Growing economic ties and a new interest in cultural exchanges are bringing the countries of Northeast Asia closer together. Yet wounds from past wrongs -- committed in times of colonialism, war, and dictatorship -- are not fully healed. All nations have some sense of victimization -- Japan vis-à-vis the United States and Russia, and China and Korea vis-à-vis Japan -- and often blame others, rather than taking responsibility.

As with many other cases around the world, reconciliation between countries in the region first occurred between governments. Japan established diplomatic rapprochement with countries it had once invaded or colonized: with the Republic of China in 1952, with the Republic of Korea in 1965, and with the People's Republic of China in 1972.

Yet Northeast Asian nations have failed to come to terms with the past. Japan paid no reparations to its former colonies -- though it gave "grants and aid" to South Korea for normalizing their relations -- and China and Korea were excluded from the

San Francisco Treaty that settled Japanese war crimes and atrocities. Historical issues such as disputed territories and Japan's colonial rule were largely swept under the rug in the Cold War system.

The failure to address historical injustice and to reconcile differing views of the past has strained Sino-Japanese relations and friction between Japan and South Korea over Japan's colonial past remains intense. Even South Korea and China are sparring over the history of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo. In addition, Taiwan is immersed in a reexamination of the past. The history question touches upon the most sensitive issues of national identity and now fuels the fires of nationalism in Northeast Asia.

In Korea, nationalism has offered a framework for dealing with victims of historical injustice such as the comfort women and forced laborers. It forces issues to be framed in binary opposition -- victims vs. aggressors -- and leaves little room for any alternative. Koreans are reluctant to acknowledge their atrocities during the Vietnam War, but readily criticize similar acts committed by the U.S. during the Korean War. Disputes over the kingdom of Goguryeo reflect lingering irredentist Korean nationalism as well as China's rising nationalism.

In Japan, uncertainties and anxieties created by the post-Cold War security environment and a decade of economic stagnation provided a fertile ground for nationalist politics. Nationalist scholars are making headway in producing textbooks to "make Japanese proud of themselves." Increased official use of such symbols as the flag and the national anthem used by imperial Japan are part of Japan's quest to become a "normal nation." The goodwill generated by Prime Minister Abe's visit to China and South Korea soon after taking office, suggesting a conciliatory policy toward Asia, has been undermined by his recent remarks on the comfort woman issue. If there is any difference between Korea and Japan, it is that the left in Korea -- as opposed to the right in Japan -- is at the forefront of nationalist politics.

China is promoting nationalism to bolster social and political cohesion. Beijing needs a new unifying force to mobilize the nation in pursuit of common goals, such as economic modernization, and the "glue" is nationalism. In the post-Tiananmen era, the Chinese leadership appealed to nationalism (patriotism) to shore up their tainted legitimacy. Nationalism also underpins Chinese foreign policy, both in the region and elsewhere. Territorial disputes, human rights issues, nonproliferation issues -- all of these touch the nationalist nerves of Chinese leaders in Beijing. They do not want to jeopardize relations with their Asian neighbors, but neither do they want to lose face.

Thus, despite increased intra-Asian trade, cultural exchanges, and talk about an East Asian community, Korea, Japan, and China all still find politics of national identity appealing. After all, nationalism is not only about ideology, but also thrives on narrowly defined "national interests." Disputed territories always serve as symbols of national sovereignty that cannot be compromised. The mutual suspicion of Japan and China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and other territorial waters, as well as the recent escalation of Japan-Korean tension over Dokdo/Takeshima are but two potent reminders.

There is widespread recognition of the need for reconciliation and the final resolution of historical injustices. But there is a fundamental obstacle to reconciliation -- the existence of divided, even conflicting, historical memories. All of the nations involved are bound by very distinct perceptions of history, often contradictory and separated by different accounts of the past and of the context of events. These perceptions are deeply imbedded in public consciousness, transmitted by education, popular culture and through the mass media.

The most daunting task is coming to a common understanding of the past. Whereas a shared view of the past (World War II at least) served to unify (Western) Europe after two devastating wars, history still divides these three close Asian neighbors. Reconciliation has been "thin," and the history issue continues to mar regional cooperation. To achieve a "thicker" reconciliation, they need to move beyond nation-state-oriented, binary victim/aggressor concepts and approaches, and understand reconciliation as a mutual, interactive process. Citizens' groups, NGOs, victim-activist groups -- be they domestic, transnational, or international, and regardless of political orientation -- should be more actively involved.

Second, Northeast Asian nations must recognize that elements in their shared past may contribute to promoting regional reconciliation. China, Japan, and Korea often argue over history, but it is nonetheless true that elements in their past may also contribute to a regional identity. Coping with Western influence since the 19th century is but one area of common ground. Their experience of building modern nation-states and economies is another example. There exist ample cases and instances of common experiences that can be readily used to formulate a shared view of Northeast Asia's modern history.

Third, we need to encourage and teach critical and independent thinking to young Asians about their respective pasts. In particular, we need to cultivate a mutually acceptable, new national history of each country, resituated in a shared regional identity. Nationalism, regionalism, and internationalism will always coexist, but they need not contradict one another. In this critical time of change and desire to cultivate a shared view, we need to redefine these mutually reinforcing ideologies beyond a narrow, exclusive sense of nation.

Ultimately, building a vision for Northeast Asia's future beyond narrow national and political interests requires enlightened political leadership. Unfortunately, until now, the region has not seen such a visionary leader who is committed to cultivating regional reconciliation. On the contrary, many leaders have politicized the history problem for domestic, nationalist consumption. Interpretations of the past are unavoidably political, producing divided memories, and there is strong temptation to politicize the process for current ideological purposes. However tempting, politically convenient, and even psychologically satisfying it may be to blame others, such an approach will neither heal past wounds nor provide a foundation for the future. We need political leadership that can build public support for sometimes unpopular policies aimed at regional reconciliation.

Reprinted with permission from the Korea Herald.

The six-party agreement reached last week in Beijing to cap North Korea's nuclear program was a triumph for diplomacy. But contrary to much of the conventional wisdom in recent days, the fruits of the victory fall mostly to the North Koreans.

In the short term, the deal will halt the country's production of nuclear materials, limiting its ability to expand a nuclear arsenal tested in October. But for this concession, the North Koreans get to keep that arsenal intact, at least for now, and stand to make significant economic and political gains in relations with the United States, China and South Korea.

Some critics say the Beijing agreement is a lesser version of "the Agreed Framework" reached in 1994 by the Clinton administration, later cast aside by President Bush. Former Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Perry, speaking Tuesday at the Asia Society, characterized the new agreement as "thin gruel," while backing it as "a small but a very important step forward."

The ultimate judgment will await the uncertain implementation of numerous crucial, but still vaguely defined, steps down the road. The North Koreans are certain to exploit every ambiguity in the text and to drag out the phase that calls for actual dismantlement of their nuclear program and weapons.

Unfortunately, the process that led to this moment suggests that this will not go well. Contrary to the administration's version of events, Pyongyang was not dragged to this deal by pressure -- not from Washington and not from North Korea's angry patrons in Beijing.

"We don't have the North Koreans on the ropes," a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who has watched that closeted country for decades said. "We don't have them on the run."

On the contrary, there is ample evidence that this agreement is yet another demonstration of North Korea's uniquely successful brand of negotiation via escalation: a use of brinkmanship and willingness to go up to and over the line that converts weakness into leverage.

Against that approach, the Bush administration's preference for using tools of coercion and threat, even of pre-emptive war, failed. If anything, it brought about the very opposite outcome than the United States envisioned: it encouraged North Korea to move even more rapidly to develop and test a nuclear weapon.

The pattern of brinkmanship was already clear during the Clinton years -- what Korea expert Scott Snyder famously termed "negotiating on the edge." When confronted, Snyder noted, the North Koreans typically responded by accelerating the crisis, unworried by the consequences. The fear of appearing weak has underlined all North Korean behavior.

The Bush administration came into office almost seeking a confrontation, as the president and many of his advisers were convinced the 1994 deal was fatally flawed. Ironically, the North Koreans thought they were on the verge of strategic breakthrough, after a deal to halt missile tests and preparations for President Clinton to visit Pyongyang in the final weeks of his administration. An improved relationship with the United States would balance the power of its Chinese patron, whom North Korea deeply distrusts, and give it legitimacy in an ongoing struggle with South Korea for leadership on the Korean peninsula.

Instead Bush froze the Clinton framework and sought a new, tougher approach. In January 2002, Bush delivered his famous State of the Union depiction of North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq. That October, U.S. negotiators confronted Pyongyang with accusations of cheating by pursuing a clandestine uranium-enrichment program.

The 1994 agreement collapsed amid a tit-for-tat series of escalatory moves -- beginning with a U.S. cutoff of heavy fuel oil and leading to North Korea ousting international inspectors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and restarting its reactor and recycling facility to produce plutonium. Bush vowed that the United States would not "be blackmailed."

Meanwhile, preparations for war in Iraq were mounting. The Bush administration was convinced the awesome display of U.S. power would successfully intimidate the other two points on the axis of evil, North Korea and Iran.

"We are hopeful," then senior State Department official John Bolton dryly said as the invasion came to a close, "that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq -- that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their interest."

American threat

The North Korean officials drew an entirely different conclusion: they could not afford to seem weak in the face of what they perceived as an American threat to terminate their regime.

"Only tremendous military deterrent force powerful enough to decisively beat back an attack supported by ultra-modern weapons can avert a war and protect the security of the country," said an official statement issued April 6. "This is the lesson drawn from the Iraqi war."

A drawn-out process of negotiations began later that month, beginning with a three-way meeting in China and moving that summer to six-party talks that also included South Korea, Japan and Russia. The U.S. position was to deny Pyongyang what it wanted most -- direct talks with Washington -- and to demand verified dismantlement of its nuclear program, on the model of Libya, before any rewards, economic or political, were provided.

As the war in Iraq wore on, and the threat of military force became less credible, the administration looked for other coercive tools. It forged a multinational agreement to intercept suspicious cargoes and launched a crackdown on illicit North Korea trafficking in drugs and counterfeit currency and goods, which are believed to be the main source of support for the regime's elite.

The North Koreans countered with their own demands, offering a plan to freeze their nuclear program, with compensation, followed by a coordinated series of reciprocal steps leading toward eliminating the program. Their offers were accompanied by statements that they already had the bomb and were prepared to test it.

When the Bush administration started its second term in 2005, it attempted to escalate pressure -- this time with charges that North Korea was exporting nuclear materials to the Middle East and calls for China to put pressure on its difficult clients. Pyongyang moved to unload a second set of spent fuel from its reactor and reprocess it -- American experts believe North Korea created six to eight bombs worth of plutonium after 2002.

Agreement sours

A return to the bargaining table in September 2005 yielded an agreement on the principles that would underlie a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. But that sign of progress disappeared within hours as both sides sparred over the meaning of a pledge to build nuclear power reactors for North Korea as compensation for it dismantling its nuclear weapons.

The imposition of measures to curb the flow of North Korean "illicit" money through Chinese and other banks added to the acrimony. Administration officials described this as a legal issue driven by Treasury Department efforts to curb counterfeiting. But as Bush admitted recently, it was used as leverage in the nuclear talks.

Throughout the past year, Bush administration officials expressed confidence that these measures were causing serious pain to the North Korean leadership. Some even talked boldly of "turning out the lights" in Pyongyang through such sanctions.

But Pyongyang could read the news from Iraq as well as any American voter. Instead of having its lights turned out, North Koreans put up their own light shows. On July 4, a date chosen with apparent intent, they carried out a test of a battery of ballistic missiles, in defiance of warnings, including one from China. A U.N. resolution condemning the action -- and other steps, including a South Korean suspension of food and fertilizer aid and Chinese attempts to slow trade -- followed.

In October, again in defiance of pressure from all fronts, the North Koreans tested a nuclear device. This prompted another U.N. resolution, backed by China, to impose limited economic sanctions. But although China was clearly angered, there is little evidence it moved to cut off the lifeline of trade, particularly energy supplies.

North Korea's willingness to cross what everyone believed was a "red line" changed the equation permanently. It allowed Pyongyang to return to the six-party talks, stalled for more than a year, but now from a position of strength. At the meeting in December, the North Koreans refused to discuss any other issues unless the U.S. financial sanctions were removed. North Korean officials hinted of preparations for a second test.

The United States blinked, agreeing to hold long-sought direct talks, held in Berlin in mid-January. The talks yielded the outlines of the Beijing deal but also a separate U.S. concession to lift the financial measures within 30 days of signing a broader deal.

The Beijing agreement more closely resembles North Korea's June 2004 freeze proposal than it does the U.S. insistence that dismantling nuclear weapons precede any substantial rewards. Clearly, this is a deal the Bush administration would not have made, says Scott Snyder, "if it were not tied down with so many other problems."

North Korea made its own concessions in the Beijing agreement. But "it doesn't necessarily mean Pyongyang is backing down or preparing to abandon its nuclear weapons," argues Kim Sung Han, a senior analyst at the South Korean Foreign Ministry's research institute.

N. Korea's rewards

Administration officials point out that the initial freeze of North Korea's nuclear program, to be implemented in two months, yields only minor compensation, about 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. But that is not what Pyongyang sees as its real reward. The lifting of financial measures will facilitate its rapidly growing trade with China and South Korea. Even more important, the South Korean government has already signaled it will now lift the ban on large-scale fertilizer and food shipments -- which are crucial to North Korea's spring planting.

Less visible, but no less vital, the North Koreans are trying to hold off a conservative comeback to power in the South Korean presidential election in December. A North-South summit meeting may take place, which would be part of an effort by the progressive South Korean government to shore up its support.

Ultimately, the Beijing agreement may yield a trade of nuclear facilities for economic and political relations, leaving the nuclear arsenal capped but still intact. For some U.S. experts, that is sufficient.

"It will limit the size of the nuclear arsenal and the amount of bomb fuel," observes former Los Alamos nuclear laboratory director and Stanford scholar Siegfried Hecker. And that, he says, should make it less likely North Korea would sell its nuclear materials or expertise to Iran.

The bargain made in Beijing flows inexorably from North Korea's skillful playing of the escalation game. But it may be the best outcome possible, given that North Korea has already crossed the nuclear threshold and that the Bush administration has squandered U.S. power in the deserts of Iraq.

Reprinted with permission from the San Jose Mercury News.

Anyone who has followed the US presidential race knows that Senator Barack Obama, if he runs and wins, will be the first African-American to live in the White House. Fewer know that, if that happens, he will also become the first US president to have lived in Indonesia as a child and to have had an Indonesian stepfather.

Until now, this bit of biography might have mattered only to fans of political trivia. But elements of the conservative press have made an issue of Obama's links to Indonesia by insinuating that during his time there he might have absorbed radical Islamist ideas at a Muslim school. "Hillary's Team Has Questions about Obama's Muslim Background" ran the headline in Insight Magazine that started the flap. The editor may have wished to kill two birds - the presidential hopes of both Obama and his main rival for the Democratic nomination - with a single stone. Readers who believed the report would have thought twice before supporting Obama, while those who considered it false would have thought less of Hillary for stooping to plant it.

Official spokespeople for Obama and Clinton, respectively, quickly denied the allegation as "completely false" and "an obvious right-wing hit job." But not before the charge had been repeated by Fox News and debated in the blogosphere.

Barack Obama's parents met at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was born in 1961. Two years later his parents divorced. His mother remarried. His new stepfather was Indonesian. In 1967, when Barack was six years old, the family moved to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. There, as described in his 1995 biography, Barack attended a private Catholic school and, later, a "predominantly Muslim" one. In 1971, when he was ten, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling.

Investigative reporting by CNN, the Associated Press, and other responsible media has established that the notion that Obama was influenced by a radical Islamist agenda is absurd. He was never enrolled in a madrasah. Nor is it surprising that students at the secular public school he did attend were "predominantly Muslim" - nearly nine-tenths of all Indonesians are. The atmosphere in Jakarta in 1967-69 was basically secular. Muslim head scarves, for example, were rare. I know because I lived there then.

Obama was sent to a Catholic and then to a secular public school. His parents, of modest means, could not afford tuition at the international school. At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama's parents registered him as "Muslim" only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father's faith.

Obama's stepfather, Soetoro, was only nominally Muslim. Like many if not most other ethnic-Javanese Indonesians at that time, he was a "statistical Muslim." That label was applied to those who, if required by a school registrar or a census taker to state their religion, would say "Islam," but who were Muslims far more from habit or heritage than by practice or conviction.

Should we be glad that this smear has been so quickly put to rest, and move on? Yes. But not before noting - and regretting - an irony: Precisely when tides of disregard for the United States and its policies are sweeping the world, when Americans more than ever before need to understand Muslim societies, American fears of Islam are being evoked and stoked.

Far from being seen as a detriment to his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama's prior exposure to a foreign culture should be counted as an asset.

At the same tender age as Obama's when he was in Jakarta, I was in Moscow attending a Soviet elementary school. I remember my teacher frowning at me when, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, unlike my Russian classmates, I couldn't manage to cry. My parents, my sister, and I could have lived in the building that housed the American Embassy - a "golden ghetto." But my father wanted us to learn the Russian language and experience Russian life. I am grateful that he did.

The idea that Americans, children or adults, should wrap themselves in familiar cocoons and avoid encounters with anything strange, including Indonesian Islam, is worse than just bad parenting. It is a willful parochialism that the United States as a country cannot afford. Not in this post-9/11 world. Not if we wish to engage with that world as it actually is - rather than as we might, in fearful isolation, imagine it to be.

This opinion piece was printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 1, 2007 under the title "Obama's international background an asset, not a flaw." To read the version that was printed in the Mercury News please click on the link below. It was also printed in Yale Global Online. There is a link below to that version.

The alliance between the Republic of Korea and the United States has been facing new pressures in recent months. Leaders in Washington and Seoul are visibly out of synch in their response to the escalatory actions of North Korea, beginning with the July 4 missile tests and leading to the October 9 nuclear explosion. South Korean leaders seem more concerned with the danger that Washington may instigate conflict than they are with North Korea's profoundly provocative acts. American officials increasingly see Seoul as irrelevant to any possible solution to the problem. Officials on both sides valiantly try to find areas of agreement and to paper over differences. If attempts to restart the six-party talks on North Korea falter again, it is likely this divide will resurface.

There is a tendency on both sides of the Pacific to overdraw a portrait of an alliance on the verge of collapse. Crises in the U.S.-ROK alliance are hardly new. As I have written elsewhere, there never was a "golden age" in our alliance that was free from tension. Korean discomfort with an alliance founded on dependency and American unease with Korean nationalism has been a constant since the early days of this relationship. Clashes over how to respond to North Korea have been a staple of the alliance since its earliest days.

Korean-American relations today are much deeper than at the inception of this alliance. Our interests are intertwined on many fronts, not least as major players in the global economic and trading system. We share fundamental values as democratic societies, built on the rule of law and the free flow of ideas. There is a large, and growing, contact between our two peoples, from trade and tourism to immigration.

The current situation is worrisome however because it threatens the security system that lies at the foundation of the alliance. Though our interests are now far broader, the U.S.-ROK alliance remains military in nature. The founding document of this alliance was the

Mutual Defense Treaty signed on October 1, 1953, following the conclusion of the armistice pact to halt the Korean War. That treaty has been significantly modified only once - 28 years ago in response to American plans to withdraw its ground forces from Korea - to create the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC).

The two militaries have a vital legacy of decades of combined command, training and war planning. American military forces in significant numbers have remained in place to help defend South Korea from potential aggression from the North. South Korean troops have deployed abroad numerous times in support of American foreign policy goals, including currently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This foundation of security is not only essential to this alliance but is the very definition of the nature of alliances in general, as distinct from other forms of cooperation and partnership in international relations.

"Alliances are binding, durable security commitments between two or more nations," Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a Stanford scholar and former Clinton administration senior defense official, wrote recently. "The critical ingredients of a meaningful alliance are the shared recognition of common threats and a pledge to take action to counter them. To forge agreement, an alliance requires ongoing policy consultations that continually set expectations for allied behavior."

Alliances can survive a redefinition of the common threat that faces them but not the absence of a threat. Nor can alliances endure if there is not a clear sense of the mutual obligations the partners have to each other, from mutual defense to joint actions against a perceived danger. "At a minimum," Sherwood-Randall says, "allies are expected to take into consideration the perspectives and interests of their partners as they make foreign and defense policy choices."

By this definition, the U.S.-ROK alliance is in need of a profound re-examination.

The 'shared recognition' of a common threat from North Korea that was at the core of the alliance is badly tattered. As a consequence, there is no real agreement on what actions are needed to counter that threat.

There is a troubling lack of will on both sides to engage in policy consultations that involve an understanding of the interests and views of both sides, much less setting clear expectations for allied behavior. Major decisions such as the phasing out of the CFC have been made without adequate discussion.

Americans and Koreans need, in effect, to re-imagine our alliance. We should do so with the understanding that there is still substantial popular support for this alliance, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. The problems of alliance support may lie more in policy-making elites in both countries than in the general public. That suggests that a concerted effort to reinvigorate the alliance will find public backing.

The results of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2006 multinational survey of public opinion show ongoing strong support for the American military presence in South Korea. Some 62 percent of Koreans believe U.S. troop levels are either about right or too few; some 52 percent of Americans share that view. A slightly larger percentage of Americans - 42 percent compared to 36 percent of Koreans - think there are too many U.S. troops. Along the same vein, 65 percent of Americans and 84 percent of Koreans favor the U.S. providing military forces, together with other countries, in a United Nations-sponsored effort to turn back a North Korean attack.

The crack in the alliance comes over the perception of threat from North Korea.

While some 79 percent of Koreans feel at least "a bit" threatened by the possibility of North Korea becoming a nuclear power, only 30 percent say they are "very" threatened. Fewer Koreans feel the peninsula will be a source of conflict than the number of Americans. More significantly, nuclear proliferation is viewed as a critical threat by 69 percent of Americans, compared to only half of Koreans (interestingly, Chinese are even less concerned about this danger).

The opinion poll was conducted before the nuclear test so it is difficult to judge the impact of that event. These survey results do clearly indicate however that while the security alliance still has support, there is an urgent need for deep discussion, at all levels, about the nature of the threat.

The crisis that faced the NATO alliance in the wake of the end of the Cold War has some instructive value for Koreans and Americans today. At the beginning of 1990, I was sent by my newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, from Tokyo, where I had been covering Japan and Korea since the mid-1980s, to Moscow. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few months earlier and the prospect of the end of a half-century of Cold War in Europe was in the air. However, I dont believe anyone, certainly not myself, anticipated the astounding pace or scale of change that took place within just two years.

Within less than a year, in October of 1990, West and East Germany were reunited.

The once-mighty Soviet empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated almost overnight. By July of 1991, the Warsaw Pact had come to an end. Perhaps most astounding of all - not least to officials of the administration of George H.W. Bush - the Soviet Union fell abruptly apart in December 1991.

These tectonic events triggered a debate about the future of the NATO alliance that had provided security to Europe since it was founded in April of 1949. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev somewhat famously - and perhaps apocryphally - anticipated this debate. "We are going to do something terrible to you," he is said to have told Ronald Reagan. "We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

In those early days, the very continued existence of NATO was under active discussion. The Soviet leadership called for the creation of entirely new "pan-European" security structures that would replace both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Some in Europe favored the European Union as a new vehicle for both economic integration of the former

Soviet empire into Europe, along with creating new European security forces that would supplant NATO's integrated command.

A more cautionary view argued for retaining NATO without change as a hedge against the revival of Russia as a military threat or the failure of democratic and market transformation in the former Soviet Union. American policymakers opted instead for the ambitious aim of expanding NATO membership to absorb, step by step, the former Soviet empire, including the newly freed western republics of the Soviet Union.

Along with expansion, the United States pushed NATO to redefine the "enemy." Americans argued that new threats to stability and security from ethnic conflict - and international terrorism - compelled NATO to "go out of area or out of business." NATO did so first in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Kosovo, though reluctantly. The alliance has moved even farther beyond Europe to Afghanistan, where NATO commands the international security forces. This draws upon the invaluable investment made in joint military command and operations that are the foundation of the alliance.

Certainly NATO's transformation is far from complete. As was evident at the most recent NATO summit in Riga, considerable differences of opinion remain between many European states and the United States over the mission of NATO. Europeans tend to still see NATO as an essentially defensive alliance, protecting the "euro-Atlantic" region against outside aggression, with an unspoken role as a hedge against uncertainties in Russia. They are resistant to continued American pressure for expansion - including a new U.S. proposal to move toward global partnership with countries such as Japan, South Korea and Australia.

But the reinvention of NATO after the Cold War provides some evidence that even when the nature of the threat has changed, security alliances can preserve a sense of common purpose.

A re-imagined U.S.-ROK alliance could draw from the NATO experience by including the following elements:

HEDGE - The alliance remains crucial as a 'hedge' against North Korean aggression, even if the dangers of an attack are considered significantly reduced. If North Korea retains its nuclear capability, that hedge will need to expand to include a shared doctrine of containment and deterrence, including making clear that the U.S. will retaliate against use of nuclear weapons, no matter where it takes place. Strategically the alliance is also a 'hedge' against Chinese ambitions to dominate East Asia and a guarantor of the existing balance of power;

EXPANSION - The alliance can reassert its vitality as the basis, along with the

U.S.-Japan security alliance, of an expanded multilateral security structure for

Northeast Asia;

NEW MISSIONS - The alliance should take on new missions, most importantly to participate in military and non-military counter-proliferation operations;

OUT OF AREA - A re-imagined alliance might formalize an "out of area" role, elevating the deployments of peacekeeping and other forces to Iraq and Afghanistan into more systematic joint global operations between the two militaries. In this regard, the participation of South Korea in a program of global partnership with NATO, most importantly in the area of joint training, merits serious discussion.

There is another alternative: South Korea and the United States can chose to bring their alliance to a close. If we cannot agree on the common threats that face us, this alliance cannot endure. What we should not do is to allow the alliance to drift from inattention into a deeper crisis that would only benefit our adversaries.

(This article is based on a presentation by the author to the 1st ROK-U.S. West Coast

Strategic Forum held in Seoul on Dec. 11-12, 2006).

This article appeared on the website of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation.

Reprinted with permission from the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation.