The Marmot’s Hole

Outstanding essay over at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, kindly sent by a reader, on U.S. alliances in East Asia. Read it on your own, but here’s a sample:

The looming changes in US policy derive primarily from the Bush administration’s efforts to realign its global military deployments and to move toward a “transformed” military strategy, and from a parallel conviction that the Asia-Pacific region is likely to feature major challenges to US security interests in the coming decade. US strategists argue that American capabilities must focus on the presumed requirements of the post-11 September world, especially operations against terrorist groups and countering the potential threat of WMD proliferation. A new defence policy, to be enshrined in the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), scheduled for completion in February 2006, will postulate the need for far more flexible, rapidly deployable forces capable of surging in response to diverse threats, with a pronounced emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Administration officials have asserted a simultaneous need to augment US regional capabilities to counter potential challenges posed by an ascendant China, directed against Taiwan or elsewhere. Though the end-point of this process of strategic change is far from certain, the broad directions are clear. Some of America’s long-standing bilateral security partnerships, most notably that with South Korea, will matter much less, and at least one, the relationship with Japan, will matter far more.

By disentangling US policy from some of the lingering vestiges of the Cold War, American policymakers seem determined to move toward a very different but as yet unlabelled regional strategic concept. This future approach will entail markedly different roles for US forces, and parallel changes in Washington’s expectations of various regional actors. US defence planners believe that the United States (especially in the face of severe manpower challenges posed by protracted instability in Iraq) cannot allow major American forces to “sit” in locales in the service of military strategies that the administration believes have long outlived their utility. At the same time, there is an explicit expectation that US allies will assent to a reconfigured American security strategy, potentially encompassing US “out of area” operations as well as military contingencies within the Asia-Pacific region. But much remains unspoken about American policy, leaving some US security partners uneasy about the underlying priorities in US regional strategy, and the precise role of long-standing allies in this emergent strategy.