Roh probably got it right when he described the conversation as “an important turning point.” Coming on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War (page 27), the meeting of the two longtime adversaries showed Moscow’s readiness to make a new–and rich–friend at the risk of snubbing its North Korean ally. “This is sort of on the scale of Sadat flying to Jerusalem to meet with Begin in 1977,” said a Western diplomat in Seoul. It was also an occasion for re-examining security arrangements all over Asia. In Tokyo last week, the Japanese Defense Ministry issued a report on Soviet forces in the region, downgrading their potential threat. Calls for a more limited American presence in the Far East were increasing–with potential impact on Japan’s own military posture. The meeting was sure to unsettle Chinese leaders who earlier had been hinting at further rapprochement with Moscow. And in Seoul, officials were scrambling for new arguments to justify the continued presence of U.S. troops in South Korea.
A larger debate was sure to grow in Washington over the burden inherited by the United States as a legacy of North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South. Until then, Korea had been regarded as strategically irrelevant–“a huge and expensive Army headache,” wrote historian Clay Blair. But that calculation changed in a single frantic week: an angry Harry Truman decided the United States must intevene–hastily establishing a precedent that made the U.S. military the chief peace-keeping force among the coastal nations of East Asia. But now, in an era of budgetary constraint, even Sen. John Warner, a solidly Republican former Navy secretary, says: “It is time to reassess the magnitude of the commitments we have. " “The U. S. is acting as if it’s still the 1960s,” says Democrat Tim Wirth of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re stuck.”
If Washington seems mired, Moscow is not. Under Gorbachev, the Soviets have removed ships and much of their air regiment from Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay, reduced their steaming time in Asian waters and have promised to remove 120,000 of the soldiers it has stationed in the Soviet Far East and Vietnam. Last week the Japanese Defense Ministry predicted that by the mid-199Os the number of submarines deployed by the Soviet Pacific fleet will fall by 31 percent while the fleet’s main surface ships–including a battle cruiser and two aircraft carriers–will be cut back by 21 percent. Meanwhile, Moscow officials have hinted that a diplomatic solution may be found to the problem of Japan’s northern islands, still occupied by the Soviets 45 years after World War II. That dispute, which may be resolved during Gorbachev’s planned trip to Tokyo next year, is a major barrier to increased Soviet-Japanese trade.
Gorbachev’s meeting with Roh marked the most important Soviet gesture to date. Moscow and Seoul haven’t had diplomatic relations since 1904, it was the Soviet Union that installed North Korean president Kim Il Sung and bankrolled his war to annex the South. But now Gorbachev had an unspoken message for Kim: trade and investment come ahead of obligations to old allies. Despite the Soviet leader’s attempt to downplay the meeting, the Pyongyang government exploded in inarticulate rage. South Korean security forces went on special alert against the possibility that North Korea might avenge itself with a terrorist or military assault. Any impulse toward violence, however, had to be tempered by the realization that North Korea is nearly alone; no Soviet or Chinese leader is willing to subsidize battles against the capitalists to the South.
While the discussion resulted in no substantive agreements, both sides got pretty much what they wanted. Gorbachev came away with the expectation of a huge increase in South Korean trade–as well as the possibility of up to $10 billion in new investments and loans. And Roh managed to give the North a strong dose of that the meeting would shock North Korea into reassessing its isolation, forcing Pyongyang to enter into serious negotiations on reducing cross-border hostilities. South Korean officials were intrigued by a proposal North Korea made two weeks ago calling for three-way (including the United States) arms-control talks aimed at replacing the 1953 armistice with a “nonaggression pact” and reducing the armies on each side of the demilitarized zone to less than 100,000 men. While South Korean officials scoffed at the North’s earlier proposals, they are inclined to explore the latest offer now that Pyongyang is under pressure.
Roh was eager to offset declining American support. Seeking to head off congressional budget cutters, U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced early this year that Washington would remove as many as 7,000 of the 43,500 U.S. servicemen stationed in South Korea over the next three years. But Roh’s meeting with Gorbachev will set off calls for a more rapid U.S. withdrawal: Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers has sponsored legislation to withdraw 10,000 troops by 1992. Other influential voices are calling for a nearly total pullout. A recent paper by the dovish Center for Defense Information insists that South Korean forces are fully capable of defeating an invasion from the North–and that the U.S. presence is actually an obstacle to any peace treaty.
A similar debate is brewing over the 68,000 U.S. servicemen deployed for the defense of Japan–either in Japan itself, in the Pacific and Hawaii or aboard ships at sea. Cheney pledged limited cuts in those forces, too, but as the Japanese-owned magazine Business Tokyo noted recently, a cut of almost 10 percent could be made by rebasing an aircraft carrier and its 6,000 crew members from Hawaii to San Francisco–but at no material reduction in cost. The primary mission in Japan is to protect against the Soviets–but even the Japanese admit that role is verging on obsolescence. Pentagon officials now hint at another mission: preventing the Japanese from becoming too militarily independent. Paul Wolfowitz, under secretary of Defense for policy, puts it bluntly: “If Japan spent 5 percent of its GNP on defense [it currently spends about 1 percent], they would build up the kind of defense establishment that they don’t want to have, we don’t want to see them have, and nobody else in the region wants them to have.” But that argument can work both ways. Masaki Nakajima, a senior research adviser at the Mitsubishi Research Institute, estimates that U.S. backing has saved Japan nearly $1 trillion in defense costs. That savings has been a major factor in Japan’s commercial victories against the United States.
Even more fundamental questions may arise about the American role in Asia if Washington fails to renegotiate the leases on its giant air and naval bases in the Philippines. The Pentagon has reduced its estimate of the cost of replacing them to less I than $3 billion from the $5 billion to $10 billion of previous years. Planes, naval forces and ship-repair facilities would be moved to Guam or Tinian and Saipan in the Mariana Islands. Japan and South Korea would receive some of the Air Force planes assigned to cover Northeast Asia, with Thailand a possible alternative. Singapore has already said it will serve as a port to cover the Southeast Asian sea lanes. “The key is that we are trying to maintain a forward defense strategy,” said a senior administration official.
But a strategy for what? “It is ever more clear that containing communist expansionism–whether from China, the Soviet Union or Vietnam–is ceasing to be a central policy problem in Asia,” says Paul Kreisberg, an Asia analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Instead, State Department officials speak of a “pre-World War II balance of power,” with the four principal players being the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union and China. American policy, says Rear Adm. Timothy Wright, acting deputy assistant secretary of Defense for East Asia and the Pacific, should be to prevent any of those nations “from becoming the single political and military power in Asia.” As the Soviet threat continues to diminish, regional specialists such as Larry Niksch of the Congressional Research Service predict that naval power will remain essential while the bulk of the ground forces can be sent home. But, he cautions, a skeletal logistics force should remain in place so that Asia’s American policemen can race back in.
