Editors’ forum ponders how to bell the U.S. cat

The war in Iraq was a culmination of the U.S. dominance in world affairs fueled by its technical and military superiority unmatched by any nation in the world, participants in the Asia-Europe Press Forum said yesterday. But the war has also revealed U.S. vulnerabilities that offer an opportunity for a realignment of the world order.
The two-day forum hosted by the JoongAng Ilbo brought together 17 senior journalists from 14 countries to discuss world issues. The forum ends today.
The president of the JoongAng Ilbo, Han Ham-kyu, said events after the Iraq war have created a chain reaction with broad effects on international politics and economics. “Asian nations are weighing the pros and cons [of cooperating with the United States] and watching the developments closely with an eye to their own interests.”
The publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Gunther Nonnenmacher, said in a speech that by outflanking the United Nations before the start of the Iraqi war, “Washington showed that it was up to America to choose when it would need the alliance and when it would not.” That was most prominently displayed in the confrontation between the United States and European countries led by France and Germany, he added.
As the the European Union continues to integrate the continent, Mr. Nonnenmacher said, there will continue to be tensions within the union arising from discrepancies in political and economic prowess. The United States, he said, “has the leverage to destroy the process of political integration if it wanted to. Iraq and its reconstruction brought dissension in the West into the open, he added. Reconstructing Iraq would be the first test of whether there is enough political will for the United States and the rest of the world to cooperate to address the world’s problems.
“It has become increasingly clear that U.S. military answers alone are unable to solve all problems ― far from it, in fact,” said the chief diplomatic correspondent of Asahi Shimbun, Yoichi Funabashi. The international community must cooperate within the United Nations to help find a solution to the problems in Iraq, he said, and humiliating the Bush administration would only worsen the situation, pushing the United States toward “dangerous unilateralism.”
The editor-in-chief of the Straits Times of Singapore, Cheong Yip Seng, who said he took a more benign view of U.S. actions, noted that the developments in Iraq displayed the limitations to U.S. power, despite the dazzling array of military power. He said the term “U.S. empire” was incorrect.
Mr. Nonnemmacher said the United States “has no talent for being an empire,” and that the United States was not talented “because U.S. politics are not intelligent.”
The director general of Le Monde Diplomatique, Bernard Cassen, said President George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq has done a great deal to form a European conscience. “Europe was united against the war,” he said, contrary to the Bush administration’s characterization of the selected countries it called “Old Europe” as the opponents. The managing editor of Israel’s Haaretz, Yoel Esteron, said the only way to fight terror was through deterrence. “The Americans do not just wait and see,” he said. “The policy of ‘wait and see’ will not solve the problem and the states that choose to do nothing will be the next victims.” The only solution to the North Korean problem, he said, “is to get rid of Kim Jong-il.” But Seoul’s Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan predictably disagreed, saying that a regime change in the North is not one of South Korea’s options. A peaceful approach, he said, was the only way to wean North Korea away from its nuclear weapons.
The participants of the forum also visited President Roh Moo-hyun yesterday. He said the general election next April would be a break from the Korean politics of the past.

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Below are excerpts from two speakers during the first day of the 8th Annual Asia-Europe Press Forum. ― Ed.

The West, as it has been known, is no more

Gunther Nonnenmacher,
Publisher, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung

Relations between the United States and the rest of the world are the one crucial issue for our common future. When I went to Panmunjeom last week, I had as a German a strange feeling, this depressing reality of a divided country. Korea is the right place for a conference like this because we can see the wounds of the old war, the confrontation between a free political system and a totalitarian communist one.
I’ve been invited as a speaker from Europe on U.S.-European relations. First, let’s turn to the question of what the West used to be and whether the term still has a useful meaning.
Looking at it geographically, the West has been a strange fellow. Its centerpiece was the alliance of North America and the western part of Europe, with Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy as its core members.
All these countries were, and are members of NATO and that were, and are a community of values. I spoke of a strange fellow, and strange geographical configurations, because many things did not fit the term “community of values,” or meet the conditions of the geographical term, “the West.”
Turkey is a member of NATO although Turkey was an Asian military dictatorship and did not fit at all the image of the West as a community of values. Israel was undoubtedly considered as part of the West, and Japan and South Korea as well. Great Britain and European nations engaged in the Korean war to defend the West. Obviously, the defining point of the West was its opposition to the East, the ensemble of communist regimes.
That old East does not exist any more; the Warsaw pact has been dissolved and the Soviet Union has passed away. Communist China has undergone profound changes. The only leftover seems to be North Korea.
North Korea is a regional problem, and Kim Jong-il’s regime is doomed to vanish sooner or later. We face the problem that without communism, without the threat, without the East, the West has lost its cohesion. The outbreak of the serious dissensions inside the Western alliance, between the United States and Britain on the one hand, and France and Germany on the other, has come after 9/11. The quarrels in NATO go back in reality to the historic turnaround we saw in Europe in 1989 and 1991. NATO since then and the European Union have not really faced the new situation. NATO has adopted a strategy without really defining what its new purpose would be. And though the EU has decided on a common currency, that has been its last step ahead in some time. In past years, Europeans have prepared for the widening and deepening, for the enlargement of the EU and closer political cooperation, without coming to grips with the problems.
NATO was founded, in the words of its first leader, to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down.
Today the United States asks itself why it should stay in Europe, doing jobs like peacekeeping in the Balkans, that Europeans should and could do very well. Why should they remain in Europe when there is no Soviet threat? Today, the United States asks itself if Russia should not join the Atlantic alliance.
Keeping the Germans down is something we have done well ourselves; the problem these days seems to be to bring the Germans back in. It is Europe’s sick man, and would not like to see more defense spending for NATO. Stabilizing Eastern Europe by embracing new members is fine, but new members want U.S. police in case Russia becomes a threat again.
NATO has defined terrorism and mass weapons as two crucial new threats, and vows to fight them; but NATO offered help to the United States after Sept. 11 and was politely refused. In Europe, Afghanistan was seen as a necessary war, but Iraq was not. Now we hear about “old” and “new” Europe.
Farikh Zakaria yesterday wrote, “What worries people around the world is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country, the United States.” The overwhelming power of the United States has set free a natural tendency to oppose and counterbalance America.
There are a lot of vested interests that will keep NATO alive. There is the American interest to influence and shape what Europeans are doing; there is the interest of “old Europeans” to influence what happens in Washington via the NATO Council. There is the interest of new regimes subdued by one superpower and protected now by the first and sole superpower. From a military point of view, America does not need NATO any more. The question is what is Europe going to achieve on its own.
Europe is supposed to widen and deepen, add more members, and form an ever-closer union of peoples. To be frank, I don’t believe this is possible. The EU was a political method to make war between France and Germany impossible. The means was the pooling of crucial resources in heavy industries in Europe.
It is important to understand this economic as well as political motivation; it explains why Europeans will not be satisfied with a free-trade zone but will aim at constructing some kind of political unity. That is in America’s interest; economic recovery will lift the burden off the United States of financially assisting Europe and intervening in dangerous quarrels.
But relations with the United States will become more complicated. Conflicting interests and different judgments will remain and will grow. It’s like 1945 again; the power of the United States then and now is overwhelming and nearly unchallenged. But American leaders have had the wisdom to put power into international institutions. The United States did not only offer protection in exchange for obedience; it offered partnership under U.S. leadership.
Iraq was catalytic in bringing the dissensions in the West into the open. The traditional “West” has in many ways come to an end.

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Asian allies watch U.S. moves nervously

Yoichi Funabashi
Columnist, Asahi Shimbun

Terrorism threatens the culturally and ethnically diverse societies of the Asia-Pacific with the potential for religious polarization. Anxiety caused by security issues is creating cracks in many security alliances. The new century has seen tensions over the realignment of maritime Asia; the tumultuous Indonesia of the late 90s provides a poignant example of the dangers.
The U.S. alliance system established during the Cold War has suffered wear and tear since 9/11. That was the starting point for an increasingly insular U.S. security policy; unilateralism has become ever more prominent during the past few years and the growing gap in military capability between the United States and the rest of the world facilitates the use of unilateral force. But the real problem is not capabilities; it is perceptions. The United States and its allies no longer necessarily share the same sense of threat. The further the United States has pressed ahead with its war on terror, the more hatred it has encountered and the more it has opened itself up as a target for terrorists. U.S. allies feel threatened by the excesses of the American reaction, particularly its inclination to strike pre-emptively and to change foreign regimes. They are beginning to feel the danger of being trapped in U.S.-led wars and feel Washington is taking it for granted that they will simply render services.
In Korea, this had already begun to occur and a recent opinion poll by the Pew Center for the People and Press in June indicates an anti-U.S. resurgence. Even though the United States and South Korea were allies in the Korean War, the belief that America was the real culprit in splitting Korea seems to have begun to take root.
The situation was further agitated when Seoul requested that the 2d Infantry Division be relocated to the South. The United States finally agreed, but the timing and the manner of their redeployment has generated feelings of great unease among South Koreans, and anti-U.S. sentiment could endanger negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program.
Japan, like other U.S. allies, feels increasing pressure to reaffirm its commitment. As a defense policy expert at the Japanese Defense Agency confided to me, “We can no longer take the Japan-U.S. alliance for granted. We feel as though the alliance is no longer a given and that we are constantly being tested by the United States.” I have called the process a shift from a “fixed-rate” bilateral alliance to a “floating-rate” alliance.
Some theorists suggest that in the future the U.S. instinct will be to turn to China. Thus, America’s position and military presence in Asia is set to alter quite substantially with potential changes in partnerships.
Tokyo nervously monitors the unraveling of Sino-U.S. interaction and is deeply uneasy about being excluded from the framework. During the late 90s, when the U.S.-Japan alliance experienced a period of relative instability, China was perceived to be trying to outflank Japan. Jiang Zeming’s visit to Pearl Harbor at his own request and Bill Clinton’s failure to reaffirm the stabilizing importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance in Asia during talks in Beijing, as if the alliance was something to be ashamed of, intensified Japan’s uneasiness.
The ambivalent relationship between the United States and China, whether as strategic partners or strategic competitors, has significant repercussions for Japan, and at the same time Japan also fears U.S.-China enmity. Should U.S.-China exchanges take a turn for the worse, the result would have an equally grave impact on the U.S.-Japan alliance.
The most urgent security threat Asia now faces is the North Korean nuclear and missile crisis. The risk that North Korea could soon announce itself as having a full-fledged nuclear status is real and the consequences would be grave. In its dealings with the anxious outside world, Pyeongyang seems to be emulating the Pakistan formula, where cunning successfully procured both nuclear power and economic aid. Kim Jong-il is playing a similarly skillful game. There are some that argue this is a mere bargaining chip, but as Victor Cha powerfully expostulated, “The notion that North Korea’s proliferation is for bargaining purposes runs contrary to the history of why states proliferate.” Crossing the nuclear threshold is a national decision of immense consequence, a step rarely taken deliberately for the purpose of negotiating away those capabilities.
East Asia could fast become the focus of a devastating arms race. China and South Korea harbor suspicions that Japan would join this worrying competition for nuclear armaments.
In the words of the Meiji oligarch, Yamagata Aritomo, Korea is “a dagger aimed at the heart of Japan” and the North Korean nuclear threat is the sharpest and most threatening dagger in Japan’s history. Japan’s position in helping to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis was heavily compromised by the recent revelations about Japanese abductees during the Cold War.
Both Korea and Japan are likely to contribute troops to the Iraq reconstruction effort in spite of substantial opposition in each country. In Korea’s case, U.S. engagement policy and more finesse over the redeployment of its infantry could be the quid pro quo. In Japan, maintaining the framework of the U.S.-Japan alliance is the core logic behind the move. And policy planners in nearly all Asian countries want to further engage the United States in the region as a counterbalance to China.
Islamic radicalism threatens to destabilize the region, just as had the U.S. withdrawn from Vietnam much earlier, Asia would have toppled to the communist tide, as many political leaders in the region admit privately.
So the concept of an American hegemony, if not an empire, is not a novel concept to Asia. The United States’ presence in the Far East simulates a full hegemony and that hegemony has also, in moments, appeared imperial.

by Kim Young-sae