The Rebalance and the Shangri La Brouhaha

Aaron Stein 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk website as well as an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a PhD candidate at King's College.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:14

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com and the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies here at the Monterey Institute.

Aaron 0:28

So today we're talking the Shangri-La Dialogue, the pivot and the rebalance, and what it means for the potential for proliferation in East Asia and what the U.S. should do about it. What do you think of the way the Shangri-La Dialogue went down? Well, first we should tell people what the Shangri-La Dialogue is.

Jeffrey 0:49

Right. So I guess what I would say, and Aaron, you're the one who... You're the one who pals around in London more than I do. The IISS, the Venerable Strategic Studies, if I call this Strategic Studies Institute, I should probably call it the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, organizes a meeting every year in Singapore called the Shangri-La Dialogue.

And I'm tempted to say it's like the Munich Security Conference, but people may not know what that is either. But it's a confab of foreign ministers and defense ministers who get together and talk about, for Shangri-La, the Asian security environment.

Aaron 1:37

Definitely. I like to think of it as the, for people who focus on Asia, it's sort of like the international security mecca where one goes to discuss very high-level issues. And this year, I think there was surprise, I guess, about how, I guess I want to say how bad it went and how the tensions that are permeating the region manifested themselves in the speeches in a way that's not normally, that's atypical of conferences past Asia.

Would you say that's an accurate representation of what went down?

Jeffrey 2:11

I mean, that's how it looked to me reading on Twitter and then talking to people afterwards. I suppose we should say that. Neither of us went. Singapore's a schlep. And now, thanks to Twitter, people were live tweeting the conference. And it was pretty clear that things were going badly. And subsequent conversations have suggested that, yeah, Asia's in a really rough place right now when it comes to security issues.

Aaron 2:36

Right, and it's Asia where the Obama administration has sought to put most of its focus, or at least wanted to quote-unquote pivot, or now they're calling it a rebalance. And maybe the problems that you saw came from, I think the first came from the Japanese prime minister's speech, which some interpreted as being aggressive. Then you had Chuck Hagel's speech, which other people have also interpreted as being aggressive.

And then you had the Chinese reaction, I think, which manifested itself in aggressive questioning of Its other Asian neighbors throughout the conference, as well as the United States for its comments throughout. I'm curious to think what you thought about all of this brouhaha that went down. And maybe if it speaks to potential problems with the pivots, maybe the pivots working better than we think.

I mean, what's going on?

Jeffrey 3:27

Well, I mean, the reason I think it's interesting is because here in the U.S., we have this kind of chattering class, and there's been a huge debate about whether the pivot or rebalance is a good idea or a bad idea, whether it's real or not, whether it's going well or not. It's very hard to measure these kinds of things.

Usually, if you're a Republican, you think it's a disaster. If you're a Democrat, you think it's going great. And so it's kind of interesting to get a real data point. So we have a meeting, and how does the meeting go? And it's a pretty big meeting, and it's To my mind, it looks like Asian security is in an incredibly tense place.

I should say, some of the Twitter reactions that I saw were people asking, well, shouldn't the Secretary of Defense be prepared for aggressive questions if he gives an aggressive speech? What I'm hearing and what I'm seeing, and we probably should invite somebody on it for a second podcast who was there, was the Chinese were... Went sort of beyond aggressive to be rude.

So, for example, one person who we all know asked something like five questions when people were asked to limit a question to one, and they asked her sort of in the middle to stop, and she kept going. And so, you know, it wasn't just that it was aggressive policies, but it seemed like the interpersonal dynamic had turned really poisonous.

And so, yeah, right, it raises this question. Is that... Is that a sign that the rebalance is not working in the sense that it's not calming the Asian security situation? The Asian security situation is getting worse? Or is that a sign that really we need to be doing the rebalance because if we don't, things there are going to totally fall apart?

Aaron 5:18

I tend to skew towards the latter part of your answer there. I feel that most of, and this may be perhaps because I'm an American, I feel like a lot of what was happening there was reaction to what is a feeling of perhaps Chinese... Aggression in the South China Sea, particularly over these disputed islands. And so I almost felt like Chuck Hagel was in a lose-lose situation.

He goes passive and he gets blasted for being too soft. And he goes overly aggressive, then people call into question the pivot. In a way, this is the very unique American problem that faces our country no matter what world issue there is. But I was more struck by the Chinese reaction. I thought of it while reading their comments and reading over the speeches as that they weren't ready for prime time.

If they are going to do what they have been doing, the Seneku Islands and other places as well where they're almost unilaterally taking territory, one should have expected its Asian neighbors as well as the United States to maybe come out a little more aggressive than they had in the past. I mean, what's your sense on that? Do you think I'm off or am I just taking a unique American approach to this?

Jeffrey 6:34

No, no. I think, you know, it's so hard to be the global hegemon, right? I mean, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Rory Medcalf, I think, has made this same argument, that this really is about the Chinese rather not being ready for prime time. And I should say, before we start a shooting war, inadvertently, The Chinese have been very aggressive about the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan, but it's the building of military bases or what look like they're going to be military bases in the South China Sea that's got Vietnam and the Philippines really worked up.

So there are these sort of similar disputes happening. That are happening, but they're not really about the islands. They are fundamentally about what is China's relationship to other Asian nations.

Aaron 7:31

And so I am sympathetic to Hegel's problem.

Jeffrey 7:36

But at the same time, I do feel like the administration hasn't found the right balance in terms of reassuring allies when they need to be reassured, but then de-escalating tensions when tensions get too high. Yeah. To end where we started that conversation. That's, that is the pain of, of, of leadership. And there was that old joke in, in NATO, which is the allies spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday worrying that we weren't going to come to their defense in the event of a war.

And they spent Tuesdays and Thursdays worrying that we would use nuclear weapons on their behalf and, and it would cause a war. So I, I think some of that tension is always present. But on the other hand, I guess fundamentally, if you judge people by results, things in Asia are not going so hot right now.

Aaron 8:31

No. Inevitably, this will lead to questions, particularly about starting with Japan. You can look at South Korea, about what steps they'll take to hedge against maybe a more aggressive China. I'm sure there will be concerns about proliferation there. And I know you've been concerned more about the South Koreans than the Japanese. But in any case, I think it speaks to, A, if the United States is perceived as weak in the region, whether rightly or wrongly, whether the pivot is thought to be working or not.

I think actually could have some political implications for individual country decision-making within the region about their nuclear future and whether the NPT remains relevant, whether they remain satisfied with American nuclear security guarantees and the way the alliance was built with most of these countries beginning in the 1950s, if I'm remembering correctly.

Jeffrey 9:31

Yeah, so I don't... I don't think the Japanese are going to build a nuclear weapon. And this is something we'll come back to. A colleague once said to me, Japan has really three options. They have what you would call unarmed neutrality, where they end the alliance with the United States and try to be neutral, kind of a Switzerland or a Sweden, and that's not going to happen because Everybody in Asia hates them.

They could try nuclear-armed militarism, which also is wildly unlikely for them. And so that kind of leaves them with their third option, which is alliance with the United States. And so I think that the Japanese historical situation, their nuclear allergy, really leaves them in a spot where Alliance with the United States is their primary goal. And I think that accounts for some of the anxiety you see from Japanese policymakers.

You know, they have basically no control over their security environment. They have to sort of take whatever level of security the U.S. is able to provide. And so I think that it's pretty easy for the Japanese to get worked up about whether particular administrations are doing right by them. And in this case, I think There is some degree of criticism of the president in the United States that's either partisan in orientation or reflects people who have been in office and have left office and would like to say things were better when they were there.

And those people maybe stir up some of these natural anxieties. But the South Koreans... I think the South Koreans, it's a real question whether they end up building a bomb or not. I don't know if you saw, but the president of South Korea, Madam Park, just said that if North Korea were to conduct another nuclear test, it was a vague phrase.

It was something like, it would be very hard to prevent another nuclear domino. I don't know which domino she was referring to, but if you're imagining Asia as a series of nuclear dominoes, the one next to North Korea is South Korea. And the person who is one of the frontrunners to succeed her, who's the scion of the Hyundai fortune and is running for mayor in Seoul, MJ Chung, he came to the Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference, which is kind of like the Shangri-La dialogue of the nonproliferation world.

And we were both there. Yeah, and gave this talk in which, you know, who shows up at a nonproliferation conference and says, South Korea should leave the NPT? Yeah, I worry about the South Koreans.

Aaron 12:17

Well, I mean, can I unpack that a little bit further? I mean, one thing that I found interesting, particularly about the Japanese case, and it applies to South Korea, is maybe we have the Reagan administration for this, and we have the Bush administration to thank for this as well. I almost feel like the new conception of the triad, the Bush administration thrust upon us with active defense included in it, you know, How would the Chinese...

I mean, this is more up your alley. Perhaps an erosion of the deterrent by the potential to forward deploy like missile defenses. I mean, you're seeing a lot of talk about increasing Japanese capabilities in this regard, South Koreans. I mean, you've seen a lot of reports even this week about deploying missile defense systems there. Is there a concern in China about, you know, whether the moves that the U.S. does to conventionally reassure these allies could then prompt them to make a, Decision to either increase their number of ballistic missiles or their number of warheads, which would then make the South Koreans or the Japanese more wary of their security environment and then to reassess their non-proliferation commitments.

I think it applies more to the South Koreans than it does to the Japanese. You see where I'm going there?

Jeffrey 13:35

I do. I mean, I think it's a really complicated question, right? So you've got the South Korean dynamic with North Korea, which involves China. It involves China for lots of very complicated reasons. And you've got the Japanese dynamic, which is fundamentally about the Chinese. And you have the dynamic between the South Koreans and the Japanese, which is not warm and fuzzy, right?

So it's a little bit complicated. I would say that over the... Last decade, the United States has gotten really interested in the ability to project power through long-range conventional means. And so things like prompt global strike, the idea that we can conduct conventional strikes at intercontinental distances on relatively short notice, that's the kind of thing that we're tremendously enthusiastic about and present as a kind of way to extend deterrence to our allies without necessarily having to be

Aaron 14:40

Having to have those systems in the region. Right. And that's in the NPR. I mean, that's in the 2010 NPR.

Jeffrey 14:45

Right. So that part of the new triad, I think, you're exactly right. And that terrifies the Chinese. That drives the Chinese crazy. And I think, you know, the Chinese were pretty neuralgic about missile defense, but I don't think that's anything compared to how worked up they're starting to get about conventional strike. And I have to say, my colleagues at the I call them my friends because I don't work with them.

But my friends at the Carnegie Endowment have done a really nice job of sort of documenting these concerns. I guess Laura Solomon is no longer there, but she's in Hawaii, but James Acton is also working on those issues. They've done a really great job of pointing out how worked up the Chinese are getting about this. So, yeah, I think – There's this way in which the Chinese themselves have transitioned the second artillery, which handles their nuclear weapons.

Now more than half of the launchers and probably more than... I did this calculation the other day and I don't remember it, but I believe it's now true that more than half of their brigades, more than half of their launchers, and more than half of their missiles are all conventionally armed. So in other words... The second artillery's primary mission now, or its future, right, is in conventional missiles.

And I think they look at our capabilities for conventional strike, and that triggers an enormous amount of anxiety and a sense of a kind of impending arms race. And it's, I think, very hard if you're the Japanese and you're the South Koreans and you're watching all this shake out, right? Right.

Aaron 16:23

In a way, you can almost see a lot of the – if the pivot or the rebalance is real, and I happen to think it is, you can see a lot of destabling aspects that could come of it. And then, again, if you are in the South Korean – if you're sitting in Seoul or if you're sitting in Tokyo – There are some very – things that will go on sort of above their heads in the US-Chinese security relationship that then they will be affected by.

It's the classic US security commitment dilemma that they will face. And – I think now we should go back to the South Koreans. Would there be and could there be real movement behind this proposal or I guess this idea floated that they should leave the NPT as a way to strategically hedge for bad days to come?

Jeffrey 17:20

Well, I mean I – Before I answer that question, I could say I think it would be a terrible idea for South Korea to leave the NPT. The big problem posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons is that the North Koreans feel like having nuclear weapons, they can launch all kinds of conventional provocations against the South Koreans. And the problem is nuclear weapons don't counteract that, right?

The Israelis have nuclear weapons and they are terrified about the Iranians getting them because they think in a situation where both sides have nuclear weapons, just like with India and Pakistan, that the Iranians will feel free to do lots of nasty stuff with Hezbollah. So whatever problem posed by North Korean nuclear weapons, whatever you... Whatever you think about that, I think the most likely scenario is that North Korea's nuclear weapons encourage conventional aggression, and South Korean nuclear weapons don't prevent that.

It's a terrible idea for them to leave, but you can clearly see the politics of it. There is this, I think, tremendous frustration on the part of the South Koreans that they can't get the North Koreans to stop these provocations, and they can't get them to give up their nuclear weapons, and South Korea is a democracy. I think it's very easy when people are upset and frustrated that they turn to the simple kind of, well, they have them, we should have them too.

Although I don't think it's in South Korea's interest to leave the NPT, I do think that there are political figures who might convince themselves, probably wrongly, that they can get the same kind of deal that India has. That they could somehow have nuclear weapons, be outside of the NPT, but still be a member of the NSG and export reactors and just sort of generally have nuclear energy for both peaceful and weapons purposes.

And so, yeah, I worry. I mean, I don't think it's likely to happen, but I don't, you know, I have the Japanese chances that, you know, One in a thousand, one in a million, I mean, some, some really low number. And, and I think the, the, the the South Korean chances are a lot higher than that, you know, 20, 30%, something like that.

Aaron 19:37

Yeah. And I mean, I tend to agree from all that I know about the Japanese case is that the nuclear allergy is much stronger than, you know, if you're just looking at it on paper then, you know, you'd have to weight it more heavily towards the government setting not to develop nuclear weapons than Going for nuclear weapons.

And the South Korean case is definitely a different case, as is Taiwan, which maybe we'll call it the nuclear wildcard. But one thing I find curious is that you raised the NSG deal. It's this thought that we should treat allies, maybe if we want to treat allies different. We would make certain exceptions that maybe violate the spirit of the non-proliferation regime to serve an overarching U.S. security interest.

I mean, one can argue that the quote-unquote pivot or rebalance may have started back with the Bush administration's courting of India as a strategic hedge on China whilst trying to fight two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Obama administration picked up the ball. And I think it's pretty safe to say that once the Obama administration goes, Whoever comes next, there will be an incredible focus on Asia and on China.

And what do we do if one of our allies wants to develop a nuclear weapon or maybe starts to hedge around, sniff around the edges, I want to say. And our overarching security concern says that we want to keep them close because that security architecture helps us contain the Chinese.

Jeffrey 21:12

So it's a very interesting debate that's played out on the pages of the National Interest.

Aaron 21:17

Boy, we should get, like, points back for magazines sold, right? Yeah, I think we need to get some money for clicks.

Jeffrey 21:22

Yeah, yeah. Between our friends, well, you said you've only met each of them once. I count them as friends. Certainly one of them is a Facebook friend. David Santoro and Bridge Colby and David.

Aaron 21:36

Oh, David's a Facebook friend, too.

Jeffrey 21:38

Yeah, well, so that's a real friend.

Aaron 21:40

Yeah.

Jeffrey 21:42

David argues that there is a real danger of proliferation in East Asia and that the United States should make it clear, especially to Japan and South Korea, that choosing nuclear weapons would be the end of the alliance. And that's been sort of the traditional U.S. position for a while, at least it was with the South Koreans in the late 70s, early 80s.

That they needed to choose between the alliance and their own nuclear weapons. And I think it underpins in part what my colleague in Japan said about the choices that Japan faces. And so David's argument was we should take a pretty tough line. And my friend Bridge Colby made the other argument. He argued that although nonproliferation is a good thing and the spread of nuclear weapons is bad, I'm putting words in his mouth, he'll probably object, but it's less bad when our friends do it and there are other concerns.

And so there are considerations or situations where he would consider, I think the way he phrased it was choosing geopolitics over nonproliferation. So that's kind of the choice here. What do you think, Aaron? Should we choose geopolitics over nonproliferation?

Aaron 22:55

I always tend to skew closer towards nonproliferation. And it's one of the reasons I didn't like the India deal. And I think in our nonproliferation community, I think most skew closer to what I'm saying. It's that you try not to make any exceptions because you don't want to under erode or undermine The non-proliferation regime that has been put in place for so long.

So the anti-nuclear norm is relatively strong. There are a few problematic cases out there, and you don't want to add to that. So I tend to come down closer to that. But as a flip side to that, I do think that the way to do this and the way to reassure allies is through conventional means. But, I mean, I've read the James Acton report.

It's fantastic. And Oh, this is the one on conventional strike. On conventional strike. I mean, I am in favor of increasing long-range strike, particularly because the Chinese are doing the same to push us out of their sphere of influence. And that, too, can be inherently destabilizing. I don't think there's any easy answers here. And I think if anybody puts an easy answer forward and says, well, we should do this, I mean, I think there's a lot of gray area there.

But I tend to skew more towards don't make exceptions for your allies. Keep the nonproliferation commitment going and look to the conventional means to offset or to any concerns that may linger that the United States isn't fully committed to their security.

Jeffrey 24:24

Well, so you raised two things, right? One was a question about conventional strike and strategic stability with China, and we should talk about that, although maybe we'll do that in another podcast. I have a book on this very topic coming out. Yeah, it's going to be an Adelphi book on China's nuclear program, and a big, heavy portion of that is dedicated to questions about strategic stability, and in particular, there's a lot of focus on conventional missiles.

But in terms of this question about allies, you know, I always teach my students this. When you look at the history of nonproliferation, we've always had these kind of two competing views of nuclear weapons. One is that they're just munitions and it's good when we have them and our allies have them. It's bad when the bad guys have them.

And then the other view is that they're somehow special, right? And that they pose this... They're so destructive that they pose this shared danger. And I think the... The idea that they were just munitions that our allies should have and we should be ready to use dominated until about the mid-60s when the Chinese got the bomb. And that was, I think, a real wake-up call for American policymakers when they began to realize that You know, if our view was our friends should have them but our enemies should not, well, everybody's got a friend, right?

Everybody thinks they're a good guy. And that's going to inevitably lead to a world where you've got a bunch of nuclear weapons states. And so, to me, the premise of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the general non-proliferation regime is the idea that we should have rules. And those rules need to entail a basic bargain by which states don't acquire nuclear weapons and those states with them agree to make efforts to get rid of them.

And I think for a deal like that to be sustainable, the rules have to be fairly evenly enforced. I had an Obama administration official call me a non-proliferation purist because I was giving them a tough time about their support for India. But I do think that if you make special exceptions for your allies, everybody has an ally, right?

Aaron 26:30

Pakistan is the Chinese ally.

Jeffrey 26:33

The Russians love the Syrians. And so... If you're going to have a regime, it's going to be one that's based on rules, and the rules have to be enforced relatively fairly. And if they're not, it's just going to fall apart. And I think my concern with Bridge's argument, and I like Bridge a ton, and I think he's probably one of the smartest people writing, and I kind of enjoy disagreeing with Bridge because I feel like it's a pretty productive argument.

Enterprise. But my problem is he sort of acts like or presents nonproliferation as one of a series of interests and you can balance those interests. But I actually think nonproliferation is one of those things where if you treat it like any other interest and you balance it too much and you make so many exceptions, then you really don't get any.

So you really have to decide. It's not being a nonproliferation purist. It's Deciding whether you want a regime of rules or whether you want a regime of special exceptions. And I just think the latter is not sustainable, and I don't want to live in a world with 25, 30 nuclear weapon states.

Aaron 27:41

Yeah, I think we're in agreement about this. But again, it's a really tough issue to unpack.

Jeffrey 27:48

I have to say, Aaron, my semester's over, and I was still kind of lecture-y.

Aaron 27:52

No, that's fine. It's just a really tough issue to unpack because... Again, I come at this more from the Middle East perspective. I spent my last three and a half years in the Middle East before I moved here to Switzerland. And from that perspective, the pivot or the rebalance has been a complete disaster. But as somebody who was looking at it from the outside, it's just something that had to happen.

We were devoting too much bandwidth to countries that really in the long terms of things are not as strategically important as perhaps some in Asia. And I don't know, like, you know, it's a really tough needle to thread. And I think the Obama administration, you know, perhaps, you know, was a little too rosy when it rolled out, you know, the way it branded the pivot.

But ultimately, I think that the ideas behind it are correct. But I think that perception issue, the way it's been poisoned, and I don't know why it's been poisoned so badly, this perception that Obama's been really weak, really has undermined it. And I'm not sure if he needs to, you know, once he's... Once he goes and a new leader comes in, whether it will be fixed.

But it's certainly an issue that we're going to have to be dealing with for the next, I mean, I see this as the major challenge moving forward for U.S. foreign policy. And this, maybe the South Korean case is the most important one, may test whether we want to really skew heavily towards ensuring that the world has robust non-proliferation rules.

Rather than making a bunch of tiny carve-outs. And I think we should skew heavily towards those rules because ultimately it benefits our security and reinforces the regime that we played an overarching and very heavy-handed role in creating.

Jeffrey 29:46

Yeah, well, I would just say two very short things. One is that that's the knock on the administration, is that they're pretty good on substance, but that they aren't so great at articulating the vision behind the substance, and then sometimes they foul up the execution. But I think the pivot is, at some level, basically the right thing to do.

Rebalance is maybe a slightly better word. But I would say this about South Korea and talk about nuclear weapons and the whole shebang, which is if we can't Ensure South Korea's security, given how wealthy we are and how wealthy South Korea is and how poor North Korea is, if we can't ensure their security at a credible level without using nuclear weapons, we have much bigger problems for the future of U.S. leadership.

If this administration can't figure out how to do that, then they need to pack up and go home. Because we can do this, right? We can certainly, in combination with South Korea, have a credible, robust, conventional defense against the North Koreans. And so it just seems to me that the fact that we're having this conversation reflects this kind of poverty of expectations, right?

We can do this.

Aaron 31:09

We can do this, and we should do it. And I always tend to think that we'll muddle along. I've looked at enough archives for my dissertation to realize that most of the time we muddle through and something comes out the other end that we can live with. Be careful. We're ending on a happy note. We are ending on a happy note.

We don't normally do, but today we will. I think we'll wrap up there. I think maybe the next time, just to build on this, I think we need to go over your Adelphi paper whenever it's out because I think we touched on a lot of the themes that you may have written about. I haven't seen a copy.

Oh, I've already been chastised. Don't say Adelphi paper.

Jeffrey 31:44

Adelphi book. Adelphi book. My apologies. They get very angry when you say that. Sorry. Adelphi book. I don't get angry. They get angry. I don't want the angry email about the podcast. Adelphi book.

Aaron 31:54

Adelphi book. Well, that's good. See, I ended it on a down note just to keep up with appearances. It's great talking to you as always. Great talking to you and see you next week. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.