America's East Asia policy is in dire need of an overhaul. Today's policy-makers would do well to consider the fact that this is 2005, not 1955, and that maintaining Cold War-era protectorates out of bureaucratic inertia is folly. At the very least, officials should be forced to explain how it is that a dramatically changed geostrategic environment demands a U.S. security posture in East Asia almost exactly the same as that required by the Cold War. We now have the worst of all possible situations, as America is responsible for the defense of feckless clients that pursue risky policies that undermine our own interests and security.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of the forthcoming America's Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and co-author of The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Justin Logan is a research assistant at the Cato Institute.

This article originally appeared in The American Prospect Online.