
and terror in the Asia-Pacific. Chaebols are not exactly democratic
institutions. More than weather has been responsible for famine's
staggering toll in North Korea. Even as there is increased freedom of
expression in China, its limits are policed by threat of imprisonment and
are well understood. The 1989 massacre of workers and students in Beijing
has not been forgotten, and many long for the day when the democratic
aspirations of that time are honored and institutionalized. And,
understandable as they are, the siege of the US embassy, Beijing's vow to
build as many missiles as are needed to overwhelm TMD, and the militarized
extension of China's claims to the Spratley islands do little to enhance
human security.
US Asia-Pacific policy and Asia-Paciific security do not exist in
isolation from events elsewhere in the world. It is in this context that I
mention the US/NATO war against Yugoslavia which had little to do with
humanitarian commitments to Kosovo's ethnic Albanians whose suffering was
multipled as a result of the bombing campaign. The US/NATO bombing
campaign had to do with hegemony, empire and restructuring the global
disorder for the coming era. It is no accident that the US and NATO went
to war in the name of Kosovar Albanians but not for Kurds, Palestinians,
Tutsis or the East Timorese.
. Much as the US "bombed Iraq into the pre-industrial age" in 1991, with
its staggering and continuing civilian death toll, Washington has savaged
Yugoslavia to reinforce its global power. The goals this time were to
guarantee NATO's credibility (i.e. its will and ability to terrorize
people and governments into submission), to reinforce the US foothold in
Europe and to contain Germany (see Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand
Chessboard), to extend NATO and the so-called "free-market" economy further
across Eastern Europe, and to stabilize that region’s Balkan frontier
which now doubles as the northwestern frontier of the US dominated and
oil-rich Middle East and as the western approach to equally large Caspian
Sea and Central Asian oil reserves. This last goal is entirely consistent
with what Noam Chomsky terms "political axiom #1 of US foreign policy: that
neither its enemies nor its allies gain independent access to Middle East
oil.
On the US left, there is growing agreement that a "Clinton Doctrine" is
replacing the Powell Doctrine. During the war against Yugoslavia, Clinton
reiterated a conception of US foreign and military policy that he had
articulated earlier at the United Nations: "The forces of global
integration [read US-dominated global economy] are a great tide inexorably
wearing away the established order of things...we must decide what will be
left in...while isolating those who would challenge [us] from the outside."
To this end, the US unilaterally, without UN sanction or a declaration of
war, bombed Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan within a six month period.
Michael Klare describes the Clinton Doctrine as having three components:
1) an increasingly pessimistic appraisal of the global security
environment, 2) as the richest status quo power, a vested US interest in
maintaining international stability, and 3) the need for the US to maintain
sufficient military strength for simultaneous military operations in widely
separated areas of the world against multiple adversaries. This helps to
explain why the US insists on maintaining its global infrastructure of
foreign military bases. I also explains why, with a military budget already
equaling the combined total of the world's next nine greatest military
spenders, Clinton and Congress are increasing the US military spending at
the expense of social security and other human needs programs.
The Clinton Administration makes frequent reference to "the international
community" to justify its aggressions, but it has repeatedly circumvented
and undermined the United Nations and the legacy of international law. This
outlaw behavior is supported by the US foreign policy elite. During the
bombing of Yugoslavia, Foreign Affairs, the publication of the elite
Council on Foreign Relations published a remarkable editorial article. It
reported, and I ask you to bear Professor O’Brien’s lesson in mind here,
that "the United States and NATO -- with little discussion and less fanfare
-- have effectively abandoned the old UN Charter rules that strictly limit
international intervention in local conflicts...in favor of a vague new
system that is much more tolerant of military intervention but has few hard
and fast rules....Kosovo illustrates...America's new willingness to do what
it thinks right -- international law notwithstanding." I should emphasize
that this analysis was not written as a critique, but with appreciation and
in celebration of this subversion of the United Nations and the legacies of
international law. Thus, even as two million US citizens are salted away in
federal, state and local prisons, and the US persists in its commitment to
capital punishment, nations as diverse as China, Russia, Malaysia and North
Korea have reason to fear that the US may someday rely on its "vague new
system" and high-tech military to savage their cities and populations for
ostensibly humanitarian purposes.
This is not entirely new. In parks across New England, where I live, you
can see monuments to veterans of the war fought 100 years ago ostensibly
to protect human rights. That was the war in which the US seized the
Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico from the Spanish Empire. The
Clinton Doctrine is perhaps best understood as simply the latest expression
of liberal imperialism.
Nuclear Weapons and U.S. Hegemony:
I should say a few things about the roles and practice of U.S. nuclear
war policy -- the ultimate guarantor of US hegemony. Many US bases and
military installations across the Asia Pacific are essential to continued
US preparations for the threat and use of these omnicidal weapons.
The British American Security Information Council recently published the
partially declassified text of the US Strategic Command's 1995 "Essentials
of Post-Cold War Deterrence." Following are a few quotations that certainly
apply to Korea and the Asia-Pacific as a whole:
"For non-Russian states, the penalty for using Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD) should not just be military defeat, but the threat of even worse
consequences. Should we ever fail to deter such an aggressor, we must make
good on our deterrence statement in such a convincing way that the message
to others will be so immediately discernible as to bolster deterrence [read
escalation dominance] thereafter...."
"[T]he United States should have available to the full range of responses,
conventional weapons, special operations, and nuclear weapons. Unlike
chemical or biological weapons, the extreme destruction from a nuclear
explosion is immediate, with few if any palliatives to reduce its effect.
Although we are not likely to use nuclear weapons in less than matters of
the greatest national importance...nuclear weapons always cast a shadow
over any crisis or conflict in which the US is engaged. Thus, deterrence
through the threat of use of nuclear weapons will continue to be our top
military strategy...." [emphasis added]
"That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests
are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all
adversaries....nuclear weapons seem destined to be the centerpiece of US
strategic deterrence for the foreseeable future."
Noam Chomsky explains that "Our strategic nuclear weapons system provides
us with a kind of umbrella within which we can carry out conventional
actions, meaning aggression and subversion, without any concern that it
will be impeded in any fashion...under this umbrella....we have succeeded
in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help protect people who we
are determined to attack." Thus the Clinton Administration threatened to
annihilate North Korea as it has threatened other nations on more than
twenty occasions. Thus the US fought its war against Yugoslavia without
fear of Russian intervention.
I should add a note about the second US use of depleted uranium weapons in
war. This is dangerous because of the apparent mid-term medical
consequences and the poisoning of the environment. Even more dangerous may
be its blurring of the fire break between nuclear and "conventional"
weapons which provides a greater semblance of legitimacy to the possible
launching of cataclysmic nuclear weapons by the US or other countries in
wartime.
US insistence on imposing as much of its Rambouillet ultimatum as it could
not only failed to provide security for Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and
savaged the lives of people of Serbia and Montenegro, but it also seriously
undermined diplomatic and popular initiatives for nuclear disarmament and
nuclear weapons abolition. In the US, the "successful" use of US nuclear
weapons to once again ensure US escalation dominance will serve to
reinforce the US commitment to its nuclear "cornerstone."
Thinking globally, more dangerous than the Russian Duma's indefinite
postponement of consideration of the START II Agreement and the decision to
cancel cooperation in addressing Y2K nuclear dangers, was Yeltsin's
decision to reiterate Russia's first-strike doctrine and his decision to
compensate for disintegrating Russian "conventional" military power by once
again deploying tactical nuclear weapons. One other development should be
borne in mind. In a sharp repartee to a Clinton defense of NATO's war,
Victor Chernomyrdan emphasized that one lesson the international community
has taken from the war is that any nation intending to challenge the United
States must have nuclear weapons in its arsenal. So much for
non-proliferation and counter-proliferation!
The U.S. Peace Movement andAsia-Pacific Solidarity:
Let me conclude with a few words about the US peace movement. Being an
anti-historical and geographically illiterate culture and society, too many
Americans can read and believe that "the most dangerous place on earth" is
Korea. That we might live in the most dangerous nation in the world rarely
occurs to any US American. With the exception of former GIs, few have any
awareness that the US maintains a global infrastructure of foreign military
bases which exacts terrible tolls from the people of "host" nations and
communities. Reinforced by a domesticated media, equally domesticated
academics, and relative economic prosperity, most US Americans are
preoccupied by simply living their daily lives and are lost to the
diversions of the consumer culture. This is compounded by the illusions
that with the end of the Cold War, Americans are secure in a largely
peaceful world and that when wars must be fought, they can be won without
US casualties.
This does not mean that US Americans actively support US foreign military
interventions or the structures that make them possible. In 1995, news that
an Okinawan school girl had been abducted and raped by US marines horrified
most Americans. The Clinton wars against Iraq and Yugoslavia were fought
without popular support. Polls have indicated that the vast majority of US
Americans favor abolition of nuclear weapons, and when voters in the state
of Vermont were given opportunity, they voted overwhelming that abolition
should become US policy.
Unhappily, I have to report that the US peace movement has seriously
atrophied over the past decade as popular consciousness has turned inward.
But a vital core remains, based in religious and secular peace
organizations and in the popular consciousness that are the legacies of the
Vietnam era peace movement, the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s,
and the Anti-apartheid and Central America solidarity movements.
The 1991 victory of the Philippine people in forcing the withdrawal of US
military bases is a powerful example of what a conscious and mobilized
people can achieve. I am sorry to say that that victory was won with
minimal support and solidarity from the US peace movement. The victory of
the Vietnamese national liberation struggle provides different example, one
in which Vietnamese cultivation of broad sectors of the US public played an
important role reducing US commitments to, and ultimately, ending funding
for, the war. More recently, with speaking tours by atomic and hydrogen
bomb witness survivors from Japan, Korea, and other nations and of
anti-bases activists from Okinawa and other parts of Japan, we have been
reminded how sincerely and powerfully US Americans can and will respond to
the human faces and stories of war and of what the government that speaks
in our name is inflicting on others.
As we consider the possibility and strategies of an Asia-Pacific wide
anti-bases campaign, I hope that we will bear these lessons in mind. Today,
the US movement is too weak on its own to force the withdrawal of forward
deployed US forces across the region. But, with with your help, we can
build important and possibly powerful solidarity movements that can give
meaningful support to Asia-Pacific struggles for freedom
and peace.