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PACIFIC POWER PARADOX
 Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2023 by Van Jackson.

All rights reserved.
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Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

INTRODUCTION
1. The Asian Peace as a Guide to Statecraft
2. Founding the Asian Peace
3. Conservative Domination of Asia
4. A Unipolar Imperium and Its Discontents
5. The War on Terror versus Great-Power Competition
6. Pivoting in Posthegemony Asia
7. The Risk-Wager Imbalance of the Trump Era
8. Searching for an Indo-Pacific Peace

Notes
Index
 Preface

HAD I TRIED TO write this book at any prior moment in my life, it would
have come out differently. Or maybe not at all. But it has been
percolating since the first time I was introduced to the puzzle of the
East Asian peace a decade ago. The peace puzzle and the academic
debates surrounding it struck me as vital to informed statecraft, and
it troubled me that nobody in Washington ever talked about it . . . or
thought about the absence of war as anything more than the by-
product of American hegemony. How could the United States engage
with the region on the basis of ideas and presumptions that had only
incidental intersections with a puzzle so important? How could it be
okay to live with a distorted sense of not only what kept war at bay
but also what could make for a deeper and more durable peace?
And since American hegemony was fracturing before our eyes (it
was the Obama era), what would become of the Asian peace if the
conceit of U.S. policy makers was more correct than many scholars
had previously acknowledged?
Whereas the Washington of my early career offered no room for
these kinds of questions, the Trump era made them impossible not
to ask. As unusual and erratic as Trump was stylistically, what
eventually discomfited me most about that time was the shocking
amount of continuity his administration represented in U.S. foreign
policy, especially toward East Asia and the Pacific. That many of us
failed to see Trump’s policies as such owed to the way in which we—
scholars, practitioners, pundits, the media—regurgitated stories
about America as a beneficent “Pacific power” that were at best
reductive and at worst propagandistic. In my first cut at this book, in
fact, I assumed I would be portraying Trump as a stunning rupture
in U.S. statecraft. But as I revisited the archival material, old
speeches, and strategy documents of past presidents, I could no
longer deny that the Trump era was an amplification of habits that
had always been in U.S. statecraft but simply not in our narrative
about it. I came to see our collective mythologizing of what was
often really American imperiousness as encouraging U.S. policy
makers to play with Asia’s fate without even realizing it. And that
was why the United States had become Asia’s greatest source of
volatility.
This book is my reckoning with all of that: a bridge between the
worlds of knowledge (where scholars theorized and measured the
Asian peace) and practice (where many policy makers had a self-
aggrandizing theory of security that was sometimes right). It gives
America due credit for sustaining the Asian peace where and when
that is actually true—but it does not shy away from showing us how
America has been not just Asia’s firefighter but also its arsonist and
an impediment to more durable forms of security. Above all, this is
an attempt to correct our vision of the past, and to reconcile
ourselves with how the region itself has been changing. As I write
this, the sun has not yet set on the Biden presidency, but what we
have seen so far corrects for the Trump administration’s style far
more than for its substance, which worries me about what comes
after.
 Acknowledgments

I OWE A DEBT of thanks to many people for supporting me while I

wrote this book, for infusing me with the ideas and verve that
brought the book to life, and for giving me their time in one way or
another. Because I’m already pushing my contracted word count, I’ll
simply keep the roll call limited to Kristin Chambers, who both
inspires me and makes the suffering worthwhile; to my editor, Jaya
Chatterjee, who saw enough promise in the early (and very
different) version of the book to become its champion; and to
Andrew Yeo, who introduced me to the East Asian peace. They were
the vital elements. But my gratitude extends far beyond them, too.
 Abbreviations and Acronyms

6PT Six-Party Talks

A2/AD anti-access / area denial
ADB Asian Development Bank
ADIZ air defense identification zone
ADMM-Plus ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus
AIIB Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
AMF Asian Monetary Fund
ANZUS Australia, New Zealand, and United States
APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
ARF ASEAN Regional Forum
ASB AirSea Battle
ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations
ASEAN+3 Association of Southeast Asian Nations Plus Three
BRI Belt and Road Initiative
CCP Chinese Communist Party
COFA Compact of Free Association
CPTPP Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-
Pacific Partnership
DPG Defense Planning Guidance
DSG Defense Strategic Guidance
EAEC East Asia Economic Caucus
EAS East Asia Summit
EEZ exclusive economic zone
FONOP freedom of navigation operation
GPC great-power competition
IFI international financial institution
IMF International Monetary Fund
INF intermediate-range nuclear forces
KEDO Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization
NIC newly industrialized country
NPR Nuclear Posture Review
NSC National Security Council
NSDD National Security Decision Directive
NSS National Security Strategy
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
ONA Office of Net Assessment
PECC Pacific Economic Cooperation Council
PIF Pacific Islands Forum
PLA People’s Liberation Army
QDR Quadrennial Defense Review
RCEP Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
SCM Security Consultative Meeting
SCO Strategic Capabilities Office
TAC Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia
TCOG Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group
TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership
PACIFIC POWER PARADOX
 Introduction

A CONTESTED REMOTE TERRITORY in the Himalayas straddling India and

China, known as the Galwan River valley, is prone to the kind
of extreme temperatures that can kill. On June 15, 2020, they did,
with more than a little help from the forces of China’s People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and the Indian Army. The two militaries
clashed there in a brawl that resulted in the deaths of at least
twenty Indian soldiers, possibly twice that many PLA soldiers, and
left more than seventy-six others injured.1 China launched the
attack, claiming that Indian forces had “provoked” it, but not with
modern weapons. Instead of rifles, tanks, and drones, the PLA relied
on fists and nail-studded iron clubs.2 Nevertheless, the scrap
produced scores of casualties; there were gruesome accounts of
soldiers being pushed off cliffs to their deaths and of some being
unable to attend to their injuries in the subzero temperatures.3 The
Galwan River valley was part of a long—more than two thousand
miles—and long-simmering border dispute between the two
continental great powers dating back to the unresolved Sino-Indian
War in 1962, but this represented the first bloodletting to occur over
the standoff since 1975.
On the same day as China’s melee with India, June 15, 2020,
North Korea’s military took credit for an explosion that destroyed the
Inter-Korean Liaison Office at Kaesong, an important symbol of
cooperation with South Korea established less than two years earlier.
Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, warned
only days before the attack that North Korea would be taking a
series of hostile actions against South Korea. P’yŏngyang had a track
record of lashing out against the South—for domestic political
reasons, to punish South Korea for actions the North deemed
unacceptable, and as a signaling tool in nuclear bargaining games
with the United States. But the attack came in the context of a
progressive South Korean presidency that was making efforts to
forge peace and reconciliation with the North. The attack was a rare
instance of North Korean aggression when the South was in a
conciliatory mode.
The Sino-Indian and Korean Peninsula incidents involved
historical rivalries and nuclear arsenals. Both also involved clear but
calibrated acts of aggression that were not intended to start a war
but willfully manipulated the risk of war all the same. Because the
attacks had very different circumstances and motivations, it was a
coincidence that they occurred on the same day. In hindsight,
however, they were also signaling the same thing: a new era of
regional precarity that had been building for years.
Of course, in the larger sweep of the region’s history, these
incidents were unremarkable. Asia has been wracked by large-scale
violence for nearly two centuries. War befell “at least one East Asian
neighborhood in every single decade” going back to 1839, when the
British and Chinese empires clashed in the Opium Wars.4 And most
of the twentieth century was uniquely unkind. During that time, Asia
was an object of colonial exploitation and subjugation by European
empires, the United States, and Japan. It was the bloodiest
battleground in World War II. As of this writing, Asia remains the
only place where nuclear weapons have been used in an attack. Its
people have suffered from a string of genocides and human
atrocities. And for decades after World War II, Asia continued to
serve as both a venue for, and an object of, interstate wars and
mass-casualty violence. Until 1979.
Despite pressures and predictions casting Asia as a “cockpit of
great power conflict,” especially after the Cold War,5 no interstate
wars have been initiated in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, or the
Pacific since 1979. This period of relative stability, commonly
described as the “Asian peace,”6 is a remarkable achievement not
only because of its stark contrast with the long century of violence
and political tumult that preceded it,7 but also because, in the
intervening period, Asia became the world’s wealthiest and highest-
growth region. Stability begot economic—and in many places
political—development. On the region’s periphery, democratic
capitalism had already established anchors, in postcolonial India to
the west and in Australia and New Zealand to the southeast. Then,
in the 1960s, Asia itself started birthing a string of economic
“miracles.” In the span of a generation, China, Hong Kong, Japan,
Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan evolved into advanced industrial
economies and global financial hubs. In a number of countries,
democracy even replaced authoritarianism.8
But the Asian peace has been less placid than implied. In the
best of times, trust among Asian states remained measurably low.9
Insurgencies, terrorism, ethnic violence, maritime piracy, nuclear
standoffs, and military adventurism persisted even as traditional
conflict abated. Kleptocracy has been rampant. And old rivalries
anchored in lingering territorial disputes, as well as great-power
rivalries invoking the future of regional order, have become much
more pronounced in the twenty-first century, particularly since the
U.S.-centered 2008 financial crisis.10 Even in Asia’s most serene
moments, then, the risk of interstate war never really disappeared; it
had simply receded to the background. But no longer.
In 2017, the region ended up on the brink of nuclear war as the
United States and North Korea confronted each other over the
latter’s nuclear weapons program—a problem that not only remains
unresolved today but in most respects has worsened.11 Friction over
Taiwan’s political independence, which has always been a regional
flash point with China, reached new levels of contention in recent
years as China took greater steps to isolate Taiwan from the
international community, and the United States stepped up its
military and symbolic support for Taiwan in direct antagonism of
Beijing.12 By 2021, China was regularly flying fighter aircraft into
Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) not only to make a
veiled threat but also to wear down the readiness of Taiwan’s air
force, which for a time scrambled fighters to meet these
incursions.13 In 2017, the Sino-Indian border dispute escalated to
overt threat making and military posturing and in 2020 escalated
further still to small-scale violence.14 Between 2016 and 2018 alone,
the Indian government claimed that China’s PLA crossed into Indian
territory 1,025 times,15 and yet it may have been an Indian
construction project on its side of the Line of Actual Control that
triggered the Chinese attack in 2020. The South China Sea remains
the region’s knottiest flash point, with six nations making over­‐
lapping sovereignty claims even as China occupies key portions of it
with military facilities built on artificially constructed islands.16 After
several years of waging a campaign of genocide against the minority
ethnic Rohingya, the Burmese military staged a coup in 2021,
triggering defiant pro-democracy protests that it met with violent
suppression and civil war. Given Myanmar’s exposure to geopolitical
currents from not only the United States and China but also India
and Japan, a fast-emerging internal conflict showed signs of bringing
about a disastrous Syria-like regional war to East Asia. Even Japan
and South Korea, both democratic allies of the United States, have
been overtaken in recent years by their historical antagonisms
toward each other, which risks giving rise to a once unthinkable
geopolitical rivalry if not well managed. And for the first time in
decades, the United States and China have entered into direct,
sustained confrontation with each other. Echoing the Cold War, deep
cultures of mutual mistrust now pervade the relationship. Some in
Washington and Beijing even fatalistically believe they have entered
an inexorable “clash of civilizations.”17 These issues do not even
encompass the totality of regional friction and interstate disputes,
only the most likely pathways out of the Asian peace and into the
world of conflict that pessimists prematurely warned about.
The precarity of the Asian peace is a problem not only in its own
right but for the United States as well. Crucially, the Asia-Pacific is
the only region outside North America where the United States has
major territorial holdings. President Obama often relished calling the
United States a “resident Pacific Power.”18 But how much has
America really mattered, for good or ill? What U.S. decisions and
thought processes have gone into preserving regional stability? How,
if at all, does U.S. officials’ thinking about Asia over time differ from
the way scholars have explained the absence of war in the region?
To what extent has Washington been not just a source of, but also a
threat to, regional security? More importantly, what might the United
States do to shore up an Asian peace that is today under
tremendous strain? Answers to these questions depend on how we
explain the Asian peace itself and America’s role in it.

Argument
This book argues that sustaining the Asian peace requires not only
acknowledging but also trying to improve on what I call the Pacific
power paradox: the unvarnished reality that the United States has
presented three different faces toward the Asian peace, sometimes
simultaneously. The first face is that of the aloof hegemon. Several
disputes and crises have bubbled up over the decades that have had
little to do with the United States, and in which either Washington
was disinterested or its decision-making was incidental to the course
of events. Not everything has been about America. A second face is
that of the vital bulwark. In a few crucial moments, U.S. choices
have kept Asia out of war and over time have set a context that
freed other states to pursue their own strategies of security and
community building. More critically, however, a third face is that of
the imperious superpower, maintaining a less-than-benign hegemony
over Asia by conducting policies that undermined sources of the
Asian peace, had negative side effects on the region, and sometimes
directly risked war. America as a Pacific power, in other words, has
not entirely lived up to its romanticized self-image of a benign
“leader”; neither has it always been the region’s chief antagonist.
Instead the United States has been, by turns, less important than
ordinarily supposed, more of a safety net than regional narratives
sometimes acknowledge, and yet also more threatening to the Asian
peace than Washington policy makers’ imaginations have permitted
them to recognize.
America’s paradoxical relationship to the Asian peace becomes
clearer in light of the numerous factors collectively responsible for it
as a historical phenomenon. To be sure, the general deterrence
furnished by America’s military presence in the region, and the U.S.-
centered bilateral alliance system that enables it, have mattered a
great deal, though as this book shows, there have also been
moments when these same factors threatened stability because of
how policy makers wielded them. But a generation of relative peace
has depended on much more than American power. It has also been
bolstered by Sino-U.S. détente,19 intra-Asian economic
interdependence, regionalism (and the institutions, norms, and
peace-building practices that constitute it), and to some extent even
democratization.20 Such a layered understanding of the Asian peace
—one that treats these various sources of stability as historically
contingent and mutually reinforcing—challenges two competing
types of conventional wisdom about America’s role in Asia and by
extension how we understand the absence of war there. One largely
looks past the United States to explain the Asian peace in terms of
local factors. Most research that specifically addresses some aspect
of the Asian peace tends to marginalize the United States.21 Far
more common, however, are claims that portray the United States as
the “indispensable” hero of Asian stability. As U.S. secretary of state
in 2011, Hillary Clinton echoed a sentiment that policy makers have
stated many times before and since: “[Asia] is eager for our
leadership and our business. . . . We have underwritten regional
security for decades . . . [because of] our irreplaceable role in the
Pacific.”22 Both images—peace as a local product and peace as an
American export—render an incomplete picture of what American
power and statecraft have meant for Asia.
These conventional narratives need correcting because, to put it
plainly, the Asian peace is in jeopardy today. Grappling seriously with
how America fits in the story of a generation of nonwar offers a way
of understanding (1) why many of Asia’s numerous crises during the
past forty years became near misses rather than wars, (2) how the
sources of regional stability have gradually been whittled down in
large part because of the United States, and (3) why America’s
margin for geopolitical error is smaller now than it has ever been.
This book attempts an honest reckoning with America’s role in both
sustaining and jeopardizing the Asian peace so that policy makers
might steer themselves toward the former and avoid the latter. A
Pacific power narrative more faithful to reality is a prerequisite for
better statecraft. Acknowledging that America has been a major
source of threat to the Asian peace as well as its occasional
guarantor opens up possibilities for policy solutions that traditionally
get short shrift in Washington—not only peace building, treaty
making, arms control, and regional institutions beyond the United
States, but also an economic statecraft that is more judicious about
coercion and combats upstream causes of war like kleptocracy,
oligarchy, widespread worker precarity, and climate maladaptation.
The Pacific power paradox is a better narrative of America’s role
in Asia because it is a more accurate one, and by extension a more
useful one as a guide for policy. To totally write off or villainize the
United States would be bad history. And to adopt an attitude of
uncritical American exceptionalism that points to the Asian peace as
some gift bequeathed to Asians would be not just condescending
but dangerous, for it would elide the myriad ways the United States
often unwittingly played with the fates of human lives across the
vast expanse that is now sometimes called the Indo-Pacific. The task
before anyone concerned about Asia, then, is not only to understand
the historical sources of what has kept war at bay—which requires
being clear-eyed about America’s mixed legacy—but also to come up
with the right configuration of risk-taking and risk management in
relation to them given what Washington’s politics allow and what the
region’s shifting geopolitics demand. Consciously thinking about
statecraft in relation to the Asian peace can help policy makers and
the public triangulate that need.

The Way Ahead

Chapter 1 provides a conceptual introduction to the Asian peace,
explains why sustaining it has relied on many factors including and
beyond the United States, and how a layered understanding of the
peace can be leveraged to draw meaningful conclusions about U.S.
statecraft in Asia. Chapter 2 discusses the emergence of the Asian
peace in the context of pivotal decisions made between the United
States and China during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations.
Sino-U.S. détente was a not entirely intentional founding moment for
what would become the Asian peace.
Chapter 3 evaluates the risks, wagers, and strategic thinking
about Asia during the Reagan era—a time when the United States
deliberately pursued a high-risk, military-centric approach to security
but enjoyed the good fortune of doing so in a relatively low-threat
environment. Chapter 4 spans the bulk of the “unipolar moment,”
starting in the George H. W. Bush administration and continuing
through the Clinton presidency. U.S. strategy toward Asia in the
immediate post–Cold War years was premised primarily on asserting
continuity at a time of radical uncertainty before transitioning into a
period of liberal hubris. Chapter 5 documents the war-on-terror
coloring of the George W. Bush administration. The Bush era’s
crusading wars of choice in the Middle East and Afghanistan,
coincidentally, saved Asia from the worst of the neoconservative
impulse. Chapter 6 examines U.S. strategy during the presidency of
Barack Obama, who pursued a deliberately conservative approach of
“rebalancing” to Asia—that is, reallocating greater time and
resources away from the Middle East and toward the region deemed
to be of greatest importance to U.S. interests. Chapter 7 presents
America’s approach to Asia under Trump as hypermilitarized,
mercantilist, as hostile to multilateral agreements as it was to China,
and consumed with rectifying bilateral trade deficits and haphazardly
imposing tariff barriers. Consequently, U.S. policy wrought trade
wars, racially tinged antagonism toward a more aggressive China,
nuclear crises, and a region on the edge. By amplifying some of the
worst tendencies in U.S. statecraft over the decades, the Trump
administration helped reduce the sources of the Asian peace to little
more than military power and Chinese restraint, making the
continued absence of war more tenuous than many realized.
Chapter 8 concludes the book by drawing out policy-relevant
insights from understanding the Pacific power paradox, outlining
principles of action toward Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region
that are robust across a range of alternative futures.
Asia is not well served by a Pacific power suffering from self-
aggrandizement; neither is America. Knowing when the United
States has mattered more or less, and for good or ill, is the only
sustainable basis for good strategy. It also helps us see that Asian
security is today structurally unsound. If we fail to appreciate
America’s mixed legacy in Asia, we risk mythologizing or
sleepwalking our way into war.
 CHAPTER ONE

The Asian Peace as a Guide to

Statecraft

R EVEALING AMERICA’S THREE FACEStoward the Asian peace requires a

more refined understanding of what it is (and is not) before
using it to assess the risks and wagers implicated in U.S. policy
across presidencies. This chapter therefore introduces the concept of
the Asian peace and explains why its “causes” must be understood
as the fortunate convergence of several factors that scholars have
often analyzed in isolation. It then justifies using this layered
understanding as a diagnostic baseline for evaluating risks and
wagers in statecraft.

What Is the Asian Peace?

While the threshold definition for the Asian peace is the absence of
interstate wars, there is a measurement controversy over what
constitutes war. Counting only declarations of war by one state
against another is problematic for the obvious reason that wars can
occur de facto, without being declared. So political scientists
generally rely on numbers of casualties for counting armed conflicts,
with debates about the minimum threshold usually varying between
twenty-five and one thousand combat-related deaths.1
This is why scholars analytically hive off the Indian Ocean region
from “Asia” when framing the Asian peace—if it were included, it
would obscure the puzzle. Although it has become fashionable to
expand the definition of Asia to sometimes also include the Indian
subcontinent and its surrounds—and, indeed, there is some
analytical merit to doing so2—the 1999 Kargil War between India
and Pakistan was a war by any definition. It involved mass military
mobilizations, heightened nuclear risk, and produced more than four
thousand casualties, with some estimates much higher. Indian and
Pakistani troops, moreover, have intermittently fought over the
disputed Siachen Glacier since 1984 and fought over Kashmir in
2001–2 in operations that produced more than three thousand
casualties.3 If the Indian Ocean region is part of the Asian peace,
then the peace never was. Yet a relative peace endured throughout
East Asia and the Pacific since 1979, suggesting distinct logics of
security exist in the Indian subcontinent that have very little overlap
with those of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, or Oceania. This may
be changing, a subject I explore later in the book, but for the
duration of the Asian peace, conflicts of the Indian Ocean region—
specifically Indo-Pakistani rivalry but also Sri Lanka’s conflict with
Tamils—have not intersected with East Asian flash points, have not
been addressed within the scope of what we typically think of as
Asia’s security architecture,4 and for better or worse have rarely
entangled actors of the Asia-Pacific to date.
To be sure, Asia’s recent history has been a “relative peace”
rather than an absolute one, and justice during it has been very
unevenly distributed.5 For this reason, the disagreements about
defining and measuring peace are more interesting than the
contestation around measuring war. Everyone can agree that peace
involves the absence of violence, but there is some dispute about
whether the violence that should analytically concern us is only
literal or structural and literal. While many studies of the Asian peace
care only about the absence of violent conflict, Johan Galtung
popularized a concept of “structural violence” in 1969, which
distinguishes between literal violence, perpetrated by individuals
against others, and structural violence, which described social
groups deprived of the means for realizing a life free from
oppression; social groups experience physical harm too, but the
perpetrator is obscured.6 The two are causally linked because much
of the literal violence in the world arises from conditions of structural
violence. Galtung considered the absence of literal violence to be a
negative peace, whereas the absence of structural violence
constituted a higher standard that he dubbed positive peace.
Although the puzzle of the Asian peace explicitly emphasizes the
negative version, appreciating Galtung’s distinction is important for
being able to make sense of the peace. Some of the sources I
address hereafter can only explain parts of the region that
experience a negative peace, while other factors associated with the
Asian peace best account for positive forms of it.7
The extreme types of peace, then, differ not just in the kind of
qualitatively different nonwar situations they describe, but also in
how they are produced. A negative or shallow peace is described as
such because it relies on strategic rationales and the wielding of fear
to preserve stability. Manipulating risk for the sake of deterrence, as
the peace researcher Dieter Senghaas critiqued, is an “organized
peacelessness.”8 Putting violence in service of nonviolent ends
perpetuates, not resolves, the prospect of violence. To rephrase this
in the idiom of coercion, as Alexander George and Richard Smoke
once observed, deterrence is at best a time-buying strategy whose
success must be measured based on how one uses the time bought
to ameliorate the conditions giving rise to the need for deterrence in
the first place.9 In other words, a stability based on fear and risk is a
precarious interim condition, not an end. By this reasoning, a
negative peace inherently lacks durability, regardless of its longevity.
A more positive and durable peace, by contrast, transcends
rational, fear-based reasons for avoiding war. The most fragile kind
of peace exists between enemies, precariously sustained by fear of
reprisal; this is the “organized peacelessness” of deterrence. But
enemies can also achieve rapprochement or détente, as China and
the United States did in the 1970s. Rapprochement or détente
involves mutual restraint from transgression based on a shared
understanding that both sides’ strategic purposes are better suited
by cooperation than conflict. It is a lukewarm kind of peace that
precedes trust. The next phase of peace beyond rapprochement
replaces images of the enemy with a security community or “zone of
peace”—a space where war is simply unthinkable because of
solidarity and trust.10 In the Asia-Pacific, the strongest security
communities include the Australia–New Zealand relationship, the
U.S. alliances (with Australia, Japan, and South Korea), and at a less
developed level the member states that make up ASEAN. The
prospect of war for these countries exists only outside these
relationships, not within them.
The point is that the Asian peace does not merely cover a diverse
geographic expanse; it covers diverse ranges of peace with different
depths. The appearance of a single observed outcome (no interstate
wars) in this instance can also be understood as many outcomes
best described as a layered understanding of the Asian peace—a
region of numerous microclimates spanning from areas where deep
security communities have formed and war is “impossible” to areas
defined by deep rivalries and frozen conflicts between sworn
adversaries, as well as hybrid zones giving rise to the trend of “hot
economics, cold politics.”11 Despite the absence of war, in other
words, the valence of different parts of the region varies depending
on context and locale. As Stein Tonnesson has observed, “Peace in a
region is the cumulative effect of a vast number of more or less
conscious decisions not to resort to [armed violence].”12 Those
conscious decisions are not likely to be based on the same reasoning
in every individual case, or even in most cases. As I will explain, it is
observably true and logical that multiple valid “causes” of the Asian
peace have existed simultaneously and complementarily with one
another.

Explaining the Puzzle

So what best accounts for the Asian peace? Scholars who have tried
to answer this question have almost always proceeded according to
the positivist designs of modern political science. Even when not
invoking the language of science explicitly, Asian peace research is
often on the hunt for that independent variable with the greatest
explanatory power.13 If done in the spirit of trying to discern the
relative importance of different factors, there is much to commend
the variable-based approach. It is logical, systematic, and evidence
based.
This approach errs, however, when presuming that there is a
single cause of what we care about, when pitting causes against
each other as if they could not be complementary, and when
implying that certain explanations should be ruled out or
disconfirmed simply for having less causal weight than the
researcher’s preferred cause. Reductionism of this sort presents a
distorted picture of reality for those who would act on research
insights. The following discussion reflects the most compelling and
commonly accepted factors associated with the Asian peace,
capturing the reasoning, merits, and limitations of each. Only by
synthesizing these together, seeing their importance as dependent
on their convergences in time, do we have both an accurate and
actionable basis for relating the Asian peace to statecraft.

Power Rationales
A common realist view is that America has been Asia’s “pacifier”—
that is, the United States has kept the peace “by engaging China in
the hope that, as it becomes more prosperous and democratic, its
demands and behavior will moderate, and by keeping a large
number of troops deployed in Northeast Asia in an attempt to keep
conflicts from starting.”14
For more than seventy years, it has been an article of faith in
U.S. grand strategy that a forward-positioned military presence in
Asia is a prerequisite of regional stability.15 With an eye primarily on
the Soviet Union, the United States spent most of the Cold War
trying to maintain a balance of power in Asia to prevent anyone from
establishing hegemony in the region. In a purely geopolitical sense,
balance-of-power thinking still prevailed in post–Cold War
Washington. But the demise of its Soviet peer competitor gave way
to “unipolar moment” thinking among U.S. policy makers, who
started believing that a geopolitical balance necessitated a favorable
military imbalance (military superiority). This meant that preventing
a regional hegemon required the ability to sustainably project
enough power into Asia that the United States could defeat any
adversary if needed.16 Such power projection, in turn, has always
presupposed a forward basing structure, not only to enable military
operations with logistics and maintenance but also to ensure U.S.
forces are close enough to the action that they can respond in a
timely manner, thus winning the day, which ultimately induces the
caution in the adversary that prevents it from aggression. This
reasoning—peace through deterrence by means of a forward
presence—is prominent in Washington, in the security studies
literature, and among most of Asia’s developing and newly
industrialized nations irrespective of whether they are allies of the
United States.17
But crucial as America’s forward military presence has been for
Asian stability, it is not necessarily even the most important power-
based explanation. From the moment Sino-U.S. relations opened in
February 1972, the United States has used détente with China as a
bulwark against regional conflict, and with some success. To the
extent that experts attribute the Asian peace to Chinese restraint
and its prioritization of economic development,18 it is premised on
détente with the United States.19 As Singapore’s former prime
minister Lee Kuan Yew once opined, whether Asia can remain free of
major conflict will depend heavily on whether “China becomes part
of the management of international peace and stability.”20 Détente
with China was an attempt at doing just that: bringing China into the
management of international stability as a way of preemptively
foreclosing on the perils of a dissatisfied rising power, thereby
keeping Asia out of war. And as Robert Ross notes, as much as we
may think of détente as involving niceties and diplomatic acumen, it
is based on an underlying balance between China as a continental
great power and the United States as a maritime one.21 That rough
equilibrium created both space and incentive for the mutual
understanding between China and the United States that ultimately
bridled China’s war proneness after 1979. It also made possible a
conveniently ambiguous status quo—in lieu of facing an irreducible
conflict of interests—regarding Taiwan’s fate. And it gave permission
for China and the rest of the region to step back from the arms race
and acute territorial competition in favor of economic development.
The third way power contributes to the Asian peace centers on
U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and to an extent
the Philippines.22 As military coalitions, they lend credibility to the
deterrence of local adversaries and amplify U.S. force capacity.23 As
sites of dense, intimate exchanges, alliances are capable of
transmitting liberal political values.24 As sources of reassurance for
the client state, alliances can prevent nuclear proliferation.25 And as
“tools of risk management,” they allow patrons to prevent clients
from waging undesirable wars.26 Allies also play host to U.S. bases,
without which the United States would have no stable local
presence. And without allies, no balance-of-power foundation for
détente would exist; a strictly out-of-region military is not much of a
balance against a locally dominant one.
America’s alliances in Asia have historically lived up to this
abstract potential. Throughout the Cold War, for instance, the U.S.
alliances with Taiwan (before opening ties with China) and South
Korea actively restrained both from waging wars of unification. The
U.S. Compact of Free Association with Palau, Micronesia, and the
Marshall Islands—a sphere-of-influence arrangement that gives the
United States exclusive responsibility for their respective national
defenses—has bought those states out of developing their own
militaries and foreclosed the possibility of conflict between them or
with their immediate Pacific neighbors.27 Similarly, we can question
whether Japan would have sustained its constitutional pacifism if not
for a U.S. alliance that has long been the core of Tokyo’s national
security strategy. The United States’ extended deterrence
commitments to Japan and South Korea are routinely credited with
preventing either nation from pursuing nuclear weapons.28 And the
United States has contained a rivalry between the two by buffering
tensions and finding reasons to maintain a pragmatic, functionally
cooperative relationship.29 Without a demonstrable commitment to
its alliances with both countries, it is hard to see how either would
have accepted America’s buffering role in their enduring antagonism.
The character of the Asian peace is not entirely reducible to U.S.-
related power considerations, though. For one thing, the way U.S.
officials have sometimes wielded military power in Asia, playing
coercion games with adversaries, as I discuss in subsequent
chapters, has been partly responsible for Asia’s near misses with
war. Further, power-based rationales sustain only the shallowest,
most fragile forms of peace, which means that the interplay of
alliances and deterrence has much stronger purchase in Northeast
Asia—where rivalry dynamics are acute and crises recurring—than in
Southeast Asia and the Pacific, where deeper forms of amity have
sometimes flowered in the absence of war, calling out for an
explanation other than (or at least supplementary to) deterrence or
alliances. And while Sino-U.S. ties have been a powerful source of
stability in Asia, perversely, détente itself was one of the motivations
for China’s February 1979 invasion of Vietnam, as chapter 2 explains.
Most important, détente too constitutes a negative peace largely
devoid of trust, meaning even it provides at best a partial
explanation for a region pocked with more positive forms of peace.

Economic Rationales
In 1994, Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew looked
at Asia’s future and declared the widespread pessimism of the day
unfounded, explaining, “The peoples and governments of East Asia
have learned . . . the more you engage in conflict, the poorer and
the more desperate you become.”30 Most of Asia’s developing
nations believed the same. Regional stability did not just overlap
with the East Asian “economic miracle”; it was inseparable from it.
Dozens of unresolved territorial disputes persisted in Asia, and
historical grievances abounded. But most noncommunist
governments decided starting in the 1960s to focus on national
economic growth, export markets, intraregional supply chains, and
trade. Lee Kuan Yew’s comment captures a collective understanding
of what Asian policy makers believed would happen if they did not
focus on development: poverty and conflict.
The economic perspective on the Asian peace takes several
forms, all of which echo Lee Kuan Yew, and all of which trace the
collective decisions by Asian statesmen to avoid war to the presence
of high degrees of economic interdependence within the region.
Interdependence exercises a restraining influence on foreign policy
decisions (and hence war) by increasing the costs of conflict through
linked supply chains and trade ties,31 by giving states an outlet for
signaling disapproval and practicing coercion without the need to
resort to military violence,32 and by empowering corporate interests
that lobby for governments to pursue commerce over conflict.33
Among its proponents, the how of an economic peace is in dispute;
the reason for the absence of war is not.
But there is also a “developmental state” account of the Asian
peace, which sees decision makers sidestepping conflict either
because it pays or because it is part of an economically centered
political identity. From this vantage point, economic interdependence
works by buying states out of conflict. For ruling classes across Asia,
avoiding war in favor of development often literally pays. Since the
1960s, corporatism—using state privilege to incubate particular
companies and business sectors—has been a dominant feature of
Asian public policy.34 This practice empowers Asia’s ruling political
elites in matters of the economy, and it has created a “substantial
overlap between business and government” via nepotism, patronage
networks, and corporate-government partnerships, some of which
are legitimate, and some of which conflate individual and national
interests.35
Everything is not necessarily attributable to greed, however. Most
of the governing coalitions across the Asia-Pacific are internationalist
rather than statist in orientation, which presupposes trading over
fighting.36 This is especially the case in Southeast Asia, where
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Deadly decoy
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Deadly decoy

Author: Randall Garrett

Robert Silverberg

Release date: November 14, 2023 [eBook #72119]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1956

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEADLY

DECOY ***
 DEADLY DECOY

By CLYDE MITCHELL

Would you say present-day Secret Service men have a

tough job protecting the President? No doubt, but as time
goes on it will get tougher. Here is about as tricky a
method of liquidation as we've ever come across.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories February 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Thank you for permitting me to come to your office," said the
Damakoi, very politely.
"Sit down," I said, and glanced at the instruments on my hidden desk
panel. With a member of the most fanatically dangerous race in the
Galaxy sitting across from me, I didn't feel like taking chances.
Every non-radiating detector we had was focussed on the blue-
skinned being before me, and every meter showed that the alien was
harmless. Which didn't necessarily mean anything, of course—
Holdreth Khain of Damak could easily have had something else up
his sleeve. It was my job to make sure that whatever it might be, it
wouldn't work.
 Deadly enemies, they drank to each other's damnation.

"I realize that you don't trust me," the Damakoi said. "But I have
come here merely to warn you. If you have time to listen to my story
—"
He left the sentence hanging, as though waiting for a rebuke from
me. But I'd had my orders.
"It's not that, Holdreth Khain," I said, keeping my voice smooth; "We
realize that a high percentage of your race are loyal to the Galactic
Federation. You are all fanatical in your beliefs, of course, but that is
merely a racial psychological trait. There are as many of the
Damakoi for us as against us. The trouble is, we can never know
which is which."
It wasn't quite true. There were many more of the Damakoi against
us than for us. At least seventy percent of the beings from the planet
Damak hated the principles that the Galactic Federation stood for. If
this alien was against us, I was in one devil of a jam.

"My people have acquired a very unsavory reputation throughout the

Galaxy," the Damakoi said. "But I am not the assassin type, myself."
He waved a four-fingered blue hand in a deprecative gesture. "I am
in complete disagreement with the anti-Federation beliefs which are
widely held on my planet."
I nodded and tried to keep my face pleasant. I had little enough love
for the Damakoi—they were mostly hotheads whose suicide
assassins had done too much already to wreck Galactic amity. I
trusted Holdreth Khain about as far as I could throw a chimney by
the smoke.
"And why did you wish to see me, Holdreth Khain?" I asked.
He seemed terribly tired and sad, as if the many sins of his
countrymen all weighed heavily on his shoulders. He put a hand up
to his face and brushed across it, as if to brush away his own fears
and worries.
"I'll come straight to the point, Mr. Cameron. One of my fellow
Damakoi—a man named Zorvash Pedrik—is on this planet. He
landed in an indetectable one-man spaceship, carrying a theta
bomb."
I nodded, and I could feel my jaw muscles tightening. If a Damakoi
assassin could get inside the Galactic Capitol building carrying a
theta bomb, the whole Council would die of radiation. A theta bomb
doesn't explode; it flares. The resulting hellish radiation kills
everything within half a mile of the radiation center. It consists of two
little spheres of ditherium—one positive, the other negative. When
they get within a few inches of each other—poof!
"How is he carrying it?" I asked. "A theta bomb has to be heavily
shielded; even when they're several feet apart, the radiation is
enough to kill whoever's carrying it unless they're pretty heavily
shielded."
The Damakoi spread his hands in a shrug. "I do not know; all I can
tell you is that I know the assassin personally. I can recognize him."
It sounded good, but I still didn't trust the being. His kind were too
treacherous and fanatic. Even the ones on the side of the Galactic
government were a hotheaded bunch.
Holdreth Khain said bitterly: "It will be the ghastliest outrage ever
committed by a Damakoi—and that covers a lot of territory. The
explosion flare will wipe out the delegates from hundreds of worlds."
"I take it you don't approve?"
Khain looked up. "My people—many of them—oppose the Multiworld
Charter and the Galactic government. They will take any steps
necessary to destroy the government. And in doing so, they have left
a trail of blood throughout space.
"I have long disagreed—sometimes violently—with this bloody policy
of assassination, I have personally removed fourteen of the
attempted killers."
I tried to keep a grim smile off my face. This bird was a true
Damakoi; he hated the killer policy, but saw nothing strange in the
fact that he had wiped out fourteen of them himself. If he had.
"Luckily," he continued, "I happened to find out what Zorvash Pedrik
intended to do. I could not kill him personally, but I have been able to
get here in time to head him off. I want you to find him—before he
succeeds."
I nodded slowly. "I understand, Holdreth Khain. It is a noble and
honorable thing that you are doing. I'll see to it that you get a proper
reward for this information."
"No reward will be necessary," the Damakoi said. "The failure and
death of Zorvash Pedrik will be reward enough for me."
"All right," I said, "let's see what we can figure out."
I was sitting right on top of a powder keg, and I knew it—but what
could I do but see it through?

The Galactic Capitol is a great, airy pile of a building that soars a full
three hundred stories into the air. It rears up from the heart of Central
City, jutting into the sky like the man-made mountain that it is.
Around it, the hundreds of floodlights cast a shower of brilliant
radiance over its sparkling, milk-white walls.
I had stationed armed guards at each of the ten entrances, the
fastest and most quick-witted men in the Service. It would be almost
impossible for a Damakoi to get inside undetected.
But "almost" isn't good enough. My nerves were tighter than violin
strings, and they felt as though they were vibrating at high pitch.
I was in a hell of a touchy position. If all the Damakoi had been
against us, it would have been easy—just blast every one that got
within half a light year of the Capitol. Unfortunately, about three out
of ten Damakoi were allies, and their insidious inside work on their
own planet kept the dangerous fanatics badly crippled. We couldn't
afford to kill three innocent Damakoi for every seven guilty.
I was pretty sure I knew where Holdreth Khain stood, but I couldn't
take any chances.
I knew he wasn't carrying a theta bomb on him; the detectors would
have picked up the radiation from the two spheres. Even if he'd had
it concealed inside his body, there would be no way of putting
enough lead around it to conceal it. I wished there was some way I
could X-ray him, but X-rays are deadly to the Damakoi. Unlike
human beings, the Damakoi can't even stand a little bit of hard
radiation; they die if they're even X-rayed.
The two of us approached the immense bulk of the Grand Capitol. I
was saying, "Damakoi have been upsetting the social equilibrium for
over a century. It almost seems as though your people get some sort
of unholy joy out of wrecking everything that other beings build,
work, and strive for." It was a thinly-veiled insult, and it was meant
that way; I wanted to get his reaction.
He looked at me oddly for a moment, but he said nothing.
"Come along," I said. "Let's go around and meet the guards. I want
to make sure they know you. I wouldn't want to have you killed
unnecessarily."
I took Holdreth Khain from gate to gate, exhibiting him to my men. At
each entrance, I saw the men's eyes fill with suspicion while their
manners remained polite.
"All right," I said, after we had been to all ten gates, "now the guards
will recognize you. Let's start looking for Zorvash Pedrik—before he
causes trouble."
Holdreth Khain nodded grimly. "Let's go."

Somewhere in the city was a killer with a theta bomb—if Holdreth

Khain wasn't lying. And I had a hunch he was telling the truth about
Zorvash Pedrik.
There were eight Damakoi legitimately in the city. All of them were
known to be pro-Galactic men with the possible exception of a
Damakoi by the name of Jedon Onomondo, who was still suspected
of having anti-Government sentiments in spite of the fact that he had
helped us in one or two minor matters.
But Jedon Onomondo had been in the city for three months or so;
we'd had him tailed all that time. He couldn't have come to Earth in
the last week in an indetectable spaceship.
Nevertheless, I ordered a double watch kept on him.
The next stop was to comb the city for radiation sources.
Ditherium is funny stuff. There are two kinds: positive and negative.
When one kind gets near the other, the radiation given out increases
as the distance between them decreases. At ten feet from each
other, they give out easily detectable X-rays. Within a few inches,
they flare violently in the hard gamma.
I knew that no Damakoi could carry them around unless they were
encased in heavy lead; the radiation would kill him.
Even so, I started looking for radiation in the city. I had an odd hunch
I'd find something.
It took several hours to go over the whole city. The normal sources,
such as the power pile on Four Hundredth Street East, were quickly
spotted and ruled out. But eventually we located a center of neutrino
radiation in the Hotel Grenada, up on Skyline Drive.
"He's in the Hotel Grenada," I told Holdreth Khain. "Let's surprise him
before he has a chance to set off that bomb."

The Hotel Grenada was a huge, ancient structure that had been built
just after the atomic bombs had blasted the city during the Final War,
and it showed every century of its age. It had once been an imposing
structure, but its chromium trim had begun to peel, and the aluminum
siding was whitely pitted with oxide.
I walked into the lobby and flashed my identity bracelet at the bored-
looking clerk. "Do you have any Damakoi registered here?"
The clerk looked a little bewildered. "Gosh, mister, I wouldn't know a
Damakoi if I saw one. We got lots of aliens registered, though."
"I am a Damakoi," said Holdreth Khain. There was a touch of pride in
his voice, and I felt my nerves tighten a little more.
The clerk looked at him. "Oh, yeah! Sure. Guy checked in
yesterday."
"Let's see the registration," I said.
The clerk pulled out the book and flipped it open. There was the
name, big, bold, and firm.
Zorvash Pedrik. Room 706A.
I left one of my men at the desk to make sure that no one warned
Room 706A, and headed for the lift tube. Holdreth Khain and I went
up to the seventieth floor and looked for 6A.
I took out the key which the clerk had given me and carefully slid it
into the lock, trying not to make a sound. I really didn't think anything
would happen here. The Damakoi wouldn't set off the bomb this far
away from the Grand Capitol; fanatics don't waste their lives on
nobodies like me—not when they're out after much bigger game.
The key engaged, and as the door slid open, I stepped inside, my
blaster held at the ready.
The room was empty.
The bed was made, the ash-trays were clean, the windows were
closed. Zorvash Pedrik might have registered for the room, but he
hadn't spent much time in it.
He was on the loose—somewhere in the city—carrying around
something which could kill everyone in the Grand Capitol if it were
set off.
"No sign of him," said Holdreth Khain.
"Doesn't look that way." Then I spotted something. "Hold it—what's
that?"
I crossed the room to the writing desk that stood against the far wall.
There was a small box on it and it was weighting down a piece of
paper.
I pulled out the piece of paper. It was a note—addressed to me.
Dear Cameron, it said, in the clear script of a voice-writer,
There's no point in your looking for me here, because I'm
not going to wait here for you to catch me. Be sure that I'll
 be able to complete my mission here despite the efforts of
your department and the treachery of my misguided
countryman.

Zorvash Pedrik
"We'll have to pick up the trail somewhere else," I said. "We better
get moving."

When we reached the lobby, I phoned Ned Dearborn, my second in

command. His blocky features filled the screen and his three-
dimensional representation looked inquisitively at me.
I said: "Ned, get up here to the Grenada and pick up a neutrino
generator in Room 706A. It was sitting on a note to me. It's
harmless, but it's what the boys picked up on the detectors."
Ned smiled grimly. "Just a dummy, eh? Okay; I'll send up a squad
right away. Anything else?"
"Better alert the local police," I told him. "Pick up any Damakoi that
isn't known to us. In case you pick him up, get him as far away from
the city as you can. Take him out and dunk him in the lake if you
have to. Get a plane ready and set up a robopilot.
"Watch him closely. If he's carrying anything at all, shoot first and ask
questions later. Got that?"
"Got it, Chief." His face faded from the screen.
Holdreth Khain looked agitated. "You say that the box on the table
was radioactive? I might have been exposed!"
I shook my head. "Neutrino radiation isn't dangerous, not even to a
Damakoi. Don't worry about it."
"But how do you know it was a neutrino generator?"
"I know what those things look like," I told him. "They are expensive
as hell, and no one would go to the expense of making one just to
load it with ordinary radioactives."
"I hope you're right," said the Damakoi.
I drove Holdreth Khain back to the Capitol. "Look," I told him, "there
are going to be plenty of trigger-happy policemen roaming around
this town for a while. I want to get you to someplace where you'll be
safe, but I've got to keep you near me. If we catch Zorvash Pedrik, I
want you to identify him."
"Yes, I see," he said. "And, if you'll pardon me for thinking of my own
miserable life, I am afraid that Zorvash Pedrik intends to kill me for
betraying him." He thought for a minute. "I would be safe inside the
Capitol," he said at last.
I suppose the expression on my face must have shown him what I
thought of the idea of allowing any Damakoi inside the Grand
Capitol, because he said, hurriedly: "Surely you must know that I am
not carrying a theta bomb or any other kind of atomic bomb. Your
radiation detectors would have spotted it, would they not?"
I had to admit that they would have spotted it if he were carrying
anything that would fission.
"Very well, then. You will have me under guard, will you not? Your
men can watch me. They wouldn't let me get away with anything
odd."
It sounded logical, and I admitted it. "Okay," I said, "we'll put you in
the basement of the Grand Capitol. You'll be safe there, and if we
catch the killer, you'll be right there to identify him."

We pulled up in front of the Grand Capitol, and the Damakoi and I

climbed out of the car. I'll admit that I still wasn't absolutely sure of
my guess about Holdreth Khain, but since I knew he wouldn't be
dangerous by himself, I felt I could take the chance.
The guards had the car surrounded by the time we got out. They
took a good look at the Damakoi, and went over him again with
detectors and searched him physically.
"You'll have to change your clothes completely," I told him. "We had
one assassin who was wearing a special plastic suit that evaporated
into a poisonous gas. It was rather nasty."
"Certainly," agreed Holdreth Khain. The guards led him away to the
dressing room.
I went inside and got on the phone to the Special Supplies
Warehouse. The supply officer faded into the screen.
"What is it, Mr. Cameron?"
"Do you happen to have a twelve by twelve foot piece of invisible
plexisteel?" I asked.
"We can cut you one in a hurry," he said.
"Cut me two," I ordered, "and get them over here to the Grand
Capitol building fast—and I really mean fast."
"We'll have them there in seven—no, six minutes."
"Right. And send along construction men with them. I'm building a
trap for a killer who thinks he's clever." I didn't add I hope, but I
thought it.
I was sure that there would be no slip-ups. I'd been picked for my
ability to outguess and out-think anyone and everyone who might try
to hurt the Galactic Government, and so far, I'd succeeded; the
Government itself had withstood everything sent against it.
Still, there had been slip-ups before. The security network protecting
President Deller had failed badly when a Damakoi assassin
smuggled himself into the Golden Palace. A meeting of the Solar
Subcouncil had been bombed two years before despite the most
painstaking precautions. There was no way of being absolutely sure
—I could only do my best. After all, the Damakoi weren't stupid—
fanatic maniacs, yes, but not stupid.
I carefully checked the loading of my blaster, just in case I'd need it.
Then I called Ned in and gave him his orders. Ned repeated them
and then said: "I hope you're right, Chief."
"So do I," I agreed. "But it's the only way to handle the Damakoi."
"That planet's a plague spot," Ned said bitterly. "We ought to send
the Galactic Fleet in there with a half-dozen good-sized planet
wrecking bombs, and get rid of every damned one of them once and
for all."
"You're being hasty, Ned," I said. "That would be genocide, the one
thing that every race fears more than anything else. The Galactic
Government would fall within a week after such an order was given."
"I know it; it was just wishful thinking."
"We'll get it under inter-planetary control," I told him. "That's the sort
of thing the Grand Council is working on right now. Once the proper
laws are passed, we'll have Damak under our thumb and force them
to be law-abiding citizens. That's why they're so anxious to blow up
the Capitol before anything definite is done."
"Yeah. Well, what do you want me to do after I've set up the
plexisteel?"
"Nothing," I said. "We just wait. That's all we can do. Just wait."

We waited. Every cop in town was patrolling the streets, watching for
a strange Damakoi. They had full, three-D photographs of the eight
Damakoi known to be in the city; anyone who didn't match one of
those photos would be picked up—or shot.
Before he could do anything, the assassin would have to get inside
the Grand Capitol Building, and I was fairly sure he couldn't do that
without my knowing it. But if I was wrong, the Galactic Government
would be ruined.
I sat in my office for hours, smoking one cigarette after another and
fortifying myself with coffee. The tension on my nerves was building
up hour by hour until I could hardly sit down. I wanted to slug
someone, to break open a Damakoi face with a fist and strangle the
life out of his killer soul.
The phone chimed and I jumped a foot before I realized what it was.
I forced myself to be calm and reached over to turn on the screen.
The sharp-nosed, blue-skinned face of a Damakoi resolved itself on
the screen. I recognized him immediately. It was Jedon Onomondo.
He wasn't known to be absolutely trustworthy, but he had been
useful to us in the past by giving us information we couldn't get
otherwise.
"Hello, Jedon Onomondo," I said. "What is it?"
"Hello, Mr. Cameron." His voice was excited. "Listen, I want to talk to
you."
"Go ahead," I said.
"No, not over the phone. There might be a tap. Listen, my life is in
danger. You've got to come over to my place right away. You know
where it is. I want to tell you something I found out—it's hot."
And he hung up without another word. I headed for his place.

Fifteen minutes later, I was going up the lift tube of a middle-class

apartment house, heading toward the ninth floor. I had a sneaking
hunch that I already knew what Jedon Onomondo would have to say,
but I wanted to be positive. I rapped on the door of his apartment.
The door opened a crack; an eye peered out.
"Come in, Mr. Cameron," Jedon Onomondo said, swinging the door
wide.
I didn't step in immediately; I took a quick look around the room,
keeping my hand on my blaster butt. There was no one else in sight
except the Damakoi.
I went on in and prowled around the room to satisfy myself that there
was no one else present. Then I searched the rest of the apartment.
The place was empty.
Jedon Onomondo was sitting in the middle of his living room,
nervously smoking a Terran cigarette. The Damakoi are one of the
few extraterrestrials who have taken up the use of tobacco. They
looked ludicrous.
I didn't sit down. "All right; what's so all-fired important that it can't be
told over the phone?"
The Damakoi blew out a long plume of smoke. "I understand you're
looking for one of my countrymen who intends to set off a bomb
inside the Grand Capitol Building," he said.
"How do you know?"
He looked pained. "Look, Mr. Cameron, just how dumb do you think I
am? I have bits of inside information. I pick things up here and there.
I put them together."
"All right," I said. "What about it?"
"You're looking all over the city for a guy by the name of Zorvash
Pedrik. He's supposed to have a bomb on him—a theta bomb.
Right?"
I nodded. "So?"
"Well, you're wrong on two counts."
"Wrong? How are we wrong?" I watched him carefully.
"Well, you're wrong in the first place in scouring the town for Zorvash
Pedrik because you've got him locked up right now. He's
masquerading under the name of Holdreth Khain!"
I felt my nerves tighten again. They couldn't stand much more of this.
"That's ridiculous," I said. "Holdreth Khain isn't carrying any theta
bomb. We've checked him very carefully."
"I know," said Jedon Onomondo. "That's where you're wrong in the
second place. Zorvash Pedrik isn't and never has been carrying a
bomb."
I was careful with my expression. "You mean he's going to use some
other method to blow up the Grand Capitol? Or is there some other
trick he's going to try?"
The Damakoi shook his head. "That isn't it. What I mean is that
Zorvash Pedrik is a lunatic—he's absolutely insane!"

"Tell me more."
"Zorvash Pedrik is a madman," the Damakoi repeated. "He's been in
neuropsychiatric hospitals more than once. He likes to think of
himself as a great savior of the people—any people. On Damak, he
has denounced more than one person falsely. He has denounced
anti-Government and pro-Government men alike.
"He doesn't have any reason for it; he just likes to hog glory—any
kind of glory."
"Wait a minute," I said. "This doesn't follow the pattern. I don't think
that our Holdreth Khain is Zorvash Pedrik."
Jedon Onomondo looked blank. "Why not?"
"It doesn't fit," I said. "If what you say about Zorvash Pedrik is right,
he would come to us under his own name and denounce someone
else as a bomb carrier. That's the psychological pattern of these
paranoids."
Jedon Onomondo just looked at me, frowning.
"I have a hunch that Holdreth Khain is telling the truth; Zorvash
Pedrik is a looney, all right, but now he's going to be a big hero in the
proper way. If he sets off a theta bomb in the Grand Capitol Building,
two-thirds of the people of Damak will hail him as a hero. They'll
forget about the silly things he's done before. Doesn't that follow the
paranoid pattern better?"
The Damakoi nodded slowly. "You may be right. The trouble is that it
doesn't jibe with the information I've received from pretty reliable
sources."
"Have you ever seen Holdreth Khain?" I asked.