| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| What If? | |
| Nicholas Eberstadt; Aaron L. Friedberg; Geun Lee | |
| 发表日期 | 2008-01-31 |
| 出版年 | 2008 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | By many measures, the U.S.-ROK alliance–formalized and underpinned through the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty signed between Seoul and Washington–qualifies as a signal historical success. After all, the proximate objective of this military alliance was to deter a second North Korean attack on South Korea (with the first such attack, in June 1950, having launched the devastating 1950-53 Korean War) and, for the five decades that the treaty has been in force, the peninsular ceasefire has steadily held, albeit at times uneasily. Moreover, this U.S. military guarantee helped to assure stability and security in the Northeast Asian region during the Cold War era, thereby facilitating South Korea’s own remarkable economic and political development. By the mid-1990s, the Republic of Korea (ROK) qualified for membership into the OECD, formally joining the world’s roster of affluent and highly industrialized constitutional democracies–an achievement that is, considering South Korea’s starting point in 1953, hard to imagine absent the strong and continuing military and political bond with the United States. Notwithstanding those past successes, the U.S.-ROK alliance is under growing strain today–and the increasingly troubled nature of the current security relationship is no secret on either side of the Pacific. Given South Korea’s tremendous relative rise in recent decades, some degree of friction and readjustment would arguably have been inevitable in this alliance. Today’s growing tensions are, however, more than a reflection of mere “structural” developments. Over the past decade, fundamental differences have emerged between Washington and Seoul over the perceived objectives of the alliance. Most critically, U.S. and South Korean policymakers now do not entirely agree on the nature and urgency of or the appropriate responses to the “North Korean threat.” Since the Mutual Defense Treaty is cast as a pact for resisting potential North Korean aggression, this fissure has potentially profound ramifications. Additional disagreements, however, have arisen with U.S. attempts to re‑conceptualize the purposes of the alliance in the post-Cold War era. On the one hand, tensions have increased especially since September 11 given that Washington is proposing new options for extra-peninsular projection of U.S. military force from bases and places in South Korea. On the other hand, Seoul is insisting that the U.S. military presence in Korea should relate strictly to the defense of the ROK. No longer supported by quite the same shared sense of purpose that characterized the relationship in earlier decades, the U.S.-ROK alliance now appears to be heading into a more unhealthy and uncertain middle age. In recent years, the woes of the U.S.-ROK alliance have generated a veritable blizzard of papers and a virtual throng of conferences on “rejuvenating the alliance”–efforts to little analytical or policy effect. Unfortunately, too much of this well-intended work has attempted to finesse–or paper over–existing and indeed widening differences in strategic assessments by Seoul and Washington. Rather than attempting to square that circle, this roundtable instead works from a somewhat more radical analytical diagnostic: a rigorous “alternative futures” exercise on the U.S.-ROK alliance. What would it mean for South Korea, the United States, and other affected parties if the U.S.-ROK alliance did not actually exist? How would we describe the “hypothetical geography” of a Northeast Asian region identical to the one we know today, save for the absence of any defense or security relationship linking Seoul to Washington? This approach to the U.S.-ROK alliance problematik is instructive for two main reasons. First, there is an intrinsic intellectual utility to the alternative futures method: for over a generation, such exercises have been used by decisionmakers in both government and business to sharpen thinking about risks and opportunities inherent in the current environment through the sustained examination of numerous plausible “contra-factuals” and the challenges they would pose. Second, the method has proved especially helpful in dialogues beset by idées fixes: in polarized or ideologically charged settings, the contemplation of alternative futures can be intellectually liberating insofar as this approach permits analysts to depart from their established positions or normative preferences and to focus instead on the positive, value-neutral task of constructing common understandings anddescriptions of the way in which a very different world from our own might plausibly look and work. The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) has found the alternative futures method to be a fruitful approach for promoting clarity of thinking on other thorny or seemingly intractable issues facing Northeast Asia. In early 2006, for example, NBR and Chinese partners convened an alternative futures conference in Beijing, examining the regional economic ramifications of a hypothetical big shift (“Bold Switchover”) by North Korea in its defense/security policies and external behavior. NBR utilized this same scenario-based approach for a conference on understanding the contours of Chinese foreign policy, politics, economy, and culture in the year 2020. The experience gained from these earlier “experiments” lent confidence to the notion that an analogous effort might be undertaken on the question of the U.S.-ROK alliance. Early in 2007, NBR and the Korea Institute for Future Strategies (KiFS) agreed to partner in this venture-subsequently convening a two-day alternative futures exercise in Seoul on September 10-11, 2007. We, the co-authors of this introductory essay, also served as co-chairs of the conference. The conference considered the implications of an end to the U.S.-ROK alliance from six thematic angles: (1) performance of the ROK economy; (2) tasks, costs, opportunities for ROK defense policy; (3) inter-Korean relations; (4) the extra-peninsular Northeast Asian environment; (5) U.S.-ROK civil society ties and prospects; and (6) U.S. strategic interests. The conference focused on but a single “scenario”: a world without a U.S.-ROK alliance; as our deliberations attested, however, the effort of fleshing out and coming to a greater understanding of the implications of this single alternative future proved to be a major analytical task. By seriously contemplating this one alternative future, it was our hope that others would subsequently be able to revisit the present dilemmas of the alliance with new and enriched perspective on the benefits and costs this relationship presents to its stakeholders–in South Korea, the United States, and the greater Northeast Asian region. One particular “design specification” of this exercise perhaps deserves special mention. As already intimated, contemporary work on international security in the Korean Peninsula features some cleavages and even somedegree of polarization. Assessments by U.S. observers today, for example, often tend to be characteristically different from those of their ROK counterparts; divergences between adherents of more “conservative” or more “progressive” perspectives are often no less apparent. Consequently, we deemed it highly desirable-practically imperative-to draw together specialists holding varying viewpoints on the many difficult topics at hand. We could not know a priori whether a gathering of experts of different nationalities and political leanings would come to consensus about the likely contours of this hypothesized alternative world. We recognized, however, that if specialists with respectful but spirited disagreements with one another’s policy preferences for the Korean vicinity were nevertheless to concur in their assessments about this alternative future, there would be special noteworthiness–perhaps even value–in such common findings. In this roundtable, Asia Policy presents three papers from this conference on various aspects of “a world without a U.S.-ROK alliance.” We trust our readers will find these contributions as stimulating and as thought-provoking as our conferees did. Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI. |
| 主题 | Foreign and Defense Policy ; Asia |
| 标签 | China ; Japan ; North Korea ; South Korea |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/what-if/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/245184 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Nicholas Eberstadt,Aaron L. Friedberg,Geun Lee. What If?. 2008. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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