« [SSJ: 7092] RIHN Seminar (Global Environmental Change and Sustainability Research) Announcement | Main | [SSJ: 7094] Re: 7024] IR Theory and the Japan's Alliance Choices »
January 10, 2012
[SSJ: 7093] Re: 7024] IR Theory and the Japan's Alliance Choices
From: Richard Katz
Date: 2012/01/10
Paul Midford wrote:
The psychological dependence of many Japanese elites on the US is not at all comparable with what we find in other East Asian countries. Others, most notably ASEAN, and even South Korea, are more willing to navigate between the US and China, playing the two off each other for their own advantage, rather than proclaiming total dependence on one or the other.
So the question is how to navigate between the two powers, as no East Asian nation should want to find itself in the unenviable position of relying solely on Beijing's or Washington's benevolence. This is a false choice that need not be made, although some Japanese elites seem determined to make it nonetheless.
It's one thing to play China and the US off against each other, and quite another to forsake alliances (formal or informal) with the US for an alliance with China based on fear of China. Japan's alliance with the US arose, not only due to the US occupation, but necause it was accepted by the Japanese voters after Japan regained its sovereignty. And that was not out of fear of the US, but out of fear of Stalin's USSR (just as it was accepted by the French and Italian voters vis-a-vis their domestic Communist parties for the same reasons). In fact, one the main factors hobbling Japan's political devolopment was that the only opposition parties were those on the wrong side of the Cold War. In this sense, the fall of the Berlin Wall helped liberate Japan. By contrast, you seem to be suggesting that Japan would ally with China out of fear of an aggressive China in the face of US retreat. Have I understood you correctly?
. .
This is also very different from the "dual-hedging"
strategy described by Heginbotham and Samuels," i.e.
"On the one hand, Japan has relied on its alliance with the United States as a hedge against military threats.
On the other hand, Japan has cultivated different partners -- including some the United States identifies as present or potential security threats -- to hedge against economic dangers."
As a complete layman, I have the impression that China is pushing Asian countries that might ordinarily prefer a more non-aligned posture into a tighter dependence on the US. And it is doing so precisely because its behavior is seen as so threatening and bullying. I read recently that a Korean coast guardsman was killed when its coast guard tried to intercept one of the growing number of illegal Chinese fishing boats in Korea's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). China's own claims about its EEZ--and how much control it has there--conflict with the claims of Korea and Japan in the East China Sea.
In an essay entitled "China's frown diplomacy"
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LJ05Ad02.html),
Donald K. Emmerson reports that Beijing tried, and failed, to prevent other nations from even discussing, let alone criticizing, its claims to broad areas of the South China Sea. He writes: "China knew that it might face a backlash in July 2010 when the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Regional Forum was scheduled to meet in Hanoi.Beijing reportedly contacted all of ASEAN's member governments and strongly urged them not to broach the subject of the South China Sea.The effort failed. At the meeting of the Forum in Hanoi on July 23.Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi.lashed out as well at the Southeast Asians who had been so bold as to mention the South China Sea.
He reminded his ASEAN counterparts of their countries'
economic ties to China, as if those links could be broken at any time. He reminded his Southeast Asian listeners that, compared to the sizes of their countries, China was bigger. My informants took his remarks to be a clear warning not to challenge Beijing."
A serious danger is that China fails to see how others perceive its actions. In a wonderful new book on the decline of all sorts of violence over the millenia and centures called "The Better Angels of Our Nature,"
Harvard psycholist Steven Pinker reports that aggressive nations are often subject to incredible misperceptions and overexagerations of their own strength (and I would add, perhaps the external threats to them). I can't find the page number right now, but, if memory serves, he somewhere reports that nations that start wars tend to lose from 25% to 50% of the time, depending on the definition and database. I've read books that speak of oligarchies being particularly susceptible to misperceptions. The problem isn't just the psychology of authoritarian rulers (though that does play a role) but also that such regimes lie to themselves. I was told by a junior editor of Caijing magazine in Shanghai that, when the SARS epidemic broke out, Jiang Zemin could not get accurate information from the provincial leaders, so he promoted a freer press to get other sources of information. That was reversed under Hu Jintao and, in late 2009, Caijjing's original founder and editor was forced out along with most of the staff.
PM wrote:
China made a number of diplomatic blunders in 2009-2010 that did have this effect, although it is striking how quickly they switched course this year. Notice how Vietnam, who was spearheading the counter-China coalition last year was pealed away from that coalition by Beijing when it made important concessions to Hanoi's territorial claims in the South China Sea.
You know more on this than I do but a quick google search shows that China cut the undersea cables of two Vietnamese oil exploration vessels in May-June 2011 and I believe Vietnam joined other ASEAN nations in demanding a multilateral solution to territorial disptues, rather than China's "divide and conquer"
insistence on bilateralism. I'd like to see China reverse course, but I leave it to experts to decide whether (or to what extent) it has.
PM wrote:
By the way, we should be careful about the "facts"
surrounding the rare earth "embargo." As Linus Hagstrom argued at EAJS in August, the rare earth "embargo" or whatever it was started a month before the Senkaku/Diaoyutai flare-up, so characterizing it as an embargo related to the islands may be more of a Japanese construction than an empirical reality.
My understanding is this: prior to the incident where the Chinese fishing boat rammed Japanese coast guard boat, the Chinese had reduced their rare earth metal exports globally, not just to Japan. That was done for economic reasons. The US, EU and Mexico had launched a WTO complaint about similar restrictions on a host of raw materials as early as 2009. Then, after the incident, and the arrest of the Chinese boat captain, there was a total embargo on Japan--one denied by Beijing but felt by Japanese importers--and not applied to other countries.. In July 2011, The World Trade Organization ruled against China even on its economically-motivated restrictions on raw material exports vital to high-tech industries.The WTO said it was illegal to restrict exports to help domestic firms vis-a-vis foreign ones.
PM wrote:
As for how unequal a
Sino-Japanese alliance would be, as I said, we can identify several ways in which it would likely be less unequal [than the US-Japan alliance]: China would be very unlikely to demand the right to station its troops on Japanese soil, or to demand that Japanese troops be dispatched overseas for combat operations as its US ally does.
This assumes this assumes that Japan gained no benefit from the US military presence, either in the past or the present.
We don't know how far China would go. But China would undoubtedly insist that other nations recognize its claims to own most of the South China Sea, including all the oil underneath, and its efforts to keep US vessels out of its "territorial waters." One-third of the world's shipping goes through these waters and freedom of navigation is vital to these nations'
survival. China would also undoubtedly want recognition of its claims to much of the East China Sea as well.
Remember its complaints about US-ROK exercises in the Yellow Sea after Pyongyang's sinking of the Cheonan.
China claimed that the US and ROK had no right to conduct exercises in what China claimed to be its Exclusive Exconomic Zone (rather expansive claims, btw). My limited understanding of international law (and I could be wrong) is that EEZs are not like sovereign waters and a nation cannot prevent others from sailing vessels through them. China would insist that others support and aid its efforts to deny the US navy access to all the waters inside "The First Island Chain" that goes from Japan to Indonesia. Given that China has used violence to take some of the tiny islands in the waters it calls its own, one does not know what China would do in the face of an even greater imbalance of power and the absence of the US.
The question about whether the US and China can coexist is a good one: the literature on power shifts tells us that rising powers often end up at war with established powers because the latter are unwilling to adjust to the rising power. Would the US see China's approach to regional military dominance as a causus belli in and of itself, or would it accept this development with equanimity?
One could add that another reason for war is the resentment of rising powers at past humiliations and an exaggerated view of how they are being held back by the status quo powers. Case in point is 1920s talk in Japan of being contained by the ABCD (American, British, Chinese, Dutch) powers and what this led to. Japan's misperception became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then there's Germany. China is an extremely resentful rising power (not without reason) and, in my view, has an exaggerated view of US "containment efforts,"
incluidng when it comes to day-to-day economic frictions. This is also combined with the systemic misperceptions attributed by at least some scholars to oligarchies.
Richard Katz
The Oriental Economist Report
Approved by ssjmod at 02:01 PM