Dan Twining's blog

By Dan Twining

Today's Wall Street Journal has a thought-provoking piece by Marcus Walker asking whether, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, China's model of authoritarian capitalism presents a new ideological challenge to the West, one comparable to that of communist totalitarianism during the Cold War.

Some Western thinkers now argue that democracy is in a new competition with unexpectedly robust authoritarian regimes over which form of government can better deliver prosperity, security and national strength. ...

Today, history is back, according to writers such as Israeli military historian Azar Gat. In his new book, "Victorious and Vulnerable," he says that although democracy is the most benign system in history, it will have to demonstrate its advantages all over again in the face of its latest rival: authoritarian capitalism, as practiced by self-confident powers such as China and Russia. ...

Neither China nor Russia is actively promoting its system of government the way the U.S. does. But China's recent growth in particular is feeding a conviction in parts of the world that democracy isn't necessary, or even helpful, for prosperity, say some analysts.

"There are hundreds of millions of people, especially in Asia, who believe that democracy usually means more bickering, more indecision and less economic efficiency, and that it requires a trade-off with prosperity that they're not prepared to pay," says Jonathan Eyal, director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a nonpartisan foreign-affairs think tank in London.

Mr. Eyal argues that the backlash against Western-style democracy began while 1989's democratic revolutions were still under way -- thanks above all to the way Beijing reacted to that year's convulsions."

This is certainly true of China, where constraints on freedom of political expression were far looser in the 1980s than today, demonstrating how the country's inexorable economic march has been accompanied by tighter limits on political speech and action. But most of Asia has been marching in the opposite direction. More Asians live under democratic rule than in any other region. Democracy has an Asian face; it's no longer considered a Western privilege or export but something Asians earned themselves -- from dictators often supported by the United States during the Cold War.

Chinese authoritarianism actually has a reverse "demonstration effect" in many countries. Just look at the numbers: despite its miraculous growth, China enjoys less "soft power" in Asia than either the United States or Japan. China's neighbors want to be part of its economic miracle, but they don't want to organize their societies along Chinese lines. Asians want to buy Chinese goods, but they don't want to be part of any new "Middle Kingdom." This debate played out at a summit of Asian leaders last weekend, where key countries resisted efforts to put China in the driver's seat of closed regional institutions that exclude America and other friendly powers like India.

Rather than a political model for its region, China is in some respects an outlier: its closed political system puts it in the company of Burma, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. This is a minority camp in Asia, and is in many ways a defensive grouping compared to the confidence pluralism inspires in giant democracies like India and Indonesia, and rich ones like South Korea and Taiwan. While the region certainly suffers from weak institutions, Asia is arguably the world's democratic trendsetter, rejecting the embrace and export of authoritarianism of the kind that characterizes, say, Russia. 

Check out Minxin Pei's China's Trapped Transition and Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower to plumb the depths of Chinese leaders' greatest source of insecurity: their own people. It will be hard to run the world with that handicap.

AFP/AFP/Getty Images

By Dan Twining

What should we make of the current imbroglio over U.S. aid to Pakistan? The fact that a singularly generous American civilian assistance package has led to a crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations rather than improving them reveals three things: one, Pakistan's continued civil-military imbalance, two, Pakistani public hostility to what has been viewed as Washington's transactional relationship with their country's leaders, and three, the imperative of a sustained U.S. commitment to Pakistan and its region that helps reconstitute the way Pakistan's military and civilian leaders define their interests -- and in turn reconfigures the possibilities for partnership between Islamabad (where the civilian government sits), Rawalpindi (the headquarters of the Pakistani Army), and Washington.

First, Pakistan's military leadership is clearly using the conditionalities contained in the U.S. assistance package as a hammer with which to beat the country's unpopular (and pro-American) civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari. That this is a manufactured rather than a genuine crisis should provide little comfort, however, for it demonstrates how well-intentioned U.S. congressional efforts to strengthen civilian governance in Pakistan can backfire. To take one example, provisions in the final congressional bill authorizing the assistance package urge the civilian government to assume some responsibility for military promotions -- anathema to the generals, who believe civilian meddling in internal Army matters threatens both its institutional integrity and, because they define their country's interests as derivative of the Army's, the national security of Pakistan.

The challenge for American friends of Pakistan is to pursue policies that strengthen the country's civilian institutions while at the same time not unduly threatening the prerogatives of the Army, working overtime to rebalance relations between them while engaging closely with both. But such is the gap between military and civilian capacity that this is the work of years, even decades -- not of a single assistance package. For the moment, Washington has a compelling interest in the sustained survival of civilian government in Pakistan, a country that has been ruled by the military for roughly half its 60-year history. Policies that threaten civilian government by crossing the Army's red lines do not contribute to that end.

Second, America needs to be a better ally of Pakistan's moderate majority of citizens who oppose Taliban or military rule but nonetheless view the United States as an enemy, not an advocate, of liberal values in their country. In the past, the United States has supported military dictatorship in Pakistan: Washington's embrace of General Zia al Haq and its partnership with him to support the Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s contributed to the rise of a strand of militant Islam that had previously been quiescent in Pakistan. Washington's support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not only immediately following 9/11 but well after his sell-by date, created political space for opponents of dictatorship to define their dissent with reference to an ideology of anti-American, Islamist zealotry.

Pakistanis lament that their leaders rule only with the support of "the Army, Allah, and America." The United States is not responsible for Pakistan's pathologies, many rooted in its violent birth as a nation and the subsequent choices of its political and military elites. But no U.S. policy to stabilize Pakistan can succeed as long as most Pakistanis view Washington as a fickle, disreputable partner that seeks a transactional relationship with their leaders and then abandons their country when narrow objectives sought by Washington are secured. Setting the matter of conditionalities aside, the Kerry-Lugar civilian assistance package promises to reconstitute relations with the Pakistani people by making sustained investments in educational, judicial, governing, and developmental institutions that provide for their welfare. But the road to a relationship of trust will be long, and American public diplomacy faces extraordinary challenges -- not only in changing Pakistani public attitudes, but in emboldening Pakistani political and military leaders to speak out in defense of partnership with the United States, rather than leveraging it as a weapon against their political adversaries (see above).

Third and relatedly, America must sustain a long-term commitment to Pakistan and its region across the political-economic-military spectrum to change some of the intractable ground realities that lead Pakistani leaders to define their interests in ways inimical to those of the United States. Chris Brose and I have detailed the outlines of such an approach here. The goal of such a strategy would be to gradually reorient Pakistan's definition of national security away from its current manifestation -- supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorism against India, for instance -- policies destructive to its neighbors, to us, and to itself. This would be a slow, systematic, and evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- approach to changing the strategic context of Pakistani decision-making and so nudging Pakistan in a direction more favorable to the interests of the United States -- and the welfare of the Pakistani people.

The most important element of such a strategy is for the United States and its Western and local allies to win the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Construction of an Afghan state that can defeat the insurgency and govern its people legitimately, in conjunction with sustained investment in Pakistani civic institutions and a reorientation of the Pakistani military's worldview, would in the long term create a dynamic in South Asia in which states like India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan define their security in ways that are positive- rather than zero-sum. It would demonstrate to the jihadists intent on undermining civilian governments in Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul that they have no hope, separating their violent aspirations from those of citizenries that instead aspire to modernity, security, and opportunity.

By contrast, failure in Afghanistan, no matter how many American resources were subsequently shifted to Pakistan, would only compound the latter's insecurity and misgovernance. The policy conundrums America confronts in South Asia today would pale against those we should expect if the Taliban continue their ascendance in Afghanistan, emboldening their fellow extremists in Pakistan. Just as our country should finish what we started in Afghanistan in part because it will strengthen the forces of moderation next door, so American assistance to Pakistan should empower our natural allies there rather than put them on the defensive.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

By Dan Twining

The problem with the current debate over Afghanistan is that it is too focused on Afghanistan. There is no question that the intrinsic importance of winning wars our country chooses to fight -- to secure objectives that remain as compelling today as they were on September 12, 2001 -- is itself reason for President Obama to put in place a strategy for victory in Afghanistan. But the larger frame has been lost in the din of debate over General McChrystal's leaked assessment, President Obama's intention to ramp up or draw down in Afghanistan, and the legitimacy of the Afghan election. In fact, it is vital for the United States and its allies to recommit to building an Afghan state that can accountably govern its people and defeat the Taliban insurgency -- for reasons that have to do not only with Afghanistan's specific pathologies but with the implications of failure for the wider region and America's place in the international system.

The surreal belief in some quarters that abandoning Afghanistan -- described as a "graveyard of empires" with its complicated tribes, forbidding terrain, and peripheral strategic importance -- would not have direct and bloody consequences for the United States, never mind the Afghan people, can be answered with three numbers: 9-11. It is troubling that our political and foreign policy elites even need to engage this debate (including its more sophisticated but equally illusory variants like moving to an "over-the-horizon" strike-and-retreat strategy). At the same time, the experts (correctly) advocating a counterinsurgency strategy make the same mistake of framing their arguments purely with reference to Afghanistan's internal dynamics. As important as they are, they constitute only part of a wider strategic landscape that would be upended by a U.S. decision to reduce its political and military commitment to Afghanistan.

A recent trip to Islamabad and Lahore revealed to me that most Pakistani elites -- including the small minority that could credibly be described as sympathetic to Western goals in Afghanistan -- already believe that the game is up: the will of the transatlantic allies is broken, Obama doesn't have the courage or vision to see America's mission in Afghanistan through to victory, and the U.S. is well along the road to walking away from Afghanistan as it did after 1989. This widespread Pakistani belief has encouraged behavior deeply inimical to Washington's regional aims, with the effect that the American debate over whether Afghanistan is worth it is inspiring Pakistani actions that will make success all the harder to achieve.

After all, why shouldn't the Pakistani security services continue to invest in their friendly relations with the Taliban if Mullah Omar and company soon will take power in Afghanistan's Pashtun heartland? Why should the Pakistani military take on the militant groups that regularly launch cross-border attacks into Afghanistan when the NATO targets of those attacks will soon slink away in defeat? Why should the Pakistani government get serious about wrapping up the Quetta Shura when the Afghan Taliban appears to be ascendant in the face of Western weakness? Why should Pakistan's intelligence service break its ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the world's most potent terrorist groups, when it forms such a useful instrument with which to bleed U.S. ally India? And why should Pakistani civilian and military leaders overtly cooperate with the United States when it appears such a weak and unreliable ally of the Afghan people -- incapable, despite its singular wealth and resources, of defeating a 25,000-man insurgency in one of the poorest countries on Earth?

As Chris Brose and I recently argued, it is vital for the West to prevail in Afghanistan because of its effect in shaping Pakistan's strategic future. Proponents of drawing down in Afghanistan on the grounds that Pakistan is the more important strategic prize have it only half right: if Pakistan is the strategic prize, it should be unthinkable not to press for victory in Afghanistan given the spillover effects of a Western defeat there. All of Pakistan's pathologies -- from terrorist sanctuary in ungoverned spaces, to radicalized public opinion that creates an enabling environment for violent extremism, to lack of economic opportunity that incentivizes militancy, to the (in)security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, to the military's oversized role in political life in ways that stunt the development of civilian institutions -- all of this will intensify should Afghanistan succumb to the Taliban as the West withdraws.

These dynamics, in turn, will destabilize India in ways that could torpedo the country's rise to world power -- and the strategic dividends America would reap from India's success. New Delhi is now a truer proponent of Washington's original objectives in Afghanistan -- the Taliban's decisive defeat by military force rather than reconciliation and the construction of a capable Afghan democracy -- than some American leaders are now. Afghanistan is in India's backyard -- they shared a border until 1947 -- and the collapse of its government would destabilize Pakistan in ways that would quickly cost Indian dearly. Indian strategists fear that the spillover from a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would induce Pakistan's "Lebanonization," with the Pakistani Taliban becoming a kind of South Asian Hezbollah that would launch waves of crippling attacks against India. India cannot rise to be an Asian balancer, global security provider, and engine of the world economy if it is mired in interminable proxy conflict with terrorists emanating from a weak or collapsing state armed with nuclear weapons on its border.

The strategic implications of a Western defeat in Afghanistan for American relations with other major powers are similarly troubling. The biggest game-changer in the nuclear standoff with Iran is not new sanctions or military action but a popular uprising by the Iranian people that changes the character of the radical regime in Tehran -- a prospect one would expect to be meaningfully diminished by the usurpation through violence of the Afghan government, against the will of a majority of Afghans, by the religious extremists of the Taliban. And despite welcome new unity in the West on a tougher approach to Iran's development of nuclear weapons following revelations of a new nuclear complex in Qum, how can Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin stare down the leaders of Iran -- a potentially hegemonic Middle Eastern state with an advanced conventional and near-nuclear arsenal and a vast national resource base -- if they can't even hold their own against the cave-dwelling, Kalashnikov-wielding despots of the Taliban?

Russia appears to be quietly reveling in the prospect that NATO, which appeared so threatening to Russian eyes during its multiple rounds of enlargement during the 1990s, could be defeated in its first real out-of-area operation. A NATO defeat in Afghanistan would call into question the future of the alliance and the credibility of American leadership with it, possibly creating a new and lasting transatlantic breach and intensifying concerns about the alliance's ability to protect weak European states against a resurgent Russia. China has no interest in Afghanistan's collapse into a sanctuary for Islamist extremists, including Uighers who militate against China's rule in Xinjiang. But a Western defeat in Afghanistan, which if historical precedent holds would be followed by a bout of U.S. isolationism, would only create more space for China to pursue its (for now) peaceful rise.

And that is the point: the debate over whether to prevail in Afghanistan is about so much more. An American recommitment to a sustained counterinsurgency strategy that turned around the conflict would demonstrate that the United States and its democratic allies remain the principal providers of public goods -- in this case, the security and stability of a strategically vital region that threatens the global export of violent extremism -- in the international system. A new and sustained victory strategy for Afghanistan would show that Washington is singularly positioned to convene effective coalitions and deliver solutions to intractable international problems in ways that shore up the stability of an international economic and political order that has provided greater degrees of human freedom and prosperity than any other.

By contrast, a U.S. decision to wash its hands of Afghanistan would send a different message to friends and competitors alike. It would hasten the emergence of a different kind of international order, one in which history no longer appeared to be on the side of the United States and its friends. Islamic extremism, rather than continuing to lose ground to the universal promise of democratic modernity, would gain new legs -- after all, Afghan Islamists would have defeated their second superpower in a generation. Rival states that contest Western leadership of the international order and reject the principles of open society would increase their influence at America's expense. Just as most Afghans are not prepared to live under a new Taliban regime, so most Americans are surely not prepared to live in a world in which the United States voluntarily cedes its influence, power, and moral example to others who share neither our interests nor our values.

By Dan Twining

Last Friday, Indonesia's electoral commission certified the winner of the country's recent presidential election, a free and fair contest that demonstrated the strength of democratic norms in a country ruled for decades by strongmen supported by Washington. Meanwhile, next door in Burma, a political show trial is preparing to convict that country's legitimately elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, of "crimes" she did not commit, most likely renewing her jail sentence to prevent her from contesting elections next year. Curiously, the Obama administration is flirting with the idea of normalizing relations with Burma's military junta, at a time when Indonesia's example -- and Indonesian leaders' outspokenness about Burma's repressive political system -- should be spurring the United States toward greater support for Southeast Asian democrats, rather than legitimizing the notion that Burma should be governed by the kind of strong hand that has been thoroughly discredited in Indonesia and across the region.

From 1967, when General Suharto seized power following a near-civil war, until 1998, Western officials and Asian elites commonly took the view that Indonesia needed a strongman at its helm. Justifications for authoritarian rule evolved over time, and included: (1) the need to hold together a fragile post-colonial state of sweeping territorial expanse with diverse ethnic groups and no tradition of unified nationhood, (2) the urgency of preventing a widespread communist insurgency in the 1960s from overthrowing the country's political order, as later occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, (3) the imperative of keeping Indonesia, rich in raw materials and geographically situated astride strategic sea lanes, in the Western camp during the Cold War, and (4) the wisdom of having an "authoritarian modernizer" to guide Indonesia's rapid economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s as an Asian "tiger" economy.

This narrative collapsed when Indonesians took to the streets in 1998, ousting Suharto in the wake of a financial crisis that debased Indonesia's currency and caused unemployment in the country to spike to levels comparable to America's Great Depression in the 1930s. Indonesia's political revolution was also spurred by a regional wave of democratization that spread from the Philippines in 1986 to South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and beyond over the following decade. After free parliamentary elections, Indonesia held its first direct elections for president in 2004, followed by those which have just given President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono a decisive mandate for a second term.

The popular and performance legitimacy required by a system of democratic accountability has led SBY, as he is popularly known, to aspire to lead Indonesia to new heights. With the country's respected former central bank governor as his new vice president, the leadership team has set a target of matching China's economic growth rate and attacking entrenched corruption, a corrosive legacy of Suharto's clientelistic rule. Democratic Indonesia is finally beginning to punch its weight geopolitically: international newspaper headlines celebrate "Indonesia Rising" and suggest Indonesia as "Another ‘I' in the BRIC Story." The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts that Indonesia will have an economy larger than those of most European nations by the 2020s. Leading Indonesian public intellectuals like Rizal Sukma ambitiously propose "a post-ASEAN foreign policy" of "strategic partnerships with global powers" grounded in Indonesia's values as a democracy. Yudhoyono speaks proudly of Indonesia's democracy as a source of soft power in the world and wants to leverage it to expand respect for human dignity and government accountability as sources of regional security, including through new institutions like the Bali Democracy Forum.

Burma is a different story. Its widespread poverty and brutal autocracy are a cancer in the heart of ASEAN, the club led by Asia's "tiger" economies that inducted Burma in 1997 in the hope that doing so would spur the kind of opening of Burma's economic and political system that has transformed the fortunes of its neighbors. It hasn't. Leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and elsewhere are embarrassed by the Burmese junta's misrule and have been increasingly outspoken in saying so -- including during the debate over ASEAN's new charter, which creates a regional human rights body and is grounded in a framework of political and economic modernity that is anathema to the generals in Naypyidaw (Burma's new capital, built deep in the jungle and featuring plush underground bunkers for the country's paranoid leadership).

Since the junta rejected the results of the country's last elections in 1990, Burma's people have grown poorer as its ruling elite have grown richer from trade in gems, timber, narcotics, and other commodities, as well as the development of offshore natural gas fields that will deliver billions of dollars in revenues to Burma's governing elite over the coming decade. Civil conflict stemming from the junta's rule has produced millions of internally displaced people and refugees. Forced and child labor are rampant. The regime's security forces fired on peacefully demonstrating monks and rounded up large numbers of innocent civilians following non-violent protests in 2007. The country's political opposition has been eviscerated. The junta may be cooperating with North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

In short, the pathologies that afflict Burma's failing state, all either derived or exacerbated by political misrule, make its regime a threat to its people, its neighbors, and the wider world. Burma's descent is in many respects a mirror-image of the success of Indonesia's vibrant democracy next door.

That's why it is hard to understand why the Obama administration is pursuing policies of engagement toward both countries. Secretary Clinton's successful visit to Jakarta on her first overseas trip marked the launch of a new U.S. effort to build a genuine strategic partnership with Indonesia -- one marked by a qualitative breakthrough of the kind that characterized the U.S. opening to India during the Bush administration. This is a worthy and important initiative whose timing could not be better, given Indonesia's democratic consolidation and Obama's own special ties to Indonesia.

But why is the administration at the same time holding out the promise of a qualitative transformation of U.S. relations with Burma? Clinton floated the idea of lifting U.S. investment and trade sanctions on the country during her recent visit to Thailand. Senior American officials huddled with Burmese counterparts to discuss a roadmap for closer cooperation on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum. The State Department is conducting a Burma policy review likely to result in the rollback of U.S. sanctions on Burma and the launch of new assistance programs channeled through the Burmese government.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress has just voted overwhelmingly to renew trade sanctions against Burma; the European Union has expanded its own sanctions regime; Indonesian and other leaders lament Burma's failure to pursue meaningful political liberalization; international assistance to Burma following the devastation wrought by Cyclone Nargis only appears to have strengthened the regime and its cronies rather than creating greater space for civil society; Aung San Suu Kyi is about to be sentenced to a new prison term; and the Burmese regime will stage-manage an election next year that renews its hold on power.

At a time when much of Asia, led in important respects by Indonesia, is taking a stronger stand in favor of democracy and human rights as regional public goods, Washington risks moving in the opposite direction.

By Dan Twining

For six decades, two things have been more or less certain in Japanese politics -- that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) would run the show, and that it would put the U.S.-Japan alliance at the center of its foreign policy. Indeed, Japan has only had one non-LDP prime minister in the last 53 years, and he served for only 11 months. All of this is about to change, however, with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) poised to take power in next month's elections. Senior Japanese politicos describe what's coming as a "blowout." But for Japan -- and the United States -- it could be more like a tsunami. And it's not clear that the Obama administration knows what's about to hit them.

Despite its hold on power, the LDP has been on life-support for some time: Prime Minister Koizumi, who governed from 2001-06, took power with the anti-establishment pledge to "smash" his own party. Unfortunately for the LDP, that never really happened, and Koizumi has been followed by a series of weak prime ministers. All have been good men, and several, including Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso, have possessed a clear vision for Japan in the world. But each has been unable to reverse the LDP's declining political fortunes.

Now the tide has started to turn. In a historic defeat for the LDP, the DPJ won control of Japan's upper house in 2007. Since then, the approval ratings of first Prime Minister Fukuda and now Prime Minister Aso have only declined as support for the DPJ has surged. Tokyo municipal election results over the weekend, a bellwether for the national vote to follow, resulted in a decisive DPJ victory. This reinforced the party's strong lead in the polls and added a feeling of inevitability to what is to come in the August elections.

There are compelling arguments in favor of the political change Japanese voters seek. The country has been in an intractable economic slump for nearly two decades, following the bursting of its "miracle economy" bubble in the late 1980s. Japan has experienced a crisis of identity as a result of four factors. First, its economic malaise has yielded slow to no growth, persistent deflation, and the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the developed world. Second, the growing influence and stature of China has it poised to eclipse Japan as soon as this year as the world's second-largest economy. Third, Japan's rapidly aging society, with an already-shrinking population, is creating further pressures on an overstretched national budget. Finally, Japan remains plagued by serious questions about its role and status in a world that's being transformed by the rise of new powers, whose dynamism has eclipsed Japan's enduring strengths.

It is questionable, however, whether the DPJ can resolve these structural conundrums. The Liberal Democrats have been so dominant for so long that the DPJ has defined itself to be what the LDP is not. Under the LDP, Japanese foreign and domestic policies have been guided by a strong bureaucracy -- so the DPJ pledges to weaken bureaucratic control. Under the LDP, economic policy has been friendly to business -- so the DPJ promises a populist economic manifesto with little explanation of how to pay for it. Under the LDP, foreign policy has been grounded in the U.S.-Japan alliance -- so the DPJ wants to renegotiate its terms.

The future of the alliance, and Japan's overall foreign policy orientation should the DPJ assume office, are further muddled by the range of views within a party whose membership spans a wide spectrum -- from former left-wing socialists, who are philosophically opposed to the U.S.-Japan alliance, to disgruntled former right-wing LDP members, who support a more hawkish Japanese security policy. Some DPJ members support a trans-Pacific foreign policy in keeping with American priorities, but want Japan to assume a more equal and capable role within the alliance. Other DPJ leaders define a future in which Japan orients itself toward China and pursues Asian economic integration as its external priority, thereby diminishing the alliance with the United States. The DPJ's political alliance with the Socialist Party in Japan's upper house will pull its foreign and security policy further to the left -- and further away from the broad consensus that has defined the U.S.-Japan alliance for three generations.

In the event of an LDP loss next month, the Obama administration will be forced to grapple in the near term with the DPJ's pledge to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that has governed the terms of the U.S. troop presence in Japan since 1960. As part of these discussions, Japan will insist on renegotiating the way the two countries share the cost of the U.S. military presence in Japan. DPJ leaders argue that the current formula, in which Japan funds the garrisoning of U.S. forces because they are there to protect Japan, must be rebalanced. This is not the message American taxpayers will want to hear.

The DPJ also wants to further reduce the footprint of U.S. troops in Okinawa, particularly with regard to military and training operations from Futenma air base. Putting the closure or relocation of Futenma at the top of the U.S.-Japan security agenda -- after years of painful negotiations toward an acceptable compromise between American and Japanese counterparts -- risks reopening a raw wound in the alliance. At a time of grave security challenges to Japan stemming from ongoing North Korean missile launches and China's aggressive military buildup next door, a public spat over U.S. basing arrangements in Okinawa risks sending the wrong message to Japan's adversaries.

The SOFA, Japanese support for American forces, and the Okinawa bases are the most intractable issues in alliance politics, and DPJ leaders make clear that nothing is sacred in their determination to rebalance alliance relations upon taking power. This position stands in stark contrast to the deference with which generations of LDP leaders treated Washington and the alliance framework that has made possible Japan's postwar prosperity and security.

Is the Obama administration prepared for this sea change in relations with America's closest Asian ally? The good news is that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell is one of Japan's most trusted friends in Washington. He played an instrumental role in revitalizing the alliance relationship in the 1990s when he was the Pentagon's top Asia official. The bad news is that President Obama has pursued an Asia policy that in many ways seems divorced from the strategy pursued by the Clinton administration in which Dr. Campbell previously served -- a strategy he has described as an "allies-first" Asia policy, which assumes that the best way to manage the region's geopolitical challenges, especially the rise of China, is to have the strongest possible relations with core allies, starting with Japan.

The Bush administration pursued a geopolitical project in Asia that, while building a stable and productive relationship with China, worked to shape Asia's strategic evolution by strengthening the alliance with Japan; expanding Japan's alliance roles and responsibilities to make that country a global security leader; facilitating India's economic and military rise through a full-spectrum partnership with Washington; expanding the strategic vision and reach of the U.S.-Korea alliance; tying allies like Japan, South Korea, and Australia more closely to NATO and deploying jointly to out-of-area conflict zones like Afghanistan and Iraq; connecting friendly Asian maritime partners in new networks of cooperation; and expanding military relations with key Southeast Asian powers Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Secretary Clinton deserves credit for visiting Japan and Indonesia on her inaugural overseas trip. But Asian great powers, Japan and India, have been treated as adjuncts of U.S. policy towards China and Pakistan, respectively -- rather than as first-tier partners of the United States, whose importance is intrinsic rather than instrumental. A DPJ government in Tokyo that treats the U.S.-Japan alliance as only instrumentally rather than intrinsically important may give us an unwanted dose of our own medicine.

Katsushika Hokusai

By Dan Twining

The Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 -- 20 years ago today -- was a decisive turning point in the history of modern China. The incident profoundly altered China's political, economic, and social evolution. To understand China's trajectory over the next 20 years, it's worth considering how developments two decades ago put China on its current course.

We should start from the premise that the crackdown, and China's subsequent rise as an authoritarian rather than a democratic superpower, was not inevitable. We know from both The Tiananmen Papers and Zhao Ziyang's memoirs that the Communist Party leadership was split on whether to use force against the protestors. There is little question that China's regime was under threat -- mass protests had erupted not only in Beijing but in more than 180 cities across China, endangering the regime's survival. We also know that popular uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s, in some cases of a smaller relative scale than those across China in 1989, led to democratic transitions from authoritarian rule in Sinic and other societies across Asia -- including in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and Indonesia.

Moreover, China itself had a history of democratic thought and practice. Sun Yat-sen founded the first Chinese republic in 1912. The student- and intelligentsia-led May 4^th movement of 1919 featured protestors, angry at the terms of the Versailles settlement in Asia, who maintained that China, to protect its integrity and interests against stronger powers in the West and Japan, needed to embrace a "new culture" grounded in Western notions of democracy and equality. The Democracy Wall movement of 1979 called for China to pursue a "Fifth Modernization": political freedom. In the liberal political climate of the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals and civic activists openly discussed agendas for democracy and reform, leading many Westerners -- and many Chinese -- to presume that China would be part of the global wave of democratization that accompanied the end of the Cold War.

The Tiananmen crackdown changed the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese economy, and Chinese foreign policy. As Minxin Pei argues, liberals like Zhao Ziyang were purged from the Party's leadership, transforming it from a broader coalition that included liberals, conservatives, and technocrats to a narrower and more cohesive one led by a conservative/technocratic elite. Not only did the Party change, but so did its relationship with society, as it pursued an aggressive new policy of coopting China's rising middle class into its ranks (which, in an inversion of Marxist class-consciousness, became a ticket to material success for the country's Party-card-carrying bourgeoisie).

Tiananmen also gave renewed impetus to economic reform in China, forcing the government to accelerate economic growth through liberalization as a substitute source of the legitimacy otherwise derived from political accountability. Twenty years after the Tiananmen uprising, one of its leading student organizers, Wu'er Kaixi, puts it this way:

In part, the change we hoped for has happened.... In 1989, when I went into exile, I said the reason for the protests initially was that China's youth wanted Nikes and wanted to be able to go to a bar with their girlfriends. Such things were not possible in the China I grew up in. They are possible today, largely because China's university students rose up in 1989 and the workers' unions and the common people joined them. The government realized it had no choice but to liberalize the economy if it was going to keep popular discontent at bay. In short, 20 years on, I believe the protests in 1989 were a kind of tragic success. China got its Nikes and discos.

The Tiananmen crackdown also changed the terms of China's relationship with its neighbors. In the 1990s, a post-Deng Xiaoping generation led by Jiang Zemin, no longer endowed with the political legitimacy enjoyed by the Long March veterans who founded the People's Republic, settled on Chinese nationalism as a means of mobilizing the Chinese public in an effort to channel popular anger at China's external adversaries rather than the leadership in Beijing. Recent scholarship (and still more recent scholarship) has shown how China's historical grievances against Japan, stemming from the legacy of World War II and subordinated during the Mao and Deng years, were consciously resuscitated in official textbooks and commentary during the 1990s -- including in an infamous trip by President Jiang Zemin to Tokyo, where he lectured pacifist Japan's startled leaders on the need to atone for their past "crimes" against the Chinese people. Chinese leaders also consciously inflamed anti-American nationalism -- for example, busing in the protestors who stoned the U.S. embassy in Beijing following the mistaken American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

So what can the 20 years since June 4, 1989 tell us about China's next 20 years?

First, China will change from a producer-based to a consumer-based society. This has considerable economic implications, including for rebalancing of the world economy. But it also has political implications: a rapidly growing class of hundreds of millions of middle-income consumers will be economically empowered to demand individual political rights in a way low-cost factory workers and rural peasants have not been. An economic model that has hinged on the relationship between governing elites and producers of manufactured goods will need to adapt as consumers rather than producers become the country's dominant economic force, as in other developed countries. These consumers may not immediately demand the right to vote, but their demands for health care, pensions, and other government services will require a degree of political accountability and representation that an autocracy will be hard-pressed to provide.

Second, for China to move up the value chain from low-cost manufacturing as it becomes a developed country and faces competition from lower-wage producers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, the Chinese government will increasingly need to tolerate the free flow of information. Continued increases in Chinese productivity will require not greater raw material and labor inputs, as in the past, but the kind of innovation that is stifled by controls on information and communications of the kind that China's government censors excel at (which is why this post will not be read in China).

Third, scholars of democratic transitions have shown that they have a high likelihood of taking place when average per capita incomes enter the range of $5-$6,000 U.S. dollars - a zone China is fast approaching. In other words, it is simply premature to judge that the relationship between economic growth and political liberalization that has held in the West, Latin America, parts of Africa and the Middle East, and across Asia will not hold in China.

Finally, the outside world may not be as tolerant of China over the coming generation as it has been since 1989. Since then, China has enjoyed an accommodating international environment that has been extraordinarily conducive to both its internal political dispensation and its external security. This will change -- as Washington prepares for a systemic challenge from what is now clearly its leading peer competitor; as the developed world rejects Chinese claims to be the poor, developing nation it once was and refuses to tolerate continued Chinese free riding on global governance issues like climate change; as China's trade partners grow increasingly queasy about the political and security implications of economic dependency on China and consider policies to counteract it, with potentially significant implications for China's mercantilist economic model; and as other big Asian powers like Japan and India hedge against China's growing military power by bolstering their own.

Asked to render his verdict on the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously responded that it was "Too soon to tell." It remains too soon to judge Tiananmen's final legacy. One day, China's citizens surely will know as much about the uprising, and its suppression, as those of us in the outside world, and it will be judged an interlude in the extraordinary story of modern China, one with a different ending than the verdict of the gunfire on June 4, 1989.

By Dan Twining

North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, new threats of war against its declared enemies, and the predictable results of these developments -– expressions of concern at the UN Security Council, U.S. offers of more unconditional talks, China’s ambivalent response –- suggest that we remain in the “Groundhog Day” cycle of crisis and response that has characterized U.S. policy towards Pyongyang since 1994. In fact, new dynamics on the peninsula and in the region, and the fresh opportunity provided by what can now clearly be judged to be years of failed policy on denuclearization and disarmament, present an opportunity for a creative rethink about U.S. policy options. To clarify a way forward, it’s worth considering how the playing field has shifted (I see five ways that it has), and how this may create a different set of possibilities for the United States and our allies vis-à-vis the North Korean regime -– one that breaks decisively from the past and offers real hope for change.

1. Regime transition in North Korea

The current crisis cycle with North Korea dates to the leadership transition from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il in 1993-4, when the U.S. embraced a set of policies centered around bilateral negotiations and fuel supply to induce North Korean cooperation on our disarmament objectives. With the exception of the “axis of evil” period from 2001-03, the Bush administration largely continued these policies within the framework of the Six-Party Talks. Following Kim Jong-il’s apparent stroke last year, we are now in the midst of the second leadership transition in North Korean history, that from the Dear Leader to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un (demonstrating that dynastic politics trumps communist ideology). 

This transition creates serious risks, including the empowerment of the North Korean military as a political constituency that the leadership in Pyongyang must appease (for instance, by testing nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles). But it also raises the possibility of a new cycle in Washington’s relations with North Korea, one that could include exploiting newly apparent fissures in its regime and creating a different incentive structure for the emerging leadership’s decision-making on ongoing nuclear and missile programs.  

2. Political realignment in South Korea

Since the election of Kim Dae-jung in 1997 and the administration of his successor Roh Moo-hyun, the Achilles’ heel of U.S. efforts to wield sticks as well as carrots towards North Korea has been South Korea’s opposition to tough measures in favor of a “sunshine policy” of unconditional engagement. For a decade, Seoul effectively elevated inter-Korean comity over its U.S. alliance relationship, reducing any leverage the United States and partners like Japan sought to bring to bear on the North. In turn, fundamental differences in style and strategy between Washington and Seoul enabled Pyongyang to drive a wedge between the allies and isolate Japan. The United States turned to China as its key partner on North Korea, with questionable results.

The election in South Korea of conservative president Lee Myung-bak in 2008 changed the equation. Lee has spoken out forcefully about the abuses of Korean people’s rights under Pyongyang’s totalitarian rule and ended the provision of unconditional food aid, which independent monitors judge to have mainly benefited the North’s ruling elite. Washington now has a like-minded partner in Seoul committed to greater realism and toughness in containing the insecurity emanating from Pyongyang, again creating new possibilities for North Korea policy going forward.

3. A new security environment in Northeast Asia

Pyongyang has now declared that it will no longer observe the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War and has threatened South Korea with military attack. Though Pyongyang has a history of shrill and alarmist declarations, it would be a mistake to assume that an unstable regime in the midst of a leadership transition and now possessing nuclear weapons will never act on its own discourse. These moves create a new security environment on the Korean peninsula –- one that requires the United States to demonstrate its commitment to the defense of core allies Japan and South Korea, including through heightened readiness and deployment of offensive weaponry as well as enhanced missile defenses. 

Pyongyang is testing our new president, and he would do well to surprise it on the upside -– just as President Clinton surprised Beijing during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis by deploying multiple aircraft carrier battle groups to the region, leading China to stand down after bracketing Taiwan with missiles. Indeed, President Obama could consider the advice of Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and senior Pentagon official Ash Carter to signal a willingness to “strike and destroy” North Korean missile launch sites to deter -- or preempt -- further North Korean mischief. As Philip Zelikow points out, such a move could also strengthen the president’s diplomatic hand on Iran.

Signaling to allies is as important as signaling to adversaries, and Japan and South Korea will be watching the U.S. response carefully. Japan is also debating a more robust military role in light of the North Korean tests: the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is debating the adoption of what former Defense Minister Nakatani calls “active missile defense,” or preemptive strikes against North Korean missile launch sites. A Japanese doctrinal and political decision to deploy offensive ballistic missiles against North Korea would transform the East Asian strategic environment and enhance American deterrence and compellence capabilities vis-à-vis Pyongyang.

4. New possibilities for quarantining North Korea

This week, South Korea joined the Proliferation Security Initiative -– a decisive move that will make it a key partner rather than the missing link in a strategy to quarantine North Korean proliferation. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council is considering the imposition of additional multilateral sanctions, including targeted sanctions against North Korean leaders and companies that have proven effective in the past. Indeed, U.S. sanctions against Banco Delta Asia proved so effective in squeezing the regime’s supply of hard currency that Pyongyang made the release of a mere $25 million a condition for the resumption of Six-Party negotiations during the Bush administration.

In reality, the U.S. debate over what mix of carrots and sticks to employ against North Korea misses a key point: America and its allies have never pursued a genuine quarantine strategy against North Korea. Such a strategy would interdict North Korean air and maritime traffic to disrupt its global trade in missile and nuclear components (a trade which continued lucratively throughout the Six-Party negotiations); end provision of food and fuel assistance to the North; and limit Pyongyang’s access to international finance through multilateral banking, corporate, and leadership sanctions. Its purpose would be to squeeze the regime in ways that would create fissures within it, coercing a change in external behavior and perhaps the rise of new leadership less committed to confrontation.

5. China’s diminishing influence –- or interest –- in North Korean compliance

In building the Six-Party Talks around a Sino-American axis, the Bush administration made a bet that China was more likely to be part of any solution on North Korean denuclearization than part of the problem. Two nuclear weapons tests, multiple ballistic missile tests, and a shredded war armistice later, it appears that Beijing is either unable or unwilling to coerce better behavior from what Chinese analysts admit is an uncontrollable client state. At the same time, the Sino-American axis within the Six-Party talks may no longer be dominant: South Korea has again become a like-minded partner, Bush administration officials’ disregard for the legitimate concerns of our Japanese ally is a historical relic, and Russia, eager to preserve the sanctity of the UN Security Council as a vehicle for its own international leadership as a declining power, has called for a robust international response to North Korea’s latest weapons tests. 

Beyond securing our people and our allies against blackmail or attack, America’s long term goal must be positioning our country to be a decisive player in a unified Korea governed from Seoul and aligned with Japan and the United States in East Asia. Both North Korean leaders -- who have in the past sought a special relationship with the United States to balance Chinese influence -- and South Korean leaders identify a Chinese design to enjoy privileged influence on the Korean peninsula, in part for defensive reasons related to competition with Japan and the United States. If our Korean friends, whose sense of danger derives from centuries of living in a neighborhood of giant, predatory powers, believe that China and the United States are engaged in a fundamentally competitive rather than cooperative relationship on the peninsula, Washington may wish to move beyond reliance on Beijing to deliver Pyongyang on denuclearization in favor of an allies-first strategy to induce strategic change on the Korean peninsula.

By Dan Twining

As President Obama hosts the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan in Washington tomorrow and calls on Congress to increase assistance to both countries, his administration can claim credit for regionalizing America's strategy for victory in Afghanistan. This was an overdue shift, one recommended by the Bush administration's various 2008 strategic reviews of Afghanistan policy. But Pakistan's latest internal crisis underlines how the fusion of "Af-Pak" as a guide to U.S. interests in South Asia also carries risks. 

Clearly, taking into account and leveraging regional dynamics is essential to the success of U.S. policy towards both countries. But there is also a danger that the unitary "Af-Pak" prism fails to sufficiently account for America's differentiated interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To put it bluntly, U.S. policy towards Pakistan offers some compelling lessons for what not to do in Afghanistan. 

Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States personalized Pakistan policy, investing in a single leader at the expense of a broader constellation of civic forces. In doing so, Washington has become a decisive actor in Pakistan's domestic politics; Pakistanis lament that their leaders rule only with the consent of the "Army, Allah, and America." U.S. interventionism has unwittingly weakened political parties, discouraged coalition-building, stifled reform, and tied American interests to unpopular strongmen.   

Meanwhile, billions of dollars in unconditional assistance to Pakistan's military has created perverse incentives for its leaders to manage rather than defeat Islamist militancy in order to keep the aid money flowing. Flush with American resources, Pakistan's security services have played a double game: fighting some militant groups while sponsoring others as instruments of strategic influence -- including, ironically, against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, as well as against friendly governments in Kabul and New Delhi. 

Although its government and armed forces contain many patriots, its dependence on and manipulation of foreign aid flows means that Pakistan risks becoming, like some African countries, a rentier state in which predatory elites pursue policies designed to maximize external patronage in service to parochial interests, rather than national ones. The Pakistani military's reluctance to engage Taliban militants in Swat can be understood in this light. The military is most useful as a partner of the United States -- one deserving of billions of dollars in new hardware and equipment, naturally -- only as long as the militant threat persists. This creates incentives to keep jihadism simmering without boiling over.

So what are the lessons for Afghanistan? America's interest lies in a genuinely free and fair national election this fall. Washington shouldn't play favorites; nor should it appear to be actively undermining President Karzai's candidacy, as some senior administration officials seemed to do earlier this year. Western assistance should build Afghan capacity at all levels of government, rather than creating structural dependencies on international aid that hollow out domestic institutions, decrease incentives for reform, and benefit a narrow ruling elite.

The United States must be especially careful to match its sustained buildup of Afghan security forces with investments of equal scale in Afghanistan's civilian institutions.  Governance and development require security.  But if the Afghan National Army - by far the most capable institution in the country today - retains this role over time, we will have put Afghanistan on a slippery slope to Army dominion over political life, as in Pakistan.

America can afford to match its military buildup with sustained investments in Afghanistan's civilian institutions, as the Kerry-Lugar legislation before Congress proposes to do for Pakistan, because the Taliban in both countries are defeatable adversaries. More Taliban foot soldiers fight for money than love of jihad, and polling by the Asia Foundation shows they enjoy the support of only 7 percent of Afghans. By contrast, 78 percent believe democracy is the best form of government.

In Pakistan, Islamists garnered their highest popular support during General Musharraf's dictatorship; in the 2008 elections, Islamist parties received only a fraction of the vote. While President Zardari is deeply unpopular, polls show that over 4 in 5 Pakistanis support his mainstream rival Nawaz Sharif, who condemns Taliban efforts to extend medieval rule in Swat across the Pakistani heartland. 

Despite all its problems, a moderate majority and strong army make Pakistan unripe for an Iranian-style Islamic revolution. But weak institutions and dysfunctional civil-military relations handicap the government's ability to respond to the Taliban challenge. That is why Congress must carefully benchmark military assistance -- both to promote near-term counterterrorism goals and to redress the civil-military imbalance that remains the Achilles' heel of the Pakistani state. 

It is also why the international community should focus on "hardening" Afghanistan against cross-border threats from Pakistan as part of a generational commitment to state-building in both countries. The alternative -- tying progress in Afghanistan to the resolution of Pakistan's enormous security and governance challenges, as senior administration officials have suggested -- is a recipe for strategic failure.   

A successful South Asia policy, while attentive to regional dynamics, will pursue differentiated strategies toward Pakistan, Afghanistan -- and India. An enduring Indo-U.S. partnership remains the region's great strategic prize. Just as President Bush de-hyphenated India and Pakistan, so should Obama de-hyphenate Af-Pak.