SPEAKING
FREELY US goads Japan into
China confrontation By John V Walsh
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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"………..Their defeat Doth by their
own insinuation grow. 'Tis dangerous when the
baser nature comes Between the pass and fell
incensed points Of mighty
opposites." Hamlet on the deaths
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
At
the height of the 2012 campaign in late October, a
US delegation tiptoed into Japan and then China
with scant media coverage. It was "unofficial,"
but former secretary of state Hillary Clinton gave
it her blessing. And it was headed by two figures
high in the imperial
firmament, Richard L Armitage, who served as
deputy secretary of state for George W Bush; and
Joseph S Nye Jr, a former Pentagon and
intelligence official in the Bill Clinton
administration and Dean Emeritus of Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. The delegation also
included James B Steinberg, who served as the
deputy secretary of state in the Barack Obama
administration and Stephen J Hadley, Bush Two's
national security adviser.
The delegation
was billed as an attempt by the US to defuse
tensions between Japan and China over a number of
small islands both claim. But was it? What is the
outlook of these influential figures?
Interestingly, Armitage and Nye provide us with a
partial answer in a brief paper published the
preceding August by the Center for International
and Strategic Studies (CSIS), entitled "The
Japan-US Alliance. Anchoring Stability in Asia",
the carefully crafted fruit of a CSIS Study Group
they chaired. The strategy proposed therein, as
outlined below, should be very distressing to the
Chinese - as well as to the Japanese and
Americans.
The Armitage/Nye paper
addresses itself to the Japanese themselves, the
target audience,in the introduction as follows:
"Together, we face the re-rise of
China and its attendant uncertainties ...
Tier-one nations have significant economic
weight, capable military forces, global
vision, and demonstrated leadership on
international concerns. Although there are areas
in which the United States can better support
the [Japan-US] alliance, we have no doubt of the
United States' continuing tier-one status. For
Japan, however, there is a decision to be made.
Does Japan desire to continue to be a tier-one
nation, or is she content to drift into tier-two
status? If tier-two status is good enough for
the Japanese people and their government, this
report will not be of interest." (emphasis
JW)
Read that carefully. It is a
thinly veiled appeal to the worst aspects of
Japanese militarism and nationalism, which for
good reason are so reviled in East Asia. It is
done in the context of the "re-rise" of China, a
phrase that invokes China's past world supremacy
and Japan's inferior status at the time. What sort
of beast is this disturbing plea designed to
awaken?
Again in the introduction, the
authors make the military dimensions of their
appeal quite specific, writing:
"Japan's Self-Defense Forces (JSDF)
- now the most trusted institution in Japan -
are poised to play a larger role in enhancing
Japanese security and reputation if
anachronistic constraints can be eased."
(emphasis JW)
What are these
"anachronistic restraints"? As the authors later
make clear, they are embodied in Article 9 of the
Japanese Constitution, written under the tutelage
of General Douglas MacArthur's occupying forces.
The Article so irksome to Armitage and Nye reads:
"ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an
international peace based on justice and order,
the Japanese people forever renounce war as a
sovereign right of the nation and the threat or
use of force as means of settling international
disputes. To accomplish the aim of the preceding
paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as
other war potential, will never be maintained.
The right of belligerency of the state will not
be recognized."
This is a
breathtakingly appealing, pacifist statement; and
there is a brief, worthwhile account of Article 9
here.
Article 9 is extremely popular in Japan, and
eliminating it from the constitution would not be
easy, as Armitage and Nye recognize. Moreover,
Armitage and Nye concede that Article 9 prohibits
collective self-defense, which involves joint
military action by the US and Japan . As they say
in their paper:
"The irony, however, is that even
under the most severe conditions requiring the
protection of Japan's interests, our
forces are legally prevented from collectively
defending Japan.… Prohibition of collective
self-defense is an impediment to the [US-Japan]
alliance." (emphasis JW)
Note that
the authors do not say protection of Japan but of
Japan's "interests".
What then is the US
to do? Armitage and Nye see a solution in the
joint rescue operations mounted by the Japan Self
Defense Forces (JSDF) and US forces (Operation
Tomodachi, meaning "Operation Friends") in
response to the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima
disaster of March 11, 2011, known as 3-11 in
Japan.
There, the joint rescue efforts
were not opposed by those who favor Article 9 and
the spirit it embodies. Armitage and Nye suggest
that Operation Tomodachi simply be taken as a
precedent to justify future joint operations. In
other words, the Japanese constitution is simply
to be ignored, pretty much the tactic that
president Harry Truman inaugurated in the US to
plunge the country into the Korean war (1950-1953)
and the tactic Barack Obama has used in
interventions like the one in Libya.
Simply ignore the constitution and its
requirement that the US Congress alone can declare
war. This is an example, as if another were
needed, of how our elites view the "rule of law"
to which they appeal so often. (And one wonders
whether from the outset Operation Tomodachi was
viewed in part in this way by its architects. How
many other US humanitarian missions might have
ancillary covert purposes, one might ask?)
Armitage and Nye also mention that the
Yanai Committee report of 2006 notes that the
prime minister could by fiat put aside the Article
9 prohibition, as in anti-piracy efforts in
Djibouti. But this report has been seen as an
effort to subvert the Japanese constitution. As
Professor Craig Martin of Washburn School of Law,
an American expert in these matters, wrote
at the time, "the exercise of using an
extra-constitutional body to advance a 'revision'
of the interpretation of the constitution, was
illegitimate on a number of levels, the most
important being that it was an end-run around the
amendment provisions in the constitution." But
then that is precisely what Armitage and Nye are
up to.
Article 9 remains popular in Japan
although its popularity has been substantially
eroded in recent years. The reasons for this and
the forces behind it deserve some careful
examination in light of the US Empire's "pivot" to
East Asia.
But so long as the Japanese
Communist Party and Japanese socialists remain a
force in government and society there is little
chance that Article 9 will be repealed, making the
end run necessary if Japan is to be remilitarized.
The very existence of the Japan
Self-Defense Forces in fact can be seen as illegal
under the provisions of Article 9, which is why
the JSDF was originally dubbed a National Police
Force.
Armitage and Nye sum up the
military aspects of their report in the following
recommendation to Japan: "Japan should expand the
scope of her responsibilities to include the
defense of Japan and defense with the United
States in regional contingencies. The allies
require more robust, shared, and interoperable ISR
(Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance)
capabilities and operations that extend well
beyond Japanese territory. It would be a
responsible authorization on the part of Japan to
allow US forces and JSDF to respond in full
cooperation throughout the security spectrum of
peacetime, tension, crisis, and war."
(Emphasis JW)
For diplomats that is about
as specific and concrete as it gets. And it is
very troubling since it is hardly a plan for
peace.
The Armitage/Nye paper contains
much more. Japan is urged to participate more
fully in forums involving the Philippines, India,
Taiwan and the Republic of Korea (ROK), ie South
Korea. China is not mentioned in this regard - not
surprisingly. Armitage and Nye know that this is a
tough sell for the citizens of the ROK with vivid
memories of Japanese conquest and atrocities in
World War II. But Armitage and Nye hope it can be
engineered.
The report also has an
economic dimension. The idea of using India as a
battering ram against China, which was popular
in the Bush administration and which was aided by
Israel, is not really viable. India is riven
by internal disputes, corruption, religious
divisions and a Maoist rebellion over a large part
of its territory. And economically it is wanting.
Military power grows from economic power
and so the US needs the aid of a powerful regional
economic power in its drive against China. That is
the role of Japan in the eyes of Armitage and Nye.
Thus, to be useful to the US, Japan must restore
its economy, now in decline.
This is
really a tall order since Japan's main trading
partner and the principle destination for its
exports is China. That became evident in the
recent Chinese boycott of Japanese goods as the
dispute over the Diaoyou/Sinkaku islands
intensified recently, which hurt Japan greatly but
had little effect on the Chinese economy.
But again Armitage and Nye hold out hope.
Their solution is for Japan to restore and expand
its nuclear power. (One wonders why the US
environmentalists have not spoken out about that
and whether the Japanese environmentalists have
knowledge of these plans for Japan, hatched in the
US). In addition, Armitage and Nye offer liquefied
natural gas (LNG) and other petroleum products
from North America as more largesse to link Japan
closer to the US.
As they write: "The
shale gas revolution in the continental United
States and the abundant gas reserves in Alaska
present Japan and the United States with a
complementary opportunity: the United States
should begin to export LNG from the lower 48
states by 2015, and Japan continues to be the
world's largest LNG importer. Since 1969, Japan
has imported relatively small amounts of LNG from
Alaska, and interest is picking up in expanding
that trade link, given Japan's need to increase
and diversify its sources of LNG imports,
especially in light of 3/11."
Again one
wonders where the voices of US environmentalists
are on this matter.
The idea of Japan
outdoing China in East Asia economically is a pipe
dream, with or without the US. China has a
population of 1.3 billion and Japan 130 million.
To expect Japan to emerge as a serious challenge
to China in the long term is like hoping that in
the immediate future, Canada with its 34 million
can challenge the US with 315 million. And China
has a vibrant economy, an educated workforce and a
culture to be reckoned with, from which Japan's
emerged and followed until it was "Westernized".
So what is Japan's protection to be in the
face of such a large and powerful neighbor? For
one thing, Japan certainly has the wherewithal to
deter aggression from any quarter with its
advanced technology and its potential for nuclear
weapons development. For another, China has no
record of expansionism overseas even going back to
1400, when it was the world's premier naval power
but never conquered or established colonies or
took slaves. But a large part of Japanese security
lies in an increasing respect for international
law with its emphasis on sovereignty.
The
concept of sovereignty in international law is the
protection of small nations from the depredations
of large ones. And ironically the principal threat
to the idea of sovereignty comes from the United
States and the West with their pre-emptive wars
and "humanitarian" interventions, which trash the
classical concept of sovereignty. Japan should be
wary of dealings with such powers and supporting
such ideas.
For Japan to take the bait and
be the cat's paw for US schemes in East Asia
borders on the insane. And diplomatic exchanges
between China and Japan in recent weeks following
the Japanese elections show that many Japanese
recognize this. They and the Chinese seem
increasingly willing to work out differences in a
structure of peace. We should hope so - and so
should the Japanese. He who takes the bait is
often left holding the bag.
John V
Walsh can be reached at
John.Endwar@gmail.com
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
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click here if you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
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