Barnett - Today I post the original interview with national correspondent Hiroyuki Akia of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, otherwise known as the Nikkei News, or the "Wall Street Journal of Japan."
Here is the edited (by me, for grammar, at Mr. Akita's request) transcript of Mr. Akita's original interview of me (in English, minus all the getting-to-know-you chit-chat at the beginning and end). The interview occurred over the phone in the fall of 2004:
Mr. Akita: So could you give me your kind of analysis of what they're trying to do, and what will be a new focus.
Mr. Barnett:Well, as I argue in the book, you know, the big challenge right now for the Pentagon is—if they're going to deal seriously with a global war on terrorism—they're going to become much more focused on the Middle East, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the northern Andes portion of South America, and then Central Asia, as well.
Put the line around that whole mess and that's what I call that "Non-Integrating Gap."
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:And these are all places where we haven't really positioned troops, even though, as I point out in the book, the vast bulk of our activity for the last 15 years has been there. We have not adjusted—in effect. We haven’t moved our troops closer to where they need to be to do what is, you know, their primary function now, which is dealing with these situations inside these various regions that I identify as the Gap.
Moving our bases closer in toward the Gap is one of the ways the U.S. military must change in order to effectively wage this global war on terrorism. You know, we had a certain amount of that sort of activity in the Cold War, but nowhere near the volume we have today. And the Cold War itself didn't take up a lot of manpower, because the Cold War was a cold war. You didn't actually fight it, you prepared for it.
Mr. Akita: Yes, yes, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:And now we're shifting from a situation where your primary function is to prepare for war, to an era in which that kind of function will recede into the background as sort of a hedge or insurance policy, meaning you'll always maintain a certain capacity to wage "big war," as I call it, just to make sure that nobody ever thinks about doing that. Instead of focusing primarily on that big conventional threat, you're going to have more of your force actually out there doing things and working around the world at a much higher tempo.
In the Cold War our activity in these underdeveloped region, that I now call the Gap, was pretty limited. In effect, we would pick out a country and the Soviets would pick out a country, and we'd both support our two countries in some sort of rivalry in a regional situation or perhaps even war, but those were fairly limited in number.
When you look at this Gap situation, you’re talking about much higher U.S. military involvement in those regions poorly connected to the global economy, or the opposite of what I call the Functioning Core of globalization (to include North America, Europe, Russia, India, China, industrialized Asia and the big economies of South America). If you get involved in the Middle East, for example, by taking down a Saddam Hussein, you're going to be involved with a lot of poorly functioning regimes and economies, so any intervention is going to require a lot of troops on the ground. So how do you deal with a huge shift from what was, in the Cold War, a very capital-intensive effort (and therefore not that manpower-intensive), to the reverse situation today (i.e., not nearly as capital-intensive, but very manpower-intensive)?
Obviously, we want to keep a certain capacity to wage conventional war against conventional great power opponents in terms of the capital and the research and development required to generate those capabilities, because those are tremendous capabilities that—no matter what opponent you fight—are useful to have in terms of keeping our people safe and keeping our casualties as low as possible. Moreover, if America doesn't develop those capabilities and field them, then it won't create the kind of winning situation that would attract coalition partners anyway. And other countries are either unable or unwilling to make those kinds of investments. So if America doesn't deal with the Saddams of the Gap, nobody does.
So there’s definitely that sense within the U.S. military that we have to preserve a certain amount of resources directed towards the capital—as opposed to the manpower—issue. And that means there's only so much money left over for manpower costs, and those really are the most expensive portion because you tend to buy people for their entire lifetimes of service. I mean, it is one of the last vestiges of lifetime employment and truly secure pensions in a world where that is going away. So it is very expensive.
So we need to spend a certain amount on our capital needs to maintain a critical mass of capabilities, but meanwhile, since the end of the Cold War, our manpower requirements, in terms of crisis response activity all over this Gap, has increased roughly four-fold from the 1980s. So how did we choose to deal with this asymptotic rise in demand for the exporting of U.S. security in the post-Cold War era? We’ve tried a variety of methods.
First, there has been the Powell Doctrine, which we've had since the end of the Cold War, which in effect tries to deny the demand. It says, "It doesn't matter. If we go in and just kill the bad guys, we won't care about what happens afterwards." And that's sort of close to what we've done in Afghanistan. The Powell Doctrine said you go in with overwhelming force and you focus only on warfighting. So that when it comes to the point where there should be nation-building, you leave as quickly as possible. If you don't do that, you get stuck in what they call "quagmires." And so we have bought that kind of warfighting force for the last 15 years, and we have not spent the money on the peacekeeping force.
Mr. Akita: Oh, that's right, that's right. I understand what you mean, yes.
Mr. Barnett:And so that was one of the ways we dealt with this rising demand. We pretended it didn't occur. And we just said, "We don’t care about it."
Another way is to say, "We are going to technologize as much as possible, and save money by doing more with less," but again we put all that R&D into the warfighting, not into the peacekeeping.
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:So we don't spend much money on non-lethal technologies, just small investments on non lethal weapons. Meanwhile, we've spent huge amounts on these giant weapons systems, which, you know, aren't so useful when it comes to things like crowd control.
A third way we've dealt with this rising demand has been to outsource as much as possible. So you outsource things like feeding the troops and security around bases, and this is what generates these very strong relationships with security companies, many of which come out of the oilfields services industry, and people see a lot of conspiracy and whatnot in that because, of course, Iraq has oil, and then you have companies that are associated with oil companies doing security.
But in reality, it's not surprising that a lot of the companies who've become contractors in security issues to the Defense Department over the '90s have come from the oilfield services industry, because the oil companies have historically been one of the rare industries willing to go into dangerous, undeveloped parts of the world and, hence, they have had to develop their own security forces in some instances. So what happened was that the oilfield services companies, which began in the business of building and maintaining wells, expanded and diversified their services to include all sorts of additional security and command-and-control functions.
And that became a rising sub-industry in the oil industry, so across the 90’s, when the Pentagon started looking for companies that could help us on non-combat functions when the U.S. military ended up going into undeveloped countries in various interventions, the only private-sector companies that could really meet that demand existed in the oilfields services industry. So that was a natural complementarity that developed over time, which some people find very conspiratorial and frightening, but it actually makes a lot of sense when you track the history of it. So that's the third way we tried to deal with this rising demand.
And then a fourth way has been that we've really been running our people ragged, meaning we’ve been working our troops too hard. especially those in the Reserve Component, which is the National Guard and the Reserves.
So those are four things we've been doing to ourselves, and on all four of those responses we're near breaking points, I would argue now, with the understanding that when we decided to go into Iraq, we bought ourselves a long-term occupation. We're coming under stress in terms of the relationships with the contractors and some of the things that have happened there, like some of the contractors who were involved in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and we realize that the oversight of some of these private companies is not very good, so we've discovered shortfalls there.
We're almost at the breaking point in terms of Reserves and National Guard. You've seen us do unusual call-ups of forces because we're running short on those things. We've reached the limit of the technology on some levels because, again, we haven't invested in the peacekeeping, we've invested in the warfighting. And you're seeing the Powell Doctrine basically crumble as a concept, meaning nation-building is in.
So all of these four big methods that we've used across the '90s to deal with this rising demand for our exporting of security are under assault.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:And at that point, it's no surprise, although I've been predicting this for a while on the basic of the logic displayed by my Core-Gap map of the world, that you see a global posture review come out of those various pressures. If you talk about a company dealing with a changed marketplace, the first response of the company is to alter itself, to reorganize internally as much as possible. And in effect, the United States military has done the easy things up to now, those four things I mentioned, and they have exhausted those four possibilities on many levels. So what they're doing now is they're trying to seek new alliances with those around the world who can help them provide this service in a more efficient manner.
And one of the first things they have to do, in fact, is to realign the way they market that service around the world. And the marketing of U.S. security, so to speak, is still, in terms of the bases, stuck in the Cold War model. Meaning we still have an inordinate amount of bases situated in western Europe and in northeast Asia. In western Europe, the case is pretty obvious. There's not much of a security issue there any more. And so you find yourself moving into eastern Europe, which offers you the advantages of being closer in to the situation in southwest Asia, but it's also cheaper because these are, you know, less expensive countries.
Mr. Akita: Oh, that's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:Now, in northeast Asia, if not for North Korea this review would be, I would argue, not that big of a deal, and it would make a lot more sense because, I mean, other than a Taiwan/China scenario, the fear factor between a united Korea, Japan and China, that relationship I think is becoming so solid that there's not a lot of fear, say, in Tokyo—other than in the usual military circles that love to worry about such things—over China's rising economic influence because, frankly, China's rising economic stature has become a huge boon for Japan, in terms of lifting it out of its long-term recession, Japan, I would argue, is becoming in effect sort of an elder brother, or kind of an economic mentor in terms of research and design and investment, to China. So you're seeing a commingling of economic fate there.
Mr. Akita: Yes, we are shifting there yes.
Mr. Barnett:Very, you know, and over time that's going to lessen Japan's concerns about China, and it's going to frankly lessen China's concerns about Japan. So if you have those things all developing, and Taiwan still sort of an issue, the only thing that really remains in that part of the world which makes this global posture review somewhat nervous for countries in Asia is the question of Kim Jong Il.
Mr. Akita: Kim Jong-Il.
Mr. Barnett:And I understand the logic of what the Bush administration is saying. America has to move its bases closer to the Gap, as I call it, and the only way they can do that is to take advantage of successes from the Cold War. And so we need to be able to capitalize on the two big efforts we made across the Cold War (Europe, Northeast Asia). Doing that in Europe—again—is no problem, but taking advantage of that in Northeast Asia, well, there you still got this threat hanging on called Kim Jong-Il.
And to not have the global posture review be on some level contingent with the successful resolution of the North Korea issue, I think, is always going to be problematic. It's going to create, possibly, more tension and uncertainty than it's worth, in terms of the savings and the rationalizing of where we should have our troops around the world.
Having said that, there is a tendency in South Korea to assume that the world—and not South Korea—in effect should pay for dealing with the North Korean threat. You know, the real resolution of Kim Jung-Il is obviously the reunification of the two countries, and South Korea is not too welcoming of that idea, I would argue, because they fear that they're going to be tagged with the bill—that it's going to cost them a lot.
Mr. Akita: That's right. Like West Germany.
Mr. Barnett:Right. And you can argue with West Germany that the real problem that's kept East Germany down is the fact that Germany as a whole has such generous labor compensation packages that they have constricted their ability to attract foreign investment.
Mr. Akita: Yes.
Mr. Barnett:I don't think that's the same story in South Korea, so I think South Korea would actually integrate North Korea with the help of global financial flows more effectively than Germany which, you know, in Germany they have something like ten weeks of vacation, and have some amazing pensions, stuff like that, that I don't think South Korea has because it developed later in history and it doesn't have the same sort of socialist attitude toward labor that Germany has. So I think that fear on South Korea's part is a little overblown.
And I think, frankly, the notion that it would be a big violent war involving millions of deaths tends to be way overblown as well. I think the North Korean regime is a lot shakier than it appears, and I think the world is catching on to that more and more.
Mr. Akita: Yes.
Mr. Barnett:The real solution here has to be—and this is where it gets really tricky—Japan, South Korea, Russia, China, the United States, and, of course, North Korea itself—you know, basically the six member states we always talk about.
Mr. Akita: Yes.
Mr. Barnett:So it's the five states, excluding North Korea, who need to come together, in my mind, at some point in the near term and basically say to Kim Jung Il that his ruling system has to go away.
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:We have to tell Kim that he has to step down from power and that the reunification has to come about simply because, you know, there's such a desperate situation in that country, there's been so many lives lost in the last ten years—by some calculations, upwards of 3 million people.
And the reunification process has to be a win-win outcome for the five countries. And there has to be such an agreement on it that they could go to North Korea and basically give Kim and the leadership an ultimatum that they can't refuse, either by buying off the senior leadership and offering Kim, I don't know, some fabulous palace somewhere to live in or something like that. I mean, this has been done historically. It was done with Baby Doc Duvallier in Haiti, and we basically let Charles Taylor leave Liberia with his $100 million in his pockets. If you let them leave with a certain amount of money, and you give them sanctuary somewhere, you know …
Mr. Akita: Maybe it is possible, yes.
Mr. Barnett:Deep in China or something like that.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:I think this could be done. Why I think that's so crucial is until that gets done, there is almost no possibility of what really needs to occur in East Asia …
Mr. Akita: …in the context of a transformation.
Mr. Barnett:… which is a NATO-like entity.
Mr. Akita: Oh, that's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:… coming together where the United States, Japan, a United Korea, China and Russia—maybe even India and ASEAN—basically come together and say, you know, "The possibility of war in Asia is no more," and we're going to have strong levels of military cooperation, and over time that military cooperation will actually reach a level that you're seeing NATO reach now, which is the primary reason for having that military cooperation, so that we, together, can send our troops to deal with situations that we care about—distant from our shores.
So in many ways, what needs to happen is we need to speed up the historical integration process in the security realm in East Asia, get it up to par with where NATO is today, and that is almost impossible without a resolution of Korea. So you're seeing the United States try to do the same thing in East Asia that we want to do in NATO, which is reduce our presence and also ask NATO to help out elsewhere around the world.
And we're nowhere near that level in East Asia. One, we don't even have a NATO, and two, to reduce our presence creates anxiety over this remaining issue. With North Korea, it's almost like if you still had an East Germany in the middle of Europe today, and it was this scary country and it had nukes and it did all sorts of bad stuff. Would we have the same ability to do in Europe, you know, what we're arguing that we should be able to do in Asia today? The answer would be no. People would say, "You have to take care of East Germany first."
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:And so that's the big hang up. And you know, I look at things very long-term, and when I look ahead over the next 25 years, I see an Asia that is going to be incredibly dependent on energy coming out of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. So what needs to occur is that the United States cannot possibly—it would be difficult, politically and economically—provide all the necessary security to central Asia and the Middle East by ourselves. It will cost us a tremendous amount in debt, you know.
If Japan and China are willing to keep buying that debt, that's one way to go, but I think that creates its own tensions that are negative, especially if, you know, in that singular sort of exporting of security to the Middle East you get China or Japan or Europe not liking the way we're doing it, and say China decides it's going to keep its reserves in euros instead of dollars, and the United States is sort of left with the bill.
And so the logic, long-term, that I would see is that you have to get some sort of buy-in from Japan, China, Korea, that if it's really their oil, by and large, in the Persian Gulf, then these countries need to do more militarily in the region. I mean, Asia today takes out of the Persian Gulf roughly two-thirds of the oil that comes out of there, and if you flip that and say, what's China's or Japan's rising dependency on Middle Eastern oil, well, for Japan it is absolutely astronomical. And China's is going to be very big as well, over the next couple of decades, as is India's, and South Korea needs it as well.
So America needs to be able to tap not just Asia's ability to fund our debt so that we can put the security in the Middle East. Over time, over the next ten to fifteen years, we've got to be able to tap your ability to send troops and to participate in the securing of the Middle East.
Mr. Akita: Oh, I see. Also sea lanes maybe?
Mr. Barnett:Absolutely, because if the biggest energy relationship in the world is between the Persian Gulf and Asia, then it all has to go through Southeast Asia.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right. So Indonesia, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea are all important.
Mr. Barnett:Right. Right. So I mean, I talk to Central Command and I say, the most important seam, if you think of their area of responsibility (i.e., from northeast Africa over to Pakistan, including Central Asia), that's the area of responsibility, the AOR, for CENTCOM . . .
Mr. Akita: Oh, yes, yes.
Mr. Barnett:… so I say to CENTCOM, the most important seam, or the most important border for CENTCOM really is toward the east—toward Asia. Because the most important flow, I could argue, over the next 20 years, is going to be energy coming out of the Middle East and going to Asia. And if that gets messed up, it'll mess up the entire global economy, and we'll see arms races and fear and all sorts of bad stuff emerging from that.
The United States is going to—on some level—naturally overextend if it tries to provide all the security to the Middle East over the next 20 years. So Russia, Japan, China, and India, inevitably are all coming to the Middle East, in terms of military presence.
Mr. Akita: I see. For the maintenance of peace and stability.
Mr. Barnett:Right. They're going to have to come, at some point, and the question is, Under what circumstances do they come? They can come under bad circumstances, meaning United States fails, becomes isolationist, pulls out of the Middle East, and then guess who decides they have to do something about the Middle East? It'll be India, Russia, Japan and China. Russia will come mostly for security issues, as they've got their own oil, but they don't want instability coming up from the south. But India and Japan and China would come to the Middle East security-wise, simply because it's mostly their oil.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:So inevitably you're coming. And the question is, do you come under good circumstances, meaning you come in a cooperative fashion with the United States and we all pitch in together and it works that way, or do you come out of fear because the United States does a bad job or decides that it doesn't want to do it any more? Or you decide that you're unhappy with the United States and the way we do it, so you start buying euros instead of dollars, and then we can't afford the military expenditures that allow us to make that effort on your behalf.
Mr. Akita: That's right. Can I ask, do you think the Pentagon is considering in the near-term or long-term to let Japan also China, those countries, to play that kind of role in Central Asia and Middle East?
Mr. Barnett:Well, again, when you talk about the Pentagon, you're talking about a place that's dominated by day-to-day considerations—on many levels.
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:So right now, the Pentagon is trying to make Iraq and Afghanistan work. And to make it work means they got to field the necessary number of troops in the theater of operations. So we're trying to recruit them, we're trying to keep them as long as possible in the service. The Army needs a lot of people, for example. The Air Force and the Navy are going down in terms of troop size, so the Army is trying to recruit people coming out of the Air Force and the Navy. You know, when you're doing all those things and you're doing them as best as you can and you still need more people, then you're going to look around and you're going to say, "You know what? I got to take some people out of Germany."
And you're going to say, "You know what? I got to take some people out of Japan, I got to take some people out of Korea. Because I just got to get more people."
Now, you ask, "Are they thinking that one of the ways to solve this issue is to get Japan and Russia and India and China more into the Middle East?" Yeah, I think we are thinking about that, but it's hard. Requires a lot of negotiation. It's simpler to grab several thousand troops out of South Korea. Because you can do that without asking anybody's permission, really. You can do it pretty quickly out of Japan, too. That's easier than saying, "Japan, please send 10,000 troops to Iraq." Because, you know, you experience a situation like the Philippines with their 51 troops where some civilian truck driver gets kidnapped, and the Philippine government says, "Well, we did what we had to do. We saved the life of the truck driver. So we had to pull out our troops to do that." When you see that kind of dynamic at work, it gets hard. You know, Japan has not lost a soldier in a combat operation in several decades.
Mr. Akita: Not yet, no.
Mr. Barnett:Right. But it's going to.
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:It's going to. And you know, the last time China went to war was in 1979, with Vietnam, and they got bloodied pretty bad. And so the reality is that, if China goes, they're going to learn some nasty lessons, I'm sure.
Of that group, Russia and India have done a lot more fighting recently: India in Sri Lanka, and Russia obviously in the Caucuses, and so I think their troops are a little more battle-hardened. But there are going to be, you know, political issues in getting any of those countries there. We asked India for 17,000 peacekeepers several months back, and we couldn't make it happen. I would argue in part because of our relationship with Pakistan, which presents its own set of problems. And there's talk now that Putin is considering sending as many as 40,000 troops to Iraq.
Back in the spring of 2004, I wrote an op-ed article in the Washington Post where I said, in effect, "We should get India and Russia and China to join the coalition occupying Iraq," and all the experts said, "That's impossible."
Well, I said, "No it's not. Think long-term. Think about whose interests are really involved. It makes perfect sense for India, Russia, China." I didn't include Japan in that argument because Japan had already decided to send some people, which was, I know, a very, very big move for Tokyo.
Again, it's just not tenable for the United States to provide all the security to the Middle East and—in effect—have other countries pay for it only indirectly by buying our debt. There will be a sense of resentment on the part of the American public, and then there's natural resentment that arises from other countries whenever we fail or do bad things or don't perform well. These countries basically say, "This is really America trying to grab all the oil," and that kind of stuff, which is to me, of course, is kind of ludicrous, because, even if American oil companies were to "get the oil"—and, of course, as we see with big oilfield developments nowadays, there is no one company that dominates anything—they would still end up collaborating extensively with non-American oil companies to exploit the reserves. I mean, the Sakhalin oil and gas project involves five or six huge companies. The notion that one country somehow controls it on that basis is kind of fantastic.
Mr. Akita: Yes, yes.
Mr. Barnett:Again, that Persian Gulf energy is going primarily to Asia. I mean, that's almost guaranteed, because of the huge increase in energy requirements throughout Asia over the next 20 years.
Mr. Akita: Yeah, I understand.
Mr. Barnett:So there's no easy answer to the question, "Is it a good thing to do this global basing realignment?" I think the Bush administration is operating under current pressures to find more troops. And this is the easiest thing to do. But the problem is, it does not deal with the lack of security alliance development that, if things were better, would be as advanced in East Asia as it is in Europe.
So when I look at that and I see those pressures over time, I say, "You know what? This should not be a fight between the United States and South Korea over troops. And this should not be a fight between the United States and Japan over troops." If you're really going to solve this issue, the focus should be on North Korea. Because until you make North Korea go away, the possibility of creating a NATO-like entity for East Asia will not happen. To create an alliance, you almost need to win a war. And the war to win is Kim Jung-Il goes away.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right.
Mr. Barnett:And there are arguments on our side about whether we should have focused on Kim Jung Il or Iran instead of Iraq, but that die has already been cast. We've already committed ourselves to Iraq, and that will slow down our ability to deal with North Korea and in some ways it complicates it because you've now got China—perhaps—that may be less willing to help us on North Korea because they fear what's going on in the Middle East and worry to themselves, "Is America going to control the oil that we need in the Middle East?" That tends to be a very 19th-century sort of balance-of-power thinking, but it still persists in many leaders' minds.
So when I look at the world of the 21st century, I see some obvious things that everybody wants to see happen, the most important being that everybody wants to see Asia get its energy. Because if that doesn't happen, then we're all going to suffer economically.
Mr. Akita: That's an interesting point. Yes. You pay so much attention to energy. I know that China shifted, in the late 1990s, from being an exporter of energy to importer of energy.
Mr. Barnett:Now you see the articles in the Wall Street Journal about China looking everywhere for oil.
Mr. Akita: Oh, that's right, that's right. Also, Japan tends to worry that maybe there is a military build-up resulting from the increased demand of China, China's need to access the Middle East and several other oilfields. So I think maybe China's desire to maintain peace and stability in Middle East is also increasing.
Mr. Barnett:Yes. So again, Japan, India, Russia, China: they are all coming militarily to the Middle East over security issues in the next 20 years. I guarantee it. The questions are, How do they come? And do they go in a cooperative fashion? If they go in a competitive fashion, because the United States does badly in its efforts or allies are unwilling to fund us any more, then I see dangerous and scary things.
Mr. Akita: I see, I see.
Mr. Barnett:If the Middle East is going to be really integrated with the global economy and stabilized over the next 20 years, I guarantee you there's got to be Chinese troops there, Japanese troops, Indian troops and Russian troops. There has to be. We'll need them to create that long-term stability. I just don't think it's tenable for the United States to try to do it primarily by itself. I don't think it will work in terms of domestic politics. I don't think that having Japan and China basically buy it, by buying our debt, works over time, because that creates certain political and economic pressures.
But it also leaves the situation in the Middle East to become a struggle defined as Islam versus the United States. And then there's this feeling among radical Islamic terrorists that westerners are weak, and so if you kill a few Westerners you'll drive them away. It would be a very different situation if China, Japan, India and Russia are there. Because then you can't pretend it's Islam versus the West any more.
In the end, I think what's missing when we discuss these potential base realignments is the larger understanding of the global economic context. And instead of understanding that larger context, what people are fearing about these moves is that they somehow signal that Japan's security interests and United States' security interests are no longer similar.
And I see that tension today because, in effect, America seems to understand and accept the long-term implications of the global energy trade and the security situations that result in the Middle East, whereas Japan, China and India are not yet ready to move towards that strategic understanding in terms of making military commitments. So what we're proposing in base realignments seems like America is leaving the scene early in East Asia, whereas Japan and the other countries in Asia aren't ready for us to make that change, because they have not developed a cooperation among themselves security-wise that would let them feel comfortable with that big change.
And one of the big reasons, again, is Kim Jung Il. If North Korea has collapsed in '91 or something like that, Asia would be very different today, security-wise. You would probably see a NATO-like alignment, I would argue, by now. Because there would have been such a rush to deal with that situation, you would have seen possibly very expanded cooperation between the United States and Japan, united Korea, Russia and China, cooperation that would have been very positive. But since you haven't had that experience, for us to propose this change to you now regarding our troops in East Asia is very hard for you to contemplate—unlike in Western Europe. And I'm not sure your fear is properly appreciated inside the Pentagon.
Mr. Akita: Yeah, I see. But the U.S. also can reduce the burden. Or in Asia, if they establish NATO type of framework in Asia.
Mr. Barnett:Yes, they can. I mean, I look at Asia: except for Kim Jung Il, there is no danger there. Of course, we can still talk about Taiwan and China, but in general terms, there really shouldn't be a U.S. military presence in East Asia of the level we've long had, simply because these are developed or developing countries which have their own militaries, and have such a confluence of economic interests that there should not be this situation of mistrust and fear.
Mr. Akita: That's right, that's right. The United States still maintain 100,000 troops in Asia, in Asia, but maybe it can be largely reduced.
Mr. Barnett:Yeah. I mean, if I got a NATO in East Asia, I'd probably have 20,000 troops there.
Mr. Akita: Oh, really. Oh, I see.
Mr. Barnett:And nobody would be frightened by that.
Mr. Akita: That's right.
Mr. Barnett:And there would be a confidence of those countries in East Asia, and the big debate in East Asia would be the same debate in Europe today, "How do we come together and send our troops to places that really need security, like the Middle East." And you're not having that conversation yet, in large part because Kim Jung Il still sits there, and when we try to force that conversation with you, it seems hard and it seems like a "bridge too far," and you feel like we're abandoning you, really. So that's a difficult conversation.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at January 2, 2005 01:38 PM |
