INSIGHTS INTO THE WORLD / Credibility of U.S. commitment a moot question : World : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri)
INSIGHTS INTO THE WORLD / Credibility of U.S. commitment a moot question
With the Democrats taking both houses of Congress in November and growing public pressure to withdraw American forces from Iraq, the question of U.S. credibility has been raised once again in a central issue in U.S. foreign policy. U.S. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in part to show terrorists and potential nuclear proliferators that the United States would not tolerate their behavior, but would rather reach out and attack them preemptively. As a result of the military quagmire in Iraq, however, Washington has brought about just the opposite result: there are more anti-American terrorists in the Middle East now than at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and rogue state proliferators like Iran and North Korea have been persuaded to accelerate rather than stop their programs. One of the main arguments against a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is that it would signal a dramatic American loss of will, that will only encourage future terrorists and states contemplating nuclear weapons to push ahead, confident that the United States will not or cannot respond.
The issue of credibility is particularly important for U.S. allies like Japan, that depend on the United States for their security. Japan accepted a "peace" Constitution, limited the size of its armed forces, and abjured nuclear weapons on the grounds that the United States would come to its defense, including making use of nuclear weapons if Japan faced nuclear attack. With the rise of China and the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by North Korea, the question of U.S. credibility has become one of great urgency.
In the past, Americans have paid a great price to maintain the credibility of their alliance commitments and military deterrent. Then U.S. President Harry Truman felt he had to respond vigorously to the North Korean attack across the 38th parallel in June 1950 because failure to do so would encourage communist aggression all over the world; the result was the Korean War that killed nearly 50,000 Americans. The United States intervened in Vietnam out of fear of a "domino effect"; if one country were allowed to fall to communism, others would rapidly follow suit. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon prolonged the Vietnam War for another five years after the initial decision to draw down forces in 1970 on the grounds that the United States needed to preserve a "decent interval" between its withdrawal and any potential collapse of South Vietnam, for the sole purpose of maintaining the appearance that the United States was not abandoning its commitments.
But while strategists assume that credibility is critical, it is not clear on the basis of historical experience how quickly it is lost, or how difficult it is to reestablish. Rapid retreat in the face of setbacks clearly set bad precedents that encourage future aggression. Osama bin Laden, for example, is reported to have pointed to the American retreat from Somalia in 1994 after the killing of 18 U.S. soldiers as one reason he believed that the United States could be driven out of the Middle East.
On the other hand, credibility once lost can be regained. Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan withdrew American forces quickly from Lebanon in 1983 after the bombing of the marine barracks, and yet despite that he convinced the Soviet leadership that they would not be able to maintain a long-term military competition with the United States. He did this by confronting Soviet allies in Central America and Afghanistan, as well as through the military buildup that took place during the 1980s. Kissinger's fears that the Soviet Union and other communist powers would take advantage of perceived American weakness after the retreat from Vietnam turned out to be greatly overblown. When the last helicopter left Saigon in 1975, no one anticipated that China would soon embark on a major shift toward a market economy, that the rest of Southeast Asia would experience an economic miracle that would leave Vietnam in the dust, and that the Soviet empire would implode 16 years later.
It oftentimes does not make sense to maintain a costly military commitment simply for the sake of credibility, if the engagement cannot ultimately be won, and if the costs of staying are so high that one cannot use one's forces to meet other commitments. Tactical retreats are periodically necessary if one is to avoid strategic defeat. This is the choice that the United States potentially faces today as it considers its options in Iraq.
The question of U.S. credibility has not been adequately discussed in Japan as it deals with potential threats from North Korea and, in the long run, China. Many Japanese have argued that the U.S. commitment to use its nuclear deterrent against Pyongyang is not believable, and that Japan therefore needs to acquire its own nuclear deterrent in response to the North Korean bomb. It is not at all clear why this is the case, however. During the Cold War, the former Soviet Union deployed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that could potentially be targeted against Japan. The People's Republic of China developed a nuclear arsenal as well, which was capable of reaching targets in Japan. During this period, Japan relied on the U.S. deterrent for its security, and ultimately decided that the American guarantee was adequate. Today, North Korea appears to have developed at most a handful of not-very-powerful nuclear weapons, and yet many observers seem to think that the U.S. deterrent is insufficient to deter a Korean nuclear strike.
To the contrary, there are many reasons why the U.S. deterrent should be more credible today than it was during the Cold War. Once the Soviet Union developed long-range intercontinental missiles, the U.S. homeland became vulnerable to nuclear attack. One of the big questions for strategists back then was whether, in light of this vulnerability, the U.S. deterrent was credible in the face of regional aggression. The United States said that it would respond to a Warsaw Pact attack on Germany with nuclear weapons; but would it really be willing to trade Hamburg or West Berlin for New York or Washington? This was the reason why the United States deployed theater nuclear weapons in both Europe and Asia; this "extended deterrent" would allow the United States to respond in a graduated way to any level of communist aggression.
That extended deterrent is still there in East Asia: the United States could hit North Korea with conventional forces, theater nuclear weapons, and weapons launched from the United States in response to a North Korean attack. In contrast to the situation during the Cold War, however, North Korea cannot attack the U.S. homeland (at least, not now), so that an American retaliatory response would not involve great risks for the United States itself.
One could argue that North Korea is a less rational state than the former Soviet Union; it is more likely to take crazy risks and cannot be deterred. But if that is the case, there is no reason to think that an independent Japanese deterrent will be more effective than an American one. Deterrence assumes a basic rationality on the part of one's opponents, regardless of identity of the one doing the deterring.
The only serious argument that Japan is less safe today than during the Cold War, then, is one concerning American will: the United States has somehow changed, and is less willing to come to Japan's defense in 2007 than it was, say, in 1957 or 1977. Is this in fact the case?
The United States' disastrous involvement in Iraq is a cause for concern. The American military is clearly overstretched by the war there that is soon to enter its fifth year. But the U.S. deterrent in Asia does not depend on large numbers of ground forces; it is maintained by air and naval forces whose capacity has not been diminished by Iraq. Iraq clearly absorbs the time and attention of decision-makers in Washington, who have not been able to focus adequately on East Asia in recent years. But this is a short-term problem; the United States will be out of Iraq in all likelihood sooner rather than later. And in any event, there has been a great strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance, and much more intensive military cooperation, during the period of Junichiro Koizumi's prime ministership.
There remains a longer-term problem of political will, however. During the Cold War, the United States regarded the defense of Japan as part of a larger defensive strategy whose ultimate stake was defense of the United States itself. Today, the United States is engaged in a global "war on terrorism," but it can be argued that the defense of Japan is not part of that struggle, and hence is tangential to American security. And even after a withdrawal from Iraq, there may be an isolationist backlash against costly foreign commitments, as occurred after the Vietnam War.
I would not underestimate the general credibility of American commitments, despite the setbacks in Iraq and the possibility of a U.S. withdrawal from that country. The United States currently takes the threat of nuclear proliferation very seriously, even if there are no obvious solutions to the challenges by Iran and North Korea. The latter is seen as a possible supplier of terrorists, and the precedent of aggression against a fellow democracy undertaken by such a state would be taken extremely seriously, as a threat not just to Japan but to the United States as well. There are many other reasons why Japan might want military capabilities, independent of its judgment about the credibility of U.S. commitments. But the question of whether the United States will stand by its alliance commitments is a serious one that deserves to be debated at length, something that has not yet taken place.
Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy" (Kodansha).
(Jan. 28, 2007)
