Strategy/security

Strategy
Military_strategy
The Strategic Studies Institute
U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy
Strategic Asia
Heartland
世界史に見られるランドパワーとシーパワーの戦略―江田島孔明
]The continued primacy of geography - A Debate on Geopolitics
Schuldのブックマーク / geopolitics
安全保障
日本国家戦略研究所
防衛白書
ダイジェスト
the Pentagon's New Map
Strategic Planning Framework
GLOBAL THREATS AND CHALLENGES TO THE
UNITED STATES AND ITS INTERESTS ABROAD
Japan’s Geostrategic Situation in the 21st Century
Brzezinski
The Grand Chessboard

March 8, 1992
U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop
A One-Superpower World

Pentagon’s Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.

Rejecting Collective Approach

To perpetuate this role, the United States “must sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order,” the document states.

With its focus on this concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence.

Implicitly, the document foresees building a world security arrangement that pre-empts Germany or Japan from pursuing a course of substantial rearmament, especially nuclear armament, in the future.

In its opening paragraph, the policy document heralds the “less visible” victory at the end of the cold war, which it defines as the “integration of Germany and Japan into a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic ‘zone of peace.’”

The continuation of this strategic goal explains the strong emphasis elsewhere in the document and in other Pentagon planning on using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe.

Nuclear proliferation, if unchecked by superpower action, could tempt Germany, Japan and other industrial powers to acquire nuclear weapons to deter attack from regional foes. This could start them down the road to global competition with the United States and, in a crisis over national interests, military rivalry

The draft notes that coalitions “hold considerable promise for promoting collective action” as in the Persian Gulf war, but that “we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished.”

What is most important, it says, is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and “the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in a crisis that demands quick response.

The draft guidance warns that “both Cuba and North Korea seem to be entering intense periods of crisis – primarily economic, but also political – which may lead the governments involved to take actions that would otherwise seem irrational.” It adds, “the same potential exists in China.”

For the first time since the Defense Planning Guidance process was initiated to shape national security policy, the new draft states that the fragmentation of the former Soviet military establishment has eliminated the capacity for any successor power to wage global conventional war.

In East Asia, the report says, the United States can draw down its forces further, but “we must maintain our status as a military power of the first magnitude in the area.”

“This will enable the United States to continue to contribute to regional security and stability by acting as a balancing force and prevent the emergence of a vacuum or a regional hegemon.” In addition, the draft warns that any precipitous withdrawal of United States military forces could provoke an unwanted response from Japan, and the document states, “we must also sensitive to the potentially destabilizing effects that enhanced roles on the part of our allies, particularly Japan but also possibly Korea, might produce.”

In the event that peace negotiations between the two Koreas succeed, the draft recommends that the United States “should seek to maintain an alliance relationship with a unified democratic Korea.”

DEFENSE STRATEGY OBJECTIVES

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.