Date: July 8, 2010, 15:40~17:40

Venue: Grand Ballroom, Westin Chosun Seoul

 

Moderator: Mely Caballero-Anthony

 

Good Afternoon. Could I invite those of you standing up there to kindly take your seats? We’re about to commence this session which is basically a continuation of I think the discussion we had this morning. But when we look at post-crisis global and regional order we go beyond just the economic issues, the economic crisis that has just recently affected many parts of the world and now look at other issues. And for this particular session, we have two very excellent speakers and it is my privilege to introduce them to you.

 

To my right is Mr. Roy Kamphausen who is the senior vice president for political and security affairs, and director of the NBR’s office in Washington D.C. As senior vice president for political and security affairs, Mr. Kamphausen manages the NBR research programs on political and security issues in Asia. To my left is Professor T.J. Pempel who is a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s known for many of the books we use in our courses and let me just highlight some of them: Remapping East Asia: The Construction of a Region, which is a Cornell University Press book, Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific and Crisis as Catalyst: Asia’s Dynamic Political Economy.

 

I think to start with, may I just refer to some of the key questions that were actually raised in our handbook which I think should be made mentioned to if only to set the tone of this afternoon’s discussion. And in these two presentations some of the key questions that are actually raised are, include as follows. What are the other security issues, nontraditional issues that have emerged in East Asia? And more importantly in the context of building regional communities, is the framework for bilateral or multilateral cooperation changing accordingly? And what kind of effort is needed for strengthening multilateral cooperation in a changed environment after the crisis? And are there any proper strategies to think about to coordinate or connect different perceptions of individual states on Asian multilateralism? I thought I’d just highlight that just to give us a sense of where we are trying to go with this session. So without further a due, may I call on Roy, please.

 

Presenter I: Roy Kamphausen

 

Thank you, Mely. I wonder how many in the room watched Germany and Spain earlier this morning. I’m mindful that we are at the end of the day and for some folks they may have combined jetlag with an early get-up to the soccer game or football match. So, I’ll try to be entertaining. Actually though, I should begin by saying that I’m actually standing in instead of my NBR colleague Meredith Miller who literally on the way to the airport learned of a death in her family and so she immediately turned around and went home and is participating in those family services this week. And so she called and asked if I would stand in for her and make some comments to lead off the discussion. And I’ll attempt to do my best and when you see her next, please speak well of my efforts even if they don’t match up to what she might have done.

 

This topic really looks at the nexus of traditional and nontraditional security issues, or transnational security issues post-economic crisis. And, I’d like to make four points as much as to get our conversation going and once you heard from Professor Pempel as well, as to present a sort of coherent completely rounded out package. So, let me make four points.

 

The first is, and it’s actually one of the questions that were posed to this memo, it seeks to understand the ways in which traditional security understandings have been adjusted or modulated or changed or transitioned after the economic crisis. And I think one of the ways to look at this is to start by understanding how capabilities may be changing after the crisis. If national resources affect capabilities, capabilities then affect perceptions. And there is one very large consideration here and that is and it relates to the United States. What is I think becoming exceedingly clear is that the United States is entering an era in which it will make national security decisions as much on the basis of resource availability as on security concerns. So, resources will matter as much as strategy. Now your immediate reaction is, “Well that’s natural. That’s the natural order of things. That’s the way it should be.” But in fact, in the United States in the last decade that has not been the case. In the post-9/11 world, the strategic consideration, the overarching concern, the highest priority was to prevent another domestic terrorist attack on the United States. So, the logic was, “will do whatever is necessary to prevent a reoccurrence.” And this fed into the development of the mentality of almost pursuit of absolute security, certainly as it pertained to domestic security within the United States. This pursuit of this condition of absolute security as you know primarily derived from what was once called the “war on terror,” and now it lacks a convenient catchy name but impulses this theme and it’s characterized by the desire to do whatever it takes to prevent this reoccurrence.

 

Now this mindset has had a spill-over effect in a broad range throughout the American defense mindset in many other contingencies including East Asia. My point is that this era is drawing to a close. And resource constraints largely as a result of an outcome of the economic crisis, these resource constraints will be as important in the formation of American strategy as anything else. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this. In fact, the early efforts by Secretary of Defense Gates to attempt to make the American defense industry a tool of American strategy and not the owner of it and this will be a pitched battle for some years. My point is on this first point, is to say that the economic crisis has resulted in a changed approach to how the United States will look at its regional strategy. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is another peg in the coffin of an American-in-decline kind of logic. In fact, there are good indications that the United State may get it right. They may get the mix of strategy and resources right. But we are at the beginning of that process and it remains to be seen on how it will turn out.

 

The second major point I’d offer for your consideration is that transnational security issues may have increased visibility post-economic crisis because these transnational issues in many cases or in nearly all are rooted in or derived from economic interactions. What do we mean by this? Well we think about the transnational nature of food security, and the transnational nature of water security. Consideration of its sources, safety, as well as rising water levels and what that means for littoral populations. A third example is environmental degradation as a result of inappropriate or immature economic development programs. A forth is climate change with many inputs to it but most of which have an economic derivation. And so, post-economic crisis these transnational issues may have greater visibility precisely because they are rooted or derived from economic interactions...(Continued)

 

---

 

Moderator

Mely Caballero-Anthony

 

Presenters

Roy Kamphausen

T.J. Pempel

 

Participants

Dipankar Banerjee

Belinda Chng

Ajin Choi

Chaesung Chun

Jae Ho Chung

Matthew Ferchen

Kiichi Fujiwara

Ilmas Futehally

Xuetang Guo

Young-Sun Ha

Qingguo Jia

Roy Kamphausen

Sung-han Kim

Santosh Kumar

Shin-wha Lee

ANM Muniruzzaman

Srinath Raghavan

John Ravenhill

Paul B. Stares

William Tow

Kirsten Trott

 

Prepared by the Asia Security Initiative Research Center at the East Asia Institute. The East Asia institute, an Asia Security Initiative core institution, acknowledges the MacArthur Foundation for its generous grant and continued support. The East Asia Institute takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the Korean government.