Charles W. King

The 2018 Olympic Winter Games began last week in PyeongChang, South Korea. In a reprise of a number of international sporting events in the early 2000’s the North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together under a join flag during the opening ceremony and will field a women’s ice hockey team with players from both North and South Korea. This is a significant event in the simmering international crisis that is the Korean Peninsula, but it is hardly the only event of the games with geopolitical importance. Also competing under a flag that is not their own are one hundred and sixty eight “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR). The Russian Olympic Committee has been sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for its extensive state-sponsored doping program that has been revealed in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin, its President, have been vocal in their criticism of the IOC’s ban on the Russian team, to the surprise of no one. What has been surprising is the reaction in South Korea to the joint participation of North and South Korea. Created in 1990 for the Asian Games, the Korean Unification Flag has been used at a number of sporting events since, including 4 Olympic Games. This time it has received significant push back. It is doubly surprising because the pushback has come from younger, liberal voters in South Korea who to date have overwhelmingly supported Moon Jae-In and his administration’s attempts to negotiate with the increasingly belligerent North Korea. Most of the objections appear to be over the joint hockey team according to polls.

The same polls also indicate a common refrain from the rest of the world; that politics shouldn’t influence sport. This inherently conservative argument is typical of when countries or individuals use sporting events to confront others with ideas or positions they disagree with, and it fails to recognize that sport, international competitions in particular, is and always has been inherently political. Various nations including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have used the Olympic Games to showcase the superiority of their political systems. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used an Olympic medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968 to protest for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad. Sport is political because competitors are deemed to be the best in their field, held up by society as pinnacles of human achievement and role models for children to emulate. Society cares what prominent athletes believe, say, and do, and that means that sports always make a political statement. Typically that statement favors the status quo, but when prominent athletes take positions on controversial issues there is outcry not because sport is apolitical but because it is inherently conservative.

If the politics of sports typically favors the status quo then why is the unified Korean Olympic team so controversial in South Korea? The unified team received widespread support in previous iterations. The reason is that the demographics of South Korea are changing. South Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s cannot remember at time without a belligerent North without a nuclear program, the increasingly oppose reunification. Just over a third of South Koreans who claimed to be estranged from family in the North by the Korean ware remain alive, and 60% of them are over the age of 80. South Korea is in the middle of its forty years in the desert. When it comes out the other side in a generation or two there may remain little to no support for reunification. The window for Korean reunification is closing and the North knows it. North Korea’s continued pressure on South Korea and its American and Japanese allies is part of a long standing plan to reunify on the North’s terms while reunification is still possible.

Charles W. King

Recently President Trump reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the war in Afghanistan and pledged to send 4,000 troops to supplement the approximately 8,000 American and 6,000 allied troops in Afghanistan. While the President did not ultimately adopt it, there was an alternative which has received significant attention over the past few weeks. This alternative, advocated by Eirk Prince of Blackwater fame, is explicitly modeled on that of the British East India Company. According to Prince replacing American troops with private contractors could save the United States billions and defeat the Afghan Taliban. He claims to have thousands of retired American and NATO Special Forces ready to do this work, but experts contend that the potential talent pool of available Western Special Forces is nowhere near deep enough to supply Prince’s proposal. Also worth highlighting is that according to sources inside the White House, as reported by Foreign Policy, the thing that may have change the President’s mind on Afghanistan is the presence of extensive mineral deposits now being developed by Chinese companies, companies which may have links to Prince. While these reasons alone should be enough to give pause to anyone examine Prince’s proposal, it is also worth examining the model that he proposes.

The British East India Company was granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I on December 30th, 1600 for the purpose of establishing trade between Britain and the Far East. At the time the protections of incorporation were only granted to ventures that advanced government agendas. Frequently, as in the case of the EIC, incorporation came with monopoly rights as well. The EIC’s most important monopolies were tea and saltpeter; the former being an inciting cause of the American Revolution, the latter being a key strategic resource. The Company would rule India for almost one hundred years before being stripped of its control of India in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

In addition to the proximate causes of the 1857 rebellion (British attempts to change social norms of both the military and civilian population, and the adoption of greased rifle cartridges) company rule in India and well as later administration by the British Raj which replaced it, witnessed large scale famines as the result of typical drought seasons. One third of the population of Bengal died in 1770 as a result of Company rule. Tens of millions of Indians died as a result of these famines; meanwhile India was a net exporter of cereal grains, a subject we have touched upon before.

The British East India Company was not a successful business venture. The British Parliament was forced to bail it out numerous times between 1600 and 1857. It was a brutal instrument of imperial power. It exercised control of the Indian subcontinent thought violence, subject to little to no oversight from London. The Company facilitated control over the economies of the British Empire’s other possessions, including the Thirteen Colonies and the Empire’s African colonies. It was an engine for the extraction of resources and wealth from the colonies for the benefit of London, and it demonstrated phenomenal disregard for the value of human life in doing so. It is not an example that the United States should seek to emulate.

Charles W. King

If the failures of nation building projects in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan must serve as a warning to policy-makers what should they look to for an example of success? The Balkan nations that NATO intervened in the 1990s are a possibility; they are in the process of accession to the European Union and negotiating their own regional free trade agreement as the EU focuses on Brexit and refugee policy. But these nations are not yet finished building the institutions that will carry them forward, as demonstrated by the ongoing corruption probes in a number of Balkan states. The Republic of Korea and the Republic of Taiwan provide better examples of successful nation building projects. When they were founded in the late 1940’s they did not have the institutional foundations that facilitated the reconstruction of West Germany and Japan. Decades later South Korea and Taiwan have joined Germany and Japan on the world stage as major allies of the United States, and significant players in the global economy. They have transitioned from ‘developmental autocracy’, to borrow a phrase from Gregg Brazinsky of George Washington University, to democratic governments.

Two of the key factors in these successes were the development of state institutions and export economies. At their founding neither South Korea nor Taiwan possessed an industrial economy or plentiful natural resources that could fill national coffers and provide an easy road to prosperity. Forced to develop economies from scratch they elected to develop for export rather than to protect against foreign imports. Successful industrial export economies require an educated workforce for the research and development, and the high quality manufacturing that sustains them. It also requires independent courts and rule of law to limit corruption and provide stability and predictability to foreign investors and partners. This strong economic development at a precursor to democratization is a common historical development, not unique to South Korea and Taiwan.

South Korea and Taiwan have also each faced a single existential threat since their founding; North Korea and the People’s Republic of China respectively. This has substantially distorted the shape of their national institutions. Where the leaders of other ‘developmental autocracies’ have used Western liberalism as a post-colonial boogeyman, and made internal dissent the primary focus of their security forces, South Korea and Taiwan could afford to do neither. Confronted with these existential threats, their militaries developed as important and respected institutions of the state rather than as oppressors of the people.

Decades of economic and institution building under ‘developmental autocracy’ provided the foundations that South Korea and Taiwan needed to become prosperous democracies. They also represent two the longest and most expensive and expansive nation building commitments the United States engaged in during the Cold War. They are not the only ‘development autocracies’ the United States supported, but they are the most successful. Policy-makers should take a number of lessons from their examples; the nature of the economic development is important, and integrating the military and other state institutions as a part of the society is essential. Subsiding dictators in exchange for policy or resources will not lead to economic development or democratization but is sometimes necessary. By having a clear conception of their strategic objectives and an understanding of the differences between the successes in South Korea, Taiwan, West Germany, and Japan and failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan policy-makers can better determine what policies to implement and how much support they can commit to.

Further Reading

Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009).

James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press: 2008)

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).

Charles W. King

In recent years the United States has begun to deploy new methods of countering ballistic missile systems, particularly to Poland and more recently South Korea. Both deployments have explicitly been to counter the increasing capability of Iranian and North Korean missile systems.  The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have objected vehemently to the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems near their borders. Some of the saber-rattling and acts of aggression that Russia and China have undertaken recently may be a direct response to the deployment of these systems.

Why the Russians and Chinese would react so aggressively to an apparently defensive system shows how subtle the intricacies of nuclear weapons strategy are. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was one of the landmark treaties of the Cold War. It prevented the Cold War from escalating further. If the US or the USSR were confident that it would be able to destroy any and all incoming nuclear weapons then they would be more willing to engage in a policy of first strike.  Both sides were understandably afraid the other would adopt such a policy. While the ABM Treaty did not eliminate ABM systems from American or Soviet arsenals, it limited their numbers of to hundreds interceptors at a time when each side possessed thousands of warheads and delivery systems. Without the ability to mount a completely effective ABM defense neither side would be willing to engage in a first strike policy. The US’s withdrawal in 2002 from the ABM Treaty did not lead to the breakdown of the international non-proliferation regime that some feared at the time, but does represent a dramatic shift in American nuclear weapon strategy.

Some observers are reasonably skeptical of whether the deployment of systems like Terminal High Altitude Ariel Defense (THAAD) significantly increase the US’s ability to intercept Russian and Chinese missiles. After all, the US already operates ABM sites in Japan and Naval ABM systems. The neglects the fact that any reduction in the viability of a nuclear deterrent is a serious threat to a nuclear deterrent.

It is this possibility, that their nuclear arsenals no longer have a deterrent value in the face of American ABM systems like THAAD, that has made the Russians and Chinese object to the deployment of American ABM systems so violently. The Russians and Chinese rely on their nuclear deterrent just as much as the US does, if not more. They have a more recent and extensive history of foreign domination than the United States does, as well as disputed land borders and off-shore claims, neither of which are an issue for the US. Russia and China have been the primary targets for American nuclear weapons since the end of World War Two, that the US might be able to use them without fear of retaliation is understandably terrifying to Russian and Chinese policy-makers. It will continue to be essential for American policy-makers to balance the need to counter the threat of nuclear weapons from pariah states like Iran and North Korea with the escalation of tensions with longtime rivals like Russia and China.

Further Reading

Ronald E. Powaski, March to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1939 to the Present, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).

David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2009).

Charles W. King

Events in recent years including North Korea’s nuclear development and Shinzo Abe’s push for reform of the Japanese Constitution  have prompted some to re-examine the nature of the United States’ bi-lateral relationships and alliances is Asia. The nature of America’s relationships in Asia varies; bases in South Korea and Japan, extensive military relations and arms sales to Taiwan and the Philippines, more limited military-to-military relations with India, Singapore, and Malaysia. It is easier to establish these relationships but they can be more fragile, as the recent decline in U.S.-Philippine relations demonstrates.

It is important to understand why bi-lateral relationships exist and how the U.S. can benefit from the strategic flexibility they offer. The re-militarization of West Germany and Japan after World War 2 established the nature of American relations in Europe and Asia. The Korean War required the re-militarization of Japan as base for American and allied operations, but the war was on the Korean Peninsula. The People’s Liberation Army’s “volunteers” were not the same kind of threat to Japan that the Soviet Army was to West Germany, France, and the Low Countries in 1950. The nature of the Korean War required expedient bi-lateral relations with Japan and South Korea to conduct a war in Korea, not the deterrent value of a large multi-lateral alliance.

Bi-lateral relationships have been the norm in Asia for centuries. From the 16th through the 20th centuries European powers used diplomacy, trade, and military force to establish bi-lateral relationships in Asia, to the exclusion of other colonial powers. The Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French all used bi-lateral trading and colonial relationships to extract resources from Asia. In the wake of the Boxer Rebellion the Western powers carved up bi-lateral spheres of influence in China as well. Earlier the tribute system established a structure of Chinese hegemony, client states, and trade between Imperial China, Korea, Japan, and their neighbors. In this era tribute to and trade with regional hegemons like China, and to a lesser extent Japan, was extensive. Relations and trade between tributary states in Asia was limited. Part of the reason for this was geography; Chinese tributary states had few other neighbors and none with the might or wealth of China. For hundreds of years the geography, balance of military power, and trade patterns of Asia made bi-lateral relationships within hegemons’ spheres of influence the dominant form of diplomatic relations.

It is not surprising that bi-lateral relationships remain the norm for the United States in Asia. Bi-lateral relations in the orbit of regional hegemony have been the norm in Asia through the Imperial, Colonial, and Cold War periods. While it will be important to rally multi-lateral support to confront certain issues—North Korean nuclear development, claims in South China Sea—the United States must recognize that there are historical factors that make bi-lateral relationships the norm in Asia. These trade relationships and alliances can be fickle, but they can also be turned to the United States’ advantage through a willingness to be flexible and examine each relationship strategically.

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Further Reading:

David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History, ed. Harry Wray and Hillary Conroy, (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1983).

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000).

Thomas J. Christensen, Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2011).