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Balancing the US, China and Japan

By Zhao Jinglun: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, February 27, 2013

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[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

The strategic balance between the United States, China and Japan -- a stable trilateral relationship -- is of vital importance to regional and global peace and stability. Unfortunately, Japan has provoked a sharp conflict with China over the Diaoyu Islands. That has created a difficult crisis throughout the region.

Fortunately, the United States, which first aided and abetted Japan's right wing in its attempts to secure the Diaoyu Islands, especially during Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, thought better and tried to cool regional hostilities. During Shinzo Abe's recent visit to Washington, he received no additional support from the White House, and was forced to declare that he would handle the dispute in a "reserved manner." The manner in which he had acted hitherto was anything but "reserved." Washington obviously does not want to be dragged by Japan into the mire of open conflict with China.

It is rather unusual for the right-wing Wall Street Journal to publish an open letter from the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Auslin to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just before the latter's Washington visit, asking him "to tell Mr. Obama that Japan will never fire the first shot [over the disputed islands], nor endanger civilian life."

The trilateral relationship is complex and its imbalance can only be understood by considering basic development trends. Among these, the most important is China's historic rise that has changed the power relationship among the three. Even though the United States is still the most powerful nation in the world economically, politically and militarily, its relative influence is on the decline. As for Japan, it has lost twenty years of economic growth and yielded its second spot in world economy rankings to China in 2010. This fact has had an enormous impact on Japan's national psyche.

As a result of these developments, the United States has decided to rebalance to Asia and the Pacific (Obama never used the term "pivot." Analysts prefer the term "rebalance"). Both the U.S. and Japan are promoting the theory of the "China threat." To contain that "threat," the United States is to deploy in 2017 all three stealth planes, the F-22, F-35 and B-2, to bases near China. By 2020, 60 percent of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50 percent today).

However, the nation's budget woes place this plan in doubt. And the U.S. is increasingly dependent on the contribution of its allies, Japan in particular. That plays into the scheme of Abe's right wing government. During his Washington visit, Abe said he and Mr. Obama agreed that the security alliance between Japan and the United States is back on track after a period of occasional bumps during the past three years when his long-ruling LDP was in opposition. He told Obama that Japan will boost its defense forces.

News reports did not mention any discussion of Abe's plan to gain the right for collective self-defense and upgrade the Self Defense Forces to a National Defense Force by revising Japan's Constitution. Some analysts were overly optimistic about this. They interpret this as U.S. opposition to Abe's plan. They seem to be unaware of the fact that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye, Jr. advocated Tier I status for Japan in a report sponsored by the Center for International and Strategic Studies last August.

They argued that the U.S.-Japan alliance anchors stability in Asia. And "together we face the re-rise of China and its attendant uncertainties," and that Japan's Self Defense Forces are poised to play a larger role in enhancing Japan's security and reputation "if anachronistic constraints can be eased." So they considered Japan's pacific Constitution, especially Article 9, to be "anachronistic".

Richard C. Bush III, director of Brookings Institution's Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies and Foreign Policy Senior Fellow, also averred that Japan would "remain a first-tier country."

Do these people really want to negate the hard-won victory of the Anti-Fascist War?

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