“Chalmers Johnson, the brilliant and iconoclastic scholar of China, Japan and the rest of East Asia, has in Blowback written a brilliant and iconoclastic assault on American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.”

—Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power:

The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945

Revolution and the Social System

An Instance of Treason:

Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring

Revolutionary Change

Change in Communist Systems

(editor and contributor)

Conspiracy at Matsukawa

Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China

(editor)

Autopsy on People’s War

Japan’s Public Policy Companies

MITI and the Japanse Miracle:

The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975

The Industrial Policy Debate

(editor and contributor)

Politics and Productivity:

How Japan’s Development Strategy Works

(with Laura Tyson and John Zysman)

Japan: Who Governs?

The Rise of the Developmental State

CHALMERS JOHNSON

Holt Paperbacks

2.     Okinawa: Asia’s Last Colony

In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush posed this question: “Why do they hate us?” His answer: “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote.” He commented later that he was amazed “that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. . . . I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”

But how “good” are we, really? If we’re so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much “blowback” upon ourselves?

This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad. Blowback was first published in the spring of 2000, some eighteen months before 9/11. My intention in writing it was to warn my fellow Americans about the nature and conduct of U.S. foreign policy over the previous half-century, focusing particularly on the period after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. I argued that many aspects of what the American government had done around the world virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples on the receiving end. I did not predict the events of 9/11, but I did clearly state that acts of retaliation were coming and should be anticipated. “World politics in the twenty-first century,” I wrote, “will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world.”

During the first year after its publication, Blowback was largely ignored in the United States. Few of the mainstream book reviews took any notice of it, and the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, wrote that “Blowback reads like a comic book.”¹ Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere in the world was somewhat different. The book was quickly translated into German, Italian, and Japanese, and the foreign news editor of Der Spiegel even flew to California to interview me about it.²

Domestic lack of interest changed dramatically after September 11, 2001. The book was reprinted eight times in less than two months and became an underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to, or at least desperate to know about, some of the realities of the world in which they lived. The catastrophic events of the first year of the new millennium not only threw an unusual light on the self-proclaimed role of the United States as “indispensable nation” and “last remaining superpower,” but also posed serious questions and new dangers for other governments that were suddenly asked whether they were for or against our “war on terror.” The term “blowback” went from being an esoteric term of CIA tradecraft to virtually a household word, cropping up in discussions of the multiple disasters that were beginning to assail the United States—from anthrax attacks on senators, the media, and other targets to Congress’s gutting the Bill of Rights through passage of the Patriot Act (by votes of 76 to 1 in the Senate and 337 to 79 in the House). There was also a widespread sense around the world that America had it coming.

Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the United States imprudently committed itself to maintaining a global empire. This book is an account of the resentments our policies have built up and of the kinds of economic and political retribution that, particularly in Asia, may be their harvest in the twenty-first century. But before I turn to the sometimes sorry details of the American empire, the reader may want to know a bit about who I am. For how I came to the views presented in this book may help explain why I am putting them forward now, a decade after the end of the Cold War.

Fifty years ago, on the eve of the Korean War, I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in economics. I had given no thought at all to East Asia, but like most Americans I regarded the Communist revolution in China as a dangerous, deeply disturbing development in our country’s growing confrontation with what we then called the “Communist bloc.” Military conscription was in effect, and any young man had to go into the army—the shortest but most dangerous, unpleasant, and unrewarding way to fulfill one’s obligatory service—or join the navy or air force for a longer but less physically demanding hitch.

I chose the navy—or rather I simply drifted into it. My father had served in the navy. In World War I, he went to Europe as an ordinary seaman on the old St. Louis. In the summer of 1943, during World War II, his ship was sunk by a long-range Japanese torpedo at Iron Bottom Bay, Guadalcanal. He survived and was in the reserves when, in 1950, as the Korean War began, he was “activated” and sent to Japan for a last fling at naval service. Two older cousins of mine fought in the navy at Leyte Gulf, and the idea that men from my family would do their military duty in the navy was more or less taken for granted.

As an undergraduate, I joined the Naval Air Reserve at Oakland Naval Air Station. I was an aviation machinist’s mate third class and flew around in the back of old Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers. Unlike my father’s unit, my reserve squadron was never activated during the Korean War. Having spent two summers in training and after receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953, I emerged as a newly minted ensign.

What happened next changed my life, but was also a typical occurrence of the Cold War years. When we received our assignments to the fleet, I was dismayed to discover that I was assigned to a ship that did not even have a name—the U.S.S. LST-883, part of the amphibious forces based in Japan. No glamorous aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean for me; I was off to a rust bucket in the Gray Line. A chief petty officer who had been an instructor of mine said to me in his gruff way, “Johnson, you don’t know it, but you lucked out. Those guys going to carriers will just be errand boys, but you’re going to a ship with only six officers. You’ll be given important things to do fast and you won’t have to waste a lot of time heel clicking or boot licking.” As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

One night in the late summer of 1953, I found myself climbing the sheer ladder of an LST moored to a buoy in the harbor of the former Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, then, as today, the headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Used to land tanks directly onto a beachhead during an amphibious assault, LSTs are diesel-powered, flat-bottomed ships with bow doors. Lacking any sort of keel, they roll all the time, even at anchor, and are no place for anyone given to motion sickness. I came aboard the Hachi-hachi-san (883, in Japanese) as the communications officer and left two years later as the operations officer.

Although we helped marine and army units practice amphibious landings in Korea and Japan, and twice crossed the Pacific at a top speed of ten knots, our diesel engines broke down regularly. The 883 spent fairly long periods being repaired at either the Yokosuka or Sasebo naval bases. Except for a few weekends in Tijuana, this was my first extended stay outside the United States, and I was enchanted by Japan. So I began to read voraciously in its history and literature. I spent Christmas 1953 in Kyoto among the old temples of Higashiyama; then, in that impoverished postwar land, they were still covered with weeds and in states of serious neglect. I began to study the language with an old Japanese naval officer who did not really believe a foreigner could learn it but was happy to be paid for giving lessons anyway.

War-defeated Japan in the 1950s was as different from the Japan of today as the Depression-era United States was from the world’s present-day “lone superpower.” Those of us drawn to Japan then could not imagine that two decades later it would be the first “miracle” economy of East Asia. What attracted us were aspects of an artistic and philosophic culture of great power that offered truly fresh insights to a foreigner from the United States. Even though the American occupation had ended a year earlier, I took it for granted that “United Nations Forces” deserved to ride in heated railroad cars while citizens of Japan shivered in ice-cold, often windowless ones at the end of the train. Nor did it seem at all unusual to me that some Yokosuka entrepreneurs had had the good sense to provide an upscale whorehouse for the exclusive use of American naval officers.

I took it for granted as well that the United States had no choice but to confront the evils of Communist totalitarianism politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically; and I assumed that the Cold War in East Asia was not essentially different from the Cold War in Europe. Admittedly, the French, British, and Dutch had been ridiculously slow to give up their Asian colonies, but American support for the European imperialists was just an unfortunate side effect of a necessary, global anti-Communist effort. I had no doubt that the Japanese-American Security Treaty was a legitimate undertaking meant to shield Japan from revolutionary events elsewhere in Asia and to give it time to evolve into a true democracy.

In 1955, released to inactive duty in the naval reserve, I enrolled as a graduate student at Berkeley. In no rush to find a career, I wanted to put my experiences in Japan into perspective, something the G.I. Bill made possible. Although I returned to Berkeley to study modern Japan, I came under the spell of the university’s preeminent historian of China, Joseph R. Levenson. Perhaps more than any other scholar of the time, he succeeded in intellectualizing Chinese history, drawing those of us who heard his lectures into the myriad complexities of Chinese civilization.

With my G.I. Bill benefits running out, I took up Chinese studies seriously, in part because that was where the money was. Some leading intellectual institutions of the time—notably the government’s foreign policy and intelligence agencies and the Ford Foundation—were then paying handsomely to attract graduate students into the study of China and, of course, Chinese communism. I saw these fellowships not as inducements to study the enemy in the service of the state but as a wonderful opportunity. I had no hint that, as a student of Asia, I would become as much a spear-carrier for empire as I had been in the navy.

My faculty adviser, political scientist Robert Scalapino, had recently acquired from Ken’ichi Hatano microfilmed files of the Japanese wartime Asia Development Board (Koain), one of the main organs through which Japan had exploited conquered China. Hatano, a former Koain official, had in 1944 moved his office files to his home, thereby saving them from the firebombing of Tokyo. Since I was a graduate student in need of work who could read Japanese, Scalapino hired me to index these once highly classified documents. Buried in them, I discovered a remarkable tale of how after 1937, Japan’s armies, bogged down in the interior of China, had resorted to “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns against the Chinese peasantry, and so had helped give birth to the most monumental and catastrophic revolutionary movement of our time. To sit alone in the university library at night and see in these dry accounts Japanese army officers sent back to Tokyo, how the then-minuscule Chinese Communist Party began organizing the peasants who had survived Japanese brutality, was revelatory—and exciting. I knew that I was witnessing, years late, a story still remarkably relevant to postwar Asia, racked with similar revolts against foreign armies of occupation.

Sometime in the late 1950s, I mentioned to Professor Levenson that on-the-spot Western observers of the Chinese Communist movement from 1937 to 1945 had almost uniformly reported on the party’s remarkable popularity among ordinary Chinese. Levenson replied that they had all paid a price for such reportage, for every one of them had subsequently been tarred as a leftist and possible traitor by Senator Joseph McCarthy or other red hunters of the time. The firsthand testimony of Edgar Snow, Evans Carlson, Agnes Smedley, Nym Wales, George Taylor, and others was still considered valueless in the America of the late 1950s, coming as it did from those believed, at best, to be ideologically predisposed to accept the Chinese Communists as mere “agrarian reformers.”

Having by now read a range of Imperial Japanese Army documents on China, I responded that I could supply secret assessments of the popularity of the Chinese Communist movement in the crucial period of 1937 to 1941 from an unimpeachably anti-Communist source—namely, the Japanese high command in China. Levenson pointed out that such a topic would make a good doctoral dissertation, and so, in 1962, my dissertation was published under the title Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945.¹ The book had a significant impact on the study of modern China. The Japanese invaders, I argued, had created conditions of such savagery, particularly in North China, that the peasant masses who survived their depredations naturally gravitated toward the only group that offered them hope and resistance—the Chinese Communist Party. China illustrated what was soon to become a major political lesson of twentieth-century Asia: only in those circumstances in which the most patriotic act is to join the Communist Party does a Communist movement become a mass movement.

On a personal level, Peasant Nationalism allowed me to avoid the two worst rites of passage of academic life—getting a job and then tenure. My own university hired me. I was lucky and I worked hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time. Between research stints in Japan and Hong Kong, I made my one and only visit to Saigon, in 1962. I was appalled by our government’s policy of “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” Knowing what I did about guerrilla war, revolutionary politics, and foreign armies, I thought it a mistake for us to involve ourselves further in what was visibly a Vietnamese civil war.² But once we did so in the mid-sixties, I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export “people’s war” to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.

It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the Untied States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework. One day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised to find that all the major books were there on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies. As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.

During a year of China-watching (as it was then called) from Hong Kong, I began to have inklings of the Cultural Revolution to come, and in 1966, I wrote a long piece on how China’s People’s Liberation Army was being transformed into the personal political instrument of Mao Zedong.³ As we would later learn, Mao was indeed in the process of allying himself with the army—in order to attack the Communist Party itself, the very organization he had begun building into a mass movement in those years of Japanese occupation. But none of us studying China then came close to imagining what the Cultural Revolution would be like or what kind of a disaster it would become, all because Mao Zedong wanted revenge on some of his fellow revolutionaries. Before the savagery ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the so-called Cultural Revolution came to resemble Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. It destroyed the last shreds of Chinese idealism about the promise of communism.

The Cultural Revolution isolated China from the First, Second, and Third Worlds. It became a pariah state, unable even to forge a united front with the Soviet Union to support the Vietnamese Communists. China and Russia came perilously close to war. The only stable person left among the top Chinese leadership, Premier Zhou Enlai, sought to avoid a preemptive Soviet strike against China’s fledgling nuclear weapons program by opening relations with the devil himself—the United States. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, jumped at the opportunity, and Sino-American rapprochement unfolded—against a backdrop of the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and China’s purge of anyone not totally committed to the cult of Mao. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 renewed popular interest in an etherealized China of acupuncture, the Great Wall, ancient cultural artifacts, and pandas—just as the real land was being run into the ground by its most despicable twentieth-century regime.

Like other foreign specialists in Chinese politics, I was active in trying to understand what was going on, writing papers and attending conferences where Chinese matters were discussed. In 1967, at age thirty-six, I was appointed chairman of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies. Perhaps the most important action I took in my five years at the center was to hire, as our librarian, John Service, one of America’s great State Department China hands of the 1940s, who had been savaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy and whose career in the Foreign Service had been ruined. When, after Kissinger’s initial visit, Zhou Enlai told American reporters that Service was one of only three Americans the Chinese would welcome back (the other two were Professors John Fairbank and Owen Lattimore), we at the center hastily helped arrange for his trip. I can vividly remember him calling me on the day in July 1971 when it was announced that President Nixon had accepted an invitation from Mao Zedong to visit China. As much as he hated Nixon, he told me, he had to give him credit as virtually the only conceivable president who could have brought off such a breakthrough.

American university campuses in the late sixties and early seventies were not ideal places for anyone who doubted that Mao Zedong was a true scourge of bureaucracy or who questioned whether there was any wisdom at all in his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Campus Maoism was everywhere, fueled by the general euphoria over China that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed. (Let us not forget that even seasoned journalists like James Reston and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times went a little gaga over the China they thought they saw.)

It was clear to me, however, that the Chinese “revolution” had degenerated into a Herodian horror show, destructive to the lives of all honest Chinese—fascinating to monitor, perhaps, but no longer of great significance to the global balance of power. In Japan, on the other hand, something interesting was going on to which no one in America seemed to be paying serious attention. In the summer of 1972, I returned to a Japan well on its way toward becoming the most advanced industrial nation on earth. The contrast with my earliest naval experiences there or with the Japan of 1961, when my wife and I had set up a household in a Tokyo suburb, was stark indeed. Japan’s economic “miracle” (a term used by Westerners to denote something attractive but from their point of view unexpected) was everywhere becoming obvious. Its economy had been growing for fifteen years at an annual rate of around 10 percent, and the results were starting to come in. Japan was producing a line of automobiles that American and East Asian consumers were beginning to buy in large numbers, thanks to their low price, reliability, fuel efficiency, built-in air-conditioning, and compact size. In design, its cameras, consumer electronics, and ships, among many other products, rivaled in simplicity and elegance the traditional designs of its houses and ceramics.

To a China specialist disillusioned by the savageries of the Cultural Revolution, Japan looked like a unique case of successful socialism in one country. A state bureaucracy guided the economy, setting social goals but avoiding the misallocation of resources, loss of incentives, and extreme rigidity that were hallmark features of the Soviet and Chinese economies. How had it done this? Americans were largely uninterested in answering such a question, even though Japan’s trade surpluses were starting to irritate their government. Americans were not even curious about the new institutional structures that Japan had forged to engineer high-speed economic growth, structures that would prevent any quick or easy solution to the trade imbalance. We still saw Japan as a “little brother,” learning from and emulating its postwar mentor. The idea that Japan could be experimenting with a different form of capitalism was, if even imaginable, certainly heresy. That they were beating us in manufacturing and marketing certain major products had to mean they were cheating.

Americans defined Japan as a democracy organized around a free-market economy, just as the United States itself was said to be. In his memoirs, Edwin O. Reischauer—the best-known American specialist on Japanese history and ambassador to Japan during the 1960s, at the height of that country’s “income-doubling plan”—hardly bothered to mention the economy. The truly amazing thing about such American myopia and condescension was that it would last well into the late 1990s, when it would suddenly turn into contempt for Japan precisely because it had a different kind of capitalism.

In the summer of 1972, one of my mentors and a preeminent political scientist, Professor Junnosuke Masumi, urged me to consider the then-emerging economic miracle. American scholars like me, he pointed out, tended to focus on left-wing and protest politics in Japan; virtually none of us had devoted any attention to its ruling elites. There were only a few studies in English of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been continuously in power since the country had regained its independence in 1952, and nothing at all on the vast bureaucratic state apparatus that supported and guided the economy in much the same way the Department of Defense supported and guided the military-industrial-university complex in the United States.

We talked specifically about the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Among knowledgeable Japanese in the Tokyo of that moment, it was the openly acknowledged author of the economic miracle. Much as Professor Levenson had suggested that I look into Japanese-occupied China to find the roots of the Chinese Communist Party’s success, so Professor Masumi suggested that I look into the roots of MITI to find the basis for his country’s “successful socialism.” I spent the next decade on this project, writing a history of an economic ministry that I thought might interest a few public policy specialists who did not read Japanese, as well as the usual group of Japanologists. I did not realize then that my research would inadvertently lead me to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported.

I have already indicated the main intellectual debts I owe. For help in conceptualizing and writing this particular book, I would like to acknowledge the following people, who gave me ideas, told me I was wrong, or otherwise provided inspiration: Sumi Adachi, Kozy Amemiya, Ron Bevacqua, Steven C. Clemons, Bruce Cumings, Jim Fallows, Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, George Hicks, Jim Impoco, Sam Jameson, Andrew Janos, Barry Keehn, Andrew Maclntyre, Gavan McCormack, Yoshihiko Naka-moto, Masahide Ota, Murray Sayle, Tim Shorrock, Patrick Smith, Odete Sousa, Koji Taira, Norman Thorpe, Chikako Yoshida, and Eiji Yutani. The monthly papers and conference presentations of members of the Japan Policy Research Institute over the past six years have also contributed greatly to my thinking. Sandra Dijkstra, my agent, was instrumental in causing me to write this book. At Metropolitan Books, Tom Engelhardt was the best editor an author could imagine, meticulous in challenging and sharpening my ideas and my writing; publisher Sara Bershtel encouraged me with her unflagging commitment to the book. Sheila K. Johnson has been my constant companion in trying to understand the world we live in.

Cardiff, California

Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (brought down by Corazon Aquino and her People Power movement after Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had hailed him as a democrat).

At about eight P.M. on September 4, 1995, two American marines and a sailor seized a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl on her way home from shopping, bound and gagged her, drove her in a rented car to a remote location, and raped her. Marine Pfc. Rodrico Harp and Seaman Marcus Gill confessed that they violently beat her and that Marine Pfc. Kendrick Ledet bound her mouth, eyes, hands, and legs with duct tape. Described in court by an acquaintance as a “tank,” Gill was six feet tall and weighed 270 pounds. He confessed to raping the girl, while the other two claimed that they had merely abducted and beaten her. According to an Associated Press account of the trial, “The court interpreter broke down upon hearing [Gill’s] account of lewd jokes he and his companions made about their unconscious and bleeding victim.”¹ Police introduced into the trial proceedings a plastic bag found in a trash can that contained three sets of bloodstained men’s underwear, a school notebook, and duct tape.

The three accused rapists—Gill, twenty-two, of Woodville, Texas; Harp, twenty-one, of Griffin, Georgia; and Ledet, twenty, of Waycross, Georgia—were in no way unusual for U.S. servicemen stationed on the island of Okinawa. Harp was the father of a nine-month-old daughter and a graduate of an ROTC program in Griffin. Ledet had been a Boy Scout and church usher. Gill had taken advanced-placement English and had won a football scholarship. All were based at Camp Hansen. Gill told the court that the three men had embarked on the rape “just for fun” and had picked the girl out at random as she was leaving a stationery store.

A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press, “I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.”² Although Macke was permitted to retire following this lighthearted comment, there was no Congressional or official inquiry into his leadership of the Pacific Command and no review of why a decade after the end of the Cold War the United States still had one hundred thousand troops based in Japan and South Korea. There was only endless public relations spin about how the gang rape of a child was a singular “tragedy,” not a consequence of U.S. basing policy, and how East Asia “needs” its American peacekeepers.

Few Americans who have never served in the armed forces overseas have any conception of the nature or impact of an American base complex, with its massive military facilities, post exchanges, dependents’ housing estates, swimming pools, and golf courses, and the associated bars, strip clubs, whorehouses, and venereal disease clinics that they attract in a land like Okinawa. They can extend for miles, dominating localities and in some cases whole nations. In South Korea, for example, huge military camptowns (kijich’on) have existed around all the American bases from the time of the Korean War. Katharine Moon writes, “They are like stage sets, in a sense, for the U.S. military presence in Korea, characterized by dimly lit alleys blinking with neon-lit bars boasting names like Lucky Club, Top Gun, or King Club. The alleys rock with loud country-western or disco music, drunken brawls, and American soldiers in fatigues and heavily made-up Korean women walking closely together with hands on each other’s buttocks.”³ Until the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Philippines in 1992, the town of Olongapo, adjacent to the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay, had no industry except for the “entertainment” business, which supported approximately 55,000 prostitutes and a total of 2,182 registered establishments offering “rest and recreation” to American servicemen.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States built a chain of military bases stretching from Korea and Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, and Iceland—in effect ringing the Soviet Union and China with literally thousands of overseas military installations. In Japan alone, immediately following the end of the Korean War, there were six hundred U.S. installations and approximately two hundred thousand troops. There are still today, ten years after the end of the Cold War, some eight hundred Department of Defense facilities located outside the United States, ranging from radio relay stations to major air bases. To those living around them (and often dependent upon them), the personnel based on them may feel less like “peacekeepers” than occupiers. This is certainly the case in Okinawa, a land whose people have in any case felt themselves under occupation by Japan since the seventeenth century and by the United States since 1945.

The island of Okinawa measures 454 square miles, almost exactly the size of Los Angeles and smaller than the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian chain. It now contains thirty-nine bases, ranging from Kadena Air Force Base, the largest airfield in East Asia, to the Sobe Communications Facility, known locally as the “elephant cage” because of its bizarre antennae, a center for communicating with submarines, intercepting other people’s telephone conversations, and intelligence operations. In the 1960s, when Okinawa was directly administered by the Pentagon, there were 117 bases, and at the time of the rape there were 42. Though few of them are contiguous to each other, in total they take up an estimated 20 percent of the prime agricultural land in the central and southern parts of the main island of Okinawa. The United States also controls twenty-nine areas of the surrounding seas and fifteen air spaces over the Ryukyus. As a prefecture of Japan, Okinawa occupies only 0.6 percent of Japan’s total land area, but about 75 percent of facilities exclusively used by the American armed forces stationed in Japan are concentrated there. With a population density amounting to 2,198 persons per square kilometer, it is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Neither Japanese nor Okinawan courts or police have any jurisdiction over these American-occupied lands, seas, and air spaces.

It may be hard for Americans to imagine why a single rape case would cause such outrage among Okinawans or endanger an almost half-century-old Japanese-American security relationship. Part of the reason is because it is hard to grasp the particular imperial circumstances under which they live. A reader trying to imagine what follows would perhaps have to transpose the Okinawan situation to Greater Los Angeles, imagining the choicest fifth of it to be occupied in a similar way by an allied and “friendly” foreign military. In addition, the reader would have to understand that the very reason for the presence of those bases, weapons, and personnel, dinned into public consciousness for forty years—the enmity of an ominous neighboring superpower and its bloc of allies—had ceased to be relevant for a decade.

Certainly, from an Okinawan point of view, Admiral Macke’s remark merely confirmed what they had already long experienced: that this was not an isolated incident committed by undisciplined enlisted men but part of a pattern ignored, if not condoned, at the highest levels of the American military hierarchy. But even more important, it posed in the starkest terms a question increasingly asked in the satellites of the informal American empire: Why absorb such costs? Why, in fact, are foreign troops based in countries like Japan more than half a century after the end of World War II and more than a decade after the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a military threat?

Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which is located at the southernmost tip of Japan. Its capital, Naha, is considerably closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo, and the culture of the Ryukyu Islands reflects strong Chinese as well as Japanese influences. The Ryukyus were formerly an independent kingdom, annexed by Japan in the late nineteenth century, at about the same time the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands.

The main island of Okinawa was the scene of the last great battle of World War II—also the last time the United States used military force victoriously in East Asia. (During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon was successful but led to his march north to the Yalu River, which precipitated Chinese intervention and the United States’ ultimately having to settle for a divided Korea.) Some 14,005 Americans and 234,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians were killed in that brutal, three-month-long campaign, so bloody that it became the main American rationale for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If using atomic weapons to end the war prevented more Okinawan-type carnage in an invasion of Japan’s main islands, then, the Americans claimed, it was more than justified.

The monument the Okinawan government built to the war dead, unveiled on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, is testimony to what the Okinawans call the “typhoon of steel.” On dozens of stone tablets, it lists the names of all the people on all sides killed in the battle—Japanese and American soldiers and affiliated personnel (including the journalist Ernie Pyle), Okinawan and Japanese civilians, and Korean slave laborers. The battle lasted from April to June 1945 and totally devastated the island. In September 1945, the American armed forces occupied defeated Japan, promising to bring to those emperorruled islands an American-style series of democratic reforms. Okinawa, however, was separated off from Japan and ruled by the military in a purely autocratic manner.

From 1945 to 1972, American military officers governed Okinawa as their exclusive preserve. In 1952, retention of Okinawa proved to be the price the American government extracted from Japan in return for the signing of an early peace treaty and of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, which signaled the end of the occupation of Japan’s main islands. Many Okinawans believe that Emperor Hirohito sacrificed them in 1945 in a meaningless battle meant to elicit better surrender terms from the Allies, and that Tokyo sacrificed them again in 1952 so that the rest of Japan could regain its independence and enjoy the beginnings of a return to economic prosperity. In this view, Japan felt relatively comfortable with the Japanese-American Security Treaty largely because most American military bases were consigned to a small southern island, where they and the problems that come with them could be ignored by the majority of Japanese. (There are still, it should be added, eight major American bases in Japan proper, located at Atsugi, Iwakuni, Misawa, Sagamihara, Sasebo, Yokosuka, Yokota, and Zama.)

America’s two major wars against Asian communism—in Korea and Vietnam—could not have been fought without bases on Japanese territory. Those military outposts were critical staging and logistics areas for the projection of American power onto the Asian mainland, as well as secure sanctuaries, invulnerable to attack by North Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Cambodian forces. Large American staffs involved in conducting those wars lived in security and comfort, and American troops often enjoyed “R & R” (rest and recreation) in Okinawa or Japan as well as in Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. In 1965, Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of American forces in the Pacific, explicitly stated that the United States could not fight the Vietnam War without its Okinawan bases.

Had the Americans had to ask for Japanese permission to conduct wars from their territory, they would have been turned down. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950, the American military still occupied all of Japan, and throughout most of the Vietnam War they still governed Okinawa as if it were their private military colony. By the late 1960s, the Americans had built their complex of more than a hundred bases, much of it by forcibly seizing land from defenseless Okinawans who were without official citizenship, legal protections, or rights of any sort from any country. When, at the height of the Vietnam War, Okinawan protests against B-52s, bars, brothels, stores of nerve gas, and G.I.-committed crimes reached a combustible point, the Americans finally took the step of officially returning Okinawa to Japanese control. Nothing, however, changed in terms of the actual American presence—except that Americans now felt obliged to justify their behavior. This they proceeded to do, ushering in a period of extraordinary American hypocrisy, mendacity, and greed, which reached an apogee just when the end of the Cold War seemed to signal a possible end to the daily indignities inflicted on the 1.3 million people of the island.

Instead, during the Clinton administration the Americans simply began to invent new “threats” that required their presence and to offer heightened assurances of their goodwill and good-neighborliness. In a November 1995 speech to the National Press Club in Tokyo, then secretary of defense William Perry assured the Japanese, “The bases are here for your good more than ours,” arguing that “without the troops, Japan would be vulnerable.” On the rape, Perry added, “The American people share this pain with you.”⁴ General C. C. Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote in reference to Okinawa that “a Marine installation is more than a collection of buildings and equipment; it is a community of good, decent and caring people, people with families and interests far beyond day-to-day military affairs; and people involved in the community. They are people who care about the lives of those beyond the fences of their installation.”⁵ Ambassador Walter Mondale, who helped engineer a deceitful scheme in which the American government publicly promised to give back the Marine Corps air station at Futenma to the Okinawans but privately required that Japan provide the United States with an equivalent base elsewhere in Okinawa, insisted to the press just before his return to the States that “we have tried in a very intensive way to be good neighbors to our friends in Okinawa.”⁶

Certainly, Okinawan daily life in the 1990s was an improvement over the days when the territory was under exclusive American jurisdiction. Japan poured money into the island, understanding that the mainland’s postwar economy had been built partly at the expense of the Okinawans and that a transfer of wealth was in order. Although Okinawa is still Japan’s poorest prefecture, it had by the 1990s reached 70 percent of the national level of wealth. Since Japan is the world’s richest large country in terms of per capita income, this meant that tiny Okinawa was now far richer than all of North Korea, to take but one example.

It is not absolute deprivation that maddens Okinawans but relative deprivation—the realization that American noise, traffic accidents, environmental degradation, and moral offenses should not have to be endured. As Etsuko Miyagi Utsumi, a leader of the women’s coalition that came into being after the 1995 rape, puts it, “The Japanese government has so far been successful in making Okinawa, the most remote prefecture, serve as the ‘garbage dump’ of the Security Treaty.”⁷

Sexual assault, for example, remains a fact of daily life. Shortly after the notorious rape that created a crisis in Japanese-American relations, the New York Times editorial page informed its readers that “American military behavior in Japan has generally been good since the occupation in 1945.”⁸ Given that in a period of only six months in 1949 journalist Frank Gibney reported G.I.s killing twenty-nine Okinawans and raping another eighteen and that in late 1958 a quarter to a third of the Third Marine Division in Okinawa was infected with venereal disease, one has to ask what the New York Times might consider bad behavior.⁹

Similarly, Air Force Lt. Gen. Richard Myers, commander of U.S. Forces in Japan, has maintained that the 1995 rape was an isolated incident, not characteristic behavior of “99.99 percent of U.S. Forces.”¹⁰ But General Myers is simply wrong. According to the conservative Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, which studied bookings at the Okinawan Prefectural Police Headquarters, U.S. servicemen were implicated in 4,716 crimes between 1972 and 1995—just under a crime a day throughout the period of General Myers’s command.¹¹

Of course, most of these criminal acts were not sexual assaults. Russell Carollo and a team of reporters from the Dayton Daily News went through one hundred thousand court-martial records going back to 1988 to find out how many servicemen had been brought before military courts charged with rape and how they had been treated. They discovered that since 1988, navy and marine bases in Japan have had 169 courts-martial for sexual assaults, the highest number of all U.S. bases worldwide, 66 percent more cases than at the number-two location, San Diego, which has more than twice the personnel. Since the navy has a large Okinawa base at White Beach and another contingent at Kadena and the marines have twenty different bases spread all over the island, “Japan” here essentially meant Okinawa. As getting information on courts-martial required months of filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and the army released its records only after being sued by the Dayton Daily News, the statistics cited in their stories of October 1-5, 1995, do not even include army figures.¹²

While the incidence of reported rape in the United States is forty-one for every one hundred thousand people, at the military bases in Okinawa it is eighty-two per one hundred thousand. And that, of course, is counting only reported rapes. In Okinawan culture it is unbearably humiliating for an adult woman to bring a charge of rape (something that the Marine Corps has often relied on in covering up its record). Thus, the numbers undoubtedly significantly understate the actual occurrence of rape. Disturbingly, the Dayton Daily News articles revealed that the military had allowed hundreds of accused sex offenders in its ranks to go free despite courts-martial convictions. The Nation magazine, considering what the Dayton reporters uncovered, concluded, “Covering up sexual assault is Pentagon policy.”¹³

But the Pentagon may finally have met its match in a group of women determined to publicize and bring to justice military rapists. The organization, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, was founded by Suzuyo Takazato, a member of the Naha City Assembly, and Carolyn Francis, an American Methodist missionary in Okinawa. They had attended the Fourth U.N. Forum on Women in Beijing in September 1995, and with colleagues they presented a revealing report on and chronology of what Okinawan women had experienced during the military occupation of their country. Returning to Okinawa to news of the gang rape of the twelve-year-old girl, they spearheaded a mobilization of Okinawans and their government that led to the largest protest demonstration in Okinawa’s history. A rally of eighty-five thousand people on October 21, 1995, demanded that the American and Japanese governments pay some attention to their grievances. The Okinawan Women repeatedly (and without irony, despite her husband’s seeming indifference to the victims of sex crimes by American servicemen) quoted from the speech of Hillary Rodham Clinton, honorary chairwoman of the U.S. delegation to the Beijing women’s forum, that “women’s rights are human rights” and that military rape is a war crime.

The rape took place on September 4; by September 8, the Okinawan police had identified the perpetrators on the basis of rental-car records and had issued warrants for their arrest, but the military did not turn them over to local authorities until September 29. It was widely reported that the three had the run of their base and were spending their time “eating hamburgers.”¹⁴ This is a matter not of simple delays but of “extraterritoriality,” one of the historically most offensive aspects of Western (and Japanese) imperialism in East Asia. From the time the United States got it written into its treaty with China following the Opium War of 1839-42 (yes, it was an American invention), “extra’lity,” as it was informally called, meant that if a European, American, or Japanese committed a crime in China (or today in Japan or Korea if he or she is a member of, married to, or the child of a member of the American armed forces), that foreigner would be turned over to his or her own consular officials, rather than being tried under the laws of the country in which the crime occurred.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chinese revolution was in part fought to be rid of this demeaning provision, which lasted in China until 1943. The Western insistence on extraterritoriality reflected the belief that Asian law was barbaric and that no “civilized” person should be subjected to it. In actuality, all sorts of Chinese criminals took advantage of it, claiming Christian conversion or other ruses to ingratiate themselves with one or another imperialist power in order to place themselves beyond the reach of local laws.

Article 17, section 5, of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) stipulated: “When U.S. servicemen and their families commit crimes, they shall be detained by U.S. authorities until Japanese law enforcement agencies file complaints with the prosecutors’ office based on clear suspicion.” While not quite full-blown extraterritoriality, it gave U.S. authorities the right to refuse Japanese investigators’ requests to hand over suspects attached to the military. Delays built into the system were often used as opportunities to transfer American suspects back to the United States, where they were beyond the reach of Japanese authorities.

Under the pressure of escalating protests in Okinawa and mainland Japan following news of the rape, the United States and Japan signed a “side letter” to SOFA allowing G.I.s suspected of rape or murder to be placed in Japanese custody before being indicted if Japanese investigators request it. This represented a distinct break in American global policies. In Korea, suspects still get handed over to local authorities only after being convicted by a U.S. military court. Similarly, in Italy, the American fliers charged in 1998 with flying so low that their jet cut a ski-lift cable, plunging twenty skiers to their deaths, were returned to the States for a military trial where, to the outrage of Italians, they were exonerated of responsibility. It is, of course, unimaginable that Americans would accept such special treatment for foreign military personnel visiting or training in our country. And that is precisely what breeds such a deep sense of injustice among Okinawans.

Certainly, the initial American response to the rape caused the greatest crisis in Japanese-American relations since a tumultuous struggle against the renewal of the security treaty in 1960. No one should be surprised to discover, however, that the sexual offenses that had plagued Okinawans did not abate. Only three months later, in December 1995, the U.S. military released a composite sketch of an American suspected of raping a woman at knifepoint near Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. Ben Takara, an Okinawan poet and chemistry teacher at Futenma Senior High School, told Newsweek, “We once surveyed our girl students, asking if they had had any scary experiences with U.S. soldiers on their way to school or back home. One-third to one-half of the students answered yes. . . . The rape case . . . was just the tip of the iceberg. I must say that the Japan-U.S. security treaty has not protected the safety of Okinawans.”¹⁵

Many of the acts that so disrupt Okinawan life are less sensational than rape but no less disturbing to the people of that island. Traffic accidents are an example. On a Sunday in early January 1996, four months after the rape that had allegedly caused the U.S. military to tighten up discipline, a female marine from the air base at Futenma drove off the road and onto a sidewalk at high speed in Chatan, near Kadena Air Force Base, killing Rojita Kinjo, thirty-six, and her daughters, Mitsuko, ten, and Mariko, one. Lance Corporal Lori Padilla, twenty, the driver, pleaded guilty to a charge of professional negligence leading to death. It may be that she was confused by driving on the left side of the road, as is the custom in Japan. She received a two-year prison sentence.

Five months later, the remaining Kinjo family sued Padilla and the two marine co-owners of the car in the Naha District Court for sixty-two million yen (about $580,000) as a solatium to compensate them for the emotional losses due to the deaths of their relatives. The payment of a solatium in the case of accidents of all kinds is an essential and longaccepted part of Japanese culture. None of the defendants appeared at the trial, one having already left for the United States (the average tour of duty for American service personnel in Okinawa is only six months). In December, the court ordered Padilla and her two codefendants to pay the sum requested, but the second codefendant had by then also left Japan and was untraceable. Padilla had neither savings nor insurance. Ultimately the U.S. military paid the family twenty-five million yen (40 percent of the total) but extracted from them, in return, a statement that this was a gift from the U.S. government and that the family in accepting it gave up any further claims against the United States. At this point, the Japanese government paid the remaining thirty-seven million yen to the victims’ family.

It was noted that at the time of the accident the driver was neither arrested nor checked to see if she was drunk but was instead transported to a military hospital. This was, of course, only one of just over a thousand auto accidents each year in Okinawa involving U.S. service personnel (slightly under two thousand for Japan as a whole), and it was quite typical in that American drivers normally do not have insurance (or at least not enough) and have often left Japan by the time Okinawan victims catch up to them in court.

Not until after the rape incident of September 1995, as part of an effort to reduce the American “footprint” in Okinawa (as Secretary of Defense Perry called it) and fifty-one years after their arrival in Okinawa, did American military cars and trucks begin to carry license plates. Prior to that Okinawans usually had no way of identifying a vehicle that collided with theirs or injured them. It took the “sacrifice of a schoolgirl,” noted the Okinawa Times, to achieve any progress at all in making “good neighbors” out of the Americans.¹⁶ There are still about fifteen thousand licensed drivers at Kadena Air Force Base and another twenty-five thousand affiliated with the marines on Okinawa, including service personnel and Department of Defense civilians, teachers, and dependents, who also pay specially reduced automobile taxes. By one estimate, were they to pay at Japanese rates, the incomes of the Okinawan prefectural government and the Tokyo municipal government would increase by ¥250 million and ¥200 million respectively.

In February 1996, a month after the Padilla case, a nineteen-year-old on a motor scooter was struck and killed by a car driven by a U.S. Navy chief petty officer. The young man’s father, Daisuke Ebihara, a mainland schoolteacher, described the callous attitudes of U.S. military representatives to a reporter for the Japan Times. “Nobody . . . attended the funeral or sent a telegram or wreath of condolence. And a Japanese working for the U.S. military phoned my wife and urged us not to engage a lawyer, saying it would be cheaper. Even before I got to the hospital, they were telling me ‘we will decide how much compensation you get.’ ”¹⁷ An American spokesman, Major Kevin Krejcarek, admitted that the U.S. forces had not properly understood how to handle the custom of a solatium in Japanese culture. This prompted Dr. Robert Orr of Nippon Motorola and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan to comment that there is something wrong when a military that has occupied Okinawa for half a century has never heard of such a basic aspect of local judicial custom.

On October 7, 1998, the inevitable again happened. A twenty-two-year-old marine corporal, drunk and driving at high speed, knocked an eighteen-year-old high school student, Yuki Uema, off her motorbike. He fled, only to be apprehended by an alert guard at his base who noticed the heavy damage to the front of his car. Possibly because the marine failed to help his victim, she died a week later, without regaining consciousness. U.S. forces then refused to hand over the suspect to the local police for a week, on the grounds that under the Status of Forces Agreement, the United States did not have to give up suspects except in “heinous crimes” until a Japanese court indicted them. The American ambassador and the Japanese prime minister were quick this time to express their condolences and to offer money as compensation; they recognized that much—from large-scale arms sales to the Japanese place in U.S. global strategy—might be at stake. A Japanese court sentenced the hit-and-run marine to twenty months in prison, and in March 1999, the Marine Corps started sending patrols of off-duty marines to the bar districts around Futenma, Kadena, Camp Foster, and Camp Hansen in a limited attempt to curb drunkenness and lawlessness among service personnel and their dependents.

Even if they avoid being raped or run down, no Okinawans can escape the endless noise the Americans make. A teacher in Ginowan City typically reports, “My class lasts for fifty minutes. It is interrupted at least three times by the incredible noise of planes landing and departing. My students cannot hear me, so we just wait patiently.”¹⁸ There are 52,000 takeoffs and landings each year at Futenma Marine Corps Air Station alone, or 142 a day. The military airfield is in the center of and entirely surrounded by Ginowan’s neighborhoods. The middle of a densely populated city is hardly an appropriate place to locate an airport, let alone a military one, and genuinely thoughtful neighbors would have moved it long ago. Even the marines know this. In March 1997, the corps grounded its helicopters for a day just so the students of Ginowan’s high schools could take their college entrance exams in peace. “ ‘Not in my backyard’ politics have motivated Okinawans for a long time,” asserts Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist and former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs whom the Pentagon employed to study potential new “threats” to national security that might justify its expensive presence in other people’s countries.¹⁹ But Nye, while suggesting the United States keep one hundred thousand troops in Japan and South Korea until at least the year 2015, like so many American officials and policy advisers, never once visited Okinawa to see what that “backyard” was really like.

While the major cause of noise pollution in Okinawa is military aircraft, there are some other unusual sources. From 1973 to 1997, the 12th Marine Regiment passed its time in Okinawa by periodically firing 155 mm. howitzer shells over Highway 104 where it enters Kin village (which also happens to be where the rape took place). Every time the marines decided to fire their guns, the highway had to be closed. In 1993, for example, the marines poured 5,606 rounds into Mount Onna on the other side of the highway, causing great environmental damage, including repeated forest fires. Unsurprisingly, they also left numerous unexploded shells on its gently inclined slopes. Requests to stop lest the tourist industry, which is by far Okinawa’s most important current source of income, be damaged were simply ignored.

Only after the rape did the local marine commander suspend the firing for three months, as a gesture of contrition. In response to continuing protests, the Japanese government finally found mainland sites for marine artillery practice. In so doing, it allocated ¥238 million to help relocate mainland families likely to be disturbed by one of the new firing ranges near Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, which led the mayor of Kin to ask bitterly, “If the government can provide such compensation on the mainland, why the hell not in Okinawa?”²⁰

Noise-pollution suits are starting to prove expensive for the Japanese government. In 1982, some 906 residents of Kadena and Chatan villages filed a noise-pollution suit against Kadena Air Force Base and asked the court to halt night flights. Sixteen years later the Naha branch of the Fukuoka High Court ordered the central government to pay compensation of ¥1,373 million to those plaintiffs still alive. The court did not, however, order a suspension of flights between seven P.M. and seven A.M., on the grounds that nothing in the security treaty or in domestic law allows Japan to interfere with the operations at Kadena Air Force Base. The U.S. military likes to say that the noise from its aircraft is the “sound of freedom,” but many Okinawans have been so deafened that they can no longer hear it.

Closely related to noise pollution is damage to the environment. This includes serious soil erosion from artillery firing and damage to coral reefs by ships and amphibious landing practice (despite a U.S. commitment to an international initiative to save the globe’s dying coral reefs). Runoff jet fuel and other toxic substances permeate the soil and water supplies in certain areas of the island and have generally neither been controlled nor cleaned up. As the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office reported in 1998, “Marine Corps Bases, Japan, and other Okinawa-based U.S. forces were informed by a letter dated August 25, 1997, from the Government of Japan’s Naha Defense Facilities Administration Bureau that the toxic substances mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls were found on the Onna communications site. The United States had closed the base and returned the land to Japan in November 1995. . . . The letter indicated that the presence of these substances has prevented the land from being returned to its owners and thus being available for reuse. The letter concludes by requesting that the United States conduct a survey, identify any contamination that may exist, and clean up bases scheduled for closure in the future.”²¹ The government, while proclaiming itself devoted to protecting the environment, has also claimed that the security treaty explicitly exempts the United States from any responsibility for environmental cleanup.

The most spectacular documented environmental outrage to date has been a barrage of some 1,520 “depleted uranium” shells fired in December 1995 and January 1996 into Torishima Island, located about a hundred kilometers west of the main island of Okinawa. These 25 mm. armor-piercing shells, each of which contained 147 grams of uranium, were first used by the United States in the Gulf War. It is suspected that the uranium oxide produced when this kind of projectile hits its target (along with other gases released when the Americans demolished Saddam Hussein’s armories) may have been a cause of so-called Gulf War syndrome.²² For over a year the Americans failed to inform Japanese officials about this open violation of Pentagon regulations specifying that such ammunition should be used only at specific firing ranges on the U.S. mainland. No one, in fact, would ever have known, had the Washington Times not broken the story.²³ Clearly fearing its culpability, however, the military had already sent troops into Torishima in March and April 1996 but had recovered only 192 of the shells.

The use of any weapon laced with uranium in any capacity in the only nation on earth to have experienced atomic warfare firsthand—and especially given that the “hands” that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were American—was hardly likely to engender good publicity, to say the least. When the story broke, in fact, a deeply embarrassed Prime Minister Hashimoto had to reveal that he had learned about the depleted uranium shells still on Torishima from the Americans (who undoubtedly knew that the story would soon break) and had done nothing. When the unauthorized use of such ammunition in Okinawa was exposed, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs assured the media, “There is no danger to the human body or to the environment. The level of radiation [emitted by depleted uranium bullets] is just about half that of a TV set in the 1950s.”²⁴ But a TV set emits ultraviolet rays, not gamma or X-rays, and ultraviolet rays do not cause cancer—as the Japanese media were quick to point out. Depleted uranium bullets, on the other hand, gasify into uranium oxide upon hitting a target, such as a tank or the ground. This gas is then carried as particles in the air or dust into the lungs, bloodstream, kidneys, and bone marrow, leading to possible leukemia and tumors.

Each mini-crisis like this is in itself a mini-example of blowback, as American imperial policies and attitudes, long established, manifest themselves in particular incidents. Each of these further undermines not only long-term American policy in Asia but, far more important, long-term attitudes of the Japanese toward Americans in general. The Americans have a record of degrading some of the most exquisite subtropical terrain in the Pacific and also of depriving the Okinawan people of the livelihoods they might have reasonably expected if the bases were not located in their midst. It is a common bit of American folklore that such bases are valuable to local economies, whose peoples have vested interests in them. In the case of Okinawa, this could not be further from the truth. Its major industry today is tourism. The presence of so many sprawling, disconnected American installations, as well as over fifty thousand Americans who do not pay taxes and have no stake in Okinawa’s future, does nothing to enhance the islands’ attraction to Japanese and Taiwanese tourists.

As the economist and editor of the Ryukyuanist, Koji Taira, observes, “According to the best estimates, the incomes generated directly or indirectly by the bases are only 5 percent of the gross domestic product of Okinawa. This is far too small a contribution for an establishment sitting on 20 percent of Okinawa’s land. Given the choice locations of the bases, if these areas were used as part of the civilian market economy, they should yield more than 20 percent of Okinawa’s GDP [gross domestic product]. In effect, the U.S. and Japan are forcing on Okinawa’s economy a deadweight loss of 15 percent of its GDP every year. In a democracy, such an abuse of the state’s taxing power should never be tolerated.”²⁵ According to the Nikkei Weekly, a Japanese business newspaper, the aggregate income from the bases, including off-base consumption by American military personnel, the salaries of the approximately eight thousand Okinawans working on the bases, and rents paid to Okinawan landowners by the Japanese government for the land on which the bases sit, totaled ¥162 billion in fiscal year 1994, or 4.9 percent of gross prefectural income.²⁶

Most of the acreage on the mainland used for American bases is owned by the Japanese government and housed Imperial Japanese military installations up until 1945. In Okinawa, virtually all the land occupied by bases was seized from private owners either at the time of the Battle of Okinawa or during the 1950s. As former governor of Okinawa Prefecture, Masahide Ota, an authority on the island’s postwar history, testified in a base lands case before the Fukuoka High Court on December 22, 1995: “Just after the Battle of Okinawa, while forcibly confining survivors in concentration camps, they [the American military] immediately enclosed all the land and picked up land for military use to the extent they wanted for ensuring U.S. military purposes. It was done as if drawing lines on a blank map. When residents were allowed to come home from the camps, they found their hometowns had disappeared behind barbed wire.”²⁷

This process of seizure at bayonet point followed by the burning and bulldozing of houses and cultivated fields continued throughout the 1950s. Okinawan objections to American arbitrariness and unwillingness to pay appropriate compensation led to the first demonstrations against the U.S. presence and to the election in 1956 of a Communist mayor of Naha. The Americans thereupon rescinded the law under which the mayor had been elected, stripped him of office, and used the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to his conservative opponents.

The protest movement that lasted from 1952 to 1957 was the first of three major waves of protest focusing on bringing democracy to Okinawa. Its issues were the right to freedom of speech for Okinawans, unionization, proper compensation for expropriated lands, and popular election of a chief executive. The second wave crested at the end of the 1960s; its issues were the use of B-52s based in Okinawa to bomb Vietnam and the impact of the segregated military whorehouses that served the black and white G.I.s, near Kadena Air Force Base. This movement resulted in the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. The third wave, which arose in the wake of the 1995 rape case, still continues. Although none of these can claim to have produced victory—which by definition will not be achieved until the last base has been shut down—they have given Okinawa a special political culture. Unlike the main islands, where after the war the Allied occupation bestowed democracy and a “peace constitution” on the people from above, Okinawa is the only Japanese community whose residents have fought for what democracy they enjoy.

In the 1950s, one of the least-known American tactics for seizing land while controlling the rebellious sentiments of expropriated farmers was to offer them land in Bolivia and aid in emigrating. On arrival in Bolivia, however, the Okinawan farmers discovered that the land was nearly unusable jungle and the Americans had no intention of delivering any of the promised financial assistance. As neither American nor Japanese citizens, they had no place to turn for help and so were at the mercy of the terrain, the climate, and their Bolivian neighbors. Most of the early settlers died of disease or fled to Bolivian towns, to Peru or Brazil. The few who survived at Colonia Okinawa, as it was called, north of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, are today, after almost unbelievably difficult lives, comparatively successful farmers. However, of some 3,218 identified emigrants whom the Americans shipped to Bolivia between 1954 and 1964, only 806 (including their offspring) reside there today.²⁸

Most of the land that the Americans occupy in Okinawa is still legally owned by 31,521 individuals or families who are forced by various laws to lease it to the Japanese government, which, in turn, subleases it to the Americans without charge. These leases must periodically be renewed. In 1991, newly elected Governor Ota exercised the power given to him under the forced leasing laws to renew some 2,636 leases that had expired. This was, he has explained, the “most difficult decision of my life”—the ruling Liberal Democratic Party had made economic support for Okinawa contingent on preservation of the bases.²⁹ In late 1995, with the movement inspired by the rape already growing, he refused to renew any more expired leases, forcing Prime Minister Hashimoto to play a politically unattractive role as lackey to the Pentagon. He had to renew the leases himself.

A sizable number of small landholders have become explicit and outspoken antiwar landlords, including some three thousand Okinawan and mainland intellectuals who have bought handkerchief-sized parcels of base land in order to protest the continued American presence. They are known as the one-tsubo landlords—a tsubo being a measure equal to 3.3 square meters—and have proved a severe thorn in Tokyo’s side. In May 1997, as the leases of many of the one-tsubo landlords came up for renewal, it became clear that the prefectural government would not save Tokyo’s face by forcibly renewing them. Prime Minister Hashimoto therefore introduced and guided through the Diet legislation that transferred all control over leases for base land to the central government. This law is almost surely unconstitutional on several grounds—it deprives Japanese citizens of their property rights without due process of law and it applies to only one place, Okinawa, although Article 95 of the Constitution stipulates that no law can deal with a particular area without its people’s consent.

The most famous of the Okinawan antiwar landlords is Shoichi Chibana. In 1945, his grandfather, armed only with a bamboo pole, attempted to protect his land from seizure and was shot to death. This land, in American hands ever since, is today on the site of the Sobe Communications Facility, one of numerous American installations in Okinawa for eavesdropping on the conversations of the surrounding nations, including Japan, and for communicating with U.S. submarines. In the spring of 1996, the lease on that land expired and Chibana refused to renew it. As a result, until the enactment of Hashimoto’s law a year later, the Americans were illegally occupying Chibana’s land. Much to the irritation of the American and Japanese governments, the Okinawan police forced the Americans to open their gates to Chibana and let him visit his land. On May 14, 1996, he and twenty-nine friends legally entered the Sobe Communications Facility, held a picnic on the lawn, sang Okinawan songs, and conducted a memorial service for his grandfather and father. The Japanese government will go to almost any lengths to avoid a repetition of this widely reported and photographed event.

One of the lengths to which it will go is to spend large amounts of public money to cover the costs of the bases, thereby turning the Pentagon into a central component of the Japan lobby in Washington, D.C. Japan is not obligated by any treaty to do this. The Status of Forces Agreement clearly states that “the United States will bear without cost to Japan all expenditures incident to the maintenance of the United States forces in Japan” except for the “construction of facilities.” But in May 1978, Shin Kanemaru, then chief of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of the legendary power brokers of the Liberal Democratic Party, arranged for Japan to donate ¥6.2 billion toward support of the U.S. forces. Kanemaru dubbed this the omoiyari yosan, or “sympathy budget,” because the American government had said to Tokyo that it was experiencing budgetary difficulties following the Vietnam War and could not cover all the costs of its bases in Japan. Initially the omoiyari yosan covered only the medical insurance of Japanese civilians working on the bases, but the Americans have asked for an increase in the sympathy budget every year since, and by 1997 it was ¥273.7 billion ($2.36 billion), more than forty-four times larger than the original sum.

Needless to say, the American press has barely reported these developments; and the Pentagon certainly never uses the term “sympathy budget,” preferring instead the euphemism “host nation support.” According to a 1998 Department of Defense report on allied nations’ “contributions to the common defense,” Japan’s host nation support is the most generous of all. It supplied 78 percent of the costs of the 42,962 U.S. troops on its soil, while Germany paid only 27 percent of the costs of the 48,878 U.S. troops based there. Of the 1997 omoiyari yosan, a bit more than half, or ¥146.2 billion, went to pay the salaries of Japanese who provide some 1,472 separate services to the U.S. troops as translators, gardeners, waitresses, and manicurists, among other things; ¥95.3 billion went to improve American apartments, golf courses, and churches; and ¥31.9 billion, to pay the costs of the public utilities supplied to the bases.³⁰

The overall Japanese government budget for the bases in fiscal year 1997 was ¥647 billion, including rents paid to landowners for use of their land, investments in countermeasures against noise pollution, and funds to “realign” bases in Okinawa in fulfillment of promises made by the Americans after the rape incident (“realignment” was the official Japanese-American euphemism for moving bases around within Okinawa but not actually changing them in any substantial ways). The total national budgetary support for U.S. forces is ¥28 billion more than the entire 1997 budget of Okinawa Prefecture, 2.2 times greater than Japan’s expenditures for university subsidies, and 2.1 times the amount it spends for day-care centers. The United States has military bases in nineteen countries, but Japan is the only one that pays all the costs of local employees. Whatever economic interest some people in Okinawa might have in the presence of the facilities, one wonders why the rest of Japan puts up with this use of national tax moneys.

In May 1997, 296 Japanese citizens from twenty-nine prefectures filed suit in Osaka District Court arguing that the omoiyari yosan violates Article 9 of Japan’s pacifist Constitution and asking that the amount of their national taxes spent for the bases be returned to them. This was the first suit to legally challenge the use of public money to maintain the American military, and its sponsors say that it was partly motivated by the 1995 rape incident. Given the length of time that Japan’s ultraconservative court system can take to resolve something it basically does not want to touch, it is extremely unlikely that this suit will ever be concluded. However, the global economic crisis that began in East Asia in 1997 may very well spell the end of the omoiyari yosan when it next comes up for reauthorization. Even Japan’s obsequiously pro-American government may find it has better things on which to spend its money in the coming century.

Nonetheless, according to the Pacific Stars and Stripes, in 1998 the marines asked the Japanese to build them what would be, if completed, in 2003, the largest golf course on Okinawa. The new four-hundred-acre facility on virgin land at the Kadena Ammunition Storage Area would replace the 116-acre Awase Meadows Golf Course in urban Naha, which the Americans agreed to return to “civilian use” if Japan would supply them with equivalent facilities elsewhere on the island. The government has no desire to build the new golf course, noting that there is already an eighteen-hole course within Kadena Air Force Base. (Kadena also houses a twenty-six-lane bowling alley, two gymnasiums, two parks, two theaters, two libraries, three swimming pools, four tennis courts, seventeen baseball diamonds, four officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, a riding academy, a ballet studio, and a dog obedience school.) But these are Air Force facilities, as Lt. Col. Billy Birdwell, deputy director of U.S. Forces Japan Public Affairs, explained: “We want the public to know that this is not going to be another golf course on Kadena Air Base. This will be a Marine facility, Marine managed.”³¹

In 1996, General C. C. Krulak, the marine commandant, became so worried that the rape incident might force his troops to give up Okinawa’s plush officers’ clubs and golf courses that he proposed moving the 3rd Marine Division to Darwin, Australia. This idea fell through when it became clear that Australia would not pay the same lucrative benefits to keep the marines happy.

The prefecture of Okinawa is, in fact, forced to pay many other costs that are incidental to housing the bases. There are an estimated ten thousand children of mixed parentage—offspring of unknown or longgone American fathers and Okinawan mothers—whom the prefecture is obliged to support and educate. During his 1998 visit to Washington, Governor Ota indicated to Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific, that “we have a situation in Okinawa where children with dual citizenship and one parent who is American are not receiving an adequate education.” He asked that they be allowed to attend schools on the bases free of charge. Campbell, who was three years old when the revision of the security treaty was signed in 1960, fobbed off the seventy-three-year-old Ota with a standard response that disguises the nature of the de facto American colonialism in Okinawa: he urged the governor to take up such issues with the government in Tokyo. Since Okinawa is part of Japan, the United States now pretends that its military bases are there as a result of Japan’s allocation of base sites. This amounts to a permanent collusion of the United States and Japan against Okinawa.³²

What does the U.S. government say it is doing in Okinawa fifty-five years after the end of World War II? Throughout the postwar period, the United States has vacillated between two basic arguments: the forces are there either in order to defend Japan or in order to contain Japan. Though one contradicts the other, each is alternately resurrected, depending on the current situation in East Asia, and used to justify policies that were first formulated to deal with conditions that existed in 1951, when the peace treaty and the security treaty were negotiated, and that ceased to exist at least two decades ago. Even in 1951, Japan was in no danger of being attacked by another nation and even less capable of attacking one of its neighbors.

According to Article 5 of the Japanese-American Security Treaty, the purpose of the treaty is to defend Japan. Needless to say, the document did not explain whom Japan was to be defended from or dwell on whether Japan needed America’s help in defending itself. No attempt has been made to invade the main islands since a Mongol fleet dispatched by Kublai Khan was dispersed by a “divine wind” in A.D. 1281. After the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, the Americans essentially gave up on the idea of an invasion and turned instead to defeating Japan through the use of nuclear weapons, strategic bombing, and a blockade.

Since World War II, only the former Soviet Union could conceivably have mounted such an invasion, although there is no evidence that it ever seriously considered doing so. American and Japanese defense officials love to say that Okinawa’s excessive burdens in the Cold War are a result of the island’s “strategic location.” But Okinawa was hardly well located to anchor a defense against the USSR, which in any case self-destructed a decade ago.

The Pentagon regularly suggests that Japan faces potential threats from North Korea and China. But North Korea is a failed Communist regime unable to feed its own people and still engaged in a barely repressed civil war with South Korea, which is twice as populous, infinitely richer, and fully capable of defending itself. The Japanese government has strongly expressed its own fears of a potential North Korean missile assault ever since Pyongyang in August 1998 fired a rocket over Japan in the process of launching a small satellite. The real threat, however, is that a suicidal North Korea—itself feeling threatened by the might of the United States—could deliver some kind of terror weapon (if it has one) to Japan by boat and detonate it there as a final, if futile, act of retaliation for Japan’s brutal colonial rule of and postwar hostility toward it. This would be more than half a century late, the worst blowback nightmare and a horrific reminder that the acts of empire are seldom forgotten by those who have suffered them. To date, however, there is no evidence that North Korea is suicidally inclined. Public opinion in Japan, in fact, remains deeply suspicious of American claims that North Korea is a threat. In 1994, when the possible existence of a North Korean nuclear arsenal first surfaced in the media, in a four-nation poll of attitudes, the Japanese named the United States as “the biggest threat to world peace,” followed by Russia and only then by North Korea.³³

The notion that the main thrust of the security treaty was to defend against Chinese expansionism, or to “contain” China, or to provide a platform from which the United States could intervene militarily in the Taiwan Strait to defend Taiwan, Japan’s former colony, from attack by mainland China is a very embarrassing and dangerous one for Japan. In Japan’s own peace treaty with China ending World War II, Japan clearly acknowledged Taiwan as a part of China. Chinese leaders regularly remind Japan that enlarging the scope of the security treaty to include Taiwan directly violates commitments Japan has long made to China.

The Japanese public (and even the conservative ruling party) do not in any case believe that their country is threatened by China. It is widely accepted that Taiwan’s highly modern defense forces effectively deter any form of military takeover by the mainland. For the public, given what Japan did in China during World War II, a serious conflict with that nation over Taiwan is unthinkable. The Japanese also applaud the evolution of the previously revolutionary People’s Republic from its emphasis on opposition to its former imperialist oppressors to domestic development through commerce with them. Japan’s policy is to do everything in its power to adjust to the reemergence of China on the world stage. It also appreciates that China, while resurgent, still has only a gross domestic product of $560 billion, compared to Japan’s $5 trillion and the United States’ $7.2 trillion; a defense budget of $31.7 billion, compared to Japan’s $47 billion and the United States’ $263.9 billion; and perhaps as many as 149 strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the United States’ 7,150.

In polls, the Japanese public has repeatedly expressed a greater concern about oscillations in U.S. policy toward China than about anything China has done or has the capability to do to Japan. Given the large military expeditionary forces the United States maintains in Japan, the real fear is that increased American belligerence toward China might invite Chinese retaliation against the bases in Japan. This is one reason why former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa advocates maintaining the Japanese-American alliance while eliminating permanent U.S. forces from Japanese territory.³⁴

The Japanese, too, have the ability to defend themselves from any likely nonnuclear threat to their security. With the second largest navy in the Pacific, more destroyers than the United States, and 120 F-15 fighter interceptors, Japan is quite capable of meeting any challenge that might arise, including one to its merchant fleet. Shunji Taoka, the military correspondent for the Asahi newspaper, argues that Japan has long been fully capable of supplying its own air, naval, and ground defenses and need rely on the United States only for its “nuclear umbrella.” According to Taoka, if the United States withdrew its forces, Japan would not need to add anything further to its defense expenditures in order to maintain its security.³⁵

If, then, American troops are not in Japan to defend Japan, could they be there to contain it? Is their role that of an “honorable watchdog” (gobanken-sama), as many conservative Japanese politicians have contended in the postwar years? The most famous expression of this came from Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, in a 1990 interview with the Washington Post.³⁶ His forces, he claimed, were like a “cap in the bottle,” preventing the monster of revived Japanese militarism from jumping out and, as in the first half of the twentieth century, threatening other East Asian countries. Versions of this view are often seen in the American press; a typical example also from the Post: “Neighboring countries, with a particularly vivid memory of Japanese aggression during World War II, also worry that if the U.S. withdrew its troops, Japan would almost certainly build up its own military power.”³⁷

One problem with this theory is that the United States has long pushed Japan to build up exactly the military power it is supposed to be containing. The government sells more advanced weapons to Japan than to any other nation or territory except Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. It has allowed the licensing of the technology of General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter plane (a derivative of which in Japan became the FS-X); it has sold Japan advanced Aegis ship missile-defense systems, ultrasophisticated AWACS command and control aircraft, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and with highly publicized threats about the dangers of the “rogue state” of North Korea has even gotten the Japanese to agree to help fund research for an antiballistic missile system. And that only scratches the surface of U.S. arms and technology transfers. In addition, administration and Pentagon officials have urged their Japanese equivalents to be strategically bolder in deploying Japanese defense forces in Asia—far bolder, in fact, than most Japanese would like their country to be.

The Pentagon is today the most important political force inside or outside Japan calling for a greatly expanded Japanese military role in world affairs. In a public-opinion poll conducted by the Asahi newspaper, 43 percent of the Japanese public opposed and only 37 percent approved the expanded Guidelines on U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation that the two countries signed in 1997.³⁸ These commit Japan to supporting American troops in times of “emergency” with many forms of assistance—opening up Japan’s civilian airports to American military operations, collaborating with American forces in removing mines, enforcing naval embargoes, and other types of direct military operations. These guidelines, as the Asahi newspaper declared editorially, have, in effect, rewritten the security treaty without consultations either with the Japanese Diet or Congress.³⁹ Such ongoing American policies undoubtedly serve to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific but bear no relation to a supposed “watchdog” role.

As former Okinawan governor Ota commented, “What’s actually happening in Japan is that, with practically no public debate, hypothetical enemies are produced one after another, and potential threats are loudly proclaimed. People talk of the need to maintain an American military presence and to pass legislation to deal with national security emergencies, without making any move to accept bases in their own communities.”⁴⁰ The Pentagon understands that it cannot come up with a credible threat to Japan or any other nation in East Asia that would demand the forward deployment of American troops. As mentioned in chapter 1, it has therefore decided to rely on something comparable to the old domino theory used to justify the war in Vietnam. According to that theory, nations all over Asia and elsewhere would “go Communist” if North Vietnam were allowed to win its civil war. With communism long gone as an enemy, the new, abstract danger is “instability.” Grave dangers, it is said, will result from the “destabilizing” act of withdrawing American troops from Asia. This new, exceedingly vague doctrine indirectly acknowledges that the purpose of American forces in Japan is neither to defend nor to contain Japan but simply by their presence to prevent the assumed dangers of their absence. The Japanese are being propagandized to believe that in these unknown future conflicts they will have a huge if unspecified stake.

In 1995, this new domino-like theory was given a classic formulation in a series of essays by former assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye. With very little in the way of specific scenarios or threats, he argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that “security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice it until you lose it.”⁴¹ In the Washington Post, he put it this way: “Our forward presence provides for the stability—the oxygen—that has helped provide for East Asian economic growth.”⁴² And in a Department of Defense publication, he offered, “Having United States forces in Asia also promotes democratic development in Asia, by providing a clear, readily observable example of the American military’s apolitical role.”⁴³

Such formulations have since entered official Washington culture and are now served up as catechism. On March 24, 1997, for instance, Vice President Al Gore told American troops and their families at Yokota Air Force Base near Tokyo, “The peace and security of the Pacific region rest on your backs.”⁴⁴ And the Pentagon has come to like this idea so much that it has announced its intention to keep troops in Korea indefinitely, even after North and South Korea have been unified. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has also defended the continued presence in Japan by insisting that any pullout would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.”⁴⁵

The most obvious problem with these propositions is that they have simply not proved true. When “instability” finally hit the region, the American forward bases offered no solace. The economic crisis that began in 1997 revealed that in East Asia, rather than security being like oxygen, it is money that you may not miss until it is pulled out. The presence of American military forces in the region did not prevent the instability—in some cases, chaos—that ensued in the wake of this crisis. In fact, the Pentagon only made matters worse by continuing to try to hawk massively expensive weapons systems to countries no longer able to afford them. As for the military’s contributing to economic growth, former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa has this sharp observation: “It was after U.S. forces withdrew from Indochina and Thailand in the 1970s that economic growth in Southeast Asia gained momentum and economic relations with the United States began to expand. The economy of the Philippines took off after the U.S. forces left there in the 1990s. These experiences show that there is little or no relation between foreign military presence and economic growth.”⁴⁶

That the forward deployment of American troops brings “stability” to East Asia is, of course, a false syllogism and, as military strategist Col. Harry Summers Jr. puts it, the equivalent of using elephant bane in New York City. Elephant bane is a chemical repellent spread by African farmers to keep elephants out of their gardens and orchards. Pentagon theorists, Colonel Summers suggests, are like the New Yorker who spreads elephant bane around his apartment and then extols its benefits because he encounters no elephants.⁴⁷ The strategy “works” because the threat is illusory. The real, long-term threat to stability in East Asia is the economic crisis caused by an American determination to perpetuate its system of satellites and its own regional hegemony long after it has lost whatever Cold War economic or political rationale it had.

Why is the United States really still in Okinawa? For its military personnel, the answer is obvious. They enjoy being based there for the same reasons that the former Soviet Union’s troops enjoyed being based in East Germany. Life in one of their country’s military colonies was for the officers and enlisted men and women of both armies better than anything most of them could possibly have experienced back home. As the unofficial guide to American military bases in Okinawa puts it, “If you prefer living with a view of beautiful Kin Bay from a lofty high-rise, [Camp] Courtney [headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division] provides hundreds of scenic dwellings in the form of nine-story apartment complexes.” For the marine family’s shopping needs, “At a construction cost of more than $11 million, the [Camp] Foster Exchange is the newest in the Pacific area. It offers all the conveniences of a modern shopping center. . . . When they’re not at work, [Camp] Hansen Marines can take advantage of two of the most beautiful beaches on the island, Kin Red and Kin Blue.”⁴⁸ All active-duty military personnel on Okinawa receive either rent- and utility-cost-free housing on base or enormous housing allowances ranging from $900 to $2,000 a month, depending on rank and family size. These benefits are supplemented by generous cost-of-living allowances—which for a captain or a major with one dependent is about $700 a month. This is not hardship living.

Okinawa is still essentially a military colony of the Pentagon’s, a huge safe house where Green Berets and the Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention the air force and Marine Corps, can do things they would not dare do in the United States. It is used to project American power throughout Asia in the service of a de facto U.S. grand strategy to perpetuate or increase American hegemonic power in this crucial region. The U.S. military is the author and prime beneficiary of this strategy, and it is in the driver’s seat executing it. This becomes clear when we turn to some of its secret global (and especially Asian) activities that it is fully aware of—but that other parts of its government and its people are not.

There were many differences between the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States’ satellites in East Asia, most importantly in the area of economic organization. In Europe, Stalin imposed on all seven of his “people’s democracies” (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania but not Yugoslavia, which was not created by the Red Army) a uniform pattern involving the collectivization of agriculture and an extreme centralization of economic decision making. The USSR demanded that all of these countries industrialize at the fastest possible pace, with absolute priority given to heavy industry. In the period from 1947 to 1952, the Soviet Union imposed its own economic methods uncritically and without taking any cultural or other differences into account. It was a process in some ways similar to the one the International Monetary Fund imposed on the smaller, more open economies of East Asia during and after the financial crisis of 1997—and with similar results.

In contrast with the Soviet Union, the United States was much less doctrinaire about economic arrangements in its satellites during the Cold War. In Japan and South Korea, its two main dependencies in East Asia, it insisted on the institution of private property and opposed any steps toward the nationalization of industry, but it tolerated land reform, state guidance of the economy, protectionism, mercantilism, and the cartelization of industry as long as these methods produced economic growth and blunted the appeal of communism. The United States used aid and preferred access to its vast market to bring these countries into its political orbit and keep them there. It disguised what it was doing—ultimately fooling only its own people—with euphemisms like “exportled growth” and “the separation of politics and economics.” The result was that over the years places like South Korea were able to export their way to personal incomes averaging over $10,000 per capita, a process that the Western business press invariably characterized as “miraculous.” It was not a process made available to the Latin American dependencies of the United States, because they were not of equal strategic importance in the Cold War.

When it came to the political and military dimensions of satellite creation and maintenance, the Soviet Union and the United States pursued similar policies and for similar reasons. They controlled their dependencies through single-party dictatorships (in Japan’s case a one-party “democracy”) that either the Red Army or the U.S. Army installed in power and then supported throughout the Cold War against any and all popular efforts to introduce truly democratic regimes. Although rebellions against our military presence in Japan were endemic from 1952 until after the end of the Vietnam War, we helped maintain (often through CIA funds channeled to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party) a single-party regime from 1949 to 1993, a record for stable satellite government (although identical in length to that of the government of East Germany from 1945 to 1989). During this period Japan was led by the same types of “shameless mediocrities” that the French international relations theorist Raymond Aron once said the Soviet Union relied on to govern Eastern Europe.¹

Democracy finally began to appear in South Korea only in 1987, over four decades after the country came into being, largely because the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had attracted the Olympic Games for the following year and so had trapped himself into behaving in a civilized manner before a global audience when Koreans began to protest his rule. Much as in 1989, when the Russians did not intervene militarily to stop the East Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, the United States in 1987 did not encourage its Korean military allies to use force, as it had done in the past. One reason was that American officials still had in mind the traumatic outcome of the Iranian revolution—when their down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime. Just the previous year, in February 1986, they thought they saw similar events unfolding in the Philippines as a popular movement swept away another U.S.-supported but corrupt and incompetent dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. In that case, the United States did not support the repression of the rebels, and the results proved relatively satisfying when Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated Marcos opponent, and a group of middle-class reformers came to power, backed by military men with strong ties to the United States. Thus, the American government again showed restraint in the Korean situation, and the student demonstrators with their middle-class backers, seizing the chance, brought into being what is today the only democracy in East Asia, other than the Philippines, that rests on popular political action from below.

The end of World War II had proved no more a “liberation day” for Korea than for Czechoslovakia or other nations of Eastern Europe. The Japanese had occupied, colonized, and exploited Korea since 1905, just as the Nazis, following the 1938 Munich Agreement, had divided, occupied, and ravished Czechoslovakia. Both countries now underwent transformations into colonies of the victors of World War II. At about the same time in February 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was carrying out a coup d’état in Prague, right-wing forces in the southern half of divided Korea, then under the control of the United States, were slaughtering at least thirty thousand dissident peasants on the island of Cheju. Although the Czech events are much better known (and led to the creation of NATO the following year), the killings in Korea were of essentially the same character as those in Czechoslovakia. The Cheju massacre was part of a process by which our puppet regime in South Korea, a government every bit as unpopular as Klement Gottwald’s Stalinist government in Czechoslovakia, consolidated power. Gottwald, president of Czechoslovakia from 1948 until his death in 1953, and Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960, were, in fact, similar figures: neither could have come to power without the aid of his superpower patron and both were prototypes of the faceless bureaucrats the Soviets and the Americans would use for the next forty years to govern their “captive nations” (a term the Eisenhower administration came to apply to the Soviet Union’s satellites).

Between Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, and the installation of Syngman Rhee (who claimed to be a former Princeton student of Woodrow Wilson’s) as president of the Republic of Korea in the southern half of that peninsula on August 15, 1948, the Koreans themselves tried desperately to create a postcolonial government of their own, just as the Czechs struggled to create a democratic government under President Edvard Benes up to February 25, 1948. They were ultimately undone by superpower rivalries. Fearing that the United States was setting up Japan as its chief client in postwar Asia, the Soviets held on to Korea above the 38th parallel as a bulwark against Japanese influence. There, they promoted and endorsed a Communist government made up of former guerrilla fighters against the Japanese.

The Americans were more ambiguous about what they were doing. General John Hodge and his U.S. Army veterans of the Battle of Okinawa were the legal successors to the Japanese in South Korea. Only in 1948 did they hand over power to Rhee, and even then they retained operational authority over the South Korean armed forces and national police for another year. Preoccupied with the security of Japan and indifferent to Korea’s status, Hodge ended up thwarting the efforts of patriots such as Kim Ku to reconcile with the North Koreans. Instead, he moved to support Syngman Rhee, who himself was supported by and who staffed his new government with numerous former collaborators with the Japanese whose main credential was their firm and reliable anticommunism. The forces under Hodge’s command then trained and supervised Rhee’s armed forces in the suppression of any and all dissenters—invariably labeled “Communists”—and waited to see whether Rhee could consolidate his power.

Following the departure of the Japanese, the people of Cheju, a remote island off the extreme southern coast of Korea, governed themselves through patriotic “people’s committees” that were socialist but not Communist in orientation, as even General Hodge acknowledged. On April 3, 1948, Rhee’s police fired on a demonstration commemorating the Korean struggle against Japanese rule. This incident led to a general insurrection on the island against the police and their attempt to integrate Cheju into the new South Korean regime. Rhee responded with a campaign similar to that of the Indonesian Army in East Timor or of the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. His police carried out a merciless assault on the people of Cheju, killing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand of them in the course of a few months and forcing another forty thousand to flee to Japan. On May 13, 1949, the American ambassador to the Republic of Korea, John Muccio, wired Washington that most rebels and sympathizers on Cheju had been “killed, captured, or converted.”²

By far the most ruthless of Rhee’s agents was a paramilitary vigilante organization called the Northwest Youth League, composed of refugees from North Korea, whom the U.S. Army tolerated with full knowledge of their reputation for brutality. The American occupation authorities, in fact, directly funded and trained a similar organization, the Korean National Youth League, under its leader Yi Pom-sok (known to the Americans as “Bum Suk Lee”), as a right-wing paramilitary organization. The “youths” were aged eighteen to fifty. Northwest Youth League members, who were not funded by the U.S. Army, were, of course, rabidly anti-Communist but they also were interested in securing their own livelihoods by acquiring wealth and wives in South Korea. They were responsible for the widely documented sadistic treatment of Cheju’s women, including forcing female survivors of families they killed to marry them and cede their land to them. Some of these men still reside in Cheju today, having profited from the island’s contemporary status as a beach and golf resort. In April 1996, when President Kim Young-sam used the beachfront Cheju Shilla Hotel as the site of his summit meeting with President Clinton, no American journalist mentioned Cheju’s past, much less the similarity between Clinton’s mindless visit to Cheju and former President Reagan’s mindless visit to a cemetery for former SS soldiers in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985.³ At an August 1998 international conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cheju uprising held in Cheju City, many speakers noted that Clinton had played golf on the unmarked graves of Syngman Rhee’s victims.

For at least forty-five years after the Cheju massacre, any Korean who so much as mentioned it was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998. Only in that year did the director of the Agency for National Security Planning, the KCIA’s successor, promise that abuse of the law for political purposes would stop and Koreans would no longer be arrested for minor violations like praising Communist North Korea.⁴ Only in 1995, after the arrests of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for mutiny, corruption, and murder did the Cheju Provincial Assembly finally feel secure enough to create a committee to investigate the massacre, whose research produced the names of 14,504 victims. The committee’s best estimate of the total killed was thirty thousand, about 10 percent of the island’s population. Some 70 percent of the island’s 230 villages were burned to the ground and a staggering 39,000-plus homes destroyed.

The consolidation of a pro-Soviet regime in North Korea and a pro-American one in South Korea led to a war that began in June 1950. The North Koreans have consistently claimed that this was a war of national liberation against American imperialism, while Americans have generally characterized it as an international conflict in which North Korea invaded South Korea. It was without question a civil war among Koreans, some of whom in the South had collaborated with the Japanese colonialists and some of whom in the North had fought against them. From my personal perspective as a veteran of the period immediately following the armistice of 1953, it was also clearly a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil.

Shortly after North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the United States intervened in force. In the autumn of that year, after American troops had invaded North Korea, China intervened in force. From June 1950 to early 1951 the war was primarily between U.S. troops and the North Korean army. Starting in March, it became a Sino-U.S. war, and its nature was transformed. The first phase of the war saw massive North Korean, American, and Chinese military movements combined with guerrilla struggles behind the lines. The later Sino-U.S. war bogged down in World War I–style trench warfare along what would later become the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Regardless of one’s view of the Korean War, the position of South Korea from the war down to the present has been that of a client of the United States.

In June 1950, the United States took its intervention against the North Korean attack to the U.N. Security Council. The USSR was then boycotting the Security Council to protest an American refusal to allow the new People’s Republic of China to occupy the seat reserved for China. On July 7, 1950, under conditions never again repeated, the Security Council, free of the threat of a Soviet veto, authorized a “unified command under the United States” to defend South Korea. Fifteen nations other than the United States contributed forces to this “unified command.” The United States on its own initiative then created the “United Nations Command” as the operational unit through which it would fight the war. The Republic of Korea also placed its troops under this American-controlled command. Thus, from 1950 to the present, the U.N. commander in Korea was and remains a United States Army general.

The United Nations itself was not, however, a party to the Korean War. There was no U.N. operational control over any aspect of the hostilities, and the United States, the designated occupant of the “unified command,” reported to the United Nations only after the fact. Cynics say that the first U.N. commander, General Douglas MacArthur, never sent the United Nations anything other than his press releases. Under international law the U.N. Command is an alliance of national armies commanded by the United States, even though there are today no other members left except for the United States and South Korea. The armistice agreement of July 27, 1953, was signed by General Mark W. Clark, the U.N. commander; Marshal Kim Il-sung of the Korean People’s Army; and General Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers—but not by any representative of South Korea. This is one reason why today North Korea insists upon negotiating with the United States, not with South Korea.

Another important result of these arrangements is that the South Korean armed forces—today, some 670,000 men, 461 combat aircraft, and a navy that includes 44 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes as well as 4 attack submarines, with a budget of around US$16 billion—is operationally part of a military command structure headed by an American general. No matter how hard the U.S. government tries to finesse the matter, the South Korean army, except for some elite paratroop and special forces units, is as much under American military control now as it was at the time of the Cheju massacre.

When in 1961 and again in 1979 this South Korean army carried out military coups d’état and in 1980 massacred civilians protesting military rule in the city of Kwangju, ordinary Koreans inevitably saw the Americans as co-conspirators. On November 30, 1994, forty-one years after the armistice and seven years after the birth of Korean democracy, the United States finally transferred peacetime control over South Korean forces to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff. In times of war, however, command reverts to a U.S.-dominated Combined Forces Command. China and Russia today have friendly diplomatic and economic relations with South as well as North Korea, whereas the United States still has 37,000 combat troops occupying 65,500 acres of South Korean territory at 96 bases and has no formal relations with North Korea.

In the years since the Korean War, the United States has had to deal with many difficult situations in its South Korean satellite brought about by popular demands for democracy and independence from the United States, which in many ways resembled the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak uprisings for democracy and independence from the Soviet Union. The major difference was that whereas the Soviet Union relied primarily on its own armed forces to suppress these popular movements, the United States entrusted repression to the Republic of Korea army, whose leaders ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1993. The most important of these situations was the suppression of the Kwangju uprising of 1980, which bore many similarities to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

The comparison is instructive. At the end of fascist rule in 1945, the Hungarians tried to establish a popularly supported government. In elections held late in that year, six political parties put up candidates. The Independent Smallholders Party emerged with 245 seats, the Communists with 70, the Social Democrats with 69, and the National Peasants with 23. These four major parties formed a coalition government, but power increasingly flowed to the Communists because of the presence in the country of the Red Army—exactly as happened in South Korea because of the presence of the U.S. Army. By 1948, most non-Communist leaders in Hungary had been silenced, sent into exile abroad, or arrested. In 1949, Hungary officially became a people’s democracy under Matyas Rakosi, a Communist trained in Moscow, who was secretary-general of the Hungarian Workers Party.

Hungary was, of course, not divided into Soviet and American zones. The Allied powers had concluded a peace treaty with Hungary that came into force in September 1947. It called for the withdrawal of all Allied armies except for the USSR’s. Soviet troops were to be stationed in Hungary to maintain lines of communication to Red Army units in the Soviet zone of occupation in Austria. In April 1948, Hungary entered into a treaty of “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” with the USSR in which both parties pledged military assistance to the other if they once again became victims of aggression from Germany or “any state associated with Germany.” The Hungarian army was expanded well beyond the limits authorized in the peace treaty.

In July 1955, the occupation of Austria came to an end; the last Soviet units left Vienna on September 19, 1955. Immediately preceding the signing of the Austrian peace treaty, the USSR and its seven people’s democracies united in the Warsaw Pact, aimed at NATO and a “remilitarized Western Germany.” Under the terms of this alliance, the Soviet Union stationed its 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions, with a strength of about twenty thousand men and six hundred tanks, in Hungary.

Rakosi and the Communists ruled Hungary with an iron hand, utilizing mainly the hated State Security Police (the AVH) to crush all dissent. In June 1949, in an interparty struggle, Rakosi arrested the foreign minister, Laszlo Rajk, charged him with an attempt to overthrow the “democratic” order, and had him hanged. Six years later, in March 1956, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed the extent of Stalin’s tyranny, Rakosi made a similar move to de-Stalinize his own country. He revealed that Rajk had been condemned on “fabricated charges.” No doubt Rakosi’s mistake was that he was still in political control and revealing his own, rather than someone else’s, criminality. Widespread protests followed, and the Russians ousted Rakosi in July 1956, replacing him with Erno Gero, a party hack who did not last out the year. In October 1956, Laszlo Rajk and other victims of the 1949 purge trials were ceremonially reburied, with large Hungarian crowds in attendance.

The autumn of 1956, following the Soviet 20th Congress, saw the first “thaw” in the Communist world. China launched its campaign to “let a hundred flowers bloom” (that is, to invite criticism of the regime); Poland took its first tentative steps toward greater independence from the USSR; and in Hungary, starting with Rakosi’s fall, people looked forward to a softening of the regime. This mood lasted no more than a year anywhere in the Communist world, but at the time optimism was prevalent. Gero’s regime ordered an end to the compulsory teaching of Russian in Hungarian schools and some other cosmetic reforms. Students and intellectuals felt bold enough to meet and discuss such subjects as ending single-party rule and asking Soviet troops to go home. They called for the return to power of Imre Nagy, who had been premier from 1953 to 1955, following the death of Stalin, and was reputedly a moderate. An old Communist, a member of the party since 1918, Nagy had lived in Moscow for some fifteen years and returned to Hungary with the Red Army in 1944. His moderation consisted primarily of opposition to the secret police and their activities. Rakosi had attacked Nagy as a deviationist and had him expelled from the party.

On October 23, 1956, in the new atmosphere of mild intellectual ferment and optimism, an incident occurred in downtown Budapest that led to a general insurrection and the mobilization of Russian forces in Hungary. The State Security Police, intensely unpopular and universally feared, opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators and killed a number of students. In the melee that ensued, ambulances with red crosses sped to the scene; when their doors opened, AVH reinforcements dressed in the white coats of doctors but armed with machine guns emerged from them.⁵ Outrage over the killings and deception led to the Budapest uprising.

Over the succeeding five days fighting broke out between students and workers wielding Molotov cocktails and Soviet tanks trying to negotiate the narrow streets of Budapest. Not a single instance was recorded of Hungarian troops fighting on the Soviet side against their fellow countrymen. Even the Soviet troops themselves seemed reluctant to push forward with the attack. As the U.N. report noted, “Soviet forces normally stationed in Hungary or Romania had been affected by their surroundings. . . . The civilians whom they fought included women, children, and elderly people. [Soviet troops] could see that the people were unanimous in their fight against the AVH and foreign intervention; that the men whom the Soviet Army was fighting and the prisoners who were captured were not fascists, but workers and students, who demonstrably regarded Soviet soldiers not as liberators, but as oppressors.”⁶

On the morning of October 24, Imre Nagy, having been readmitted to the party a week earlier, was elected to the Politburo and hastily appointed prime minister. It was a gesture designed to calm the crowds, which by then had broken the power of the AVH, while the Soviets were taking losses in the street fighting. The events of October 24 and 25 were extremely confused, and people did not know whether Nagy was actually in power or even whether he was fully on their side until later in the month. On October 25, Janos Kadar replaced Gero as first secretary of the party, and Gero fled to the USSR. Only on October 27 was Nagy finally able to form a government, into which he invited both Communists and non-Communists as ministers. The people of Hungary then accepted Nagy as their leader, having concluded that although he was a Communist he was also a good Hungarian. In the few days remaining to him, Imre Nagy ordered a cease-fire (which the insurgents honored), asked the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces from Hungary, ordered the AVH abolished, released all political prisoners, withdrew his country from the Warsaw Pact, and asked the international community to defend Hungary’s neutrality. This was obviously far more than Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders had bargained for or were prepared to countenance.

On November 4, 1956, at 5:20 in the morning, Nagy announced over Radio Budapest that Soviet forces in battle formation had invaded the city with the intent to overthrow the legal government of Hungary. This second Soviet attack, using troops from central Asia who had been led to believe that they were being sent to Egypt to fight against British and French “imperialists,” was swift and thorough.⁷ By eight A.M. that same morning, Soviet tanks were in control of the Danube bridges. Imre Nagy, Laszlo Rajk’s widow, and several other democrats and women and children sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. The Soviet Union promised them safe passage out of Hungary, but the bus taking them from Yugoslavia’s embassy delivered them not to the border but to the headquarters of the Soviet military command. They were never heard from again. In 1958, the Hungarian government announced that Nagy had been secretly tried and executed.

Janos Kadar entered the Hungarian capital in the baggage train of the Soviet invaders and re-created single-party rule under the Hungarian Workers Party. Kadar and the USSR announced to the world that they had successfully prevented an attempt “to overthrow socialism in Hungary and to restore the capitalists and landowners to power.” Kadar thanked the Soviet Union for its assistance in defeating the “reactionary forces.” All fighting in Hungary was over by November 6, although in the interim some 190,000 students, liberals, and intellectuals managed to flee the country via Austria. The Soviet Union also deported a large but unknown number of Hungarians to the gulags of Russia.

In Korea, the roots of the Kwangju rebellion went back to General Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état of 1961. The previous year, students protesting Syngman Rhee’s flagrant corruption and rigged elections had brought down his regime. However, the democratic government they created was ineffective. Park, a graduate of a Japanese military academy in Manchuria, staged a military coup. Once in power he announced as his goals the end of South Korea’s extreme dependence on American economic aid and restoring relations with Japan. His economic reforms succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, surprising the Americans in charge of Korean affairs, who despite the evidence from Japan refused to believe that authoritarian guidance of the market could produce high-speed economic growth.

General Park’s associate in the 1961 coup was General Kim Jong-pil, who proceeded with the help of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to create the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in order to consolidate Park’s military rule. The KCIA was and is a secret-police apparatus accountable only to the president of South Korea and has been used over the years to silence any and all calls for a genuine democracy. As the historian Perry Anderson observes, “In the mid-sixties the KCIA had 350,000 agents out of a population of 30 million, dwarfing the NKVD at its height. The dungeons were filled with opponents of every kind; torture was routine. Yet the regime, which as a front line of the Free World could not dispense with the formality of elections, was never able to crush opposition completely.”⁸

Despite Park’s unquestioned success in overseeing the rapid industrialization of South Korea, his draconian methods and the great inequities of wealth they produced led to opposition to his rule. In the 1971 elections, the dissident leader Kim Dae-jung, who would finally become president in December 1997 and who is from Mokpo, in the same South Cholla region as Kwangju, almost defeated Park. As a result, Park changed the constitution. He ended direct election of the president, allowed the president to be indefinitely reelected, and gave the president the authority to nominate one-third of the National Assembly (the organ that would reelect him). Throughout the 1970s, the KCIA enforced this new “Yushin” constitution (the Korean pronunciation of the Japanese word meaning “restoration”) while Park continued to move the country toward an industrialization that favored steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and manufacturing rather than labor-intensive light industries.

Although many economists criticized his new economic initiatives, Park’s intention, not unlike that of the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, was to create the industrial foundations for South Korea’s own national defense. He deemed this necessary in view of the probable defeat of the United States in Vietnam and its possible withdrawal from Asia. He was, after all, a nationalist and an anti-Communist who did not want the United States to call all the shots when it came to protecting his country. Nixon’s opening to China worried him as much as anything the North Koreans did.

By 1979, Park’s economic “miracle” in South Korea was considered irreversible. His harsh policies nonetheless continued to elicit student protests, riots, and labor disturbances. On October 16, 1979, over dinner, his KCIA chief, Kim Jae-kyu, pulled out a pistol and shot first Park’s bodyguard and then Park himself, allegedly to end his repression of the people. Park’s assassination seriously destabilized South Korea and afforded North Korea the most propitious circumstances it had encountered since 1953 to renew the civil war. Yet North Korea did nothing. In South Korea, the United States was suspected of having ordered Park’s death, because the assassin was the chief channel of communication between the U.S. government and Park and because it was widely believed that the United States had grown tired of Park’s nascent independence.

In a secret cable to Washington, the American ambassador to Seoul, William J. Gleysteen, denied that he had ever so much as hinted to Kim Jae-kyu that his government was exasperated with Park. But the Americans did have one clear motive for wanting to be rid of him: as part of his efforts to ensure a South Korean victory in any new war with the North, Park had launched a program to build his own nuclear weapons, which the United States opposed. According to the prominent Seoul daily Jungang Ilbo, his target date for having deployable bombs was 1985.⁹ Park’s death stopped the program in its tracks. The United States and South Korea had feuded over nuclear research since the mid-1970s, and the United States has never cooperated with South Korea on atomic-power development, as it has with Japan.¹⁰ In response to Park’s initiative, North Korea also began to build its own nuclear strike force, a program that did not stop with Park’s death. By the 1990s, the possibility that the North might develop nuclear weapons had become a major source of instability in the area.

Our understanding of what happened next in the South Korea of late 1979 owes a great deal to the efforts of an American journalist, Tim Shorrock, who was raised in Seoul as the child of American missionaries. Shorrock has used the Freedom of Information Act to sue the U.S. government, forcing it to divulge some two thousand diplomatic and military cables concerning Korea to and from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1979 and 1980. The documents still contain huge blacked-out areas, and a complete opening of U.S. secret files certainly has not occurred. Most of the cables are from a secret policy-making group that the Carter administration set up ten days after the assassination of Park Chung-hee. Its members were President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador Gleysteen, and the top intelligence official at the National Security Council, Donald Gregg. Vance gave this group the code name Cherokee.¹¹

As revealed in these documents, the primary goal of the United States was to keep South Korea from turning into “another Iran.” Toward this goal, the Americans were quite prepared to see General Park replaced by a new, perhaps more malleable general who would effectively suppress the rising calls for democracy that might prove “destabilizing.”

Martial law and an interim government under former diplomat Choi Kyu-hah followed Park’s death. Choi came up with a plan to spend twenty months writing a new constitution that would guide South Korea from authoritarian to democratic rule. This would put off political reform for a suitably long time. Washington backed the plan despite warnings that ordinary Koreans could not possibly remain politically patient for longer than a year. The extended hiatus in political leadership gave an unknown major general in the army, Chun Doo-hwan, time to prepare his own seizure of power. On December 12, 1979, General Chun, then in charge of defense intelligence at Republic of Korea (ROK) military headquarters, withdrew the 9th Army Division, whose commandant, General Roh Tae-woo, was his co-conspirator, from the demilitarized zone with North Korea and used it to assume control over the rest of the armed forces. These military movements were undertaken without formal approval from General John Wickham, the U.N. commander, but there is every reason to believe that he had been informed and assented to them. The following May, General Wickham readily gave Chun permission to use the 20th Division in the final assault against Kwangju, and at General Chun’s trial fifteen years later his main defense was that all his actions in 1979 and 1980 had been explicitly approved by Washington.

Ambassador Gleysteen’s characterization in the Cherokee cables of what happened is accurate enough: “We have been through a coup in all but name. The flabby façade of civilian constitutional government remains but almost all signs point to a carefully planned takeover of the military power positions by a group of ‘young Turk’ officers. Major General Chun Doo-hwan, advantaged by his powers of security and investigation, seems the most important figure of a group of men who were very close to President Park. . . . The organizing group planned its actions for at least ten days and drew support throughout the armed forces among younger officers.” Gleysteen was concerned that General Chun had “totally ignored the Combined Forces Command’s responsibilities, either ignoring the impact on the United States or coolly calculating that it would not make any difference.” “At the same time,” he added, “I do not think we should treat the new military hierarchy as so bad that we decide to risk seriously alienating them.” A few days after the coup, Gleysteen wrote, “Whatever the precise pattern of events, they did not amount to a classical coup because the existing government structure was technically left in place.” And at the end of December, he added hopefully, “If the new leaders handle themselves with moderation, there may be no violent repercussions.” (These quotations are all from Shorrock’s documents.)

As the administrator of the martial law then in effect, Chun became the de facto ruler of the country. He had to move carefully, however, because he lacked legitimacy within the South Korean legal system and because he could not be certain that all of the armed forces were behind him. Not unlike the “thaw” in Eastern Europe in 1956, there was widespread anticipation that the next election, whose date had not yet been set, would usher in the democracy that had failed to develop after the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960.

On April 14, 1980, acting president Choi, now totally subordinate to Chun, promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general and appointed him acting director of the KCIA. These actions prompted student demonstrations throughout the country. Molotov cocktails were hurled at police formations, and the police retaliated with hypervirulent CS tear gas (the same type used by the FBI at Waco in 1993). Everyone knew that Chun had to consolidate his position before the National Assembly convened for the first time since Park’s death on May 20, when the Democratic Republican Party, the façade behind which Park had ruled, was likely to join with the opposition in ending martial law. That would have destroyed any legal basis for Chun’s political ambitions.

In a secret cable dated May 7, 1980, preceding a scheduled meeting with General Chun, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to his superiors in Washington: “In none of our discussions will we in any way suggest that the USG [U.S. government] opposes ROKG [Republic of Korea government] contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army [italics added].” The next day Warren Christopher cabled back, “We agree that we should not oppose ROK contingency plans to maintain law and order.” Pat Derien, who was President Carter’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, later said to Shorrock that this was “a green light as far as I could see then and as far as I can see now.” She went on to accuse Holbrooke of “pandering to dictators” and of “national security hysterics.”¹²

General Chun did not wait long after talking with Gleysteen to complete the coup d’état he had begun the previous December. Late on the night of May 17, 1980, General Chun expanded martial law, closed the universities, dissolved the National Assembly, banned all political activity, and arrested thousands of political leaders.¹³ Unlike Park, Chun had no following whatsoever outside the army. All Korean cities were tense with fury at his usurpation of power, but only in Kwangju did the situation explode, much in the same way it had in Budapest twenty-four years earlier. What resulted was, in the words of historian Donald Clark, “the most notorious act of political violence in South Korea’s history.” Professor Clark adds that the explicit American endorsement of Chun’s recapture of the city “forever associated the United States with the Kwangju Massacre.”¹⁴

On May 18, 1980, a few hundred demonstrators in Kwangju took to the streets to protest the imposition of martial law. They were met by paratroopers of the 7th Brigade of the Korean special forces, known as the “black berets,” who had a well-known reputation for brutality going back to their service on the American side in the Vietnam War. The 7th Brigade also included a battalion of infiltrators and provocateurs, who wore their hair long and dressed to look like students. According to eyewitnesses, the special forces troops set about bayoneting all the young men and women they could find and attacked others with flamethrowers. In a May 19 cable to Washington, Gleysteen wrote, “Rumors reaching Seoul of Kwangju rioting say special forces used fixed bayonets and inflicted many casualties on students. . . . Some in Kwangju are reported to have said that troops are being more ruthless than North Koreans ever were.”

In reaction to these acts of state terrorism, the whole population of Kwangju and sixteen of the twenty-six other municipalities of the South Cholla region rose in rebellion. They drove the paratroopers from the city, which citizens’ councils controlled for the next five days. They appealed to the U.S. embassy to intervene, but General Wickham had already released from his United Nations Command the forces Chun would use to retake the city. Gleysteen later claimed that he was unable to verify the authenticity of the mediation request and therefore decided not to act. “I grant it was the controversial decision, but it was the correct one. Do I regret it? I don’t think so.”

On Wednesday, May 21, martial law command headquarters in Seoul broke its near total censorship of what was going on in Kwangju and reported that 150,000 civilians, about one-fifth of the city’s population, had gone “on a rampage” and that they had seized 3,505 weapons and 46,400 rounds of ammunition from arsenals and had commandeered 4 armored personnel carriers, 89 jeeps, 50 trucks, 40 wreckers, 40 buses, 10 dump trucks, and 8 tear-gas-firing jeeps.¹⁵ On the same day, Ambassador Gleysteen wrote to Washington that a “massive insurrection in Kwangju is still out of control and poses an alarming situation for the ROK military.” He said that the Korean military was “concentrating defense on two military installations and a prison containing 2,000 leftists. . . . The December 12 generals obviously feel threatened by the whole affair.”

In the cables released to Tim Shorrock, there is ample evidence that the American embassy knew about the transfer of the special forces to Kwangju and what was likely to happen when they applied their well-known skills to civilians. In cables dated May 7 and May 8, Ambassador Gleysteen had gone into detail on the numbers of special forces brigades brought into Seoul and around Kimpo Airport “to cope with possible student demonstrations.” On May 8, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had sent a cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon saying that all Korean special forces brigades “are on alert.” “Only the 7th Brigade remained away from the Seoul area,” and “was probably targeted against unrest at Chonju and Kwangju universities.”

Under the Combined Forces Command (CFC) structure, Korean special forces (as distinct from all regular army units) were outside joint U.S.-Korean control and did not need U.S. approval to be moved. However, it was routine for the Koreans to inform the CFC of any troop movements. In Gleysteen’s May 7 cable, he speculates that the Koreans might ask for approval to move the ROK 1st Marine Division. “There has been no request for such approval yet, but CINCUNC [Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command] would agree if asked.” In a May 22 cable, Gleysteen describes “the extent to which we were facilitating ROK army efforts to restore order in Kwangju and deter trouble elsewhere.” However, he told the South Korean foreign minister, “We had not and did not intend to publicize our actions because we feared we would be charged with colluding with the martial law authorities and risk fanning anti-American sentiment in the Kwangju area.”

In Washington, D.C., on May 22, the newly created Policy Review Committee on Korea met at the White House to consider what the United States should do. Its members included newly appointed secretary of state Edmund Muskie, President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the director of central intelligence Admiral Stansfield Turner, and the secretary of defense Harold Brown, plus Christopher, Holbrooke, and Gregg. Brzezinski, himself a Polish-American and an authority on the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe, summarized the consensus of the meeting: “In the short-term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution.” According to the minutes transmitted to Gleysteen, “There was general agreement that the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later.”

On May 23 Gleysteen met with the acting prime minister and told him that “firm anti-riot measures were necessary.” He agreed to release “CFC [Combined Forces Command] forces to Korean command for use in Kwangju.” General Wickham withdrew the Korean 20th Division from its duties on the DMZ and turned it over to the martial law authorities. General Chun broadcast news of the American decision to release the troops throughout South Korea, thus cleverly bolstering the view that the United States backed Chun. At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of May 27 the 20th Division entered Kwangju, killing anyone who did not lay down his or her weapons. This was a highly disciplined unit, and the city was quickly secured, much as Budapest had been in 1956.

The endgame of the Kwangju uprising dragged on for another two years. In the summer of 1982, two special forces brigades were moved from the border with North Korea to the cities of Kwangju and Chongju in order to hunt down rebels who had fled into the hills when the 20th Division entered the city. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that these remnants were not Communist-inspired but were reacting against the brutality of their own country’s army.

Back in Seoul, General Chun arrested dissident leader Kim Dae-jung on trumped-up charges of favoring North Korea—Kim had spoken of a federal system for the future of a unified Korea—and on May 22 charged him with instigating the protests in Kwangju even though he was in jail when they occurred. The martial law authority sentenced him to death. Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser, takes credit for saving Kim’s life. He claims that he traded a presidential invitation to Chun Doo-hwan to visit the White House—in February 1981 Chun was the first head of state to be received by the new president—in return for a life sentence. (Allen actually ended the article in which he described this achievement with the sentence “Chalk up one for the Gipper!”)¹⁶ In 1982 Chun allowed Kim Dae-jung to go into exile in the United States.

On May 24, 1980, Chun took care of some old business and had Kim Jae-kyu, Park’s assassin, hanged, since dead men tell no tales. He then put together an “electoral college” under the authority of the Yushin constitution and had himself elected president of the republic. By August 1980, the Carter administration was more than satisfied that Chun Doo-hwan would serve nicely as the leader of one of America’s oldest satellites.

It is hard to calculate how many people were actually killed at Kwangju. There was no United Nations investigation as there was into the Hungarian uprising. The United States has remained even more closemouthed about what happened there than the Chinese Communists are about the 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square. There were only a few Western eyewitnesses. Jurgen Hinzpeter, a German television reporter, reached the city on May 20 and photographed bodies being loaded onto trucks, terrified citizens being led away by troops at gunpoint, and burning buildings. His films circulated underground in South Korea for years among student and Christian groups.

Norman Thorpe of the Asian Wall Street Journal was so appalled by what he saw at Kwangju that he retired from being a journalist in East Asia. In 1996, he protested Richard Holbrooke’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize stemming from his work in Bosnia. “Mr. Holbrooke argues that stability was important,” writes Thorpe about Holbrooke’s role in Korea, “because of the North Korean threat. Nonetheless, under the U.S. policies he helped develop, the military prolonged its rule in South Korea, delaying the transition to democracy and taking the lives of many demonstrators.”¹⁷

Following the attack on the city on May 27, Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times rented a car and driver to get to Kwangju. He reported that although there was no way to confirm a death toll, at least 200 armed insurgents were said to have made a final stand in the provincial headquarters building. He counted 61 caskets on the floor of a gymnasium across the street from provincial headquarters, victims from the early days of the protest who had been identified by relatives. Photographs placed on the coffins showed the faces of mostly young men, but there was also a middle-aged woman and a child identified as seven years old. The South Korean government later settled on a figure of at least 240 killed; Kwangju sources claim more than 3,000 killed or injured.

General Chun ruled South Korea as president from 1980 to 1988 and then was succeeded by his co-conspirator General Roh, who held office until 1993. Finally, under the subsequent civilian presidency of Kim Young-sam, prosecutors developed bribery and corruption cases against both generals. They produced evidence that while in office the two had shaken down the chaebol (the large conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy) to the tune of $1.2 billion for Chun and $630 million for Roh. In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea’s maturing democracy, the government arrested both generals and charged them with accepting bribes. President Kim then made the decision to indict them as well for the military mutiny of December 1979 and for the massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators at Kwangju in May 1980. The South Korean state charged that their purpose at Kwangju had simply been to consolidate their own power, which they had acquired illegally.

In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to twenty-two and a half years in prison. In December, an appellate court reduced the sentences to life for Chun and seventeen years for Roh, and in April 1997, the South Korean Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld both sentences. Only in December 1997, after Kim Dae-jung (himself sentenced to death by Chun) had been elected president did outgoing president Kim Young-sam pardon both Chun and Roh, with the new president’s consent.

When asked about the 1996 convictions of Chun and Roh, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Nicholas Burns, replied, “This [the Kwangju massacre] is an obvious tragedy for the individuals involved and an internal matter for the people of the Republic of Korea.”¹⁸ No one in the U.S. government seemed to remember that the events in Kwangju deeply implicated them and that Messrs. Gleysteen, Wickham, Holbrooke, Christopher, and others might well have belonged in the dock alongside their Korean colleagues.

In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate Kwangju on its own, the Bush administration refused to allow Ambassador Gleysteen or General Wickham to testify; and the interagency task force assembled to review Shorrock’s requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act specifically refused to release any of General Wickham’s communications with his Korean counterparts or with the U.S. government, even though he was the official closest to the Korean military. The New York Times never once mentioned the results of Shorrock’s FOIA suit, and most Americans remain in the dark about what happened at Kwangju or the American role in it. They know much more about the Chinese government’s violent clearing of protesters from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 than they do about their own government’s cover-up of the costs of military rule in South Korea. Blowback from these American policies is one of the most volatile ingredients in South Korean politics today.

North Korea long claimed a greater legitimacy in the struggle against Japanese colonialism than South Korea, a claim that many students in South Korean universities and historians of the Korean War accept. Moreover, until at least 1975, North Korea was considerably richer than South Korea in terms of per capita gross domestic product, a situation that slowly changed with South Korea’s extraordinary economic achievements.

The Seoul Olympics of 1988, which the North boycotted, brought worldwide attention to the prosperity of South Korea. Russia and China, both of them caught up in domestic-reform movements, took notice. The only Communist country that respected the North Korean boycott was Cuba. In 1990, Russia opened diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea; in 1992, China followed suit. On December 18, 1992, Kim Young-sam was popularly elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first civilian head of state since 1961.

The North did not like any of this, but did not totally foreclose adjusting to the new southern realities. Ever since the end of the Cold War, North Korea had very tentatively signaled an increased openness to discussions with unofficial South Koreans about the future of the peninsula, while also trying to shield itself from the infinitely greater economic power of the South. In 1990, a North Korean commented to a Chinese official, “What we have hung out is not an iron curtain, but a mosquito net. It can let in breezes, and it can also defend against mosquitoes.”¹ The North’s dictator for life Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, just before he was scheduled to attend a first-ever Korean summit meeting with Kim Young-sam.

The U.S. news media have dismissed North Korea as a “rogue state” and its leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, as a “mad prince . . . whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam Hussein of North Asia.”² What we know about that land, however, suggests that it is less a rogue state than a proud and desperate nation at the end of its tether. Having been driven into a corner, it has offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a muscle-bound but poorly informed competitor.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 precipitated an acute crisis in North Korea. Even if it was not prepared to abandon its ideology and reform its economic system of juche (self-reliance), the northern leadership still could not help noting that the endgame of the Cold War was particularly dangerous for players on the Communist side. The former leaders of Romania were put up against a wall and shot; the former leaders of East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a newly unified Germany. Meanwhile, in another sign of the North’s potential fate, the United States persisted in its boycott and embargo of Communist Cuba even though that island’s regime no longer posed any kind of threat to it. Asked why the United States was willing to engage North Korea while still maintaining a strict embargo against Cuba, a “senior administration official,” speaking on condition of anonymity, said with a smile, “To my knowledge [the Cubans] do not have a nuclear weapons program.”³ This difference, in a nutshell, is the secret of how North Korea caught the Americans’ attention.

As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War—which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support—had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang. In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party–Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital. The idea of going to North Korea was entirely Kanemaru’s and was vigorously opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time, however, it was widely assumed in South Korea that Japan was deliberately trying to undermine its increasingly friendly relations with the USSR, just as the North Koreans naturally assumed that Kanemaru, as a representative of Japan’s longstanding, one-party government, was coming as an official spokesman.

As it turned out, Kanemaru’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets. As Tokyo political commentator Takao Toshikawa has put it, “It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic glory in old Shin’s declining years, and also a brazen attempt to generate huge kick-backs out of the flow of grants, yen credits, etc., that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying reparations [for Japanese colonial and wartime acts of brutality] was established.” While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, “drunk and slightly senile, is suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim II-sung] grants and low-interest loans totalling ¥100 billion.”⁴

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both. In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports (though they also accepted some barter payments).

Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons—including fear of Japan, energy demands, post—Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” (Raymond Aron’s phrase) against Japan and a triumphant South Korea—North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had. It has never actually tested a nuclear device. (It is highly unlikely, in fact, that it yet has one to test.) The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,” á la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.

American policy on nuclear nonproliferation has long been filled with obvious contradictions, and the officials in charge of the Korean branch, through overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played right into the North’s hands. Until the five Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, the United States had more or less refused to acknowledge that in addition to Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union, proliferation had already occurred in Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Taiwan had technologically proliferated without testing; and that Iraq—perhaps Iran, too—was almost surely pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. doctrine of nonproliferation also ignores the fact that there is something odd about a principle that permits some nations to have nuclear weapons but not others and that the United States has been only minimally willing to reduce its own monstrously large nuclear strike forces.

North Korea has ample reason to build a nuclear-power-generating capacity, given its vulnerability to a cutoff of crude oil. From a national security standpoint, Japan’s nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder reactor program, its plutonium stockpile, and its solid-fuel rockets with ICBM capabilities could all plausibly appear threatening to a country that it once colonized and exploited. Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30 percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity through nuclear power by the year 2010.

The North Koreans must also have come to the conclusion that, whatever the American threats, a military strike against it was wholly unlikely. For one thing, South Korea is deeply opposed, not least because of memories of the way its capital, Seoul, only thirty-five miles from North Korean troops at the DMZ, was totally destroyed during the Korean War. In March 1999, when the United States was once again stridently issuing warnings about possible North Korean weapons of mass destruction and insisting that Pyongyang was developing ballistic missiles to deliver them, the South Korean defense minister ruled out participation by his country in a U.S. plan to create a regional missile shield, the theater missile defense (TMD). He further stated in the clearest possible terms that Seoul was opposed to any preemptive attack on North Korea even if war tensions were to rise to unbearable heights on the peninsula.⁵

Equally important, a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American alliance. Since the Americans would inevitably take some casualties and the Japanese would refuse to participate at all militarily, the American public would want to know why. The Japanese-American Security Treaty was badly strained by a similar pattern during the Gulf War; a repetition in Japan’s “backyard” might well snap it. The American military therefore tacitly gave up on a military option and turned to the idea of imposing sanctions against North Korea if it did not rejoin the control regime created by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow the IAEA to resume inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did reveal to the American government how little its strategic thinking fits the actual complexities of the region. The legal basis for imposing sanctions would have to be Articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations Charter, which authorize the Security Council to impose interruptions of economic and diplomatic relations and militarily enforced blockades to give effect to its decisions. China would have vetoed the use of either article. Nor was it clear that there had ever been any legal basis for sanctions, because North Korea had formally and in a legalistic sense quite properly declared its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Such sanctions would have involved some combination of acts that would include interrupting North Korean telecommunications, cutting off desperately needed remittances of money from Koreans in Japan, prohibiting people and vessels from going there via a blockade, and stopping all trade. North Korea promptly announced that it would regard any blockade as an act of war and would retaliate directly against Seoul. This caused the South Koreans to lose their enthusiasm for sanctions. The suggestion that Japan join in the use of sanctions against North Korea proved acutely embarrassing, revealing as it did both the extent to which Japan was already involved in propping up North Korea economically and the extent of the Japanese guilty conscience over its mistreatment of its own sizable resident Korean population, many of whom support North Korea.⁶

Once the Americans had started to talk about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale analysis of what might be involved. The secret report that resulted was subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju.⁷ It revealed Japan as North Korea’s second most important trading partner after China, and the organization of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Chosen Soren, as a remitter of huge amounts of foreign currency to the North, as well as large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean banks. Individual Japanese contributions to North Korea amount to at least ¥60 billion to ¥70 billion per annum—an amount equal to the value of North Korea’s total trade with China—and Korean operators of pachinko (pinball) parlors, many of whom are allied with Japan’s Socialist Party, have in the past contributed as much as ¥100 million on Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Any Ministry of Finance attempt to freeze these assets in Japan, the government report stated, would be ineffective since most private remittances and shipments go through third countries and then through China before reaching North Korea. Thus, even if the Americans had gotten U.N. approval of sanctions and avoided a Chinese veto, Japan concluded, they could not have successfully been implemented.

As is often the case, American policy toward North Korea in 1994 was belligerent but ineffective. The threat of a military intervention to destroy possible North Korean nuclear facilities lacked credibility, was not supported by either the South Korean or Japanese people, and might have destroyed relations with China. In this context former president Jimmy Carter undertook a mission of personal diplomacy to resolve the situation. Carter had long been interested in Korea. As president he had advocated withdrawing American military forces from the peninsula as part of a post-Vietnam reassessment of the failures of American policy in East Asia. He had been forestalled by implacable opposition from cold warriors in Washington, the assassination of Park Chung-hee, the anti-U.S. revolution in Iran, and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1994, the American ambassador to South Korea, James T. Laney, a former missionary in Korea and president of Emory University in Atlanta, was a close friend of Carter’s and was aware of the former president’s willingness to undertake personal diplomacy whenever it seemed he might be helpful. Laney also knew that Kim Il-sung regarded Carter as less hostile than most American officials because of his aborted attempts in the late 1970s to bring peace to Korea. Although without evident enthusiasm, the Clinton White House did finally approve a Carter visit to Pyongyang.

As it turned out, Carter almost surely kept the United States from making a tragic mistake in a region long dominated by the military. His mission was quite comparable to the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China twenty years earlier. Whether Kim Il-sung was personally satisfied with a former president rather than a sitting president, we do not know, but clearly it was a better opportunity than negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had nothing to offer him in return for his compliance with its inspection requirements. The Americans, on the other hand, could deliver goods North Korea badly needed, and also wring concessions and economic assistance from the Japanese and the South Koreans. Carter’s visit, like Nixon’s to China, was also testimony to the legitimacy of an isolated regime, something the United States had long denied. Kim Il-sung therefore agreed to freeze his nuclear program and opened negotiations on what he would require in order to permanently stop his weapons project and shift to a Westernapproved form of nuclear power generation.

So ended the first phase of one of the potentially most serious confrontations of the post–Cold War era. Had the United States government followed the advice of its military, it might have produced its own version of the Russian catastrophe in Chechnya (as it may yet at some point in the future). Had the North Koreans pursued their nuclear program (as they may still decide to do), they would have achieved their own Iraq-like status as the true pariah of East Asia. The United States could have avoided this confrontation had it opened some constructive channel of communication with Pyongyang years ago; instead, our soldiers continue to glare at theirs across the table at Panmunjom, within the Demilitarized Zone between the two parts of Korea. The West’s master theorist of war, Karl von Clausewitz, once argued that even after hostilities have commenced it is desirable to keep some channels of communications open among belligerents; failure to establish diplomatic ties in peacetime was, he thought, inexcusable. American—North Korean relations have been an apt example of his point.

Talks to implement the Carter-Kim agreement opened on July 8, 1994, the day Kim Il-sung unexpectedly died, and as a result were immediately suspended. His death and the lack of credible information about his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, which might have set back the negotiations, actually seemed to have little effect on the discussions. But they did create serious problems in South Korea, where the government prohibited any public expressions of grief over Kim’s death and banned a church-sponsored human chain that was to extend to the Demilitarized Zone on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan. The South Korean government also released letters that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had given to President Kim Yong-sam on a visit to Moscow in June 1994 allegedly proving that Kim Il-sung had started the Korean War. The police even entered elite Seoul National University’s campus to arrest some 1,400 students who were calling for U.S. troops to get out of Korea and quit blocking unification.

On August 5, 1994, talks between North Korea and the United States resumed in Geneva, leading to an “Agreed Framework,” which the two sides signed that October 21. According to this agreement the United States was to arrange for the construction by the year 2003 of two 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors in North Korea to replace its current graphite-moderated reactors (a Soviet design from which plutonium can rather easily be extracted for possible use in nuclear weapons). The United States was also to provide fuel oil to replace energy lost by the closing of North Korea’s current reactors, and it was to guarantee that it would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Finally, the United States pledged to open trade and some form of diplomatic relations. For its part North Korea agreed to stop using and then dismantle its Russian reactors, ship its used nuclear fuel rods out of the country, remain a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and allow IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites.

The new reactors the United States was to provide were estimated to cost in the range of $4 billion to $4.5 billion. By March 1995, South Korea had agreed to pay about 70 percent of their cost and Japan 20 percent (with the remainder covered by various, mainly European countries). Although the United States negotiated the agreement, it agreed to pay nothing. All three nations—the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan—set up a new organization called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to do the construction work.

The Japanese government supplied an initial $5.8 million so that KEDO could go into operation, but it has since regularly suspended funds whenever something has happened in North Korea that has not met its approval. In addition, elements in the U.S. government keep undercutting the agreement. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, for instance, said in Seoul in April 1997 that the United States intends to keep its forces stationed in Korea even if the two Koreas reunite. He gave no reason for this astonishing one-sided commitment, which implies an unending American imperial role in East Asia. He also predicted that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which may explain why the United States has been so slow to implement the agreement. Instead of delivering fuel oil, as promised, or opening diplomatic and economic relations, as the North Koreans expected, the U.S. government has vacillated, often blaming Congress for its failure to fund the new relationship. Its impulse seemed to be to provide North Korea with just enough food to keep it from starving while hoping that its collapse would be “soft,” relatively nonviolent, and controllable. Unexpectedly, with the onset of the global economic crisis in 1997, South Korea itself came close to collapse and proved incapable of paying its share of the new North Korean reactors. The American government made no effort to find or raise replacement funds.

It is important to understand that the war scare of 1994, temporarily relieved by Jimmy Carter’s mediation and the subsequent Agreed Framework, sprang from two sets of related causes. The first was, of course, North Korea’s flirtation with nuclear brinkmanship in the context of the collapse of the Communist world that had sustained it since its creation. The second was a kind of military machismo on the part of the Pentagon and its assorted cronies and clients around the world. Without any regard at all for Korean and East Asian realities, the American military leadership and its political backers seemed intent on having another “splendid little war” in Korea, a rerun of the 1991 Gulf War, with all of its medals, promotions, and new post–Cold War assignments for the armed forces. Needless to say, the Pentagon strategists who abstractly think of Korea as a potential East Asian Iraq give no heed at all to Korea as a real place in time and space—it is not, for example, an uninhabited desert, and any use of force there will produce catastrophic casualties on all sides. Despite its being one of the most heavily armed places on earth, there is no plausible military “option” in Korea. The temporarily favorable resolution of the 1994 threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea, once direct negotiations and diplomacy were given a chance to work, did not eliminate either of the contending forces that had caused it, and at the end of the 1990s they reerupted to produce a festering politicalmilitary sore.

Frustrated by the failure of the United States to deliver on what Pyongyang expected to get from the Agreed Framework, North Korea continued development of a medium-range and potentially an intercontinental-range missile force. The North had long worked on copying, improving, and manufacturing the Soviet-designed Scud short-range liquid-fueled battlefield missile, which it then exported to earn hard currency or barter wherever it could. Throughout the 1980s, it traded weaponry to Iran for oil, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all Iranian arms imports during the Iran-Iraq War.⁸

After the Scud, the North’s next big project was to build an intermediate-range missile that conceivably might deter the massive forces the United States arrayed against it at bases in Japan and on the ships of the Seventh Fleet. It is not clear whether this effort was technologically serious or whether it merely aimed at deterrence by raising anxieties. The first North Korean IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile), the Nodong 1, was a Scud with additional engines bolted to its waist, giving it enough thrust to reach parts of Japan. The North only tested the Nodong once, in June 1993, when it went three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan. The accuracy of the Nodong and how many it has are unknown. Equally unknown is whether North Korea has even one nuclear warhead that it might attach to one of its missiles. The presumption is that the Agreed Framework interrupted its movement toward a nuclear device and that its missiles, even if they conceivably might arrive over their targets, are not armed with nuclear weapons.

However, in August 1998, a truly explosive development transformed this relatively benign environment into a paroxysm of Japanese and American overreaction and worst-case scenarios. On August 31, 1998, the United States government announced that North Korea had testfired a two-stage (later revised to a three-stage) liquid-fueled missile over Japan. The United States knew about the North Korean missile launch as it occurred; indeed one of the Air Force’s two RC-135S Cobra Ball surveillance aircraft, both assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, was on station above the Korean peninsula to observe it.⁹ The Japanese, at least metaphorically, went ballistic. They condemned North Korea for a dangerous military provocation and an implied threat to Japan’s security. They cut off all contacts with the North and announced that they would launch their own spy satellites specifically to keep track of what was going on in North Korea and to end their dependence on military intelligence from the United States. They even professed to be thinking about withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.

It turned out that the North Koreans had used a three-stage rocket to launch a rather modestly designed satellite in connection with the celebration of the country’s fiftieth anniversary. Like the famous 1970 Chinese satellite that broadcast the Maoist anthem “The East Is Red” into outer space, Pyongyang Radio announced that its satellite was transmitting the “Song of General Kim Il-sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” which it labeled “immortal revolutionary hymns.” The satellite seems to have malfunctioned, and no one ever recorded these melodies. The North Korean foreign ministry also pointedly added, “We have never criticized the United States and Japan for having launched artificial satellites. We are well aware that these satellites have been used for espionage on our country.”¹⁰ Japan has in fact launched at least twenty-four satellites since its National Space Development Agency was founded in 1969. The Japanese (and Americans) also failed to mention that this was only the fourth North Korean missile firing on record and only the second in the 1990s, five years after the test of the Nodong 1 in May 1993. It also did not mention Japan’s own highly developed rocket program, including a behemoth called the H-2, which has a payload of 5 tons, considerably greater than the 3.8 tons the United States’ MX Peacekeeper ICBM can lift. This is not to imply that the North’s missile was not threatening, only that it was most plausibly an attempt to deter much more formidable strategic forces deployed against it by the United States and Japan.

The United States has continued to harp on the threat posed by North Korea’s missile capability. It ostentatiously flew B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers to its Pacific bases in Guam. Among the reasons for this belligerence was a desire on the part of the Defense Department and the arms industry to continue working on an antimissile defense system, an idea now considerably scaled down from the Reagan administration’s lasers in outer space but still devoted to intercepting an incoming missile by firing a defensive missile at it. The technological requirements of hitting a bullet with another bullet are fierce, and there is always a possibility that nuclear fallout and debris from a successful interception will kill more people than if the warhead had been allowed to proceed to its target.

The American government has so far spent billions trying to make the theater missile defense (TMD) work but has repeatedly met with failure. One of the things it had most wanted was to get the Japanese to help fund the project (which even if it does not work will be very lucrative for the companies trying to build it) and provide technical input into it. The Japanese had consistently balked. The TMD seemed to them a probable violation of the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in terms of deterrence theory, utterly destabilizing. If one country should ever achieve a successful missile defense (or believe that it had), it would have a strong incentive to launch a preemptive strike against its opponents before they too achieved such a defense. This is the main reason why China has consistently denounced America’s infatuation with the TMD, as well as because it does not want to be drawn into a ruinously expensive arms race to develop it.

North Korea’s launch of a missile with a range of several thousand miles transformed this debate. The Japanese finally agreed to buy into the TMD. On September 20,1998, to the jubilation of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Japan reversed itself and joined the missile defense research program. Whether Japan and the United States together will ever overcome the stupendous technological problems, not to mention the strategic issues of decoys, reliability, lack of defense against cruise missiles (because they fly too low), the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction through much less sophisticated ways than missiles (for example, via boats, helicopters, airliners), and the likelihood that civilian populations will never actually trust defensive missiles are all open questions, to say the least. The history of the Cold War demonstrated that stable, credible deterrence is the only rational answer to weapons against which there is no defense. Nonetheless, the North Korean missile launch, together with evidence that North Korea is working on even longer-range missiles, gave great renewed impetus to the TMD idea.

The unraveling of the Agreed Framework was not entirely caused by Pyongyang. The drumbeat demonizing North Korea has continued unabated in Washington. In February 1999, Republican congressman Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was convinced that “North Korea could nuke Seattle,” and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the senators, “I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea.”¹¹ It seemed evident in the spring of 1999 that North Korea was being groomed as Public Enemy Number One until events in Yugoslavia overtook this campaign.

Even though it remains a small, failed Communist regime whose people are starving and have no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington. If the military needs a post–Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China. Politicians seek partisan advantage by claiming that others are “soft” on defending the country from “rogue regimes.” And the arms lobby had a direct interest in selling its products to each and every nation in East Asia, regardless of its political orientation.

There is considerable evidence that since the signing of the Agreed Framework in 1994, a series of mysterious incidents has been created deliberately to undermine diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions. In September 1997, for instance, the United States, South Korea, China, and North Korea were scheduled to hold negotiations on replacing the forty-five-year-old Korean armistice with a peace treaty. In the same month the United States also said it hoped to obtain North Korea’s adherence to an international agreement first negotiated in 1987 called the Missile Technology Control Regime. This agreement sought to bring under control the transfer of technologies that could be used to make intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States had indicated in advance that it would lift some of its economic sanctions against North Korea if it would halt deployment and sales of its missiles.

On August 22, 1997, the eve of the talks, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt, a key player in North Korea’s missile sales to the Middle East, “defected” to the United States. R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post, quoted a CIA source as saying, “There will be people in the intelligence community who will be salivating to see this guy.”¹² In the New York Times Steven Lee Myers noted that the defection threatened the peace talks but quoted another U.S. official as saying, “The alternative of turning down a bona fide plea for asylum from a state like North Korea is pretty unthinkable.”¹³ Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman, insisted that the defection “will not affect the four-party peace talks.”¹⁴ Then Newsweek revealed that the former ambassador had in fact long been on the CIA’s payroll.¹⁵ Informed observers concluded that he had not so much defected as been called in from the cold at a time of the CIA’s choosing and with an eye toward scuttling the upcoming talks. North Korea in retaliation declined to attend either set of scheduled meetings.

A year later, amid reports that North Korea had grown frustrated with the failure of the United States to normalize relations, the New York Times published a front-page article by David E. Sanger—“North Korea Site an A-Bomb Plant, U.S. Agencies Say”—which revealed that “United States intelligence agencies have detected a huge secret underground complex in North Korea that they believe is the centerpiece of an effort to revive the country’s frozen nuclear weapons program, according to officials who have been briefed on the intelligence information.”¹⁶ Congressional sources later revealed that Sanger’s source was unanalyzed intelligence photographs probably leaked by Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to congressional aides, General Hughes regularly passed on information about the site, later identified as Kumchang-ri, to Republican congressmen.¹⁷ None of the Times’s reporting on this incident ever cited a single government official by name, relying instead on the “blind quote”: “high government officials say,” “sources close to the White House reveal,” “members of the intelligence community disclose,” and so forth.

Two days after the article appeared, the Pentagon announced that the underground A-bomb plant actually seemed to be a large hole in the ground—one of thousands of such holes, some of them containing whole factories that were sited underground after the devastating American bombing during the Korean War—and that the United States had no evidence the North Koreans had ceased to comply with the Agreed Framework. Analysts in Asia speculated that if North Korea did decide to pull out of the agreement, it need only restart its reactors at its nuclear research center at Yongbyon instead of building a brand-new, inherently risky and expensive underground reprocessing plant. In Europe, the IAEA’s spokesman said that the international monitoring agency first heard of the alleged new nuclear site from the New York Times.

Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones, who from 1992 to 1994 was the State Department’s desk officer for North Korea and subsequently the Asia Foundation’s representative in South Korea—as well as the American who probably has visited the North more often than any other—wrote, “This . . . story is centered in Washington, not in Pyongyang. It involves America’s intelligence community and not North Korea’s nuclear program. . . . The recent leak of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ certainly appears to have been an irresponsible effort by a ‘pessimist’ within the American intelligence community. . . . The U.S. government has officially denied the accuracy of the reports.”¹⁸ Nonetheless, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the “suspected nuclear facility” a “huge threat” and demanded the right of the United States to conduct inspections in North Korea when and where it chooses.¹⁹ North Korea agreed to let Americans look into Kumchang-ri in return for food aid. When the inspection was completed, American officials disclosed that it was a huge, empty tunnel and that there was no evidence of any preparations to construct a nuclear reactor or install machinery of any kind in it.²⁰

In addition to these and other North Korean alarums, 1999 saw a number of strident but ultimately overstated U.S. claims about Chinese missile deployments and nuclear espionage, and unfortunate “accidents” (the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war). These raised serious questions about whether the armed and intelligence services were either out of control or being manipulated for political ends.

This is not to say that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are not serious problems. Since there is as yet no worldwide treaty banning them, nor an effective defense against them, all programs to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, including those of the United States and Japan, are “destabilizing.” They constitute the most dangerous offensive weapons in existence at the present time. The issue is what to do about them. North Korea remains isolated in part because of policies the United States has pursued over the past forty-five years. To be sure, these policies were first formulated during the Cold War, but with the end of the old postwar order in East Asia, we finally have a chance to help promote a peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. Instead, the Pentagon is promoting a ballistic missile defense system. Surely no better illustration exists of our continued imperial ambitions and delusions.

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.

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).

China has protested vigorously any intrusion by the United States and its Japanese client into Taiwanese affairs, but to no avail. The United States continues to sell arms to Taiwan in violation of agreements the Reagan administration signed with China during the 1980s (in the communiqué of August 17, 1982, the U.S. government promised gradually to reduce the quantity and not improve the quality of arms sold to Taiwan). These sales include 150 F-16 advanced fighter aircraft, which President Bush agreed to sell during the 1992 presidential election campaign in order to appeal to voters of Texas, where the airplanes are manufactured. Combined with 60 Mirage fighters from France and sophisticated fighter aircraft that it manufactures itself, Taiwan has an aviation capability superior to anything possessed by the mainland. Taiwan’s ability to threaten Chinese coastal cities, including Shanghai, is an effective deterrent against any mainland attempt to invade the island. This is one reason why mainland China’s leadership seeks to intimidate Taiwan through the threat of a missile attack rather than an invasion and why the U.S. proposal to develop and station antimissile missiles on Taiwan is so alarming to them.

Slightly more than a week after Clinton had reassured his Chinese audience that the United States had no designs on their country, Secretary of Defense Cohen, at a joint news conference with his South Korean counterpart, outlined a military role in East Asia as dangerous as the one the USSR planned in Cuba in 1962—which almost led to nuclear war. Cohen indicated the United States intended to maintain combat troops on the Korean peninsula indefinitely, offering no reason why American troops should remain in a potentially unified Korea or who exactly they were meant to defend against. He also spoke of how any pullout of forces from Japan would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.” This was interpreted at the time in the Japanese and Korean media as a barely veiled reference to China as a future enemy and as a warning against the possibility that Japan might undertake a foreign policy independent of the United States.

The friendly relations the United States enjoyed with China during the last eighteen years of the Cold War era, following the historic Nixon-Kissinger realignment, were based on a common opposition to the USSR. The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore ended China’s main usefulness to the United States as an ally, while enhancing its new status as a possible long-term rival to American hegemony. In the wake of the Cold War, with the Pentagon intent on maintaining near Cold War levels of military spending, enemies on the global horizon were much needed. With the Soviet army increasingly seen as a disintegrating “paper tiger,” China’s economic emergence as a major power in the Pacific offered one possible fit with the Pentagon’s need for a major enemy. Moreover, China’s continuing disputes with Taiwan, its claims to islands in the South China Sea, its friendly relations with North Korea, its occasional armed disputes with Vietnam, and its modest ICBM forces armed with nuclear weapons all seemed to give evidence—in American eyes at least—of its aggressive intentions; all seemed to indicate that it might someday menace American imperial interests in the region.

In the years from the end of the Cold War to the present there has clearly been disagreement, even bitter acrimony, within the highest levels of the American government, from the White House to Congress to the Pentagon, over policy toward China. The question largely has been whether, like President Clinton, to espouse a policy of “engagement” with the People’s Republic—that is, to emphasize trade as a tool of bringing the country into a regional system still dominated by the United States—or, like Republican congressman Christopher Cox, to espouse a policy of “containment”—that is, to make China the enemy around which an American regional system is to be organized—or even some at present inconceivable combination of the two. In pursuing various aspects of these policies and fighting out internecine, intragovernmental, intrabureaucratic struggles over them, various factions in American officialdom have highlighted issues ranging from human rights abuses to trade policy to potential atomic spying, leaking material to the media, holding inflammatory hearings, and making subtle military gestures.

What no American official seems to have considered is what a policy of “adjustment” to the reemergence of China might look like. To make space for or alter American policies in order to accommodate China’s legitimate concerns as a potential future superpower seems beyond the policy horizons of American officialdom. Adjustment would hardly mean “appeasement”; it is possible that China might miscalculate and undertake some initiative so damaging to the rights of others that retaliation would indeed be appropriate. But the United States seems to assume that such an outcome is preordained, rather than undertaking diplomacy and statecraft to head it off.

The American president says one thing, but the American military presence in East Asia implies another. During the first half of the twentieth century, China often found itself in a similar situation in relation to the Japanese, whose central government expressed a desire for peace while its military simultaneously launched armed attacks on Chinese territory. A distrust of public protestations of peace and the need to draw conclusions from concrete military acts are part of China’s heritage of international relations. They played a role in Chinese thinking during the Korean War, when differences between General MacArthur’s strategic decisions in Tokyo and President Truman’s statements in Washington contributed to China’s decision to intervene. In the same way, the discrepancies between the American military’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, on May 7, 1999, and the White House’s subsequent protestations that the attack by a B-2 bomber using precision-guided munitions was an accident based on an “outdated map” are particularly hard for the Chinese to overlook. Contemporary American actions in East Asia, as distinct from statements by Washington, help trigger these old memories in Beijing.

The Chinese were sufficiently alarmed by our self-appointed post–Cold War mission of maintaining stability wherever we declared it to be threatened that, according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt (an executive of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and a close associate of Henry Kissinger’s), they began studying George Kennan’s early reports from the Soviet Union. At the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan was the State Department’s foremost specialist on Russia. In a famous 1947 article in the magazine Foreign Affairs written under the pseudonym “X” and entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he first suggested a postwar policy of attempting to “contain” the expansion and influence of the USSR. According to Sonnenfeldt, the Chinese were interested because “now that the United States was turning containment against China, they wanted to learn how [the policy] had started and evolved.”²

U.S. policy toward China, whatever the disagreements about it within the government, is driven by a familiar global agenda aimed at preserving and enhancing a Washington-centered world based on our being the “lone superpower.” Whether it is called “globalization,” the “Washington consensus,” “soft power,” or the “indispensable nation,” it still comes down to an urge to hold on to an American-inspired, -financed, and -led world order. Whereas such hegemonism vis-à-vis Germany, Japan, Latin America, Russia, or the United Nations is only likely to result in imperial overstretch and the probable long-term decline of the United States, attempts to establish American hegemony over China hold out more explosive futures and are in any case doomed to failure.

As the histories of previous empires demonstrate, imperial overstretch can be a long-drawn-out process if all sides are careful to avoid confrontation (the Russian and Ottoman empires come to mind). But such hegemonic policies applied to China are likely to precipitate a crisis. China is the world’s most populous country and has recently achieved an economy that promises to provide it with commensurate wealth and power. It is also an old civilization, whose humbling by foreign imperialists over the past two centuries led to the most sweeping and complex of all the modern revolutions. Its leaders are still working out whether they should seek parity on a global stage as defined by Western conceptions of international relations or try to re-create an older Sinocentric world of tributary states that existed before the arrival of the European imperialists, or perhaps some amalgam of the two.

In any case, China owes no obeisance to the United States. From 1950 to 1953, at great cost to itself, it fought the American military to a stalemate in Korea. A new policy of containment toward China once again implies the possibility of war, just as it did during the Cold War vis-à-vis the former USSR. The balance of nuclear weapons prevented that war, but this may not work in the case of China, where great asymmetries in manpower between China and any single external power or alliance will always exist. China has the capacity to deter an American use of nuclear weapons by threatening retaliation against U.S. cities, and the United States could never mobilize a large enough army to defeat China in a land invasion. There is also a much firmer foundation for a Chinese government’s resistance to external threats in Chinese nationalism than there was at the time of the British, French, Russian, or Japanese depredations over the past 150 years. Many Americans do not evaluate Chinese nationalism correctly, thinking it is whipped up by Communist Party propaganda to suit its purposes. But like American nationalism after Pearl Harbor, it is actually rooted in concrete historical experiences of victimization, including Japan’s attempt to establish a protectorate over China in 1915, its creation of a puppet regime in Manchuria in 1931, and its invasion of the whole country in 1937. The Chinese pose no threat to the territory of the United States, but the Americans (and the Japanese) have done so in the past and conceivably still could directly threaten China. A war with China would almost certainly bankrupt the United States, radicalize China, and tear Japan apart.

Military containment of China is a particularly dangerous policy for Japan (as an American ally) to espouse, since its own emergence onto the world stage began a century ago with its invasion and defeat of China in 1895 and its seizure of the island of Taiwan, which it held as a Japanese colony until 1945. Moreover, because Japan’s devastation of China in the 1930s and 1940s was the crucial factor leading China into the civil war from which the Communist Party emerged victorious, politically aware Chinese remain acutely sensitive to any hint of revived Japanese militarism, just as Russians do to any hint of revived German militarism.

According to a Hong Kong wisecrack, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and is back. The question is whether the United States can adjust to the emergence of a new great power in Asia. Will it deal more effectively and less bloodily with China than, say, the former hegemon Great Britain did in the early twentieth century, when it failed to adjust to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan, and Russia? The current trend of events is not promising.

In addition to its desire to maintain national security, advance its economic interests, and repress dissidents, China’s ruling Communist Party emphatically plays upon the country’s experience as a victim of imperialism and on its newfound nationalism. In its foreign policy, its primary focus has not been on expanding its territory or influence at the expense of other nations but on settling old, irredentist claims. The term “irredentism” derives from the name of an Italian political party of 1878 that sought to recover adjacent regions inhabited largely by Italians but under foreign control; by extension it now refers to any policy aimed at recovering territories lost to foreigners.

In the Chinese context irredentism applies to places formerly claimed by Imperial China, whose last dynasty ended in 1912, and allegedly lost due to foreign activity. Without regard to their relative importance, the primary ones in question have long been 1) Hong Kong, 2) Taiwan, 3) various island groups in the South China Sea, and 4) Tibet. The issues surrounding these contested areas have varied depending on whether each was occupied by China or others, on the nature of the historical record that lay behind each claim, and on the relative power of the claim holders. In addition, there is the question, seldom directly raised by the Chinese but to one degree or another taken into consideration, of the costs today of pursuing old claims, no matter how well founded. Each of the remaining claims—the Hong Kong one having been peaceably settled in 1997—is much exacerbated by the regime’s increasing reliance on nationalism to solidify a base of support for its rule. The need to invoke the inviolable nature of “the Chinese motherland” as a basis for power has spurred the government to right old wrongs even when doing so violates another nation’s sovereignty or tramples on the human rights of peoples who were never in any sense part of the Chinese empire. This is only complicated by China’s stated willingness to use military means to achieve its irredentist aims.

Hong Kong is indeed no longer at issue. It began its colonial existence in the nineteenth century as the booty of the English opium cartel after a successful war fought to prevent China from cutting off trade in the substance. On June 30, 1997, it was returned to China by the British government in an elaborate, ceremonial, and nondisruptive manner. Consistent with their penchant for publishing only bad news about China, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek all predicted that the reversion of Hong Kong would go badly and questioned whether Beijing could administer the territory successfully as the capitalist financial hub it had long been. And yet nothing out of the ordinary has happened. The government of Hong Kong is today similar to the colonial one under British rule from 1841 to 1989. Only after the Tiananmen repression, with reversion in sight, did Hong Kong’s British rulers introduce elements of democracy to the colony. China has retained some of these late democratic reforms but rescinded others. Much was at stake for the Chinese government in a peaceful and successful reversion. Hong Kong was certainly seen as a model for the future incorporation of Taiwan into the Chinese nation and evidence to the Taiwanese that the process, despite disparities between the two societies, need not be painful or punitive.

Taiwan is, in fact, similar to Hong Kong in one respect: the cultural gap between citizens of the mainland and of either Hong Kong or Taiwan is now far greater than it was fifty years ago, when the Communists came to power in Beijing. Taiwan was settled by immigrants from Fujian province in the seventeenth century and then became a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945. For China, the “liberation” of Taiwan remains a fundamental goal, a final task left over from the revolution that Mao led in the 1930s and 1940s against Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek, who retreated to Taiwan with what was left of his defeated forces at the end of a bitter war.

The Nationalist exiles who evacuated to Taiwan in 1949 have slowly died off or been assimilated into the island’s preexisting Chinese population. Today, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) is led by a native Taiwanese, who must compete for power against other Taiwanese not hobbled by old Nationalist affiliations. The hostility that existed after World War II between mainland exiles and long-resident Taiwanese has been slowly ameliorating, not only due to the deaths of first-generation exiles but also to intermarriage, the growing wealth of both groups, and a gradual political democratization that has in its own way been a form of decolonization. The emergence of Taiwanese-led political parties has signaled the end of a mainlander monopoly over politics. One result of this is that today few Taiwanese of any stripe particularly want to “rejoin” the mainland. Yet they do not dare declare their independence, fearing that this would force the hand of the mainland government. Serious political instability on the mainland, however, might prompt a unilateral declaration of independence, which would probably draw China and the United States into a war that neither wants and neither could win.

In the spring of 1995, the U.S. government permitted a visit by the president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese, even though the United States had broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1978, when it recognized the People’s Republic. He was ostensibly to attend an alumni gathering at Cornell, his alma mater. Although this was billed as a private visit, the House of Representatives had voted 396-0 and the Senate 97-1 in resolutions calling on President Bill Clinton to admit Lee. To add insult to injury, Chinese officials first heard the news on CNN rather than through diplomatic channels. They were outraged and said so, pointing out that China has a legal claim to Taiwan older than the United States itself and accusing Congress and the president of meddling in their “internal affairs.”

Lurking here, as elsewhere, is a classic American error: the superpower’s mistaken belief that its role is pivotal in any context. Taiwan has been actively complicating the mainland’s decision making in ways far more effective than bluster from Washington. Taiwan is, for example, by far the largest investor in Vietnam and has risked more than $15 billion on Southeast Asian projects. Vietnam, a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has the longest and best record when it comes to countering Chinese pressures on its southern neighbors. The Taiwanese, in other words, have done their best to ensure that any Chinese attack on the island would involve the region as a whole, including ASEAN, which is slowly emerging as one of three major poles, along with Japan and China, in East Asia’s new balance of power.

Meanwhile, America’s cold warriors continue to exacerbate tensions between the mainland and Taiwan through incessant saber rattling of various sorts. Some of this is done largely for partisan political advantage in the United States, some in hopes of selling extremely expensive if sometimes untested advanced weapons systems in the area. Some of it is instigated by paid lobbyists for Taiwan, which seeks to ensure that the United States would be drawn into any conflict in the area, even if Taiwan’s own policies provoked it. It must be stressed here that the United States has no basis in international law for intervening on Taiwan’s behalf in what is essentially a not-yet-fully-resolved civil war. Thus the tactics of American provocateurs in leaking false intelligence reports, prodding Japan into closer military cooperation with the United States, and promoting a theater missile defense (TMD) for the region are not only dangerous but potentially illegal.

On February 11, 1999, for example, American newspapers quoted unnamed sources at the Pentagon claiming that the “Chinese government has deployed more than 120 ballistic missiles, and possibly as many as 200, on its side of the Taiwan Strait. . . . Analysts said the deployment—at least a doubling of the previous number of missiles massed on China’s southern coast—is sure to fuel calls in the U.S. for including Taiwan in . . . the TMD.”¹ The following day, navy Captain Michael Doubleday, a Pentagon spokesman, publicly contradicted this by declaring that “China has not increased the number of missiles aimed at the island . . . since an early 1990s buildup.”² On February 26, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fearing perhaps being pressured into a major investment in an unproven, essentially nonexistent antimissile system, proclaimed its appreciation of U.S. concerns about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait but added, “The policy of the ROC government is that cross-strait issues should be resolved with peaceful means.” On the other hand, in a statement typical of Taiwanese pressures in the area, Shaw Yu-ming, a high-ranking ROC official now affiliated with the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, suggested that Taiwan might want to use the (false) Pentagon assessment as a basis to seek more arms sales from the United States.³

A missile defense system, if at all effective, would be particularly threatening from a mainland point of view. China lacks the capability to successfully invade and conquer Taiwan, but in the present highly nationalistic domestic climate, no mainland government could acquiesce in Taiwanese independence and survive. As a way to deter the island from declaring independence, China therefore threatens to respond with missiles. It does not want to do so, and it understands that Taiwan, in the face of an unprovoked attack from the mainland, would retaliate with massive force. The way to avoid conflict in the area is thus to perpetuate the status quo: continued self-government for Taiwan without a formal declaration of independence.

The American government’s attempt to promote the TMD in this context is an unwelcome provocation. Its untested technology will not, in the end, reassure the Taiwanese, while the Chinese fear it as the basis for a strengthened military alliance between Taiwan and the United States. Wang Daohan, a senior adviser to President Jiang Zemin, said to the press of a possible future deployment of the TMD in Taiwan, “It is like playing with fire. That will completely disrupt the current world situation, and instead a new Cold War will appear.”⁴

None of this is even slightly necessary. The United States needs to bring its own security apparatus under control and stop exaggerating the Chinese military threat. With regard to nuclear warheads, for example, between 1964, when China first tested a nuclear device, and 1996, when China signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, it conducted 45 nuclear tests. The United States, in contrast, has conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, not including the actual atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Robert Walpole, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, testified in September 1998 that China had at most twenty ICBMs, which were being maintained in an unfueled state and with their warheads unattached.⁵ Admiral Dennis C. Blair, commander in chief in the Pacific, testified before Congress in March 1999 that “China is not a military threat to U.S. interests. It will be many years before the People’s Liberation Army presents a major challenge to U.S. forces.”⁶ And yet, in that same month, the Senate voted 97-3 to build a “national missile defense” essentially against China and North Korea, and President Clinton endorsed spending some $10.6 billion on it over the coming five years. This is American overstretch, not a responsible national defense policy.

Some members of Congress and Pentagon officials are also promoting worst-case scenarios about Chinese moves in the South China Sea. Through this waterway passes virtually all of the oil from the Middle East intended for China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. There are two sets of about a thousand islands, reefs, and rocks in the South China Sea, the Spratlys (Nansha in Chinese) and the Paracels (Xisha), which are claimed in part or in whole by seven different governments—those of China, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. It was only in late 1987 that sovereignty over the Spratlys first became an issue in Chinese foreign policy, reflecting a shift to nationalism as the main legitimating principle of the regime. Most of these barren bits of land are unoccupied, but during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in pursuit of their various claims, China occupied six of them, Vietnam twenty-one, the Philippines six, Malaysia three, and Taiwan one.⁷

In March 1988, China first occupied its six locations; later that same year it separated its large southern island, Hainan, from Guangdong Province, making it a special economic zone and a major military base. In February 1992, it passed the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone,” which laid down an exclusive claim to the entire Spratly archipelago, about 340,000 square miles of ocean, and authorized the Chinese navy to evict “trespassers” by force. In February 1995, China built a structure on a rocky formation claimed by the Philippines about 135 miles west of that country and hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland. At that time the aptly named Mischief Reef was unoccupied. Although China has been verbally belligerent on the issue of the Spratlys, it has also been careful not to seize a rock or reef already occupied by some other nation.

China and Vietnam have already clashed twice in the South China Sea, once in 1974 over the Paracels and again in a short but bloody naval battle over the Spratlys in 1988. China has staked its claim to the islands on a series of fifteenth-century voyages by Ming dynasty admiral Cheng Ho. According to Vietnam, China was even then infringing on its territory. Meanwhile, Malaysia is building a tourist resort on its island, known as Terumbu Layang-Layang. All the nations of the area have increased their defense postures significantly.

China’s island policies certainly reflect the force of its new nationalism and its commitment to defend all claims to Chinese territory as a way of dramatizing its previous humiliations at the hands of imperialist powers. It is a policy that may also reflect incipient Chinese hege-monism, a response to the breakup of the USSR and to the American claims of being the “indispensable nation” in East Asia. And there may be oil under the Spratlys. China is now a net oil importer, reflecting its advancing industrialization and motorization, so it is interested in any potential new source of oil. Many experts doubt, however, that any significant reserves in the South China Sea will ever materialize, as the waters separating the Spratlys are about 2,000 meters deep. The deepest oceanic drilling for oil at present is only to a depth of 872 meters in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is more than likely that the issues surrounding the South China Sea will be contained by ongoing negotiations between China and ASEAN, focusing not on sovereignty but on “confidence-building measures.” China has actually moderated its claims to the area over time. To date, this dispute is a classic example of the dangers of worst-case analysis—that is, of treating possibilities as probabilities or inevitabilities, particularly when doing so, in the American case, may someday contribute to a larger military budget.

Tibet is another matter. As an independent state or even culture, it is probably doomed. China is currently implementing what the Dalai Lama calls its “final solution” for Tibet—an openly racist policy of state-sponsored Chinese emigration to the area and forced “assimilation” (the word used in the Chinese press is hanhua, literally “to make Chinese”) of what is left of the Tibetan people. Tibet’s only hope lies in the extraordinary efforts of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s priest-king, and his followers in exile in Dharamsala, India, to internationalize their struggle. Combined with continuing Chinese blunders, it is possible (though not likely) that global concern will raise the costs to China of its obstinate and destructive behavior. Meanwhile, Sinophiles at many foreign academic institutions and ministries of foreign affairs continue to advise their political leaders that Tibet has always been a part of China, which is simply not so.

The concept of irredentism does not apply to Tibet. It was never a province of China, nor was it even involved in the normal tributary relationships that vassal states of Imperial China traditionally maintained with Beijing. The Tibetans are of Mongol origin; their country emerged as a distinct place in the seventh century, when an early version of Mahayana Buddhism took root there. China first established relations with Tibet during the Tang dynasty (618-906). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Tibet was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhists fleeing ahead of the Muslim invasion of the subcontinent. During the thirteenth century Mongol power came to predominate in Lhasa, just as the Mongols also ruled at that time in Beijing, but Mongol influence persisted in Tibet until the eighteenth century, much longer than in China itself. In 1270, Kublai Khan was converted to Lamaism by the abbot of the Sakya lamasery.

In 1720 the Manchu dynasty in China replaced Mongol rule in Tibet, and from that time on China claimed a limited suzerainty over Tibet—actually a loose arrangement in which Beijing was responsible for foreign relations and defense while Lhasa was left entirely in charge of domestic affairs. After imperial rule collapsed in 1912, Tibet became something like an independent state with its own governing institutions and even a small army, although its nationhood was not recognized by any other country. During this period the Tibetans expelled most Chinese. All this changed with the Chinese Communist invasion in 1950.

The legal status of Tibet today is clear and is similar in nature to the kind of colonial rule Japan imposed on Korea in 1910. A seventeen-point agreement, signed by Beijing and Tibetan representatives in 1950 at a moment when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had occupied much of the country, incorporated Tibet into the Chinese state as a “national autonomous region.” This was an unprecedented status. Even then, the Tibetans never expected the Chinese to interfere in the actual running of their country. But a brutal occupation—including mass executions, forced labor, confiscations of property, and destruction of religious sites—led to a low-level revolt in the mid-1950s that exploded in March 1959 into open rebellion. The CIA covertly aided this rebellion, which may be part of the reason why the Chinese have shown so little flexibility in dealing with Tibet.⁸ Blowback from CIA support, which was cut off at about the time that President Nixon decided to pursue an opening to China, has been very costly to the Tibetans. In 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India, where he has ever since devoted himself to a campaign to publicize the Tibetans’ plight. He turned sixty-three years old in 1999—and there is every sign that the Chinese will simply try to wait him out, believing that on his death they will be able to appoint a youthful successor, as they have done with the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest lama in the Tibetan hierarchy.

China will probably succeed in maintaining its imperium over Tibet and ultimately assimilate both the Tibetan people and their culture. There are no powerful interests to save them. The Tibetans are in this sense similar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America. A continuing propaganda barrage from both Beijing and Taipei argues that the Tibetans are “feudal” and do not deserve to be saved. But the Chinese are very nervous about what they are doing and regularly make stupid mistakes.

A typical example was the spectacle of officially atheist China attempting to name a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama. On May 15, 1995, from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama designated a six-year-old shepherd boy as a “living Buddha” and the successor to the Panchen Lama, who had died in China in January 1989. The Chinese government responded that the Dalai Lama was interfering in China’s domestic affairs and in elaborately staged ceremonies in Beijing and Lhasa anointed a different six-year-old (evidently placing the Dalai Lama’s choice and his family under house arrest). They formally installed him on December 9, 1995, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; he was quoted in the newspapers as having said, “Thank you, Jiang Zemin. Thank you, government of China. I will study hard and love the motherland.”⁹

It is possible that, as they regain their national self-confidence, the Chinese will invite the Dalai Lama to return and allow him to re-create something like the relationship that existed in the past between Lhasa and Beijing. This would be clever of them. As matters stand now, people in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea (or in Hollywood) could well become as emotionally involved with the fate of Tibet as others have been with the pandas, whose fate seems destined to be similar. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Tibet will become Sinified and its lamaseries will be left as nothing more than crumbling museums, as most already are.

A particular focus of foreign concern over Tibet as well as other areas of Communist Party rule is China’s record on human rights. This is a subtle and complex issue. As the prominent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote at the height of the Cold War,

Politics is a game of vulnerabilities, and the human rights issue is clearly where the “socialist” world has proven most vulnerable, just as the economic rights issue is where the “capitalist” world is most open to criticism. . . . The debate on human rights can be conceptualized in part as a struggle between eighteenth century libertarian persuasions [the West] and nineteenth century egalitarian beliefs [China]—that is, from a vision of human rights having to do with the right of individual justice before the law to a recognition of the rights of individuals to social security and equitable conditions of work and standards of living.¹⁰

During the Cold War the Soviet Union lost any number of friends and potential allies by forever hectoring them about Marxism and the stages of economic growth they would have to go through in order ever to hope to live like Russians. Such Marxist rigidity clearly benefited the American side in the superpower face-off of that era. Ideological arrogance turned many countries, like Tanzania and Egypt, against their Soviet economic advisers, and overbearing Soviet behavior contributed heavily to the Sino-Soviet dispute. Unfortunately, in the post–Cold War era it is the United States that is exhibiting a capitalist version of such heavy-handedness and arrogance.

Ideology—that is, the doctrines, opinions, or way of thinking of an individual, a class, a nation, or an empire—is as tricky a substance to use in international conflicts as poison gas. It, too, has a tendency to blow back onto the party releasing it. During the late 1950s, in the depths of the Cold War, many Americans began to suspect that the Soviet Union was actually a third-rate economy; but it still had the world’s most alluring ideology, a body of thought capable of attracting more people in the Third World than the “possessive individualism” (to use the philosopher C. B. Macpherson’s term) espoused by the United States. Soviet intellectual appeals were built around the ideas of Karl Marx—indubitably a man of the West and properly buried in Highgate Cemetery, London—which attracted even the most chauvinistic people on earth, the Chinese. Marxism-Leninism, as espoused by the Soviet Union, provided explanations for the inequities of colonialism, a model of economic development based on the achievements of Russia under Stalin, and the promise of world peace when all nations had passed beyond imperialism, which was the “final stage of capitalism.”

Part of what gave Soviet ideology such power to convince whole peoples in the Third World was the way it assimilated and invoked the single most uncontested ideology of our century, that of science. It claimed to rest not on the hopes of idealistic reformers but on the logic of “scientific socialism.” The Soviets insisted that they were acting in accordance with laws of human development discovered by their patron saints, Marx and Lenin. By contrast, the ideology of the “free world” looked at best like a rationalization of the privileges enjoyed by Americans because of their exceptional geography and history.

Not surprisingly, American leaders came to feel that somehow they had to match the ideological claims of communism in what they saw as a great global battle for the souls of earth’s contested majority. Nowhere did this need seem more acutely necessary than in East Asia, where Communist regimes had come to power in China, North Korea, and Vietnam despite the fact that Marx’s analysis of class conflict in industrializing societies bore only the faintest relation to the actual conditions in any of these countries. At the time, communism was also an active competitor in every other country of the region. Asians were attracted to it precisely because it claimed to be based on science—the ingredient that seemed to undergird the industrial and military might of their European, American, and Japanese colonizers—and because the example of the Soviet Union held out the hope of a solution that might someday be within their own revolutionary grasp.

The American response, never expressly articulated but based on the total mobilization of the American people for the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy and other leaders, was twofold. First, we would do everything in our considerable power to turn Japan into a capitalist alternative to mainland China, a model and a showcase of what Asians might expect if they threw in their lot with the Americans instead of the Communists. Second, academic economics as taught in most American universities was subtly transformed into a fighting ideology of the “West.” From each of these transformations would come fateful consequences for the American empire after its competition with the Soviet Union ended. Because most Americans never understood either policy to be a strategy for pursuing the Cold War, they took both Japan’s achievements and the wealth of the West to be evidence of an ineluctable destiny that made the United States a singularly appropriate model for the rest of the world. Any doubts raised about these propositions were seen as undermining the pretensions of the American empire. Thus, what began as tactical responses to temporary, often illusory or misleadingly interpreted Soviet “advantages” ended up as ideological articles of faith for the “sole superpower” of the post–Cold War world.

From approximately 1950 to 1975, the United States treated Japan as a beloved ward, indulging its every economic need and proudly patronizing it as a star capitalist pupil. The United States sponsored Japan’s entry into many international institutions, like the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, well before a post–World War II global consensus in favor of Japan had developed. It also transferred crucial technologies to the Japanese on virtually concessionary terms and opened its markets to Japanese products while tolerating Japan’s protection of its own domestic market. It even supported the Japanese side in all claims by individual American firms that they had been damaged by Japanese competitors. In addition, the United States allowed Japan to retain an artificially undervalued currency in order to give its exports a price advantage for well over a decade longer than it did any of the rebuilt European economies.

We proclaimed Japan a democracy and a model of what free markets could achieve while simultaneously helping to rig both its economic and political systems. We used the CIA to finance the ruling party and engaged in all manner of dirty tricks to divide and discredit domestic socialists.¹ In this process there was much self-deception. For far too long America’s leading officials insisted that Japan could never be an economic competitor of the United States’. President Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles was, for example, convinced that while the Japanese might be able to sell shirts, pajamas, “and perhaps cocktail napkins” to the American market, little else was possible for them.² Americans did not wake up to Japan’s competitive challenge until their steel, consumer electronics, robotics, automotive, camera, and semiconductor industries were virtually extinct or fighting for their lives.

After the “security treaty riots” of 1960, when a Japanese mass movement tried to prevent the signing of a treaty that would perpetuate the basing of American troops in Japan and Okinawa, the United States moved its campaign to portray Japan as a model democracy into high gear. It appointed as ambassador the well-known Harvard historian of Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, who was married to a Japanese woman from a distinguished political family. His job was to repair the damage to the image of Japanese-American amity caused by the 1960 riots, which to many Asians appeared to be a Japanese equivalent to the Budapest uprising of 1956. Reischauer was to “reopen a dialogue” with the alienated Japanese left while shoring up the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, its aging rightists from prewar and wartime governments now screened from public view while it emphasized economic growth over democracy.

Perhaps Reischauer’s most influential step was to endorse in his own extensive writings and speeches of the time a movement among American academic specialists to rewrite the history of modern Japan as a case study of successful “modernization.” So-called modernization theory flourished in the United States during the 1960s just as the Japanese economy “took off” (to use that famous term of the modernization theorists), achieving double-digit growth rates. This new approach to Japan traced the country’s course of development from the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which was Japan’s debut as a unified nation rather than a collection of feudal states. It contrasted Japan’s achievement of great-power status with the dependency and susceptibility to colonialism of the rest of Asia, particularly China. It stressed how the initial authoritarianism of the Meiji oligarchs evolved into a toleration of political parties during the 1920s, producing at least the possibility of parliamentary democracy. The theory drew attention to how the “liberal” 1920s, although ultimately destroyed by reaction and militarism after 1931, provided precedents for reform that many Japanese leaders seized upon when genuine democratization got under way during the American occupation.

Japan emerged from this stirring tale of political and economic development as an exemplary nation, the only country in Asia that avoided being colonized. The fact that it did so by joining the Western colonialists in victimizing the other countries of Asia was underemphasized in such accounts. Japan’s kuroi tanima, or “dark valley,” from 1931 to 1945, in which it warred with China and the United States, was explained away as due to a unique concatenation of international factors—the Great Depression, the closing of European and American colonies to Japanese exports, Japan’s fear of bolshevism, and American isolationism. What actually went on in the “dark valley,” from the rape of Nanking to the Bataan Death March, was incidental to the tale of economic growth and political consolidation and best forgotten, since Japan’s aggression was now understood to be but a temporary sidestep on a long march toward modernization. The emperor of Japan, who had reigned since 1926 and presided over much military aggression and brutality, emerged as a simple marine biologist and pacifist who had opposed the war from the beginning and had actually brought it to an end in 1945 through his own decisive action. It was said that he was a man of few words in view of the fact that from the end of the war to his death in 1989 he was never again allowed to utter many in public.

The American public, like its policy elites never very well informed about Japan to begin with, bought this rosy picture of that country as the chief bulwark against communism in Asia. John Dower and a few American academic specialists argued that modernization theory was incomplete and that Japan’s militarism had domestic roots every bit as deep as its commitment to modernity, but they were easily ignored.³ Japan was now entrenched in American consciousness as a full-fledged democratic ally with a system rooted in free-market capitalism and certain eventually to “converge” with the United States as a liberal, consumer-based state.

To be sure, there were occasional “misunderstandings” as one nation’s capitalists sought competitive advantage over the other. In dealing with such “unfortunate” developments, the task of diplomacy and the mission of the American embassy in Tokyo became not to champion American interests but to ameliorate the conflict itself, usually to Japan’s advantage. Nothing seriously wrong could come of such policies, it was argued, because, as modernization theory taught, the two societies were on the same developmental path toward common economic ends.

The second aspect of the ideological challenge to the Soviet Union was the development and propagation of an American economic ideology that might counter the promise of Marxism—what today we call “neoclassical economics,” which has gained an intellectual status in American economic activities and governmental affairs similar to that of Marxism-Leninism in the former USSR. Needless to say, Soviet citizens never understood Marxism-Leninism as an ideology until after it had collapsed, just as Americans like to think (or pretend) that their economics is a branch of science, not a fighting doctrine to defend and advance their interests against those of others. They may consider most economists to be untrustworthy witch doctors, but they regard the tenets of a laissez-faire economy—with its cutthroat competition, casino stock exchange, massive inequalities of wealth, and a minor, regulatory role for government—as self-evident truths.

Until the late 1950s, academic economics remained one of the social sciences, like anthropology, sociology, and political science—a non-experimental, often speculative investigation into the ways individuals, families, firms, markets, industries, and national economies behaved under different conditions and influences. It was concerned with full employment, price stability, growth, public finance, labor relations, and similar socioeconomic subjects. After it became the chief ideological counterweight to Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, its practitioners tried to extract it from the social sciences and re-create it as a hard science.

Its propositions were now expressed less in words than in simultaneous equations, the old ideas of Adam Smith reappearing as fully mathematized axioms, increasingly divorced from empirical research. Its data were said to be “stylized facts,” and economists set out to demonstrate through deductive reasoning expressed in mathematical formulas that resources could be allocated efficiently only through an unfettered market. By now all these terms (“resources,” “efficiency,” “markets”) had been transformed into abstractions, not unlike the abstract formulations (“the proletariat,” “the bourgeoisie,” “class conflict”) of its Soviet opponents. English-speaking economics became such a “hard science” that in 1969 the central bank of Sweden started giving Nobel Prizes to its adepts, virtually all of them American academicians. This ensured that virtually all aspiring economists would in the future try to do so-called theoretical economics—that is, the algebraic modeling of markets—rather than old-fashioned empirical and inductive research into real-world economies.

Economics split from the social sciences and took up a new position somewhere close to mathematics. Economists were now endlessly called upon by governmental bodies to testify that the American economy was unmatchable, even if it sometimes behaved badly because of overspending liberals, pork-barrel politics, or greedy monopolists. Alternatives to it were understood to be either converging with it or destined to fail. Economics no longer studied the economy; it spoke ex cathedra about what was orthodox and what was heresy. Meanwhile, empirical research on economic phenomena migrated to business schools, commercial think tanks, and the other social sciences.

Unquestionably, after the first two decades of the Cold War, in a purely dichotomous choice between an economy based on Marxism-Leninism and one based on free-market capitalism—as exemplified by the economies of the Soviet Union and the United States—most people around the world would have chosen the free market. But in East Asia, at the height of the Sino-Soviet dispute and the American war in Vietnam, neither ideology was working out according to either superpower’s script. The Chinese were discrediting forever whatever attractiveness might have remained in the forced-draft economic achievements of the Soviet model. Through bungling, megalomania, and deep ideological confusion about what Marxism and the Soviet experience taught, the Chinese Communist Party managed to kill thirty million of its own citizens and then, in a paroxysm of mutual blame, came close to destroying its unmatchable cultural legacy in the so-called Cultural Revolution. Today this period is recognized—even in China—as a monumental disaster, but at the time many Americans, from idealistic leftist students to presidents and other political leaders, failing to understand what was happening, retained a sentimental attraction to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the mismanagers of the Chinese revolution.

The truly surprising development in East Asia, however, was that America’s “non-Communist” satellites, protectorates, and dependencies were starting to get rich and to compete with their superpower benefactor. All of this was camouflaged by the Cold War itself, so that the enrichment of East Asia occurred almost surreptitiously. The year-in, year-out record-breaking growth rates of such previously poor places as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were not precisely what American elites had expected, but they were explained away as nothing more than confirmations—even overconfirmations—of officially espoused free-market ideology and so were greeted with parental pride.

If the capitalist economies of East Asia were starting to perform better than the United States itself, this anomaly was usually attributed to mysterious Japanese or Asian cultural or even spiritual factors or to complacency on the part of American managers and workers. By the time the Western world awoke to what had actually happened, economic growth in East Asia was self-sustaining and unstoppable by external actions (although many Asians thought this was exactly what the United States was attempting when its policies toward the area led to the meltdown of 1997). The enrichment of East Asia under the cover of the Cold War was surely the most important, least analyzed development in world politics during the second half of the twentieth century. It remains to this day intellectually indigestible in the United States.

The fundamental problem is not simply that in the Cold War era Japan attained a $5 trillion economy—although that alone was an unexpected competitive challenge to American economic preeminence—but how it did so. It had found a third way between the socialist displacement of the market advocated by Soviet theorists and an uncritical reliance on the market advocated by American theorists. The Japanese had invented a different kind of capitalism—something no defender of the American empire could accept. It was therefore assumed either that the Japanese were cheating (and all that we needed to compete successfully against them was a “level playing field”) or that they must be headed for a collapse similar to the one that had overtaken the USSR.

In turning neo-classical economic theory into a fighting ideology, American ideologues encountered one element of capitalist thought that they could not express in abstract, seemingly “scientific” mathematical terms. This was the set of institutions through which competitive market relationships actually produce their benefits. Institutions are the concrete, more-or-less enduring relationships through which people work, save, invest, and earn a living—such things as stock exchanges, banks, labor unions, corporations, safety nets, families, inheritance rules, and tax systems. This is the realm of the legal, political, and social order, where many considerations that govern the economy other than efficiency contend for primacy. For economic theorists institutions are “black boxes,” entities that receive and transmit economic stimuli but are themselves unaffected by economic theory.

In attempting to forge a fully numerical, scientific-looking model of the capitalist economy for purposes of the Cold War, Western ideologues simply assumed that the institutions of modern capitalism must be those that existed in the United States in the late Eisenhower era. This meant that savings were typically moved from the saver to industry through a capital market (such as the New York Stock Exchange) rather than, for example, through the banking system. They assumed that industrial-labor conflicts were settled by interminable strikes, and not by, for example, offering some workers career job security; and they assumed that the whole purpose of an economy was to serve the short-term interests of consumers, instead of some overarching goal such as the wealth and power of the nation as a whole.

These American assumptions were almost identical to the Soviet assumption that the institutions of “socialism” must be those that existed in the USSR during, say, the Khrushchev era. Neither side ever produced an ideological model to sell to others that could be divorced from their own country. Because of this inability to express the institutions of either socialism or capitalism in some culturally neutral—or at least more varied—way, it is understandable that many observers simply reduced the claims of Marxist-Leninist ideology to the USSR and those of free-market capitalism to the United States.

In finding a third way, Japan’s postwar economic “miracle” reinvented not economic theory but the institutions of modern capitalism so that they would produce utterly different outcomes from those imagined in the American model. Given Japan’s history of catch-up industrialization, its overarching need to avoid the victimization and colonialism to which every other area of East Asia had succumbed, its virtual dearth of raw materials, its dependence on manufacturing and international trade to sustain its large population, and its overwhelming defeat in World War II, it could not ever have become a clone of the United States. Its postwar planners and technocrats instead organized a capitalist economy intended to serve the interests of producers over consumers. They forced Japan’s citizens to save by providing little in the way of a safety net; they encouraged labor harmony regardless of what it did to individual rights; and they built industries based on the highest possible human input rather than simply on some naturally given comparative advantage, such as cheap labor or proximity to a large market like China’s. Their goal was to enrich Japan, if not necessarily the Japanese themselves. They viewed all economic transactions as strategic: theirs was to be an economy organized for war but now directed toward ostensibly peaceful competition with other countries.

Since the 1950s, the United States had seen the entire world in Cold War terms. This meant that Japan was far more important as an anti-Communist ally than as a potential economic competitor. In order to keep U.S. troops and bases in Japan, the Americans provided open access to their market and the government pressured private American firms to relinquish ownership rights to technologies being transferred to Japan. As Japanese trade and industrial bureaucrats took advantage of this deal, trade disputes became inevitable. From the “dollar blouses” that flooded into the United States during the Eisenhower era to the textile disputes of the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, complaints about the costs of “alliance” with Japan became a permanent feature of Washington politics. They also produced a lucrative new field for former government officials turned lobbyists, whom the Japanese hired in increasing numbers to ameliorate or paper over the disputes. Even though Washington remained more or less ignorant of how the government in Tokyo actually worked, the government in Tokyo took a life-or-death interest in Washington’s role in regulating the American economy. Japanese officials also did everything in their power to maintain the artificial separation between trade and defense that the U.S. government had invented and to see that the Pentagon was happy with its facilities.

This artificial separation between trade and defense has been a peculiar characteristic of the half-century-long American hegemony over Japan. Official guardians of the Japanese-American Security Treaty and their academic supporters have maintained an impenetrable firewall between what they call, using the Japanese euphemism, “trade friction” and the basing of one hundred thousand American troops in Japan and South Korea. There was no reason why these two aspects of the Japanese-American relationship should been dealt with as if they were separate matters except that, had they not been, the actual nature of the relationship would have been far easier to grasp.

Until the 1980s, the United States officially ignored all evidence that this compartmentalization of its massive military establishment and its growing trade deficits with Japan was going to be very costly. From about 1968 on, trade deficits began to rise just as the hollowing out of certain industries that the Japanese government had targeted became more visible. U.S. officials then consulted with their Japanese counterparts about these problems and accepted fig-leaf agreements that offered the pretense of remedies to distressed American businesses and communities. With the exception of President Nixon’s 1971 decision to force an ending to Japan’s artificially undervalued exchange, nothing else of significance was done.

During the 1980s, however, pressures for action of some sort markedly increased. The Japanese economy, now a major competitor, was starting to erode the industrial foundations of the United States. Moreover, the Cold War was settling into its final Reaganesque rituals. Despite inflated CIA estimates of Soviet strength, it became increasingly clear to many, even before the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, that the two sides were starting to accommodate each other and that the threat of a superpower war was declining. In this context, a new way of thinking developed about Japan itself and about the nature of America’s relationships with newly rich Asia. Business Week dubbed it “revisionism” and wrote:

No less than a fundamental rethinking of Japan is now under way at the highest levels of the U.S. government, business, and academia. The standard rules of the free market, according to the new school, simply won’t work in Japan. . . . Some people call the new thinking “revisionism,” departing as it does from the orthodox view that Japan will eventually become a U.S.-style consumer-driven society.⁴

Arms Sales

Greider, William. Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace. New York: Public Affairs, 1998.

A short but powerful introduction to the economic implications of America’s massive military apparatus and the interests of the arms industry.

Shear, Jeff. The Keys to the Kingdom: The FS-X Deal and the Selling of America’s Future to Japan. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

A brilliant exposé of “the little state department in the Pentagon” and how and why it transferred the technology of America’s best fighter aircraft to Japan and got nothing in return.

Tirman, John. Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade. New York: Free Press, 1997.

If you read no other book on America’s arms trade, read this one. Tirman’s treatment of the U.S. stake in Turkey’s “white genocide” against the Kurds is the best available.

Introduction: After 9/11

Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation