The disputed Northern Limit Line (NLL) that forms the maritime border between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea cuts through a number of small islands and winds through rich fishing grounds. Credit: lamoix/CC-BY-2.0

By John Feffer and Michal Witkowski
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 2014 (IPS)

Environmental problems, by their nature, don’t respect borders. Air and sea pollution often affect countries that had nothing to do with their production. Many extreme weather events, like typhoons, strike more than one country. Climate change affects everyone.

These environmental problems can aggravate existing conflicts among countries. But they can also bring countries together in joint efforts to find solutions. A case in point is the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in Korea.

The NLL is the oft-disputed border between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of the peninsula. Although the two countries agreed to a territorial boundary at the 38^th parallel following the Korean War armistice, they have never agreed on the maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea, which threads between a number of islands and through rich fishing grounds.

Over the years, North and South Korea have exchanged artillery fire across the NLL, and naval vessels as well as fishing boats have clashed in the area on a number of occasions.

Various environmental challenges have only sharpened the conflict. But with a new imperative to address these environmental problems, the NLL can offer the two Koreas an opportunity to chart a new relationship for the 21^st century.

Anatomy of a Dispute

North Korea maintains six naval squadrons on the [Northern Limit Line]. The North’s fleet consists of approximately 430 combat vessels. The South’s fleet is smaller in numbers, with about 120 ships and 70 aircraft. But it has the military edge, due to the size of the vessels and their technological superiority.
The NLL region has been a zone of contention between North and South Korea for more than six decades. It has been the site of several clashes between the Koreas.

Among the most notable are the naval confrontations of 1999 and 2002, the 2009 gunboat incident near Daecheong Island, the 2010 artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, and the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship.

This maritime border is heavily militarised. North Korea maintains six naval squadrons there. According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the North’s fleet consists of approximately 430 combat vessels—around 60 percent of which are stationed around the coastal borders.

Due to the decline of the North Korean economy, the fleet mostly consists of smaller vessels used for covert operations and for escorting fishing boats around the NLL.

The South’s fleet is smaller in numbers, with about 120 ships and 70 aircraft. But it has the military edge, due to the size of the vessels and their technological superiority. It’s further reinforced by the presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in nearby Yokosuka, Japan.

South Korean troops, along with their American counterparts, carry out annual drills in the region, which always raise tensions along the disputed maritime border.

North Korea does not recognise the present border arrangement. Furthermore, the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) regime set by the U.N. – which grants states special resource exploration rights in a sea zone stretching 200 miles from their land borders – cannot be applied in a close-quarter situation such as the NLL.

The fishing zones that lie within the NLL are the source of fierce contention between both South and North Korea.

One of the major arguments that North Korea has made around the disputed NLL is that South Korea has access to the majority of fisheries within the current boundaries, while the North occupies far less territory than it potentially could.

When the NLL was being drawn up, the international standard for territorial water limits was three nautical miles; by the 1970s, however, 12 nautical miles became the norm. The North’s argument is that the current setting prevents it from accessing neighbouring sea areas, which, in Pyongyang’s view, should belong to the North.

Such a border set-up fails to acknowledge that small islands, such as Yeonpyeong Island, are not equivalent to continental masses in terms of generating maritime boundaries.

Environmental issues

Overfishing and other destructive fishing practices that have continued for decades have had perhaps the greatest impact on the NLL’s environmental situation. Such activities have caused habitat destruction and biomass change in the Yellow Sea.

For instance, due to overfishing between the 1960s and the 1980s, the number of invertebrates and fish dropped by over 40 percent. With the decrease in fish populations, more effort is required to maintain the desired catch capacity, and many commercially significant species have been severely depleted. As a result, the species composition and the relative proportions of the fish found in the region have been altered.

One country alone cannot ensure the region’s sustainability. The trans-boundary nature of these issues requires a cooperative approach.

The nature of the Yellow Sea – and in particular the seabed on which the NLL is located – limits water circulation, increasing the amount of harmful sediments and aggravating the quality of the water. This has decreased the sea’s ability to “cleanse itself,” making the area around the NLL even more vulnerable to pollution and the harmful effects of human activities on land.

Habitat depletion can greatly affect local communities as well as cause problems for the fishing industry. Development projects on the South Korean side have been a major factor in this process.

More than 30 percent of marshland fields have been lost in South Korea between 1975 and 2005 due to dam construction, embankment, and dikes. Rice paddy fields have been lost as a result of reclamation and the lowering of water tables in nearby lakes.

An ever-increasing market demand for seafood boosts the profitability of short-term-oriented fishing activities. Insufficient pollution prevention only aggravates the situation.

Possible Solutions

As a result of the tense security situation and the unresolved border – along with the lack of a peace treaty between the Koreas to formally end the Korean War – any sort of consensus on the matter of the NLL in the context of inter-Korean relations is difficult to achieve.

One proposed solution is the establishment of a joint fishing zone between the two countries. This zone would boost the North’s fishing industry and could serve as a start to a trust-building process between the neighbours.

Such a process would be based on increased economic cooperation in the NLL region that could lead to further improvements in relations and make future collaboration more likely.

The “Sunshine Policy,” a period of North-South engagement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was an attempt at establishing such cooperation. In the negotiations regarding the NLL during that period, North Korea demanded changes in the border situation that had to be met before it could agree to participate in the 2007 inter-Korean summit.

The South reportedly agreed to this condition. However, the summit failed to bring any real closure to the matter: concrete decisions were left to be discussed in the future.

The overall framework dating back to the Sunshine Policy’s prime is still in place. For instance, the Kaesong Industrial Park – a joint North-South venture on the northern side of the DMZ – is still operational. Ties between the Koreas could be further enhanced by cooperation around the NLL region.

Some ideas have already been put forward and were initially agreed upon by both sides. In 2000, for example, the two countries came to an agreement along the maritime boundary on the east side of the peninsula where South Korean boats shared the profits from their squid fishing in Northern waters.

Also in 2000, the two sides agreed to create a special peace and cooperation zone around the west coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Another proposal was to combine a joint fishing zone with a common industrial complex in Haeju, a port city on the Northern side. Finally, the Koreas agreed to establish a “peace sea” from the island of Yeonpyeong right to the estuary of the Han River.

No military presence would be allowed in this area. With the South’s withdrawal from the Sunshine Policy framework under the right-wing President Lee Myung-Bak, however, the joint projects were put on hold.

A resuscitation of such joint projects could potentially move cooperation beyond the issue of the NLL to other areas of both business and policy-making. Two major obstacles would need to be overcome in order for such a solution to work.

First, an independent body to monitor the area would need to be appointed to prevent breaches of the agreement and to ensure that both parties follow environmental rules. This mechanism would have to recognise the specificity of the issues surrounding the NLL and formulate policies accordingly.

Second, the two sides would have to agree on a peaceful dispute resolution mechanism.

A universal solution that can resolve the NLL issue does not exist. A carefully devised policy that takes into account the political and economic tensions between the two Koreas may be the answer.

Importantly, the NLL would have to be gradually demilitarised to reduce the probability of any unwanted conflict that could destabilise the area. However, there is minimal possibility that the two countries will agree to reduce their military positions given that the two countries signed the armistice nearly six decades ago but never agreed on a peace treaty.

Thus, for such a solution to become possible, economic cooperation must come first.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service. Read the original version of this story here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

Ukraine, US, NATO and Partnership for Peace member nations kick off Exercise Rapid Trident 2011. Credit: DVIDSHUB/cc by 2.0

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

The NATO summit that took place at the end of last week in Wales was supposed to celebrate the end of a long, draining war in Afghanistan. But with the presidential election still up in the air in Kabul, NATO couldn’t enjoy its “mission accomplished” moment.

Instead, the assembled ministers took steps to accelerate two new conflicts, one on its borders and the other in the distant Middle East."It seemed to me that the Summit offered an alternative vision of a period of intense geopolitical and arms rivalry that could soon prove as dangerous as the one that occupied our attention during the Cold War.” -- Ian Davis

NATO members have certainly not welcomed either the growing confrontation with Russia over Ukraine or with ISIS over the future of Iraq and Syria. But these developments have nevertheless provided the transatlantic alliance with greater purpose and cohesion than it has experienced in years.

The war in Afghanistan, after all, was not just costly in terms of money spent, lives lost, and objectives unmet. It also opened up various rifts in the alliance over strategy and resources.

Meanwhile, with European military spending on a downward trajectory over the last couple years, the vast majority of NATO members are not meeting their obligation of spending two percent of GDP on defence.

But the potential of the Ukraine conflict in particular to spill over into NATO territory has pumped new fire into the 65-year-old alliance’s veins.

In Wales, NATO agreed to a rapid reaction force – essentially a redesign of part of the already existing NATO Response Force — that would keep several thousand troops on standby to deploy in an emergency.

Designed to respond within 48 hours to a threat to the Baltic members, the force can be deployed anywhere in the world. The UK has already committed to providing a substantial contingent for this force.

NATO also upgraded Georgia to an “enhanced-opportunities partner,” which will involve the creation of a NATO training centre in the Caucasus country.

Despite these moves, NATO showed a measure of caution in not pushing too aggressively against Russia.

Although the Ukrainian government has also asked to join NATO, that option is currently not on the table. The alliance also decided not to send arms to the government in Kiev, though individual members can opt to do so.

Despite Ukraine’s announcement that several countries have decided to send lethal assistance, four of those countries, including the United States, immediately issued denials.

NATO didn’t agree to Poland’s request for a permanent force of 10,000 NATO troops stationed on its territory. Nor did it accede to a proposal from the Baltic nations to reorient missile defense against Russia.

“The NATO leaders clearly struggled over how strongly to push back against Russia,” observes Ian Davis, director of NATO Watch in the United Kingdom.

“While some no doubt argued against an overreaction that would risk military confrontation, it is clear that deterrence against Moscow is once again NATO’s top priority (despite the U.S. push for a coalition to combat ISIS). And the proposed limited buildup of forces along the latest East-West divide will take the ‘border’ hundreds of miles closer to Moscow than it was in the Cold War era.”

Joseph Gerson, who works with the American Friends Service Committee, agrees. “With the multiple military exercises across Eastern Europe and the Baltics, increased deployments in the region, and further military cooperation with Georgia and likely Ukraine, the United States has used the Ukraine crisis to more deeply integrate Eastern Europe into the U.S./NATO sphere.”

Gerson adds, “Also note Sweden and Finland are now to be NATO ‘host’ nations, though formally not yet full NATO members. The United States and NATO have been doing a host of military exercises in Sweden for some years, and there’s an electronic communications/intelligence base in Sweden’s north.”

The other major issue on NATO’s plate in Wales was addressing the challenge of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The United States used the summit to pull together a “core coalition” of nine countries to coordinate a military response.

The strategy will be more of what the United States has already pursued, namely air strikes and support for forces already on the ground such as the Kurdish peshmerga and the Western-allied Syrian rebels.

The Barack Obama administration clearly stated that it would not send U.S. combat troops into the conflict.

Meanwhile, given Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and its opposition to radical Islam, the fight against ISIS offers the possibility of cooperation between Moscow and NATO.

But even with a fragile ceasefire in place between the Ukrainian government and the pro-Russian separatists, ties remain frayed between NATO and Russia. Most NATO members maintain sanctions against Russia, and the European Union is pushing through a new round to target additional Russian firms and officials.

Ian Davis is pessimistic on the prospects of exiting the spiral of conflict. “The decisions taken at the Summit raise the prospect of continual and possibly escalating NATO-European-Russian tensions,” he concluded.

“At some point, a ‘grand compromise’ between the United States, Europeans, and Russia will be required in which U.S., EU, and Ukrainian ‘vital’ interests and those of Moscow are eventually redefined and reconciled.

“But it seemed to me that the Summit offered an alternative vision of a period of intense geopolitical and arms rivalry that could soon prove as dangerous as the one that occupied our attention during the Cold War.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Japan has functioned under its “peace constitution” for nearly 70 years. The distinctive Article 9, which prevents the country from conducting war as a means of resolving international conflict, is showing its age.

Over the last several decades, after repeated “reinterpretations,” the peace constitution has become increasingly enfeebled. With its latest decision, the government of Shinzo Abe has quite nearly euthanized the document.Rather than a direct attack on the constitution, Japanese conservatives have favoured an approach of successive reinterpretation that has gradually gutted Article 9 of its original intent.

The Abe government recently announced a Cabinet decision that commits Japan to the principle of collective self-defence. Tokyo, in other words, can use force not only in self-defence but also to help an ally in peril, even if Japan itself is not under attack.

Prime Minister Abe has stressed that this reform reduces the risk of Japan being involved in war. He has also emphasised that this is not a major change in how Japan handles its foreign and military policy – and thereby does not violate the peace constitution. But the changes will in fact have significant implications.

The United States, which has long prodded Japan to shoulder more security responsibilities, immediately praised Abe’s bold move. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel called it “an important step for Japan as it seeks to make a greater contribution to regional and global peace and security.”

Japan’s neighbours were considerably less enthusiastic. Japan is currently embroiled in several island disputes – with China, South Korea, and Russia – which has coloured the reception of Abe’s statements in those countries.

For instance, not much unites the ruling party and the main opposition in South Korea, but Abe succeeded in forging at least temporary unity among them. Representatives of both parties condemned the Japanese move as a threat to regional stability. The Chinese media was even harsher, citing an “evil intent” behind the shift.

Nor has the change in policy been warmly embraced by all Japanese. The prime minister was forced to resort to pushing the change through at the Cabinet level rather than attempt to change the constitution itself. Japan’s ruling party and its allies don’t have the parliamentary supermajority needed to change the constitution.

A parliamentary vote would also require a national referendum. That step might not be any easier. According to one recent poll, 58 percent of Japanese oppose Abe’s latest reform. Jettisoning Article 9 altogether would likely encounter similar opposition. However, during his first term as prime minister, Abe pushed through a new referendum law that requires no minimum turnout.

Shinzo Abe has made it clear from the start that he wants Japan to have a more assertive military. But this is not the first time that a Japanese government has reinterpreted the constitution to enlarge the functions of the military, which is still formally called the Self-Defence Forces (SDF).

After North Korea launched a rocket into Japanese airspace in 1998, Japan ramped up its participation in U.S. missile defence. After Sep. 11, Japan passed new laws that allowed the SDF to support U.S. forces outside of Japan. It also overturned the ban on using military force should the country come under attack.

More recently, Tokyo got rid of the formal prohibition on exporting military hardware (though Japan had long been selling many of the same items under the pretense that they were for civilian use).

Rather than a direct attack on the constitution, then, Japanese conservatives have favoured an approach of successive reinterpretation that has gradually gutted Article 9 of its original intent.

The decision on collective self-defence also comes at a time when Tokyo is about to push ahead on the construction of a new U.S. military base in Okinawa. Despite opposition from nearly three-quarters of the Okinawan population, the United States and Japan are planning to replace the Futenma Marine Air Force Base with a new facility at Henoko in the northern part of the island.

Both Tokyo and Washington put considerable pressure on Okinawan governor Hirokazu Nakaima to switch his position and support situating the new base on the island. Some preliminary work site preparation has already begun, and drilling surveys are set to start at the end of July.

Okinawans have long opposed the deal to build the new base, which has been under negotiation between Tokyo and Washington since the 1990s. A non-violent sit-in protest at Henoko Village has been going on for over 15 years. The opposition movement is currently making plans to broaden their resistance to the base construction.

Japan’s rapidly evolving position on its military stance coincides with the much-heralded Pacific Pivot – or strategic realignment – of the United States. The Obama administration has emphasised the importance of a shift of military and economic focus to East Asia.

But this shift is taking place at a time of fewer resources for the Pentagon, particularly in comparison to the massive increases of the George W. Bush era. In order to accomplish this pivot, then, Washington needs to rely on the resources of its key allies: South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Japan.

Despite its peace constitution, Japan boasts one of the largest militaries in the world. It is the eighth largest military spender in the world – ahead of all other Asian countries except China – and it’s planning to increase its spending substantially over the next five years.

It already ranks in the top ten in the Global Firepower index. New fighter jets, naval destroyers, and surveillance drones will likely push it higher on the list. Japan has already made a commitment to the United States to purchase 42 F-35s, the mishap-prone fighter jet, at a total cost of around 10 billion dollars.

Without Japan, in other words, the pivot wouldn’t happen because the Pentagon simply couldn’t underwrite it. What has held Tokyo back in the past from stepping up its military cooperation with the United States has been its constitution. And now Abe has effectively removed that obstacle.

Although the United States played a major role in drafting Japan’s constitution back in 1946, today Washington is pushing hard for a rewrite. From the point of view of saving American taxpayer dollars, the U.S. encouragement of Japan’s new military policy makes a great deal of sense.

But given the ratcheting up of tensions in the region connected to Abe’s strategic realignment, Washington’s calculus may turn out to be penny wise and pound foolish.

South Korea is now a rule-abiding participant in the global economy. If North Korea traded its nuclear weapons programme for a peace treaty, security guarantees, and economic development assistance, it might be able to accomplish the same trick. Credit: yeowatzup/cc by 2.0

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, May 14 2014 (IPS)

Small underdeveloped countries, unless they suddenly discover oil or gold, are at a distinct disadvantage in the global arena. If they play by the rules, they will remain underdeveloped. Over the last half-century, very few countries have managed to jump from the Third World to the club of richest nations.

South Korea is one of the exceptions. It managed to jump over the development gap with luck, determination, and a willingness to break the rules. The luck was South Korea’s strategic location during the Vietnam War, which provided myriad business opportunities for companies that supported the U.S. military.For better or worse, both Koreas have recognised at some deep level that the rules of the game are rigged in favour of the already powerful.

The determination was the grit of an entire generation of people who sacrificed so much to send their children to university and thereby transformed a country of farmers into a nation of engineers, doctors, and lawyers.

The third factor, a willingness to break the rules, is the most controversial. The modernising authoritarian governments of the 1960s and 1970s were not content with the country’s comparative advantage at that time, which was to exporting raw materials.

Instead, the state directed strategic investments into sectors that produced goods that South Korea, if it were following the rules, would simply have imported from other countries. In this way, South Korea built up its iron, automobile, and shipbuilding sectors, and became a global leader. This commitment to the latest technologies laid the groundwork for future innovations in computers, software, and communications.

North Korea, in its own way, was following a similar path. It refused to take a subordinate position in the Soviet-dominated economic partnership known as Comecon. Instead, Pyongyang broke the rules of the Communist system by building up its own manufacturing capabilities.

Shut out of the capitalist global economy, however, North Korea hit a brick wall with its go-it-alone effort, and its economy began to decline after the 1970s.

But Pyongyang eventually discovered another way to break the rules and achieve something like parity with the most powerful countries in the world. Since its economy was declining relative to its southern neighbour, North Korea could no longer allocate enough money to maintain a conventional military that could serve as a deterrent.

So, it opted for the cheaper alternative: nuclear weapons. To do that, however, North Korea had to violate international rules and challenge the United States.

While other regimes that attempted something similar have failed—Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya—the Kim dynasty appears to have succeeded with its strategy at least at one level. Although its economy remains marginal and the country labors under considerable sanctions, the political system has remained more or less intact into the third generation.

The rule-breaking spirit that unites North and South Korea has left them in very different circumstances. North Korea is a pariah state, and even its closest ally China treats the country with a measure of suspicion. South Korea, meanwhile, is profoundly integrated into the global economy and a web of security relationships.

The negative consequences of breaking the rules are apparent with North Korea. The regime has survived but at the expense of the people. The negative consequences of breaking the rules for South Korea require a bit more scrutiny.

For instance, South Korea’s ambition to catch up to the wealthier countries within a single generation required some cutting of corners, and those shortcuts sometimes proved fatal.

For many years, construction disasters were common in the country—such as the Wawoo apartment building in 1970s, the Seongsu bridge disaster in 1994, and the collapse of the Sampoong department store that killed more than 500 people and was the world’s deadliest building collapse at that point since the Roman era. All three disasters were caused by construction companies cutting corners.

The recent Sewol ferry tragedy reveals a similar inattention to rules, this time safety regulations. Accidents happen. But often what separates inconvenience from catastrophe is the amount of time and money invested in disaster preparedness. In the case of the Sewol sinking, the crew was clearly ill prepared for dealing with what was in fact a slow-motion disaster.

It’s important not to indict an entire society for the misdeeds of a few. In many respects, both North and South Korea are far more rule-bound societies than, for instance, the more freewheeling United States. But, for better or worse, both Koreas have recognised at some deep level that the rules of the game are rigged in favour of the already powerful.

The challenge is to figure out how to translate rule breaking into legitimate status rather than an outlaw reputation. In this sense, breaking the rules should be a ladder used to scale the heights before being kicked away. South Korea is now a rule-abiding participant in the global economy.

If North Korea traded its nuclear weapons programme for a peace treaty, security guarantees, and economic development assistance, it might be able to accomplish the same trick.

But the greatest challenge still looms. At a time when global inequalities are increasing, North and South Korea have to figure out how they can together break the rules and overcome the enormous economic, political, and social gap between the two countries. The rule, as established by West and East Germany, is that the more powerful absorbs the weaker, effectively canceling out the latter.

If the two Koreas manage to reunify the country in a more equitable fashion, one that honours the contributions and perspectives of ordinary North Koreans rather than simply forces them to behave exactly like South Koreans, then the countries will have transformed their mutual rule-breaking traditions into a new source of legitimacy for the peninsula as a whole.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

President Barack Obama watches archers on horseback demonstrate their skills at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Japan, Apr. 24, 2014. Caroline Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and her husband Dr. Edwin Schlossberg watch at right. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Apr 29 2014 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s recent tour of Asia was an opportunity to reenergise his foreign policy after a series of setbacks in the global arena.

The four countries on the week-long tour — Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines – have all been eager to upgrade their relationships with the United States in light of their concerns over Chinese maritime ambitions and an uncertain global economy.Ever since the Obama administration announced its “strategic rebalance” of U.S. foreign policy several years ago, the effort has encountered both domestic and foreign challenges.

But if the president thought that his short pass through Pacific would provide a lift to the much-vaunted U.S. “pivot” to Asia, he soon discovered that the world is not cooperating with his best-laid plans.

Ever since the Obama administration announced its “strategic rebalance” of U.S. foreign policy several years ago, the effort has encountered both domestic and foreign challenges.

At home, budget constraints have prevented the release of sufficient resources to finance a significant Pacific reorientation. Indeed, the threat of a government shutdown over the federal budget forced the president to postpone an earlier version of his Asia trip last October.

At the geopolitical level, meanwhile, the pivot was intended to reduce the liabilities of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But that region has refused to allow the Pentagon and State Department to shift their attention.

The war in Syria, the collapse of negotiations between Israel and Palestine, the reversal of political fortunes in Egypt, and the ongoing talks with Iran have all continued to demand considerable U.S. focus.

An even greater distraction for the president at the moment is the crisis in Ukraine. Russia has already annexed one part of the country, the peninsula of Crimea. International sanctions have so far failed to discourage Moscow from fanning the flames of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

As Obama prepared to head toward Asia, Polish Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak urged the United States to “re-pivot to Europe” in order to bolster its NATO alliances.

Reassuring concerned allies over the potential military actions of a great power was also the expressed purpose of Obama’s trip to Asia. The president provided a good deal of rhetorical and symbolic assurances during his Pacific tour. But the pull of other pressing concerns has turned the “strategic rebalance” into a half-pivot at best.

Last week, Obama did reiterate that Washington would support Tokyo in any conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. But he was also careful not to endorse Japanese sovereignty over the islands that China also claims.

Moreover, the Obama administration has quietly expressed dismay at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s more provocative actions, such as his visit to Yasukuni shrine and his controversial interpretations of World War II history, which have outraged neighbouring countries.

Obama’s greater emphasis on Asia has failed to repair the relationship between the principle U.S. allies in the region, Japan and South Korea.

Despite some progress in the negotiations, the president was also unable to persuade the Japanese to remove trade barriers necessary for the completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact involving 12 countries.

To a certain degree the discussions in Japan were moot, since the president lacks the votes in Congress to achieve “trade promotion authority,” the fast-track authorisation that nearly every trade pact has required for passage.

In South Korea, Obama’s visit was overshadowed by the ferry disaster that has so far left more than 200 dead. North Korea, meanwhile, tried to capitalise on Obama’s trip by ramping up its preparations for a fourth nuclear test.

Both Washington and Seoul have threatened repercussions should the North conduct a test, which would likely demonstrate the viability of its uranium enrichment programme.

But North Korea already endures some of the toughest sanctions in the world. Its decision to flout these warnings is yet more evidence that the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic patience” has failed to address either North Korea’s nuclear programme or any of the country’s underlying security concerns.

The trip to Malaysia reinforced the perception that the Obama administration has not put democracy and human rights front and centre of its foreign policy. In the first trip of a U.S. president to Malaysia in nearly 50 years, Obama did mention democracy in his official speech.

But Malaysia’s potential participation in the TPP and its role in pushing back against the expansion of China’s maritime influence all make the country critical to U.S. role in the Pacific. Obama needs Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s support, not his irritation, so it was left to National Security Advisor Susan Rice to meet with leading oppositionist Anwar Ibrahim.

The one success the administration is touting from this swing through Asia is a new basing agreement with the Philippines, which gives the U.S. military greater flexibility in its access to the country. The Philippine government asked the United States to withdraw from its military bases in 1992.

But the new agreement does not add substantially to the previous two agreements signed by the two countries, the Mutual Defence Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement. Even this modest bump-up in cooperation, however, generated sizable demonstrations in Manila over the rotation of U.S. troops in and out of the country.

The enormous panda in the room, of course, is China. Obama and his entourage took pains to emphasise that all of these negotiations and treaties and military upgrades are for the general stability of the region and are not targeted at any particular country.

The Chinese, however, view the Pacific pivot as a form of containment. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the Pentagon was drafting a set of contingency plans to deal with any possible military moves by China.

“As outlined by Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last June, the Pacific Ocean is large enough for the development of the two countries, and each side should respect the core interests of the other,” China’s Xinhua news agency observed before issuing a not-so-veiled warning.

“Meanwhile, it’s advisable for the United States not to underestimate China’s determination to defend its territories.”

Obama’s four-country trip did the minimum required to maintain the narrative of a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy to Asia. But distracted by other foreign policy challenges and soon heading into the mid-term election cycle, the president may not be able to return his attentions to the Far East any time soon.

USS Ronald Reagan and other ships from RIMPAC 2010 transit the Pacific. The United States, a Pacific power whose military spending is not included in the Asia figures, has also played an important role in driving up the expenditures in the region. Credit: U.S. Navy photo

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Apr 14 2014 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, the world is spending a little less on the military. Asia, however, has failed to get the memo. The region is spending more at a time when many others are spending less.

Last year, Asia saw a 3.6 percent increase in military spending, according to figures just released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The region — which includes East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania — posted topping off a 62 percent increase over the last decade.To a certain extent, the arms race in Asia is connected not to the vast expansion of the Pentagon since 2001 but rather to the relative decline of Asia in U.S. priorities over much of that period.

In 2012, for the first time Asia outpaced Europe in its military spending. That year, the world’s top five importers of armaments all came from Asia: India, China, Pakistan, South Korea, and (incredibly) the city-state of Singapore.

China is responsible for the lion’s share of the increases in East Asia, having increased its spending by 170 percent over the last decade. It has also announced a 12.2 percent increase for 2014.

But China is not the only driver of regional military spending. South Asia – specifically the confrontation between India and Pakistan – is responsible for a large chunk of the military spending in the region. Rival territorial claims over tiny islands  — and the vast resources that lie beneath and around them — in both Northeast and Southeast Asia are pushing the claimants to boost their maritime capabilities.

Even Japan, which has traditionally kept its military spending to under one percent of GDP, is getting into the act. Tokyo has promised of a 2.8 percent increase in 2014-15.

The United States, a Pacific power whose military spending is not included in the Asia figures, has also played an important role in driving up the expenditures in the region. The Barack Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot” is designed to reboot the U.S. security presence in this strategically critical part of the world.

To a certain extent, the arms race in Asia is connected not to the vast expansion of the Pentagon since 2001 but rather to the relative decline of Asia in U.S. priorities over much of that period.

As U.S. allies, South Korea and Japan were expected to shoulder more of the security burden in the region while the United States pursued national security objects in the Middle East and Central Asia.

China, meanwhile, pursued a “peaceful rise” that also involved an attempt to acquire a military strength comparable to its economic strength. At the same time, China more vigorously advanced its claims in the South China Sea even as other parties to the conflict put forward their counter claims.

The Pacific pivot has been billed as a way to halt the relative decline of U.S. influence in Asia. So far, however, this highly touted “rebalancing” has largely been a shifting around of U.S. forces in the region.

The fulcrum of the pivot is Okinawa, where the United States and Japan have been negotiating for nearly two decades to close an outdated Marine Air Force base in Okinawa and transfer those Marines to existing, expanding, and proposed facilities elsewhere.

Aside from this complex operation, a few Littoral Combat Ships have gone to Singapore. The Pentagon has proposed putting slightly more of its overall fleet in the Pacific (a 60-40 split compared to the current 50-50). And Washington has welcomed closer coordination with partners like the Philippines and Vietnam.

Instead of a significant upgrade to U.S. capabilities in the region, the pivot is largely a signal to Washington’s allies that the partnerships remain strong and a warning to Washington’s adversaries that, even if U.S. military spending is on a slight downward tilt, the Pentagon possesses more than enough firepower to deter their power projection.

This signaling function of the pivot dovetails with another facet of U.S. security policy: arms exports. The growth of the Pentagon over the last 10 years has been accompanied by a growth in U.S. military exports, which more than doubled during the period 2002 to 2012 from 8.3 to 18.8 billion dollars.

The modest reduction in Pentagon spending will not necessarily lead to a corresponding decline in exports. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true, as was the case during the last Pentagon slowdown in the 1990s. The Obama administration has pushed through a streamlining of the licensing process in order to facilitate an increase in military exports – in part to compensate U.S. arms manufacturers for a decline in orders from the Pentagon.

Asia and Oceania represent the primary target for U.S. military exports, absorbing nearly half of all shipments. Of that number, East Asia represents approximately one-quarter (South Asia accounts for nearly half).

The biggest-ticket item is the F-35 fighter jet, which Washington has already sold to Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Long-range missile defence systems have been sold to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Overall between 2009 and 2013, Australia and South Korea have been the top U.S. clients. With its projected increase in military spending, Japan will also likely rise much higher on the list.

The more advanced weaponry U.S. allies purchase, the more they are locked into future acquisitions. The United States emphasises “interoperability” among its allies. Not only are purchasers dependent on the United States for spare parts and upgrades, but they must consider the overall system of command and control (which is now C5I — Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat systems and Intelligence).

Although a French fighter jet or a Russian naval vessel might be a cheaper option in a competitive bid, the purchasing country must also consider how the item integrates with the rest of its hardware and software.

The United States has argued that its overwhelming military presence in the region and lack of interest in territorial gain have dampened conflict in Asia. But the security environment has changed dramatically since the United States first presented itself as a guarantor of regional stability.

Japan no longer abides by a strict interpretation of its “peace constitution.” North Korea has developed nuclear weapons. China has dramatically increased its capabilities. South Korea has created its own indigenous military manufacturing sector and greatly expanded its exports. Territorial disputes in the South China, Yellow, and East China Seas have sharpened. The only flashpoint that has become more peaceful in the last few years has been the Taiwan Strait.

The continued increase in military spending by countries in East Asia and the massive influx of arms into the region are both symptoms and drivers of conflict. Until and unless the region restrains its appetite for military upgrades, the risk of clashes and even all-out war will remain high.

In such an increasingly volatile environment, regional security agreements – on North Korea’s nuclear programme, the several territorial disputes, or new technological threats like cyberwarfare – will be even more difficult to achieve.

Most importantly, because of these budget priorities, the region will have fewer resources and less political will to address other pressing threats, such as climate change, which cannot be defeated with fighter jets or the latest generation of battle ship.

As the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance, U.S. politicians from both parties have been scrambling to take advantage of the crisis.

Republicans in Congress have slammed President Barack Obama for his “trembling inaction.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has revived the hawkish approach of her pre-secretary of state years by comparing Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s actions to Hitler’s.The partisan divisions in the United States are dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

With the mid-term elections coming up this fall and the presidential elections beckoning two years hence, the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine has become the latest issue to roil partisan politics in the United States. In this case, however, the divergent rhetoric conceals a broad consensus on how Washington should deal with the crisis.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to be largely non-violent. But tensions remain at a high pitch.

After protesters in Kiev sent President Viktor Yanukovych in exile to Russia and took power in late February, a pro-Russian backlash gathered force in areas of the country with a large Russian-speaking minority.

The resistance has been most acute on the Crimean peninsula, a semi-autonomous region that is the only part of Ukraine where Russian speakers are in the majority. The region also hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, in a leasing arrangement good until 2042.

Russian troops have spread throughout Crimea, effectively neutralizing Ukrainian forces. After armed men stormed the Crimean parliament last weekend, lawmakers hastily chose a new Crimean prime minister, Sergei Aksynov, who leans toward Moscow.

He has called for a referendum on Crimea’s fate on Mar. 16 when voters will choose between Russia and Ukraine. The result is not a foregone conclusion, given the sizable number of Ukrainians and Tatars who live in Crimea.

Secretary of State John Kerry has attempted to negotiate a way out of the impasse, but his meetings this week in Paris and Rome with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have not yielded a compromise.

Both the United States and the European Union are working quickly to assemble aid packages for the new leadership in Kiev, which presides over a rapidly tanking economy.

These diplomatic efforts have not prevented critics of the Obama administration from seizing the opportunity to repeat complaints that the president is not sufficiently strong.

Congressional opponents urged a military response to the crisis in Libya in 2011, which helped to force the president’s hand and initiate intervention.

Similar criticisms of administration weakness in the face of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war last August led the administration to ask Congress for authorisation to use military force, a plan made moot by a Russian-brokered plan for the Assad government to give up its arsenal.

The same critics have been quick to recycle their earlier judgments. Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential elections, John McCain (R-AZ), echoed comments he made during the Libya and Syria crises when he appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington on Monday.

The situation in Ukraine, he said “is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”

His colleague in the House, freshman Congressman Cotton, accused the Obama administration of “trembling inaction.” The Republicans are eager to pick up seats in the mid-term elections and possibly retake control of the Senate.

For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking further ahead to the 2016 elections. During her 2008 presidential bid, she derided Obama for his lack of experience in foreign policy and called his willingness to talk with America’s adversaries “naïve.”

Obama went on to win the election and appointed Clinton his secretary of state. In her new position, she implemented the foreign policy she had previously criticised, particularly in her negotiations with the leadership in Myanmar.

Despite her misgivings about Vladimir Putin – during the 2008 elections she famously said that he lacked a soul – she led the team responsible for pushing the “reset” button on U.S.-Russian relations.

Although her reservations about Putin are not new, her comments comparing Russian actions in Crimea to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 certainly establish distance between her and the administration she once served.

Clinton has not come out and said that President Obama is weak, but her invocation of the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland suggests that appeasement might be just around the corner.

Yet the administration and its critics do not offer substantially different recommendations for dealing with Ukraine.

The Obama administration has sent fighter jets to the region, but only to monitor the air space. No one is talking military options. The only different of opinion is over the relative mix of economic sanctions and diplomatic sticks.

The partisan divisions in the United States are, of course, dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

But despite demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, stand-offs between Russian and Ukrainian troops in Crimea, and the seizure and re-seizure of public buildings by competing factions in eastern Ukraine, so far there’s been no more violence than what might occur in an average European soccer match.

Even though politicians in the United States are failing to model bipartisan behaviour, there is still a chance that the different sides in Ukraine can find a compromise that keeps the country together and also protects the rights of minorities.

Much depends on Russian intentions and Ukrainian reactions, but also on the ability of policymakers in Washington to keep their own political ambitions in check.

On the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Europe is at peace. There are no major border disputes. The countries form a unified economic bloc instead of a patchwork of jostling alliances.

In the last 70 years, the only large-scale violence took place during the unraveling of Yugoslavia, which ended 15 years ago. In Sarajevo today, where World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the residents endured a brutal siege in the 1990s, all is quiet on the Balkan front.China and Japan are on a collision course. If they don’t find a way to back down and save face, no amount of historical knowledge and mutual commerce will prevent an Asian march of folly.

Not so in Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently compared the brewing conflict between his country and China to the Anglo-German relationship of 1914. In both cases, the two countries maintained economic relations even as they built up their respective militaries. The trade relationship between Britain and Germany didn’t prevent a catastrophic war from breaking out.

Japan and China have a long history of conflict. In the 13^th century, Mongol China attempted to invade Japan on two occasions and was defeated both times by the kamikaze or “divine winds” of two separate typhoons. In the late 16^th century, Japan invaded Korea with an eye toward conquering China but was ultimately forced to retreat.

In the modern era, the two countries went to war in 1894, and it took only nine months for Japan to come out on top, with Taiwan as the prize. It was the beginning of Japan’s ascent to empire. It would later annex Korea, expand its influence in China during World War I, seize Manchuria, and go on to capture China’s major cities in the lead-up to World War II.

Asian historians frequently cite the Chinese proverb that “two tigers cannot share a mountain” when discussing the quest for dominance by Japan and China over the last 1,000 years. For the most part, the two tigers have traded dominion over the region. In the last few years, however, a resurgent Japan and a still growing China have found themselves on the same mountain. Abe’s reference to 1914, despite his other pleas for peace and stability in the region, suggests that a serious clash is in the offing.

The Japanese prime minister expressed his greatest concern over Chinese military spending. Having increased its defence budget by double digits annually over the last two decades, China now spends more on its military than any country in the world except the United States (which still spends approximately four times more than China). Japan, meanwhile, is the fifth leading military spender. The Abe government recently announced a five-percent increase in the country’s military budget over the next five years.

The spark that might set off a replay of 1914 in Asia is the ongoing conflict over an island chain in the East China Sea called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. The uninhabited islands are no bigger than seven square kilometres in total. Japan currently controls the territory and dates its sovereignty claim to its defeat of China in 1895. China, however, argues that the chain was part of its domain during the preceding history. Taiwan also asserts sovereignty over the islands.

The islands themselves are less important than the sea around them. Japan and China are primarily interested in the fishing grounds, the potential oil beneath the waves, and control over shipping routes. In 2008, the two countries negotiated a deal on joint exploration of oil around the islands but never implemented the agreement. Collisions have taken place at sea, notably in 2010 between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol, and the Japanese government has threatened to shoot down Chinese drones that have approached the islands.

The historical allusion to 1914 is troubling in another regard. Europe, prior to World War I, had enjoyed nearly a century of muted rivalry as part of the Concert of Europe that regulated relations among empires in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat.

The dispute between China and Japan similarly takes place within a balance of power that has held in Northeast Asia, more or less, since the end of the Korean War. China and North Korea stand together as uneasy allies on one side – along with the occasional participation of Russia – and Japan, South Korea, and the United States form an alliance on the other.

World War I rapidly escalated because alliance obligations drew the major powers into a war that they might ordinarily have kept at arm’s length. The United States has an alliance obligation to stand with Japan in the event of a clash with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

Shinzo Abe has given every indication that he will not back down on this issue. He has cultivated the image of a proud nationalist. He has burnished this reputation at home and provoked his neighbors by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of 14 Class A war criminals are enshrined. He has pledged to revise his country’s “peace constitution” and restore a true offensive capability to Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. He has pushed through a new law to establish a National Security Council and more strictly control domestic dissent.

This nationalism goes hand in hand – rather than in opposition to – U.S. security strategy. Although the Yasukuni visit and the harsher rhetoric toward China have displeased Washington, Abe has in other regards conducted an all-out charm offensive toward his U.S. ally. The military budget increase includes the purchase of 28 F-35 fighter jets and two Aegis-equipped destroyers. And a carefully calibrated promise of economic investment into Okinawa turned around the prefectural governor’s position on the construction of a new U.S. military base on the island, which has been a major sticking point in U.S.-Japanese relations.

There are many reasons why 1914 is not an apt analogy for the situation in Northeast Asia today. The region, unlike Europe of 100 years ago, is not unbalanced by empires in decline. The presence of nuclear weapons is both a deterrent to escalation and also a guarantee that all-out war would have immediate, global consequences. And the earlier experience of World War I ensures that no national leader can pretend that the next conflict will be the “war to end all wars.”

But wars are not rational affairs. China and Japan are on a collision course. If they don’t find a way to back down and save face, no amount of historical knowledge and mutual commerce will prevent an Asian march of folly.

A very Shakespearean epic is unraveling today in Pyongyang.

This particular tragedy involves a son and his uncle by marriage. There are plots and counter-plots. There are tragic reversals of fortune, dramatic denunciations, and a rising tide of blood. And North Korea’s official pronouncements on the case sound very Bard-like in their ornate archaisms. No one performs Shakespeare in the theatres of Pyongyang. Instead, he is enacted in the corridors of power.The treachery runs much deeper, and thus the story becomes suitably Shakespearean. It turns out that Jang Sung Taek had likely been plotting a coup since the 1990s.

Let’s start at the end and move backwards. The current leader of North Korea Kim Jong Eun, the third Kim in the dynastic succession stretching back to his grandfather Kim Il Sung, recently executed his uncle Jang Song Taek along with several of his coterie. Some of the crimes listed in the official condemnation seem rather trivial.

Jang didn’t clap hard enough during the elevation of his nephew. He ordered the placement of an inscription from Kim Jong Eun in a less prominent, shaded location. For this he was considered “worse than a dog” who “perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery” and was sentenced to death by overkill before a machine-gun firing squad?

No, the treachery runs much deeper, and thus the story becomes more suitably Shakespearean. It turns out that Jang Sung Taek had likely been plotting a coup since the 1990s. When top North Korean ideologist Hwang Jang Yop defected in 1997, he didn’t provide a full explanation for why he left his high position and exposed his family back home to certain risk of punishment.

Now it has come out that Hwang told the South Korean authorities confidentially that he’d been working with Jang Sung Taek to eliminate the North Korean leader at the time, Kim Jong Il (son of the country’s founder and father of the current power holder). The plot had been sniffed out, and Hwang ran.

Co-conspirator Jang, however, remained behind. For the last 15 years, he bided his time. There are now rumours that he was working with China, perhaps to bring one of Kim Jong Eun’s brothers to the throne. He was accumulating power and money to mount his challenge. He’d clearly lost faith in the system, so no wonder it was difficult for him to clap with enthusiasm.

Plots and conspiracies are not alien to North Korea. Kim Il Sung, the founding father of the system, arrived in the divided country in 1945 alongside a contingent of Soviet troops. He brought with him a couple hundred guerrilla fighters that had joined him in Soviet exile during the war. He was only 33 years old (not much older than his grandson would be on taking power).

On returning to Pyongyang, the aspiring leader faced much larger Communist factions led by more experienced partisans. But he was no hesitating Hamlet. Over the years, Kim Il Sung managed to purge, execute, and otherwise sideline three rival groups: Communists that had been fighting in the north, Communists from the south that journeyed northward after partition, and Communists aligned with the Chinese.

What emerged from this bloodbath was a ruling corps of families connected to his original team of guerrilla fighters. They have been running North Korea ever since.

Jang Song Taek did not come from such a distinguished lineage. He was a member of the elite, to be sure, and studied at Kim Il Sung University. But when he met Kim Kyong Hui at university, her father Kim Il Sung opposed the match because of Jang’s outsider status. Nevertheless, the two eventually married, and Jang went on to become a close confidante of the chosen successor, Kim Jong Il.

The picture of Jang in the West is bipolar. On the one hand, he was a henchman of the system: he “regularly supervised routine audits of state-owned enterprises, presided over executions and incarcerations and dismissed thousands of officials during his career.”

On the other hand, he was considered a “reformer” who supported an economic shift toward the market and was reportedly behind the reduction of labour camps and the release of political prisoners. It’s possible that the great famine of the 1990s – and the deaths of so many Party faithful among the hundreds of thousands who perished — pushed Jang into covert disobedience. In any case, he was engaged in a dangerous game, attempting to soften the edges of the regime even as he plotted to overthrow it.

It’s never been safe in North Korea to be considered a “reformer,” no matter how high you’ve climbed in the system. But often those who have disappeared from the ranks of leadership for being on the wrong side of a policy shift have reappeared after a period of internal exile. Pak Pong Ju, rumored to be in favour of Chinese-style economic reforms, lost his premiership in 2007 and disappeared from view. But he reappeared in 2010 and regained the title of premier in 2013.

Despite his connections to Jang, Pak is still alive and appearing at state functions. So is Jang’s wife, who divorced him shortly before the execution. So, it would seem that the purge in Pyongyang is limited to those identified as coup plotters rather than those considered to be “reformers.”

Indeed, on the day of Jang’s dismissal, North Korea went ahead with a deal with China to build a high-speed rail link that will pass through Pyongyang, and it has continued to back the expansion of export-processing zones. Pyongyang is still proposing negotiations with South Korea over their joint economic zone in Kaesong. And North Korean officials have maintained their openness to negotiations with the United States on security issues, without preconditions.

The United States should not use the execution of Jang Song Taek, however brutal it was, to reinforce its isolationist policy toward North Korea. Our approach of “strategic patience” only encourages greater obduracy in Pyongyang and puts the reform-minded on potentially dangerous ground. The case against Jang reminds us that even those near the very top of the North Korean pyramid harbour hopes of change, if only circumstances were to become more propitious.

Like Richard the Third in Shakespeare’s retelling, Jang plotted, fought, and lost. The death of the “bloody dog” at the end of the 1593 play drew a curtain across the War of the Roses and ushered in the “smooth-faced peace” of the House of Tudor. Except that the reign of the Tudors was not a “smooth-faced peace” at all. It produced such monstrosities as Henry the Eighth and his succession of headless ex-wives, not to mention considerable religious strife. Even the Tudor queen to whom Shakespeare gave fulsome praise, Elizabeth the First, had much blood on her hands, her cousin’s among others.

Kim the Third might seem, with his Falstaffian girth, more a figure of humour than a figure to be feared. Appearances have proven deceptive. He has quickly demonstrated that, like his grandfather, he will act decisively and ruthlessly to maintain his perch.

A future plot might one day dethrone him. But the odds have just gone up in his favour. Washington would do well to reconstruct its North Korea policy around the reality that Kim the Third will not depart the stage any time soon.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up his finger-wagging tour of Asia on Friday, with a busy week of lecturing the Chinese, trying to get the South Koreans and Japanese to play nice with one another, and damning North Korea with faint praise for releasing an 85-year-old American after more than a month of detention.

Aside from a couple of verbal gaffes, his performance elicited generally passing marks at home and abroad. But Biden’s effort did little to reverse the fundamental reality that the U.S. role in the region has dwindled over the last decade, despite recent efforts to reverse the trend.

The United States has long billed its presence in Asia as one of an “honest broker”. More recently, the Obama administration has tried to underscore U.S. interests in the region through its “Pacific pivot”, away from the roiling conflicts of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of the East."“The ‘pivot’ seems to reflect a desire to maintain things as they have been. I don’t see anything new in it.”
-- Patrick Smith

U.S. policy, however, has been slow to pivot. Continued turmoil in Syria, nuclear negotiations with Iran, and a raft of domestic challenges have absorbed Washington’s attention. Biden’s trip was an effort to bolster U.S. commitment to Asia after President Obama cancelled his trip to the region in October because of the U.S. government shutdown. The vice president, definitely not an Asia hand, was an unusual choice for emissary.

“Politicians always make a virtue of sheer circumstance,” observed Patrick Smith, a longtime correspondent in Asia and the author most recently of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century”. “Biden, we were told, was the right technology for this trip.”

“But Biden has no experience in Asia. He was the wrong guy in the wrong place,” Smith continued. “It underscored…that we just can’t keep up with events any more. I’ve seen this problem with pace coming for years, and now it’s here: China, Iran, Syria. We’re running to catch up.”

Biden’s mission was not just handicapped by his lack of deep regional knowledge. Instead of a bold effort to stay ahead of the curve, the Biden trip became an exercise in damage control when China announced a new Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) shortly before he set out.

The newly expanded zone includes a set of islands that Beijing and Tokyo contest – Diaoyu in Chinese, Senkaku in Japanese – and which Tokyo currently controls. It also covers a submerged rock that South Korea uses as a tiny maritime research station.

The United States responded to China’s unilateral announcement by sending two unarmed B-52 fighter jets to fly through the zone without advance notification. Japan instructed its commercial airlines to ignore the demand to notify Chinese authorities of their flight paths through the zone. South Korea most recently has responded with its own slightly expanded ADIZ to encompass the submerged rock.

In Beijing, Biden pushed the Chinese to back off from applying its new rules to disputed parts of the zone, and the Chinese reiterated their own sovereign right to do what other countries have already done.

So the vice president was left to repeat his own diplomatic boilerplate about the importance of cooperation over competition, saying in an interview with a South Korean newspaper, “Economically, diplomatically, militarily, we have been, we are, and we will remain a resident Pacific power.”

The past history of involvement and present alliance commitments certainly bind the United States to the region. Even if  current tensions have more to do with simmering tensions between Tokyo and Beijing, Washington necessarily finds itself in the middle, leaning geopolitically toward Japan and geoeconomically toward China.

“My sense is that Washington will have to play a significant role,” argued Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japanese studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Two of the players, Japan and South Korea, are our allies. Crisis management will involve us – even if we are unprepared.”

The pivot to Asia was touted as a way for the United States to check rising Chinese influence, recommit to allies in the region, and tap into Asian economic success through trade and investment deals.

But Patrick Smith considered the pivot a “figment.” He explained that “if the thought now is to play the role in the region that we already played, that’s a reiteration and no more.” Rather than a set of new initiatives, the new policy is an effort to maintain the status quo. “The ‘pivot’ seems to reflect a desire to maintain things as they have been. I don’t see anything new in it,” he concluded.

Figment or fact, the “pivot” has not been an easy manoeuvre for the United States to execute. The Obama administration has been rearranging military forces in the region, sending Marines to a new base in Australia, expanding facilities in Guam, and negotiating new access agreements with the Philippines and Vietnam.

But local resistance has prevented the construction of a new military based to replace the facility in Futenma, Okinawa, and budget constraints at home make a significant increase in Pacific military presence unlikely.

Meanwhile, Japan has continued to develop its own more assertive foreign and military policy, most recently proposing to overturn its decades-old ban on weapons exports. Tokyo and Seoul have descended into a deep freeze in relations, with friction over their own disputed islands as well as Japan’s contrition – or lack of it — regarding its World War II actions in the peninsula. Further south, China and a number of countries spar over the South China Sea and the resources beneath the waves.

And Washington’s prospects for concluding a trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership, are not especially bright either. Opposition is fierce in some participating countries, such as Japan, and it will be very difficult for negotiators to meet the end-of-year deadline for the treaty’s text. Nor is the enthusiasm level in Congress particularly high.

Now that Biden is back in Washington, Asia is once again out of the U.S. headlines. Obama is heading to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, the war in Syria grinds on, congressional opposition to the agreement with Iran continues to simmer, and the demonstrations in Ukraine are expanding. The territorial conflicts in East Asia haven’t disappeared. But the United States must attend to priorities other than its much-vaunted pivot.

Artwork by James Montgomery Flagg, 1920, commenting on post-World War I conditions, although the image of a depleted Treasury resonates today. Credit: public domain

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

In his 2007 bestseller The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam.

It’s an optimistic vision of the future – if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or a cockroach. No more ranchers. No more huge trawling nets or D-Con.It’s an optimistic vision of the future - if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or a cockroach. No more ranchers. No more huge trawling nets or D-Con.

But it’s not such a great future if you’re a human being. In its dispassionate, non-human-centred perspective, Weisman’s book is designed to shake humans out of our naïve assumption that we will always be around, regardless of the existential threats that drape our shoulders like the cloak of Nessus.

Evolution has, for some reason, made us incapable of facing our own demise. It’s almost as if we wouldn’t be able to balance our checkbook or plan our vacations unless we treated nuclear weapons and climate change and pandemics as just another set of vaporous bogeymen that scare the bejesus out of us but always disappear at morning’s light.

Now let’s turn from the existential to the geopolitical. What would the world be like without the United States?

The recent government shutdown has prompted many to contemplate a world in which the United States hasn’t so much disappeared but collapsed in on itself. Focused on domestic issues, Washington would cancel Pax Americana (or Pox Americana, as anti-imperialists like to say) and step down from its role as the world’s policeman and the world’s financier.

Would the world be better off? As in Weisman’s hypothetical universe, how one answers this question depends a great deal on who one is. Americans certainly profit from our country’s economic and military hegemony: our carbon footprint, our per capita GDP, our mighty dollar, our reliance on English as the world’s default language.

We take these entitlements for granted. Non-Americans, however, might feel a bit differently. Like the buffalo and the dolphins and the cockroaches in a human-free world, everyone outside the United States might very well applaud the end of American superpowerdom.

At the height of the recent political crisis in Washington, an English-language opinion piece from the Chinese news agency Xinhua called “for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanised world.”

It repeated many familiar arguments. The United States “has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.”

The solution, according to the widely read piece, is to strengthen the U.N., create a replacement for the dollar as the global currency, and give more power to emerging economies in international financial institutions. These all seem like sensible suggestions.

But as several U.S. commentators have pointed out, this provocative essay doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese government opinion. Beijing remains dependent on U.S. economic power, whether in the form of American consumers or Wall Street liquidity.

And, to the extent that the United States fights terrorism, polices the world’s sea lanes, and continues to more or less constrain the ambitions of its key allies in the Asia-Pacific, China is also dependent on U.S. military power.

Chinese leadership values domestic, regional, and international stability. It wants, in other words, to preserve an environment in which it can pursue its primary objective: domestic economic growth. If it can hitch a free ride on the gas-guzzling, armour-plated American Hummer, China will gladly get on board.

But if the Hummer starts to mess with its economic growth, political stability, and regional interests, China will bail. For now, after a congressional deal has averted default and ended the government shutdown, Chinese calls for “de-Americanisation” have subsided. But political deadlock in Washington is by no means over. And the structural issues that underlie the relative decline of the United States over the last decade remain in place.

Most observers of U.S. decline, from Paul Kennedy to Fareed Zakaria, have generally shared the same ambivalence as China. They see U.S. decline as relative, as gradual, and as something to be mourned in the absence of a viable alternative.

The same could be said of the Latin American nations that have long decried U.S. imperialism. The latest salvos in this conflict have concerned the Snowden affair and revelations of the NSA’s overseas surveillance. But like China, Latin America is heavily dependent on trade with the United States and thus also ambivalent about U.S. economic decline.

Some participants in this debate, of course, have no ambivalence at all. The 2008 documentary “The World Without U.S.” describes the state of anarchy that would result if a future progressive president trimmed the military budget and withdrew troops from around the world.

The film relies heavily on British historian Niall Ferguson’s rosy descriptions of American hegemony. At one point, Ferguson suggests that U.S. military withdrawal would likely send the world down the same path of destruction that Yugoslavia experienced in the 1990s.

The European Union was feckless back then, and continues to be so today. No other guarantor of peace has stepped forward. Only China looms on the horizon, and the film ends with images of nuclear blasts hitting Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, presumably from Chinese missiles launched in the wake of the U.S. military’s departure from the region.

In Alan Weisman’s book, the primeval forest takes over the once-civilised world. In The World Without U.S., the primeval forces of anarchy take over a world once made stable by U.S. military presence.

It is, in so many ways, a dangerously silly movie. The United States has supported plenty of dictators in the interests of stability. We have generated considerable instability – in Afghanistan, in Iraq – when it has served our interests. Our stability is often unjust; our instability is devastating.

Moreover, we have cut back on our military involvement in Latin America and the region has prospered. We’ve reduced our troop presence in South Korea, including the legendary “trip wire,” and no anarchy has been loosed upon the peninsula. We are finally closing down many Cold War-era bases in Europe, and Europe remains calm.

Remember, the real message of Weisman’s book is that there are still things we can do, as humans, to develop a more cooperative relationship with nature and prevent apocalypse. Similarly, the United States can take positive steps to avoid the global Balkans scenario.

It’s not a matter of appointing a successor as global guardian or duking it out with China to prevent Beijing from stepping into our shoes. It’s not about crawling into our shell and pouting because the world no longer wants to follow our orders.

We are in the world, there’s no escaping that. Just as humans must reconfigure their relationship with nature, the United States must reconfigure its relationship with the world. In both worst-case scenarios, the only winners will be the cockroaches.

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

U.S policymakers indulge in a variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away. And poof! Kim Jong Eun’s North Korea eventually disappears. Raul Castro’s Cuba eventually vanishes.

Except that they haven’t.Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

Of course, the United States doesn’t simply ignore North Korea and Cuba. Both countries have been under stringent economic sanctions and a tight military cordon practically since their creation. But attempts at military rollback like the Bay of Pigs fiasco are history. Today, other than tightening the screws from time to time, Washington has largely been content with a waiting game.

Even diplomatic engagement is often predicated on expectations of eventual collapse. For instance, when the Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework with North Korea in 1994, it sold the agreement to Congress with the argument that the regime in Pyongyang wouldn’t be around by the time the United States finished building the two promised light-water nuclear reactors.

Kim Il Sung died, and so did his son, Kim Jong-Il. But the regime lives on. In Cuba, meanwhile, Fidel Castro stepped aside in favour of his brother Raul. But the regime lives on. And Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

There’s no point, according to the prevailing wisdom among collapsists, to engage with North Korea or Cuba as long as the governments there are tottering on the edge. This was the argument also used with China in 1989 and with Iran during the Green movement uprising in 2009. Both those countries stabilised themselves through the time-honoured approach of repression.

John Feffer, Courtesy of FPIF.

Collapsism has largely given way to engagement with China. And after the recent election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, tentative signs of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement have emerged.

North Korea and Cuba, however, remain the Teetering Twosome. In Pyongyang, the young leader Kim Jong Eun has defied early predictions that a Swiss education and a fondness for basketball could somehow combine to create a Gorbachev of the East. After a long-range missile test last year and a third nuclear test this year—not to mention his shake-up of the high-ranking military staff and his hardball negotiations with South Korea—Kim has signaled that for now he’s not Mr. Perestroika.

Pundits and policymakers have now concluded that, having declared itself a nuclear power, North Korea has given up on the strategy of trading its bomb-making capabilities for a golden ticket of entry into the international community. The Obama administration failed to advance the promising initiatives that had gained steam in the last years of the Bush administration.

Last year, on leap day, the United States and North Korea came to an agreement trading food aid for a moratorium on uranium enrichment and missile tests as well as a return of inspectors to the plutonium facility at Yongbyon. North Korea’s subsequent satellite launch scotched that deal. Pyongyang recently rejected a non-aggression pact that Secretary of State John Kerry offered in exchange for denuclearisation.

Engagement with North Korea is major political risk in Washington, and the Obama team certainly doesn’t want to expose its flank when it’s making headway with another adversary, Iran. So, what’s left? Waiting for collapse.

Or, to paraphrase a recent RAND report that is all the rage among Korea hands, preparing for collapse. For myriad reasons, from economic decline to increased flow of information into the country, the RAND report concludes that North Korea is again close to the edge.

Although the date of collapse remains frustratingly obscure, the United States and South Korea in particular should ramp up their contingency planning. This planning, as outlined in the report, boils down to: sending in ground forces at the first sign of instability, securing weapons of mass destruction, providing humanitarian aid to discourage out-migration, and putting down all signs of military resistance.

Making plans is an admirable exercise. No one wants to be caught with pants down if the Kim Jong Eun regime suddenly implodes. But by suggesting that collapse and intervention form the most likely future scenario—not if, but when—the RAND report implicitly recommends that the U.S. and South Korean governments should abandon diplomatic engagement that might lead to a peaceful and perhaps more gradual rapprochement on the Korean peninsula (a “far less likely outcome,” according to the report).

The furthest the report goes in the direction of diplomacy is to suggest that Washington and Seoul would be wise to sit down with Beijing to coordinate a division of responsibilities in the case of collapse.

Worse, by proposing to reshape policy in Washington and Seoul around an imminent collapse/intervention scenario that requires early action for its success, the RAND report encourages policymakers and intelligence services not only to seek out signs of instability in Pyongyang but encourage them as well.

“If a collapse really is likely at some point in the future,” author Bruce Bennett writes in the report, “actions to prepare for it are really more likely to accelerate a collapse rather than cause it.”

The situation with Cuba is slightly different. Instead of a nuclear programme to attract the attention of Washington, there is geographic proximity. The Obama administration made some moves toward an easing of the tight embargo on the island, for instance lifting some restrictions on travel and remittances and beginning negotiations on the resumption of direct mail service after 50 years. An earlier piece of legislation allowed states to negotiate agricultural export deals with Cuba, which has sent over 4.3 billion dollars  in food from 2001 through 2012.

Further attempts to chip away at the blockade, however, have come up against significant political resistance. Republican Party moderates once indicated a willingness to reconsider. As Richard Lugar said in 2009, “We must recognise the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” But Lugar got tea-partied out of the Senate, and Republican Party moderates are an endangered species.

The collapsists have not secured the kind of consensus in Washington that seems to exist around North Korea. They face U.S. business interests and Cuban-American entrepreneurs that want fewer trade restrictions with the island and a cross-section of the policymaking community that prefers the stable status quo to a risky collapse scenario.

Unlike North Korea, Cuba is close to home, so spillover effects of regime change like refugee flows can’t be blithely ignored. So, the Cuba hawks continue to wait and watch for Raul Castro’s economic reforms to peter out, for Venezuelan aid to dry up, and for the long-awaited collapse to happen.

North Korea and Cuba cannot be simply wished away. They have both survived economic squeeze and military punch. Yes, some day, things will change dramatically in Pyongyang and Havana. The questions are: how will they change and what can be done to ensure a minimum of suffering and a maximum of public participation? Sudden collapse, followed by outside military intervention, is not the best-case scenario in this regard.

We’ve been stuck in a Samuel Beckett play for some time. The last thing we want at this point is a Quentin Tarantino ending.

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

They are unpopular all over the world, with one exception. According to a new Pew Research Center poll, the only country where a majority of citizens support drone strikes is the country that uses the new technology most regularly: the United States.

Only 28 percent of U.S. citizens oppose drone strikes, compared to 62 percent who approve of their use. Once again, they prove the exception to the rule.

Armed Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile. Credit: Public domain

As Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt write in alternating chapters in their terrifying new book “Terminator Planet”, drones have been part of U.S. exceptionalism from their very beginning. They were introduced in the late 1990s to conduct surveillance during the Kosovo conflict, and they soon became a major element of the U.S. dominance of airspace.

As the two authors point out, even before the introduction of drones, U.S. pilots had such overwhelming air superiority that Pentagon chief Robert Gates, in a 2011 speech, could declare that the United States hadn’t lost a plane during air combat or a soldier from enemy aircraft attack in 40 years.

With a persistent economic crisis putting cost-cutting pressure on the Pentagon budget, drones have become a low-cost method of preserving U.S. military dominance and thus the status of the United States as the single global superpower. As Engelhardt points out, drones are an integral part of “guarding the empire on the cheap as well as on the sly, via the CIA.”

But drones have played another key role in extending the tradition of U.S. exceptionalism. The Barack Obama administration, inheriting the counter-terrorism programme from its predecessor, expanded the use of drones to kill top Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

“No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones – not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an everyday, all-year-round activity,” writes Engelhardt.

The United States has asserted its right to conduct these assassinations outside of war zones in the face of global public opinion, U.N. reports, and international law.

In this collection of essays that originally appeared on the TomDispatch website, Nick Turse provides a comprehensive mapping of the new drone world the Pentagon and the CIA have created. The Reapers and Predators and Global Hawks take off from the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the bases at Incirlik in Turkey and Sigonella in Italy, from new sites in Djibouti and Ethiopia and the Seychelles, across Afghanistan, and now even in Asia.

The military has come to rely more and more on the new technology. One in three military aircraft are robots. In 2004, Reapers flew 71 hours. In 2006, this number had gone up to 3,123 hours. By 2009, the flying time had increased to 25,391 hours.

With manpower tied up in operations in Afghanistan, anti-base movements challenging large concentrations of U.S. soldiers abroad, and bureaucrats in Washington desperately looking for places to cut the U.S. budget, drones appear as an attractive alternative.

“We are moving toward an ever greater outsourcing of war to things that cannot protest, cannot vote with their feet (or wings), and for whom there is no ‘home front’ or even a home at all,” Engelhardt observes.

The global unpopularity of drones stems in large part from their fallibility. The pilots and screeners viewing the footage from the safety of bases in the United States make a lot of mistakes and end up killing a lot of civilians, several hundred in Pakistan alone, including nearly 200 children.

So far, U.S. citizens are immune to these effects of drones. They have been reassured by the Obama administration that drones surgically remove the cancer and leave the surrounding healthy tissue intact.

Moreover, the United States continues to maintain a major technological edge in the research and development of drones. The risk of a drone attack on the United States remains low, though the George W. Bush administration justified its attack on Iraq in part on the belief that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction against the United States via drones.

But drone attacks have also generated enormous anti-U.S. sentiment, as the Pew poll suggests. The Times Square bomber, whose car bomb failed to detonate in Times Square in New York in 2010, was motivated to act in part because of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

Also, other countries – Israel, Russia, China, even Iran – have entered the drone business. It may only be a matter of time before the United States loses its dominant market share.

Turse and Engelhardt are divided on the question of whether drones represent a fundamental revolution in military affairs or simply an extension of an earlier trend toward air superiority.

“Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs,” Engelhardt writes. “They are in some ways not even all that advanced.”

Moreover, modern air defence systems can rather easily bring down these drones. They have been effective only in places where they are largely unchallenged.

On the other hand, in the same way that the exponential growth of the web not only revolutionised communication but transformed the way humans think, drones may well be precipitating a change in how the United States, and increasingly the rest of the world, is thinking about war and national boundaries. The two authors describe various futuristic scenarios that pit autonomous drones, preprogrammed to target and fight, against each other.

In one of these scenarios, drawn from a Pentagon document titled the “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, FY 2011-2036,” U.S. drones detect and neutralise other drones tampering with an undersea oil pipeline off the coast of West Africa. This projection into the future of drones anticipates that the United States maintains its lead in drone technology.

The other scenario that the authors return to again and again is from Hollywood: the “Terminator” movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg sent from the future to the present to kill the woman who would eventually give birth to a rebel leader. That leader, John Connor, is in charge of the human resistance to the robots that rule the planet.

The Pentagon is betting on the first scenario. Turse and Engelhardt are concerned that a naïve faith in technology, a consistent belief in U.S. exceptionalism, and the exponential spread of drones around the world may well bring about a world much closer to Hollywood’s nightmare vision.

It’s not an easy time for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The ongoing economic crisis is putting pressure on military budgets on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the Libya conflict revealed the stark limitations of the United States’ military partners in Europe, virtually all the allies are heading for the exit in Afghanistan, and no country is eager to intervene in the Syrian civil war.

As it prepares to meet in Chicago, NATO faces both an existential and a fiscal crisis. Countries like the United Kingdom, Greece, and Spain are slashing their military budgets, and the United States is contemplating the first Pentagon reductions in over a decade.

The alliance is also struggling to identify a grand strategy that can serve as the organisation’s new raison d’etre in the post-post-Cold War era.

In the past, “we’ve seen allies cut five to 10 percent of budgets, and this had an impact on the alliance, but it wasn’t a serious blow,” explained Julianne Smith, deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden at a recent conference on NATO at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

“What’s changed now is that the cuts are now around 20-25 percent. That’s where some tough choices have to be made. One can find some inefficiencies and waste. But there is a collective fear that it will create a new capabilities gap,” Smith said.

In the lead-up to the Chicago summit, NATO has tried to put the best face on a difficult situation. It has stressed the importance of networking and “smart defence”. This approach responds to military budget cuts by pooling efforts and reducing redundancy among the 28 member states. Compared to the “strategic concept” of the Lisbon summit in 2010, smart defence is less big picture than minor reframing.

“This summit will not be historic, will not be the summit that solves everything,” predicted Andras Simonyi, the managing director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the School for Advanced International Studies. “Some summits just kick the ball further.”

Still, U.S. officials continue to accentuate the positive. “Despite the fact that we’ve seen quite considerable cuts, we’re not seeing nations pulling out of operations because of the financial crisis,” continued Smith. “They’re not leaving Afghanistan because they can’t afford it.”

Afghanistan is indeed the first issue of business in Chicago: to orchestrate a credible withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and pay for the security and development programmes that take their place.

It will cost four billion dollars a year just to finance the Afghan security forces after 2014, and the United States is pushing its European allies to cover one-third of the tab. So far, the only NATO country to come forward with an offer, of 110 million dollars, is the United Kingdom.

Rangina Hamidi, a human rights activist and president of Kandahar Treasure, the first women-run business in Kandahar, is disappointed by the conversation about Afghanistan that is taking place within NATO.

“I don’t think the solution to terrorism is more killing,” she told IPS. “There are more strategic ways to address it, and that would put NATO out of a job. There’s diplomacy, looking at financial sources of terrorist training, working with Pakistan to stop harbouring terrorist training camps or groups on their soil.”

The conversation in Chicago about Afghanistan will focus more on the country and less on the region.

“Whether it’s NATO or the United States, the future of Afghanistan depends on how we address the future of the region, particularly Pakistan,” Hamidi continues. “If they’re going to just talk about Afghanistan as an entity, we’re just going to waste more money, resources, and lives on the Afghan side and still not have a viable solution in 2013 or 2024.”

The United States will be rattling a tin cup not only for contributions for Afghanistan. Washington will likely be asking its European partners to put up more money for a missile defence system whose price-tag runs into the tens of billions of dollars. Turkey, Spain, Romania, and Poland are among the countries participating.

Recent reports by a Pentagon advisory group and congressional investigators in the Government Accountability Office warn of technological problems and cost overruns associated with the system. Earlier this month, the National Academy of Sciences recommended eliminating the satellite-tracking component of the system.

Washington will also pressure NATO members to meet their obligation of spending two percent of GDP on the military. Only three countries – the United Kingdom, Greece, and the United States – met that goal in 2011, with France and Albania recently dropping below the threshold.

NATO officials complain of a capability gap. Last year’s operation in Libya revealed that European partners lack the unmanned drones, surveillance capabilities, and air-to-air refueling required for the aerial attacks. Only eight of the 28 NATO members participated in the mission.

Even countries that have increased their spending have come under criticism. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder recently singled out Canada, which increased its military spending from 15 billion dollars in 2005 to 23 billion dollars in 2011, for placing “an unfair burden on those who spend the resources”.

As NATO struggles with problems of money and mission, it must also address the limits of force. NATO must ask itself “how to shift the conversation from power over to power with,” explained Lorelei Kelly, research fellow at the New America Foundation.

“We have entered a world in which the military is moving from containment to sustainment, from military deterrence to credible influence so that other countries go into partnership with you.”

NATO is all about partnerships: with Russia, the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. But without a clear purpose or the money to hold the alliance together, NATO remains adrift two decades after the end of the Cold War that birthed it.

(END)

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalising enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. It was a tempting conclusion.

Except that Big Money never received the obituary notice. After some minor tweaking of Wall Street practices, some bailouts of enterprises deemed too big to fail, and the injection of some stimulus spending to arrest the free fall, Washington continued with business as usual.

The IMF and the World Bank, meanwhile, didn’t fundamentally change their policies. And the European Union, led by tight-fisted Germany, continued to back austerity. All the major economic actors held to the old orthodoxy even though it flew in the face of common sense and common decency (though not in the face of the bottom line).

Wall Street’s continued irrational exuberance, its lavishing of bonuses on its elite, and its pushback against even the most modest of regulations all suggest that the old Ptolemaic system – with Wall Street and the Washington Consensus still at the centre of the universe – had not yet given way to a Copernican revolution that displaces these powerful institutions from their privileged position.

Such revolutions, of course, are not made in a day. Remember: Ptolemy’s system, with the earth at the centre of all things, reigned for 1,300 years even as it grew inordinately complex to explain new astronomical observations. A century after the publication of the great Pole’s theory of heliocentrism, Galileo still ran afoul of church authorities for his Copernican leanings. Orthodoxy dies hard.

As a first sally against the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, today’s economic Copernicans have taken aim at austerity. It’s a fat target: belt-tightening, after all, is not only unpopular but unsound.

Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe. There, the case for austerity, explains Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, “was that once governments began slashing their spending and deficits, markets would reward them by investing in their presumably more productive economies. But the reverse has happened. As Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have cut their budgets, investors have grown less willing to buy their bonds. By plunging themselves deeper into recession, these nations have convinced investors not that they’re fiscally virtuous but that they won’t become economically viable for many more years.”

French and Greek voters rejected austerity in the elections this weekend not because, as the U.S. media coverage implies, they are unruly children who refuse to swallow their medicine. Rather, they realise that austerity economics at this delicate moment could very well precipitate a double-dip recession (i.e.: a lot more pain).

Moreover, they want the pain – and everyone knows that there will be pain – to be fairly shouldered. Francois Hollande, the new Socialist president in France, has called for a 75-percent tax rate on all earnings over 1.3 million dollars. Now that’s a Buffet tax! Hollande is also emphasising job creation and public investment.

The left has woken from its collective stupor just in time, for Europe at the moment is very much up for grabs. The far right has also rejected austerity, and it has a much simpler platform: blame the immigrants.

The National Front in France has injected its xenophobic virus into the very heart of France’s center-right Union for a Popular Movement; the street thugs of Golden Dawn in Greece will enter parliament for the first time; Geert Wilders and his anti-Islamic chest-thumpers brought down the government in the Netherlands last month.

Much rests on the shoulders of Hollande and the French Socialists. To them falls the responsibility of rebuilding a European left that returns the EU to its roots – a socialist market economy that grows together and preserves unity in diversity. To pull France out of its own doldrums, Hollande can’t think small. He must go big and, through persuasion and arm-twisting, rewrite the rules of European economic revival. Rejecting austerity is only a first step.

The Europeans could learn something here from Latin America, particularly Argentina. In the late 1990s, having racked up a huge debt, Argentina faced the typical recommendations from the international financial institutions: cut the budget, privatise government firms, remove barriers to outside investment. But Buenos Aires said no. It defaulted on 100 billion-plus dollars in loans.

According to the rules of the game, Argentina should have been thrown out on its ear and forever banned from playing in the global casino. But that didn’t happen. Most creditors – 93 percent – eventually accepted the 35 cents on the dollar haircut that the government offered.

With a bit of luck – particularly the rise in price of soybeans, a key Argentine export — the country clawed its way back to economic health. Unemployment dropped from 25 percent in 2001 to below eight percent in 2010. Social programmes reduced the percentage of the population living beneath the poverty line from 51 to 13 percent (though it went up again in 2010).

The recovery, like all recoveries, is tenuous, for it depends a good deal on the price of the commodities Argentina exports.

Which is why Argentina is going one step further to exert some control over the process. The government of Cristina Kirchner has nationalised Argentina Airlines as well as pension funds, and it has also instituted measures to slow capital flight from the country. Most recently, it nationalised a key oil company, YPL, taking back control of the firm from a Spanish company that had a majority stake.

Argentina is by no means the only country in the region to roll back the privatisation mania. The Brazilian government increased its control over the oil company Petrobras a couple years ago. In Bolivia, the government of Evo Morales recently renationalized the electricity grid, which had also been in Spanish hands. Venezuela and Ecuador have also adopted similar policies.

Despite this new trend in Latin America, foreign investors have been flocking to the region. In 2011, the region saw a 31-percent increase in foreign capital.

But here’s the underlying reason for the nationalisations. According to a recent U.N. report, “FDI revenue transferred back to the countries of origin has increased from 20 billion dollars per year between 1998 and 2003 to 84 billion dollars between 2008 and 2010 per year.”

Finally, there’s been change at the World Bank. The new head Jim Yong Kim is a health professional, not a free-trader like Robert Zoellick or a neocon like Paul Wolfowitz. Under Jim Kim’s more grassroots- oriented approach, perhaps the World Bank can help shift the locus of attention from facilitating financial speculation to empowering the poor.

A backlash against austerity in Europe, a move toward greater state control in Latin America, a change in leadership at the World Bank: this might seem slender evidence for a Copernican revolution in economics.

Moreover, a number of leaders like Barack Obama are styling themselves as Tyco Brahe, the Danish astronomer who attempted to combine both Ptolemy and Copernicus into an untenable geo-heliocentric system. These modern-day Brahes want to preserve the Washington consensus with only a few modifications.

As the world lurches from one economic crisis to another, and with the even larger crisis of global warming looming above it all, one thing is certain: there is no longer any consensus in Washington over what to do. Neo-liberalism survives, but more out of inertia than conviction.

Meanwhile, out there in the world, the economic Copernicans are busy reconstructing the order of things.

*John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

It’s a deal that’s been more than 15 years in the making and the unmaking. The United States and Japan have been struggling since the 1990s to transform the U.S. military presence on the island of Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan.

In preparation for this week’s visit of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to Washington, the two sides rolled out the latest attempt to resolve what has grown into a major sticking point in alliance relations.

According to the most recent deal, 9,000 U.S. Marines will leave Okinawa, thus fulfilling a longstanding U.S. promise to reduce the overall military footprint on the island. Half of that number will go to expanded facilities on Guam while the remainder will rotate through other bases in the region, including Australia, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

Japan will cover a little more than three billion dollars out of the estimated 8.6-billion-dollar cost of the Guam transfer.

“These adjustments are necessary to realize a U.S. force posture in the Asia-Pacific region that is more geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable,” according to a joint statement issued by Washington and Tokyo.

The deal confirms an earlier decision to separate two key components of the Pacific realignment, namely the transfer of some Marines away from Okinawa and the construction of a replacement facility to house the Marines that remain behind.

The current location of the Marines, the Futenma air base in Ginowan City, is both outdated and, because of the city’s growth over the years, increasingly hazardous for the surrounding civilian population.

“The decision to decouple finding a Futenma replacement from the move of Marines to Guam and elsewhere has relieved some of the pent-up pressure in the U.S.-Japan alliance,” observes Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security.

“Building a second runway at Camp Schwab is still unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever, but the alliance can now move forward with more closely integrating U.S. and Japan Self-Defense Forces.”

Steve Clemons, long-time Japan observer and editor-at-large at The Atlantic, characterises the agreement as a case of the Japanese no. “They say, ‘it is very difficult,’ but they don’t actually say no,” he says. “This agreement allows the Japanese no to happen without Japan explicitly saying no to its strategic partner.”

The transfer of the Marines has considerable support on Okinawa and Japan more generally. It has, however, generated concerns in the U.S. Congress, particularly over costs. At the end of 2011, Congress removed all the funding connected to the Guam transfer in the 2012 military spending bill, pending completion of an independent review.

Key critics of the process of Pacific realignment – including John McCain, Carl Levin and Jim Webb – remain sceptical of the latest agreement since the review has not yet been completed.

Also sceptical are anti-base activists in the places where the Marine presence will increase.

“Hawaii does not need more military,” says Koohan Paik, a media professor at Kauai Community College.

“There are already 161 military installations in Hawaii, which have resulted in hundreds of sites contaminated with PCBs, trichloroethylene, jet fuel and diesel, mercury, lead, radioactive Cobalt 60, unexploded ordnance, perchlorate, and depleted uranium. And they call this security? The only ‘security’ this brings is economic security to military contractors.”

The second part of the deal, the construction of a replacement facility for Futenma, remains as challenging as before. Okinawans have consistently opposed the construction of a new facility on the island. Although only one percent of Japan’s total landmass, Okinawa already houses nearly 75 percent of the entire U.S. base presence.

Polls indicate that at least 80 percent of Okinawans oppose relocating the facility on their island. In Henoko, where the government in Tokyo has proposed to expand the existing Camp Schwab to accommodate the Marines from Futenma, activists have maintained a sit-in protest since 1996. They have argued that the new construction would, among other things, compromise an already endangered species of dugong, a large sea mammal.

Okinawans have not been enthusiastic about any of the other options that would keep the Marines on the island, including the expansion of the existing Air Force base at Kadena. According to Clemons, the Kadena option also runs up against inter-service rivalry, with the Marines and the Air Force unwilling to make the necessary compromises to share the space.

“We’re going to have a low-yield ulcer that will continue indefinitely,” observes Clemons. “We’ll burn through another 10 years with Henoko not built until finally a future presidential administration will pull the plug.”

The latest U.S.-Japan deal comes at a time of considerable uncertainty regarding military spending. The Pentagon is under pressure to reduce costs in order to meet new spending limits dictated by concerns over rising national debt.

However, the Barack Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot”, announced last year, is difficult to achieve on the cheap. U.S. allies are concerned that they will have to shoulder an increasing amount of the costs of this realignment. Included in this bill will be the cost of upgrading the Futenma facility while Tokyo and Washington debate the base’s future.

“There are serious and legitimate questions about the strategic underpinnings of the dispersal of U.S. forces in small numbers to disparate territories,” says Cronin. “There are also contradictory trends between trying to preserve a strong military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and the real trend lines in spending on serious naval and air forces.”

In early February, Iran launched its third successful commercial satellite in three years. The Barack Obama administration, the United Nations, and the news media barely acknowledged the accomplishment. North Korea, on the other hand, has created a furor each of the three times its satellites failed to reach orbit.

Its latest effort, on Apr. 13, broke up within two minutes of launch. Pyongyang acknowledged the failure and went on with its celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

The Obama administration immediately condemned the North Korean launch. It followed through on its threat to suspend its participation in the Feb. 29 agreement that would have sent 240,000 metric tonnes of food assistance to North Korea.

“We want to make clear to them…that each step that they take in terms of provocations will only lead to a deeper isolation, increase consequences,” stated Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. “And frankly, that’s not just a message they’re hearing from us, they’re hearing it from the Chinese and the Russians as well.”

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) released a “presidential statement” on Apr. 16 accusing North Korea of violating a 2009 sanctions resolution that barred the country from missile tests, including satellite launches. The UNSC’s sanctions committee will look into freezing the assets of additional North Korean entities and preventing additional “proliferation-sensitive technology” from entering or exiting the country.

Iran and North Korea are both already subject to considerable sanctions, and the United States routinely expresses concerns over the missile programmes of both countries. That hasn’t prevented either country from moving forward with its space programme.

Iran and North Korea view satellites as a sign of technological achievement and, given that satellites are a multi-billion-dollar industry, potential economic gain. North Korea is additionally motivated to get a satellite in orbit because of the two-time failure of South Korea to launch one of its own.

So attractive is the prospect of having a satellite in orbit – and the requisite rocket capability – that North Korea gave up the promised U.S. food aid just on the eve of its “barley hump”, when the winter stores are depleted and the new barley crop has not yet come in.

Part of the reason why Iran’s satellite launches don’t attract nearly the same attention as North Korea’s lies in the origins of North Korea’s space programme, which began with an unannounced 1998 launch that particularly shocked Japan.

“North Korea’s apparent readiness to launch multi-stage rockets back then with little warning came as a surprise, one that it seems we’ve never quite gotten over,” an arms control expert told IPS on a non- attribution basis. “Now add to that their Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) withdrawal and nuclear tests, and these launches look very threatening, indeed.

“Iran, by contrast, seems to avoid overflying other countries when conducting space launches. Even though the UNSC says they shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing, either, it never gets the same sort of reaction. They’re still in the NPT, of course.”

Other factors include the lack of allied support for North Korea. Iran, with its considerable energy exports, continues to trade with China, Russia, India and Turkey, and can count on those countries for a measure of diplomatic support. North Korea, by contrast, has little to offer, and even its putative allies Russia and China have joined in the condemnation of its satellite launch.

In the aftermath of the failed launch, Pyongyang has indicated that it will pursue the construction of a larger rocket. The South Korean government, meanwhile, anticipates a third nuclear test from North Korea.

But the international community has few levers with which to influence North Korean behaviour. The country is already heavily sanctioned, and the U.N. will be hard pressed to find ways to tighten the screws.

“The United States is best advised to let the launch’s failure be its own ‘punishment,'” argues John Delury, an assistant professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “Sanctions have long passed the point of utility. Likewise ‘tough’ language from the UNSC only plays into the hands of hardliners in Pyongyang.

“More constructively, the diplomatic focal point – and Beijing might want to take the lead here – should be continuing with the plan to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in to monitor the freeze at Yongbyon. Were that to proceed, President Obama would have justification for going through with the U.S. side of the Leap Day deal after all. The alternative is probably an intensified version of the worst of 2009-10.”

In an Apr. 13 New York Times op-ed, Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, takes the opposite tack. “Spectacular failure though it was, North Korea’s latest rocket launching calls for punitive measures from America and its allies,” he writes. “Bad engineering is no reason for complacency; the benchmark for American policy must be North Korea’s intent.”

For the better part of its term, the Obama administration maintained a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea. During an election year, with many other issues competing for the administration’s attention, neither a proactive nor a severely punitive approach is likely.

“I see relative continuity among the United States, Japan, and South Korea, with the exception being that there is little likelihood of serious or high-level dialogue through the end of the year,” observes Scott Snyder, the director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“North Korea’s advantage currently comes from our respective preoccupations with domestic politics. Otherwise, I wonder whether there might have been the prospect of a more robust response.”

By John Feffer and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

The geopolitical centre of gravity, as measured in arms spending and transfers, has shifted to Asia.

The top five arms importers over the last five years, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), are from Asia. And, led by deep-pocketed China, Asia is poised to overtake Europe for the first time in modern history in overall military spending.

The Cold War ended in Europe in the early 1990s. But Asia continues to buy and sell weapons as if the Cold War never went out of style.

The biggest pull factor for the global arms trade is now South Asia. India is the world’s top weapons importer, accounting for 10 percent of the global total, with Russia as the top supplier. Pakistan is number three on the list, with China and the United States providing the bulk of the weapons.

After being the world’s largest arms importer from 2002-2006, China is now surging as an arms exporter. But the top five global arms suppliers remain non-Asian countries. The United States accounts for nearly one-third of all military exports, with Russia at the number two spot, supplying nearly one-quarter. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom round out the list.

“Those top five have been at the top for decades,” explains Paul Holtom, director of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme. “If you go back to the SIPRI data from the 1950s, they were always there. The one thing we’ve noted is that their share is declining. So there is now competition with the dramatic increases of China.”

So far, China’s major purchaser is Pakistan. The two countries have teamed up to produce the JF-17 Thunder combat aircraft, a rival to the U.S. F-16. If other countries begin to purchase this big-ticket item – and several countries including Azerbaijan have so far expressed interest – then China will continue to rise in the ranks of arms exporters.

Other changes affecting arms sales in Asia include Japan’s decision at the end of 2011 to further relax its 1967 ban on arms exports to facilitate participation in missile defence and fighter jet production.

South Korea, meanwhile, doubled its arms sales last year and is on pace to reach a record three billion dollars for 2012. As the United States executes its “Pacific pivot”, it has asked allies to spend more money on the military either as part of burden-sharing or to promote the interoperability of allied weapons systems.

“Arms sales are following the general global shift in power to the Asia,” explains Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Center for a New American Security.

“More impressive than the arms trade to and from Asia is the rising indigenous production capabilities. The qualitative advances in Asian arms are gradually leveling the playing field with arms produced in the United States and Europe. These trends are likely to continue, even if the pace varies from year to year. ”

China’s increased military spending is also driving up the regional numbers. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Asia spent 262 billion dollars on military expenditures in 2011 (excluding Australia and New Zealand).

China accounts for approximately one-third of that figure. With 12 percent annual growth over the first decade of the 21st century, Chinese military spending may well surpass all of Asia combined by 2015, the research firm IHS reports.

For many years analysts resisted calling the increased military spending in Asia an arms race because the budget increases were not necessarily a response to the spending patterns of rival countries. But the dynamic is changing.

“If a country sees that a rival in a soft sense is acquiring a particular weapon system, it wants it as well,” says Holtom. “It’s the keeping-up with-the-Jones effect, and it’s setting off some alarm bells because of the ability of these systems to project power.”

Asia, moreover, is the locus of numerous simmering conflicts – between India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, and North and South Korea. Border issues, which are largely settled in Europe, continue to plague Asia, whether between China and India or over disputed islands between South Korea and Japan and between Japan and China. A multi-party dispute over islands and drilling rights in the South China Sea has resisted multilateral resolution.

The lingering global economic crisis has done little to dampen the arms race in Asia. The region, compared to Europe, has recovered economically. And many countries justify arms sales as a boon to their economies and a way to underwrite domestic military spending.

The United States, too, has rationalised arms sales as a way to compensate arms manufacturers who are losing Pentagon contracts at a time of austerity.

“U.S. companies have said that they’re going to increase foreign sales by 25 percent to offset what they say are deep cuts in Pentagon spending, but which is really just a leveling off,” explains William Hartung, the author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex”.

The arms export market doesn’t necessarily translate into more U.S. jobs, as industry representatives claim.

“You may see some more competition in terms of offsets,” adds Hartung. “In other words, if you buy our plane, we’ll build part of it in your country or make investments in your country to compensate for your buying our equipment. But this undercut the jobs argument, since the manufacturers will be exporting some of these jobs.”

In 2010, the world spent approximately 1.6 trillion dollars on global military expenditures. On Apr. 17, SIPRI will release its figures for 2011. The numbers for Asia will likely be up.

To coincide with the release of the SIPRI figures, the Global Day of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS) will take place in dozens of countries around the world. Participants will focus on the huge sums spent on the military at a time when the gap between rich and poor is widening and threats like climate change remain largely unaddressed.

“Major arms importers like India and Pakistan also have some of the most urgent development needs,” explains GDAMS organiser Noah Gimbel. “The people taking part in GDAMS demand a different set of priorities both nationally and globally.

“On the one hand, the combination of climate change and increased militarisation is certain to exacerbate human crises in nutrition, health and education. But on the other hand, if seriously addressed, these problems can be solved on the cheap compared to the more than 1.6 trillion dollars spent worldwide on war and preparations for war.”

Excerpt:

After three years of frozen relations between North Korea and the United States, the two longstanding adversaries are on the verge of a thaw.

In what has been called the “leap day deal”, North Korea has pledged to stop uranium enrichment and suspend nuclear and missile tests. The United States, meanwhile, will deliver 240,000 metric tonnes of food to the country’s malnourished population.

The Barack Obama administration has maintained a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, which amounted to a wait-and-see approach while Washington was preoccupied with other foreign policy issues. Obama administration officials portray the leap day deal as a modest first step in reengaging the North.

“After the really tough sanctions that were put in place by the U.N. Security Council and the North Koreans announced that they wanted to return to Six-Party Talks, talks that they had previously abandoned, we and our allies made clear that North Korea needed to take a number of steps that would demonstrate their seriousness of purpose,” said a senior U.S. official at a background briefing on Feb. 29.

“We were firm that we were only interested in credible negotiations leading to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.”

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in late 2011 interrupted the preparatory steps toward this deal. Although the country remains officially in its 100-day mourning period, the leader’s youngest son and successor, Kim Jong Un, has continued key elements of his father’s policies. Foremost among these is the more energetic diplomacy North Korea has conducted over the last year.

As the Obama administration attempts a “Pacific pivot” to refocus its geopolitical energies from the Middle East to Asia, North Korea has been executing a pivot of its own. The centennial of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung, 2012 is also the year that North Korea has pledged to achieve the status of kangsong taeguk: an economically prosperous and militarily strong country.

To attract the economic investment necessary to achieve this goal, North Korea has reached out to friend and foe alike.

North Korea has been negotiating with Russia, for instance, over a natural gas pipeline that would extend down the peninsula to customers in South Korea and possibly Japan. Extensive deals with China have been concluded over access to minerals and ports. Even inter-Korean relations, which bottomed out over the last several years as a result of low-level military clashes and high-level belligerent rhetoric, promise to improve as both ruling party and opposition party leaders in the South lean toward a more conciliatory policy.

Meanwhile, the industrial zone at Kaesong, run by 123 South Korean firms on North Korean territory, has expanded to employ more than 50,000 North Korean workers.

But the focus of the North Korean negotiating strategy has been the United States, with whom it has frequently insisted on bilateral discussions.

“The North Koreans have been interested in reaching some accommodation with the United States for a while now,” observed Joel Wit, a former State Department official and currently a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

“It’s been a year now that they’ve been sending signals that they’re interested in talking and taking some limited steps forward. The Obama administration didn’t take them up on it because the South Koreans were against it. But South Korea’s position changed last summer,” he said.

Another reason for the North Korean pivot is its perennial push-pull relationship with China.

“The North Koreans feel that they’ve become very close to China over the past few years because of the U.S. policy of ‘strategic patience,’ which has forced them into the Chinese arms,” Wit continued. “But the North Koreans aren’t comfortable with that. They’re trying to create some distance with the Chinese, using the United States as a balancer.”

U.S. reaction to the leap day deal has ranged from relief at North Korea’s moratorium on testing and missile launches to scepticism that the deal represents anything new.

“North Korea’s promise to suspend certain nuclear activities can’t be taken at face value, given the almost certain existence of several undeclared nuclear facilities,” said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a press statement. “Pyongyang will likely continue its clandestine nuclear weapons program right under our noses. We have bought this bridge several times before.”

North Korea, meanwhile, seems to interpret the agreement somewhat differently from the United States. A Korean Central News Agency article reported that the Six-Party Talks would prioritise “the lifting of sanctions on the DPRK and provision of light water reactors”, neither of which are mentioned in U.S. government statements.

The humanitarian community has reacted with unambiguous support for the resumption of food aid, which will consist of nutritional supplements designed particularly for children and pregnant women.

“There have been over six nutritional assessments, most everything done on our own dime, to verify that there is a need for food,” says Robert Springs, the head of Global Resource Services, one of the five NGOs involved in the last round of U.S. food aid distribution. “We welcome this nutritional assistance. It’s responding to a need. It should have been done a long time ago.”

A new round of multilateral negotiations through the Six-Party Talks has not yet been announced. North Korea must first make arrangements for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to return to the country after being expelled in 2009. Monitoring protocols for the U.S. food aid deliveries must also be negotiated.

U.S. officials remain upbeat. “They’re doing it within the 100-day mourning period that’s self-declared in North Korea,” says a senior administration official. “So it shows that they’re interested with some alacrity to reach out, to get back to the table, and begin to try to make diplomatic progress, and I think that’s a positive sign.”

(END)

By John Feffer and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

After three years of frozen relations between North Korea and the United States, the two longstanding adversaries are on the verge of a thaw.

In what has been called the “leap day deal”, North Korea has pledged to stop uranium enrichment and suspend nuclear and missile tests. The United States, meanwhile, will deliver 240,000 metric tonnes of food to the country’s malnourished population.

The Barack Obama administration has maintained a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, which amounted to a wait-and-see approach while Washington was preoccupied with other foreign policy issues. Obama administration officials portray the leap day deal as a modest first step in reengaging the North.

“After the really tough sanctions that were put in place by the U.N. Security Council and the North Koreans announced that they wanted to return to Six-Party Talks, talks that they had previously abandoned, we and our allies made clear that North Korea needed to take a number of steps that would demonstrate their seriousness of purpose,” said a senior U.S. official at a background briefing on Feb. 29.

“We were firm that we were only interested in credible negotiations leading to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.”

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in late 2011 interrupted the preparatory steps toward this deal. Although the country remains officially in its 100-day mourning period, the leader’s youngest son and successor, Kim Jong Un, has continued key elements of his father’s policies. Foremost among these is the more energetic diplomacy North Korea has conducted over the last year.

As the Obama administration attempts a “Pacific pivot” to refocus its geopolitical energies from the Middle East to Asia, North Korea has been executing a pivot of its own. The centennial of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung, 2012 is also the year that North Korea has pledged to achieve the status of kangsong taeguk: an economically prosperous and militarily strong country.

To attract the economic investment necessary to achieve this goal, North Korea has reached out to friend and foe alike.

North Korea has been negotiating with Russia, for instance, over a natural gas pipeline that would extend down the peninsula to customers in South Korea and possibly Japan. Extensive deals with China have been concluded over access to minerals and ports. Even inter-Korean relations, which bottomed out over the last several years as a result of low-level military clashes and high-level belligerent rhetoric, promise to improve as both ruling party and opposition party leaders in the South lean toward a more conciliatory policy.

Meanwhile, the industrial zone at Kaesong, run by 123 South Korean firms on North Korean territory, has expanded to employ more than 50,000 North Korean workers.

But the focus of the North Korean negotiating strategy has been the United States, with whom it has frequently insisted on bilateral discussions.

“The North Koreans have been interested in reaching some accommodation with the United States for a while now,” observed Joel Wit, a former State Department official and currently a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

“It’s been a year now that they’ve been sending signals that they’re interested in talking and taking some limited steps forward. The Obama administration didn’t take them up on it because the South Koreans were against it. But South Korea’s position changed last summer,” he said.

Another reason for the North Korean pivot is its perennial push-pull relationship with China.

“The North Koreans feel that they’ve become very close to China over the past few years because of the U.S. policy of ‘strategic patience,’ which has forced them into the Chinese arms,” Wit continued. “But the North Koreans aren’t comfortable with that. They’re trying to create some distance with the Chinese, using the United States as a balancer.”

U.S. reaction to the leap day deal has ranged from relief at North Korea’s moratorium on testing and missile launches to scepticism that the deal represents anything new.

“North Korea’s promise to suspend certain nuclear activities can’t be taken at face value, given the almost certain existence of several undeclared nuclear facilities,” said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a press statement. “Pyongyang will likely continue its clandestine nuclear weapons program right under our noses. We have bought this bridge several times before.”

North Korea, meanwhile, seems to interpret the agreement somewhat differently from the United States. A Korean Central News Agency article reported that the Six-Party Talks would prioritise “the lifting of sanctions on the DPRK and provision of light water reactors”, neither of which are mentioned in U.S. government statements.

The humanitarian community has reacted with unambiguous support for the resumption of food aid, which will consist of nutritional supplements designed particularly for children and pregnant women.

“There have been over six nutritional assessments, most everything done on our own dime, to verify that there is a need for food,” says Robert Springs, the head of Global Resource Services, one of the five NGOs involved in the last round of U.S. food aid distribution. “We welcome this nutritional assistance. It’s responding to a need. It should have been done a long time ago.”

A new round of multilateral negotiations through the Six-Party Talks has not yet been announced. North Korea must first make arrangements for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to return to the country after being expelled in 2009. Monitoring protocols for the U.S. food aid deliveries must also be negotiated.

U.S. officials remain upbeat. “They’re doing it within the 100-day mourning period that’s self-declared in North Korea,” says a senior administration official. “So it shows that they’re interested with some alacrity to reach out, to get back to the table, and begin to try to make diplomatic progress, and I think that’s a positive sign.”

Excerpt:

When Hu Jintao took over as the leader of China in 2002, U.S. companies welcomed his accession as a “good sign for American business”.” Political analysts described Hu as a member of the fourth generation of Communist party leadership who might very well turn out to be a “closet liberal”.

Playing it safe, the media tended to portray him as a pragmatic enigma. In the wake of 9/11 and high-level cooperation on counter- terrorism, Hu proved to be a reliable U.S. partner, prompting Colin Powell to remark in 2003 that U.S.- China relations were the best since 1972.

It didn’t take long, however, before the media and the punditry turned sour on Hu. By 2005, The Economist was labeling him a “conservative authoritarian” for tightening party discipline and cracking down on intellectuals. Hu came under fire for holding firm against the United States around disputes over trade, currency, intellectual property, and human rights.

On counter-terrorism, U.S.-Chinese interests converged. But on this issue and most others, Hu turned out not to be a closet liberal at all.

Now, with China gearing up for another leadership transition, Hu’s putative successor Xi Jinping has embarked on his own grand tour of the United States. As with Hu, Western sources admit that they don’t know very much about Xi beyond his generally “pro-business” approach. He has a celebrity wife; he doesn’t like corruption. Aside from these tidbits, journalists have been forced to sift through the recent appearances – Xi’s meetings with the Obama administration, his return to the Iowa town he visited 25 years ago, his attendance at an LA Lakers game – for clues to the new Chinese leader’s true political nature.

Xi Jinping has done what he can to frustrate the media. He has been careful to tailor his remarks in Washington to satisfy both his Western hosts and his colleagues back home. So, for instance, he spoke of U.S.-Chinese relations as an “unstoppable river that keeps surging ahead” and of Beijing’s willingness to engage with Washington on a broad agenda of issues from counter-terrorism to North Korea.

At the same time he was careful to warn his hosts to “respect the interests and the concerns of China”.

This latter point, that China has its own national interests, invariably eludes Western observers no matter how often Chinese leaders repeat it. However much a Chinese leader might like basketball or admire U.S. business, he leads a political, economic, and military apparatus dedicated to preserving itself and the country’s territorial integrity.

The same can be said for the leaders of most countries. Certainly no one in Beijing expects the 2012 U.S. elections to produce a president who embraces state capitalism, a trade order that disproportionately favours Chinese economic growth, or a ceding of U.S. military power in the Pacific to the up-and-coming superpower.

China’s national interests are perhaps most visibly on display around security issues. During the early Hu years, the discussion in the West centered on China’s “peaceful rise”. More recently, the talk has gotten darker, as pessimists point to China’s recent purchase of an old Ukrainian aircraft carrier, its ambitions in the South China Sea, its confrontation with Japan over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and of course its increased spending on the military.

By 2015, according to IHS Jane’s, Chinese military spending will reach 238 billion dollars, more than all the projected spending in the Asian region as a whole.

But there are no real indications that Beijing has abandoned its “peaceful rise” approach. The refurbished aircraft carrier is not terribly impressive (particularly compared to the U.S. Navy’s 10 such vessels). South Korea and Japan have a similar row over a disputed island.

China’s claims to islands in the South China Sea, however dubious, are longstanding and date back to the pre-communist era. And it’s been more than 30 years since China has conducted a significant military intervention overseas, an overall pattern of risk-averse behaviour it shows no sign of abandoning.

The United States, meanwhile, continues to outspend China militarily by at least five-fold and is in the midst of a “Pacific pivot” to reorient its security policy away from the Middle East and toward Asia. Increased U.S. military cooperation with Australia, the Philippines, and even Vietnam makes China nervous.

The overarching priorities of Chinese leaders remain nationalist: to keep a vast and fractious country together, maintain influence in Taiwan, and ensure a steady supply of energy through its neighboring regions to sustain high levels of economic growth. Hu and now Xi consistently tell their U.S. interlocutors that closer U.S.-Chinese relations are possible and desirable as long as Washington recognises these national imperatives.

The underlying threat from China, of course, is not military but economic. Now the second largest economy in the world, China could very well surpass the United States during the next presidential term. Washington complains about unfair trade practices, manipulated currency, and a culture of intellectual piracy.

Like all late modernisers and following the example of Japan and South Korea, China has realised that making the jump from underdeveloped to developed requires some breaking of the rules.

Critics might point out that China, as an economic powerhouse, is no longer an underdog. But much of China remains underdeveloped. And China’s economic power is not reflected in its voting power in international economic institutions.

At both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the United States commands approximately 16 percent of the votes, with China is much further down the list at around four percent. China, in other words, has been invited to the table but is not part of setting the rules of the game. No surprise, then, that it is still bending these rules.

Xi Jinping no doubt has is own thoughts about how to maintain what the Chinese might call the Three Balances: China’s domestic harmony, its relations with the near abroad, and the push-pull dynamic with the United States. He is not, however, that mythic figure that the West hopes that China will one day produce. Xi is partly his own man, partly a Party man.

But he is by no means Washington’s man in Beijing.

For the last two decades, U.S. administrations have come in like a lion and out like a lamb with their policies on North Korea. Determined to demonstrate Washington’s resolve, U.S. presidents have played hardball with Pyongyang in an effort to precipitate regime change or at least bully the intransigent country into knuckling under.

When this strategy failed to achieve its intended results, successive administrations ended up, however reluctantly, negotiating with the hard-nosed team in North Korea.

The Barack Obama administration has been no exception to the lion-lamb rule. It did little to follow up on the initial bargains that George W. Bush negotiated in the latter part of his second term. Instead, after North Korea’s second nuclear test, Obama adopted a tactic of “strategic patience” that amounted, essentially, to ignoring the country in favor of other foreign policy priorities.

In the last few months, however, the administration began finally to sit down with negotiators from Pyongyang and hammer out a deal. According to reports by the Associated Press, the United States was on the verge of announcing a food aid package for North Korea that would have been followed by Pyongyang’s announcement of a freeze of its uranium enrichment programme.

These dual announcements, however, have been preempted by the death over the weekend of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. His son and successor, Kim Jong Eun, has yet to indicate his position on the incipient deal with Washington – or his position on any other issue for that matter.

Currently, North Korea is in a 13-day mourning period for his father, who was only the second leader that the country has ever known. Rumors of a shift to collective leadership, with Kim Jong Eun sharing power with the military, have leaked out of Pyongyang.

The elder Kim has bequeathed to his son a decidedly mixed legacy. On one hand, he leaves behind a country poorer than when he took over, a population more malnourished, and a political system no less autocratic and antiquated.

On the other hand, Kim managed to keep his regime relatively intact even as outside powers helped oust his peers in Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. He preserved the country, at times ruthlessly, during famine and economic collapse. Across three administrations and 17 years, he weathered the often dramatic shifts in U.S. policy, only for the international media to call him, and not U.S. leaders, “mercurial” and “unpredictable”.

The North Korean leader negotiated when that path was available, freezing his nuclear programme during the Bill Clinton years and even starting down the path of dismantlement during the subsequent Bush years. But he also hedged his bets by developing a secret uranium enrichment programme as a second path to the bomb. And by testing two nuclear weapons in 2006 and 2009, Kim Jong Il officially ushered his country into the nuclear club.

Outside observers are scrambling to make predictions about the contours of the post-Kim Jong Il era. Washington analysts have long despaired over the lack of solid intelligence about North Korea, a fact underscored by the failure to discover that Kim Jong Il had died until 48 hours after the fact. This lack of information extends to Kim Jong Eun, about whom little is known beyond his rough age (late twenties), schooling (a stint in Switzerland), and leisure-time interests (basketball).

Even less is known about how the younger Kim fits into the political order in Pyongyang. Like his father, he has a close but largely contrived relationship with North Korea’s most effective institution, the military, having become a four-star general despite no known record of military service and certainly no battlefield experience.

He may well listen to the advice of his putative regents, Kim Jong Il’s sister and brother-in-law, even to the point of becoming little more than a figurehead. The North Korean system, presided over by a gerontocracy, is not set up to accommodate a young man with bold ideas of reform even if it turns out that Kim Jong Eun is inclined in that direction.

At the same time, a technocratic elite schooled in the West has been waiting in the wings for some years for the chance to chart a new path for the country. A new middle class has also emerged that conducts business deals with China, operates the newly available cell phones, drives the increasing number of private cars, and crowds the new restaurants in Pyongyang.

So far, Kim Jong Eun has not demonstrated whether he sides with this technocratic elite or this new middle class. He has kept his mouth shut, which either reflects his age, his personality, or a measure of wisdom beyond his years.

The Obama administration, having finally jettisoned strategic patience to negotiate in good faith with North Korea, is now back in wait-and- see mode. The State Department has indicated that the food aid discussions are still ongoing but that further progress is unlikely before the New Year.

Washington shouldn’t let this opportunity slip to test the new leadership in Pyongyang. With 2012 an election year, Obama is not likely to risk charges of “appeasement” from his Republican rivals because of an overture to Pyongyang. Moreover, the administration has already expended some political capital and undertaken some risk by sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma. But North Korea’s strategic location and its mysterious nuclear programme require Washington to pay attention.

When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, the Clinton administration followed through on the negotiations for the Agreed Framework that negotiated the freeze in North Korea’s nuclear programme. Because of congressional resistance, however, the administration didn’t pursue the diplomatic and economic engagement it promised. An opportunity to end the Cold War with North Korea was effectively lost.

The Obama administration has a similar chance to use the death of Kim Jong Il to open a new chapter in its relationship with North Korea. Patience is certainly a virtue. And it’s important to wait for Pyongyang to put its political house in order. But Washington shouldn’t waste this second opportunity to end hostilities with its longest-running adversary.

Protesters rally at Wall Street on Nov. 17, 2011. Credit: Lauren DeCicca/CC BY 2.0

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 2011 (IPS)

It’s not the topic of George Packer’s latest essay that’s particularly surprising. Inequality, he writes, is undermining democracy. Progressives have been hammering home this message for years if not decades.

Nor is the choice of publication necessarily a shocker. Foreign Affairs is the flagship publication of the elite that runs U.S. foreign policy. But it is no longer the exclusively centre-right publication of the Cold War years and publishes the occasional progressive thinker.

No, it’s the prominent placement of the Packer essay that merits attention. It’s the lead article of the November/December issue. And it comes with the bold headline, “Is America Over?”

When Foreign Affairs puts inequality on its cover, the Occupy Wall Street movement has achieved a major victory that eclipses even the generally favourable coverage in liberal bastions such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. It’s also a sign that a profound anxiety gnaws at the foreign policy elite in this country. The question is: why does Foreign Affairs want its readers to take this issue so seriously?

Packer argues that the U.S. economy went off the rails in the late 1970s, when the top one percent stopped thinking about the national interest and focused instead on the preservation of their own economic and political power. Powerful lobbyists, anti-government politicians on the right, and a newly unregulated Wall Street all combined to boost the wealth of the very rich and leave everyone else behind.

“We can upgrade our iPhones, but we can’t fix our roads and bridges,” Packer writes to illustrate our economic predicament. “We invented broadband, but we can’t extend it to 35 percent of the public. We can get 300 television channels on the iPad, but in the past decade 20 newspapers closed down all their foreign bureaus.”

In other words, the public realm has deteriorated over the last two decades even as the private realm continues to promise cutting edge speed and novelty. Worse, it’s a self-reinforcing dynamic, with the wealthy accumulating more political influence that helps them remain on top.

This all makes sense to me. What’s not so clear to me is why Foreign Affairs has decided to highlight this message. The November/December issue features a Shell ad on the inside front cover and a Goldman Sachs ad on the back cover: these are not exactly OWS boosters. The Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, has long had a cozy relationship with Wall Street and such figures as David Rockefeller and Peter Peterson. It seems as though Foreign Affairs is biting the hand that feeds it.

Here are three possible reasons for the sudden interest in inequality.

Disappearing Jobs

Many of the young people spearheading the OWS movement have followed the rules, gone to college, racked up lots of students loans, and still can’t get decent jobs.

In the early 1970s, Adam Davidson writes in The New York Times Magazine, “less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from non-elite schools.”

And the jobs are simply not there. The OWS message resonates in mainstream society – and publications such as Foreign Affairs – because middle-class parents have become acutely concerned about their children’s future.

Sure, inequality has adversely affected working-class America and African Americans for a long time. But the elite pricks up its ears when college-educated white kids, saddled with debt and dependency, become the functional equivalent of Third World countries.

Declining Competitiveness

Free-market advocates have traditionally had a quick answer to the complaint that the United States is no longer competitive globally. Even with so many manufacturing jobs sucked overseas, they argue, the United States remains a leading center for innovation: iPhones, gene sequencing, dodgy financial instruments.

Even if our health care system is so obviously broken, our high-end care remains the best in the world, and the global elite continue to flock to our hospitals for the most sophisticated treatments.

Yet the plain truth is that by all objective standards, the United States is falling behind. In the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Index, the United States slipped for a third year in a row to fifth place. The top positions continue to go to European countries: Switzerland, Finland, Sweden.

In The Atlantic, urban studies theorist Richard Florida underscores the negative relationship between inequality and competitiveness to emphasize that creativity can go hand in hand with equity. We can have our cake and distribute it fairly too.

It’s Not Just the Global South Anymore

The Arab Spring followed the classic revolutionary pattern of a rising economic class thwarted in its ambitions by sclerotic states in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. When the aftershocks of the Arab Spring hit the OECD club of economically advanced countries, the focus shifted to inequality.

This summer, for example, Israel experienced the largest protests in its history. Before the tents appeared in Zuccotti Park in New York City, they appeared on the streets of Tel Aviv under the slogan “We want a welfare state.”

Israel’s “economic miracle”, created largely by a high-tech boom, had benefitted only a small segment of the population. Israel ranks the fifth highest in the OECD in terms of inequality and has the highest poverty rate to boot. Even in countries touted for their ability to surf the new wave of innovation, the middle class was losing out.

According to the OECD, inequality has increased rather dramatically among the most economically advanced countries of the world. It’s one thing for inequality to undermine democracy, something that foreign policy mandarins have never worried about too terribly much. But when inequality undermines stability and the overall investment climate, the Foreign Affairs crowd starts to fidget.

So, it seems, the foreign policy mandarins are slowly realising that their Bush-era hangover has not one but two major symptoms. The military invasions and violations of international law continue to cause enormous headaches. And the deregulatory fervor and tax cuts for the wealthy are causing major stomach distress.

The race for profit and the embrace of greed is all fine and good up to a point for these folks. But when it approaches the danger point, a correction is necessary. The decision to publish and promote Packer’s essay is comparable to parents showing up in the wee hours of a loud party and ordering the kids to turn down the music before the neighbours call the cops.

Ronald Reagan used to say rather fatuously that Democrats had gone so far left they’d left the country. Now the foreign policy elite is realising that the Republicans have gone so far right, they’ve gone right off the rails.

The Republican Party has been so extreme in its defence of the one percent – actually the 0.1 percent out – that it has effectively seceded from the country to create a confederacy of cupidity. This confederacy is as single-minded in its pursuit of power and privilege as the North Korean nomenklatura.

However closely connected to Wall Street they might be, the bigwigs at Foreign Affairs realise that this is not a confederacy to which they want to pledge allegiance.

*John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

By John Feffer and - -
WASHINGTON, Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

President Barack Obama intended to use the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting last weekend in Hawai’i to signal a shift in U.S. foreign policy away from the Middle East and toward the Asia-Pacific region.

This was not simply a geographic shift. With a presidential election approaching in 2012, the president is emphasising jobs, not war. When it comes to economic opportunity, Asia is where the action is.

“No region will do more to shape our long-term economic future than the Asia Pacific region,” the president announced at his press conference on Monday. APEC links the United States with 20 other countries, including Japan, Russia, South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, and accounts for nearly half of the world’s trade.

But the president did not have an easy time in Hawai’i steering U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. The Middle East overshadowed the APEC discussions, with the first question for the president at his press conference focusing on Iran and U.S. sanctions.

In fact, aside from the hot-button issue of economic competition with China, none of the journalists seemed very much interested in Asian matters. The chief focus of news coverage of the event was the president’s decision to break with the APEC tradition of forcing heads of state to wear native garb for a photo op.

The Obama administration has long wanted to reorient, literally, U.S. foreign policy. During their years of political exile under the George W. Bush administration, key foreign policy figures like Kurt Campbell complained of how Washington was ignoring Pacific affairs at its peril.

Although Campbell is now in charge of Asian affairs at the State Department and his current boss Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has worked hard to achieve this reorientation by visiting the region and attending regional confabs, the Obama administration has largely continued the Bush-era focus on fighting in Afghanistan and conducting counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan and around the Horn of Africa.

Even though Obama has largely fulfilled his promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, the Arab Spring has presented additional reasons to keep U.S. attention on the Middle East and North Africa.

The pivot toward the Pacific has been complicated by challenges from the region itself. North Korea, which the George W. Bush administration eventually decided to re-engage, has reacted negatively to Obama’s studied indifference to the country (a policy officially known as “strategic patience”).

Overwhelming opposition in Okinawa to plans to build another U.S. military base on this southernmost Japanese island has thrown relations between Tokyo and Washington into a slow spiral of decline. China, meanwhile, has both expanded its economic ties with countries in the region and asserted its claims more vociferously to islands in the South China Sea.

Over the decade or so that the United States has downgraded Pacific relations in its overall foreign policy agenda, it has lost economic influence, strained relations with allies, and missed opportunities to resolve differences with adversaries. To rectify this drift, the Obama administration has used APEC and the president’s trip to the region as an opportunity to solidify two initiatives.

The first is a stronger commitment to regional economic integration through free trade agreements. The shift to a regional strategy focused on Asia comes after a decade of failure.

Multilateral trade talks through the World Trade Organisation have been stalled for 10 years. The attempt to enlarge the North American Free Trade Agreement into a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas hasn’t moved forward either. Even bilateral trade agreements have been difficult to negotiate.

President Obama signed one recently with South Korea, but the parliamentary opposition in Seoul has rejected the agreement as currently written.

At APEC, leaders agreed to boost trade in green goods and technology and reduce their “energy intensity” by 45 percent by 2035. Energy intensity is a figure derived from energy use and energy efficiency.

What the United States didn’t achieve, beyond merely liberalising green trade, was an ambitious free trade area for the entire region. Dubbed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the agreement reflects the president’s earlier scepticism about free trade by proposing stronger environmental and labour standards.

But the United States has also insisted on including a controversial measure on investors’ rights that has served as a lightning rod for criticism in the region. Under this provision, included in most other U.S.-sponsored FTAs, corporations can sue national governments for regulations that purportedly interfere with the bottom line.

The TPP, which counts nine of the 21 APEC countries as members, expanded to a dozen by the end of the APEC summit, with Japan, Mexico, and Canada signaling their interest in joining.

It’s not just the sheer number of countries that will make TPP negotiations difficult. The major challenge comes from the country that so far lies outside the club, namely China, which has negotiated its own bilateral trade agreements and explored alternative regional trade orders.

China could well join the TPP at some point. But the United States has not been exactly welcoming, with President Obama noting in Hawai’i that China will have to “play by the rules”. Beijing, meanwhile, might not like some of these rules, like the ones associated with labour standards or intellectual property rights.

China is equally concerned about the new security agreement that Obama concluded with Australia on this trip that will bring a new contingent of U.S. Marines to the northern port city of Darwin. Beijing has long been sensitive to what it considers the U.S. encirclement of its borders through strategic partnerships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, and so forth.

The upgrade in relations with Australia, as Li Hongmei writes in China’s official Xinhua News, “has raised concerns among some analysts that it could complicate the already volatile situation, escalate regional tensions and damage relations with China.”

What neither Beijing nor Washington will admit, however, is that the Obama administration is acting as much from a position of weakness as from a position of strength. The surge of Marines in Australia is in part a response to the difficulty of negotiating a new Marine base in Okinawa. The push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an acknowledgement that the United States has lost considerable ground economically to China in its trade relations with Pacific countries.

The Pacific pivot that the Obama administration has tried to execute around the APEC summit has inadvertently underscored not only its previous indifference to Asia but also the limited power that the United States now possesses to reinsert itself into the economic and security realities of the region.

Excerpt:

By John Feffer and - -
JEJU ISLAND, South Korea, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

The South Korean government has been campaigning to have its southern island of Jeju recognised as one of the seven new wonders of nature. A favourite honeymoon spot in Asia and an official “island of peace”, Jeju already boasts several UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites.

The coastline of Jeju Island. Credit: Martin Chen/wikimedia commons

An increasingly vocal anti-base movement believes that one of these things is not like the others. Anti-base activists have gone to jail, gone on hunger strike, and gone to great lengths to stop the Korean government from building the 970-million-dollar military facility in the southern part of the island in Kangjeong Village.

“The most beautiful coastline on this most beautiful island is the Jungdeok coast, and it is also the base construction projects epicentre,” says Matthew Hoey, an arms control analyst who is the international coordinator of the Campaign to Save Jeju Island.

“This base site is about two kilometres from the nearest UNESCO World Natural heritage site. It is madness that the government is allowing the military to destroy the beauty of the island to build this dangerous facility. It could undermine Jeju’s UNESCO status in the future without a doubt. As for the Seven Wonders competition in light of the base construction project, it is the ultimate hypocrisy.”

The South Korean government plans to open the naval base in 2014 to host submarines, warships, and the three new Aegis-equipped destroyers that cost South Korea one billion dollars each. The government argues that the base will protect sea lanes for Korean commerce and bring economic benefits to the island.

But Korean activists see different motives for the Jeju naval base. Under the terms of their mutual security alliance, the United States can use any South Korean military facility, and that would eventually include the Jeju base.

“Jeju is located in a very strategic area between China and the United States,” points out Wooksik Cheong, who heads up the Seoul- based Peace Network. “It’s a strategic point where the United States can check or contain China.”

With President Barack Obama attending the APEC Summit in Honolulu this week and then heading off for points further west including Australia and Indonesia, the United States is pledging a refocus on Asian issues.

In a widely cited article in Foreign Policy magazine, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that, after 10 years of focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq, “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will…be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.”

It’s the “strategic” part that worries Wooksik Cheong, who sees the Jeju base as a key node in the missile defence system that the United States wants to construct in the Asia-Pacific.

“The United States argues that Okinawa and Guam form a single integrated battle field with the Korean peninsula,” he says. “So, Washington argues that Seoul should contribute to protecting these islands from the ballistic missile threat from China or North Korea.”

Since it has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, China has interpreted such a missile defense system as potentially neutralising its deterrent capabilities. If China expands its nuclear and ballistic missile arsenals as a result, the naval base at Jeju would help stimulate an arms race in the region.

In Kangjeong Village, meanwhile, opinion is divided on the base issue. The mayor of the village went to jail at the end of August as part of his opposition to the base, and he remains there still. Dozens of other protestors have gone to prison, including South Korea’s foremost film critic Yang Yoon-Moo, who conducted a 71-day hunger strike that garnered national and international attention.

After security forces ejected them from the construction site, protestors have maintained a vigil in Kangjeong Village near the fence that conceals the construction equipment.

Jeju Island has a long history of resistance to outside pressure that goes back at least as far as the military campaigns against the Mongol invaders in the 13th century. For some people on Jeju island, the anti-base movement recalls earlier experiences of resistance, particularly the uprising of Apr. 3, 1948 that the Korean government, with U.S. military support, brutally repressed.

During that precursor to the Korean War, government forces and right- wing militias killed one-tenth of the population, or 30,000 people, and tens of thousands of islanders went into exile in Japan.

“The Jeju people around me, they hardly know the real situation, and many think the naval base will keep the country safe,” says Hye Kyoung An, a Jeju activist. “Someone like me thinks that the naval base will give Jeju people trauma, like what came from Apr. 3. But some other people think totally the opposite. They think a strong military can protect the people of Jeju.”

A majority of islanders favour a referendum on the issue, according to a survey conducted by the provincial government. The South Korean government has not shown any interest in holding a referendum.

Activists have cited potential environmental damage and the destruction of priceless archaeological ruins as reasons to halt the construction. The South Korean government has said that 15-20 percent of the base construction has already been completed.

“That 20 percent completion figure is one of the great misconceptions of the base project and the progress to date,” counters Matthew Hoey. “That number reflects the amount spent on the base construction to date out of the total base budget. Keep in mind that a tremendous amount of money has been wasted due to the crackdown on villagers and efforts to suppress the protesters’ right to free speech and public assembly which has resulted from the illegal process that led to the base plan approval in the first place.”

Voting for the seven new wonders of nature ends on Friday – 11/11/11. Jeju is in very good company. The 28 finalists include the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef. Neither the website nor the campaign billboards that dot the island, however, mention the Jeju naval base.

Excerpt:

The United States and South Korea maintain a close military alliance. Congress just passed a free trade agreement that will boost economic ties with Seoul. And the leaders of the two countries form a small but very powerful mutual admiration society, which The New York Times has termed a “presidential man-crush”.

It was certainly a love fest when South Korean President Lee Myung- Bak visited Washington last week to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama, their sixth confab in three years. The two politicians share a “yes we can” ethos, a faith in “green energy”, and a history of bucking the odds.

With relations between Washington and Tokyo complicated by wrangling over military bases and Japan’s leadership in perpetual shuffle mode, the United States has moved closer to South Korea as its go-to country in East Asia. The relationship extends beyond regional politics. Obama bestowed on his Korean pal the considerable honour of hosting the second nuclear summit in 2012.

This rosy relationship, however, conceals a number of thorns. Indeed, some prominent failures have taken place on their watch.

Both Washington and Seoul, for instance, have adopted a hawkish stance toward Pyongyang that has basically backfired. The momentum achieved by 10 years of South Korean engagement policy toward the North disappeared, as Seoul began to emphasise North Korean human rights issues, conduct provocative military exercises near the maritime borders, and demand uncompromising economic positions.

Inter-Korean relations veered toward heightened conflict, particularly after North Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean boat in March 2010 and its subsequent shelling of Yeonpyeong Island across the Northern Limit Line.

The Obama administration has adopted a “strategic patience” approach to North Korea, which has essentially been to largely ignore Pyongyang and back Seoul’s uncompromising strategy. Unlike the George W. Bush administration, which ultimately reassessed its hard-line policy and made a 180-degree turn in its second term, Obama has yet to undertake a reassessment or execute a mid-course adjustment in its North Korea policy.

Faced with few opportunities to talk with Washington, North Korea went ahead and tested a second nuclear weapon in 2009. Deprived of additional economic opportunities from Seoul, North Korea concluded more deals with China and moved closer to Russia.

Lee Myung-bak, recognising the shortcomings of his policy, has tried in the last couple months to revive inter-Korean cooperation. South Korean officials have met with their northern counterparts twice to discuss nuclear issues, and the Lee administration has backed an oil pipeline deal with Russia that would net North Korea an estimated 100 million dollars a year and reduce natural gas prices for South Korea by 30 percent.

Such a win-win approach with the North now has the support of both Lee’s conservative colleagues and his liberal opponents.

Meanwhile, U.S.-South Korean military relations face significant challenges. Two U.S. soldiers stand accused of raping teenage girls last month in South Korea, prompting fresh calls from Korean activists to reassess the rules governing the U.S.-ROK military alliance.

On the island of Jeju, off the southern coast of the country, the Korean government is encountering significant pushback from residents protesting its plan to build a naval base that would figure prominently in U.S. missile defence plans for the region.

The restructuring of U.S. military presence in Korea over the last decade – which included a reduction in personnel, the planned relocation of the huge Yongsan base in the middle of Seoul, and a redeployment of U.S. infantry away from the Demilitarized Zone – has defused some anger among Koreans. But the continued crimes committed by U.S. soldiers and the creation of new facilities like the Jeju naval base erodes Korean support for the alliance.

Finally, despite the hoopla in Washington over the FTA, it’s not a done deal. The South Korean parliament still must ratify the agreement, and the opposition party wants further revision. If South Korea ultimately ratifies the FTA, it will lead to significant economic dislocation in both countries that could be a flashpoint in relations.

Billed as a win-win deal, the FTA is predicted to increase trade by 10 billion dollars a year. But Korean farmers will be hit hard by the influx of U.S. products. And the United States, still struggling with high unemployment, will lose as many 159,000 jobs in the first seven years after implementation, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The United States has long preferred to deal with Asia on a bilateral basis, playing South Korea and Japan off one another and negotiating separate agreements with China and Taiwan. Every so often, the political cycles in Korea and the U.S. produce like-minded leaders, as with Bill Clinton and Kim Dae-Jung.

But they just as often generate a clash of personalities, as between George W. Bush and Roh Moo-Hyun. Personal connections between the two presidents, whether warm or wary, reflect only a small part of the bilateral relationship.

The love fest between Obama and Lee has come at the expense of regional relations. The situation with North Korea has deteriorated. All the countries in the region have significantly modernised their militaries and, with the exception of Japan, considerably increased their military spending.

The Six Party process, designed to facilitate the denuclearisation of North Korea, promised to become an authentic regional security framework. But the talks have lain dormant since 2007.

With elections in both countries coming up in 2012, the United States and South Korea need to look beyond presidential passions and even the bilateral relationship itself. Northeast Asia is a more dangerous place now than when Lee and Obama took office. Their successors need to focus on spreading the love around.

Peace has never been a particularly popular word in Washington, DC. This is, after all, the home of the Pentagon and the major military contractors, not to mention all the think tanks and congressional lapdogs that lie in the king- size family bed with them.

But the word “peace” has acquired such a negative reputation inside the Beltway that the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), which saw Congress nearly axe all its funding over the summer, is now considering a name change.

“Peace,” the Institute’s president Richard Solomon recently told The Washington Post, “is too abstract and academic.” One alternative he is proposing: the U.S. Institute for Conflict Management.

Excuse me? “Conflict management” is less academic and abstract than “peace”? Get that man a thesaurus.

What Solomon really means is that “conflict management” is considerably more ambiguous than “peace”. USIP, which already gets funding from such dubious sources as Lockheed Martin, could probably extract even more loot from arms manufacturers with a deft name change. Conflict “management” sounds so dour and corporate next to its more hopeful cousins, conflict resolution and conflict transformation. Management is what you do to a disease when it resists all other medical interventions. Management is all about learning to live with the problem.

Unfortunately, Solomon is simply reflecting the shift in the Barack Obama administration itself. Running for president, Obama flirted with the title of the peace candidate for opposing the war in Iraq and calling for early withdrawal of U.S. troops. Once ensconced in the White House, however, Obama has been firmly in “conflict management” mode.

Indeed, in his Nobel Prize speech, he emphasised that he would resort to the instruments of war to preserve the peace, and he has subsequently deployed such tools as intervention, escalation, and targeted assassination. Obama generally eschews the Bush swagger and declarations of missions accomplished. A consummate technocrat, he believes that task forces and white papers and parboiled rhetoric can give the outward impression of adult supervision even as his administration expands the use of drones and the Joint Special Operations Command.

The presidential superego is in charge of the speeches. The presidential id, meanwhile, is in charge of the arsenal.

In Washington, at least, peace might seem to be a quaint artifact of the pre-9/11 era, of that decade of heightened expectation that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Terrorism has become the problem that won’t go away, the conflict that the Obama administration is now tasked with managing.

The George W. Bush team did what it could to make this conflict as unmanageable as possible by pouring money into the Pentagon and playing up external threats as part of a substantial overhaul of U.S. foreign and military policy. From a president with a legendary drinking problem came Binge Militarism.

Ten years later, we are still dealing with the hangover. The aftereffects have been so extreme – the lost lives, the wasted money, the opportunity costs – that even some early enablers have recognised the problem.

Journalist Anne Applebaum was gung ho about the Iraq War, faulting the Bush administration only for its inept arguments for the intervention. Today, as a Washington Post columnist, she laments all that the United States has neglected over the last decade in the relentless pursuit of global terrorism: the rise of China, the transformation of Russia, the dollars that could have been invested at home.

Too bad she couldn’t have figured this out earlier, for instance, by reading the analyses in Foreign Policy In Focus, among other publications. Her colleague Richard Cohen at least manages a muted mea culpa for his role in stoking the fires of war, but then goes on to “blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term” (jeez, the least you could do, Richard, would be to acknowledge the huge peace movement that didn’t fall in behind your banner).

Like most commentators reflecting on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Applebaum and Cohen both fall prey to the “it’s all about us” syndrome. By putting the United States at the centre of all things, analysts confer on Washington the power and responsibility to manage the world’s conflicts. We either do it well or we do it poorly, and this becomes the yardstick for evaluating the legacy of the Bush administration and the conduct of the Obama White House.

But 9/11, for all the shock and horror the attacks caused here in the United States, was primarily not about us.

“Al-Qaeda was certainly devoted to rolling back U.S. influence in the Islamic world, particularly in Saudi Arabia,” I write in an Other Words op-ed. “But its primary audience was Muslims. Its radical objective of recreating a global caliphate was part of a debate on how to engage with modernity that has been taking place among Muslims for at least 150 years.”

Al-Qaeda decisively lost that debate, even before 9/11. The vast majority of Muslims rejected Al-Qaeda’s brand of Islam, its style of politics, and its approach to geopolitics. From Indonesia to Palestine, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the protestors in Syria, there has been indeed a great upheaval in the Muslim world that emphasises ballots not bullets, that draws on an impressive history of nonviolence (check out Amitabh Pal’s recent book on the subject), and that rejects both the authoritarian allies of America and the imagined caliphate of Osama bin Laden.

Neither the U.S. war on terror nor U.S. policies in general toward the Muslim world made the big difference here. Washington has consistently alienated public opinion among Muslims, whether by invading and bombing predominantly Muslim countries, backing unpopular leaders, or continuing to supply economic and military aid to Israel regardless of what it does.

The United States has kept up the attack on Al-Qaeda for the last decade, but it was Muslims themselves that drove the stake through the heart of the terrorist organisation. The Arab Spring happened despite, not because, of 10 years of grinding U.S.-sponsored war in the Muslim world.

So, if 9/11 was not really about us, if Al-Qaeda is even more marginal today than it was a decade ago, if the world today is actually becoming less violent, peace should not be passé. The problem isn’t out there. It’s right here, in the minds of those who believe that the United States is essential to managing these conflicts.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of all places, Melvyn Leffler makes the case that the Binge Militarism following 9/11 was not an aberration but entirely consistent with mainstream U.S. foreign policy up to and including the Obama era:

“The United States’ quest for primacy, its desire to lead the world, its preference for an open door and free markets, its concern with military supremacy, its readiness to act unilaterally when deemed necessary, its eclectic merger of interests and values, its sense of indispensability – all these remained, and remain, unchanged.”

The last 10 years of conflict enhancement and conflict management have been a disaster. Perhaps it’s finally time – and please pardon the hopelessly passé sentiment – to give peace a chance.

*John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

Osama bin Laden didn’t live to see the 10th anniversary of Sep. 11. And his organisation, according to many U.S. government insiders, is on its last legs since his death at the hands of U.S. Special Forces in May. “We’re within reach of strategically defeating Al-Qaeda,” Defence Secretary Leon Panetta recently observed. Others disagree, pointing to the strength of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Both sides are wrong. In fact, Al-Qaeda had lost its battle even before Sep. 11, 2001. For all the pain and suffering that the terrorist attacks caused Americans, Al-Qaeda’s mission wasn’t focused on the United States, but rather on transforming the Muslim world.

The Muslim world, however, wasn’t listening. Only 10 years later, with the turmoil of the Arab Spring still ongoing and the United States slowly and painfully trying to extricate itself from the quagmires in which it got drawn, can we finally begin to understand the larger significance of 9/11.

Al-Qaeda was certainly devoted to rolling back U.S. influence in the Islamic world, particularly in Saudi Arabia. But its primary audience was Muslims. Its radical objective of recreating a global caliphate was part of a debate on how to engage with modernity that has been taking place among Muslims for at least 150 years.

Except for a few marginal groups — the Taliban in Afghanistan and some small non-state actors like Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan — Al- Qaeda lost this debate before Sep. 11. The Muslim world, from conservative Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia to radical Marxists in the Palestinian liberation movement, had definitively embraced nation- states and the international system. The fraction of the Muslim world that embraced violent means to rebuild a world based on Sharia law was getting progressively smaller.

Indeed, the Muslim world not only rejected Al-Qaeda, it embraced the terrorist organisation’s antithesis. Even before the dramatic and non-violent events that ousted authoritarian leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, a remarkable Gandhian tradition had sprung up in the Muslim world — from civil disobedience in Palestine to a largely peaceful transition of power in Indonesia.

Al-Qaeda’s resort to dramatic spectacle was at once a brilliant tactic and a desperate effort to revive its own fortunes. Some portion of the Muslim world did rally around Al-Qaeda for a brief period, but only to protest U.S. occupation policies — first the presence of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia, then in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, Osama bin Laden’s support in the Muslim world fell steadily from 2003 through 2011. The use of suicide bombers to advance Al-Qaeda’s aims, like the last- ditch efforts of the Japanese kamikazes, only underscored the movement’s marginality.

Ironically it has been the United States and its ill-conceived response to 9/11 that has sustained Al-Qaeda’s reputation. Osama bin Laden wanted the United States to respond with a crusade, and the United States obliged him. To the extent that this crusade continues — with, for instance, the Obama administration’s escalation of drone attacks across a broad swath of the Muslim world — the narrow, anti- occupation mission of Al-Qaeda retains a measure of popularity. But its very raison d’etre of challenging the modern international system has failed.

Ten years after 9/11, the world continues to debate about economic and political models. As in the 1930s, global capitalism teeters on the brink. Democracy is looking sclerotic, corrupt, or unrepresentative in too many countries. Even in this chaotic environment, Al-Qaeda has failed to thrive. The Arab Spring protestors in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and elsewhere want more democracy and more connection to the modern world, not less. The prospect of turning the clock back to the seventh century AD appeals to very few Muslims.

By continuing to fight a chimera called radical Islam, the United States helps to sustain it. Yes, there are imams and jihadists who want a global caliphate, but the Muslim world generally ignores them. A decade after 9/11, it’s time not only to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s time to end the war with Al-Qaeda and its minions — a war they lost even before we entered the battlefield.

*John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence.

In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramilitary organisations, we occasionally accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment, we delegate the responsibility to declare and prosecute war to our legislative and executive branches, and we put guns into the hands of the army and the police.

Governments, in other words, kill on our behalf.

This arrangement is a form of social contract, which means that governments are basically contract killers. Some states, like Nazi Germany, use the tremendous power of arms and bureaucracy to transform their territories into slaughterhouses.

Regimes that are merely authoritarian can be equally brutal but display a greater selectivity in their tyranny. In our more decorous democracies, meanwhile, we perfume our conversations with words like “justice” and “national security” to mask the odour of death.

Americans have never been entirely comfortable with this bargain. We have a long tradition of taking the law into our own hands, beginning with our own hallowed revolution. During the Reconstruction period, lynch mobs were a continuation of the Civil War by other means.

More recently, a variety of paramilitary organisations have flourished, from the racist Posse Comitatus chapters that sprang up in the late 1960s to more recent anti-immigrant militias like the Minutemen. Even suburban soccer moms have zealously defended their “right” to bear arms.

On the other side of the spectrum, meanwhile, a broad-based coalition has challenged the government’s “right” to kill citizens through the death penalty. And an equally diverse movement has protested the government’s waging of wars overseas.

It would perhaps be naïve to expect that a government, invested with the exclusive legal power to kill people, would use that power only within the borders of the country that it administrates.

At some point in the distant future, a world government might assume the privilege of the monopoly on legitimate violence and discipline individual countries for their violent outbursts – in the same way that individual governments currently sanction their citizens if they fire off submachine guns in malls.

For the time being, however, we live in a semi-regulated environment in which governments use violence to secure their borders and, occasionally, territories that lie beyond.

States committing acts of violence were much in the news this week, particularly in the Middle East.

Turkish forces have been bombing targets in northern Iraq for a week after a series of attacks by Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey.

Israeli aircraft launched raids in Gaza after coordinated attacks along the Israeli-Egypt border left eight Israelis dead. The Syrian government continues to crack down on protesters, with a death toll passing 2,200 after several months of resistance. And NATO forces bombed selected targets around Tripoli as rebel forces streamed into the Libyan capital for a final assault on Muammar Gaddafi’s stronghold.

Quick test: which of these uses of violence are legitimate?

Some people treat the issue as they would a sports game, always rooting for the home team no matter how dirty they might play. If you support Israel, then Israeli actions are by definition right. Pacifists also have a simple answer: there are no legitimate uses of state violence. But states are unlikely to adopt pacifism unless forced to (as the United States forced Japan after World War II).

Aside from the partisan and the pacifist arguments, those who support the legitimate use of state violence will claim self-defence or promise the prevention of a greater violence like genocide. But these, too, are tricky justifications.

Turkey believes that it is acting in self-defence, but so do the Libyan and Syrian governments. And military intervention to stop genocide – the stated purpose of NATO’s action against Libya – can have mixed motives, and it is not easy to define genocide before the fact.

One popular way of determining the legitimacy of these exercises of violence is to invoke democracy. Democratic governments, as opposed to authoritarian regimes, legitimately use violence because there has been an opportunity for citizens to freely form a social contract with the government.

Turkey and Israel are democratic countries, and thus their use of force is legitimate. Ditto with NATO’s attack on Libyan targets.

Democratic countries use violence in a self-limited way. As political philosopher John Keane writes in ‘Violence and Democracy’, “Ideally conceived, democracies understand themselves as systems of lawful power-sharing, whose actors are attuned to the dangers of violence – and to the mutual benefits of non-violence.” As such, Keane argues, democracies progressively “democratise violence” by subjecting it to rules, procedures, consent.

When democracies use violence overseas, they only do so against undemocratic forces such as tyrants or terrorist groups. Democracies, according to one of the few postulates of international relations, don’t go to war with one another.

This is a common argument, and it surely makes democracies feel more comfortable about their use of violence. The problem with the argument is that it doesn’t square well with the historical record. After all, democratic states have committed gross acts of violence, whether against members of society not deemed full citizens (slaves, suspected terrorists) or against non-combatants that have inadvertently found themselves in a battleground (Hiroshima, Gaza, Afghanistan).

Keane establishes an escape clause for his argument by suggesting that “mature democracies” do not commit such violations. Certainly when it comes to the death penalty, democracies have matured in their practice (each year since 1990, three countries on average have abolished the death penalty). But what about when it comes to the use of force overseas – say, the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Did the United States simply suffer a fit of immaturity?

Rather than view these acts as some unfortunate stage in the evolution of democracy, I prefer to think that democracy consistently attempts to obscure its relationship to violence.

Wars are not put to a vote. Indeed, here in the United States, Congress has been largely shunted to the side when it comes to war, and it generally weighs in only after the fact. The militarism of the Bush administration required a concentration of power in the executive branch and a flouting of international law (such as the Geneva Conventions).

The Obama administration, with its policies on drones and extrajudicial killing, has not relinquished much of that executive power or shown much greater sensitivity to international law.

More troubling, perhaps, is the fact that leaders don’t necessarily hijack the political process in order to use violence. Swayed by fear and nationalism, a democratic society can agree, albeit with significant minority dissent, to a rollback of democracy (such as the USA PATRIOT Act) or a full-scale military invasion (into Afghanistan, for instance).

Violence is not antithetical to democracy, particularly if the democracy aspires to maintain its status as sole global superpower. However, democratic governments do develop different strategies to rationalise the use of violence – at a bureaucratic level (a shift in checks and balances, for instance), with a domestic audience (manipulation of an otherwise free press), and to the international community (in a presumed defence of human rights).

Robert Cover, in a famous essay on law and violence, once wrote that judges sit “atop a pyramid of violence.” The same can be said of presidents who, in the foreign policy sphere, sit on top of a different but equally immense ziggurat.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

Lady Gaga and Alice Walker don’t have much in common. One dresses in red meat; the other doesn’t even eat the stuff. One writes lyrics like “I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your everything as long as it’s free.” The other writes “The Color Purple”.

But they are both cultural celebrities, and the media gravitates to them for comments. And they both have used this celebrity status to weigh in on global issues.

Alice Walker, for instance, was a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, one of the boats that tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. She appeared in the first paragraph of The New York Times story on the second flotilla’s formation, made her case on CNN, parried questions in a Foreign Policy interview, and prompted a disparaging Commentary commentary entitled “The Alice Walker Flotilla”.

Walker used her celebrity status to raise the media profile of the initiative but also to bring her own sensibility to bear on the issue. She compared the blockade-busting to the U.S. civil rights movement and spoke of her “awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the American south in our time of need.”

At 67, Walker decided to put her reputation on the line, as well as her life. Last year, Israeli forces killed nine people after confronting a similar flotilla. This year, the Barack Obama administration preemptively excused any Israeli attack on the flotilla as self-defensive. In reality, though, Israeli forces would have been defending themselves against a truly paper enemy, since the only cargo on the Audacity of Hope were letters of solidarity.

Walker was not able to reach Gaza. The Greeks and Israelis were about as impressed with her celebrity status as the Birmingham police were impressed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s. The Greek government imposed a ban on all ships heading to Gaza from Greek ports. Only one boat, the French Dignity, has managed to leave a Greek port with plans to continue on toward its goal of challenging the blockade. And Alice Walker will live to fight another day.

Lady Gaga has not shied away from important issues either. She has campaigned against the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law and supported marriage equality. And with her project to help out the people of Japan after the March earthquake, she is now going global with her activism. Her “We Pray for Japan” wristbands raised several million dollars (though a Michigan law firm is claiming that the charity is pocketing some of the money).

But on her recent trip to Japan, Lady Gaga went a step further in her activism. She dressed up as a panda and drank Japanese tea on television. This might seem more like performance art or an outtake from a music video rather than a political act. But it was all part of an effort to demonstrate that Japanese food is safe, despite the spike in radioactivity after the meltdown at Fukushima.

Lady Gaga, like Alice Walker, is risking her life, but inadvertently and in service of a government instead of in defiance of one. As economist William Easterly describes the difference between these two modes of celebrity activism – John Lennon the radical versus Bono the darling of the G20 – “There is something inherently noble about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk.”

Easterly has gotten it half right. It’s when celebrities do what comes naturally to them – cuddling up to power – that they become slightly ridiculous. Power and popularity are the lifeblood of celebrity culture. Only if cultural icons go against the grain and risk unpopularity do they engage in an inherently noble enterprise.

Celebrity involvement in global affairs is nothing new. Mark Twain, for instance, spoke out against the genocide in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the century. Helen Keller was a prominent anti-war activist. But it seems that over the past decade, more and more celebrities have gotten involved in global affairs.

It’s almost as if they’ve been instructed, like beauty contest aspirants or rising high school juniors, to add some gravitas to their resumes by choosing an issue to become passionate about: Burma (Woody Harrelson, Jennifer Aniston), Tibet (Richard Gere), Sudan (Mia Farrow, George Clooney), the environment (Leonard DiCaprio), Iraq and Haiti (Sean Penn), Iran (Annette Benning).

Here in Washington, NGOs rack their Rolodexes for celebrities that can boost their issue, as Princess Diana once did for the landmines campaign or Elizabeth Taylor did for AIDS. Soliciting a celebrity is like accessorising your issue: you must select with care. Imagine the cause that has to deal with Lindsay Lohan…

Being high-profile themselves, cultural icons generally gravitate toward big issues. I can’t think of any U.S. celebrities who have devoted their energies to promoting principled engagement with North Korea, rallying against gold mining in El Salvador, sticking up for Roma rights in Europe, or opposing the authoritarianism of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

With some exceptions, celebrities usually reinforce what the media is already interested in. They tend to bandwagon, to use political science lingo, like all the celebs that have flocked to the ONE campaign (including Lohan, but her liability is lessened by the sheer quantity of participating stars).

The exceptions to this bandwagoning rule usually involve U.S. power. It’s one thing for a celebrity to challenge the Burmese, Chinese, and Sudanese governments, but as soon as they say something critical about U.S. policy, they go beyond the pale. Sean Penn travels to Cuba, and suddenly he “hates America“. Danny Glover opposes the U.S. war in Iraq and acquires a #3 ranking in “top 10 most dishonorable Americans”.

Celebrities are their own brand, and most are careful to cultivate that brand. Feeding hungry people, standing against genocide – these efforts are, of course, important and worthwhile. But they are relatively safe, for they ultimately serve to build, rather than undercut, the brand.

The policy elite sometimes adopts a certain snobbishness when it comes to celebrities. It is, after all, deeply disconcerting to see how the media and politicians listen so avidly to these famous instapundits after yawning through another wonkish PowerPoint. But celebrity activism is important for its demonstration effect. People want to be like celebrities, so they might just decide to get involved in global affairs to link arms, virtually, with Angelina Jolie.

Foreign policy, after all, is not just for the mandarins. It’s for all citizens, however famous or obscure. And if more celebrities go out on a limb – like Alice Walker or Sean Penn – then more citizens will feel moved to take unpopular positions themselves.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

They were both responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in causes they believed were righteous. They both occupied top spots on the World’s Most Wanted list. They were both the subject of raids that were years in the making and required extensive intelligence work.

But in all other respects – and particularly in the messages they sent to the international community – the operations against Ratko Mladic and Osama bin Laden couldn’t have been more different. It wasn’t a foreign power, but the Serbian police that conducted the pre-dawn raid to capture the former Bosnian Serb military general who was responsible for the shelling of Sarajevo and the massacres in Srebrenica.

Rather than kill Mladic, the police took him into custody. And instead of dealing with the perpetrator domestically, the Serbian government has announced that it will send him to The Hague to be tried for war crimes – 16 years after his indictment was handed down.

Hollywood is already preparing a movie on the search for bin Laden that will dramatise the targeted assassination of the Al-Qaeda leader and thereby amplify the message that this was a just and worthy enterprise. The capture of Mladic was, by contrast, anti-dramatic. A team of special police showed up in the northern Serbian town of Lazarevo and confronted the old man as he was about to go for a pre- dawn walk. He handed over his two guns and gave up without a struggle.

Mladic and bin Laden stand accused of killing a comparable number of civilians. But Mladic didn’t kill any Americans. So nabbing the war criminal was not a top White House priority, though the CIA spent years tracking the man around former Yugoslavia. Instead it was left to Serbia to choose how diligently to pursue Mladic.

Until 2000 and the ouster of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, the war criminal lived more or less in the open, protected by supporters in high places. It took a while, but eventually those who favor the rule of law gained the upper hand in Belgrade.

The timing of the arrest was perhaps a little too perfect. The European Union had been pressing Serbia to clear away this major obstacle to EU membership, with the head of EU foreign policy Catherine Ashton in Belgrade the very day of the arrest. And the ruling party of Boris Tadic was looking at an uphill battle in the 2012 elections.

Regardless of the motivations and the outside pressures, the Serbian government opted to do the right thing. And as Merdijana Sadovic writes at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the arrest was an opportunity for the Serbian media to take a long hard look at the past: “RTS television showed several documentaries about the crimes committed in Srebrenica in July 1995, the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, and reels of archive footage showing Mladic as an unpredictable and arrogant commander displaying no respect for the UN troops deployed in Bosnia, no empathy for civilians, and no mercy for his enemies.”

The backlash within Serbia has been comparatively muted. On Sunday, several thousand hardcore nationalists, including soccer thugs and neo-Nazis, rallied in Belgrade, but these numbers pale in comparison to earlier demonstrations of ultra-nationalist fervour.

Still, polls from before Mladic’s arrest suggest that opinion was roughly divided between those who approved his arrest (34 percent) and those who regarded him as a hero (40 percent). Tadic was taking a certain political risk by nabbing this half-hero.

Ultra-nationalist Serbs are not the only ones who have rallied behind Mladic. That great Islamophobe Pamela Geller, the force behind the protests around the Park 51 Islamic Center in lower Manhattan, has been trying to rally support for Mladic and his other Serbian colleagues charged with war crimes.

“The crime they are all morally charged with – above and beyond anything legal or technical – is daring to fight back when Muslims attacked,” she recently wrote.

There were, of course, atrocities committed by Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has indicted several of them. But the aggressors were the Bosnian Serbs, backed by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic. Geller is not just wrong, but wrong at the level of Holocaust denial.

The United States has sometimes ignored evil, in Bosnia or in Rwanda. Or the world’s lone superpower has taken the superhero approach and, like Spiderman or Superman, gone after the world’s bad guys to simply do away with them.

Washington targeted rogue leaders (Saddam Hussein), rogue states (North Korea), and just plain rogues (Osama bin Laden). Barack Obama has operated firmly in the tradition of a la carte multilateralism – acting with other countries if we can and acting alone “if we must” – most saliently in the targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden.

It has dispensed with the notion of sovereignty and continued with some of the most secretive aspects of the previous Bush foreign policy. In the comic-book world, only the superhero/superpower can break the rules on behalf of the greater good.

The apprehending of Ratko Mladic offers a different model of behaviour. The Serbs ultimately did the job themselves in adherence to international standards of justice. They did so despite considerable public support for Mladic, misgivings about the balance of the ICTY, and frustration over the EU’s carrot-and-stick tactics.

Imagine how different the situation in South Asia might have been if Pakistan, through a combination of inside determination and outside pressure, had apprehended Osama bin Laden and sent him to The Hague. It might have taken a few more years to orchestrate. But the benefits would have been enormous.

It is not naïve to prefer justice meted out by the rule of law versus justice meted out by the rule of superheroes. In a very pragmatic way, Serbia’s action strengthened respect for legal practices. Witness the upsurge in support for the Serbian policeman who used not a truncheon against a would-be ultranationalist arsonist at Sunday’s protest but simply the words, “So, you came here to demolish my Belgrade?”

The peaceful arrest of Mladic, which signaled that Serbia is ready to become embedded in the web of rules and regulations of the EU, was a rite of passage. In contrast, the United States got its man, but demonstrated that it still hasn’t grown out of its comic-book phase.

Evil rarely comes in arch-villainous packages like The Joker. Evil is systemic, pervasive, and yes, part and parcel of modern U.S. policy from Hiroshima to Iraq. After another Memorial Day of mourning our dead, we should reflect on the Serbian path.

It was not easy for Serbs to confront their own bloody history, grapple with their own legitimate grievances, and address the problem of evil in the form of Ratko Mladic. But this arrest helps move us closer to a world without war than the successful but deeply troubling operation against Osama bin Laden.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

If the Obama administration needed a rogue nation to demonstrate its foreign policy resolve, central casting couldn’t have supplied a better candidate than North Korea. The government in Pyongyang routinely promises to unleash destruction of biblical proportions on its enemies. It has pulled out of international agreements, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has sentenced two U.S. journalists to 12 years of hard labour on the charge of violating its borders. And after conducting two nuclear tests, it now declares itself a nuclear power.

President Barack Obama – conciliatory in his handshake with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his messages to the Muslim world – ca not appear too soft in the foreign policy world. Democratic presidents are notoriously susceptible to conservative charges of being weak on defence. North Korea can now function as the ‘heavy’ that brings out the administration’s ‘tough guy’ side.

To demonstrate its hawkish credentials, the administration has corralled the U.N. Security Council to issue a strong statement in response to North Korea’s April rocket launch and an even stronger resolution condemning the May nuclear test. The U.S. has established a naval interdiction regime around North Korea. It has reaffirmed its promise to South Korea to strike North Korea with nuclear weapons if it attacks the South. It has appointed a new envoy to coordinate financial sanctions against the North and pressure countries to implement them.

These moves are still not enough for congressional hardliners. “I think that the President comes across as lacking resolve,” says Representative Sam Johnson (Republican from Texas). Even more seasoned foreign policy mandarins, like former Defence Secretary William Perry, have urged the administration to consider a military response as part of a series of escalations.

In the foreign policy equivalent of the film ‘Groundhog’s Day’, the Obama administration is facing the same crisis as its predecessors and making the same mistakes. Like the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, the Obama team came into office unprepared to deal with Pyongyang. North Korea was not a foreign policy priority, and all three administrations acted as if they expected the problem could resolve itself.

Obama, at least, did not start out on a hostile footing.

With a general emphasis on the importance of diplomacy, the new administration appeared willing to talk with North Korea. The relatively speedy appointment of Korean hand Stephen Bosworth as special envoy on North Korea and his offer to go to Pyongyang boded well. It turned out, however, that Bosworth’s offer was conditional: he would go to Pyongyang if it did not go ahead with its April rocket launch.

Iran, which launched a satellite only a few months before, merited no such requirement.

Now, with the Six Party Talks in a coma and an escalation dynamic in place, the Obama administration is grasping at straws. It is attempting the same containment policy that failed during the Bush and Clinton years: squeezing North Korea through financial sanctions, a military cordon, and political condemnations.

It has been more successful than past administrations in eliciting Chinese support, in part because China’s patience with its erstwhile ally has frayed to the snapping point. But Washington fails to understand that Beijing’s influence over Pyongyang is limited – and this influence declines the more the U.S. pushes it to be openly critical of Pyongyang.

The Obama administration’s hawkish turn is counterproductive. The naval interdiction, particularly if the U.S. decides to attempt to board North Korean ships on the high seas, could lead to open conflict. The financial sanctions will either prove ineffectual – as North Korea buys what it needs from China and elsewhere – or produce unintended consequences as the country steps up its efforts to acquire hard currency through illegal means.

The Obama administration would be wise to review the record of engagement with North Korea: quickly and dispassionately. Hard-line policies have only made Pyongyang more intransigent. Diplomacy, on the other hand, has achieved concrete results.

The first nuclear crisis with North Korea ended with the visit of high-level envoy Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang. The Clinton administration was sceptical of the strategy; yet Carter knew that the North Korean leadership would respond to a visit by a former U.S. president. Those discussions produced the 1994 Agreed Framework, which froze North Korea’s plutonium program for eight years.

The second major crisis with North Korea, which culminated with the country’s first nuclear test in 2006, ended with bilateral discussions between top negotiator Chris Hill and his North Korean counterparts – producing the Six Party Talks agreements of February 13, 2007, which led to dismantling 70-80 percent of the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Over the last 15 years, North Korea has backtracked on its commitments and hedged its bets. But the U.S., too, has reneged.

We never built the light-water nuclear reactors promised in the Agreed Framework. We removed North Korea formally from the terrorism list, but attached verification requirements that were not part of the original agreement. We promised steps toward diplomatic recognition but have largely failed to take them. Our allies promised heavy fuel oil but did not deliver the full amount.

The Obama administration – and the international community – is understandably appalled at North Korea’s actions. Condemning, sanctioning, and cordoning off the country might be all satisfying and politically expedient tactics. But these responses have not proven effective in the past.

Arms control, on the other hand, has worked with North Korea. To achieve a viable agreement with North Korea, we must negotiate in good faith. And that means being prepared to offer North Korea a political, economic, and security package that we can deliver in exchange for their denuclearisation.

Whether North Korea will ever give up its single bargaining chip is unknown. But the world was undeniably a safer place with North Korea negotiating at the table rather than experimenting at the nuclear test site.

The sooner the Obama administration demonstrates its diplomatic resolve – as opposed to its hawkish resolve – the sooner it can extricate itself from both the mistaken policies of its predecessors and the worsening crisis in Northeast Asia.

Although it concluded more than 60 years ago, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial is still a live issue today – in Japan as in the world at large.

The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes.

The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, can be traced back to the court discussions and decisions of more than half a century ago.

The Tokyo trial lives on not only through its precedents but also in the continuing controversy over its structure, purposes, and verdicts.

“There has continued to be a lively and often contentious debate in Japan about the trial and its implications,” says George Washington University associate professor Mike Mochizuki, who participated in a Mar. 23 seminar in Washington, DC sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA and the Sigur Centre Project on Memory and Reconciliation.

“You can find a couple books on the subject in Tokyo bookstores at any given time. The literature in the English language, in contrast, has been pretty thin until recently,” Mochizuki said.

This debate generally divides into two camps. “One side believes that, despite the various flaws of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, it was essentially the judgment of civilization against Japan,” Mochizuki explains.

“Those on the opposite side of the debate believe that, although there may have been some good intentions on behalf of those who pushed the trial, it was essentially a case of victors’ justice,” Mochizuki said.

The prosecution at the trial, representing the 11 Allied victors, focused on proving that Japanese officials and high-ranking army officers committed widespread war crimes. To prove their case, the prosecution team relied on the doctrine of “command responsibility.”

“The Japanese government ordered the destruction of all military records that appeared incriminating, and this created an enormous difficulty for allied investigators to find evidence of criminal orders,” explains Yuma Totani, assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i.

“So they turned to command responsibility instead,’’ said Totani. ‘’The advantage of this doctrine was that it didn’t require proof of criminal orders. The prosecution had to prove three things: that war crimes were systematic or widespread; the accused knew that troops were committing atrocities; and the accused had power or authority to stop the crimes.”

In a majority decision, the court ruled in favor of the prosecution and convicted the 25 defendants of war crimes. Many Japanese, however, are more familiar with the dissenting opinion of the Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, who acquitted the defendants on all counts.

“Justice Pal’s long, dissenting opinion,” Totani says, “is widely received in Japan as more authoritative than the majority judgment.”

The verdict distinguishes between individual and state responsibility. “One of the purposes of the trial,” argues Yoshinobu Higurashi, professor at Kagoshima University, “was to defend Japan by penalising the militarists.” This judicial sleight of hand allowed the U.S. to then ally with its former adversary during the gathering Cold War.

It worked both ways, adds Higurashi: “Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida considered using the trial as a means for the purification and reconstruction of Japan and its cooperation with the United States.”

But this focus on individual rather than collective guilt also undercut one of the purposes of the trial, namely for Japanese people to acknowledge and take responsibility for what happened during the war.

“The criminality of the individuals allowed the public and the government to accept the judgment of the trials,” explains Higurashi. “The Japanese people felt that they’d been liberated as a result of the trial but didn’t feel individually responsible for the war itself.”

“As for the tribunals’ educational potential,” Totani says, “the proceedings had a minimal effect if at all on Japanese understanding of war responsibility.”

Daqing Yang, an associate professor at George Washington University, agrees that the tribunal evaded the question of state responsibility.

Yang wonders whether “other measures undertaken by occupation authorities – such as disbanding the military or writing the Japanese constitution – imply responsibility on the part of the Japanese state. Maybe the trial did not implant, as [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson intended, a sense of guilt among Japanese people. But these other measures may have accomplished that effect’’.

Some Japanese went further and dismissed the verdicts altogether as being simply justice imposed by the occupation authorities. “The victors protected themselves from any prosecution,” Totani observes. “This was a structural problem, one of the trial’s greatest weaknesses.”

According to this notion of “victors’ justice,” judgments concerning war crimes apply only to the weak and the defeated. “The rules from the Tokyo Trials about military aggression and crimes against peace will only be applied to small countries,” notes Cecil Uyehara, a retired State Department official who worked in the international prosecution section in 1946-47 as a supervisory translator during the trial.

“When Mai Lai occurred in Vietnam, nothing happened. We didn’t apply this justice in Iraq, at Abu Ghraib either,’’ Utehara said.

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial still has an impact in the region. It not only divides scholars, it also divides countries. When, for instance, the Japanese prime minister visits Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the spirits of several war criminals, other countries in the region such as China and South Korea lodge vehement protests.

Discussion of the tribunal can also serve as a springboard for regional reconciliation.

“Revisiting the Tokyo Tribunals would appear at first glance to be a really powerful way to build a new sense of East Asian communality – which all its leaders keep talking about – yet the problem remains that since Tokyo continues to sustain denial about the actual events of the war and obfuscate the question of war responsibility, this cannot happen,” explains historian Alexis Dudden.

Author of ‘Troubled Apologies: Among Japan, Korea, and the United States,’ Dudden said: ‘’Ironically, Japan, which would have the most to gain by taking the lead does the opposite by allowing its new voices of nationalist narration to run with the story, only further isolating Japan from the neighbors with which it shares the most ancient and recent history.”

Japan has entered a season of grand strategising. Government commissions, business associations, leading foundations, and academic working groups are all developing blueprints for a new, 21st-century Japanese role in the world.

It might seem like the worst possible time for Tokyo to think big. The global economic crisis is hitting Japan hard. The current government of Taro Aso is scraping the bottom of public opinion polls.

And with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party poised to suffer a game-changing defeat in the upcoming elections, the domestic political environment is chaotic to say the least.

Michael Green, the Japan chair at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, counter-intuitively believes the time is ripe for such grand strategising on Tokyo’s part.

Citing Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Nixon – who all produced grand strategy in the midst of political turmoil – Green told a panel organised by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Washington, DC on Tuesday: “I am encouraged by Japanese domestic crisis. I think that a good grand strategy will come out of it.”

One of Japan’s leading grand strategists of the liberal internationalist variety is Takashi Inoguchi, a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo who also believes that in crisis lies the opportunity for governments to craft grand strategies.

“I like to argue that at a time of great uncertainty and prevailing chaos, you have to have a certain strategy to solidify your strengths and alleviate your weaknesses,” Inoguchi says. “Japan has many strengths but has not taken advantage of them. Japan also has many weaknesses, but these are getting worse.”

To guide the Japanese government in its strategising, Inoguchi has issued six commandments.

Because of China’s rise, the potential for a modest decline in U.S. capabilities, and unpredictability on the Korean peninsula, he argues that “it is essential to enhance Japan’s self-defense capabilities.”

This enhancement, Inoguchi hastens to add, should take place within a strengthened U.S.-Japan alliance and according to Japan’s constitution, but it should also include support of U.N.-sanctioned military operations.

Further, Tokyo should focus on bolstering its peaceful engagement with the world through participation in peacekeeping operations, humanitarian missions, and development programs.

This active engagement should be accompanied, Inoguchi argues, by an “aggressive legalism” in which Japan plays a strong role in the development and promulgation of rules in multilateral settings.

Finally, Inoguchi maintains, Japan should be an idea leader in the world. And, as a non-member of the nuclear club, it should work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Tsuyoshi Kawasaki, an associate professor at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, offers a realist counterpoint to Inoguchi’s six commandments. Instead of focusing on how to supply international public goods, Japan should instead evaluate its position according to the global distribution of power.

Looking toward 2025, Kawasaki imagines a multipolar system divided into two major blocs. In the status quo bloc are the United States, the European Union, and Japan. In the bloc of rising powers are China, Russia, and India.

“Japan’s overall objective,” Kawasaki argues, “is to help maintain the global balance of power in favor of the status quo and avoid war with rising powers like China.” In this context, Japan should resist any divisions in the status quo camp, particularly in the alliance with the United States, and simultaneously cultivate better relations with India and Russia.

Finding merit in both camps, Green endorses Japan’s quest for greater soft power. Japan routinely tops the surveys of countries most respected in the world – for its global engagement on diplomacy and development as well as for its commitment to multilateralism.

“Japan is a leading nation on environmental technology and improving energy efficiency, and it can leverage that technology,” Green said citing as example cutting-edge soft power.

However, Green adds, “Japan is most influential when it has money and good people behind its ideas. Japan was influential in the Cambodian peace process because it put money behind it and deployed people to implement policy.”

At the same time, Green urges Japan to strengthen its security policy. But instead of focusing on new military capacities, such as a unilateral counterstrike capability, he prefers that Tokyo team up with neighbors such as Australia to address China’s rising military power.

Green was uncomfortable with Japan resigning itself to middle-power status. “I want an ambitious Japan internationally,” he says. Japan’s grand strategy should be a “marriage of an external balance-of-power view with progressive social policy at home.”

Such progressive social policy – more liberal immigration laws, greater empowerment of women – would begin to address Japan’s significant demographic problems. Japan’s population is expected to drop by 20 percent by 2050.

Not everyone puts a strengthened alliance with the U.S. at the heart of Japan’s grand strategy. Gavan McCormack, emeritus professor at Australian National University and author of ‘Client State: Japan in the American Embrace’, believes that Japan should respond to the current economic and environmental crisis in a fundamentally different way.

“I am convinced that the door to serious grappling with these issues will not be opened till Japan gains independence, grows out of its dependent subservience on the United States, renegotiates that relationship, and attains ‘popular sovereignty’ (shuken zaimin, as the constitution puts it),” McCormack says. “Only then will Japan be able to look seriously at its past, its neighbors, and the world.”

Japan’s grand strategy depends a great deal on leadership. “The leadership doesn’t worry about the long term. They worry about corruption and making mishaps in their statements,” Inoguchi observes. “It is very hard to raise the standard of leadership.”

Many Japanese await the next Junichiro Koizumi, the charismatic prime minister from 2001 to 2006. “In terms of leadership styles, Japan has had strong leaders who haven’t talked at all,” Green notes. “There are many younger politicians on both sides of the aisle who are impressive. Their time will come. But no one will be able to do anything without a mandate and more time in office than one year.”

“It won’t necessarily be a Koizumi,” Green concluded. “And remember, Koizumi in the 1990s was not considered a very serious candidate.”

George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001 with the least foreign policy experience and the most modest foreign policy programme of any modern U.S. president.

He was focused on domestic issues. He promised a “compassionate conservatism”. In a 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, he recoiled from the image of an arrogant United States offending the rest of the world. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us,” he said. “If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.”

Eight years later, Bush leaves behind a very different legacy. Foreign policy dominated his two terms, from the global war on terror to the invasion of Iraq, from the collapse of the global economy to the rising concerns over global warming. This approach was neither conservative nor compassionate, but radical in scope and brutal in effect.

And the president who promised to lead a humble nation presided instead over an extraordinary display of national arrogance that, as Bush the candidate predicted, led to unprecedented global unpopularity for the United States.

Bush dates his own transformation to the Sep. 11 attacks that his administration was singularly unsuccessful in preventing and woefully unprepared to address. At the same time, the changes put into place after 2001 were also carefully scripted by a group of neoconservatives, led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had waited many years to obtain power and expand U.S. military dominance.

But this story of a radical rupture in U.S. foreign policy – as a result of either unanticipated tragedy or carefully prepared politics – is only half the story. The arrogance and overreach of the Bush team only partially explains the failures of their foreign policy.

Over its two terms, the Bush administration also maintained certain features of traditional statecraft, although conflicts within the administration diluted, paralysed, or otherwise compromised these attempts at diplomacy. In fact, it was the interplay between these two competing tendencies within the administration that doomed so many of the Bush initiatives. Much of the failure of his foreign policy can be chalked up to the external resistance to the radical initiatives and to the half-hearted commitment internally to the more traditional approaches.

After Sep. 11, for instance, the United States had a legitimate grievance against terrorist organisations such as al Qaeda. But instead of taking treating these acts within the realm of criminal justice, the administration launched a “global war on terror” that had no boundaries or time limits, that had poorly defined targets and goals, that broke international laws and offended key allies, that swelled the ranks of terrorists and dramatically increased the number of terrorist attacks worldwide, and that precipitated conflicts in countries like Iraq that had nothing to do with Sep. 11.

Because of the damage to U.S. reputation and its relations with potential allies in the effort, this radical departure from international practice hamstrung the State Department in its pursuit of more traditional counter-terrorism practices.

Russia is another example of how mixed signals compromised U.S. policy. Cooperation between Washington and Moscow looked promising after the first summit between Bush and Putin in June 2001. The two countries negotiated the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) and took some steps to expand energy cooperation.

But here, too, a more radical U.S. agenda, advanced over the objections of balance-of-power conservatives, undercut the more traditional diplomacy. The Bush administration, pushing ahead with missile defence, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and planned to place portions of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

By pushing NATO expansion to the borders of Russia, the United States also unnecessarily antagonised what should have been an important global partner. As a result, nuclear reductions stalled, disputes over Iran grew sharper, and the gulf widened over both Kosovo and Georgia.

Or consider U.S. policy toward North Korea. Bush came into the White House rejecting the traditional diplomacy of the Bill Clinton administration, which had frozen North Korea’s nuclear programme and nearly negotiated a missile deal as well. Instead, the new administration pursued a containment-plus approach that sought regime change in Pyongyang. Neoconservatives hated Clinton’s “appeasement” of North Korea and couldn’t wait to unravel his 1994 Agreed Framework.

But the Bush strategy failed miserably as North Korea unfroze its programme in 2002 and moved quickly to build the nuclear weapon it tested in 2006. Subsequently and belatedly, the administration changed course and pursued negotiations. Yet hard-line opposition within the administration – and North Korean suspicions of U.S. motives – prevented traditional diplomacy from achieving denuclearisation and an overall peace deal with Pyongyang.

This pattern repeated itself elsewhere. The radical programme for Iraq – invasion, regime change, occupation – made subsequent attempts to build democracy or recreate a functioning economy nearly impossible. Stubborn unilateralism – around global warming, the war in Iraq, blockading Cuba – made it more difficult for the United States to forge multilateral coalitions or strengthen international organisations.

The Bush administration talked a great deal about human rights – in Sudan, Cuba, Iran. But its more radical commitment to torture (Abu Ghraib), extraordinary rendition (to countries like Syria), and illegal detention (Guantanamo) made its declarations ring hollow.

The administration touted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But because of a more radical contempt for using government funds for social needs, overall U.S. foreign aid dropped nearly 10 percent in 2007, and the United States tied for last (with Greece) as the stingiest major industrialised country in terms of aid as a percentage of gross national income.

Bush’s foreign policy legacy is not entirely negative. After some initial tension with China, the administration managed to forge a useful working relationship and helped to decrease the risk of war across the Taiwan Strait. Building on a model of engagement started by the Clinton administration, Bush continued to work with Libya and managed to ink a deal to eliminate the country’s nuclear programme.

But when people look back on the first U.S. administration of the 21st century, the modest diplomatic successes with Libya and across the Taiwan Strait will not loom large. Far more influential will be the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dangerous indifference to global warming, and the gargantuan increases in military spending.

Neither the arrogant attempt to remap the world nor the more modest efforts to repair the damage achieved their intended goals. The United States is weaker today than eight years ago, in hard and soft power, and both experts and the general public give the president very low grades.

George W. Bush, however, prefers the judgment of history to the evaluation of his peers. He is right in one respect at least. Unlike William Harrison or Millard Fillmore, Bush will indeed be remembered. Future generations will remember the Bush years in every dollar of debt to repay, every inch of rising seawater to sandbag, and every terrorist bombing in Kabul and Baghdad to decry.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.