Why the Six Party Talks Should Succeed

Policy Forum Online 05-62A: July 27th, 2005

Why the Six Party Talks Should Succeed

By Peter Van Ness

CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Essay by Peter Van Ness

III. Nautilus invites your responses

III. Notes from Why the Six Party Talks Should Succeed

I. Introduction

Peter Van Ness, visiting fellow at the Contemporary China Centre and lecturer on security in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University as well as author of Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific , wrote: “The outcome of the Six Party Talks is likely to transform the strategic relations of Northeast Asia and beyond. If they are successful and North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in a verifiable way in return for security and economic assistance, there would be an opportunity to begin to build new security institutions in one of the most volatile regions in the world, thereby providing both strategic stability and economic opportunities for all six participant countries to advance trade and investment projects that would benefit them all.”

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Nautilus Institute. Readers should note that Nautilus seeks a diversity of views and opinions on contentious topics in order to identify common ground.

II. Essay by Peter Van Ness

– Why the Six Party Talks Should Succeed
by Peter Van Ness

A successful Six Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear programs can serve the interests of all six participants, including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States. But, contrary to the Bush administration expectations, this would not be, nor could it be, a “coalition of the willing” to force North Korea to agree to the American unilateral demands. In that sense, the Talks are a coalition of the unwilling . There are two conditions that must be met for success: first, the DPRK would have to hold back from actually testing a nuclear device, because once a country tests, it is likely to be much more difficult to convince its leadership to give up its nuclear programs; and, second, both the DPRK and the US would have to come to the resumed Talks prepared to engage in the give and take necessary to achieve a peaceful, negotiated conclusion to the crisis. The other four participants (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan) would have to convince the US and the DPRK to modify their initial negotiating positions sufficiently to achieve agreement. ^[1]

There is much at stake in the Six Party Talks. ^[2] Behind the scenes and away from the newspaper headlines, there is a struggle going on over the future of East Asia. The choice is: a right wing, with-us-or-against-us Bush vision versus a more live-and-let-live, multilateral, ASEAN-type accommodation among diverse governments with different interests and priorities. How this struggle will be played out can best be seen in the Six Party Talks and in the plans for the East Asian Summit, scheduled for December 2005 in Kuala Lumpur. The rise of China, on the one hand, and the militance of the Bush “neoconservative” revolution, on the other, push and pull at the web of ASEAN-based cooperative arrangements in the region. Strategic initiatives from East Asia are being shaped and reshaped by the Sino-US dynamic, the most important bilateral relationship in the region.

Some analysts see this relationship as a contest between hegemons or as a balance of power; but China is not a hegemon (at least not yet) nor is Beijing attempting to balance US power. ^[3] Instead, the US and China offer competing visions of Asia’s future; ^[4] differing understandings about the role of war in resolving disputes among strategic adversaries; and alternative approaches for achieving international stability in the region.

Japan, potentially a major player, remains hesitantly deferential to American leadership, but most other countries in the region want to engage both the US and China. They want no confrontation between China and the US. They value good relations with both, and don’t want to have to choose between the two. At the same time, they are no less concerned about the rise of China than is the United States (as a trade and foreign investment competitor as well as a huge and powerful neighbor), but they, unlike the US, have reached a consensus within ASEAN about how to try to incorporate China into regional groupings (like ASEAN Regional Forum, ASEAN plus One, and ASEAN plus Three) rather than challenge the People’s Republic with military alliances and missile defenses.

A special difficulty in achieving multilateral cooperation in East Asia is that it requires China and Japan to work closely together. There are many problems in that Sino-Japanese bilateral relationship, which is economically very close but politically unsettled. Obvious problems include contemporary disputes about Japan’s World War II past, competing territorial claims, access to vitally important sources of energy, and Chinese opposition to a seat for Japan on the United Nations Security Council. But there is an additional difficulty. Every US administration since the end of World War II, no matter whether Republican or Democrat, has maneuvered one way or another to play China and Japan against each other.

To be clear, no American administration has wanted to see a military conflict between the two Asian powers, but all administrations have worked to prevent any regional alignment led by China and Japan that did not include the US. For example, the US opposed Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir’s proposal for an East Asian Economic Caucus in the early 1990s; Washington rejected the Japanese initiative to establish an Asian Monetary Fund to help deal with the financial crisis of 1997-1998; and the Bush administration is now skeptical at best about the current plans for an East Asian Community.

My objective in this brief comment is to place the Six Party Talks in context. First, I will discuss the strategic implications of the Bush Doctrine for the region; next, China’s new strategy; and, finally, how a successful conclusion to the North Korean nuclear crisis might contribute to the well being of all of the parties involved.

The Bush Doctrine

The United States was generally recognized, for good or ill, as the guarantor of strategic stability in East Asia when George W. Bush became president in January 2001, its predominant role firmly established following the collapse of the Soviet Union ten years earlier. The US maintained 100,000 military personnel in the region, principally in bases in Japan and South Korea, in a military regime built on security commitments to those two countries as well as Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia; and in addition it maintained other security arrangements such as the Taiwan Relations Act regarding the Republic of China government on the island and port facilities in Singapore. ^[5]

Analysts often described the structure of strategic relations in the region as a balance of power system — and some even talked in terms of a “strategic triangle” among the US, China, and Japan — but the fact of overwhelming American power plus the acquiescence of the other major powers in East Asia to the US leadership role confirmed the reality of the American hegemonic position. ^[6] Moreover, when crises emerged in the region, it was the United States that stepped in to respond: for example, confronting North Korea in 1994 over its nuclear-weapons programs; committing two aircraft-carrier battle groups in 1996 to oppose the PRC “missile exercise” threat of force against Taiwan; and brokering the Indonesian acceptance of an Australian-led military intervention in East Timor in 1999.

After initial confrontations with both the People’s Republic of China and North Korea, President Clinton had by the end of his presidency negotiated fairly stable relationships with both Communist powers based on a comprehensive engagement approach. In the case of North Korea, there was even discussion of a possible Clinton visit to the DPRK in the final months of his presidency when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made an unprecedented trip to Pyongyang.

Because George W. Bush, once he took office in January 2001, seemed to make such a point of reversing Clinton policies, commentators characterized his early approach to foreign affairs as “ABC” or “anything but Clinton.” South Korean President Kim Dae Jung was one of the first heads-of-state to face Bush’s determination when he visited the new president in March 2001. Kim Dae Jung, author of the “sunshine policy” for reconciliation with North Korea, who had held an historic summit meeting with the DPRK leader Kim Jong Il just nine months earlier, was told by President Bush about his deep distrust of engaging with North Korea. Bush’s State of the Union address the following January included the famous “axis of evil” charge against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; and the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the press two months later, listed North Korea by name as a potential target for US nuclear attack. The administration’s declaration of its strategic doctrine in September 2002, and most importantly its commitment to so-called preemptive war against “rogue states,” explicitly detailed Washington’s hostile intent. The invasion of Iraq that followed must have confirmed Pyongyang’s worst fears about the dangers of the Bush administration. ^[7]

A key component of the Bush foreign-policy strategy is the concept of “preemptive war.” They call it pre-emption, but in fact it is a commitment to preventive war. The distinction is important. While preemption is a defensive concept, preventive war is clearly an offensive design. The United Nations Charter provides for war-making in self-defense, but only in the face of an imminent threat. The Bush administration explicitly shifted US strategic calculations, as articulated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, from a “threat-based” concept to a “capabilities-based” understanding of threat. Rumsfeld’s argument was that the United States should be prepared to make war against any state with the capabilities to do it serious harm. This would be preventive war, however, not preemption.

Even before the invasion of Iraq, David Hendrickson argued that the Bush Doctrine at its core was “a quest for absolute security” for the United States. ^[8] In his view, unilateralism and a commitment to preventive war were the key elements of this futile search. Hendrickson saw these to be “momentous steps,” standing in “direct antagonism to fundamental values in our political tradition,” which threaten “to wreck an international order that has been patiently built up for 50 years, inviting a fundamental delegitimation of American power.” Hendrickson concluded his essay with a quote from Henry Kissinger that sums up the basic flaw in a search for absolute security: “The desire of one power for absolute security means the absolute insecurity for all the others.”

The invasion of Iraq, for the Bush leadership, became the prototype of this search for absolute security: “regime change” by military force to punish any adversary who dared to stand up to American power. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was intended to show the world that opposition to the Bush grand design was futile. Washington would have its way, through the use of overwhelming military force if necessary, even in the face of opposition by major allies. There is good reason to assume that, faced with this kind of threat, Kim Yong-Il has concluded that a nuclear deterrent is his best hope to stay in power, and as a result, the issue of regime security has become a central issue in the Six Party Talks.

All five of the other participants in the Talks agree that the DPRK must give up its nuclear programs. China is no less committed to achieving a non-nuclear Korea than the US. But the two countries disagree about the issue of regime change. Apparently, debate within the Bush administration continues about whether the first objective for the US in the Talks is regime change or ending the DPRK’s nuclear programs. If it is regime change, China does not agree and will not help. Beijing is opposed to regime change in North Korea. So if the US seriously wants to achieve an agreement to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, it will have to give up regime change and decide to negotiate seriously with the other participants about what sort of package of incentives might convince Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear capability.

China’s New Strategy

Typical of right-wing opinion in the United States has been both an argument that China was the most likely challenger to the U.S. position as unipolar power and that the “China threat” should be a priority concern for the new George W. Bush administration. Although President Bush chose to identify “rogue states” as the main danger in his early speeches on national security, many analysts inferred that the main rogue that the administration had in mind was China. When the classified Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 was leaked to the press, it specifically identified China as one of seven possible targets for nuclear attack by the United States, and a PRC-Taiwan confrontation as one of three likely scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used. ^[9] Administration commitments to both preventive war and missile defense further elevated Chinese concerns. If the US missile defense project were ever to prove successful, for example, it could undermine the PRC’s basic nuclear deterrent, obviously a central security concern. ^[10]

During Bush’s first term as President, official Chinese reaction to the new administration passed through three distinct stages, that might be called: avoidance, collaboration, and strategic response . At first, Chinese policy seemed designed to avoid confrontation with the new president. As the administration set about putting its foreign and security policies in place, Beijing could see that many of the Bush initiatives clashed with PRC interests. But rather than confront the new president directly, the Chinese appeared determined to stand aside from what looked like a hard-line bulldozer, hoping that the early Bush enthusiasms for missile defense and preventive wars against “rogue states” would pass in time.

However, 9/11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks in the United States provided China with an opportunity to find common ground with the new administration-to collaborate in the new “war on terror.” This second stage began almost immediately after the attacks, when President Jiang Zemin telephoned Bush to offer his sympathy and support. In effect, Beijing’s message was: We have terrorists, too (among China’s 10 million Muslims), and we want to work together in the struggle against terrorism. ^[11] When it came to invading Iraq, however, China joined France and Russia in opposition. If the United Nations Security Council had put a second resolution on Iraq to a vote, one that proposed to endorse a U.S.-led invasion, it was unclear whether China would have joined France and Russia in vetoing that resolution, but China clearly opposed the invasion. Nor did China join in other U.S. undertakings such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, the multilateral attempt to interdict shipments of weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery systems. ^[12]

Meanwhile, however, the PRC had begun to take its own initiatives, step by step implementing a full-blown third stage: a strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. The focus was on Asia. The core of the Chinese alternative was a cooperative-security response to Bush’s unilateralist, preventive war strategy. In contrast to the American determination to reshape the world by force, China proposed to build cooperation among different groupings of states to create new international institutions by achieving win-win solutions to common problems.

For Beijing, these initiatives were unprecedented. From dynastic times to the present, China’s leaders had adopted a largely Realist view of the world, and, like the United States, they had preferred to bilateralize their foreign relations: to play “barbarians” off against each other, in the Chinese version, similar to building security ties like “spokes” in a “wheel,” in the U.S. version. Moreover, both in its dynastic past and its Communist present, China had been no more benevolent toward its neighbors or more hesitant to use military force in its international relations than most major powers. ^[13] For China now to found its foreign relations on a multilateral, cooperative-security design was something new and important.

By the mid-1990s, some analysts had begun to identify China as a so-called responsible power, pointing to Beijing’s increasing participation in international institutions like APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and then the World Trade Organization. China won the opportunity to host the Olympics in 2008, and in many different ways, Beijing began to signal that it was aware of its growing stake in the status quo, and was prepared to help in maintaining the strategic stability that was such an important prerequisite for the continued economic prosperity of East Asia. It is estimated that in the twenty-five years following Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of China open policy in 1978, China’s gross domestic product had grown by 337%.

From this beginning emerged the strategic response to the Bush Doctrine. Some called it “China’s new diplomacy,” ^[14] but it was much more than that. Beijing followed the establishment of “ASEAN+3” (yearly meetings between the ten member-countries of ASEAN with China, Japan, and South Korea) with the establishment of “ASEAN+1,” just China and the ASEAN countries. China took the lead in creating the first multilateral institution in Central Asia, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan), ^[15] and worked to demonstrate to its neighbors that both economic and security cooperation could be based on a win-win design.

In the name of “non-traditional” security cooperation to deal with terrorism and other transnational crime, Beijing even normalized its relations with its former adversary India, ^[16] and conducted unprecedented, joint naval exercises with both India and Pakistan in the East China Sea near Shanghai in late 2003. Chinese commentators emphasized the cooperative-security theoretical basis for these initiatives: “China has been a proponent of mutual understanding and trust through international security cooperation and opposed any military alliance directed at any other countries,” and claimed that “China won’t accept any military cooperation that is directed at other countries.” ^[17]

In October 2003, China signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (the first non-ASEAN country to do so), and negotiated a “strategic partnership for peace and prosperity” with the ten ASEAN member-countries. The objective is to build an East Asian Community founded on economic, social, and security cooperation. ^[18] And, finally, Beijing’s offer to host the six-party negotiations to find a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis is the classic example of China’s cooperative-security strategic response to date.

The new Chinese strategy is by no means a pacifist design. For example, there is absolutely no question but that China is seeking to modernize its military capability, and giving very serious thought to exactly what kind of military would be most effective in dealing with the dangers of today’s world, including a potential U.S. threat. ^[19] Paul Godwin notes that “a primary objective of the PLA is to exploit perceived US vulnerabilities,” ^[20] but I think it would be a mistake to understand the Chinese modernization project as predicated on launching an arms race with the United States -at least not yet.

To date, Chinese nuclear doctrine has focused on maintaining a “minimum nuclear deterrent” capable of launching a retaliatory strike after surviving an initial nuclear attack, rather than building huge arsenals of more and more powerful nuclear weapons. ^[21] The Chinese are well aware of the great disparity in military capabilities between China and the United States, as well as the disparity in financial and technological capacities to sustain them. They are also aware of the argument, popular in some circles, that one of the key factors that finally broke the back of the former Soviet Union was its inability to sustain the arms race with the United States. The Chinese are determined not to fall into that kind of trap.

Clearly, China wants to avoid a conflict with the United States. The Japanese journalist Funabashi Yoichi quotes one Chinese think-tank researcher as saying: “We are studying the origin of the US-Soviet Cold War. Why did it happen? Was there no way to prevent it? Some see that a US-China cold war is inevitable, but what can we do to prevent it?” ^[22] China’s strategic response to the Bush Doctrine does not confront the United States, and does not require China’s Asian neighbors to choose between Beijing and Washington, something none of them wants to have to do. ^[23] It is not actually a design for what Realists would call “balancing” the United States, yet it challenges Washington to think and to act in a very different way when trying to resolve differences in international relations.

For a time, Chinese analysts described this strategy as a design for heping jueqi or “peaceful rise” to counter charges that a more powerful China should be seen as a threat. Later, the term customarily used has been “peaceful development.” ^[24] Zheng Bijian, former vice-president of the Central Chinese Communist Party School, says that the “peaceful rise” initiative is prompted by the conviction that “China must seek a peaceful global environment to develop its economy even as it tries to safeguard world peace through development.” ^[25] Building win-win relations with all of its neighbors is a central objective of this strategy. Beijing wants to demonstrate that closer trade, investment, and even security relations with China can be beneficial to its neighbors. The idea of establishing relations with neighboring states in terms of mutually beneficial economic and security ties makes sense for everyone in Asia. If successful, these arrangements would also help to maintain the strategic stability that China needs for its economic modernization.

The Importance of Japan

In 1998, North Korea launched a rocket that flew across Japanese territory, prompting a sense of anxiety about Pyongyang’s intent. The current crisis over nuclear weapons in North Korea has enhanced that sense of threat. Japan is a participant in the Six Party Talks on North Korea, but if those talks should fail and if the DPRK were to become a nuclear-weapons power, there would be increased pressure for Japan to respond. Public debate about nuclear weapons for Japan, which used to be something of a taboo in that constitutionally pacifist country, has already become more open. ^[26]

Any hope for the success of the Six Party Talks and the planned East Asian Community, both cooperative-security initiatives, is dependent upon a firm commitment to multilateral cooperation by all of the major powers in the region. To achieve that, the inevitable bilateral issues in dispute among them must somehow be put aside or meliorated; however, strategic cooperation has become particularly difficult for China and Japan as tensions between the two countries have heightened.

Paradoxically, while Sino-Japanese economic relations have boomed (for example, in 2004, China became Japan’s most important trading partner and bilateral trade for the year increased by 26%), political and strategic ties have deteriorated. In April 2005, anti-Japanese street demonstrations broke out in China, prompted by the official acceptance in Japan of new school textbooks that glossed over Japanese atrocities committed in China during World War II, ^[27] and in part by a petition published online in China opposing Japan’s attempt to become a permanent member of an enlarged United Nations Security Council, that collected millions of signatures.

Relations between the two countries were the worst they had been since the two countries established formal diplomatic relations in 1972. As the Koizumi government chose to link Japan’s security ever closer to relations with the United States, political ties with China became more strained. Prime Minister Koizumi’s insistence on repeatedly visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a memorial that honors the war dead including Japanese leaders convicted of war crimes, despite protests by China, seemed to symbolize their differences. Territorial disputes, competition for vital energy imports, and Japanese concerns about PRC violations of Japanese territorial waters grew in importance in the tense new atmosphere. Beijing’s foremost strategic concern perhaps was Japan’s role in what appeared to be a Bush, second-term design to encircle and to contain an emerging China. ^[28]

Prime Minister Koizumi appears deeply ambivalent about policy toward North Korea and the Six Party Talks. ^[29] At the same time that Koizumi has led Japan to support the global aspirations of the Bush Doctrine (for example, by sending Japanese Self Defense Forces to engage in peace-keeping in Iraq, the first time without United Nations sanction), he has also made two unprecedented trips to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong Il and committed himself to normalizing relations with the DPRK, actions quite contrary to Bush priorities. For Koizumi, resolving the sensitive problem of abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korea years ago has compounded the difficulties in his establishing a workable relationship with Pyongyang.

The Six Party Talks and the Future of East Asia

The outcome of the Six Party Talks is likely to transform the strategic relations of Northeast Asia and beyond. If they are successful and North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in a verifiable way in return for security and economic assistance, there would be an opportunity to begin to build new security institutions in one of the most volatile regions in the world, thereby providing both strategic stability and economic opportunities for all six participant countries to advance trade and investment projects that would benefit them all. ^[30] If, however, the Six Party Talks fail and North Korea tests a nuclear device to place itself decisively among the nuclear-weapons powers of the world, as India and Pakistan did in 1998, then pressure would build on other countries in the region (especially South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan) to consider their own nuclear-weapon option. Finally, if Japan were to “go nuclear,” that would probably mean the end of a viable nuclear nonproliferation regime worldwide.

Despite Bush’s commitment to war as a means of resolving international disputes, the Americans thus far have been convinced by their East Asian colleagues at least to participate in the Six Party Talks. Currently, the United States probably does not have a military option with respect to North Korea because of having overextended itself financially and militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. ^[31] Washington could order an air attack on those facilities in North Korea that it believes to be vital to its nuclear programs, but the US does not now have the forces available to deal with any of Pyongyang’s range of possible reactions to such an attack. South Koreans are adamantly opposed to the military option, especially because of the array of missiles that the DPRK has emplaced on their side of the DMZ with a destructive capacity sufficient to destroy Seoul and nearby military bases without North Korean forces even crossing into South Korean territory.

For the DPRK, given the circumstances in which Kim Jong Il finds himself with the Bush administration, it is possible that nothing the international community could offer would be sufficient for him to agree to give up his nuclear option. He may feel that having been demonized as a member of the “axis of evil” and designated as a target for attack in the US Nuclear Posture Review, he could not trust the Bush leadership to honor any agreements that they might make and that nuclear weapons are his only hope to survive in the face of relentless US hostility. In order to achieve success, the other participants will have to pressure both the US and the DPRK to agree to a compromise. ^[32]

The countries of Southeast Asia have known first hand the horrors of war and the benefits that peace can provide for economic modernization and increased prosperity through cooperation rather than confrontation. As Amitav Acharya has shown, they have worked in ASEAN toward building a “security community” within which inter-state war would become unthinkable. ^[33] They have done this through the Cold War and beyond, and continue to do so despite George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”

China has become convinced that such cooperative-security arrangements can be beneficial in providing a stable environment for its own economic advance. ^[34] Although Beijing insists on making Taiwan an exception in its commitment to peace-making in the region, it actively supports the Six Party Talks and the plans to extend the ASEAN design into an East Asian Community. The East Asian Summit, planned for December 2005, is intended to be a significant step in this direction. This is not just a multilateral alternative to Bush’s unilateralism, but rather an alternative strategy for how to resolve differences between adversaries. ASEAN decided a long time ago that war was not the answer.

The Six Party Talks and the East Asian Community are in certain ways similar to other multilateral institutions in the region like ASEAN, ARF, and APEC, each with a different membership list of countries, and like them, might separately gain recognition as yet another multilateral layer of overlapping memberships in the Asia-Pacific, focused on the common objectives of maintaining strategic stability and enhancing the opportunities for greater prosperity in the region. Working together, the countries of East Asia have an opportunity both to blunt the Bush insistence on making war as a means of resolving international problems and to build instead a security community in their region that also incorporates the United States.

III. Nautilus Invites Your Responses

The Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network invites your responses to this essay. Please send responses to: napsnet-reply@nautilus.org . Responses will be considered for redistribution to the network only if they include the author’s name, affiliation, and explicit consent.

III. Notes from Why the Six Party Talks Should Succeed

¹ These comments are my own conclusions from participating in a conference on the Six Party Talks, co-hosted by Professors Ha Yong-Chool of Seoul National University and Donald C. Hellmann from the University of Washington, Seattle, and held in early June 2005 at Mount Kumgang in North Korea. My thanks to colleagues at the meeting for their important insights. Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations are solely my responsibility.
² For a more extended analysis of the dynamics of the Talks, see Peter Van Ness, “The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Four-Plus-Two — an Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in Mel Gurtov and Peter Van Ness (eds.), Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
³ Peter Van Ness, “Hegemony, Not Anarchy: Why China and Japan Are Not Balancing US Unipolar Power,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific , Vol. 2, No. 1, 2002.
⁴ Peter Van Ness, “China’s Response to the Bush Doctrine,” World Policy Journal , Vol. XXI, No. 4, Winter 2004/05, pp. 38-47.
⁵ Office of International Security Affairs, US Department of Defense, “United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region,” February 1995.
⁶ Van Ness, “Hegemony, Not Anarchy.”
⁷ Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., “Preserving the North Korean Threat,” Arms Control Today , Vol. 31, No. 3 (April 2001).
⁸ David C. Hendrickson, “Toward Universal Empire: The Dangerous Quest for Absolute Security,” World Policy Journal , Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2002), pp. 1-10.
⁹ See Timothy Savage, “Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle: The Bush Nuclear Doctrine in Asia,” in Gurtov and Van Ness (eds.), Confronting the Bush Doctrine .
¹⁰ Li Bin, “China: Weighing the Costs,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 60, No. 2 (March/April, 2004), pp. 21-23. Paul Godwin argues that “assuring a reliable second-strike capability in the shadow of US ballistic missile defense programs is unquestionably China’s highest priority.” Paul H. B. Godwin, “The PLA’s Leap into the 21st Century: Implications for the US,” The Jamestown Foundation, China Brief , vol. 4, No. 9 (April 29, 2004).
¹¹ You Ji, “China’s Post 9/11 Terrorism Strategy,” The Jamestown Foundation, China Brief , vol. 4, No. 8 (April 15, 2004).
¹² “The Proliferation Security Initiative,” Bureau of Nonproliferation, US Department of State, July 28, 2004.
¹³ See, for example, Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Allen S. Whiting, “The Use of Force in Foreign Policy by the People’s Republic of China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , No. 402 (1972), pp. 55-65; and Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1975).
¹⁴ Evan S. Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s New Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs , vol. 82, No. 6 (November-December, 2003), pp. 22-35.
¹⁵ For the Shanghai Cooperation Organization statement on terrorism, see Beijing Review , January 17, 2002, p. 5.
¹⁶ For agreements signed and a chronology of Sino-Indian contacts, April-June 2003, see China Report (New Delhi), vol. 39, No. 4 (October-December 2003). See, also, “The Tiger in Front: A Survey of India and China,” The Economist , March 5, 2005; and Amelia Gentleman, “Wen Ends His Visit with Giants Vowing To Be Cooperative,” International Herald Tribune , April 13, 2005, p. 1.
¹⁷ Xiao Zhou, “China’s Untraditional Thoughts on Security,” Beijing Review , November 27, 2003, pp. 40-41.
¹⁸ “East Asian Community Now Possible,” Beijing Review , October 30, 2003, pp. 40-41. China: An International Journal , published by the East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore, has taken a special interest in China’s relations with ASEAN. In each issue of this new journal, there is a final section in which a chronology of events and documents on the relationship are published.
¹⁹ See David Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects (Berkeley: University of California, 2002).
²⁰ Godwin, “The PLA’s Leap into the 21st Century.” See also William S. Murray III and Robert Antonellis, “China’s Space Program: The Dragon Eyes the Moon (and Us),” Orbis , vol. 47, No. 4 (Fall, 2003), pp. 645-52.
²¹ See Joseph Cirincione et al., Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), pp. 141-164; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, World Missile Chart , (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2005; and Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military .
²² Funabashi Yoichi, “China’s ‘Peaceful Ascendancy,'” December 2003, YaleGlobal Online at yaleglobal.yale.edu
²³ Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?” International Security , vol. 28, No. 3 (Winter, 2003/04), pp.149-64; and David Shambaugh, “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order,” International Security 29:3, Winter 2004/05, pp. 64-99.
²⁴ Chris Buckley, “China Seeks to Reassure on ‘Peaceful Development,'” International Herald Tribune , April 25, 2005.
²⁵ Willy Wo-Lap Lam, “China Aiming for ‘Peaceful Rise,'” CNN.com, February 2, 2004.
²⁶ Mitsuru Kurosawa, “Moving Beyond the Debate on a Nuclear Japan,” The Nonproliferation Review 11:3, Fall-Winter 2004, pp. 110-137.
²⁷ Norimitsu Onishi, “Asia History That Won’t Go Away,” The New York Times , April 18, 2005.
²⁸ Willy Lam, “Beijing’s Alarm Over New ‘US Encirclement Conspiracy,'” Jamestown Foundation, China Brief , Vol. V, Issue 8, April 12, 2005. For insight into Bush’s policy toward Asia in his second term, see “Remarks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Sophia University,” Tokyo, Japan, March 19, 2005, online from US Embassy, Japan.
²⁹ Gavan McCormack, “Koizumi’s Japan in Bush’s World: After 9/11,” online at napsnet-reply@nautilus.org, November 8, 2004.
³⁰ Selig S.Harrison, “Gas and Geopolitics in Northeast Asia: Pipelines, Regional Stability, and the Korean Nuclear Crisis,” World Policy Journal (Winter 2002/03); and Francis Fukuyama, “Re-Envisioning Asia,” Foreign Affairs , Vol. 84, No. 1, January/February 2005, pp. 75-87.
³¹ The Bush administration, which came to office with a record federal budget surplus, is now running record budget deficits to the point that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has warned that “the federal budget is on an unsustainable path.” Jeannine Aversa, “Greenspan Issues New Warning on Deficits,” Associated Press, April 22, 2005. Spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone is expected to pass a total of $300 billion since 2003. “US Senate Approves $81 Billion for Iraq, Afghanistan,” Associated Press, April 22, 2005. On military overextension, see: Ann Scott Tyson, “Two Years Later, Iraq War Drains Military, The Washington Post , March 19, 2005; and Tom Squitieri, “General Says New War Could Strain Military,” USA Today , February 17, 2005.
³² Van Ness, “The North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” in Gurtov and Van Ness (eds.), Confronting the Bush Doctrine .
³³ Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (London: Routledge, 2001).
³⁴ Van Ness, “China’s Response to the Bush Doctrine”

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