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US hoist by its own pivot petard
By Peter Lee
It should be noted that his conservative vision also involves a repudiation of US tutelage that dovetails with Okazaki's well-honed sense of the Sino-Japanese rivalry, and puts the US State Department on notice that "Japan reborn" is going to be
something other than a tractable ally:
The Abe Cabinet is the first conservative government in Japan in a long time. I believe, roughly speaking, conservatism in Japan faces two major tasks.
The first is eradication of the so-called postwar historical view. This view was a product of the US policy in the earlier days of the postwar Occupation. US Occupation authorities taught Japanese children that all of Japan's past and traditions were bad in an attempt to completely eradicate Japan's war potential, both materially and spiritually.
The US revised this policy as soon as the Cold War began in order to make Japan a reliable ally. But the education based on this policy was taken over by pro-communist leftist elements in Japan, whose main purpose was to neutralize Japan in the realm of intellectual and moral capabilities. This led to the emergence of the leftist biased historical view.
No nation can survive when its history and traditions are denied. Eradication of this leftist historical view has been a long-term issue for the Japanese nation and it has to be continuously pursued in classrooms and other educational arenas. [6]
Even if nostalgic nationalists are in the minority in public opinion polls, their acolytes are in power and can set the national agenda, override majority doubts, and, most importantly, foreclose competing options for their successors ... especially if they can invoke the specter of a national crisis.
The constitution beckons
And big doings are expected for the second half of the year - if the Liberal Democratic Party trounces the fractured opposition as expected to control a two-thirds majority in the upper house of Japan's legislature and adds revision of Japan's constitution, including its restrictions on military adventures outside Japan's borders, to the national renaissance/standing up to China dialogue.
So far, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has successfully kept the international focus on revival of Japan's stagnant economy through "Abenomics", a gigantic roll of the quantitative easing dice that has not coincidentally strengthened Abe's political hand by delivering two highly anticipated benefits to the LDP's well-heeled corporate base - a skyrocketing Nikkei index and a plummeting yen.
However, his administration has simultaneously engaged in a flurry of diplomatic, economic, and security engagement with China's current and potential antagonists from India and Sri Lanka to Vietnam to the Philippines, Taiwan, and Russia.
On May 3, Asahi Shimbun - which has emerged as a reliable conduit for anti-Abe anxiety inside Japan - reported on the recent visit of Deputy Prime Minister Aso to Sri Lanka:
Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso's visit to Sri Lanka yielded promises of stronger ties between the two countries, bringing Japan a step closer to its goal of building a coalition against China. ...
Aso and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are currently conducting a broad range of diplomatic activities to counter China's growing influence. ... When Abe first served as prime minister in 2006, Aso, who was then foreign minister, proposed making the area from Southeast Asia to central and eastern Europe an "arc of freedom and prosperity."
The strategy was intended to contain China by helping Asian countries move forward with democratization and the development of their economies. [7]
Don't worry. Mr Aso said "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity". He didn't say "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere", and I do believe that Japan's plans for regional pre-eminence include exploiting the United States, not confronting it.
If and when constitutional revision goes through and the doctrine of "collective self-defense" permits military operations beyond Japan's borders, Japan looks more and more like an destabilizing regional power that relies on a narrative of existential threat, heightened polarization with its enemies, and the expectation that the US has no alternative but to back it up in its disputes with its neighbors even when that works at cross purposes to US interests and objectives for the region.
This creates a dilemma for the United States and its master plan for securing US pre-eminence in Asia. President Obama, for reasons not entirely of his own making but inseparable from his inability to wheel and deal with dictators, decided that G-2 - a US-PRC condominium that would order East Asia to everyone's satisfaction - was not a viable option.
Instead, the Obama foreign policy team decided that a concerted display of forceful (but not hostile!) pressure by the United States and its allies was needed to extract satisfactory Chinese behavior in the short term and integration of the PRC into a US-led liberal-norm diplomatic and economic architecture in the long term.
Call it the "pivot to Asia".
The economic keystone of this coercive architecture is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a "high standards trade pact" that pointedly excluded China while not even trying to address the contradiction of welcoming Vietnam - a nation whose rickety mixed-socialist economy mimics the Chinese economy ... from 10 years back.
Unwanted turn on trade talks
With the TPP, perhaps the Obama administration was too clever for its good. I have a feeling - well, I hope - that the Obama administration emitted a hollow groan of foreboding when Prime Minister Abe announced during his US visit that Japan would join the TPP negotiations.
Abe's enthusiasm for the TPP process appears to be genuine - Japan had to lobby all 10 current participants to obtain approval to join - even though the near-term benefits to Japan appear relatively marginal.
In the back-of-the-envelope version (and not taking into account the inevitable backroom deal-cutting, especially in the automotive sector), by conservative calculations the TPP grows total Japanese GDP about 0.5% (with about half of the growth in industrial production offset by a spectacular cratering of agricultural production as domestic rice, beef, and pork lose tariff protection and disappear beneath an import avalanche). [8]
Economic factors aside, the TPP factor has already had a beneficial knock-on effect to Japan's negotiating position in a raft of other trade pacts, as Professor Aurelia George Mulgan of the University of South Wales wrote:
Japan's decision to participate in the TPP negotiations appears to have spurred a whole series of other trade developments, including:
the first round of trilateral China-Japan-South Korea FTA talks, beginning less than two weeks after the TPP announcement on 15 March;
the start of serious Japan-EU talks on an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) in April; and
the launching of negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in May, demonstrating how both emulation and competition can act as triggers for FTA diffusion.
From a US perspective, the RCEP and China-Japan-South Korea FTA are both potentially rival blocs to the TPP, but Japan will be advantageously positioned in all three. This has not escaped Chinese commentators who note how Japan has welcomed the opportunity to maximise their profits by establishing a footing in the TPP while not closing the door to cooperation with China through means such as the China-Japan-South Korea FTA. [9]
Trade blocs, in addition to their economic significance, are also important geopolitical gambits in the Japanese struggle to deal with China. Per Mulgan:
Abe ... recently told the Japanese Diet, "Japan's TPP participation will result in Japan and the United States virtually leading the TPP ... there are advantages to Japan and the United States forming a team to make rules for the free trade area."
Which is why despairing groans should rise from the bosom of the Obama administration. As noted above, unanimous agreement is stipulated for a new nation to join the TPP negotiations. Behind closed doors, apparently lesser powers such as Brunei allow the US to speak on their behalf on membership issues.
But I doubt Japan's plans for its future security and prosperity involve surrendering to the United States the precious right to blackball China.
If Japan is able to join the TPP club on its own terms, it will probably possess a de facto veto over any PRC application to join the talks. In other words, if current political trends continue, China may never join the TPP. TPP policy toward China - the key raison d'etre for the TPP - will become hostage to Japan's priorities and strategy.
For the United States, that raises the possibility that the pivot to Asia will not create a region-wide open market system with Chinese buy-in that will give full play to US competitive advantage in technology, patent-protected products, and sophisticated services, thereby enriching the US corporations that are the TPP's most enthusiastic promoters and, in fact, are basically writing the treaty's texts and talking points and supporting the initiative through campaign contributions and public relations expenditures.
Instead, maybe the Asian economy will plod ahead with only two cylinders firing: a continental Eurasian bloc of state capitalist economies that look to China as their primary demand engine, and a maritime bloc of Asian democracies banded together by their shared China-related security anxieties (which Japan will happily foment) but hobbled by the fact that the two biggest participants, Japan and the United States, both want to export their way out of their economic slumps.
Hijack, Middle East style
If Japan holds the whip hand for US policy in Asia, it will be an unwelcome recapitulation of the fiasco in the Middle East that the Obama administration is trying to leave behind.
In the Middle East, the United States has largely lost control of the security agenda thanks to the Arab Spring, but also thanks to the desire of key US allies to seize the initiative and shape policy through their unilateral actions. Israel and Saudi Arabia advance a narrative of existential crisis centered on Iran and its nuclear program and conduct independent security policies that exacerbate regional polarization and force the US to abandon rapprochement with Iran and back the narrower priorities of its allies instead.
Following the precedent of America's vexatious allies in the Middle East, Japan is also advancing a narrative of national crisis, polarizing the region into pro- and anti-China blocs, and exploiting the security alliance to invoke US support that would otherwise be given grudgingly or not at all.
I have the feeling that President Obama hoped and expected that by pivoting to Asia - a region of peace, prosperity, and rapid growth generally sympathetic to a dominant US security role - the US would find a way of profitably leveraging its military and economic advantages into market and diplomatic opportunities throughout Asia.
Unfortunately, by piggybacking on the pivot - basically "soft China containment that dares not speak its name" - Japan is working to wrong-foot the US and establish itself as the key security and economic intermediary in an Asia bifurcated into China and anti-China blocs.
The Obama administration is showing various signs of unwillingness to proceed down this dangerous, expensive, and well-trodden path. Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser openly frets about the difficulties of managing the Chinese relationship, difficulties that are certainly exacerbated if they include Japan openly goading the PRC to advance its own destabilizing regional agenda in the expectation of US backing.
Kurt Campbell, the proud pappy of the pivot, now cautiously redefines it as "a rebalancing", as if the game-changing injection of the US into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' island disputes with China never happened, and the most important goal of the US Asian effort was no more than the sweet, sweet victory of slaking the thirst of freedom-loving (and, occasionally, Muslim-massacring) Burmese with legal, un-smuggled Coca Cola.
In recent weeks there have been valiant attempts to assert that the pivot as conceived by the United States was "not about China", in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey. [10]
And, in a way that the Obama administration never anticipated, this is true. The pivot to Asia isn't about China anymore. It's about Japan.
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