Big 3 Tested: Will Economic Rivalry Break Up the Allies? : Policy: U.S., Germany and Japan face new realities in global competition after the end of the Cold War.

All around the world, the Stars and Stripes are coming down. From Subic Bay in the Philippines to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, the U.S. armed forces are striking the colors and leaving empty the posts where they kept watch through four decades of Cold War.

It is the largest American military withdrawal since Vietnam. In only two years, 27 major bases and 345 smaller facilities have closed and more than 120,000 troops have come home--with more to follow.

The threat they were posted to guard against--a hostile Soviet Union--is gone; the allies they defended are now safe. And to the distress of many American officials, the alliances they built to wage the Cold War no longer have a clear mission.

Like the empty barracks left behind by departing American troops, the old alliances are still in place, but their future usefulness is open to question.

The key allies of the Cold War--the United States, Germany and Japan--are now the principal economic competitors and the strongest political powers of the post-Cold War world, a new Big Three. But they are finding it difficult to act as allies and adversaries at the same time.

In the short run, the result has been increased contention over each nation’s role when regional conflicts erupt, from the Persian Gulf to Yugoslavia.

In the long run, the stakes are higher: Can the Big Three continue to act as military allies, working together to defuse common threats? Or are they fated to drift apart, each looking after its own defense--an outcome that could, someday, bring them in conflict with each other?

“It’s going to be a very tough decade,” says Rozanne Ridgway, a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs who now heads the private Atlantic Council. “During the Cold War, we got used to a world of ‘Either you’re for us or you’re against us.’ We expected 100% support. . . . The major challenge for the United States is learning to deal with people who on some issues are partners but on other issues are competitors. We will find that discomfiting--to put it politely.”

Prof. Chalmers A. Johnson, an Asia expert at UC San Diego, agrees, saying: “There’s no doubt that the military arrangements today are totally anachronistic. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty is based on the idea that Japan has unlimited strategic significance and no economic significance--but the situation today is precisely the reverse.”

Strategy Needed

The allies are already drifting apart, some officials and scholars say.

“We have to have a strategy to keep the West together; otherwise, it won’t stay together,” warns Michael Vlahos, a strategist at the Center for Naval Analyses here. “It’s like the 1930s,” the decade that led to World War II. “(If) everything you see happening now just keeps on happening, more conflict is entirely likely.”

Even during the Cold War, of course, America’s alliances were frequently troubled by arguments over who paid the costs of the common defense. But now, the allies are beginning to worry about a more fundamental issue: the reliability of their commitments to each other in a world where economic issues drive them apart more effectively than any military threat.

The Persian Gulf War was celebrated by President Bush as the proving ground of a “new world order,” but it turned into a painful lesson in allied differences when both Germany and Japan refused to lend troops to the war effort.

Ensuring security in Europe has turned into a subject of contention as well, as Germany and France have launched a new European military force that some U.S. officials fear will lock the United States out.

And where wars are actually underway--in Yugoslavia, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Azerbaijan--the old alliances have shown little effectiveness. Neither the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nor the European Community has succeeded in restraining the nationalist passions that appear to pose the greatest immediate danger to international order.

The questions are basic: Who shall lead? Who shall fight? Who shall pay? And with the Soviet Union gone, what are we defending against?

So far, the last question has the clearest answer. The end of the Cold War didn’t remove every military threat in either Europe or Asia. The Yugoslav civil war could spill across borders into Albania, Bulgaria and Greece; North Korea poses a potential menace to South Korea and Japan.

And the possibility that Russia’s reformist President Boris N. Yeltsin could fail, and his nation revert to some form of truculent nationalism, has defense planners keeping a long-term eye on Moscow.

“It’s important that Americans be present on the same continent where Russia is present,” says Volker Ruehe, Germany’s new defense minister.

American, German and Japanese officials don’t like to talk about it in public, but they note privately that economic giants can go to war with each other, too. One function of America’s continuing alliances, they say, is to prevent Japan and Germany from feeling a need for greater military power of their own.

The role is usually described with euphemisms--America as a “balance wheel” or “honest broker”--and German and Japanese officials say they welcome it.

“Our eastern neighbors still aren’t sure how the Germans will behave,” says Karsten Voigt, the foreign policy spokesman of Germany’s opposition Social Democrats. “The presence of American troops makes them happy. It ensures them against something that will not happen. And it commits the Americans to consultation with the Germans. So we say, ‘It’s an element of stability in Europe.’ That’s a polite way of saying these things.”

In Asia, too, “the Chinese (and) the Southeast Asians say, ‘We really don’t trust the Japanese--that’s why we want the Americans around,’ ” a senior State Department official says. “There’s a comfort level, a sense of security, by the United States maintaining this relationship, because it doesn’t yet burden (Japanese) society with issues that they can’t cope with.”

But that leaves Americans resentful of the costs they bear--and angry at the refusal of Germans and Japanese to fight in police actions like the Gulf War.

Big Spender

The United States still spends far more than its allies on defense, even after the end of the Cold War. The U.S. defense budget for fiscal 1992 comes to almost $284 billion, about 5% of the nation’s gross national product. Japan is spending only 1% of its GNP, $37 billion; Germany is spending 2.3% of its GNP, $32 billion.

The cost of stationing a shrinking force of U.S. troops in Germany and Japan is not the problem; both countries already pick up much of the added cost. Indeed, beginning in 1994, Japan has agreed to pay 75% of housing, food and other in-country costs for American troops, making it cheaper to station U.S. naval forces in Yokosuka than in San Diego.

Instead, the Gulf War revealed a deeper, more divisive problem: the public in Germany and Japan opposed sending their troops overseas into battle, even in actions approved by the United Nations.

After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, the United States urged Germany and Japan to send noncombat personnel to the Gulf but both countries backed off; as the losers of World War II, the Germans and Japanese long ago swore off military adventures overseas. But both governments promised to push through new laws to make participation in Gulf War-style actions possible.

“We’ve got to be patient with them,” a top Bush Administration official said in the fall of 1990. “It may take them a few months.”

But the changes have not happened yet. Almost two years after the invasion of Kuwait, Japan’s Parliament is only now near the point of passing legislation to allow noncombat personnel to join the U.N. peacekeeping forces overseas. (The legislation passed the upper house early today.)

Germany’s defense minister, Ruehe, says he cannot foresee sending his troops overseas for a decade or more: “I simply do not see that the population, psychologically speaking, and the military, materially speaking, are ready for this.” A poll released last month found that only 23% of German voters favored sending troops to a Gulf-type war.

Different Viewpoints

Among Americans, it is a sore point that has never healed. At a meeting in Washington this spring, Takahiro Ninomiya, a retired air force general, suggested that Japanese “see troops and defense differently than you Americans do. . . . We don’t want to send our sons or children overseas.”

Replied James Auer, a former Pentagon official: “I don’t think American mothers are eager to send their children off to dirty and dangerous jobs, either.”

The Bush Administration has also tried to push both allies toward a more active political role short of sending troops. But when Germany did step forward--pressing the United States for more aid to Russia and for recognition of Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia--other Administration officials expressed dismay.

Part of the problem stems from a mismatch among the German, Japanese and American views of the world. Germany and Japan are global economic powers, but their military and diplomatic interests are focused more narrowly on Europe and East Asia. The Bush Administration, on the other hand, still defines American interests as global, just as during the Cold War.

“It’s not clear that Germany and Japan want to reach beyond their own regions,” European specialist Ridgway noted. “One of our problems is that if we think there is an international agenda worth pursuing and these countries don’t step up to it, we’re going to get angry.”

Another part of the problem stems from American ambivalence over the very idea of Germany and Japan acquiring political and military power to match their economic clout.

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has warned that the growing “German domination of Europe” is reducing American influence on the Continent. “Germany has become so strong that existing European institutions cannot by themselves establish a balance between Germany and its partners,” Kissinger wrote in a recent column.

That kind of alarm could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, a senior U.S. diplomat warns. “You have to be a little bit careful,” he says. “The Germans, accused of not having done enough in the Gulf War, but then criticized for doing too much in Yugoslavia, may come to the conclusion that . . . we’re not going to be able to please people, and therefore let’s just do what we think is right.”

Japan has found itself in the same boat; in the 1980s, U.S. officials regularly asked Tokyo to increase its spending on defense--but that made Americans nervous about the specter of growing Japanese military power.

Both countries face a kind of Catch-22, Vlahos noted: “The more they do to protect themselves, the more we will look at them as different, as separate and not as allies.”

Underlying the U.S. ambivalence about Germany and Japan is an even more basic, unresolved debate over the American role in the world: Is the United States a uniquely potent superpower ready to act alone, or a first-among-equals that need not always take a leading role?

A draft Pentagon planning document that surfaced this spring showed that at least some Administration policy-makers seek a world in which the United States is the only military superpower, unchallenged by either allies or adversaries.

“The United States must show the leadership necessary to . . . (persuade) potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests,” the Defense Planning Guidance draft said. It added that the United States must “account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations”--the allies--”to discourage them from challenging our leadership.”

The paper set off a storm in Europe; Germany’s Voigt called it “a prescription for disaster.” The Pentagon quickly revised the document, and the final version was much less assertive in tone. But the dilemma remains.

“We need to get used to a world in which we don’t pay 100% of the bill and we don’t control 100% of the outcome,” Ridgway says. “It’s going to be very difficult for the United States to handle that, psychologically and emotionally.”

In Europe, the allies are struggling to define their new roles, trying to design new institutions--or redesign old ones--to keep the Continent’s peace.

The Administration has nominated NATO for the job; to make the alliance relevant to the post-Cold War world, Secretary of State James A. Baker III invented a kind of NATO auxiliary, the North Atlantic Coordination Council, to give Russia and its former allies seats at the alliance’s table. That annoyed French President Francois Mitterrand, who wanted to see NATO’s role diminish; Paris has long viewed the Atlantic Alliance as too U.S.-dominated.

At the same time, France and Germany have joined to build a European Community military command, beginning with a combined French-German corps of 35,000 troops. In a series of furious diplomatic messages, the Administration has warned that the plan could weaken NATO, but the Europeans made it clear they were going ahead anyway.

The challenge in U.S.-Japan relations is different. Japan isn’t seeking an independent military identity; if anything, Tokyo is still more reticent than some American officials would like. But within the existing U.S.-Japan alliance, Japanese officials are working to keep their defense costs low--and their influence on Washington high.

“The Japanese don’t have a world view yet,” a senior U.S. official says. “They don’t have a concept of where they fit into the scheme of things in any organized sense. . . . The elite (don’t have) a sense of Japan having a place in the world apart from the West.”

But at the same time, he adds, “there’s much less patience to being given a seat in the back row, particularly as they’re paying more and more of the dough. . . . They want a front-row seat.”

The friction between the United States and Japan has been most intense when their cooperation on defense has rubbed up against their commercial rivalry--as in the 1988 argument over the FSX fighter plane.

Japan originally wanted to produce a jet fighter on its own but agreed to a U.S. proposal for joint production of a plane with technology based on the American F-16. But American critics charged that the FSX agreement would allow Japan to obtain technology that it might use to develop its own civilian aviation industry, nearly derailing the deal.

Asian Role

The Pentagon still defines its role in Asia in traditional terms: “protecting the United States from attack; supporting our global deterrence policy; preserving our political and economic access; maintaining the balance of power to prevent the rise of any regional hegemony,” in the words of a 1990 Defense Department White Paper.

Bases in Japan are important to those missions, officials say, especially since America has withdrawn from facilities in the Philippines and Korea. At the same time, the Pentagon has quietly withdrawn about 5,000 American troops from Japan; Japanese defense officials warn that any further draw-down might compel Tokyo to take on a larger military role in Asia.

If Japan decided to operate on its own, military analysts say, it would have little trouble doing so.

“At a relatively rapid rate, Japan has achieved the defense capacity of a medium power, with an emphasis upon state-of-the-art equipment and well-trained personnel,” Asian scholar Robert A. Scalapino of UC Berkeley wrote last year. “The capacity to undertake regional military defensive measures has also improved, including sea and air surveillance.”

Americans may welcome the lifting of the burden that leadership in the Cold War imposed. But in both Europe and Asia, the loosening of those ties has also weakened the American ability to exert influence.

“For 40 years, our leverage has derived from the security relationship,” says Robert Gerald Livingston, director of the Center for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies here. “Now that’s disappearing.”

U.S. Comes Marching Home Measures of world influence show the United States still plays a strong role, though its profile is declining as Germany and Japan step forward.

DEFENSE SPENDING (Billions of constant 1987 dollars)

Year United States Germany Japan 1950 14.5 0.0 0.0 1960 45.3 2.9 0.4 1970 77.8 6.1 1.3 1980 143.9 27.7 10.9 1990 285.6 35.6 28.7 1992 284.0 32.0 37.0

FOREIGN AID (Millions of constant 1987 dollars)

Year United States Germany Japan 1965 17,491 1,983 1,061 1970 11,424 2,170 1,659 1980 9,633 4,814 4,524 1990 9,755 5,411 7,765

Sources: The World Bank, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, U.S. Defense Department, German Federal Defense Ministry, Japan Self-Defense Agency, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers”