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2 Asian arms race gathers
speed By John Feffer
Diplomats remain upbeat about solving the
nuclear stand-off with North Korea; optimists
envision a peace treaty to replace the armistice
that halted, but failed to formally end, the
Korean War 55 years ago. Some leaders and scholars
are even urging the transformation of the
six-party talks over the Korean nuclear issue,
involving the United States, Japan, China, Russia
and the two Koreas, into a permanent peace
structure in Northeast Asia.
The countries
in the region all seem determined to make nice
right now. Yasuo Fukuda, the new Japanese prime
minister, is considerably more pacific than his
predecessor, the ultra-nationalist Shinzo Abe. The
new South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, despite
his conservative credentials, is committed to
continuing the previous
president's engagement policy with North Korea and
plans to reach out to Japan via his first
post-inaugural state visit.
The party that
won the recent Taiwanese parliamentary elections,
the Kuomintang, wants to rebuild bridges to the
mainland and, when it comes to the Chinese
Communist Party there, mend fences the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party tried to pull down.
Beijing, for its part, is being super-conciliatory
toward practically everyone in this Summer Olympic
Games year.
Despite all this talk of
peace, something else, quite momentous and hardly
noticed, is underway in the region. The real money
in Northeast Asia is going elsewhere. While in the
news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an already
massive regional arms race is threatening to shift
into overdrive.
Since the dawn of the 21st
century, five of the six countries involved in the
six-party talks have increased their military
spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has
maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget
while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every
country in the region is now eagerly investing
staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems
and new offensive capabilities.
The arms
race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace
in the region. It also sustains a growing global
military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is
where four of the world's largest militaries -
those of the United States, China, Russia, and
Japan - confront each other. Together, the
countries participating in the six-party talks
account for approximately 65% of world military
expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly
half the global total.
Here is the real
news that should hit the front pages of papers
today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large
swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global
military-industrial complex lies in Northeast
Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this
potentially destabilizing monster must start with
the militaries that face one another there.
The Japanese reversal The
Northeast Asian arms buildup - a three-tiered
scramble to dominate the seas, beef up air forces
and control the next frontier of space - runs
counter to conventional wisdom.
After all,
isn't Japan still operating under a "peace
constitution"? Hasn't South Korea committed to the
peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula?
Didn't China recently wake up to the virtues of
soft power? And how could North Korea and Russia,
both of which suffered disastrous economic
reversals in the 1990s, have had the wherewithal
to compete in an arms race? As it turns out, these
obstacles have proved little more than speed bumps
on the road to regional hyper-militarism.
Perhaps the most paradoxical participant
in this new arms race is Japan. Its famous peace
constitution has traditionally been one of the few
brakes on arms spending in the region. The country
has long limited its military expenditure to an
informal ceiling of 1% of its overall budget. As
that budget grew, however, so did military
spending. Japan's army is now larger than
Britain's, and the country spends more on its
military than all but four other nations. (China
surpassed Japan in military spending for the first
time in 2006.) Nonetheless, for decades, the
provisions of its peace constitution at least put
limits on the offensive capabilities of the
Japanese military, which is still referred to as
its Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
These days,
however, even the definition of "offensive" is
changing. In 1999, the SDF first used offensive
force when its naval vessels fired on suspected
North Korean spy ships. Less than a decade later,
Japan provides support far from its "defensive"
zone for US wars, including providing fuel to
coalition forces in Afghanistan and transport in
Iraq.
Japan was once incapable of bombing
other countries, largely because its air force
didn't have an in-air refueling capability. Thanks
to Boeing, however, the first KC-767 tanker
aircraft will arrive in Japan this year, providing
government officials, who occasionally assert the
country's right to launch preemptive strikes, with
the means to do so. This is not happy news for
Japan's neighbors, who retain vivid memories of
the 1930s and 1940s, when its military went on an
imperial rampage throughout the region.
Tokyo already has among the best air
forces and naval fighting forces in the world,
trailing only the US. But leading Japanese
officials have displayed an even larger appetite.
Some Japanese politicians are lobbying to amend
the peace constitution or even scrap it entirely,
while sending military spending skyrocketing. To
promote these ideas, they use the thin rationale
that Japan should be participating regularly in
"international peacekeeping missions".
The
Japanese Defense Agency - its Pentagon - which was
upgraded to ministry level last year, wants more
goodies like an aircraft carrier, nuclear-powered
submarines and long-range missiles. A light
aircraft carrier, which the government has coyly
labeled a "destroyer", will be ready in 2009. The
subs and missiles, however, will have to wait. So,
too, will Tokyo's attempt to take a quantum leap
forward in air-fighting capabilities by importing
advanced US F-22 stealth planes. Concerned about
releasing latest-generation technology to the
outside world, Congress scotched this deal at the
last moment in August 2007.
Washington has
been a good deal more accommodating when it comes
to missile defense. Japan has been a far more
enthusiastic supporter of missile defense than any
of America's European allies. In fact, the United
States and Japan are spending billions of dollars
to set up an early-warning-and-response prototype
of such an advanced missile system. Part of this
missile shield is land-based. Last month, Japan
installed its third Patriot Advanced Capability-3
(PAC-3) surface-to-air interceptor and plans on
nine more by 2011. The more ambitious part of the
program, however, is based at sea. In December,
Japan conducted its first sea-based interceptor
test.
With Japan and the US in the lead, a
space race is also on in Northeast Asia. Last
year, China tested its own anti-ballistic missile
system by shooting down one of its old weather
satellites. While at present this is far from an
actual missile-defense system, China effectively
served notice that it is up to the technological
challenge of hitting a bullet with a bullet in
space. Meanwhile, thanks to US pressure, Russia,
too, is upgrading its missile defense systems,
while pouring money into the development of new
missiles that can bypass any putative shield the
US and its allies can develop.
Give me
peace, but not just yet The two most
recent South Korean presidents, Nobel Peace Prize
winner Kim Dae-jung and the left-leaning Roh
Moo-hyun, have been well known for their efforts
to foster reconciliation with North Korea. Less
well known have been their programs to beef up
South Korea's military.
The dark side of
their engagement policy has been its unstated quid
pro quo of satisfying the security concerns of
South Korean hawks by giving the military
everything it wants - and then some. Between 1999
and 2006, South Korean military spending jumped
more than 70%. In 2007, at the launching ceremony
for a new Aegis-equipped destroyer, which brought
South Korea into an elite club of just five
countries with such technology, Roh declared, "At
the present time, Northeast Asia is still in an
arms race, and we cannot just sit back and watch."
By 2020, the South Korean navy wants to build
three more Aegis destroyers at a cost of US$1
billion each.
South Korean hawks are not
only responding to concerns about North Korea, the
traditional threat around which the South has
organized its military. They are concerned about a
declining military commitment from the US, which
has reduced the levels of
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