Japanese Scholar Says Scrap U.S.-Japan Alliance; Recognize U.S.-China Co-Dependency

Last Saturday U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced in Singapore that by 2020 the U.S. will be deploying “six aircraft carriers, a majority of our cruisers, destroyers, combat ships and submarines” in the Asia-Pacific region.   This armada will constitute 60% of U.S. naval power, a “rebalancing ” from the current 50% of naval resources currently committed to the region.

“Some view the increased emphasis by the U.S. on the Asia-Pacific region as some kind of challenge to China.  I reject that view entirely,” said Panetta.   But then the question is:  if not toward China, then toward whom or what is such massive power being directed?

On Monday Prime Minister Yoshihiro Noda surprised the defense community by installing a “civilian” (i.e., not an incumbent politician) as the new Japanese Minister of Defense.  He is 71 year old Satoshi Morimoto whose long career includes active service in Japan’s air force and foreign affairs ministry, as well as advisory roles for primarily Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians.

Representing traditional LDP thinking, Morimoto is known as a strong backer of the U.S.-Japan defense alliance and supports keeping U.S. Marines in Okinawa at a relocated Futenma airbase. The reason is to counter China’s increased power.

On May 26 Japan hosted in Okinawa a meeting of leaders from 16 Pacific island countries, the third annual “summit” of this kind.  For the first time the U.S. State Department officially attended.   The atmospherics were all about countering increased Chinese influence in the region.

Japanese-Chinese relations are at the lowest point since the icy tenure of PM Koizumi and Chinese president Jiang Zemin.   As just one example, when Noda visited Beijing on May 13 for the meeting to launch negotiations for a China-Japan-Korea Free Trade Agreement, Hu Jintao refused to meet with him in a one-on-one session.

It is hard to make sense of much of this, and particularly of the U.S. deployment, but one senses that, in all of it, Japan’s foreign relations and its security are hardly being enhanced.

One of Japan’s most eminent China watchers and Japan-China specialists sees danger and is raising alarms in a just-released book. He is Susumu Yabuki, professor emeritus of Yokohama City University.  In a new book (in Japanese) entitled Chimerica – the U.S.-China Collusion and the Way Forward for Japan (ﾁャｲﾒﾘｶ―米中結託と日本の進路) Professor Yabuki makes what should be an obvious key point:  the U.S. cannot afford to and will not under any conceivable circumstances confront China militarily, barring a direct attach on American “core interests.”  These interests specifically do not include territories in Northeast, East or Southeast Asia that are “disputed”—meaning, not just islands in the Spratly chain variously under control of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan, but also the Senkaku Island (Diaoyutai) and its vicinity which are under Japanese control but also claimed by China.   U.S. policy has long been that it “takes no position” on the disputes.

During the past decade, China has overtaken all other countries—and Japan most dramatically of all—as United States’ most important economic and financial partner, and has become America’s banker.  Unlike the situation the Soviet Union during the Cold War, where economic and trade ties were insignificant, China and the U.S. are tied together  so closely–most significantly with China holding over USD 2.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt.   The U.S. would be immensely damaged by Chinese dumping of Treasury debt, something that would inevitably happen in a serious conflict.

Notwithstanding these fundamentally changed circumstances, many policy-makers in the U.S. (particularly DoD) and Japan (particularly the Ministry of Defense and the LDP) seem locked in the old Cold War paradigm, with the target now seemingly being China.   The U.S.-Japan defense alliance is a product the Cold War and had relevance during that period, but has been obsolete since the early 1990s.

And not just obsolete, but counter-productive and severely detrimental to Japan’s interests.  Yabuki maintains that China’s military expansion, as well as its tolerance of North Korea’s policies, has largely been in response to the U.S.-Japan military alliance which has given military-industrial interests the excuse they have needed to command allocations of domestic budgetary resources.  As long as the alliance continues, it will continue to drive Chinese military expansion and to underwrite a potentially disastrous tendency toward Chinese militarism.

Professor Yabuki does not believe that China threatens Japan’s de facto control of the Senkaku Islands, or that it would be the first to use force to expel claimants in disputed areas of the Spratlys.  China’s foreign policy strategy under Hu Jintao and his successors has been reset from one of non-engagement to one of active efforts to use China’s greatly expanded “soft power” resources to advance its interests.  We have seen this strategy in action in the way China has handled recent tensions with the Philippines.

The way forward for Japan, writes Yabuki, should be active diplomacy and the search for “win-win” accommodations to a naturally more assertive, globally engaged, and regionally powerful China.  In both the short and long run, this approach—and not nostalgia for the constructs of the past century—will best serve the interests of Japan and the region.

I think Professor Yabuki is 100% right but I also wonder if anyone in Washington or Tokyo is listening to him.