Jump directly to page content

New Shifts of Power Balance and Potential Hotspots in the Asia Pacific

BCAS, 15.12.2002

The Asia-Pacific Security Agenda

Topics from the 5th Waldbröl Group Meeting, December 2002

Views expressed here do not reflect official policy.

New Shifts of Power Balance and Potential Hotspots in the Asia Pacific

by François Godement, ifri

In the aftermath of the 9/11 aggression, it seemed that the nexus of strategic confrontation in the Asia-Pacific had suddenly moved westward, to South Asia. The potential destabilisation of several community or religion based states by the magnitude of the Al Qaeda threat, and the force of the counterattack by the antiterrorist coalition, drew attention away from all other possible events. There had always been in the Asia-Pacific a mix of "old" crises simmering since the Cold War (Korean peninsula, Taiwan, potential border issues throughout the region) and "new" tensions, largely based on communitarian, secessionist and social protest trends (the Philippines, the Indonesian periphery, religious and provincially based conflicts in Malaysia and Thailand, ethnic and political clashes in Myanmar). Both were suddenly overshadowed by the magnitude of the terrorist challenge emerging from South Asia, and the scale of the effort launched to counter it.

Fifteen months later, there are indeed some on-going trends that confirm this view. The coalition against terrorism has widened so much as to dampen the strategic competition between China and the United States. America now emphasises the value of stability for the Asia-Pacific and is clearly no longer bent on the agenda for cultural, political and social transformation that had seemed to go hand in hand with globalisation. Conversely, China has, if perhaps more modestly than often suggested, contributed intelligence data in the fight against terrorism, it has perhaps more importantly gone along with the long-term arrival of US and other allies' troops in several Central Asian states and in the Philippines, with a growing logistical and direct military support by Japan in the Indian Ocean for the maritime interdiction force that is stationed there. The recent enquiry by China's ambassador in Brussels to NATO about the function of the alliance is perhaps the clearest indication yet of a shift from loud suspicion to careful prodding of a new co-operation with the Western-based alliance, as it shifts eastward.

Another on-going trend since September 11 is the increasing challenge to Southeast Asia's security of community and religion based conflicts that are now closely interconnected with the Al Qaeda web of terrorist organisations, and the resulting radicalisation of these communities: the crisis of Islam, in particular, was one of the "new" crises gathering force since the 1980s in this multi-religious part if the world. But with a series of events that start with numerous assaults on Christian churches and communities in Indonesia in 1996, continue with the rise of Abu Sayaf in the Philippines and the turn towards violence of several Malaysian groups, and now climax with the Bali terror bombing and the resulting fracture opening up in Indonesia between those who advocate repression and those who deny any guilt of national organisations, a spiral has been created: the future of investment, the proceeds of tourism, the aid relationship with external partners are now all threatened by a terrorist strategy that threatens as much to isolate the region and to cash in on the resulting social crisis as to kill Christians, Westerners and other non-Muslim elements.

How to deal, not only on a short-term police and security perspective, but in a longer term political, developmental and cultural perspective, will be a main problem for the members of the coalition fighting terrorism. The pitfalls are already apparent: economic and social pains growing from the 1997-1998 financial crisis and the symptoms of an ill-planned transition to globalised economics fuel hostility towards the West; the rush to support Internal Security Acts (that differ in fact from country to country in Southeast Asia) is based on the obvious need to combat a ramified terrorist situation, but also risks to further antagonise bona-fide political and social oppositions; as terrorism hurts local economies as much as it hurt the Western air industry, the need for a comprehensive aid policy to support increasingly weakened societies is already apparent.

A strategy that is focusing almost exclusively on the security effort, and that leaves out the larger economic picture, runs the risk of failing to get to the hearts and minds of Southeast Asians. At the overall Asia-Pacific level, another contradiction is also rising: Japan's long term economic and political travails are diminishing the capacity of what the region's main economic locomotive. China's successful bid for an increasing share of the world's exports, based on low cost and incentives for foreign direct investment, can now also count on the appeal of political stability in a country that is no directly challenged by terrorism or communitarian conflict, while Southeast Asia appears to be an increasingly risky proposition for outside investors. An Asia where economic success would go to the more authoritarian based system, while the so-called "third wave" democracies in transition meet increasingly tough economic challenges, is far from inherently stable.

Yet all these challenges, hard to quantify in hard military or security aspects, pale with the sudden return of Asia-Pacific's oldest crisis, North Korea's systemic and behavioural challenge to the world order. That crisis has taken by surprise even seasoned observers of the Korean peninsula, because the web of engagement policies towards Pyongyang, with their accompanying aid policies and other gifts, seemed to create a convincing basis for North Korean leaders to cash in on a process of détente. Two years of president Kim Daejung's sunshine policies, a year and a half of European recognition and increased assistance without any mandatory or even compelling condition made to the North, and Prime minister Koizumi's surprise "historical" move towards the DPRK, essentially separating strategic from other issues, just seemed too good to be neglected by Pyongyang. Certainly, the Bush administration hadn't followed suit, halting instead the political gestures initiated by president Clinton in his last year of office. But neither had Washington reversed course on Pyongyang: fuel deliveries and indirect food aid were continuing, and an increasingly questioned Kedo process was sustained, less as a true energy substitution project than as a channel to keep communication with the North - while delaying into the future the crucial questions about what happened in the past with the plutonium from the Yongbon installation.

This pattern may have been defective and full of twists and turns. The North Koreans didn't really fulfil the expectations from the Sunshine policy agreements with South Korea. They launched several major incidents at sea with South Korean forces - meeting with a surprisingly strong answer from the SK navy, and the retreated into an "apology" process: the political use of apologies was evident immediately afterwards, when Kim Jongil attempted to sweep into the past the issue of kidnappings with Japan. Most strikingly, nothing substantial ever followed from any of the trade or economic agreements that North Korea signed with its partners: somehow, either the impossible conditions placed on those deals or a refusal to follow suit generally killed these plans or made them otherwise unsustainable.

Yet nothing has prepared us for the escalation of the situation that took place during assistant secretary of State James Kelly's visit to Pyongyang, the first resumption of official contacts since the inauguration of the Bush administration. In spite of the "axis of evil" speech, Washington hadn't come forward with new evidence regarding North Korea's nuclear potential. With Mr. Kelly's first material challenge, the North Korean leadership seems to have made a fateful move towards admission, if not of a clear nuclear status, then at least of being a threshold state. By legitimising a completely new nuclear effort, it negated in one stroke several international commitments signed in the past decade: from the Geneva agreement itself to the older North-South denuclearisation agreement. The steps taken since - a defiant if ambiguous press statement regarding the advancement of the country's efforts towards acquiring nuclear weapons, and the recent announcement to restart the Yongbon nuclear plant and thus effectively kill the major condition laid out by the 1994 Geneva agreement, take North Korea into an entirely new ground: that of open acquisition of a nuclear capacity.

That event has rendered void each policy course followed towards North Korea in the past decade. Advocates of engagement policies and assistance towards a transition, even granted that the North Korean leadership seemed to be a singularly slow learner, now see the basis for their strategy proven wrong. It is right after North Korea's biggest breakthrough yet, achieved with Japan, opening the prospect of a political rift among allies that Pyongyang could exploit, that it has decided on a new policy that closes these prospects. But neither is the policy inherited from the Clinton administration validated. The Geneva and Kedo processes, based on step by step mutual concessions, had bogged down into a quasi-paralysis based on the following compromise: so long as the replacement plants didn't move forward to crucial steps, North Korea didn't have to account about the past use of Yongbon plutonium. Perhaps this meant no new energy plant for the country - but the cash was flowing anyway, and since there had been no attempt to build a power grid anyway, it did not seem to matter too much.

North Korea's nuclear status was thus indefinitely postponed, and attention had turned towards the ballistic side of the issue, where Pyongyang seemed to hold a trump card for a very hard sell. Nobody had anticipated that it would attempt to sell the nuclear effort twice - or worse, come out of the negotiation process altogether, as may be the case. And few had anticipated that it would turn the argument of Kedo delay on its head, by arguing that this delay was a material breach of the Geneva agreement, when it had been designed to avoid a head on collision over the issue of accounting for the past.

Pyongyang's basic design is still unclear. Judging from the past record, there are two main possibilities. Kim Jongil and his father have been prowling for strategic opportunities in the past - pleading with Stalin for a war of reunification in 1950 after the Chinese communist victory, and more modestly seizing the USS Pueblo in the weeks following the Amercian retreat from Vietnam in 1975. The prospect of a military confrontation over Iraq, along with a perceived procrastination over putting in place any policy towards their country, may have convinced North Korean leaders that Washington's actions wouldn't be where its words were. Running the gauntlet now, and achieve further nuclear progress, while military and strategic attention are focused on the Middle East, is the kind of risky bet that Pyongyang is known for.

The other possibility, still favoured by many observers, is that Pyongyang's blustering rhetoric and brinkmanship are a blackmailer's way to gain further attention from the world community, and to command a higher price for concessions. In the past, Pyongyang has been singularly adept at moving back from confrontation and essentially focusing its adversaries not on the task of fostering change, but of containing uncontrollable behaviour.

To decide between these two suppositions, we must look at the way Pyongyang hints, ever more clearly, to its quasi-possession of nuclear weapons, but refrains from outright admission. Since two successive US administrations, not to mention its allies, essentially turned their eyes away on the lack of fulfilment of the Geneva agreement on the Yongbon issue, Pyongyang may speculate that a threshold state status or a non-declared status is within reach. Working towards this hypothesis is the huge human and economic cost of a military rollback of North Korea: even if the ultimate victor is not in doubt, the initial wrecked on South Korea is hard to contemplate. This explains the extraordinary moderation of State Department pronouncements, singularly by undersecretary Charles Bolton.

It is a perilous path, however, to suggest nuclear acquisition without actually claiming it. It leaves open any policy response on the part of the United States and its allies in the future; it ignores the possibility that the international community may asphyxiate North Korea by suspending most aid. In the recent past, Kim Daejung's South Korea and Japan, both essentially advocates of engagement, have not hesitated to withdraw essential humanitarian assistance (food and fertilizer). The human toll of this policy would be tragic for the North Korean population, but it may be seen as the only alternative to war.

What is particularly disquieting is the fact that North Korean leaders seem to think more in terms of economic resource substitution via international aid and/or blackmail than in terms of economic transition. The extraordinary delay in implementing any North-South direct communication, the failure of the new "Hong Kong zone" near the Chinese border (which may have due, for once, to Chinese reluctance to see any future industrial competition in that region), the preference for hard cash requests based on strategic assets, don't plead for a repetition of the Chinese scenario of opening up to the outside world. North Korea seems to be looking for an insurance policy against regime change, the premiums for which would be paid by the outside world.

The most perplexing fact is that they may be right. The downside of a war are almost unimaginable, for almost no perceptible benefit, since a shock reunification following a war would be a huge burden on the South and other concerned parties. The most likely result of North Korea's new gamble is that is preparing the scene for a strategic bargaining on a scale unseen before on the Korean peninsula. On the one hand, North Korea might be able claim more benefits up front than it has ever achieved. On the other hand, it is also unthinkable that any future negotiation would, like the Geneva agreement, put off strategic concessions into the future and remain unspecific about a rigorous and concomitant verification process. Here, future treatment of the North Korean issue converges with present treatment of the Iraqi case, but with a major twist: in the case of Iraq, the United States have accepted an international verification phase in the hope that it will only further prove the need for a military campaign. In North Korea's case, even a hard line administration will conclude, together with North Korea's neighbours, that almost any policy option is preferable to war. Iraq's regime and Saddam are a strategic obstacle to any positive change in the Middle East, and the sterilise nearly 15 % of the world's oil reserves. North Korea and Chairman Kim are a failed and recessive regime that seeks to delay its fall and hardly believes in a successful transition, but who without nuclear and ballistic weapons are mostly a threat to themselves, not to others. North Korea's dissuasive uncertainty, carefully preserved and now raised to a new level, are a weapon of the weak in front of a radically adverse environment.

Prof. François Godement is Director of centre asie ifri (Institut français des relations internationales) and Professor at Inalco (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales). He is also co-chair of the European committee of CSCAP (Council for security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific) and a cofounder of CAEC (Council for Asia-Europe cooperation). An outside consultant to the Policy planning staff of the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, he specializes in East Asian international relations and strategy, regional integration and Chinese contemporay affairs.

François Godement is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm (Paris), where he majored in history, and a former postgraduate student at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in contemporary history, has received teaching appointments at the University of California (Irvine) and Inalco. He has also been a consultant to OECD, the European Union and the World Bank.

Prof. Godement writes on Chinese and East Asian strategic and international affairs, issues of integration and conflicts. Among his publications are the following recent books : The New Asian Renaissance (first published in 1993; in English by Routledge, London & New York, 1997) ; The Downsizing of Asia (Routledge, London & New York, 1999); Chine, Japon, ASEAN. Compétition stratégique ou coopération? Ifri-La Documentation française, Paris, 1999 Chine-états-Unis. Entre méfiance et pragmatisme, La Documentation française, Paris, 2001.