They had to find some new justifications for their overseas presence, particularly in East Asia, where Japan's inherent power and the emergence of a commercially oriented China offered implicit challenges to the old American order. More concretely, Pentagon strategists have tried to find replacement enemies for the former USSR by demonizing North Korea and muttering ominously about China's successful transition from a Leninist command economy to a state-guided market system resembling the other successful capitalist countries of East Asia. Then, on the initiative of the South Korean president, the two Koreas began to negotiate their own reconciliation without asking for US permission. Regardless of which ventriloquist is in charge of him on any given day, George W. Bush shows no sign of comprehending these matters. Korea policy has become a plaything of Congressional Republican mastodons, and the Bush White House seems much more interested in pleasing them than in the situation in East Asia.
China is another matter.
Taiwan, whose status constitutes the still incomplete last act of the Chinese civil war, remains the most dangerous place on earth. Much as the 1914 assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo led to a war that no one wanted, a misstep in Taiwan by any side could bring the United States and China into a conflict that neither wants. Such a war would bankrupt the United States, deeply divide Japan and probably end in a Chinese victory, given that China is the world's most populous country and would be defending itself against a foreign aggressor. More seriously, it could easily escalate into a nuclear holocaust. Since any Taiwanese attempt to declare its independence formally would be viewed as a challenge to China's sovereignty, forward-deployed US forces on China's borders have virtually no deterrent effect.