ASEAN Nights
Harries, Owen
ing on national forces. While the Soviets continue to press for such ceilings, it is not clear that a concession in this area would cost them much. Even if the Bundeswehr is not legally restricted...
...Even if the Bundeswehr is not legally restricted by MBFR, any attempt to in-crease its size in compensation for the withdrawal of American forces is likely...
...It would be unrealistic to expect that what has happened in the Philippines will have no effect on these countries...
...Three Western countries have fought major military actions in Southeast Asia since World War II, and currently the Soviet Union thinks it important enough to spend about $2 billion a year it can ill afford to support a client state there...
...All NATO is buying itself are Soviet promises for the future and an arms control regime that will create new and unwelcome political realities in the present...
...The capacity of Singapore even to survive seemed dubious, given that it had absolutely no resources (not even its own drinking water) and a racially divided population...
...Take Indonesia, the most likely target for American reformist zeal...
...The current MBFR initiative comes with the label Thatcher, Kohl, and Reagan...
...As the "Philippines corOwen Harries is co-editor of the National Interest...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986...
...But thereductions being proposed are a nullity in military terms...
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...Before it achieved in-dependence in 1949, its only experience as a united political entity was under Dutch colonial rule, which did not goin much for apprenticeship in self-government...
...foreign policy among conservatives, neoconservatives and neoliberals...
...One can only hope that Ambassador Wolfowitz will succeed in keeping Senators Laxalt and Lugar well away from Jakarta...
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...So they are ideal targets for an American policy of promoting democracy by pressuring authoritarian governments to reform, right...
...an escape from a "narrow" concentration on anti-Communism...
...foreign policy...
...It would be one thing if NATO had achieved its long-sought goal of major reductions in Soviet forces stationed in East Germany (even though questions might remain about the ability of the Soviets rapidly to reinforce any standing-start offensive...
...ollary," the idea has even been incorporated by some into an extended version of the "Reagan Doctrine...
...Perhaps the problem with conservatives is that they don't take arms control seriously enough...
...But there have also been recent killings by government-controlled "death squads...
...policy toward the Philippines during the recent crisis...
...He has a case...
...It would also be unrealistic to expect that some American enthusiasts for "third forces" will not, in any case, target some of the ASEAN countries for treatment...
...More particularly, it is a member of an important andsuccessful regional organization: the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose other members are Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Brunei...
...Consider the recent history of the countries...
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...Strategically they are both important and vulnerable...
...Outside U.S...
...In fact, one of the features of ASEAN as an organization has been suspicion and hostility toward such interference...
...Sukarno's "To hell with your aid...
...Given all this—the still recent history of instability and backwardness, the success against all odds in overcoming it, the strategic importance of the region, the Vietnam factor—it would be insanely dangerous and irresponsible for the United States to heed the ad-vice of those who, in the name of freedom and democracy, now urge it to press change on the governments of the region...
...Conditions in the other ASEAN countries are not anything like as bad as they are in Indonesia, but, by the standards now being applied by many Americans, they are not very good either...
...This is serious enough...
...Editors Owen Harries, Robert W. Tucker Publisher Irving Kristol Advisory Board Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Martin Feldstein, Samuel P. Huntington, H. J. Kaplan, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Henry A. Kissinger, Charles Krauthammer, Edward N. Luttwak, Daniel Pipes, Robert A. Scalapino *The Washington Post, October 9, 1985 The National Interest Sub...
...In Thailand the military plays a dominant role...
...Box 3000 AS Denville, NJ 07834 Please open my subscription for ^ ONE YEAR (4 issues) $18 ^ TWO YEARS (8 issues) $36 ^ Check enclosed ^Charge my (circle one) MASTERCARD VISA AM...
...Around this time, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Under these circumstances, it is difficult to believe that the Soviets can long resist taking NATO's yes for an answer, though it can be anticipated that they will extract a last pound of flesh in the form of further Western concessions on verification...
...As far as corruption is concerned, Indonesia's President Suharto is in the same league as Mar-cos...
...Most were killed in massacres (which may or may not have been carried out spontaneously by anti-Communist villagers) following the abortive coup of that year, and in the process of imposing Indonesian rule over Timor, following the withdrawal of the Portuguese...
...There is one other thing to be said about Indonesia and the other ASEAN countries...
...MBFR was once a conservative cause, but at a time when conservatives were fighting a desperate holding action against the tides of American confusion and retreat...
...They control the passage between the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, which is vital for Japan and other countries of northeast Asia, as well as for the U.S...
...Hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as a million—have perished violently in Indonesia since Suharto seized effective control in 1965...
...and the Soviets are making toward an agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces, arguing that the elimination of NATO's newly-deployed Pershing II's and ground-launched cruise missiles will be destabilizing unless the conventional balance improves in NATO's favor...
...In these circumstances it seems less surprising that the country is today under authoritarian rule than that it is still in one piece...
...Governments became more efficient, and internal order and stability were established...
...the potential for arousing bipartisan support and for restoring a much-longed-for consensus in U.S...
...In the late 1940s liberal intellectuals were the pacesetters in creating a new American foreign policy...
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...That many of them evidently do not is a cause for deep concern about both American conservatism and the prospects for American foreign policy...
...Twenty-one years ago it was in political and economic shambles...
...Or perhaps the lesson is simply that arms control talks acquire an institutional momentum that is difficult to reverse without paying a political price, and that conservatives are unwilling to pay the premium political price they know will be exacted from them by the current arbiters of Western political culture...
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...It has neighbors, it belongs to a region...
...but the political constraints such an agreement would place on NATO in a crisis are potentially fatal...
...Indonesia had the largest Communist movement in the world outside the Soviet bloc and China, an inflation rate of over 600 percent, and one of the most radical and anti-Western governments in the world...
...Economic growth rates varying from good to absolutely spectacular were achieved and maintained through the 1970s...
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...It is a huge country: superimpose it on a map of Europe and it stretches from Ireland to the Caspian Sea...
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...Malaysia was coping with the remnants of a serious Communist guerrilla movement...
...This is something that one would expect conservatives, at least, to understand in their bones...
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...Paul Wolfowitz, until recently the State Department's assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, played a key role in making and implementing U.S...
...Now he is off to be America's ambassador to Indonesia, the Philippines' nearest neighbor...
...to encounter severe political resistance within West Germany on the grounds that such an increase would undermine prospects for further progress in MBFR...
...And as these are among the most economically advanced countries in the Third World, with well-developed middle classes, they offer more convincing prospects of viable democratic "third forces" than most...
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...The defeat of the Communists and the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia re-moved a major source of trouble-making...
...All in all a sorry picture...
...and the promise that, as there is allegedly a global "democratic revolution" in progress, it will be in harmony with the times...
...Generally speaking, an agreement is likely to generate new political pressures against conventional force improvements of any kind in every NATO country in the reductions zone...
...airmail...
...Second, though someone depending exclusively on American media coverage of recent events might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, the Philippines does not exist in a void, nor exclusively in terms of its relations with the United States...
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...It should be an interesting experience...
...Well, no actually...
...That these arbiters have in the present in-stance failed to bark is perhaps the key to the mystery...
...It is made up of 13,500 islands...
...In his new job, Ambassador Wolfowitz will have cause to consider very carefully the interaction of two facts...
...Now, in a similar period of creation, the most vigorous and penetrating discussions are being conducted among conservatives * about the future of Nato * the relative merits of realpolitik and ideological approaches *interventionism versus isolationism * multilateralism as against unilateralism This discussion appears at its most sophisticated in the pages of The National Interest...
...In the bargain, the U.S...
...First, recent events in Manila (and to a lesser extent Haiti) have aroused considerable enthusiasm in America, among conservatives as well as liberals, for aiding "third forces" against authoritarian regimes, as a general policy...
...This juxtaposition of weak, prosperous countries and a strong, poor one is intrinsically dangerous...
...As well, with Sukarno's Indonesia in a confrontational mood and the union between Malaysia and Singapore having broken up, relations among the countries themselves were far from good...
...was still ringing in American ears...
...wrote with justification of "an under-developed subcontinent filled with fictitious states in vague, chaotic and unpredictable revolutionary ferment...
...The commitment not to increase forces in the zone will make it much more difficult for NATO to reach a decision to mobilize in an acute crisis, particularly if Soviet actions are ambiguous (for example, if mobilization occurs in the western military districts of the Soviet Union under theguise of an exercise...
...What the ASEAN countries have managed is an incredible achievement...
...What hat is going on...
...and its allies have thrown away a principle—prior agreement on data relevant to compliance with arms control treaties—which is essential for effective verification of any agreement with the Soviets, and which the Soviets had accepted as essential in the SALT II treaty and elsewhere...
...It is a matter of great concern to the Chinese that the region should not fall under the domination of another great power...
...There may be countries in the world where it would make sense (i.e., where it would serve America's national interest) to destabilize friendly authoritarian governments...
...But it is an activity that should be undertaken only after very careful deliberation, a close examination of the particular circumstances, and a clear sense of what it is likely to lead to...
...Such intervention would be much more likely to endanger the hard-won gains of the last two decades, and to result in a return to the conditions of the 1960s, than it would be to further the cause of democracy...
...ASEAN was formed in 1968 and regional cooperation began to flourish...
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...Lee Kuan Yew controls Singapore's press and intellectuals with a firm hand and tolerates little genuine opposition...
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...It has a population of 170 million...
...Owen Harries ASEAN NIGHTS There are limits to the Reagan Doctrine...
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...But it is a measure of the continuing disarray of Western security policy that this initiative not only serves no discernible conservative purpose, but makes little sense as arms control...
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...In particular, it will no doubt be politically out of the question to introduce additional American forces into West Germany unless large Soviet units actually begin to cross into Poland, regardless of the existence of an explicit non-circumvention clause...
...Communist China to the north and North Vietnam to the east, both countries with formidable armies, presented external threats which the region was ill equipped to meet...
...In Malaysia there is serious economic discriminaTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 15 tion, sanctioned by law, against the large Chinese minority and the government is attracted to Islamic fundamentalism...
...In terms of ruthlessness he is in altogether a higher one...
...In the battle of ideas, how long can you afford to be without the ultimate weapon...
...Tivo decades ago they were rightly seen as amongst the most unstable and vulnerable in the world: internally divided, weakly governed, economically stagnant, threatened by subversion and insurrection...
...These same West Germans have recently been voicing reservations about the apparent progress the U.S...
...There are large ironies here...
...so , ryR With the appearance of its third issue, The National Interest is already widely recognized as one of the three major foreign policy quarterlies...
...The purpose of The National Interest is to reflect, stimulate and focus the discussion of U.S...
...Indeed, they have already started to do so: A. M. Rosenthal, the executive editor of the New York Times, has recently urged that America should bring leverage and pressure to bear on, among others, Indonesia, in the interest of promoting political freedom...
...Then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, just about the time Schlesinger's words were published in 1967, they began to get their act together, and in a few years both the reality and image of the region had changed radically...
...At the same time, and despite their economic success, the ASEAN countries are militarily weak, while, in Vietnam, they have a neighbor that possesses one of the world's most powerful fighting machines, is ambitious, and is very poor...
...In the course of a decade, what had been one of the world's principal areas of instability became and remains one of its great success stories, in most ways a model for the rest of the Third World...
...It has several things going for it: the ideological and moral appeal of helping the good guys...
...The Western proposal of December 1985 reportedly represents a joint British-West German initiative...
...All this was achieved with little outside help or interference...
...After all, let us not forget (to cite the most arresting example) that it was Jimmy Carter who let the Soviets know that any violation of any provision of the SALT II treaty would bring on nuclear war, while Thatcher, Kohl, and Reagan have done precisely nothing to remedy demonstrable Soviet violations of a variety of arms control agreements...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
