Clinton's Maiden Voyage Aims to Reassure Asian Allies

Written by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 15 (IPS) - Hillary Clinton's maiden voyage overseas as secretary of state is designed above all to reassure Washington's key East Asian allies and China of the U.S.'s enduring interests in the region and commitment to its stability, according to regional experts here.

The week-long trip, which begins Sunday and will take her to Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and China, in that order, is also being billed as a ”listening tour” that, in addition to re-establishing Asia a top priority in U.S. foreign policy after eight years in which the Greater Middle East took centre-stage, will permit her to hear firsthand the chief concerns of the region's most powerful players.

From her side, the emphasis will likely be on the eagerness of the new administration of President Barack Obama to cooperate on a range of global issues, beginning in particular with the ongoing financial crisis, but also featuring non-proliferation, regional security, energy, and climate change.

In a preview of her trip at the Asia Society in New York Friday, Clinton stressed Washington's need for ”strong partners across the Pacific” to tackle these challenges.

Officials here hope that North Korea, which has ratcheted up tensions with South Korea in recent weeks, will not try to upstage her tour by testing a long-range ballistic missile as intelligence reports have indicated it may be preparing to do. Clinton's remarks Friday appeared designed in part to reassure Pyongyang of Washington's readiness to fully normalise relations if it follows through on its pledge to abandon its nuclear weapons programme.

”We are hopeful that some of the behaviour we have seen coming from North Korea in the last few weeks is not a precursor of any action that would up the ante, or threaten the stability and peace and security of the neighbours in the region,” she noted.

”If North Korea is genuinely prepared to completely and verifiably eliminate their nuclear weapons programme, the Obama administration will be willing to normalise bilateral relations, replace the peninsula's longstanding armistice agreements with a permanent peace treaty, and assist in meeting the energy and other economic needs of the North Korean people,” she added.

Clinton's trip will take place despite the fact that the administration has only just begun to staff key Asia policy-making positions throughout the government, including the State Department. As a result, one of her main guides to the region will be a Bush holdover, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Christopher Hill, instead of his likely successor, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Kurt Campbell, who has yet to be officially nominated for the post.

But Clinton was reportedly eager to make the trip, in part to claim Asia as a key region of the world where she could quickly establish her own pre-eminence in an administration brimming with foreign policy specialists anxious to stake out their own territory.

Obama has already named special presidential envoys on Arab-Israel relations and on Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Vice President Joe Biden's appearance at the head of a high-powered U.S. delegation to the annual European security conference in Munich last week suggested to many observers here that he intends to be the president's top adviser on trans-Atlantic relations.

”Some people have criticised her going so early when, not only is the full East Asia team not yet in place, but many of the important policy issues have not yet been hashed out within the administration,” said Alan Romberg, a veteran Asia hand and former senior State Department official now with the Henry L. Stimson Centre, a foreign policy think tank here.

”I would disagree with that criticism, however, because it's so important that the new administration convey both early on and forcefully how important it considers the region to be to us,” he added. ”This trip helps make that clear.”

In addition to Hill, whose tenure as assistant secretary was dominated virtually exclusively by North Korea and the Six-Party Talks (which include Russia, as well as the two Koreas, Japan, and China), Clinton will be accompanied by Todd Stern, the administration's new special envoy on climate change, a tangible sign, as Clinton herself said Friday, of ”the seriousness we feel about dealing with this urgent threat”.

China's commitment to joining any post-Kyoto international agreement to curb emissions of greenhouse gases is considered critical to Washington's own participation. Top energy and environment officials in the new administration reportedly believe that cooperation on climate change can be one of the most fruitful ways of deepening the relationship between the two countries, which are also the world's two biggest greenhouse emitters by far. In her remarks Friday, Clinton said the issue will also be high on the agenda at her other three destinations as well.

Of course, uppermost on the minds of her hosts, including in China, will be the ongoing financial crisis which, while it originated in the United States, has hit the region particularly hard.

On that issue, Clinton will likely be prepared both to acknowledge Washington's responsibility for the situation and stress its willingness to cooperate closely in addressing the crisis, especially in fighting protectionist impulses, and to consider major reforms in multilateral economic agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that would provide Asian and other emerging markets with much greater influence than they currently enjoy.

Aside from those general assurances, however, Clinton is unlikely to say much as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who is already well known in Asian capitals, and National Economic Council chairman Lawrence Summers hold the reins on U.S. economic policy.

The highlight of Clinton's trip to Japan, whose politically weak government is reportedly both apprehensive about the new administration and gratified that she chose Tokyo as her first destination, is expected to be her meeting with the families of Japanese citizens who were abducted to North Korea in the 1970s and '80s.

Pyongyang's refusal to provide details about the fate of those who have not been returned has alienated Japan from the Six-Party Process. Moreover, Washington's decision in October to remove North Korea from its terrorism list despite Tokyo's pleas that it not do so until Pyongyang provided an accounting was widely considered a serious betrayal of the alliance.

Given the sensitivity of the issue in Japan, how Clinton, who reportedly insisted on meeting with the families in spite of Hill's reservations, handles the issue both poses a major challenge to her diplomatic skills and has potentially significant implications for the future of the Six-Party process.

”I think it's absolutely essential that Tokyo and Washington present a united message to Pyongyang that this is not a relationship they can cleave...,” noted Sheila Smith, a Japan scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Given the recent rise in North-South tensions, Pyongyang is also likely to top the strategic agenda during Clinton's visit to Seoul, although the fate of the 2007 Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which remains unratified by both countries' legislatures, may also figure high in bilateral talks. Most analysts here believe there is little chance that the new Congress will act on the accord, and there is some concern that Clinton could unduly raise expectations.

Expectations in Jakarta are reportedly particularly high given the fact that Obama's stepfather was Indonesian and he spent part of his childhood there. As the world's most populous Muslim nation whose democratically elected government has cooperated closely with U.S. counter-terrorism efforts and has called for a major upgrade in bilateral ties, Indonesia has long been seen as a natural destination for any top U.S. policymaker on a tour of the region.

That it is also an energy producer that also retains some of the world's biggest - albeit increasingly threatened - rainforests makes it especially compelling for a trip that will make climate change a central theme.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

ASIA: Public Pressure to Shape U.S. Military Presence in Region

By Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON, Oct 4 — A combination of public opposition and financial instability is creating pressures on the United States and its Asian allies to scale down the number of U.S. bases and military personnel in North-east Asia, analysts of Asian politics and U.S. foreign policy say.

But populist concerns about the heavy U.S. presence in South Korea and Japan are growing at a time when the U.S. military is adding to its forward-bases posture in Asia and the Japanese government is contemplating a deeper military alliance with the United States in the wake of the Sep. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

"A definite policy challenge is looming for the governments of the region and the United States," said Kent Calder, director of a programme on U.S.-Japan relations at Princeton University and the special adviser to two recent U.S. ambassadors to Japan, Walter Mondale and Tom Foley.

"Political competition is leading to pressure against U.S. bases across a whole range of countries," he pointed out.

"There sure is a major rise of populism which demands reduction of the U.S. forward deployment in Japan," added Yoichi Kato, a staff writer for the 'Asahi Shimbun' newspaper and a visiting research fellow at the National Defense University and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"The role of the (U.S.-Japan) alliance in terms of defending Japan is being questioned seriously," he added.

Calder and Kato spoke here at a forum on Asian populism and U.S. bases sponsored by Japan's Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

The forum took place two days after the Department of Defense issued its Quadrennial Defense Review, a blueprint for U.S. military policy and strategy. This year's report, issued in the wake of the Sep. 11 attacks, emphasises "homeland defense" of the U.S. mainland and the need to maintain a "forward deterrent posture" in critical areas around the world, including East Asia.

Without specifically naming China, the report makes it clear the U.S. military intends to maintain enough forces in Asia to keep the Chinese military in check. "Asia is gradually emerging as a region susceptible to large-scale military competition," the report stated.

"The possibility exists that a military competitor with a formidable resource base will emerge in the region. The East Asian littoral — from the Bay of Bengal to the Sea of Japan — represents a particularly challenging area," the report explained.

To prepare for this challenge, the review calls for the U.S. Navy to increase its aircraft carrier battlegroup presence in the Western Pacific and study "options for homeporting an additional three to four surface combatants and guided cruise missile submarines".

That will add to the already formidable firepower at the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka, Japan, which is home to the Kitty Hawk, the only aircraft carrier based outside the United States.

The United States, the review stated, "will maintain its critical bases in Western Europe and North-east Asia, which may also serve the additional role of hubs for power projection in future contingencies in other areas of the world".

In Asia, those forward bases include Kadena in Okinawa, the largest U.S. Air Force base outside the U.S. mainland, and, on Okinawa, one of the U.S. Marine's three rapid deployment forces. Key U.S. bases in South Korea include U.S. Army installations.

In Europe, U.S. forces dropped from 250,000 during the Cold War to less than 85,000 today. But in Asia, the U.S. military structure is "largely unchanged", noted Calder, and in the last five years, "they've become even more forward-deployed".

But during that time, changes in the politics of host countries and economic shifts in Asia have altered the strategic landscape, creating the pressures that Calder and Kato now see as threatening to the U.S. military position in Asia.

In Korea, the relaxation of tensions between North and South as well as negotiations between the North and the U.S. government have substantially "reduced the (South) Korean sense of threat," Calder said.

That, combined with much greater political freedoms in a country once dominated by authoritarian military governments, is likely to make Koreans "less inhibited" and "more confrontational" about the impact of U.S. bases, he said.

That can already be seen in local movements opposed to a U.S. bombing range and the recent renegotiation of the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States.

Similarly, political discourse in Japan has widened as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has lost political status with the public, culminating with the election by the party's rank-and-file of reformist Junichiro Koizumi over party elder Ryutaro Hashimoto.

Japan's faltering economy and corruption have also eroded the reputation of the once-powerful Ministry of Finance. On a local level, that has opened political space for NGOs in cities outside of Okinawa to criticise the presence of bases near their cities, Calder said.

In Okinawa itself, where nearly 75 percent of U.S. bases in Japan are located, anti-base sentiment remains high despite the attention paid by U.S. policymakers to the problems on the island. In 1995, the rape of a Okinawan girl by a U.S. marine triggered a crisis in U.S.-Japan relations. Six years later, the situation remains so volatile that another rape "would drive the alliance to almost collapse", said Kato.

In addition, Japan's deep financial problems and its decade-long recession are raising serious doubts among the Japanese public about the five billion U.S. dollars Japan spends every year to support the U.S. bases.

As the Japanese government embarks on a structural reform programme that is shifting economic policy from one of distribution of wealth to one of distribution of burdens, Kato said, "it's only natural that people ask 'are we getting a fair deal or being taken advantage of?' "

The LDP, which includes factions that are anti- and pro- American, is in a serious dilemma, Kato said, because of a "lack of plausible rationale for the alliance".

During the Cold War, a close military alliance could be justified by threats posed by the Soviet Union or North Korea. But with the Soviet Union long gone and dangers in Korea fading, the new threat has been explained as transnational terrorism. "But against (terrorism), the existing alliance is of little use," he said.

In Kato's view, Tokyo "should come out and say China is the reason for the alliance. If they talk of China as a potential target, people would really support it."

On the other hand, recent newspaper polls about the Koizumi government's decision to deploy Japanese Self-Defense Forces in support of U.S. military action in response to the Sep. 11 attacks show a deep ambivalence about Japan becoming a military power.

An 'Asahi' poll shows that 42 percent support the new mission, while 46 percent are opposed. Said Kato: "This shows the people are not yet sure Japan should take on a military role." (IPS/2001)