Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

It is also worth remembering that what we call the Korean War ended as a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil. Had it been strictly a “Korean” war in which only the United States intervened, the side we supported would have been militarily victorious and Korea today would not be divided. If the Korean peninsula ever erupts again into open warfare, China, an active participant in the Korean War, would undoubtedly once again consider intervention. China today actually seems most interested in a perpetuation of the status quo on the Korean peninsula. Its policy is one of “no unification, no war.” Not unlike the eighth- and ninth-century Tang dynasty’s relations with the three Korean kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche, China presently enjoys diplomatic relations with both Koreas and may prefer a structurally divided peninsula. A Korea unable to play its obvious role as a buffer between China, Russia, and Japan would give China a determining influence there. China’s greatest worry has been that the Communist state in the North may collapse due to economic isolation and ideological irrelevance, thereby bringing about a unified, independent, and powerful new actor in northeast Asian politics, potentially the size of and as rich as the former West Germany and defended by a good army, possibly armed with nuclear weapons—not a development the Chinese would necessarily welcome.

For all of these reasons, the United States should cultivate North Korea and become an active supporter of Korean unification. In return for unification, the United States should withdraw its forward-deployed land forces from East Asia but retain its role as a balancer and provider of a “nuclear umbrella.” A unified, economically successful Korea would help ensure a genuine balance of power in East Asia rather than the hegemony of either China, Japan, or the United States. Such a policy would also be a more effective way of instilling prudence in the foreign policy of an emerging China than our current pretense that we have the will, money, or patience to “contain” China.

CHINA: THE STATE

OF THE REVOLUTION

On June 29, 1998, on a state visit to China, President Bill Clinton addressed the students of Beijing University in a speech carried live by television to all parts of China and then responded to their questions. One young man asked, “With a friendly smile, you have set foot on the soil of China. . . . So we are very excited and honored by your presence. What the Chinese people really aspire for is the friendship between China and the United States on the basis of equality. And I know that before your departure from the States, you said that the reason for you to visit China is because China is too important and engagement is better than containment. I’d like to ask you whether this is a kind of commitment you made for your visit, or do you have any other hidden things behind this smile? Do you have any other design to contain China?”¹

This was a good question. Two years earlier the president had mobilized two carrier task forces when China launched a dramatic rocket barrage as part of its “military exercises” in the vicinity of Taiwan. These symbolic gestures were clearly aimed by the People’s Republic at the upcoming Taiwanese presidential elections, and were a response as well to an unprecedented visit by the Taiwanese president to the United States the previous year. The exercises were meant as reminders to both governments that the mainland would never look on Taiwan as anything other than a province of China, and the American response, equally symbolic and crude, was a sobering reminder to the Chinese of the massive military forces the United States maintains and is capable of deploying just off their coast. Ironically though, from the point of view of American policy goals, Clinton’s show of force had the unintended effect of helping the government in Beijing overcome its loss of legitimacy following the collapse of communism in Europe and its repression of its own students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Much as did Japanese aggression in the 1930s, American saber rattling rallied ordinary Chinese behind their government.

Since those aircraft carriers appeared in the waters off Taiwan in the spring of 1996, the United States has signed agreements with Japan enlarging the latter’s military commitments, undercutting its pacifist constitution, and securing its acquiescence in remaining a privileged sanctuary for American military operations. The issue of the territories and waters in East Asia covered by these agreements has been deliberately obscured: the U.S. government insists the area to be “protected” includes the Taiwan Strait, while the Japanese government insists it does not (and neither government has been candid with its citizens about the major ambiguities in the new agreements).