On August 22, 1997, the eve of the talks, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt, a key player in North Korea’s missile sales to the Middle East, “defected” to the United States. R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post, quoted a CIA source as saying, “There will be people in the intelligence community who will be salivating to see this guy.”12 In the New York Times Steven Lee Myers noted that the defection threatened the peace talks but quoted another U.S. official as saying, “The alternative of turning down a bona fide plea for asylum from a state like North Korea is pretty unthinkable.”13 Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman, insisted that the defection “will not affect the four-party peace talks.”14 Then Newsweek revealed that the former ambassador had in fact long been on the CIA’s payroll.15 Informed observers concluded that he had not so much defected as been called in from the cold at a time of the CIA’s choosing and with an eye toward scuttling the upcoming talks. North Korea in retaliation declined to attend either set of scheduled meetings.
A year later, amid reports that North Korea had grown frustrated with the failure of the United States to normalize relations, the New York Times published a front-page article by David E. Sanger—“North Korea Site an A-Bomb Plant, U.S. Agencies Say”—which revealed that “United States intelligence agencies have detected a huge secret underground complex in North Korea that they believe is the centerpiece of an effort to revive the country’s frozen nuclear weapons program, according to officials who have been briefed on the intelligence information.”16 Congressional sources later revealed that Sanger’s source was unanalyzed intelligence photographs probably leaked by Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to congressional aides, General Hughes regularly passed on information about the site, later identified as Kumchang-ri, to Republican congressmen.17 None of the Times’s reporting on this incident ever cited a single government official by name, relying instead on the “blind quote”: “high government officials say,” “sources close to the White House reveal,” “members of the intelligence community disclose,” and so forth.
Two days after the article appeared, the Pentagon announced that the underground A-bomb plant actually seemed to be a large hole in the ground—one of thousands of such holes, some of them containing whole factories that were sited underground after the devastating American bombing during the Korean War—and that the United States had no evidence the North Koreans had ceased to comply with the Agreed Framework. Analysts in Asia speculated that if North Korea did decide to pull out of the agreement, it need only restart its reactors at its nuclear research center at Yongbyon instead of building a brand-new, inherently risky and expensive underground reprocessing plant. In Europe, the IAEA’s spokesman said that the international monitoring agency first heard of the alleged new nuclear site from the New York Times.
Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones, who from 1992 to 1994 was the State Department’s desk officer for North Korea and subsequently the Asia Foundation’s representative in South Korea—as well as the American who probably has visited the North more often than any other—wrote, “This . . . story is centered in Washington, not in Pyongyang. It involves America’s intelligence community and not North Korea’s nuclear program. . . . The recent leak of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ certainly appears to have been an irresponsible effort by a ‘pessimist’ within the American intelligence community. . . . The U.S. government has officially denied the accuracy of the reports.”18 Nonetheless, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the “suspected nuclear facility” a “huge threat” and demanded the right of the United States to conduct inspections in North Korea when and where it chooses.19 North Korea agreed to let Americans look into Kumchang-ri in return for food aid. When the inspection was completed, American officials disclosed that it was a huge, empty tunnel and that there was no evidence of any preparations to construct a nuclear reactor or install machinery of any kind in it.20
In addition to these and other North Korean alarums, 1999 saw a number of strident but ultimately overstated U.S. claims about Chinese missile deployments and nuclear espionage, and unfortunate “accidents” (the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war). These raised serious questions about whether the armed and intelligence services were either out of control or being manipulated for political ends.
This is not to say that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are not serious problems. Since there is as yet no worldwide treaty banning them, nor an effective defense against them, all programs to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, including those of the United States and Japan, are “destabilizing.” They constitute the most dangerous offensive weapons in existence at the present time. The issue is what to do about them. North Korea remains isolated in part because of policies the United States has pursued over the past forty-five years. To be sure, these policies were first formulated during the Cold War, but with the end of the old postwar order in East Asia, we finally have a chance to help promote a peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. Instead, the Pentagon is promoting a ballistic missile defense system. Surely no better illustration exists of our continued imperial ambitions and delusions.
It is also worth remembering that what we call the Korean War ended as a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil. Had it been strictly a “Korean” war in which only the United States intervened, the side we supported would have been militarily victorious and Korea today would not be divided. If the Korean peninsula ever erupts again into open warfare, China, an active participant in the Korean War, would undoubtedly once again consider intervention. China today actually seems most interested in a perpetuation of the status quo on the Korean peninsula. Its policy is one of “no unification, no war.” Not unlike the eighth- and ninth-century Tang dynasty’s relations with the three Korean kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche, China presently enjoys diplomatic relations with both Koreas and may prefer a structurally divided peninsula. A Korea unable to play its obvious role as a buffer between China, Russia, and Japan would give China a determining influence there. China’s greatest worry has been that the Communist state in the North may collapse due to economic isolation and ideological irrelevance, thereby bringing about a unified, independent, and powerful new actor in northeast Asian politics, potentially the size of and as rich as the former West Germany and defended by a good army, possibly armed with nuclear weapons—not a development the Chinese would necessarily welcome.
For all of these reasons, the United States should cultivate North Korea and become an active supporter of Korean unification. In return for unification, the United States should withdraw its forward-deployed land forces from East Asia but retain its role as a balancer and provider of a “nuclear umbrella.” A unified, economically successful Korea would help ensure a genuine balance of power in East Asia rather than the hegemony of either China, Japan, or the United States. Such a policy would also be a more effective way of instilling prudence in the foreign policy of an emerging China than our current pretense that we have the will, money, or patience to “contain” China.
CHINA: THE STATE
OF THE REVOLUTION
On June 29, 1998, on a state visit to China, President Bill Clinton addressed the students of Beijing University in a speech carried live by television to all parts of China and then responded to their questions. One young man asked, “With a friendly smile, you have set foot on the soil of China. . . . So we are very excited and honored by your presence. What the Chinese people really aspire for is the friendship between China and the United States on the basis of equality. And I know that before your departure from the States, you said that the reason for you to visit China is because China is too important and engagement is better than containment. I’d like to ask you whether this is a kind of commitment you made for your visit, or do you have any other hidden things behind this smile? Do you have any other design to contain China?”1
This was a good ques
tion. Two years earlier the president had mobilized two carrier task forces when China launched a dramatic rocket barrage as part of its “military exercises” in the vicinity of Taiwan. These symbolic gestures were clearly aimed by the People’s Republic at the upcoming Taiwanese presidential elections, and were a response as well to an unprecedented visit by the Taiwanese president to the United States the previous year. The exercises were meant as reminders to both governments that the mainland would never look on Taiwan as anything other than a province of China, and the American response, equally symbolic and crude, was a sobering reminder to the Chinese of the massive military forces the United States maintains and is capable of deploying just off their coast. Ironically though, from the point of view of American policy goals, Clinton’s show of force had the unintended effect of helping the government in Beijing overcome its loss of legitimacy following the collapse of communism in Europe and its repression of its own students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Much as did Japanese aggression in the 1930s, American saber rattling rallied ordinary Chinese behind their government.
Since those aircraft carriers appeared in the waters off Taiwan in the spring of 1996, the United States has signed agreements with Japan enlarging the latter’s military commitments, undercutting its pacifist constitution, and securing its acquiescence in remaining a privileged sanctuary for American military operations. The issue of the territories and waters in East Asia covered by these agreements has been deliberately obscured: the U.S. government insists the area to be “protected” includes the Taiwan Strait, while the Japanese government insists it does not (and neither government has been candid with its citizens about the major ambiguities in the new agreements).
China has protested vigorously any intrusion by the United States and its Japanese client into Taiwanese affairs, but to no avail. The United States continues to sell arms to Taiwan in violation of agreements the Reagan administration signed with China during the 1980s (in the communiqué of August 17, 1982, the U.S. government promised gradually to reduce the quantity and not improve the quality of arms sold to Taiwan). These sales include 150 F-16 advanced fighter aircraft, which President Bush agreed to sell during the 1992 presidential election campaign in order to appeal to voters of Texas, where the airplanes are manufactured. Combined with 60 Mirage fighters from France and sophisticated fighter aircraft that it manufactures itself, Taiwan has an aviation capability superior to anything possessed by the mainland. Taiwan’s ability to threaten Chinese coastal cities, including Shanghai, is an effective deterrent against any mainland attempt to invade the island. This is one reason why mainland China’s leadership seeks to intimidate Taiwan through the threat of a missile attack rather than an invasion and why the U.S. proposal to develop and station antimissile missiles on Taiwan is so alarming to them.
Slightly more than a week after Clinton had reassured his Chinese audience that the United States had no designs on their country, Secretary of Defense Cohen, at a joint news conference with his South Korean counterpart, outlined a military role in East Asia as dangerous as the one the USSR planned in Cuba in 1962—which almost led to nuclear war. Cohen indicated the United States intended to maintain combat troops on the Korean peninsula indefinitely, offering no reason why American troops should remain in a potentially unified Korea or who exactly they were meant to defend against. He also spoke of how any pullout of forces from Japan would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.” This was interpreted at the time in the Japanese and Korean media as a barely veiled reference to China as a future enemy and as a warning against the possibility that Japan might undertake a foreign policy independent of the United States.
The friendly relations the United States enjoyed with China during the last eighteen years of the Cold War era, following the historic Nixon-Kissinger realignment, were based on a common opposition to the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore ended China’s main usefulness to the United States as an ally, while enhancing its new status as a possible long-term rival to American hegemony. In the wake of the Cold War, with the Pentagon intent on maintaining near Cold War levels of military spending, enemies on the global horizon were much needed. With the Soviet army increasingly seen as a disintegrating “paper tiger,” China’s economic emergence as a major power in the Pacific offered one possible fit with the Pentagon’s need for a major enemy. Moreover, China’s continuing disputes with Taiwan, its claims to islands in the South China Sea, its friendly relations with North Korea, its occasional armed disputes with Vietnam, and its modest ICBM forces armed with nuclear weapons all seemed to give evidence—in American eyes at least—of its aggressive intentions; all seemed to indicate that it might someday menace American imperial interests in the region.
In the years from the end of the Cold War to the present there has clearly been disagreement, even bitter acrimony, within the highest levels of the American government, from the White House to Congress to the Pentagon, over policy toward China. The question largely has been whether, like President Clinton, to espouse a policy of “engagement” with the People’s Republic—that is, to emphasize trade as a tool of bringing the country into a regional system still dominated by the United States—or, like Republican congressman Christopher Cox, to espouse a policy of “containment”—that is, to make China the enemy around which an American regional system is to be organized—or even some at present inconceivable combination of the two. In pursuing various aspects of these policies and fighting out internecine, intragovernmental, intrabureaucratic struggles over them, various factions in American officialdom have highlighted issues ranging from human rights abuses to trade policy to potential atomic spying, leaking material to the media, holding inflammatory hearings, and making subtle military gestures.
What no American official seems to have considered is what a policy of “adjustment” to the reemergence of China might look like. To make space for or alter American policies in order to accommodate China’s legitimate concerns as a potential future superpower seems beyond the policy horizons of American officialdom. Adjustment would hardly mean “appeasement”; it is possible that China might miscalculate and undertake some initiative so damaging to the rights of others that retaliation would indeed be appropriate. But the United States seems to assume that such an outcome is preordained, rather than undertaking diplomacy and statecraft to head it off.
The American president says one thing, but the American military presence in East Asia implies another. During the first half of the twentieth century, China often found itself in a similar situation in relation to the Japanese, whose central government expressed a desire for peace while its military simultaneously launched armed attacks on Chinese territory. A distrust of public protestations of peace and the need to draw conclusions from concrete military acts are part of China’s heritage of international relations. They played a role in Chinese thinking during the Korean War, when differences between General MacArthur’s strategic decisions in Tokyo and President Truman’s statements in Washington contributed to China’s decision to intervene. In the same way, the discrepancies between the American military’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, on May 7, 1999, and the White House’s subsequent protestations that the attack by a B-2 bomber using precision-guided munitions was an accident based on an “outdated map” are particularly hard for the Chinese to overlook. Contemporary American actions in East Asia, as distinct from statements by Washington, help trigger these old memories in Beijing.
The Chinese were sufficiently alarmed by our self-appointed post–Cold War mission of maintaining stability wherever we declared it to be threatened that, according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt (an executive of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and a close associate of Henry Kissinger’s), they began studying George Kennan’s early reports from the Soviet Union. At the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan was the State Department’s foremost speciali
st on Russia. In a famous 1947 article in the magazine Foreign Affairs written under the pseudonym “X” and entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he first suggested a postwar policy of attempting to “contain” the expansion and influence of the USSR. According to Sonnenfeldt, the Chinese were interested because “now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how [the policy] had started and evolved.”2
U.S. policy toward China, whatever the disagreements about it within the government, is driven by a familiar global agenda aimed at preserving and enhancing a Washington-centered world based on our being the “lone superpower.” Whether it is called “globalization,” the “Washington consensus,” “soft power,” or the “indispensable nation,” it still comes down to an urge to hold on to an American-inspired, -financed, and -led world order. Whereas such hegemonism vis-à-vis Germany, Japan, Latin America, Russia, or the United Nations is only likely to result in imperial overstretch and the probable long-term decline of the United States, attempts to establish American hegemony over China hold out more explosive futures and are in any case doomed to failure.
As the histories of previous empires demonstrate, imperial overstretch can be a long-drawn-out process if all sides are careful to avoid confrontation (the Russian and Ottoman empires come to mind). But such hegemonic policies applied to China are likely to precipitate a crisis. China is the world’s most populous country and has recently achieved an economy that promises to provide it with commensurate wealth and power. It is also an old civilization, whose humbling by foreign imperialists over the past two centuries led to the most sweeping and complex of all the modern revolutions. Its leaders are still working out whether they should seek parity on a global stage as defined by Western conceptions of international relations or try to re-create an older Sinocentric world of tributary states that existed before the arrival of the European imperialists, or perhaps some amalgam of the two.
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Page 19