|
Fukuyama: Build New Asian Alliance System-- Make Five-Power Forum Permanent
Long past time we shifted our attention away from Europe toward Asia. Fukuyama has some good ideas here. Excerpt: A five-power forum [comprising the US, Japan, SoKorea, China and Russia, along the lines of the OSCE] would be particularly useful in dealing with several foreseeable problems. The first is a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime. In the short run, such an implosion would cause huge difficulties: coordinating relief efforts, dealing with refugees, paying for reconstruction, and containing any violence that might ensue. Over the long run, the political deck in Northeast Asia would be reshuffled: the rationale for the U.S.-South Korean alliance would disappear, and tensions between a unified Korea and Japan and China could rise for reasons already indicated--all of which would be easier to tackle in a pre-existing multilateral setting. Another issue is Japanese rearmament. Japan will not revise Article 9 this year or the next, but the handwriting is on the wall. Although rearmament should not threaten China and Korea, they will have many incentives to hype a new Japanese threat; China, in particular, has used anti-Japanese sentiment to bolster the communist regime's nationalist credentials. Germany, which rearmed and has been moving down a similar path toward "normalcy," moderated the threat by encasing its sovereignty in several international institutions, including NATO, the EU, and the UN. A Japanese return to normality will seem much less threatening if done within a regional security organization as well as a continuing bilateral relationship with the United States. But the new group's relevance wouldn't stop there. A fully nuclear North Korea, a possible Asian arms race, the implications of Chinese military modernization--these are just a few of the potential problems a five-power body could tackle. Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=53136 |