The Progressive ResponseVolume 3, Number 13
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of ContentsI. Updates and Out-TakesU.S.-CHINA SECURITY RELATIONS II. CommentsFOREIGN POLICY AND VOICE OF ANCESTORS
I. Updates and Out-TakesKOSOVO QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Has the NATO bombing met the three goals originally announced by President Clinton on March 24:
The bombing has done just the opposite. It has increased the repression against the Kosovar Albanians, threatened to widen the war, strengthened Milosevic, and weakened NATO. The NATO air offensive has also failed in the additional goals originally listed by President Clinton and others in the administration: 1. To "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe"--to the contrary, the attack provoked one. 2. "To prevent a wider war"--to the contrary, the war is threatening to engulf other countries. 3. To build a "peaceful, secure, united, stable Europe" by
meeting the following challenges: 4. "Demonstrating the seriousness of NATO's purpose"--but neither President Clinton nor other top officials specified what would constitute a successful NATO effort. (New York Times, March 25) Now, according to the New York Times (April 11), the NATO allies face an ever more "daunting task" to: 1) stop the Serb attacks against civilians; 2) escort the half million-plus refugees back to Kosovo; and 3) guarantee a lasting peace settlement through an indefinite peacekeeping operation. And to get there will take not only greatly escalating the bombing but, military experts argue, sending in somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 NATO ground troops--something President Clinton explicitly pledged would not happen. What is the immediate and long-term impact of NATO bombing on Serbia and the entire region? The NATO destruction of Serbia's infrastructure, including felled bridges that have blocked the Danube, will cause severe long-term damage to the entire economic activity of the Balkans. The larger region, which was heavily hit by the 1992-95 sanctions on Yugoslavia, is hit economically again. While Milosevic is evil, his small country, under sanctions for seven years now, simply does not have the ability to do much damage beyond its borders. The fallout from the NATO assault will, however, extend throughout the Balkans. Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania are in severe danger of destabilization. Macedonia's delicate ethnic balance has been disrupted, and its irresponsible actions toward the refugees have further isolated it. Albania's weak economy and infrastructure are being further stressed by the flood of refugees and, reportedly, KLA guerrillas. The democratic and anti-Milosevic forces in Montenegro have been silenced and the country may have to house refugees for a long time. By intervening militarily in what is technically a civil war in Eastern Europe, NATO has ignited ultra-nationalist, anti-Western sentiments in Russia and elsewhere. It has validated many of Russia's fears stated during the debate on NATO expansion that the Alliance is not a defensive organization anymore. Russia has responded with the unprecedented step of withdrawing its ambassador to NATO and its lower house of parliament voted on April 7 to facilitate arms shipments to the Serbs. Was a NATO military action of this type appropriate and legal under the organization's mandate? NATO was the wrong instrument to respond to the Kosovo crisis. Its use not only violates the UN Charter, but is not encompassed by NATO's own charter (signed in Washington in 1949), which, under Article 5, defines the Alliance as collective defense against armed attack and limits NATO to acts of self-defense. Kosovo marks the first offensive action ever undertaken by NATO against a sovereign nation and as such it constitutes what R.W. Apple (New York Times, March 25) terms "a leap in the dark." The NATO summit to be held in Washington (April 23 and 25) is intended to chart the Alliance's new "strategic concept" defining its role into the 21st century. But the Kosovo action and earlier Bosnian operation (punitive air strikes and peacekeeping troops) constitute an end run around this process, producing through action a new raison d'etre for NATO: what NATO officials term "non-Article 5" missions against ethnic instability. This may turn NATO into a replacement for the United Nation's role of defining and responding to international peace and security crises. What authorization, if any, has the UN given for NATO's military action? None. The U.S. bypassed the UN Security Council in anticipation of a likely Russian and Chinese veto. The UN has given no authorization for NATO's military actions, although UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (April 9) called for a ceasefire and issued a 5-point demand to Belgrade for ending the conflict: 1) end intimidation and expulsion of civilians from Kosovo; 2) withdraw its forces; 3) allow the return of refugees; 4) permit deployment of an international military force; and 5) agree to international monitoring for compliance. Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, only the UN Security Council can authorize the use of force (except in cases of self-defense). While the Council has passed resolutions regarding repression in Yugoslavia, none of these authorizes the use of force. In fact, UNSCR 1199 specifically stated that the Security Council "remained seized of the matter," meaning future decisions belong to the Council. This has not been done. Article 51's right of inherent self-defense does not give any authority for individual countries or regional organizations to use force for political, military, or humanitarian intervention within a state. Likewise, the Charter prohibits the use of force by individual nations unless authorized by the Security Council, except in self-defense to respond to an armed attack. That exception is a narrow one, which recognized that a nation being attacked could not wait for Security Council authorization to respond. The UN Charter identifies the importance of regional organizations and their role in maintaining international peace and security. Those organizations, like the UN itself, are urged by the Charter to exhaust all peaceful means of resolving disputes "before referring them to the Security Council" (Article 52) where presumably non-peaceful means might be considered. The Security Council might have looked to NATO to carry out an "enforcement action under its authority" (Article 53) in Kosovo, but no such authorization was requested or granted. And the Charter is explicit that "no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council." What would a negotiated, diplomatic settlement to this conflict look like? Any settlement would almost certainly begin with a ceasefire, as the UN Secretary General noted. The process should be done under joint UN and OSCE auspices and include: 1. Reasserting the primacy of the UNHCR as the highest authority to coordinate international response to the refugee crisis and, eventually, their safe return to Kosovo. 2. The safe return of the ethnic Albanian Kosovars to their original communities, with adequate financial support for rebuilding them, and permanent settlement in the United States and other NATO countries for those Kosovar refugees who choose that option. 3. The stationing of international peacekeepers in Kosovo, perhaps a joint UN-OSCE armed protection force, to create and hold corridors and safe havens throughout Kosovo to enable the safe return of refugees. 4. Autonomy, independence or partitioning for Kosovo? The precise formulation remains to be determined: what is key is that negotiations are broad-based and inclusive.
U.S.-CHINA SECURITY RELATIONS
Although economically China has experienced rapid growth, militarily, China has been in relative decline since the 1970s. China does not and will not pose in the foreseeable future the kind of military threat to the U.S. that the Soviet Bloc did (exaggerated though that threat often was). China is not even an irritating "rogue state" as some consider Iraq, Iran, or North Korea. China has achieved normal commercial and diplomatic relations with the U.S. and most of China's neighbors. Even where there is tension, as in China's relations with Taiwan, India, and Vietnam, relations have improved considerably since the armed clashes of decades ago. Both the relative decline in China's military capabilities and the improvement of China's foreign relations should lead to U.S. optimism and confidence about the prospects for continued peaceful progress in Asia. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, he began a drastic shift in policy away from centralized socialist planning toward a market-influenced economy. Many commentators assume that rapid economic growth also ensures China's ascendancy as a military superpower. There are two reasons why we should be skeptical of such claims: 1) China's high growth rate is slowing, and 2) China's pattern of growth has actually undermined its ability to become an autonomous military power. China's economy until 1978 was oriented around suppressing both consumerism and individual employment freedom in order to direct much of society's energy toward military production. This massive effort succeeded in making China a major producer of tanks, artillery, submarines, warplanes, and other weaponry, though all of 1950s Soviet design. This massive, obsolete arsenal still constitutes the overwhelming bulk of China's military hardware. Since the start of Deng's reforms, production of weaponry has fallen drastically. Except for limited production of obsolete warships, China's production of major weapons systems, including tanks and combat aircraft, has virtually ceased in the 1990s. Many policymakers have voiced concern that the influx of U.S. dual-use technology into China will facilitate military modernization. However, in industries such as aerospace the trend has been for foreign involvement to relegate Chinese manufacturers to subcontracting low-tech components rather than manufacturing entire systems, let alone weapons systems. China's incapacity to design and manufacture most modern weapons has forced it to rely, like most developing countries, on arms imports. China's limited acquisition of modern foreign weapons (mostly Russian) has been a tiny fraction of what would be needed to replace China's aging arsenal. China's armed forces are the world's largest, but smaller per capita than those of many countries, including the United States. The present size of its forces is actually a hindrance to military modernization because China cannot afford adequate pay, training, or modern weapons for most of its forces. China will not be able to develop modern military forces unless it either greatly increases military spending (which seems unlikely) or drastically cuts the size of its forces. China can defend its territory, but its capacity for external aggression is minimal given the low quality of its forces, the logistical difficulties of mobilizing these forces across China's vast expanse, and its declining strength relative to potential enemies. Although China does have border disputes with most of its neighbors, it has not resorted to force to resolve them since its defeat in the 1979 war with Vietnam (except for a brief clash with Vietnam in the disputed Paracel Islands in 1988). China and Russia have made great progress in demilitarizing their common border, and China has shown more restraint than Taiwan in their mutual dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. China has extensive trading relations with all of its neighbors, including Taiwan and both North and South Korea. Unlike the U.S., China does not use economic boycott as a political weapon. Since Chinese external relations have generally improved, its arms exports declined, and its own military forces deteriorated during the past decade, there should be both less fear and less criticism of China in the U.S., while in fact there is more of both. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious is the shock of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, which shattered for many Americans their progressive image of China. Less widely recognized is the second reason: the end of the Cold War has made China less useful to the U.S. as a military ally and more useful as a potential threat to justify U.S. military spending to the public. There have been three major concerns in U.S.-China security relations in recent years: Taiwan, transfer of military-related technologies (including nuclear secrets), and Chinese arms export policies. In all three areas the emerging frictions have more to do with the post-Cold War changes in U.S. policy than they do with memories of Tiananmen or any changes in Chinese policies. The U.S.-China rapprochement was founded in a fundamental realignment of U.S. foreign policy embodied in the Shanghai Communiqu of 1972. The U.S. began to transfer official recognition from the Kuomintang government in Taiwan to the Communist government in Beijing, culminating in the restoration of full diplomatic relations in 1979, just as Deng was beginning his momentous reforms. The U.S. withdrew its military forces and bases from Taiwan and terminated its defense treaty with the island. Yet the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 mandates continued U.S. relations with Taiwan virtually as if it were an independent country, while officially the U.S. does not dispute Beijing's claim that Taiwan is merely province of China. In 1982, the Reagan administration agreed to limit arms sales to Taiwan. China, in return, promised to resolve differences with Taiwan peacefully. During the 1990s, however, the U.S. resumed sales of high-tech weapons to Taiwan, including 150 F-16 fighter aircraft. The ostensible reason for this sale was to counter China's purchase of 50 modern Russian Su-27 fighters, but the response was disproportionate, especially since Taiwan also acquired 60 modern Mirage fighters from France and manufacturers its own fighter (mostly from imported U.S. components) superior to anything made in mainland China. Now the U.S. is considering sharing with Taiwan and Japan a proposed theater missile defense (TMD) system. Similar systems were outlawed by the U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty of 1972. Now that China has apparently developed MIRV technology (perhaps in part through spying), any TMD system could be inexpensively overwhelmed by multiple-warhead missiles. MIRV technology is what led the U.S. and USSR to ban ABMs as uneconomic. Excessive weapons sales to Taiwan--driven largely by the U.S. export drive and its pandering to arms manufacturers--remain an obstacle to consolidating peace in the Asia-Pacific region. The second area of tension has been over U.S. restrictions on the transfer of military-related technologies to China since 1989. At that time, several major U.S. arms manufacturers had contracts with Chinese firms to upgrade Chinese weaponry, including fighter aircraft, tanks, and missiles. President Bush forced the cancellation of all these contracts as part of the sanctions imposed after Tiananmen. Despite the uproar over the supposed transfer of missile technology to China in the months prior to Clinton's June 1998 visit, projects to upgrade Chinese weaponry such as those of the 1980s have not resumed. Recently it has been alleged that China's spies have acquired U.S. nuclear weapons technology. Since Chinese production of missiles and nuclear weapons remains a tiny fraction of that of the U.S. and the former USSR, this should not portend a new nuclear arms race. The third area of tension revolves around U.S. efforts to restrict Chinese arms exports. Ironically, Chinese exports were much greater in the 1980s, at a time when the U.S. did not complain. In fact, several of China's biggest arms customers then, including Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, were also U.S. allies and arms customers. China sold weapons to both sides during the Iran-Iraq war, but then the U.S. and its allies helped both sides too and the U.S. covertly sold arms to Iran. During the 1990s, the low quality of Chinese weapons and end of the Iran-Iraq war led to a precipitous drop in Chinese arms sales. By the mid-1990s Chinese arms sales were one-sixth the peak level of 1987-88 and only 4% of U.S. arms sales. While the U.S. has its increased its market share of global weapons sales, China's sales and market share have decreased. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies decided to restrict international sales of ballistic missiles with the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Although the MTCR was negotiated without Chinese input, China was asked to adhere to it and agreed to do so in 1992. The powerful Chinese military-industrial companies resent these restrictions because the MTCR limits the possibility of selling one of the few weapons that China can make that is in demand abroad. China regards U.S. arms control efforts as being one-sided. The U.S. makes demands on China, but does not offer reciprocal concessions, such as limiting arms sales to Taiwan. Foreign arms sales to Taiwan (mostly from the U.S.) have been more than twice as great as sales to China during the past decade. (James H. Nolt (noltj@newschool.edu) is Senior Fellow at World Policy Institute specializing in East Asia relations.) Sources for More InformationAmerican Friends Service Committee Asia-Pacific Center for Justice and Peace Center for Defense Information Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Pacific Campaign for Disarmament and Security World Policy Institute
II. CommentsFOREIGN POLICY AND VOICE OF
ANCESTORS The United States, by its role as the super power of the world affects even the smallest village in an obscure country. It has the power to affect the way humans treat one another and the world around them. This power in the past and present has been used for material gains and personal power. This type of structure can no longer continue in the global nature of foreign policy today. The intertwining of economies necessitates a new way of looking at Earth as a whole, where an action in one part deeply affects those who may be far removed from those actions. We, as indigenous people, look at humanity as caretakers, not owners, of our environments. The original instructions of our environment and its processes have been tempered and altered, to its detriment. The global economic structure omits personal responsibility for the effects of corporate or national actions on people and the environment. In the multinational corporate structure, CEOs blame stockholders, or managers or anyone they can for their actions that cause wholesale destruction of indigenous cultures and communities and the environment. This is also true on a political level. It is sad to say that our political structure is more influenced by a few multinational firms based on greed and power, than a true resolution of the problems facing our planet. We look for the short term gain rather than the long term vision. What is the answer? In regard to U.S. foreign policy anywhere in the world, we must first consider and focus with honor and respect on the sacred process of the environment and its relation with the indigenous peoples who have learned how to survive and adept in that environment and its sacred processes. We must bear in mind the results of our actions--common sense, not focus groups, studies or impact states that waste time, money and resources. If you remove an element from an environment, such as the removal of vast amounts of water from the Great Lakes to sell overseas, is this a wise use of resources? It may be that this removal affects lives in Mexico and the Gulf States. As native American tradition states, we must see our actions in terms of their effects on the seventh generation in the future. We the few and Indigenous in nature believe in offering our energies for the healing of our sacred and living planet and humanity. The future is now, we must think in hundreds of thousands of years and put aside that, what's in it for me attitude and turn it around and say how may we help, and participate in the healing process: Bring back the focus on original instruction of our environment and its people. The voice of our Ancestors. Coki Treespirit
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