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| Image: Wiki Commons |
By Andrew Gawthorpe
The US today could draw some useful lessons for its Asia policy from the administration of President Gerald Ford.
Despite the Obama administration’s attempt to bolster the U.S. position in the Far East through its “pivot,” the American alliance structure in the region is under its greatest pressure in a generation. China’s military modernization is spurring U.S. partners and allies to engage in buildups of their own. Of more immediate concern is Beijing’s expansionism, typified by its declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone over an area that includes the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Given U.S. President Barack Obama’s hands-off foreign policy, analysts and diplomats are increasingly questioning whether the U.S. will respond to more concrete moves by China to assert its control over disputed territories. If Beijing were to employ the sort of “special warfare” which Russia recently pioneered in Crimea, deploying paramilitaries or otherwise muddying its role, the outcome would seemingly be even more in question.
Obama is not the first president to face these problems – aggressive adversaries, nervous allies, and a U.S. public deeply unwilling to make the commitments necessary to reassure those allies – in the Asia-Pacific. A look back at the Asia-Pacific policy of President Gerald Ford and his chief foreign policy architect Henry Kissinger is surprisingly instructive for placing America’s contemporary position in the region in perspective.
Ford came into office in 1974 after Watergate unseated Richard Nixon, and it fell to him to craft America’s response to the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The final loss of the Vietnam War sent shockwaves throughout the Asia-Pacific, raising questions as to whether it marked the beginning of a general rout of U.S. power. As today, American allies began to question whether the U.S. would stick to its security commitments. And also just as today, after Obama set the precedent of consulting Congress prior to military action in Syria, an assertive and anti-interventionist Congress looked set to complicate the use of military force to defend the American alliance system. On top of all this, Ford and Kissinger faced criticism from a nascent neoconservative movement, who like today’s China hawks saw policy as being too weak and accommodative.
Ford and Kissinger had to balance these competing pressures into a competent policy which hit the pause button on what looked like an American rout from the region after the fall of Saigon. They also had to do so without causing a reprise of the bitter domestic debate over Vietnam, which had ultimately only made the public and Congress leery of the use of force abroad. In this, they largely succeeded – and the reasons why are instructive for today’s policymakers.
Read the full story at The Diplomat