American
Military Power in Asia and the Trump Factor
Tim
Shorrock and Tom Engelhardt, December 14, 2016
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
“Did China
ask us if it was OK to… build a massive military complex in the middle of the
South China Sea? I don’t think so!” tweeted President-Elect
Donald Trump after shattering nearly
40 years of U.S.-China diplomatic protocol by having a telephoneconversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
The call – the first official contact between a U.S. president
or president-elect and Taipei since President Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic
recognition from Taiwan to China in the late 1970s – was prime Trump. So was
the tweet, a no-nonsense response to typical Chinese military provocations.
At least, that’s one way to look at it.
Of course,
if China’s president Xi Jinping was a social media blowhard, he could have
easily tweeted back: “Did America ask us if it was OK to… maintain a massive
military complex of more than 100 bases in nearby Japan? I don’t think so!”
Or the
Chinese leader could have tweeted: “Did America ask us if it was OK to… rent
space at the massive U-Tapao military complex in nearby Thailand? I don’t think so!”
Or Xi could
have tweeted: “Did America ask us if it was OK to… use portions of the military
complexes at Antonio Bautista Air Base, Basa Air Base, Fort Magsaysay, Lumbia
Air Base, and Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base in the nearby Philippines? I don’t think so!”
China’s
president might have tweeted: “Did America ask us if it was OK to… deploy
troops to a military complex near Darwin, Australia? I don’t think so!”
Xi could
have even tweeted “Did America ask us if it was OK to… maintain four major Army
facilities in nearby South Korea at
Daegu and Yongsan as well as Camps Red Cloud and Humphreys; not to mention air
bases at Osan and Kunsan and a naval facility at Chinhae? I don’t think so!”
Had he
enough characters to spare, Xi might have mentioned U.S. access to key
facilities in Singapore or its
other Pacific military strongholds like Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan. He could even have mentioned the “massive” U.S.
military presence in Asia – the U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Army Pacific, U.S.
Pacific Air Force, U.S. Marine Forces Pacific, U.S. Special Operations Command
Pacific, and U.S. Forces Korea as well as the U.S. Eighth Army (also in Korea)
– for which there are no Chinese analogs operating in or around the Americas.
Even if Xi Jinping were to counter Trump’s twitter storm with
gale-force tweets of his own, it’s fair to assume that the president-elect
wouldn’t be swayed. American leaders don’t view U.S. power projection through
the lens of those on the receiving end. Meanwhile, the American public remains
mostly ignorant of the ways in which the U.S. garrisons the globe and rings its
rivals with military bases.
Today, Tim
Shorrock, a long-time Asia expert, seeks to do his part in obliterating this
obliviousness with his inaugural TomDispatch article. The
author of Spies for Hire: The
Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, he delves into how the election of Donald Trump
will affect President Obama’s famed “Asian pivot” by teasing apart the tangled
history of U.S. foreign policy in that region, and analyzing what it all means
for the longstanding U.S. military footprint in Japan and South Korea. ~ Nick Turse
Cops of the Pacific?
The US Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump
By Tim Shorrock
The US Military’s Role in Asia in the Age of Trump
By Tim Shorrock
Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and
conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role
of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot
wars: Asia. Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment
when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular
military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial
make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the
president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways
into the distant future.
On November
18th, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s most
conservative prime minister since the Cold War, became the first foreign head
of state to meet with Donald Trump after his surprise election victory. The
stakes for Abe were high. His rightist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which
has run Japan for much of the last 70 years, has been one of America’s most
reliable, consistent, and subservient allies.
Yet during the campaign, Trump humiliated him, as well as the leaders of nearby
South Korea, with bombastic threats to withdraw U.S. forces from both
countries if they didn’t take further steps to defend themselves.
Even more
shocking was Trump’s proposal that Japan and South Korea develop
their own atomic weapons to counter North Korea’s rising power as a nuclear
state. That left the governments of both countries bewildered – particularly Japan, which lost tens
of thousands of lives when the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
incinerated by American atomic bombs in World War II. (Hundreds of Koreans in
Japan died in those attacks as well.) Trump made these statements despite the
LDP’s ardent support over the decades for American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and
Iraq, and the Japanese government’s payment of around $2 billion annually to
maintain a string of U.S. bases, primarily on the island of Okinawa, which host
over 48,000 American soldiers.
Abe
apparently got what he wanted. During an hour-long meeting at Trump Tower on
New York’s Fifth Avenue, he and the president-elect agreed that their military
alliance was stable and capped their discussions with a friendly exchange of golf equipment. “I am convinced Mr.
Trump is a leader in whom I can have great confidence,” Abe declared to a
gaggle of mostly Japanese reporters. The president-elect, he said, had
established the trust “essential for the U.S.-Japanese relationship.”
That
same day, a high-level delegation representing Park Guen-Hye, South Korea’s scandal-ridden president
(who, three weeks later, would be impeached by the
Korean parliament), was also in New York. She and her right-wing Saenuri Party
had been no less disturbed than Abe by the tenor of Trump’s campaign. According to a
recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, South Korea already pays about
$900 million a year, or about 40% of the costs of the network of U.S. bases it
hosts. It also has had a special relationship with the
U.S. military that has no parallel elsewhere. Under the U.S.-Korean Combined
Forces Command, established in 1978, should war ever break out on
the peninsula, an American general will be in charge not just of the 28,000
U.S. personnel permanently stationed there, but of more than half a million
South Korean troops as well.
Unlike Abe,
however, Park’s delegation was shunted off to discuss its concerns with Michael
Flynn, the retired general who will soon be Trump’s national security adviser.
A few days earlier, Park had spoken to Trump for 10 minutes by phone. In that
conversation, the president-elect reportedly stressed his admiration for
Korea’s economic prowess. “I’ve bought a lot of Korean products; they’re
great,” he told Park,according to a
Reuters correspondent in Seoul. Flynn would also reassure the
Koreans that their alliance with Washington was “vital.” So, on the surface at
least, with less than six weeks to go until the Trump era officially begins,
all is well and seemingly normal when it comes to U.S. relations with its
allies in East Asia.
The Earth Shakes in Asia
Despite the
apparent post-election softening of Trump’s positions, however, his victory
continues to cause consternation. In Tokyo, Japanese politicians of every
stripe expressed doubts that the alliance with the U.S. could withstand the
shock of the new American president. When Trump takes power, Shigeru Ishiba, a
former defense minister and powerful figure in the LDP, told foreign reporters,
“Japan can’t just sit back and do what it’s told to do by the United States.”
On the subject of the ties between the two countries, this rare sort of public
dissent was one reason outgoing Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter flew to
Tokyo on December 7th to reaffirm the
alliance as “unlike any other.”
The response
in Seoul has been similar. “Koreans must think seriously about their ability to
defend themselves when the U.S. they have long regarded as a friend and
protector becomes a mere business acquaintance,” the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo editorialized on
November 10th. That was the day after the South Korean military held an unexpected
emergency meeting to “assess the possible impact” of Trump’s presidency and
then established a task force to ensure that alliance agreements were kept in
the years to come.
While fears of a more nationalistic
America coursed through Asia, Trump’s campaign rhetoric sent shudders through
Washington as well. Decades of carefully laid plans by the Pentagon and the
foreign policy establishment for tighter military ties with Japan and South
Korea suddenly seemed threatened. In challenging the importance of such
alliances, Trump could not help but implicitly question the essence of
post-World War II U.S. military dominance in the Pacific, and of the primacy of
Japan and South Korea as forward bases for the Pentagon in the “containment” of
Asia’s rising power, China.
Add one more
thing to all of this: Trump’s threats to withdraw American forces from the
region have undermined President Obama’s “Asian pivot”
strategy, which has sparked the most significant U.S. military buildup in that
region since the end of the Vietnam War. The steady, if slow, shift in military
resources toward Asia remains highly dependent on the base structure that’s
been built up there since World War II and the Korean War and on the nearly
100,000 U.S. personnel now stationed in Japan and Korea. The establishment’s
fear that all of this might begin to unravel has been palpable in Washington
since Trump’s election.
“The
president-elect has said rather curious things about our allies,” lamented John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who is now
president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
which functions as an unofficial Pentagon think tank. Speaking at a November
21st conference on improving cooperation between the U.S. and Korean arms
industries, Hamre obliquely criticized Trump for “implying we’re not in Korea
to help ourselves but just to help Korea.” Not so, he insisted. The new
president needs to understand that “we feel our strategic interests are at risk
in Korea” and that those “require us to stay there. We should be grateful to
have such a strong ally in South Korea.”
As Hamre’s audience well understood, the U.S. bases in the
region have long been considered critical to the Pentagon’s forward-based
military strategy in Asia.
Nailing a Triple Alliance in Place Before Trump Takes Power
In the last
few years, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have used China’s
expanding military might and the never-ending standoff with nuclearizing North
Korea to incorporate Japan and South Korea ever more fully into a vision of an
American-dominated Pacific. One stumbling block has been the deep animosity
between the two countries, given that Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945;
later, during the Korean War, which devastated the peninsula, Japan profited handsomely by supplying U.S. forces
with vehicles and other military supplies. In addition, Korean anger over
Japan’s refusal to apologize for its use of Korean sexual slaves (“comfort
women”) during World War II remains a powerful force to overcome.
Until
recently, the U.S. has had the help of a compliant leader, President Park
Guen-Hye who, just as the Trumpian moment begins, finds herself scrambling for her political life as the first
Korean president to be legally toppled since 1960.
(An interim president, Park’s conservative Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, will
run the government until the Constitutional Court reviews the legality of her impeachment, a
process that could take up to six months.) Despite all these problems, and
while never quite publicly stating the obvious, American officials have been
focused on putting in place a triangular alliance that would transform the
Japanese and South Korean militaries into proxy forces capable of helping
extend U.S. power and influence ever further into Asia (and also, potentially,
elsewhere in the world).
On the eve
of Donald Trump’s election, such arrangements were quickly reaching fruition.
As 2016 draws to an end, the Pentagon appears to be rushing to make Obama’s
Asian pivot and the militarization of the region that goes with it permanent
before Trump can act or, for that matter, the United States can lose its Korean
political allies (which could
happen if Park’s conservative ruling party is replaced in next year’s
elections).
Here are some recent steps taken to cement in place a
U.S.-Japan-South Korean alliance:
On
November 23rd, Japan and South Korea signed their
first military intelligence agreement that, according to the Korean
government-owned Yonhap news agency,
will allow the two countries to “better cope with evolving North Korean missile
and nuclear threats despite historical animosities.” This pact, the General
Security of Military Information Agreement, has long been pushed by the
Pentagon as a way to solidify the three-way alliance. When negotiations between
Tokyo and Seoul broke down in 2012, American officials led the
successful effort to get them back on track. (North Korea, according to its
official news agency, views the
arrangement as a serious threat “pursuant to the U.S. strategic interests to
hold hegemony in Northeast Asia.”)
* The construction of a maritime-based Aegis missile defense
system aimed at China and North Korea that will link Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul.
Not surprisingly, this has provoked deep concerns in Beijing, while sparking a
broad, if localized, South Korean movement opposed to the building of a vast
naval complex considered critical to Korean participation in the system on Jeju
Island. “Missile defense is the core issue of the trilateral alliance,” Choi
Sung-Hee, a South Korean historian and one of the chief organizers of the
protests at the Geongjang naval base, told me last spring when I visited the
island.
* A historic
2015 change in Japan’s national security law that allows the government to send
its “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF) into military operations overseas for the first
time since World War II. In Korea, this is seen as a legal mechanism that paves
the way for Japanese forces to someday be deployed on their peninsula in case a
war with the North looms. As Hankyoreh put it recently,
“Landing troops from the Japanese Self-Defense Force in South Korea to rescue
Japanese citizens is one of Japan’s main goals, and it is a request that Japan
has repeatedly made to South Korea.” Like the intelligence-sharing pact, it’s a
change that has long been sought by the United States.
* An
escalation of military and economic pressure on North Korea, including flights
of U.S. nuclear-armed stealth B-2 bombers into Korean skies and intensified unilateral
economic sanctions against dictator Kim Jong-Un and many of his top military
aides. (The U.N. Security Council, with China’s support, recently endorsed some sanctions
as well.) In addition,
stepped-up military exercises with South Korea have included practicing both
preemptive strikes on the North’s nuclear sites and the “decapitation” of that
country’s leaders. In other words, to use a phrase that previously hadn’t made
it out of the Greater Middle East and North Africa: regime change. Both Abe and
Park have been solidly behind such developments, and Park’s government has
actually been encouraging the Pentagon to do more.
A decision
by the Pentagon to permanently station a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
(THAAD) missile system designed to
counter incoming North Korean ballistic missiles in South Korea over the strong
objections of many Korean citizens and politicians who dispute its value as a
deterrent against the North. Despite its defensive nature, THAAD has also been
denounced by China as a provocation. In November, Beijing made clear that
it would regard the ultimate decision about installing THAAD as a “political
weather vane” in its evaluation of the Trump administration. In recent days,
Japanese defense officials said that they are studying the idea of deploying U.S.
THAAD batteries in Japan as well. Such a move, the Japan Times pointed out, “would enable effective THAAD
operations and information-sharing to be conducted among the three allies.”
It goes
without saying that such developments will greatly benefit the U.S. military
industrial complex. Missile defense is a major boon for American military
contractors and in particular a potential bonanza for Lockheed Martin in
particular, which makesboth the Aegis vessels and the THAAD system. These
industrial projects would also deepen the developing trilateral alliance.
After
signing a $490 million contract with South Korea and Japan to expand their
Aegis missile defense fleets, Lockheed Martin noted, for instance, that the deal “comes on the heels of a successful
joint-missile defense exercise… in which Aegis destroyers from the three
nations shared data while detecting and tracking a simulated missile threat.”
As the military newspaper Stars & Stripes noted, that exercise, which took place last June, was “aimed
as much at fostering cooperation between the two Asian neighbors as preparing
for a possible North Korean attack.”
Of course,
none of this was discussed during the presidential campaign. But one reason
Hillary Clinton received such solid support from Republican foreign policy
establishment hawks like former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was
her staunch support for the Asian pivot and the Pentagon’s stepped-up presence
in the region. Clinton was a sure bet to extend the buildup in Asia, deepen the
trilateral alliance, and continue the current hostile policy toward China and
North Korea. Now, the Pentagon and U.S. military planners can only hope that
Donald Trump, already in a contretemps with
China over receiving phone congratulations forhis election from the president
of Taiwan, does the same.
In the
meantime, there are two other potential holes in this strategy that will
undoubtedly also come into play next year: a years-old, intense, and still
growing popular opposition to
the U.S. Marines’ base in Futenma, Okinawa, the Japanese island that is home to 70%
of U.S. bases in that country, and the massive political protests in
South Korea that have now toppled President Park and could bring an end to her
pro-corporate, pro-U.S. government.
Global Cops and Robbers
When the
Cold War ended in 1991, the rationale for all the American troops then based in
Asia – namely, the communist threat – suddenly became less clear. U.S.
officials, grimly determined not to see them go just because their raison
d’être may have disappeared, began promoting the idea that a permanent presence
in Asia was inevitable for the purposes of “stability.” As historian Chalmers
Johnson chronicled in his 2000 masterpiece, Blowback: The Cost and
Consequences of American Empire, the chief ideologists for this
view were Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who had been an assistant secretary of
defense during the Carter administration, and Armitage, who had held a similar
position at the Pentagon in the Reagan administration. American forces in Asia,
Nye wrote in 1995, ensured “the stability – the oxygen – that has helped
provide for East Asian economic growth.”
More than
two decades later, that vague but all-encompassing code word for American
domination of the Pacific region remains the primary justification for the
Asian pivot. As Pentagon chief Carter
typically put it in a
recent Foreign Affairsarticle: “Every port call, flight hour, exercise, and
operation [in the pivot] has added a stitch to the fabric of the Asia-Pacific’s
stability.” In other words, we’re to remain the cops of the Pacific and the
world.
But as global and Pacific cops, we need help. From the early
post-Cold War years until today, American officials have pressured Japan to
loosen its peace constitution (imposed during the post-World War II U.S.
occupation) and allow its forces to be used abroad in conjunction with the U.S.
military. That campaign finally bore fruit in 2015, when Abe managed to pass
the new security law.
The
precipitating event: the U.S. and Japanese response to the devastating
earthquake and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011. American
military forces in Japan played an instrumental role in the subsequent rescue
operations, dubbed “Operation Tomodachi [friend].” Abe then drove home lessons
from this collaboration to convince the Japanese Diet of the necessity of
passing a new security law that allows Japan to exercise the right of
“collective self-defense” and, for the first time since World War II, allows Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to provide
logistical and other support globally to U.S. and allied foreign forces.
Previously, such support was limited only to areas near Japan.
As a result
of this law, which went into effect in 2016, U.S. and Japanese military forces
have commenced their first joint military drills and, in September, signed a new logistics agreement that allows
Japan’s SDF to supply the U.S. military with fuel and ammunition anywhere in
the world. These steps will further enhance U.S.-Japanese military cooperation.
As usual, in
the run-up to the new legislation, Abe received a political boost from Nye and
Armitage. They got the collaboration ball rolling with a 2012 study for CSIS,
“The US-Japan Alliance: Anchoring Stability in Asia.” Citing the 2011
earthquake and “Operation Tomodachi,” they suggested that Japan’s “prohibition
of collective self-defense” was “an impediment to the bilateral military
alliance.”
The 2011 earthquake, they argued, “demonstrated how our two
forces can maximize our capabilities when necessary.” As a result, a change in
the law opening the way to collective self-defense “would allow our forces to
respond in full cooperation throughout the security spectrum of peacetime,
tension, crisis, and war.” The first step, they added, would be for Japan to
expand its legal system to encourage the protection of “other international
peacekeepers, with force, if necessary” – the exact point of Abe’s 2015 law.
Lo and
behold! On November 21st, three days after Abe’s meeting with Trump, the first
contingent of Japan’s Self Defense Forces “authorized to
use their weapons against enemy combatants while engaged in protection and
rescue operations overseas” left Japan for South Sudan. There, they will take
part in a U.N. peacekeeping mission. Despite the opposition of a
majority of the Japanese public to the move, the dream of an American-led
collective global defense, long held by Nye and Armitage, is now in place.
Abe’s
LDP has also been instrumental in protecting another pillar of Washington’s strategy
in the Pacific: retaining the island of Okinawa as a major forward base for the
U.S. Marines. In the 1990s, following national protests against the rape and
murder of an Okinawan schoolgirl by a Marine, Washington agreed to scale down
its primary base in Futenma and shift the Marines there to Guam. But after
protracted negotiations – and intense pressure exerted by the Bush and then
Obama administrations – the drawdown agreement was linked to the right of the
Marines to build a new base at Henoko Bay in the northern part of Okinawa. Almost the entire
island and its elected officials, from the governor on down, fiercely oppose this idea.
Over the past year, Abe’s national police have been engaged in
daily combat with citizens fighting such an expansion project, a situation that
could well become critical in the early months of a Trump presidency. But so
could the political situation in South Korea.
Tensions Rise
While Japan is home to 45,000 American airmen, soldiers, and
sailors, South Korea is critical to Washington because it houses the only
American ground forces on the Asian mainland. While the primary justification
for them is the hostility of North Korea and its ominous nuclear weapons
program, the U.S. military also considers its forces in Korea important for
“global force projection” elsewhere in Asia.
A recent
paper by the Center for a New American Security, a military think-tank founded
in 2007, explained the view from the Pentagon’s
perspective:
“South Korea
is the only place on the Asian continent with a U.S. military foothold. The
military presence on the peninsula makes South Korea an essential geopolitical
‘beachhead’ for the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. Second, the
U.S.-ROK [Republic of Korea] alliance provides physical territory from which to
manage the North Korea problem… The main purpose of the alliance is to deter
North Korea, but the U.S.-South Korea alliance is a vital tool for both Seoul
and Washington to shape Asia’s developing regional order and their respective
roles within it.”
The catalyst
for all such planning has, of course, been North Korea, which is now seen by
many military analysts as the toughest problem facing Washington in the foreign
sphere. In these years, the Obama administration has refused to engage in any kind of negotiations
with that country and its leader, Kim Jong-Un, unless the North Koreans agreed
in advance to dismantle the nuclear program that they now see as essential to
their national survival.
Since
Obama took office in 2009, the North has, in fact, steadily improved its
military capabilities. It has tested four
nuclear weapons and worked to develop various kinds of missiles. In
response, the Pentagon has steadily ratcheted up its military preparedness, in
part by conducting massive annual joint exercises with the South Korean
military, while from time to time flying nuclear-capable warplanes in Korean
skies.
These steps
have only heightened tensions with the North and neighboring China, while
stirring powerful opposition movements in South Korea. If the intelligence pact
with Japan, long sought by the Pentagon, was indeed the next logical step in
the confrontation with the North, it has been bitterly opposed by some South
Korean opposition lawmakers and much of
the public, some of whom have also taken a strong stand against the THAAD
anti-missile system. Now, with Park’s government teetering, the Pentagon is
suddenly concerned that its favored policies will be derailed – or worse, that
new presidents in both Seoul, where elections are scheduled for December 2017,
and Washington this January could throw the evolving strategic triangular
alliance into chaos.
Those were
undoubtedly the fears that lurked behind John Hamre’s remarks in late October at the Heritage
Foundation, when he cautioned against moves that could spark further
controversy in South Korea. “We have to do something [so] we don’t become an
issue in [Korea’s] next election,” he said. “There’s a strong strain in the
left parties [there] that America is the problem.” (Ironically, Armitage may
have added to that concern on December 6th, when he told a CSIS conference on
the U.S.-South Korean alliance that he now favored a U.S.
policy of regime change in North Korea – something that’s anathema not only to
South Korean leftists but to many centrists as well.)
As December
began, as if to underscore Hamre’s point, USA Today reported
that the growing protests against President Park could shift the
country’s priorities. “The pro-U.S. foreign policy of South Korean President
Park Geun Hye is at risk now that she appears to be on her way out over a
growing corruption scandal.” CNBC similarlypointed out that
the opposition parties pushing for Park’s removal were firmly against the
emplacement of THAAD and suggested that “South Korea’s promise to host advanced
American missile defense technology on its soil may fall apart” following
Park’s political demise.
Aware of the
rising tide of criticism, the Pentagon has doubled down on its insistence on
THAAD. When a reporter from Yonhap asked U.S.
defense officials if Park’s impeachment or resignation could affect the
deployment of the THAAD system, he was told that the plans “remain ongoing, and
the alliance continues to move forward with that plan.”
So much for respecting Korean
democracy.
Alternatives in Asia?
How Donald
Trump will deal with these issues is, of course, an open question. During the
campaign, he raised the possibility of talking directly to Kim Jong-Un as a way
of defusing the nuclear standoff with North Korea – an idea embraced by many Korea specialists and U.S.
officials who have, in the past, dealt with that country. Since winning the
election, however, he and his aides have been silent on the subject. Based on
what the president-elect and his national security chief have reportedly said
to the Japanese and South Korean governments, it’s possible that his
administration may not make any drastic moves soon to upset the three-way
military alliance or undermine U.S. security policies in the region. In the
unpredictable atmosphere of a Trump Tower presidency, however, there is simply
no way yet to know.
Certainly,
Trump’s recent appointments of Flynn as national security adviser and retired
Marine General James Mattis as secretary of defense suggest that
his love for the Pentagon and for tough-guy generals may override any desire to
upset the military apple cart in Asia and reverse policy developments of the
last three decades hurriedly being nailed in place at this very moment. At the
same time, he’s being warned in no uncertain terms by the Obama administration
and former Pentagon officials that North Korea could present his administration with an “explosive”
situation that might, in fact, require a military response.
Donald Trump is certainly an unpredictable figure, but at the
moment it looks like the only genuine opponents of the status quo may be the
democratic opposition movement in South Korea, the anti-base movement in
Okinawa, and what remains of the peace movement in the United States. Unfortunately,
while the Pentagon has been focused on the military situation in Asia, the
American antiwar movement has largely left Asia behind in the decades since the
Vietnam War ended.
As we adjust
to life under Trump, it might be wise to start looking again for alternatives
to our militaristic policies in Asia, for more equitable ties with Japan and
South Korea, and for a shift away from confrontation with North Korea and
China. Perhaps the massive demonstrations and candlelight vigils that have
brought millions of people into the streets of Seoul and other Korean cities,
despite the volatile security situation in East Asia, could show us the way.
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based writer
who was raised in Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. He is the author
of Spies for Hire: The Secret
World of Intelligence Outsourcing.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook.
Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count
the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest
book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower
World.
Copyright 2016 Tim Shorrock
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