Bombings Have Ripple Effect on U.S. Asia Policy

If you want to see the subtle ways in which the Kosovo campaign has affected American policy toward Asia, consider for a moment what has been happening--or, rather, what hasn’t been happening--between the United States and Vietnam.

Early this year, the Clinton administration was quietly moving to upgrade U.S. ties with Vietnam. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was supposed to visit Hanoi and nudge forward a budding U.S. military relationship. A trade agreement seemed to be in the works.

Such steps would help lay the groundwork for what could well be the big foreign policy surprise of the year 2000--an eye-catching trip by President Clinton to Vietnam, the country he went to some lengths to avoid during wartime three decades ago.

But hold on: In the last few months, American officials have found it harder to make progress with Hanoi. And the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia seems to be one of the main factors.

“The bombing has echoes of another time and place,” observed one American policy-maker, referring, of course, to the American bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War. “It has made the Vietnamese a bit more cautious in their dealings with us.”

Vietnam’s recent coolness is merely one illustration of how Kosovo and the NATO air campaign have unsettled Asia.

It’s not just China, which was infuriated by the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Rather, the recent war has had ramifications for American policy toward many other Asian countries, too:

* JAPAN. American officials admit that Japan has been privately troubled by the implications of NATO’s decision to bomb Yugoslavia without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.

In 1991, when the United States and its allies mounted the Desert Storm campaign against Iraq with Security Council approval, Japan said in official statements that it “supported” the use of force. This time, Tokyo used a much weaker word: It said it “understood” NATO’s action.

“We always prefer that military action be taken according to the U.N. Charter and Security Council resolutions,” Yukio Sato, Japan’s ambassador to the United Nations, explained this week. “But in this case, given the atrocities [by Serb forces in Kosovo], we understood.”

Japan hopes that the use of military force by America and its NATO allies without Security Council approval will prove to be a onetime, Europe-only affair.

“The intervention has . . . rekindled Japanese concerns, which date back to the 1950s, about being dragged into one of ‘America’s wars,’ ” Michael McDevitt of the Center for Naval Analyses wrote in a recent paper. “The Japanese see in Kosovo the precedent for a U.S. intervention on behalf of Taiwan and worry.”

* TAIWAN. In 1990, when the Bush administration was desperately trying to raise money around the world to help pay the costs of the Gulf War, Taiwan offered $300 million. U.S. officials, nervous about China’s reaction, reluctantly turned down the money.

This time, Taiwan has been more subtle and more successful. One of the little-known stories of the last few months has been Taiwan’s involvement in support of the NATO campaign that China so fervently opposed.

Taiwan established diplomatic ties with Macedonia in January. During the war, it sent doctors and aid workers to Macedonia and set up a field hospital to help refugees fleeing from Kosovo.

On Monday, President Lee Teng-hui announced that Taiwan would contribute a huge new chunk of money for humanitarian aid to Kosovo refugees. How much? Precisely $300 million, the very amount that Taiwan had offered in support of the Gulf War. The aid would go directly to Macedonia--so that, this time, Washington couldn’t stop the payments even if it wanted to.

* INDONESIA. The efforts of the Kosovars to win independence from Yugoslavia could inspire or encourage various separatist movements in Asia. Among these are the Timorese and Acehnese, who have been battling for independence from Indonesia.

Other such movements include the Moro guerrillas on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines and the Tibetans and Uighurs inside China. But it’s hard to imagine any of these latter groups having much success any time soon.

* SOUTH KOREA. Some of America’s military allies in Asia, including South Korea and Australia, seem to have worried early on that the war over Kosovo might show that U.S. military power wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The apparent success of the air campaign will relieve some of these jitters.

However, the war has also shown how reluctant America is to put its ground forces at risk or to suffer casualties. And Asians have seen that America’s huge arsenal of warplanes and ships can sometimes be overstretched: because of the European war, the United States has operated for weeks without any aircraft carrier in Asia.

“The war has not been popular in Asia,” acknowledged one American official. That could be the epitaph for a faraway bombing campaign that many Asians seemed to feel was too close to home.