By Robert E. Kelly
The benefits of US alliances in Asia are often touted, but what about the costs?
The conventional wisdom on U.S. alliances in Asia, at least in the West, Japan, and Taiwan (but not necessarily in South Korea), is that they are broadly a good thing. One hears this pretty regularly from U.S. officials and the vast network of U.S. think tanks and foundations, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, and their many doubles in Asia. U.S. alliances, we are told, provide stability. They keep China from dominating the region. They hem in North Korea and defend the powerfully symbolic South Korean experiment in liberal democracy and capitalism. They prevent the nuclearization of South Korea and Japan and a spiraling regional arms race. In short, they re-assure.
The Chinese would almost certainly disagree with these attributions. I have argued in The Diplomat before that Chinese hegemony is less likely than U.S. and especially Japanese alarmism would have one think. Nor is it really clear that China intends to bully Asia like the Kaiser tried to in Europe (although it is looking ever more likely). But it is also true that U.S. alliances are rarely questioned on their own terms. We tend to assume these benefits – perhaps out of widespread strategic distrust of China – rather than prove them. And we also tend to overlook or downplay any negatives, unintended consequences and second order effects.
So what are the second-order effects of U.S. alliances (in Asia), and if they are costs, do they outweigh the first-order benefits? Measuring the possible negatives would be quite difficult, but then the positives listed above are also rarely measured. We just assume, for example, that the U.S. presence halts a spiraling nuclear arms race in East Asia, even though that has not happened between India and Pakistan after they both went nuclear in the 1990s. Neither India nor Pakistan has a strong U.S. alliance, nor are they governed as competently as most East Asian states are, but that has not led to the widely feared nuclear spiral between them, suggesting that U.S. reassurance might not actually be necessary for nuclear responsibility in Asia after all.
This strikes me as the sort of question that the think-tank consensus on U.S. foreign policy could not digest without an intellectual meltdown. But it is clearly a logical possibility. Stephen Walt and many others have argued, for example, that the closeness of the U.S.-Israel alliance has all sorts of negative unintended consequences, like Muslim anger at the U.S. in turn feeding sympathy for radicalism, and so on. So it is methodologically possible, however undesirable to U.S. analysts, that similar negatives and false positives exist in Asia. Post-Iraq, it should no longer be taken as self-evident that a heavy U.S. forward presence is obviously a good thing. Restraint does not equal decline, betraying allies, Munich 1938 all over again, and so on. But as the panicky, Obama-is-weak paranoia that followed Crimea illustrates, axiomatic hawkishness will be a hard habit to break.
Read the full story at The Diplomat
The Views express by the author are his alone & don’t necessarily reflect those of the “PacificSentinel” Blog.