Opening Session

Keynote Speech

RADM Phil Wisecup, President of Naval War College

Good Morning. Madam President Lee, Mr. Chairman Lee of the East Asia Institute, Mayor Kim from Pyeongtaek, and other distinguished participants, thank you so much for inviting us to speak here at this conference. I will give some personal remarks today. And for me this is a return. It is a homecoming. I lived here in Seoul for 2 years from 2005 to 2007. I returned with USS Ronald Reagan to Shinsundae in Busan in 2008.

 
And today I am here. I am President of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island which is celebrating its 125th year. I am a kid from small town in Ohio, and yet, my family is connected with Korea. My parents married while my father was in the Army and because I will be 57 years old, today you can guess that while my dad was serving in the Army during the Korean War, in Washington D.C., they met and married, and I was born. My family lived here with me in Seoul. My wife and 5 children lived in Yongsan. And we had very good memories of that. I am an operator. And what that means is that I take ships to sea. And I have been doing that now for 33 years. As Naval War College’s President, we are actually studying the Korean War this week in Newport, Rhode Island. The previous President before me also served in Korea. So for the last 6 years, the President of the Naval War College has personal firsthand experience living here, in your country. We are no strangers to this area, nor is the 7th fleet.

 
It is tough place to operate. And this is what I can tell you. As I flew into Incheon Airport yesterday, I could see the ocean. I was reminded of the history. I was reminded of the difficult conditions. The tides, the currents, the shower water, the fog, the wind, the cold, we know about this. We practice. We practiced with ROK Navy. I have a friend in ROK Navy. In fact, ROK naval officers have been coming to Newport since the international program was founded in 1956. Do the math. That is a lot of Korean naval officials who have studied at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. My Navy friends reminded me last night what this means.

This is In-Yoen. This is relationships. It is not only in intellectual. It’s in our heart. That is my lesson from living in your country from 2005 to 2007 in Yongsan. Maritime partnerships, like the U.S. Navy and the ROK Navy are forged over generations and it is now a part of our cooperative maritime strategy for the 21st century: our commitment to the combined defense, safety, and security so that the Korean people are iron-clad. For me, I am wearing this, listening to ROK Navy leaders. Working here, listening to people like General Baek Sun Yeop, who visited me in Busan onboard USS Ronald Reagan. He told me stories about dealing with the U.S. Navy. My Korean friends told me of their experiences in the Korean War. All this touched me very deeply. In closing, I would like to offer a quote from our President, Abraham Lincoln, who also lived through difficult times. Lincoln said “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present.” The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise to the occasion. As our cases are new, so must we think new and act new. That is what we tried to teach our students at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. We tried to teach them how to think, how to ask questions, and how to look at historical case studies, just like the one here in Korea. I would like to thank the conference organizers for inviting me here, and thank you all for attending this very interesting conference with our distinguished panelists. Thank you very much.

Session I: The Changing Strategic Environment and its Implications for the Alliance

“The Rise of China”

Victor Cha, Professor of Georgetown University

Thank you very much Chairman Lee. Thank you to EAI and to CNAS for hosting very important conference. Mayor Kim of Pyeongtaek, it is a pleasure to be here with you today. Chairman Lee Hong-Koo is not only a colleague I respect dearly but also a good family friend. It is a pleasure to see you here too. And I want to say I am also particularly happy to be here in Seoul with Admiral Wisecup who has very distinguished career in the United States Navy, but what many people do not know is that he was also a Director of the White House situation room which is, may be next to the President, the most important job at the White House because when things are going well or in the crisis he has to make sure everything runs as he should. And the most importantly, for the rest of the White House staff, he had to make sure the president was happy and he did make sure that president was happy because if the president wasn’t happy he will take it out on the staff. So we are really grateful to Admiral Wisecup for what he did there as well.

My topic today is on the rise of China, which is something I am happy to talk about because I am kind of tired of talking about North Korea. I was asked to do this as the first speaker to paint a wider picture or scene of how we think about the rise of China. I will try to do that in short time that I have been given. When I teach International Relations at Georgetown, in the first class the very first question I ask to students is, “What is the single most important unanswered question in international relations today?” Students raise their hand and they say the war on terrorism, finding Osama bin Laden, the Middle-East peace process. And I talk to them what I think is the most important unanswered question in international relations today is how the international systems going to deal with the rise of China. Because the answer to that question will affect the way we study International Relations from now on. In thinking about this, how the international system deals with the rise of China, there are three schools of thought in terms of how one can think about this. The first is, from an international relations perspective, one might call an offensive realist perspective. Essential idea here is that in an offensive realistic world, states as they seek more power, as they seek more capabilities, they do not always seek these capabilities to survive but they also seek a desire to change the external environment in which they live. So all nation-states are security seeking states, and all of them are concerned about taking care of themselves. From an offensive realistic perspective, as states grow in power they not only seek their own security but they also seek to try to affect or change international systems in which they live—to try to change it to seek their needs—because this is the most effective way of trying to maintain one’s security. So if you take this offensive realist view of China’s rise, what you see is more masculine China, in terms of its foreign policy; you see China that, as it rises, wants to redefine the rules of the international system, wants to create its own rules and own institutions by which to govern the international system. And this perspective naturally means there would probably be some sort of clash of interests at least, at the minimum, between the rising power and the lead power in the system like between China and the United States. For offensive realist, this is almost a law-like attribute of the international relations. As countries grow in power they seek to control their environment. Particularly, as these countries grow in power as they grow in economic capabilities they will eventually seek to dominate the system. Offensive realists would point to the countries throughout history that have done this: Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the United States. All these countries as they grew in their capabilities sought to change the external environment in ways that suited their interests.

 
Second way to look at the rise of China is what we call in international relations, a defensive realist perspective. Defensive realism essentially says that states all seek power to survive, but overall rising powers and tensions may not necessarily be revisionists. They may not seek to completely overturn the system. They would seek to grow in power, but largely remain pretty much ‘status quo’ that their ambitions overall are limited. Their ambitions are not to overtake or undercut the existing system but to change it in ways that are limited in scope enough to be secure but not in a way that overextends. That would be from the defensive realist perspective. From this view, the rise of China will be something that will be somewhat limited in scope. China would largely be confined to secure its interest within its immediate geographical area, the things that it cares most about: Taiwan, Tibet, and to degree, out to the South China Sea. Essentially, the rise of China would mean will be a some sort of accommodation, on the one hand involving the United States, Japan, Australia, and the continental accommodation on the other, largely centered around China. This does not necessarily mean that there will be conflict between the lead power in the system and the rising power.

 
The third view, in terms of thinking about how China’s rise affects international relations, (and I apologize for the jargon) is from a neo-liberal institutionalists’ perspective. In the basic idea here is that changes in the distribution of power in the international system that are created by rising states, they can create conflict and instability but the potential for conflict and instability can be kneeled by and can be lowered by embedding the rising power in the current norms and rules of the international system. Such that the rising power feels that it wants to be a part of current system rather than seeking to overturn that system. From this view the rise of China is not necessarily a zero-sum game. As China grows in power it will try to play by, and contribute to, the international system. It will become a part of all of the international institutions that govern the globe and they will become a contributing member—one that becomes the rule abider and sees abiding by these rules as being in its interests. In international relations, this particular view is associated with scholars like John Ikenberry at Princeton and some others.

The first conceptual point I want to make here is that how the rise of China turns out will greatly determine how we study international relations from this day forward. If China ends up rising and becoming a part of the international system playing by its rules, becoming a contributing member, then the way we study and teach international relations—whether it is at Georgetown or Naval War College, or whatever it is—will be talking about how liberal institutionalism really is sort of our framework for understanding international relations. On the other hand, if the rise of China leads to conflict or China seeks to overturn this system, and seeks to undercut the system that has been created since World War II, then offensive realism will be the way we understand and teach international relations. So there is a tremendous amount of writing on the questions of China’s rise and how it affects the way we study and think about international relations. That is the first conceptual point.

 
Second point is on policy. I hate that the clearest statement from policies perspective from the United States about how to think about the rise of China is essentially an idea that has been associated with the former deputy of secretary of state and our president for World Bank, Robert Zoellick, when he talked about this concept of China becoming a responsible stake holder. And the idea was essentially that liberal, institutionalist argument. That is, as China rises in power, it needs to contribute more to the public goods of the international system. What I mean by public goods are things like counter-proliferation, climate change, freedom of navigation, the host of things that are all seen to be important in the international system. Things to me are the clearest statement of the U.S. grand strategy with regard to China for quite some time. Through and during the Bush administration, the previous administration, it did lead to some good cooperation between the United States and China on a number of issues. I think the Obama administration really try to push this concept of “strategic stakeholder” to the next level. I think that China needs to become a responsible stakeholder with the emphasis on the verb, “needs.” And I think for the Obama administration, the change was that they really pushed China. They did not say that China needs to become responsible stakeholder; they said that the China was now a responsible stakeholder. And it has to play a role whether it is Copenhagen, Iran, North Korea, these sorts of things. This led many media to talk about so-called G2, a group of 2 of the United States and China, basically deciding a lot about the global agenda. I think what we have found thus far is that China is not ready to play that role. China may need to or as a future aspirational point may want to become a responsible stakeholder but it is not ready to play that role now. Its behavior recently has largely been quite parochial and it has not been public goods-oriented, public goods provision-oriented. Any contributions that China has made to public goods, whether this is signing on to counter-proliferation sanction against Iran or making small appreciation in their currency, things have largely been tactical moves. They have not represented a genuine understanding of China’s desire to be a responsible stakeholder. So the result is that there’s currently a great deal of disillusionment with China in the international system. Unlike many other administrations, the Obama administration has already, in two and an half years or two years, come a long way in its views on China. Arguably almost any other past U.S. administration has followed certain pattern in terms of China relations: which is they start out very tough on China and then over the course of four years they end up with a much more pragmatically-oriented policy of cooperation with China. You can certainly say that about George Bush administration and George H.W. Bush administration and the Clinton administration. But the Obama administration started out in almost complete mirror image. They start it out very willing to engage with China to see it in a G2 context, and in after their first year they were quite disappointed with results. And now it had moved much more to policy that is more normal with China. That is, not of engagement that it is relationship in which there is competition, there are complaints, there are things that we want them to do that they want us to do. People now said relationship is bad, but I don’t think it is bad. It’s normal because it is sort of what we normally expect in the U.S.-China Relations.

One other point that I wanted to make on the U.S. views is all you know in the United States we just had mid-term elections. What was very interesting to observe in this election was that for the first time China is actually in issue in the election; it became an issue in the campaign. What is interesting here is that the American public views on China are very different from the sort of elite policy making views. As I just described, the elite policy making views now tell us to be a bit of disappointment with China that they have not been played a role that people hope they would play; in fact, they may not be ready to play that role. But the public view of China completely different. American public view of China, especially during the campaign was China that is rich, (which is completely wrong) and China that owns the United States because it owns so much of our debt. So there is a big gap in the way American public and the elite policy makers’ views on China these days...(Continued)

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