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U.S.-Japan Security Alliance Is Obsolete Leaving Japan Caught between China and the U.S. in a New Asian Order

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Has the U.S.-Japanese security alliance been a factor in the dangerous dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands,

Senkaku Islands (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

controlled by Japan but claimed by China and called Diaoyutai?   And is the alliance going to be a factor in any future resolution or management of this dispute?   To anyone closely watching the situation, the answer to both of these questions is clearly “no.”

But in observing the irrelevance of what both the U.S. and Japan continue to claim is the cornerstone of  our bilateral relationship, as well as the of the whole structure of the U.S.-dominated security system in Asia (the crux of “The Armitage-Nye Report: U.S.-Japan Alliance: Anchoring Stability in Asiafrom Washington, D.C.’s CSIS, of which more below), we must ask:  “If not, why not?”

The answer here is complex, in that it reflects strongly directional (I am tempted to say irreversible) current in the strategic power relationships between China, Japan, and the United States.  What is the current and where is it pushing the three countries?

For this answer, I can do no better than to summarize the analysis of Australian National University professor of strategic studies Hugh White in his new book, The China Choice:  Why America Should Share Power (2012 Black Ink Books, 191 pp.).

White starts by pointing out that Asia has lived under and benefited for some sixty years from a unchallenged and unchangeable U.S. strategic military and geopolitical primacy, based primarily on naval, nuclear, and air power.  By “unchallenged” is meant that the U.S. has had no real rival or contender for power in the region.   All other countries were either effectively client states (Japan, an economic power, accepting a client state position), Taiwan, the Philippines; or too weak to pose any conceivable threat (China until the opening of the current century).

This era has been irretrievably brought to an end by the rise of a powerful China.  China sees itself as a great power, an equal or potential (rightful?) equal to the United States.  Chinese economic power has in fact made China a strategic partner of the U.S., as well as a competitor—particularly in terms of allegiance by and self-interest of Asia’s second-tier powers (including, crucially, Taiwan, Japan and Australia) whose economies are increasingly integrated into and dependent upon China’s.   China has strategic defense interests and has been building a military that can defend and advance them.  China is no longer prepared to accept U.S. strategic primacy as the natural or desirable order Northeast Asia.

White’s argument:  If the U.S. is not prepared to share power, rather, if the U.S. remains intent on maintaining unchallengeable and exclusionary primacy in East Asia, then military conflict with China is a distinct danger, if not an inevitability.  Yet so far, maintaining primacy seems to be the U.S. default position and goal, such that the response to China’s developing maritime defense capabilities has been the Pentagon’s “Air-Sea Battle Concept” of mounting large scale conventional strikes against China’s “anti-access and area-denial” capabilities.

On this Professor White is definite:  “As applied to China, the Air-Sea Battle is an operational concept that makes no strategic sense.” (My italics.  For his full explanation, please see White’s book, pp. 73-78.)

It may seem that we have gotten side-tracked from the issue of the U.S.-Japan security alliance and its relevance for Japan’s security, but we have not.   On the contrary, as elaborated by Professor White (and before him, as I have written before, Professor Yabuki Susumu), Japan’s security, or lack thereof, is inextricably tied to America’s “China Choice.”

White writes “Japan is the Asian power that will be most willing to support the United States in maintaining its supremacy….( p. 82)   Japan’s predicament is this: it deeply fears China’s growing power….Japan’s leaders have little faith that China will prove a benign regional leader.” (p. 83).

“As long as Japan’s alliance with America remains the center-piece of its strategic policy, it will depend almost completely on Washington to protect it from Chinese pressure.  The problem is that the more powerful China becomes, the less Japan can depend on the United States.”  (p. 84)

“Escalating rivalry between Washington and Beijing would be disastrous for Japan, but so too would friendship and cooperation…The only clear way for Japan to get out of this predicament is to stop relying on America for protection from China…” (p. 84, my italics).

As for the U.S., “…if [Professor White argues in the affirmative] America can maintain a strong position in the Western Pacific and protect its core interests without maintaining primacy, then the Japan alliance will cost the United States more than it is worth.” (p. 85, my italics again).

So this is the conclusion.  The apparent irrelevant if not dysfunction of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the cases of Japan’s current territorial crises is an adumbration of the fundamental obsolescence and inoperability under the today’s—and tomorrow’s—geostrategic reality in Asia, with the U.S.-China relationship at its core.  As I wrote that Professor Yabuki advocated in his new book, the alliance should be scrapped, and Japan freed to marshal its considerable (and adequate) hard and soft resources in its own defense.

I will end by acknowledging that the White-Yabuki argument (with which I fully agree) seems to be diametrically at odds with the prevailing mood and opinion in Washington, an expression of which can be found in  “The Armitage-Nye Report: U.S.-Japan Alliance: Anchoring Stability in Asia recently produced with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.  A video of the paper publication event, featuring Ambassador Armitage, can be seen on CSIS’s website.

All I will say about the Armitage-Nye paper is that it reads like (and is) talking points for vested-interest, bureaucratic (especially DoD) status quo budget-defense lobbying.  It deals with a changing geopolitical and geostrategic reality in Asia mainly by ignoring (or denying) it.  Unlike White’s book, which deserves to be and will be, I believe, widely read, the Armitage-Nye report will be ignored, deservedly so.

It is a new era in Asia, and the U.S., China, and Japan face and cannot avoid making some fateful choices.  For Japan, caught it the middle, the way forward could be one of neutrality between great powers.