War looms in Asia

OPINION:

President Trump had the right idea when he changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. At the rate we’re going now, we may soon plunge into perpetual battle on fronts around the world.

Like wild animals pawing at the ground before butting heads and locking horns, the U.S. and its enemies — real, potential and possible — are weighing the odds and the differences between war and peace. Mr. Trump gives the impression of edging close to the brink but not quite ready to jump in. Pete Hegseth, headstrong, heedless, exalting in his title of “secretary of war,” would love to take up arms right now, the sooner the better.

Mr. Trump, however, has a way of shrinking back. Just as he proposed outrageous tariffs, only to bring them way down, so he talks big but climbs down from the heights of warlike, jingoistic rhetoric for fear of making matters worse. So it was with China’s Xi Jinping, with whom he had a most cordial conversation at the South Korean air base outside the port city of Busan before jetting back to Washington for Halloween.

Mr. Trump, of course, didn’t care about the gathering of leaders of what are called the 21 “economies” banded together in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group. He let Mr. Xi hobnob with them while he celebrated Halloween and focused on getting recalcitrant Democrats in the Senate to approve the budget.

Had he stayed, he might have brushed past the representative from Taiwan, whose status as an independent “province” of China is anathema to the Chinese. They missed the chance for a pro forma bow and handshake, but they both appeared in a group photo of the leaders at the conference.

It’s Taiwan that arouses the deepest fears. The Chinese are attempting to intimidate the island with air and naval exercises despite the show of goodwill between Messrs. Xi and Trump. A real shooting war may seem a distant prospect, but Washington, shoring up Taiwan’s defenses with weapons, training and intelligence, may have to use them sooner rather than later.

Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of war for policy, sees China as the greatest threat to the region and Taiwan as its No. 1 target. Mr. Hegseth, at another regional confab, that of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then in Vietnam and South Korea, talked up the need for standing fast against the Chinese, whose threat level has not diminished despite the happy talk between Messrs. Trump and Xi.

Taiwan, though, is just one of an increasing number of flash points. China claims the entire South China Sea, including atolls on which it has built air and naval bases. Mr. Hegseth was thinking as much about Russia as China when he visited Hanoi, talking to the Vietnamese against whom we fought such a terrible war more than 50 years ago, about providing them with transport planes and helicopters.

Strangely, Hanoi counts on its old enemy, the U.S., to be able to stand up to the Russians, with whom it is also dickering for weapons.

Hanoi’s relationship with Beijing is trickier still. Beijing supplied rifles and machine guns for the communist “North” Vietnamese that defeated the “South” Vietnamese in 1975, but Hanoi can hardly ask the Chinese to outfit its soldiers after fending off Chinese forces in a nasty border war in 1978.

History never works out as either the policymakers or historians, looking over their shoulders at the horrors of centuries past, predict. After visiting the capital of Washington’s onetime Vietnam War enemy, Mr. Hegseth was off to South Korea, the scene of an equally fierce war. South Korean gratitude to the Americans for saving the South against the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War is not always apparent.

The South Korean president, Lee Jae-myung, barely tolerates joint exercises with U.S. troops and rates OPCON — South Korean forces gaining full operational control of their own troops from American command in time of war — as a top priority. Mr. Lee also yearns to see North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, but Mr. Kim won’t have anything to do with him. Nor did Mr. Kim respond to Mr. Trump’s entreaties for a summit while he was in Korea. South’s spy agency, however, predicts he will be amenable to seeing Mr. Trump in March after U.S. and South Korean troops have wrapped up another military exercise.

In the cauldron of a potential regional war, the sense persists that the ornate structure of enmities and friendships could collapse at any time while Mr. Kim courts Russian President Vladimir Putin by providing a steady flow of arms and men to support Russian troops in Ukraine. Buttressed by Russia, Mr. Kim has no need to talk to the Americans or South Koreans. If he does finally agree to see Mr. Trump, it will be to get him to say, ‘Let’s forget about your nukes,’ meaning Washington will no longer be uttering the shibboleth of “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.”

Mr. Trump has already told his “War Department” to get ready to resume nuclear testing, and Mr. Putin is saying the Russians should be gearing up to go nuclear in tandem with the Americans. Neither of them has tested a nuke since the 1990s. North Korea remains the only country to have conducted a nuclear test in this century, but Mr. Kim, perhaps under Chinese pressure, has not ordered one since 2017. Japan, 80 years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is veering to the right under its first female prime minister, Sanai Takaichi, who is not inclined to let the Chinese have their way on Taiwan or the South China Sea.

Thus, by fits and starts, talks and tests, war looms ever closer with each round of yakking going nowhere.

• Donald Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington Star.