Analysis: Asia allies won't back Bush
Thursday, 26 April 2001 20:21 (ET)
Analysis: Asia allies won't back Bush
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush won the
enthusiastic support of armchair strategists in his own Republican Party for
warning China off Taiwan. But he will have to go it alone in Asia.
America's two main allies in Northeast -- Japan and South Korea -- look
virtually certain not to support the United States if China calls Bush's
bluff and forces him to confront it with military force in order to protect
the offshore island of Taiwan.
Democratic India, which some senior Bush officials want to court, looks
certain to stay on the sidelines too. And even loyal Australia may not go
along with an aggressive U.S. policy that risks war with Beijing.
Bush Wednesday set the United States on a collision course with China over
Taiwan. Less than a day after approving a huge conventional arms sale to the
offshore island of 23 million people, the president said on ABC television
that he was prepared to do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan.
But from the point of view of America's strategic alliance with Japan, its
most crucial relationship in the Pacific, the timing of Bush's remarks could
not have been worse.
They came the day after Junichiro Koizumi, a tough, bold and immensely
popular nationalist, became prime minister of Japan.
Koizumi immediately appointed Makiko Tanaka, the daughter of Kakuei
Tanaka, Japan's dominant prime minister of the 1970s, as his foreign
minister, the first woman to hold the top diplomatic post in all of Japanese
history. And Tanaka, 47, while pledging to continue the close relationship
with Washington, said it was also time to review America's use of bases in
Japan.
"I believe we are in a situation where we should renew Japan's security
role and the status of U.S. troops in Japan," she said Thursday. Tanaka also
made clear Japan wanted peace and relaxed relations between China and
Taiwan, not the increased tensions certain to flow from Bush's remarks the
day before.
"On the issues involving China and Taiwan, the international community
should not try to stir things up maliciously but should calmly watch and
back up (efforts to resolve them)," she said. "This, I believe, will result
in global peace and stability."
Tanaka's statement, while diplomatically and skillfully presented,
amounted to a full repudiation and disapproval of Bush's remarks. Also, her
words about reviewing America's use of its military bases in Japan served
notice on Washington that it could soon lose the crucial Okinawa facilities
that it has long taken for granted in protecting Taiwan.
Even the EP-3E Aries II surveillance plane, which forced down on Hainan
island a few weeks ago after colliding with a Chinese F-8 fighter jet over
international waters in the South China Sea, had flown out of a U.S. air
base on Okinawa.
The Japanese Island of Okinawa houses the nearest U.S. sea and air bases
to Taiwan, which is 500 miles away. Pressure has been building up in Japan
for decades for the United States to vacate them.
The previous government of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori also expressed a
desire to negotiate America's evacuation of the Okinawa bases. But Tanaka's
comments are far more serious.
Mori was obsessively cautious in foreign policy, just as Mori was on
domestic issues. He bent over backwards to avoid doing anything new at all
in any foreign policy area whatsoever. There was no bite behind his bark.
But Tanaka and Koizumi are very serious indeed. First, Koizumi is a strong
nationalist in foreign affairs, a trend that has been little remarked on in
the American media so far, but which alarms neighboring South Korea.
He announced Wednesday he wanted to revoke the famous Article Nine of the
post-World War II Japanese Constitution -- dictated by occupying U.S.
military viceroy Gen. Douglas MacArthur, renouncing the practice of war.
Unlike Mori, Koizumi does not want to put off the issue of Okinawa. With
Upper House elections coming up for his discredited and fractured Liberal
Democratic Party in July, it is very much in his interests to confront the
Untied States head-on on the issue.
Second, Tanaka also made clear Thursday that she regarded her top priority
as keeping Japan out of dangerous regional conflicts. That can only mean
distancing Tokyo from Washington to avoid getting sucked into any possible
shooting match over Taiwan.
Tanaka is also likely to seek closer ties with China to make doubly sure
Japan is not drawn into a conflict it dreads with its enormous neighbor. "I
recognize China as a major power," she said Thursday. Also, warm ties with
Beijing are in her family tradition. Her father, as prime minister,
normalized Japan-China relations in 1972, ending three-quarters of a century
of conflict and distrust that had started with Japan's victory in the war of
1895.
But if the United States loses the use of its Okinawa bases in the near
future, then it will face the extremely difficult logistical challenge of
projecting the naval and air power necessary to protect Taiwan a thousand
miles from its next nearest air and sea bases. They are on the Western
Pacific Island of Guam.
That means U.S. warships and aircraft will have to travel 10 times as far
as Chinese ones to contest control of the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan's own airfields and naval bases are already within reach of
destructive batteries of hundreds of Chinese ground-to-ground missiles
already in place -- and hundreds more are feverishly being bought and
deployed.
That means that damaged U.S. warships would have a days-long trek through
probably contested waters to seek protection and repairs from damage they
incurred in such a conflict.
Not only can the United States not count on Japan to support it or provide
secure bases in the event of any conflict with Taiwan, but its other main
ally in the region, South Korea, looks extremely unlikely to offer its
support.
South Korean leaders were surprised and upset when Bush abandoned his
predecessor Bill Clinton's policy of seeking to improve Washington's
relations with North Korea. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung won the most
recent Nobel Peace Prize for the success of his "Sunshine" policy in
defusing tensions and building ties with the North.
Now, Bush's Wednesday warning to China that the United States was ready to
do whatever it took to defend Taiwan also came as an unpleasant surprise to
South Korea.
East Asian diplomatic sources say the South Koreans are privately coming
to view the Bush administration as a loose cannon, ready to take
irresponsible and unpredictable actions without clearing them or even
extending the courtesy of informing their allies first.
South Korea has excellent ties with China, its historic ally and
protector. Also, sharing the Asian mainland with the world's most populous
and fast-rising nation, the South Koreans are determined not to run the risk
of angering it.
For these reasons, South Korea, like Japan, wants the Taiwan dispute
settled peacefully between the United States and China.
Ronald Reagan won the trust of China, Japan and South Korea. As a result,
he led them in a united front that successfully deterred the Soviet Union
and kept the peace in Northeast Asia for two decades.
The second Bush administration's policy makers proudly see themselves as
Reagan's heirs. But in their first three months in office, they have only
succeeded in isolating their own nation in Northeast Asia, and made possible
future conflict there far more likely. |
