Powerplay

The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia

Victor Cha

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883431
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

A close look at the evolution of American political alliances in Asia and their future While the American alliance system in Asia has been fundamental to the region's security and prosperity for seven decades, today it encounters challenges from the growth of China-based regional organizations. How was the American alliance system originally established in Asia, and is it currently under threat? How are competing security designs being influenced by the United States and China? In Powerplay, Victor Cha draws from theories about alliances, unipolarity, and regime complexity to examine the evolution of the U.S. alliance system and the reasons for its continued importance in Asia and the world.Cha delves into the fears, motivations, and aspirations of the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies as they contemplated alliances with the Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and Japan at the outset of the Cold War. Their choice of a bilateral "hub and spokes" security design for Asia was entirely different from the system created in Europe, but it was essential for its time. Cha argues that the alliance system's innovations in the twenty-first century contribute to its resiliency in the face of China's increasing prominence, and that the task for the world is not to choose between American and Chinese institutions, but to maximize stability and economic progress amid Asia's increasingly complex political landscape.Exploring U.S. bilateral relations in Asia after World War II, Powerplay takes an original look at how global alliances are achieved and maintained.

1

THE PUZZLE

We were huddled in the cramped quarters of the US Secretary of State’s airplane, planning for our next stop in Sydney, Australia. The most coveted space on the Boeing C-32, the Secretary’s suite, comes complete with a foldout couch and flat screen TV. But given the numbers in the room, we were all seated cross-legged on the floor like overgrown boy scouts around a campfire, in shirts and ties, rumpled from the seven-hour flight from Jakarta. We ran through the policy items for the meetings with Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, with each staff person briefing on his or her area of expertise: China, UN reform, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, North Korea. The last issue was the East Asia Summit (EAS). A new organization created largely through Malaysia’s initiative, EAS had gained the interest of many countries in Asia as the first true indigenously created regional institution. The Singaporeans were hosting the next meeting and the Australians and Japanese sorely wanted the United States to join this new grouping, in no small part to prevent the Chinese from dominating the organization. There were benefits to being included in the grouping. Membership would constitute a good representation opportunity in the region for the United States. At the same time, a US commitment to EAS, which still had not evinced a clear agenda or mission as a regionwide institution, would detract from the work of the other regional body, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (APEC). Moreover, it would be hard to convince domestic staff within the White House to send the president halfway around the world to participate in a “talk shop” among leaders with no clear agenda. In the run-up to the Sydney visit, the Australians were pushing for the United States to begin informal participation in EAS as a non-member by sending the Secretary (rather than the president) to the next meeting. The State Department was leaning in this direction, but APEC proponents within the US government were against transmitting any positive signals on the issue during this trip. In the midst of the discussion, the Secretary asked one of her staff for his opinion. He sighed, and then stated in a deadpan tone, “Madame Secretary, EAS is a bad idea whose time has come.”

The US official’s point was that the United States could no longer eschew the new emerging architecture in Asia. Our bilateral alliance system, with treaty allies and security partners in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore, was still the most significant security architecture in the region. But the United States needed to consider transacting business in Asia through these new multilateral groupings, even if they were somewhat duplicative of work done through our exclusive relationships with the governments in the region. The United States eventually did join the East Asia Summit in 2010, but not without some trepidation.¹ Validating the new organization through US membership despite its absence of a clear agenda or mission was troubling to some who insisted that our bilateral alliances were still the most important feature of the region’s architectural design.

These experiences in government led me to wonder why it has taken so long for Asia to develop inclusive political and security structures. Asia is home to the fastest growing economies in the world today. Over the next five years, 50 percent of global growth outside of the United States will emanate from this region.² Though many of its governments are democracies, many are not; yet this variety has not precluded high levels of regional economic, social, and political interaction. Nevertheless, multilateral structures in Asia, like EAS, emerged only in 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II. By contrast, multilateralism took hold much earlier in Europe with the creation of NATO in 1949. Rather than multilateralism, the most distinctive architecture in Asia through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first has been the US bilateral alliance system—an exclusive rather than inclusive security architecture. Why did security in Asia over the last six decades evolve this way? Why has it taken so long for Asia to develop viable multilateral security institutions? And why did the United States, the preeminent power in the region after the defeat of Japan in 1945, choose to build bilateral security institutions in Asia rather than the multilateral ones it forged in Europe?

Some might respond to these questions by noting that Washington has been supportive of Asian regionalism, including organizations like APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But when compared with NATO and the European Union, it is fairly evident that: (1) Europe is more organized as a “region” than Asia; and (2) while the United States transacts business all over the world both through exclusive one-to-one arrangements and through more inclusive regional groupings, on balance, Europe has seen more multilateralism while Asia has seen more bilateralism.

The reason for Asia’s unusual security evolution and the slow growth of multilateralism can be found in the origins of the American alliance system in Asia. In this book, I argue that a confluence of historical, political, and strategic circumstances led the United States to build a unique “hub and spokes” security network in Asia. “Hub and spokes” is defined as a set of tightly held and exclusive, one-to-one bilateral partnerships with countries in the region. Like a bicycle wheel, each of these allies and partners constituted “spokes” connected with a central hub (the United States), but with few connections between the spokes. This bilateral method of organizing Asia stood in stark contrast to Europe, where security was organized in a more elaborately designed multilateral framework (i.e., NATO). The rationale for this institutional design decision is what I term the “powerplay” in US grand strategy—the creation of these alliances to exert considerable political, military, and economic control over key countries in East Asia. In Taiwan and Korea, the bilateral alliances were created to bolster staunchly anti-communist regimes as a bulwark against Soviet influence. But an equally important, if unstated, rationale for Washington’s creation of deep bilateral alliances was to constrain anti-communist leaders, embroiled in civil wars and with questionable domestic political legitimacy, from going “rogue” and recklessly pulling the United States into unwanted conflicts in Asia when the primary strategic concern was Europe. In Japan, the powerplay rationale was to create a tight, exclusive hold over the defeated imperial power to ensure that the region’s one major power would evolve in a direction that suited US interests.

The powerplay strategy had a deep and enduring impact on the region’s security evolution. Once created, the Cold War hub and spokes bilateral alliance system afforded the United States an informal empire of sorts in Asia. Whether this was the American intention is not the subject of this book. Rather, I seek to trace how and why the United States chose this bilateral institutional design for Asia, and to demonstrate why it has endured. While democratic values may have something to do with the longevity of the US alliance system, the fact is that democracy did not come to these East Asian players (with the exception of Japan) for decades after the creation of the hub and spokes system. Bilateral alliances, however, afforded the United States a powerplay advantage—it exercised near-total control over foreign and domestic affairs of its allies, and it created an asymmetry of power that rendered inconceivable counterbalancing by these smaller countries, on their own or in concert with others. Not only did the United States dominate the power matrix, it also dominated the network matrix. That is, as the central “hub” power among disparate “spokes” as allies, the United States made itself the indispensable power to all in Asia. Undeniably, things are changing today, but the legacies of this bilateral tradition are hard to shake. Indeed, the US-based alliance system remains the single most important security and political institution in Asia amid a plethora of recent and new regional groupings.

I argue that the powerplay rationale informed American intentions vis-à-vis the creation of the United States-Republic of Korea (ROK) (1953), the United States-Republic of China (ROC) (1954), and the United States-Japan (1951) alliances. The United States established mutual defense treaties with the ROK and ROC not only to contain communism, but also to stop the Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek governments from provoking conflicts with North Korea and mainland China (respectively) that might embroil the United States in a larger unwanted war on the Asian mainland when the primary theater of concern for US national security was Western Europe. The desire to use the alliance as a form of “constraint” obviated the need for a larger multilateral security alliance framework in Asia. Washington best exercised control bilaterally. To have tried to exercise similar control in a larger multilateral regional framework would have diluted US material and political influence. In Europe, by contrast, the United States had less concern about small aggressive states entrapping it in a larger war with the Soviet Union. This reduced the obstacles to designing a multilateral security organization.

The powerplay rationale for Japan was slightly different from that informing the US-Korea and US-Taiwan alliances. The concern was not that Japan would entrap the United States in another war; instead, it was the concern that Japan’s postwar recovery would occur absent American input. The United States understood that Japan was the only candidate for great power status in the region after World War II. Washington initially attempted to embed Japan in a regional framework of maritime Asian countries for its postwar recovery, just as they were doing with Germany and its neighbors in Europe. But when this failed, the United States reverted to a tight bilateral alliance with Japan. The powerplay rationale for the alliance therefore was to “win Japan” as an ally—that is, to exercise decisive influence over Japan’s transformation from a defeated wartime power into a status quo power supportive of American interests in the region. This was accomplished through the creation of bilateral security dependence within the alliance. This powerplay rationale had the effect of isolating Japan from the rest of Asia, making historical reconciliation with its neighbors difficult. Japan’s lack of postwar integration with the region in turn made multilateralism difficult. The evolution of security in Asia was therefore different from that in Europe. Alliances were not just instruments of containment against the adversary; they were also instruments of control over the allies. The supplementary powerplay rationale both reduced the need for and made the prospects of organizing a NATO-like multilateral organization in Asia less likely.

The powerplay argument has implications for the recent work on multilateralism and the uses of power. It challenges the prevailing causal proposition in the literature put forward by liberal institutionalists and foreign policy internationalists that embedding a state in multilateral structures and rules is the best way to control power and dampen unilateralist inclinations.³ Many have argued, for example, that embedding China in multilateral rules and institutions offers the most prudent path for managing the country’s rise. Others have argued that America’s unilateralist temptations and tendencies in an age of unipolarity are best moderated through allowing itself to be bound by the multilateral institutions and rules that it helped to create as part of the postwar order. While I do not disagree with these propositions, I show that they are highly conditional ones. Under different circumstances, the same goals of controlling others and amplifying one’s own power might sometimes be more efficiently attained through bilateral rather than multilateral ties. I show that power asymmetries “select” for the type of institutional designs that work best for control. If small powers try to control a great power, then multilateralism works. But if great powers seek control over smaller ones, multilateralism is less efficient and far messier, requiring consultation and patience amid the vagaries of committee-based decision-making. Bilateral control is more effective and efficient.

The powerplay argument also has relevance for work in international relations on hierarchy. This body of scholarship acknowledges that world politics is composed of sovereign states operating under anarchy, but that in practice there is an informal hierarchical order, and in some cases an informal empire, that has always coexisted with sovereignty and anarchy. This order is based on the power of the strong states over the weak, but it is also based on the “micropolitics” of those relationships—that is, notions of the legitimacy of that order in the subjective mind-sets of both ruling powers and the subject states.⁴ In this regard, the US hub and spokes system in Asia established at the beginning of the Cold War very much resembled an informal empire. Of course, all states were sovereign in this alliance framework, but the United States strode atop massive power gaps with its allies that basically muted any counterbalancing tendencies.⁵ Moreover, this US-imposed order was more or less considered legitimate by all participating governments. Alliance elements like host-nation support (i.e., Korean and Japanese government funding of the costs of US bases in their countries); status of forces agreements (i.e., negotiated agreements that protect the rights of US military operating in the host country); US-imposed restrictions on allied countries’ military arms acquisitions (i.e., Taiwan); the US military’s right to put down “domestic disturbances” in a country without that country’s consent (i.e., Japan until 1960); and even the exercise of US control over an allied government’s sovereign right to use force (i.e., in Korea) all reflected and reinforced the micropolitics of an informal empire. Indeed, for political leaders in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, closeness to the United States was an important metric of domestic political legitimacy. These are all telltale signs of an informal empire.

The powerplay argument also has relevance for the literature on network theory. One of the primary propositions of this body of literature is that an actor’s power and influence are relational rather than just material. The unit of analysis is not material power capabilities, but the position one occupies in a network. Well-situated or strategically placed actors in any organization or network can exert disproportionate influence derivative of their position.⁶ In this regard, the powerplay argument demonstrates how US hegemony and power was not sim...