Arms race for Northeast Asia?

John Feffer

「Asia is in the midst of its most peaceful period of the 20th century,」 The Economist editorialised in 1993, 「yet its nations are continuing to arm themselves at an alarming rate.」

The arms spending in Asia attracted media attention in the early 1990s in large part because it was seemingly anomalous. The rest of the world was scaling back or, at least, considering doing so. In Northeast Asia, between 1989 and 1994, both South Korea and China increased their military spending by double digits.

Jump forward to a comparable five-year period between 2001 and 2006. During those years, no major periodicals proclaimed an arms race in Asia. Most news coverage of security issues focused on North Korea』s nuclear program and the difficulties in the US-South Korean alliance. Yet, for Northeast Asia at least, the military budget increases were more dramatic at that time than in the early 1990s.

In the 1990s, Desmond Ball analysed the post-cold war surge in spending and concluded that the acquisition of weaponry in Asia was neither sufficiently rapid nor implemented in a reciprocal fashion to amount to a proper arms race. Countries were increasing their spending not as part of a tit-for-tat process but for a variety of other external and internal factors.

Our notions of an arms race based on perceptions of threat – and the spiral of reciprocal spending based on those perceptions – must be altered. There are still fears of falling behind an adversary』s capabilities. But equally important is the fear of falling behind new standards of modern weaponry and the latest technological advances in networked warfare.

The one country in Northeast Asia that has bucked the trend in military spending has been Japan. Although it has built one of the most powerful and sophisticated militaries in the world, Tokyo still abides by the informal cap of one percent of GDP. Indeed, over the last decade, Japan』s annual military spending has been flat or declined slightly. Can Japan provide similar leadership on the issue of military spending?

Japan cannot do this alone. The Six Party Talks, which focus on North Korea』s nuclear program, has also established a working group on a regional peace and security mechanism. Should these talks resume and the working groups start up again, one item for discussion can and should be conventional military spending.

The countries involved in the Six Party Talks are responsible for the lion』s share of global military spending. If they can agree on a plan to restrain military spending, this would have a profound impact on global spending patterns. The region』s military spending patterns in the 1990s, with budgets going up as global spending went down, were anomalous. By restraining and reducing military spending, the region can once again be anomalous in the 21st century, but in a way that enhances rather than undermines regional security.

John Feffer is the editor of Foreign Policy in Focus. This article is an excerpt of his essay published in 「Asian Perspective on the arms race in Northeast Asia」. www.fpif.org