War is breaking out where most of us had not expected it.
By now we are accustomed to daily headlines on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and on the Israelis fighting to destroy Hamas terrorists in Gaza. What’s next, and how capable is America of standing by still more countries under siege and under attack?
The question assumes special relevance when you consider U.S. troops are not fighting on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza. These are proxy wars. America is sending arms and funds, but it is not Americans who are fighting and dying.
What’s going to happen, then, if the U.S. is called on to send its own troops?
We must face that possibility, with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un escalating his threats against South Korea, not to mention Japan and the U.S. The United States is bound by separate treaties with both South Korea and Japan to defend them. Washington maintains huge bases in both countries. The fear, though, is that of a war involving hundreds of thousands of troops against the two other major powers, China and Russia, in contention for the region.
At the moment, that concern seems abstract. China’s President Xi Jinping may talk big when it comes to taking over the independent island province of Taiwan, but he does not appear to be quite willing to go to war. That was clear from his recent meeting with President Biden in San Francisco.
Sure, he’s asserting Chinese influence from the Korean peninsula to the South China Sea, and in Southeast Asia and beyond, but he’s not interested in anything much more serious than skirmishes with Indian troops along the Himalayan frontier.
The Taiwan presidential election Jan. 13 may test the degree of Xi’s warlike intentions.
The outgoing Taiwan president, Tsai Ing-wen, has resolutely refused to upset China by declaring Taiwan’s independence; her vice president, Michael Lai Ching-te, running to succeed her, now favors the “status quo” after having infuriated Xi by advocating Taiwan’s “sovereignty” as an independent entity. He’s up against the candidate of the Kuomintang (KMT), the old “Nationalist” party whose forces fled across the Formosa Straits to Taipei before Mao’s victorious Red Army in 1949. The KMT now is all for placating Beijing, by far Taiwan’s biggest business partner.
Lately, Chinese coast guard vessels have been spraying Philippine fishing boats with water cannons in the South China Sea, which China claims as its own. That’s a far cry from firing real live bullets.
The Americans completely sympathize with their Philippine ally, to whom Biden is promising much support after years of sometimes bumpy relations. Washington occasionally orders its warships and planes to show the flag over the South China Sea, but Biden will not risk an armed clash in those disputed waters.
We’ve been surprised, however, by the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and Israel, and we have to be ready for shocks in Asia too. North Korea’s relationship with Russia is disturbing. There is no doubt the Russians are providing much-needed technological support for North Korean satellites and missiles.
Russian expertise is seen in Kim’s plans to send more spy satellites on orbits around the Earth. The first satellite was probably not too helpful technically, but the North Koreans are sure to get better under Russian tutelage. Similarly, Russian expertise is seen in the launching of the North’s latest Hwasong-18 missile, an intercontinental model capable, theoretically, of carrying a nuclear warhead to targets in the U.S.
The common denominator between satellites and missiles is they’re launched the same way. North Korean satellite technology has as much to do with perfecting the launching phase as with picking up photographic images of U.S., South Korean and Japanese facilities, many of which can be found via Google Earth. It’s because of its potential military ramifications that the United Nations theoretically bans North Korea from launching satellites and long-range missiles and has sanctioned the North repeatedly.
North Korea’s relations with China and Russia mean that it can easily avoid sanctions while remaining confident those two great powers will offer the ultimate defense in a showdown.
China is North Korea’s greatest trading partner, the source of almost all its oil and half its food, and Russia has been a terrific market for North Korean artillery shells and other arms since Kim’s historic mission in September to the Russian far east, where he met President Vladimir Putin at a cosmodrome near the Amur River.
Putin, fighting in Ukraine suffering from worse economic difficulties than China, is even less interested than Xi in waging a war in the Far East, including the Korean peninsula.
It’s not China or Russia but political divisions within the U.S. that may be America’s worst enemy. Americans are in no mood for sending troops overseas when they are fighting one another politically and socially at home. Anti-war sentiment is intense. It was for that reason that the U.S. had to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, leaving the South Vietnamese government to go down in defeat in 1975.
Similarly, the U.S. withdrew precipitously from Afghanistan in 2021.
Biden has sounded determined in asking Congress to authorize extra funding for Israel and Ukraine, but he may not be so tough about deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to engage in wars for countries about which Americans know very little. Unlike Harry Truman, who staked his presidency on turning back the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, Biden does not give the impression of being such a fighter. It’s one thing to assure the leaders of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, as well as the Philippines, of America’s “commitment” to defend them; it’s quite another to risk putting America on a real war footing.
Nor should we expect former President Trump, if he returns to the White House after this year’s presidential election, to be any better. In fact, he might be far worse. He bonded with Putin during his presidency and professed to “love” Kim after their summit in Singapore in June 2018. Despite the failure of their summit in Hanoi in February 2019, he would want to keep up the relationship. Amazingly, Trump also talked about withdrawing U.S. troops from Korea and Japan while asking Korea to pay an excessively huge amount for the privilege of having them on vital bases in the South.
It took the election of Biden in the U.S. and then of Yoon Suk Yeol as president of South Korea in 2022 to bring the longstanding alliance back to combat effectiveness.
Just as fighting has broken out suddenly, unexpectedly, elsewhere, so war could erupt in Northeast Asia if any of the actors — Xi, or Putin, or Kim — feel unduly threatened or need a war as an antidote to unrest at home. The U.S., riding high economically, may have the resources to pour into the struggle with any or even all of them, but does it have the will?
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.