An inconvenient but telling detail that is consistently avoided in any public discussion of America’s “presence”, i.e. our military personnel in Asia, is that we simply are not wanted there.
Note the periodic demonstrations on Japan’s island Okinawa concerning the location of our bases. Part of this (besides the underlying and rankling elementary cultural issue) is the nuclear warhead problem of just where, if anywhere at all, to put these things. The author pointedly reminds us that the Japanese have been on the receiving end of two of our nuclear bombs.
Naturally the South Koreans have similar anxieties. The author reminds us that, regarding nuclear warheads:
….”In fact, it is so obviously necessary that South Koreans themselves have begun to suggest it,[nuclear warheads again in S. Korea] something unthinkable only a few years ago when huge crowds were demonstrating in Seoul’s streets against the U.S. presence in the peninsula. The mood in the ROK has changed dramatically since then.”
Taiwan also has had its anti-American demonstrations with varying causes. So,the mood of our local mercurial allies in that theater is a major issue in any American strategic decision making.
Now, returning, join all this with the ugly main point of the North Koreans selling their weapons to Islamic terrorists. (Conspicuously missing here is the US Dollar cost of maintaining our massive presence in East Asia.) Let us then concentrate on launching any pre-emtive strikes against North Korea from offshore, and apply our U.A.V.s.
We’re caught now in the nasty (author’s word, “grim”) situation of not having the resources to fight a separate war in East Asia along with continuing that two-fronted war in Central Asia. So, in the face of our needs versus our resources to fight our borderless, uniformless, amorphous adversary of Islamic terrorism I’d advocate a withdrawal of our massed ground presence from both Central and East Asia. Let any necessary ground fighting be the special preserve of the locals, admittedly with varying degrees of effectiveness. Let that be a local problem.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, American blood is not an entitlement.
