This month's summit between the two Koreas throws the Pentagon's key rationale for billions in defense into question. With the "rogue states" becoming friends rather than foes, military planners are hard put to justify rising military expenditures, not to mention some $60 billion earmarked for a national missile defense (NMD) system. PNS analyst Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and author of "Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws" (Hill and Wang, 1995).

The peace accord signed by the leaders of North and South Korea on June 15 has been greeted with jubilation in Asia and many other parts of the world as people glimpse the end of the one of the world's most dangerous military rivalries. In Washington, however, the accord has produced widespread gloom -- for, if the two Koreas succeed in overcoming their animosity, the entire rationale of America's post-Cold War military strategy will come crashing down in ruins.

For the Koreans, reconciliation between the North and the South would end fifty years of painful separation and a constant threat of war. For China and Japan, moreover, the pacification of the Korean Peninsula would eliminate the most dangerous source of conflict in the region. For the U.S. Department of Defense, however, peace on the Korean Peninsula would erase the most menacing of our putative "rogue state" adversaries and undercut the nation's prevailing "two-war" strategy -- and this, in turn, could imperil hundreds of billions of dollars in future military appropriations.

To appreciate the enormity of the stakes riding on in this for U.S. military planners, it is necessary to go back to the early post-Cold War period, when Pentagon officials had to scramble to invent a guiding doctrine to replace the "Containment" strategy of the Cold War era. The product of this scramble was the "Rogue Doctrine"--the claim that the United States is mortally threatened by a host of anti-Western "rogue states" equipped with large armies and nuclear or chemical munitions.

The most notorious of the rogue states is, of course, Iraq, which in 1990 lent enormous credibility to the Rogue Doctrine by invading Kuwait. After the Gulf War, Pentagon planners depicted a new threat environment in which the United States would face attack by two such enemies at once: a rearmed Iran or Iraq in the Gulf, and North Korea in Asia. To defend against this threat, the Pentagon devised a two-war strategy under which the United States would maintain sufficient strength to fight and beat two such adversaries at the same time.

The two-war strategy was initially endorsed by President Bush in 1991 and later embraced by President Clinton upon assuming office in 1993. After a major reexamination of U.S. military doctrine in 1998 -- the Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR -- the Pentagon again committed itself to a two-war strategy.

"It is imperative," the QDR proclaimed, "that the United States now and for the foreseeable future be able to deter and defeat large-scale, cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames." The QDR also made clear where U.S. planners were expecting to fight these wars: "on the Korean Peninsula and in Southwest Asia."

At the time, it was thought that annual defense expenditures of approximately $300 billion would be sufficient to enable U.S. forces to prevail in these hypothetical contests. By early 1999, however, the Clinton Administration -- prodded by hawkish Republicans in Congress -- reported that Pentagon spending would have to rise in coming years to at least $330 billion in 2005 and much more after that. Furthermore, when it was discovered that North Korean was developing a primitive ballistic missile that might someday be able to reach parts of the United States, the Administration laid plans to spend another $60 billion on a national missile defense (NMD) system designed to intercept a missile of this type.

Because the technology to be employed in NMD is still unproved, Mr. Clinton gave himself until later this summer to decide on the actual deployment of the system (as distinct from continued research and development). Up until the signing of the Korean peace accord on June 15, all bets in Washington were on a "go" decision, based on reports that Clinton sought to eliminate a possible campaign issue for George W. Bush. But now, with the likelihood of a war on the Korean Peninsula diminishing by the minute, it will be far more difficult to justify expenditures of $60 billion on a system intended to protect against a hypothetical North Korean missile -- especially when NMD has encountered well-publicized technical problems and our allies in Europe are flatly opposed to the plan.

Even more worrisome for the Pentagon, any further progress toward peace in Korea would demolish the rationale for a military establishment configured around a two-war scenario. Perhaps a one-rogue contest could still be contemplated-- although with Iraq still badly crippled by Operation Desert Storm and Iran lurching toward reintegration with the West, it will be hard to defend even that argument -- but a two-rogue scenario appears increasingly implausible.

Of course, Pentagon planners, along with their allies in Congress and the military industries, can always invent new reasons to perpetuate the two-war strategy under some alternative pretext. Perhaps China, or a newly militant Russia, will be selected to replace North Korea as the new rogue-state enemy. But maybe, just maybe, reason will finally set in -- people will conclude that the rationale for a $330 billion-per-year military establishment has evaporated, and that the time has come to downsize the armed forces in accordance with the new global realities. After all, most non-military U.S. corporations have already been forced to restructure their operations in this fashion, and it is not unreasonable to insist that large federal institutions do the same.