Like it or not, America is being cast as the world’s globocop, especially since its mighty display of air power in Yugoslavia. But those who imagine that the U.S. emerged from Kosovo as the unquestioned enforcer of world peace haven’t been watching Asia. Simultaneous crises are erupting in a 4,000-mile arc from South Asia to Taiwan and the Koreas in the east, and U.S. officials are finding the tensions more intractable than ever. Worse, even the Asians are beginning to wonder how ready or able Washington is to quell them.
Take North Korea. Despite threatening Pyongyang with a cutoff of food aid and civilian nuclear projects, Clinton administration officials are not hopeful they can avert the imminent test-firing of a new long-range North Korean missile. The test will send shivers through Tokyo and Seoul, which recently fought a bloody Yellow Sea battle with the North. To the south, neither Taiwan nor China looks ready to heed Washington’s pleas for a stand-down from their war of words since July, when Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui seemed to edge his “renegade province,” as Beijing calls it, toward independence. Last week Chinese authorities appeared to test U.S. resolve by leaking hints that China plans to seize Taiwanese islands or take other military action against Taipei.
Similarly, some Japanese officials now question whether the 100,000 U.S. troops in Asia will become hostages trapped by Chinese or North Korean aggression–especially if the United States is unwilling to risk heavy casualties, as in Kosovo. Two weeks ago, in a triumph of mutual fear over mutual enmity, rivals Japan and South Korea ran joint naval exercises, their first without U.S. participation. The Asians “realize they live in a really ugly neighborhood. Everybody is pursuing increasingly sophisticated hedging strategies against uncertainty,” says Robert Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The first uncertainty is China. And the second is the U.S.”
The Asians may be wise to hedge. The U.S. military posture around the world is badly stretched, thanks to force reductions. Last week Rear Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of the Kitty Hawk carrier group, warned that if China threatens Taiwan “they are going to have the U.S. Navy to deal with.” Perhaps. Clinton sent in carriers in 1996 after Beijing fired missiles toward Taiwan. But such a move might not be so automatic now. “If we had to respond today to events in [both] North Korea and the Taiwan Strait,” one U.S. admiral told NEWSWEEK, “we couldn’t do it.”
Washington remains tied by treaty or law to defending Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. But whereas the United States once touted itself as the “ultimate guarantor” of peace, the balance of power in East Asia “will increasingly be triangular”–a tricky dance of diplomacy between the United States, Japan and China, says former assistant Defense secretary Joseph Nye. Washington also has a newly chastened sense of its ability to shape events. Clinton’s South Asia trip is no longer linked to a demand that the two nations sign a nuclear-test-ban treaty. “We’re not going to sanction either country into doing those things we would like them to do,” a senior U.S. official says. “It’s only a matter of time before [there’s] another” Kashmir crisis–“one that we may not be as successful” in ending. Clinton, at least, looks as though he’s going to try.
