June 3rd 2002
By Jason Sherman
Defense ministers and senior government officials from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and North America gathered here for a first-ever meeting aimed at forging new cooperation on security matters in Asia-Pacific, possibly laying the groundwork for new regional multilateral security structures.
Top-level defense officials from Southeast Asian nations as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States joined academics for the May 31-June 2 conference hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a non-profit London-based think-tank. Defense News went to press before the conference began.
"It is a pioneering experiment," Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. deputy defense secretary, told reporters travelling with him to Singapore. "I think the spirit of trying to create better institutions for managing the security problems of Asia in the future is a very, very important one."
The intent of the conference is to create an Asian version of Wehrkunde, an annual gathering in Germany of government, academic and business leaders to discuss European and North Atlantic security issues.
With many of the important defense officials from the region in one place at the same time, the opportunity for informal, unscheduled encounters is one major benefit of the meeting, a delegate said.
Antonio Chiang, deputy secretary-general of Taiwan's National Security Council, and Maj. Gen. Zhan Maohai, director-director of Beijing's Foreign Affairs Bureau, are scheduled to attend, and China analysts said it would be the first time official representatives dealing in military matters from both sides of the Taiwan Strait have attended a conference together.
"[This] may be the beginning of a more regularized defense ministry dialogue that brings together all the major players in the Asia-Pacific region," said conference attendee Bates Gill, director of Northeast Asian studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., part of a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers, said the defense issues in the Asia-Pacific region are "very critical to our future diplomatic and trade relationships, all the important linkages to our future."
"A lot of the Asian defense ministers here will be looking very carefully at what noises and signals come out of the senior U.S. officials present, whether they have a future concept in mind here that might be a bit more flexible," Jonathan Pollack, professor of Asian and Pacific studies at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and a conference attendee, said in an interview.
Indonesian Maj. Gen. Sudrajat, Jakarta's director general for strategic defense, said he hopes the conference fosters a common perception of the threat of global terrorism, and that he hopes such a view leads to cooperation "in a more concrete way" in fighting terrorism, such as the agreement Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Australia signed recently.
That message resonates with a key point Wolfowitz said he wants to make here. "This gathering storm that is the terrorist threat is something that threatens the whole world," he said May 31. "It's true that the attacks of Sept. 11 were on [the United States]. Some people here may feel that that's thousands of miles away, but the terrorist threat is here as well."
Perception of a common threat is key to getting nations with vastly different sets of concerns focused and talking, Pollack said. But formal multilateral security arrangements are much further in the future.
"It's really kind of vaporous, it's not alive yet," said Pollack. "No one has that concept in mind. The question is can you use a format like this conference on an annual basis to ... build an Asian version of Wehrkunde."
