Bush’s Pacific Journey Will Help Revise Geopolitics: Triangle Now a Quadrangle

George Bush is about to become the first U.S. President to cross the Pacific Ocean before venturing across the Atlantic. Bush leaves at midweek for Japan, China and South Korea on a journey prompted by the death of Emperor Hirohito. Yet the timing and itinerary of his trip have a significance beyond funeral logistics. Events in Asia are moving quickly, and the Bush Administration will be trying hard to keep up with the changes.

Old ideological barriers are breaking down in Asia and old rivals have started to talk, deal or at least flirt with one another. Just within the past few months, for example, high-ranking Chinese officials have begun to meet with their Vietnamese counterparts, and U.S. diplomats have begun to talk with North Koreans. South Korea has been courting both the Soviet Union and China. Taiwan, too, is steadily improving ties with China, and has recently sent a trade delegation to the Soviet Union.

These developments are themselves an outgrowth of the changes among the four powerful nations with interests in East Asia: the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan and China. For most of the past two decades, the overriding factor governing relations among them was the threat of Soviet military power. This was the factor prompting China to mend fences with the United States, a policy shift that culminated in Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing.

Now, in the wake of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposed troop reductions and the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the fear of Soviet expansion has begun to diminish. At the same time, China, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union, have begun to worry about the implications of Japan’s growing economic power and political influence in Asia. That concern provides some of the backdrop for Deng Xiaoping’s invitation to Gorbachev for a summit meeting in Beijing this May.

Until only a few decades ago, no U.S. President had ever crossed the Pacific. The first to do so was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had promised during his 1952 campaign that, if elected, he would go to Korea in an effort to help end the war. To the considerable annoyance of Harry S. Truman, Eisenhower then fulfilled his pledge a month later while he was still President-elect.

Since then, presidential visits to Asia have focused largely upon war (Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon visiting U.S. troops in Vietnam) and China (Presidents Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan traveling to Beijing). By now, China has become such an established stop on the presidential tour that its vote-getting potential seems to have diminished.

There was never any serious doubt that Bush would fly to Japan as head of the U.S. delegation at Hirohito’s funeral. The President’s personal attendance helps underscore the obvious importance the new Administration places on relations with Japan. In the next few years, as the Administration seeks to do something about its budget deficits, it will turn increasingly to Tokyo to help provide the financial underpinnings for U.S. foreign policy. For example, large-scale Japanese aid to the Philippines will be a crucial element in any arrangement to preserve the two huge American air and naval bases in the former U.S. colony. This combination of American military might and Japanese financial power may well serve as the forerunner of joint endeavors by the two countries elsewhere in the world.

Indeed, before Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita flew to Washington last month, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official spoke of a “group of two”--that is, the United States and Japan--exercising a decisive influence on world events. “Our bilateral relationship has assumed a global dimension,” he said.

No one knows yet the extent to which the United States and Japan--who are, after all, economic competitors--will actually try to cooperate around the world. But the prospect is unsettling to other nations, such as China and South Korea. The Chinese, in particular, are concerned that Japan might seek to transform its economic power into military might. Forming a “group of two” would at least help preserve the U.S. military presence in the Pacific and prevent Japan from going it alone; to that extent, China and other Asian countries might welcome it. Still, the whole idea of the United States and Japan pooling their assets to influence events in Asia inevitably makes others nervous.

Hence the logic of Bush’s planned stops in China and South Korea. The only real question about Bush’s travel itinerary was whether he would go exclusively to the Hirohito funeral, or whether he would go from Japan to other Asian destinations. By stopping in Beijing and in Seoul, the President will avoid the problem of having U.S. policy in Asia too closely identified with Japan.

While in China, Bush will also have a chance to talk with Deng and other Chinese leaders about Gorbachev’s impending visit and what it means for the future of Sino-Soviet relations. It’s a reasonable bet that during the President’s stop in Beijing, Chinese officials (and, perhaps, the White House) will tell the world that there will be no return to the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s. This is the stock answer the Chinese regime came up with a couple of years ago to explain its improving relations with the Soviet Union. The real question is what kind of ties China and the Soviet Union will have in the 1990s.

At this point, there is no sign of any deep-seated Chinese desire to restore close ties with the Soviets. The two countries have a long border and a long history of antagonism; even their alliance of the 1950s was a pretty shaky marriage. Yet China might, at some point, form its own “group of two” with the Soviet Union if it felt such an action were necessary to limit the power of Japan.

Within the United States, there is still a tendency to view Sino-American relations with the perspective formed nearly two decades ago, in the Nixon-Henry A. Kissinger era. Americans still talk at times of the “strategic triangle” of relations between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Typically, when Bush announced that he would go to China after the Hirohito funeral, he was quickly asked how this visit might affect the Administration’s relations with the Soviet Union.

Yet particularly within Asia, the concept of the “strategic triangle” is outdated, because it ignores the power of Japan.

If any geometric metaphor is to be used for foreign relations in Asia, it would have to be a “strategic quadrangle.” A decade ago U.S. visitors to Beijing found Chinese leaders like Deng seeking to enlist American help in restraining Soviet expansion. Now, Bush and other American visitors may increasingly find Chinese leaders preoccupied by concerns about Japan, rather than the Soviet Union.