Asians Don’t Want a Pullout of American Troops : Japan: Despite the protests on Okinawa, the presence of U.S. forces is considered beneficial, even necessary.

Do we need American forces on Okinawa? After the horrifying rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by U.S. servicemen, the question is receiving considerable attention, especially as April’s U.S.-Japan summit meeting nears. Okinawa Gov. Masahide Ota is pushing for the removal of U.S. military personnel, and analysts at the Brookings Institution propose sending 20,000 Okinawa-based Marines back to the U.S. So, what’s the matter with this idea? It scares Asians and it should scare us.

Most Americans take the posting of U.S. forces overseas for granted. Asians feel differently. As South Korean President Kim Young Sam stated in an address to Congress, American security allowed Asian economies to develop and flourish. Today more than half the world’s economic growth occurs in the Asia-Pacific region. The future holds even greater promise, and U.S. economic strength is inextricably linked to this growth. In 1993, two-way Pacific trade totaled more than $374 billion and accounted for 2.8 million American jobs. By 2003, if growth continues, this trade could generate 6.6 million jobs in this country.

Here’s the problem: The region is “an ample pool of festering grievances, with more potential for generating conflict than during the Cold War,” as Richard K. Betts, director of Columbia University’s Security Policy Program, put it recently. Territorial disputes range from the Russian-occupied Kuriles claimed by Japan to the military standoff in Korea to the multinational contest for the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. All are eclipsed by the drama unfolding between America’s sixth- and seventh-largest trading partners, China and Taiwan.

Those who don’t appreciate this economic-security relationship should look at Taiwan. Its stock market index looks like a seismograph reading shock waves. When China announced last July that it would test missiles off Taiwan, the index plunged 4.2%. It dropped 3.5% in January when Hong Kong papers reported that China would announce a reunification timetable for Taiwan.

Asian nations want U.S. military forces present, as the Singapore newspaper Lianhe Zaobao stated last year. American troops largely hold together an otherwise fragmenting region. When U.S. presence declines, anxieties rise. After American troop levels began falling from 135,000 in 1990, Japanese newspapers commented on the resulting power vacuum. While defense budgets fall in other regions, they rise in Asia, fueled by fear of a retreating America and a return of regional animosities. Today, U.S. troop levels remain frozen at 100,000.

Japan refrains from military buildup as long as the U.S. shield remains. Reduce or weaken it, and most agree that Japan would go nuclear, facing as it does such nuclear powers as Russia, China and possibly North Korea. A retreating U.S. sends the wrong signal to China, which is increasingly using military force to resolve disputes, as it did last year with the Philippines in the dispute over the Spratlys.

Japan Foreign Minister Yukihiko Ikeda stated in January that the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan, including Okinawa, are vital to the U.S.-Japan relationship and regional stability. The presence of our troops means that the U.S. nuclear umbrella must protect Japan as well. Additionally, U.S. forces in Japan respond to crises in and beyond the region, just as Marines did in Desert Storm, the relief effort in Bangladesh, the U.S. base evacuation in the Philippines during Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption and the U.N. extraction from Somalia. All this is contrary to the belief that there is no conceivable military contingency in East Asia today that could possibly justify our facilities there.

Pulling U.S. forces back to America is no bargain. Japan now pays 70% of the country’s U.S. bases’ cost, about $5 billion annually. If our forces withdraw to the states, we pick up these costs and more. If they respond to crises in Asia, they will require more time and a larger force if they have to fight their way in.

What happened on Okinawa was a heinous crime--one that shames those who served there. The sentences pronounced by a Japanese court last week were deserved. But if we pull our forces out of Japan, it may lead to collective injustice on a much wider scale--and that’s what Asia fears.