Cognitive biases and the rise of China

Harvard's Alastair Iain Johnston has a must-read article in the Spring issue of International Security in which he dissects the spread of a meme of China's "new assertiveness" spread among policy analysts, the media, and scholars in the US in 2010. (Available for free as a pdf, at least for the time being.)

As Paul Pillar notes, Johnston not only raises questions about whether China's foreign policy has become more assertive since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, citing numerous examples of continuity, but he provides an important examination of how foreign-policy narratives form in the twenty-first century. By using memetics — the process by which an idea or belief spreads from mind to mind — Johnston provides a new way of thinking about how conventional wisdom forms. As Johnston notes, the media has played an agenda-setting role before, but with the emergence of the blog and the rise of Twitter as a medium for the exchange of serious ideas, foreign-policy discourse, especially in the US, seems qualitatively and quantitatively different, not just moving faster but also occurring in much greater volume than ever before.

After all, not too long ago to receive the latest conventional wisdom on foreign policy you had to wait for the latest issue of, say, Foreign Affairs to arrive in the mail, with a steady diet of newspaper op-eds and weekly magazine articles to tide you over. Now in the time between issues of Foreign Affairs you can read daily the fifteen blogs at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations (which publishes Foreign Affairs), not to mention the fifteen blogs at Foreign Policy's website and numerous other blogs hosted by think-tanks and publications, and the Twitter feeds of the contributors to these blogs and magazines. This all amounts to what Johnston calls a "discursive tidal wave."

Johnston talks about first-mover advantages and herding when it comes to the formation of prevailing narratives in foreign-policy discourse, but there is another, related problem Johnston doesn't explicitly mention but more or less illustrates in his essay. Namely, with so much data streaming past our eyes, the dangers from the cognitive biases are surely heightened. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the human mind is "a machine for jumping to conclusions." Presumably the more information analysts must sift through, the more they're likely to fall victim to confirmation biases, the halo effect, the availability heuristic, and other mental shortcuts that can lead to erroneous conclusions. Human beings did not need to invent the Internet to struggle with these biases — and one can easily argue that policymakers have always fallen prey to them — but the Internet is uniquely suited to encourage Kahneman's "fast thinking" (intuitive thinking in the face of uncertainty).

Johnston's article, then, is a note of caution to be sensitive to how foreign-policy narratives form today, a warning to analysts to not take shortcuts but instead to use careful scientific reasoning before reaching conclusions and, in the case of China, to be sensitive to history, to avoid making inferences from a small sample size, and to be clear about what they think is driving China's behavior. There probably isn't much that can be done about the state of foreign-policy discourse today, but one can hope that the high-speed, high-volume discourse is at least more amenable to self-correction than the older discourse.

(For other comments on this essay see Daniel Drezner and Graham Webster. Drezner's comment that Johnston falls victim to ahistoricism himself is probably right — I would have liked to see a bit more discussion of how conventional wisdom formed in US foreign policy in the past, beyond a handful of references to media studies articles on the media's role as agenda setter.)

A new alliance in the making

Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya has arrived in Hawaii for a Tuesday morning meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Following weeks of bilateral acrimony, the two will discuss negotiations to strengthen bilateral cooperation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the US-Japan mutual security treaty, signed fifty years ago this month.

For the moment it appears that the US will — not without displeasure — set Futenma aside while a defense ministry team considers possible alternatives for building a replacement facility at Henoko bay. In advance of her meeting with Okada, Clinton said, echoing a recent New York Times op-ed by Joseph Nye (more on this in a moment), that the alliance is more important than Futenma, and she and Okada will discuss ways to improve cooperation instead of dwelling on the contentious base issue.

It is about time that the Obama administration stepped back from the brink. The administration ought to have known better. It is one thing to state that the US government understands the Hatoyama government's political constraints; it is another to act on the basis of this recognition and play it cool, recognizing that perhaps there is something unseemly about the US government's leaning heavily on the first Japanese government headed by a party other than the (longtime US client) LDP to abandon a campaign promise within weeks of taking power.

Nye's counsel of patience is well-timed and appropriate — as is his admonition that "a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic" if it comes about through a heavy-handed approach to the Hatoyama government. Also appropriate is his reminder that the bilateral relationship is about China, as it was when Nye was at the Pentagon spearheading the review of the alliance in 1995. "Integrate, but hedge," writes Nye.

The problem, however, is that 2010 is not 1995. Japanese leaders and the Japanese public remain concerned about China's rise, but Japan's economy is far more dependent on China's than it was in 1996 when the US and Japan reaffirmed their security relationship. If anything, the idea of a threatening rise seemed clearer in 1996, when China was menacing Taiwan, than today, with China, its economy growing even as the developed economies struggle to recover from the global financial crisis, continuing to modernize its armed forces. Today China is an indispensable participant in global meetings but also, perhaps, a hegemon in waiting in East Asia. At the same time, the value of the US-Japan alliance as a security relationship may be less valuable today than in 1995. It would only be sensible for Japanese officials to wonder about the value of the US deterrent after what Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong call "the end of influence." As they write in their new book by that title: "As money alters power relations, the United States is not simply becoming dependent — but it is no longer independent, either. That is a major change. And China is no longer helpless and cowed in face of the superpower hegemon; it has got a grip on it. Indeed, while the world peeks in, the two countries are realizing that they have thrown themselves into an intimate economic embrace with, to say the least, very mixed feelings."

The alliance is by no means valueless, but the terms certainly have changed. Japan can no longer afford to be wholly dependent on the alliance as its hedge against a violent turn in China's rise, because the US commitment may be less than ironclad. Even politically, Japan has plenty of reasons to desire good relations not just with China — as it watches the US develop the bilateral relationship described by its current secretary of state as the world's most important — but with other countries in the region that eye China warily even as they profit from its rise. The Futenma feud has, to a certain extent, drawn attention away from the Hatoyama government's other initiatives: the prime minister's multilateral diplomacy, but, more importantly, his visit to India, his government's first negotiations with Russia over the Northern territories (of particular importance to Hatoyama as the grandson of Ichiro, who restored Japan's relations with the Soviet Union in 1956), and the possibility of a rejuvenated partnership with South Korea. Analysts who see Japan's foreign policy decision as a dichotomous choice — the US or China — are missing the reality that Japan prefers to be dependent on neither, or rather prefers good relations with both (a "dual hedge") and moreover close relations with other countries in the region as a hedge against US-China competition and cooperation. It will take time for these diplomatic initiatives to bear fruit, but the Hatoyama government is moving forward with a clear vision. It recognizes the need to enhance Japan's influence in the region, and by signaling a renewed willingness to make amends for Japan's wartime past and a desire to deepen Japan's economic ties within the region (an important theme of the government's new growth strategy), the Hatoyama government is developing an Asia-centered foreign policy.

The question for the US and Japan going forward is what role the alliance can play in this more fluid regional environment. The hope that the US and Japan, along with other democracies, could present a united front tasked with integrating China peacefully has proven unrealistic. Instead the most salient division in the region may be that separating the US and China from the region's middle and small powers. Accordingly, the security relationship will be scaled back (as discussed here), making the dispute over Futenma that much more of a distraction. The future of the US-Japan relationship may be a hard security core linked to the defense of Japan and some form of US forward presence in Japan (in the same way that Singapore has facilitated the US forward presence in the region), looser political and economic cooperation in the region, and closer cooperation on global issues like climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, and the like.

What remains to be answered is how long the US will be willing and able to maintain forces in the region — and how much of the cost of basing them in Japan Tokyo will be willing to bear. The answer to these questions remains to be seen, but in time Ozawa Ichiro's offhand remarks last year about the US forward presence one day being reduced to the Seventh Fleet (and air force elements, as he later added) could prove accurate.

These changes will take years to unfold, and they are not foreordained: exogenous shocks of one form or another could take the region and its major players in different directions than that outlined here.

But the dream of 1996 has passed. The US-Japan relationship will be looser and less security-centered than alliance managers had hoped following the 1996 security declaration, the 1997 guidelines, and the Koizumi government's support for the Bush administration in Western and Central Asia.

A reply to Randy Waterhouse on balancing

Randy Waterhouse graciously addressed some points I raised in response to his discussion of Japanese balancing behavior, and I would like to respond in turn.

Although before I do, I must add that I like the Stephensonian moniker.

1 and 2) I think what we're dealing with here is the difference between balancing as a description of behavior intended to counter or neutralize visible threats to a state's security and balancing as the process by which the structure of international system changes. Japan may be engaged in the former in regard to North Korea and the latter in regard to China. There may be some overlap, but perhaps not as much as meets the eye. (Although any legal or constitutional changes that grow out of the North Korean threat would undoubtedly influence balancing against China.) For example, Japan has little reason to ramp up military spending to neutralize the threat posed by North Korea. The debate is over whether passive or deterrent defense is adequate to meet the threat posed by North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, or whether Japan needs to consider preemptive defense. Arguably meeting the North Korea challenge does not require all-out mobilization, a comprehensive change in how Japan mobilizes national resources in response to external threats. The debate over how to deal with the North Korean threat is obviously connected with the debate over how to deal with a rising China, but the question is how these two debates are connected.

One connection is simply that Japanese hawks are not making clear distinctions between North Korea and China when making their case. I figured that Waterhouse and I agree on the importance of China for Japanese balancing behavior over the long term, but my point was that China may play a more prominent role in Japanese debates about balancing in the near term than I read his post as arguing. After all, Waterhouse wrote of "the lack of bold, provocative military signals from China of late," which may be true in an objective sense, but from the perspective of Japanese elites arguing for balancing behavior of one form or another, China has done plenty to merit more balancing on Japan's part, whether by spending more on its military or by sending the PLA Navy to waters ever further from China (and by acting with greater assertiveness closer to China). Arguments about China may carry less weight than arguments rooted in meeting the North Korean threat, but some elites are making arguments about the China threat. It may not be easy to separate the two: national security hawks are trying to create a climate of uncertainty in order to sell their policies, and they are willing to use any external threat at hand to make their case. North Korea may provide a particular perturbation — but the sensitivity of elites and public to a perturbation may have as much to do with worrying signals from China as with North Korean behavior.

3) Just to build on a point here, there are a number of different ways to think about post-cold war changes to the US-Japan alliance. External balancing against a long-term threat may be the most likely explanation, but there are other plausible explanations, whether domestic politics or a structural explanation rooted less in preparations for a rising China than in the impact of unipolarity of the US alliances that were the legacy of the cold war. It is entirely possible that we may be entering a period in which Japan chafes at a security policy overly centered on the alliance and instead opts for Samuels's "Goldilocks consensus," a grand strategy that features a more even mix of external and internal balancing, maximizing Japan's options in a changing regional security environment. (Of course, if US power declines markedly relative to China's, structural realism would presumably predict greater incentives for external balancing by both the US and Japan and more internal balancing by Japan to compensate for US relative decline.)

Is Japan balancing?

"Randy Waterhouse," the nom de blog of a contributor to the political science group blog Duck of Minerva, looks to Japan in a discussion of when and why states balance against other states.

As I wrote in April, the lack of Japanese balancing behavior is the great puzzle in Japanese security policy since the end of the cold war. Waterhouse considers the possibility that North Korea — as opposed to China — is leading Japan to pursue a balancing strategy. He considers threatening signals from North Korea as a source of "perturbations" (borrowing a concept from Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies) that will trigger Japanese balancing behavior against North Korea.

There are a few problems with this argument. First, while the DPRK is in a sense be "revisionist" in that it wholly rejects the prevailing international order, as a small, impoverished, isolated country dependent on its neighbors to feed its people and having little more than its nuclear weapons, its missiles, and its wits to depend on for survival it hardly constitutes a revisionist power in the sense outlined by Robert Gilpin. North Korea may be revisionist in rhetoric, but do states balance against rhetoric or reach? The idea — implied but not explicitly stated by Waterhouse — is that Japanese conservatives can balance against the state that may one day become a revisionist power if it is not one already (see Alastair Iain Johnston's consideration of this question here) by using the DPRK as a stand-in for China. Policy decisions made to cope with North Korea could serve as a "down payment" on a balancing strategy against China. Or not: as Waterhouse notes, there is a difference between reactionary balancing and long-term balancing. And while Waterhouse argues that elites interested in a more robust security posture are treating North Korea's recent behavior as a catalyst, certain conservatives make no secret of their desire to balance against China. A recent Sankei editorial on the LDP subcommittee's draft NDPG points to China's rise to second place in the SIPRI index of defense spending to make the case for reversing cuts in Japan's defense spending, a call echoed in an op-ed by Sassa Atsuyuki, the first head of the Cabinet's national security office, who calls for an increase in defense spending to 1.5% of GDP (but does not mention China). Japan's desire to purchase the F-22 is explicitly connected to a desire to balance against Chinese airpower. Despite the positive developments in the Sino-Japanese relationship, the China threat thesis is alive and well among the Japanese elites arguing for a more robust security policy. North Korea's actions may help make the case for balancing, but that does not mean that elites using Chinese behavior too.

There is a bigger question in this debate, namely how do we know when a state is balancing? What mix of policies would constitute a Japanese balancing strategy? Waterhouse essentially assumes that any change to the status quo in Japanese security policy would constitute balancing. But there has been plenty of change in Japanese security policy in the past twenty years, but it is debateable whether these changes constitute balancing. Japan may have opted for some balancing: the decision made by Japanese officials in 1994-1995 to keep the US-Japan alliance at the center of Japanese security policy (and to "strengthen" the alliance) was a response to the uncertainty surrounding China's rise, although US and Japanese officials were careful to not mention China when discussing the redefinition of the alliance. In other words, it is possible to argue that Japan has opted for external balancing over internal balancing, which would entail sweeping legal changes and (presumably) an expensive rearmament program that would give Japan greater autonomy from the US to cope with an uncertain regional environment. Nearly a decade of stagnant defense spending in areas aside from missile defense and host nation support — i.e., defense spending directly connected to the alliance — means that autonomy has become increasingly costly for Japan, which may in turn explain why Japanese elites are especially sensitive to recent signals emanating from Washington.

But that being said, there are other explanations for Japan's decision to embrace the alliance that have less to do with balancing and more to do with institutionalist arguments: Japan opted to renew the alliance after the cold war because there was a certain degree of path dependency. While it appeared as if Japan was making a choice between the US-Japan alliance, greater autonomy, and greater independence within the UN and other multilateral organizations, the choice may have been a false one. Japan may have reaffirmed the alliance simply because the balance of power among domestic actors was overwhelmingly in favor of doing so, with little thought to the strategic implications of this choice versus other choices.

Is this about to change? With the defense division of the LDP's Policy Research Council approving its subcommittee's draft NDPG that recommends the acquisition of preemptive strike capabilities — most notably cruise missiles — it is possible that Japan is preparing to shift from external balancing to internal balancing. Prime Minister Aso is favorably disposed to the proposal, although his defense minister, Hamada Yasukazu, is more cautious (triggering two blog posts from Komori Yoshihisa criticizing Hamada for being too soft). But Hamada's caution suggests that there may be skeptics within the LDP who could prevent the government from making a radical break with the status quo. (And there's a strong possibility that the LDP will not be in power long enough to oversee the publication of the new NDPG in December.)

In short, Waterhouse is right to look at domestic politics as a source of Japanese balancing behavior, but he understates the extent to which Japan may have already opted for a particular balancing strategy via the US-Japan alliance, and the extent to which domestic politics constrains political actors who want Japan to embark on a substantial and expensive rearmament program.

The emergence of Middle Power Asia

Over the past week, we have seen more signs of the shape that international relations in East Asia will take over the coming decades.

I've written before about the role that middle powers — most notably Japan, Australia, South Korea, ASEAN acting as a bloc, and to a lesser extent India — will play in the East Asia balance, maneuvering between the US and China, the region's two giants as they attempt to enmesh China in regional institutions and profit economically from its rise while cooperating with the US to hedge against a violent turn in China's rise and to ensure that they have strategic flexibility more generally.

Prime Minister Aso Taro visited China to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, renewing their commitment to building a "strategic, reciprocal relationship" and discussing a number of urgent problems, most notably the global spread of swine flu, the ongoing global economic crisis, and North Korea's latest turn to intransigence. The deep freeze of the Koizumi years is increasingly distant, and these Sino-Japanese summits are becoming so routine in their agendas as to be boring. But in this relationship, boring is positive. Despite Chinese anxiety about the gift sent by Aso to Yasukuni Shrine for the Spring Festival prior to his trip to China (and the expected Chinese netizen protests about welcoming Aso to China after his gift), Wen and Hu mentioned the history problem but did not harp on it, just as Aso expressed his hope for Chinese participation in nuclear disarmament. Both sides seem content to accentuate the positive in their meetings, and — aside from Wen's cautionary note — the Basil Fawlty line remains in effect: don't mention the war.

In fact, looking at the post in which I first mentioned the Basil Fawlty line, Aso has proved me wrong. Last May I wrote, "Mr. Aso and his comrades will most likely not embrace the Fawlty line." However, it appears that the structural factors that draw Japan and China to one another have tamed another Japanese conservative politician. In fact, in a speech in Beijing Thursday, Aso alluded to the possibility of an economic partnership agreement between Japan and China; the obstacles to such an agreement are high, certainly as high or higher than the obstacles facing an EPA or trade agreement between Japan and the US, but as symbolism goes it is significant that Aso mentioned the possibility of institutionalizing the Sino-Japanese economic relationship. In the meantime, Japan and China outlined the three pillars of their relationship going forward: economic cooperation (Japan will host a senior-level economic dialogue in June); environmental and technology cooperation; and cultural and educational exchanges. The beginnings of perpetual peace? Hardly: there is still much work to do, whether on the Senkakus, North Korea, the history problem (how sustainable is the Fawlty line after all?), or Chinese military transparency. But by acknowledging that there are areas on which they can cooperate and that there is value to meeting even without perfect harmony in their positions, Japan and China are making Northeast Asia ever so slightly more stable.

At the same time, even as Aso parlayed with China's senior leaders in Beijing, Hamada Yasukazu, his defense minister, prepared for a Golden Week visit to Washington where he would be meeting with Robert Gates, his US counterpart. Gates and Hamada met Friday morning, and central to the discussion was Hamada's practically begging Gates for the right to purchase F-22s from the US as Japan considers its next-generation fighter. "Even just a few," Hamada said. Of course, it is not in Gates's power to permit Japan to buy the F-22; as mentioned in this post, its sale abroad is prohibited by the Obey Amendment, meaning that the Japanese government should be making its case to Congress. (I am certain that if it isn't doing so already, the Japanese government will be lobbying representatives and senators from the forty-four states involved in the production of the F-22. Sakurai Yoshiko tellingly included this detail in the articles mentioned in this post.) No word on how Gates received Hamada's petition, but the Gates-Hamada meeting reveals the other side of Middle Power Asia. With one hand, Japan is reaching out to China, with the other it is balancing by constantly working to strengthen the US-Japan alliance. Gates and Hamada discussed coordinating as the US prepares its next Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and Japan prepares its next National Defense Program Outline for later this year. They also talked about further strengthening missile defense cooperation and devoting sufficient attention to the realignment of US forces in Japan.

Australia, as I've written before, faces the same strategic imperatives, a fact thrown into relief by events this week. As it was characterized in the Economist's Banyan column this week, "On the one hand, Australia’s crackerjack fit with the Chinese economy is reshaping Australia’s trade and investment flows, drawing the country into a China-centred Asian orbit. On the other, Australia’s security hangs on America’s continued presence in the western Pacific." One can easily substitute Japan for Australia without skipping a beat. This week Australia has been feeling the tension growing out of its economic relationship, due to an investment bid by Chinalco in Rio Tinto. In a speech at the Lowy Institute, Malcolm Turnbull, leader of the opposition, called on the government to reject the bid, which, regardless of the outcome of the bid, has brought concerns about the Sino-Australian relationship to the fore — anticipating, in a sense, the Rudd government's defense white paper.

Much as Japan is looking to hedge against China, so too is Australia: reports suggest that the white paper will lavish Australia's navy with new resources.

Rory Medcalf at the Interpreter writes that Japanese and South Korean analysts look favorably upon Australia's plans, although he suggests that the Rudd government's plans could spark a spate of middle power arms building. But regardless of what other middle powers do, the Rudd program and Japan's desperate pursuit of the F-22 suggest that the middle powers will not feel secure simply by pursuing external balancing (tighter alliances with the US and other countries in the region). Particularly as the US looks to deepen its cooperation with China across a range of issues — whether or not it is appropriate to refer to Sino-US cooperation as a G2 — the middle powers will likely rely more on internal balancing, concluding that while their alliances with the US are fine, perhaps an additional guarantee of security is worth the investment. They may look to each other for security too, although as I argued when Australia and Japan issued a joint security declaration, it is unclear what Japan and Australia can do for each other.

In any case, there are limits to how far the middle powers can and will go in their hedging against China. They will continue to work on their economic relationships with China, they will continue to look for opportunities to bind China through regional institutions, and, especially in the case of Japan, they will face fiscal constraints in maintaining capabilities adequate to defend themselves without the US. Despite concerns about the Gates defense budget, the US is not going anywhere — and it is as imperative for the middle powers to ensure that that remains the case as it is for them to ensure that the US does not go overboard with containing China. For the foreseeable future, this is the delicate balance facing the middle powers.

A future for values diplomacy?

Daniel Twining, currently a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and formerly an Asia policy staffer at the State Department's policy planning staff and an adviser to John McCain, offers his recommendations to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Shadow Government, a new blog at Foreign Policy featuring the writing of conservative and Republican foreign policy analysts.

Twining is a dedicated believer in the idea of "values diplomacy," that catch phrase of the Abe government — with Aso Taro as foreign minister — that placed "universal values," at the center of Japan's foreign policy, at least rhetorically.

The US, Japan, and other democracies of East Asia, according to this view (common in neoconservative circles in Washington, see this post for example), must cooperate to promote the spread of democracy in the region. Accordingly, for Twining the first two goals for US strategy in Asia must be "Accelerate the rise of democratic great powers in Asia that are increasingly willing to help police the region" and "Encourage strategic cooperation among Asia-Pacific democracies." Democracy reappears in point eight, "Promote democracy." The contrast with Secretary Clinton's vision of US East Asia strategy could not be more pronounced. Recall that in her first statement on Asia policy, Mrs. Clinton barely mentioned cooperation among democracies and democracy promotion as important US goals in the region.

And yet Twining thinks that no goal is more important than binding the region's democracies closer together. Twining celebrates what he sees as a "trend" of "Asian nations...leading the effort to form democratic security concerts, a trend Washington should enthusiastically nurture."

There are several problems with Twining's proposal.

First, it is not clear that the trend he sees is actually a trend. He cites the "quad," the strategic partnership among the US, Australia, Japan, and India, as a leading example of this trend. Except that it appears that the quad barely survived the Abe government that spearheaded its creation. Similarly, while the Australia-Japan and India-Japan security agreements are unprecedented in Japanese foreign policy, it is still unclear what substance lies behind the agreements. The democracies may be talking to each other more, but it is too early to declare that Asian democracies have deepened their strategic cooperation in any substantial way to the point of promoting "regional peace and prosperity."

However, if we grant that Twining's assessment of the state of cooperation among Asian democracies is correct, he still makes what I think is an overly optimistic assessment of the gains from said cooperation. Twining concludes that strong, democratic states on the Asian littoral — the same democratic states who he believes are deepening cooperation amongst themselves — "could deter Chinese adventurism and help ensure its peaceful rise."

Does Twining really believe that, that China will somehow be so impressed by the strength of its neighbors that it will simply accept what is tantamount to encirclement, cease enhancing its military power, and trust the US and the other democracies on its periphery to keep the sea lines carrying vital resources to China open at all times? If China is, in Twining's words, "a prickly, insecure giant," why would it feel any less insecure in these circumstances? It does not take a considerable leap of imagination to wonder whether this view might be a bit fanciful. Why is Twining so sure that deepening security ties among democracies (and non- or semi-democracies, in the case of Vietnam and Singapore) arrayed around China's borders while trigger such a benign response from China? This isn't simply a matter of Chinese paranoia. Is there a country in the world that would respond benignly to the formation of ever closer security ties among surrounding countries that also stress the illegitimacy of the surrounded country's government?

In short, the policy proposed by Twining here and by US and Japanese officials at various points in time would amount to encirclement, whether intentionally or not. As Joseph Nye has said, "If we treat China as an enemy now, we’re guaranteeing an enemy for the future."

But it is unlikely that this scenario will come to pass, for another reason ignored by Twining. Even if the Asian democracies are talking more with each other, they are also talking more with China, because, much like the US, none of them can afford to let relations with China deteriorate. South Korea, a strong Asian democracy that barely figures in the flurry of strategic cooperation mentioned by Twining except in regard to NATO-South Korea ties, is often written off as destined for the Chinese sphere of influence if and when reunification occurs. Australia has worked to avoid giving the impression that new security talks with Japan are aimed at China. India certainly looks warily across the Himalayas and now out into the Indian Ocean at China, but that does not make India a reliable junior partner for the US in a league of Asian democracies.

As I've argued before, to understand the future of East Asia it is essential to look at the role of middle powers, the powers forced to maneuver between China and the US, working to minimize antagonism while preventing the two from reaching agreements prejudicial to their interests. The firm ties rooted in shared values envisioned by Twining make it more difficult to pursue the flexible diplomacy required by life as a middle power, and I do not expect we'll see substantial progress in security cooperation among the democracies qua democracies. Twining comes close to recognizing this: "They are less likely to fall under the sway of their giant neighbors when they have options for partnership with a benign, distant partner. America's staying power at a time of dramatic strategic change gives smaller Asian countries geopolitical options they would not otherwise have." But while small (and not-so-small) Asian countries are in no hurry to see the US leave Asia, they also do not want the kind of universal relationships envisioned by Twining. They want the US as an option: a hedge against Chinese expansionism, a market for their goods, and perhaps as a source for investment. But that does not mean that they support active containment of China or making democracy a top priority for the region. The desire of middle powers for an active US presence in the region is an asset for the US only insofar as the US doesn't overreach in its zeal to promote democracy and bend regional institutions to its ends.

Twining further calls for fostering a "pluralistic regional order" in East Asia but the reality is that East Asia is already pluralistic, checkered with a growing array of bilateral, mini-lateral, regional, and trans-Pacific organizations, in addition to the network of US bilateral alliances. These organizations are based not on shared values, as they feature ties between democracies and non-democracies, but shared interests, and one interest in particular: stability in East Asia. The US should be engaged as much as possible in these organizations, but it should also be willing to accept that there is not a seat for the US at every table, at least not if the US wants to dominate the discussion and, as Mrs. Clinton said Friday referring to past US governments, act "reflexively before considering available facts and evidence, or hearing the perspectives of others." While he recognizes the importance of "talking economics," it seems for the most part US engagement in the region would involve more talking — about democracy and security — than listening.

Meanwhile, given the existence of a pluralistic regional order, the US should not fear the creation of what Michael Green calls institutions based on "preserving Asian exceptionalism." Asian exceptionalism sounds like another way of saying, Asian countries working together to solve Asian problems without the US at the table. Is that such a terrible thing? If there are, as Twining says, so many burgeoning and established democracies in the region, why should the US fear organizations from which it is absent?

Finally, on the very question of democracy promotion, Twining includes it as a goal but does nothing to explain how to go about it except to say that democracy is on the march in the region and China is on the wrong side of history. (Sounds awfully Marxist, doesn't it?) How does Twining propose to make China (or Vietnam or Burma or North Korea) democratic? How does Twining propose for the US and other regional democracies to keep existing democracies from lapsing, as in the case of Thailand?

Meanwhile, there is also a bit of irony in Twining's enthusiasm for democracy promotion, in that the more developed the democracy, the greater the popular ambivalence regarding the country's ties with the US. For example, while Japan's leaders talk of the strength of the alliance — perhaps for want of anything else to say — the Japanese public is increasingly doubtful about the alliance after years of an approach to the alliance that dovetailed with Twining's vision. Skepticism regarding ties with the US in countries like Japan and Australia does not necessarily mean that the Japanese and Australian peoples are more trusting of China, it means they are moving in the direction of a middle-power foreign policy that looks at both regional powers with a certain degree of distrust, wary of Chinese intentions while concerned about US overzealousness that would entrap their countries in wars not of their choosing.

In sum, the emphasis on democracy is misguided, not just because there is little the US can do — and little US allies want to do — to promote democracy in the region, but because it assumes that the region can be neatly divided into democracies and non-democracies, which in turn risks alienating China and sending it down a more assertive and unilateralist path, the very future Twining says he wants to prevent.

What will be the impact of the Chinese ASBM on the US-Japan alliance?

Reports are emerging that in the process of enhancing its short- and medium-range ballistic missile forces, China is also developing the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile, similar to the DF-21, a ballistic missile with a range of 1800 kilometers. (Whether the new version will have a similar range remains to be seen — it may in fact have a longer range.)

This could pose a major threat to US naval forces in East Asia in the event of a crisis.

As Richard Fisher, Jr. writes at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (Hat tip: NOSI):

China's new ASBMs pose a strategic as well as a tactical challenge to U.S. forces in Asia. At present the U.S. does not have anti-missile capabilities to defend large U.S. ships against this threat, so vulnerable targets, most importantly aircraft carriers, will have to remain out of missile range in order to survive. This factor will further limit the effectiveness of their already range-challenged F/A-18E/F fighter bombers. U.S. Aegis cruisers and destroyers now being outfitted with new SM-3 interceptors with upgraded radar and processing capabilities may in the future be configured to deal with this threat, but if so, they may not be available for other missions, like protecting people. The fact is that no anti-missile system is going to come close to providing reliable defense. For China, ASBMs provide a means for saturating U.S. ships with missiles. While ASBMs are bearing down from above, their attack can be coordinated with waves of submarine, air and ship-launched anti-ship cruise missiles.

Sam Roggeveen at The Interpreter recently noted that the US is waking up to the threat posed by a Chinese ASBM. Roggeveen notes that for the moment one saving grace is that it is difficult to find an aircraft carrier at sea. He also notes that the US is shifting its priorities to reflect the new threat.

But what Roggeveen doesn't address is the threat posed by the new ASBM to US naval assets berthed in Japanese ports, most notably US fleet activities Yokosuka, the future home of the USS George Washington and the headquarters of the US Seventh Fleet. It may be difficult to find an aircraft carrier and its escorts at sea, but it is considerably easier to find them in their home port, as the accompanying image from Google Maps shows. (That's the USS Kitty Hawk to the right side of the map.)


View Larger Map

Google Maps also tells me that Yokosuka is less than 1400 kilometers from Tonghua in China's Jilin province, home to some Chinese DF-21 launchers.

The question I have is whether the Chinese ASBM will render US naval forward deployments in Japan obsolete, in that homeporting an aircraft carrier in Yokosuka may leave it vulnerable to a crippling first strike before even leaving port. Are anti-ballistic missile deployments in Japan — both by the US military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces — reliable enough to protect US forces while in Japanese ports?

If not, hadn't the US and Japan be having a serious discussion about the impact of China's ASBMs on the future of US forward deployments in Japan, and with them, the future of the US-Japan alliance? Should the US consider relocating more assets from Japan to Guam to put them out of the range of ASBMs?

This is all speculative given that next to nothing is known about the specifications of the new missile, but its impact is potentially drastic. It's certainly something to watch.

Asia's future is in the hands of its middle powers

Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, has been waging a determined fight against Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Asian regional vision in a series of articles and blog posts.

The crux of his critique can be found in the title of a speech he gave in Tokyo earlier this month: "War in Asia remains thinkable." He points to the existence of two, overlapping contemporary Asian realities. One is the Asia in which cooperation and integration are proceeding apace as the region's economies continue to develop. The other is the Asia of arms race, nationalist feuds, border disputes, security dilemmas, and possibly war. Professor White then focused on what the region's powers can do to ensure that the latter reality is Asia's future, positing that the options for a new regional order are (1) EU-style Asian integration, (2) enduring American primacy, (3) a balance of power, or (4) a concert of powers to run the region, with the US, China, and Japan at the center. He advocates the last, suggesting that the first is too optimistic, the second possibly unsustainable (especially because — and this is a key point — "The fear is that for many Americans primacy has become, not (as it was) a means to the end of peace and stability, but an end in itself. That raises the real risk that Americans will find themselves undermining stability in Asia in order to preserve their primacy"), and the third too dangerous.

But a concert will be difficult to achieve, because the US, China, and Japan would have to concede much to make it workable. The US would have to accept China as an equal, China would have to concede important roles to the US and Japan, and Japan would have to drop its antagonism towards China.

I would argue that Japan has the most to gain from such an arrangement: it would take a seat at Asia's head table, would still have the US engaged in the region, and it would have the option of cooperating with China to restrict the US when the latter is out of line. In fact, I think Professor White vastly overstates Japan's hostility to China. In a column in The Australian last week, he suggested that Prime Minister Rudd "flubbed" his Japan trip because he failed "to tell Japan that Australia wants a vibrant, strategic relationship with a strong and active Japan, but we also want the same kind of relationship with China." I think his vision of Japan's China policy is a bit dated (i.e., it's a better description of the revisionist conservative approach to China than the Fukuda approach to China). Japan's conservatives may ultimately win the fight over China policy, but for now Japan's approach to China is no less contested than Australia's (or India's or America's). Not all Japanese are as afraid of distance from the US as Professor White seems to think (in this post for example) — and thanks to the US shift on North Korea, even conservatives in the LDP who might have been reluctant to consider a looser alliance may now be willing to think otherwise.

Meanwhile, I think he's too quick to dismiss a balance of power for Asia. We can already see how the Asian international system will develop in the behavior of ASEAN, which has maneuvered among China, Japan, and the US and made itself the hub for a variety of regional mechanisms. ASEAN and the region's other middle powers (including the bigger middles, Australia, Japan, and India) will ultimately be responsible for keeping the peace in Asia, hedging against China by maintaining active security ties with the US to ensure that the US remains present in the region, hedging against a US attempt to stifle China by conceding a greater regional leadership role to China in the economic realm (and exploring new security ties with the PLA). In the meantime, regional integration would continue. Professor White says little about Asia's middle powers in his Tokyo address, but I think that it will be the middles who determine Asia's future because it is they who are stuck between the US, the longtime security guarantor, and China, their most significant economic partner. It is they who have the greatest need for stability and a sustainable balance between the US and China, moderating the extremes of each country's behavior.

Japan, despite the size of its economy, fits the profile of an Asian middle power (in part because it is not open enough, and thus lacks the influence that comes with economic openness); despite the vitriol of the conservatives, Japan is not in a position to choose between the US and China.

There is still hope for peace in Asia, but it will depend on the middle powers to restrain the great powers and keep them from opting for policies that will drag the whole region into a conflagration.

Strange days

Perhaps showing just how serious China is about not mentioning the war and acknowledging Japan's "consistent pursuit of the path of a peaceful country," not to mention illustrating just how dire the situation in Szechuan is, the Chinese government has reportedly asked the Japanese government to dispatch planes to China in order to deliver tents, blankets, and other relief supplies.

It apparently doesn't matter whether those planes are civilian or JSDF.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura, answering questions about the request in his daily press conference, could confirm only that Beijing made the request, that the Fukuda government is considering its response, and that the request appears to be for planes to deliver the supplies to Chinese airports instead of directly to affected areas.

What a dilemma for the Japanese right — a new opportunity for the JSDF to show its quality...by aiding "the grotesque superpower, China." (The Social Democratic Party of Japan, as if to rub this dilemma in the right's face, has quickly stated its opposition to using the JSDF to deliver supplies, declaring that "the JSDF is not a disaster relief organization.")

In short, this request is another blow to those in Japan and the US who see a belligerent, dangerous China that must be contained — and want Washington and Tokyo to take steps that will guarantee a belligerent, dangerous China.

Here's hoping that the Fukuda government swiftly agrees to provide China with the requested supplies, borne on the wings of JSDF transport planes.

Mr. Hu's relentlessly upbeat visit

Chinese President Hu Jintao will leave Japan Saturday after a five-day visit, a visit that the Chinese Communist Party's external relations bureau has described as a "great success."

(Photo from the Office of the Prime Minister)

It is hard to dispute that, as far as symbolism goes, the visit was indeed a success. Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo showed that the relationship is on an even keel, and Mr. Hu, by staying longer in Japan than in any other country (a meaningful statement considering his relentless globe trotting), showed Japan that China still finds value in a close relationship with its wealthier (for now) neighbor. The two leaders reaffirmed the "strategic, reciprocal relationship" approach to Sino-Japanese relations developed during Abe Shinzo's premiership.

In a joint statement, the two leaders agreed to a five-point program to enhance peaceful cooperation between Japan and China: (1) political confidence-building measures, including annual summits between heads of state and government, exchanges between parties and legislatures, and high-level visits and talks in the security realm; (2) cultural and personal exchanges; (3) reciprocal cooperation in the areas of energy and the environment, trade, finance, investment, and other economic sectors, continuation of the high-level economic dialog, and making the East China Sea a sea of "peace, cooperation, and friendship;" (4) cooperation in East Asia, including a commitment to the six-party process, with China welcoming normalization of Japanese-North Korea relations following resolution of "various problems," and the realization of an East Asian region grounded in openness, transparency, and inclusiveness; and (5) cooperation to resolve global problems and combat global warming, energy shortages, and infectious diseases (for China this latter effort starts at home).

As one might expect, there is little of substance in the joint agreement. MOFA has provided a list of concrete steps that will be taken in the coming months, but for the most part these are limited to scheduled summit meetings, visits, and exchanges. I'm certainly not complaining about that — the more interaction between the two governments and peoples, the better — but this week's summitry was more about "agreeing to pursue agreement" and establishing a new framework for Sino-Japanese relations than reaching substantive agreement on the real issues that haunt the bilateral agenda.

Reading the transcript of the joint press conference with Mr. Hu and Mr. Fukuda held on Wednesday, it is clear that both governments worked hard to keep the tone positive. The only reference to bilateral history was Mr. Hu's noting that "there are more than 2,000 years of history of friendly interaction between the peoples of Japan and China." The prevailing, tacit agreement in Sino-Japanese — and now, under President Lee Myung-bak, Japanese-South Korean — relations seems to be that all governments concerned will follow the Basil Fawlty line: "Don't mention the war." Unpleasantness over Tibet and poisoned gyoza was dispatched with ease in questioning; indeed, Mr. Hu, questioned about discussions with the Dalai Lama's representatives before the summit, drew a hard line, stating that it is now the responsibility of the Dalai Lama's "side" to forswear violence, separatist activities, and efforts to wreck the Olympics. The two leaders remained focused largely on enhanced political and economic times.

It is worth noting the difference in Japanese and Chinese visions. Mr. Fukuda spoke largely of the bilateral relationship; Mr. Hu spoke of the bilateral relationship, but embedded it in a regional and global context. In his remarks at the press conference, Mr. Hu spoke frequently of mechanisms for bilateral and regional cooperations. Wannabe dragon slayers may think that talk by Chinese officials about multilateral cooperation is a ploy to disarm potential enemies, but I think that may be overly cynical. China clearly recognizes the value of regional institutions, even with Japanese involvement (that might dilute China's power within said institutions). Judging by this summit, there is an appreciation in Beijing that it is better to placate Japan and have it play a constructive role in the region than to have an embittered Japan drawn to fantasies of containing China. The China on display at the joint press conference was a confident regional leader dedicated to creating a new East Asian order — hence there was no mention of the US (or Taiwan) by either leader.

There is nothing the US can or should do about this: Japan needs stable, cordial relations with both the US and China. Indeed, perhaps the more Japan undertakes initiatives outside the US-Japan alliance, the healthier the alliance will become, as Japan will feel less obligated to do Washington's bidding for lack of other options.

The question now is whether this approach is sustainable within Japan. For months now, the LDP's ideological conservatives and their allies in the media have been hammering Mr. Fukuda for being soft on China, especially in regard to Tibet and the poisoned gyoza issue. The "True Conservative Policy Research Group," the seat of the conservative ideologues within the LDP, has been particularly relentless in its criticism of Mr. Fukuda.

In a Mainichi article reviewing the group's opposition to Mr. Fukuda's China policy, one member is quoted as saying, "China policy will be one important theme in the next party president election. If Mr. Aso enters the presidential election, most of the members will shift their support to him." This last line is not particularly surprising — I've assumed from the beginning that Nakagawa Shoichi's study group is at least in part a committee to elect Aso Taro — but this article as a whole shows that the conservative approach to China remains bankrupt. The conservatives still have nothing constructive to offer. They would still rather harangue China for its failings than outline a way forward.

While Mr. Abe's overtures to China suggest that a conservative prime minister can still pursue a positive relationship with China, I fear that an Aso government — particularly an Aso government accompanied by a McCain administration calling for a League of Nations Democracies — would be considerably less forward-looking in its China policy. Mr. Aso might not necessarily return Sino-Japanese relations to the Koizumi-era deep freeze, although a glance at this speech he gave in 2006 on Yasukuni, in which he fails to mention the enshrined Class-A war criminals, suggests that Mr. Aso might have a devastating impact on the latest Sino-Japanese rapprochement; Mr. Aso and his comrades will most likely not embrace the Fawlty line. With Mr. Fukuda enfeebled and Mr. Aso positioning himself to take the premiership, there may yet be bumps ahead, sooner rather than later.

That said, I suspect that over the long term, the ability of China hawks in both Japan and the US to freeze or rollback cooperative ventures with China will be limited, provided that Beijing continues to talk about cooperative mechanisms and regional order. The challenge is making it to the long term with the least amount of backsliding due to agitation by conservatives.

UPDATE: Perhaps as part of the ongoing process of reinventing himself, Mr. Aso praised the talks as being effective on the tainted gyoza problem.

The US in Asia and the world

Princeton's G. John Ikenberry has a long guest post at the Washington Note addressing Kishore Mahbubani's arguments in The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Not having read Mr. Mahbubani's book yet, I can't speak directly to his argument, but I do want to address the points raised by Professor Ikenberry.

The crux of Professor Ikenberry's argument is that the rise of Asia does not necessarily mean the decline of the West, or, more specifically, the decline of the US. He does not deny Asia's growing influence, but he suggests that while power is flowing Asia's way, the Asian powers have not proposed new organizing principles for world order. He suggests that what might happen — and what will probably be the best possible outcome — is a modified version of the American-led postwar system, a postwar system with an Asian flavor in which China and the other Asian powers recognize that maintaining the system is in their interests. As Professor Ikenberry writes:

China may well be tomorrow's greatest supporter of the American-led postwar system. That system provides rules and institutions for openness and nondiscrimination. These are features of order that China will want going forward as its growing economic weight will be greeted by efforts by others (including some governments in the West) to close and discriminate. Rule-based international order is not a Western fixation. It is a system of governance that all states - East and West - have some interest in maintaining, China not least.

There is considerable value in this argument. Given that China most likely will not have the opportunity to remake the international order anew in the manner that the US and its allies did in the aftermath of the World War II, China, India, and the other rising powers will have little choice but to jury-rig preexisting institutions to reflect their power and their interests.

It's also possible to overstate US decline, both in Asia and globally. As an "Asian" power — the US unmistakably is a great power in Asia — the US will have a stake in shaping the "Asian" world order. Washington will have to reconsider how it exercises its power regionally and globally, of course, becoming less reliant on its military power and more willing to listen to others, but the US has not begun its Recessional yet.

The emphasis needs to change, however. Since the US expanded its role in Asia at the end of the war, its Asia policy has been schizophrenic, divided between a crusading, transformational tendency and a stabilizing tendency. This schizophrenia persists up to today, with the crusaders keen to paint China as the next great threat to the US. But the time for US crusades in Asia is past. For the first time in nearly two centuries, Asian powers are in a position to manage the region's affairs themselves. That doesn't mean there is no role for the US; in fact, it means the US role as stabilizer and pacifier is more important than ever. I think, for example, that the presence of the US military, especially the US Navy, has ensured that political tensions have risen inexorably despite the ongoing Asian arms race. In short, US power should be used less for dictating terms and more for underwriting the efforts of others to create international order. The US should participate in the latter process, but only as one country among many. Its alliances in the region should shift accordingly, measured more in terms of how the support this US role. Transformational ideas, like Abe Shinzo's and Aso Taro's "arc of freedom and democracy" have little place in this order. Asian countries are in no hurry to see the US evacuate Asia; if anything, they want the US to be more involved, to be less obsessed with terrorism and more willing to listen to their concerns. It is imperative that the US start thinking seriously about how it will play this stabilizing role in Asia over the long term.

The US role globally will be more central than in Asia, but the question will be the same: as Professor Ikenberry writes, "...the United States should be asking itself: what sort of international order do we want to have in place in 2040 or 2050 when we are relatively less powerful?" Extending US influence, if not predominance, will depend on developing foreign policy tools other than military power (and with it, a shift in attitude that acknowledges that the US is less able to dictate terms to other countries).

Meanwhile, it is a mistake to refer casually to "Asia" in this discussion. Whose Asia? Is Asia a codeword for China? For India? For ASEAN? Each of these players has a different vision for the region, which redounds to the advantage of the US. Just as the Asian regional future is unknown, so to is the future of an Asia-centered world order unknown. The US is still in a position to shape the Asian and global orders.

Japan passing, Australian style

Tom Conley and Michael Heazle, writing in The Australian, look back to the 1990s to criticize Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's travel itinerary.

In addition to haranguing Japan on whaling, they argue

Rudd has added insult to injury by snubbing Japan on his coming world tour. The Prime Minister seemingly can find the time to traverse the entire globe but not to visit Japan. The cold-shoulder is made more disturbing for Tokyo by the inevitable comparison it creates with Australia's relationship with Beijing and the constant reporting of Sinophile Rudd as China's new golden child. It is certainly no secret that early visits are symbolically important, since they give a strong indication of who and what the new leader considers to be important. In the arena of foreign relations and diplomacy, impressions matter and Australia has had few prime ministers more aware of this basic fact. All of which makes Rudd's Japan passing even more curious.

They further argue that Mr. Rudd's focus on China is misguided due to Japan's commitment sound Australia-Japan relations and its enduring significance as a regional economic power.

Back when Mr. Rudd followed Mr. Fukuda into power last year, I expressed my hopes that "with Fukuda Yasuo replacing Mr. Abe, and the Mandarin-speaking Mr. Rudd replacing Mr. Howard, the 'deputy sheriff,' the 'quad' may be no more. Both Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Rudd seem to believe that their power is best spent promoting cooperation in Asia, not deepening security cooperation among democracies conveniently located on all sides of China."

I still think that these leaders' thinking on Asia policy is the way of the future, but I was clearly mistaken in expecting that Australia and Japan might begin articulating a new approach in the immediate future. The fault is not Mr. Rudd's alone. What would a visit to Tokyo now accomplish? The Fukuda government, completely distracted by mounting domestic problems and possibly on its last legs, has made little progress articulating a new Asia policy or a new grand strategy in which to embed it.

So yes, Mr. Rudd should have made a stop — and should put some effort into thinking about both countries can balance their China ties with their links to the US. But he can't be blamed too much for passing up a photo-op with an enfeebled Mr. Fukuda.

Essential reading on China's ASAT plans

Continuing with its thread of providing a more realistic assessment of China's military capabilities, Wired's Danger Room blog has published a three-part article by MIT researcher Geoffrey Forden that attempts to provide a realistic picture of the role that China's ASAT capabilities could play in a Sino-US war.

Forden outlines the difficulties China would face in trying to cripple the US Military's satellite capabilities in the event of a war over Taiwan and suggests that while China might be able to cause some damage to US capabilities, it will not be able to launch a "Pearl Harbor" that blinds and cripples the US Military.

Read the whole article here, here, and here.

Deflating the China threat

The Danger Room's Noah Shactman points to a report by the Federation of American Scientists that notes that China's submarine fleet — a favorite bugbear of China hawks (see this report, for example) — was little more active in 2007 than it was in previous years.

Without dismissing China's military modernization, reports like this are important reminders that the China threat argument is based mostly on speculation about what China might be able to do in the indefinite future and the idea that the US has a right to unchallenged military primacy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Even in the Taiwan Straits, US deterrence of China still works. Regardless of Beijing's bluster and saber-rattling, China still believes that the threat of US intervention is credible enough and threatening enough and has still not acted to overturn the status quo, despite importance that the "recovery" of Taiwan has for many mainland Chinese. No matter how distracted the US is by Iraq, the US Navy is still the region's most powerful navy, a position that the US will not relinquish anytime soon.

So what does the US have to lose in persisting in efforts to keep lines of communication open between the PLA and the US Military? As the great Asian arms race continues, the US will have to become accustomed to sharing the maritime environment with other navies. The US should therefore persist in developing its ties with the PLA as much as China will permit and regardless of setbacks.

The bankruptcy of the China hawks

Sankei's Komori Yoshihisa, arch-conservative and China hawk, has published at his blog a list of complaints about Prime Minister Fukuda's visit to China last week, criticizing the prime minister for failing to criticize China for every perceived and actual failing of the Chinese Communist Party.

Sounding much like his American peers, including the Washington Times's Bill Gertz, who recently made claims about the Pentagon's employing a Chinese translation service compromised by Chinese intelligence that proved "patently false," Mr. Komori thinks that instead of trying to improve the mood in Sino-Japanese relations, Mr. Fukuda should have "referenced, pointed out, criticized, and voiced fears about": the PLA buildup and lack of transparency, the threatened use of force against Taiwan, rogue development of the East China Sea gas fields, the CCP's one-party rule, oppression in Tibet and Xinjiang, copyright theft, toxic products, and environmental destruction. (On this last point, Mr. Komori has the gall to criticize China for prioritizing economic growth and neglecting environmental harm. Seriously? Has he seen what Japan's prioritizing economic growth-above-all-else did to Japan's environment?)

Having failed to harangue China on these fronts, Mr. Fukuda's China diplomacy ought to be like an "air-raid siren" for the Japanese people.

Nowhere in his remarks does Mr. Komori suggest what complaining about these issues would have achieved. It's wholly beyond me how Japan's (or any other country's) berating China will (a) lead to the creation of a multi-party democracy in China, (b) lead Beijing to cancel its relentless "colonization" of Tibet and Xinjiang, (c) lead to China's shifting to "green growth" and inspecting every product leaving China, etc.

This, I think, illustrates the bankruptcy not only of the "contain China" school in Japan, the US, and elsewhere, but also the bankruptcy of the foreign policy thinking of Japanese conservatives.

I recognize that there are genuine problems related to China, but the idea that those problems will be solved if the leaders of neighboring governments just criticize or threaten by way of an encircling security alliance is dangerously absurd. What is it about China hawks that they have an inability to understand mutual interdependence? For better or worse, Japan, the US, and others are bound together with China. The process of making a "responsible stakeholder" out of China will be long and frustrating, with setbacks along the way. This process will demand patient, steady, visionary leadership, not vitriolic, belligerent rhetoric that serves little purpose other than to antagonize China and accelerate arms racing in East Asia.

Meanwhile, this belligerence is about all Japan's conservatives have to offer for Japanese foreign policy. No constructive vision for the East Asian future here, just bluster and fear. They take the same approach to North Korea and the Korean Peninsula in general.

One problem with this approach is that unless Japan rids itself of its security relationship with the US in near future, Japan's conservatives are dependent on the US government's sharing their views on Asia. Japan alone is not in a position to force China to change on any of the issues identified by Mr. Komori as problematic. Any confrontational approach would have to occur in sync with the US, with the US taking the lead. As we have seen in regard to both North Korea and Taiwan under the Bush administration, there is no guarantee that Washington will be on the side of Japanese conservatives even under a bellicose Republican administration. (On the economic front, though, perhaps Mr. Komori and his ilk should hope for a Democratic victory.)

Despite their lack of a concrete and constructive foreign policy agenda — no, the arc of freedom and prosperity does not count — the conservatives will undoubtedly step up their pressure on Mr. Fukuda on foreign policy in the New Year.

And I remain convinced that Dwight Eisenhower was mistaken in his farewell address: the danger is of a military-industrial-media complex, with the media serving the interests of the others by playing up foreign threats and making it appear as if there are no alternatives to belligerence and confrontation. Komori and Gertz are undoubtedly extreme examples of this, but one need not look far to find other examples of press coverage of China that seeks to stoke public fears.

A dangerous word

AEI's Michael Auslin, weighing in on the feud over China's denying US Navy ships access to Hong Kong at Contentions, argues that US credibility has suffered from a failure to respond to China's behavior other than by sending the USS Kitty Hawk back to Japan via the Taiwan Straits.

He says, "A number of my Asia-wonk acquaintances in Washington have expressed their concern that Washington is sending a signal of weakness by making no response to the Chinese provocations (sailing the fleet back through the Taiwan Straits doesn’t quite cut it)—even canceling some meetings would have been seen as something."

I would be more concerned if he was citing comments made by "our Asian allies" than by his "Asia-wonk acquaintances."

"Credibility" is a dangerous word, a word that led the US to overextend itself during the cold war, with disastrous consequences. Are US allies in Asia really worried about the US not standing up to China's unpredictable behavior over the past year? Do they really doubt that if China actually posed a threat to their security, the US would be unwilling to act? Do security treaties with Japan, Australia, and other countries in the region obligate the US to "stand up" to China, even if doing so might actually undermine the security of China's neighbors by deepening the PLA's paranoia and strengthening the hand of PLA elements in favor of more confrontational policies (not to mention potentially provoking China to retaliate in other fora)?

The emergence of China is one long, unpredictable, iterative game, and the US, as the prevailing maintainer of stability in East Asia, will not benefit from "defecting" and initiating a game of tit-for-tat that could go on for years. Indeed, as the leading power in the region, the US has an obligation to demonstrate forbearance, to refrain from retaliating against China's bewildering violations of diplomatic and maritime custom and continuing to find ways of coaxing China to play a more constructive regional and global role. To do otherwise could hasten the decline of the US as a regional power and make the neighborhood more dangerous for US allies, a perverse consequence of actions purportedly taken in the interests of US alliances in Asia.

Ozawa to China

Despite the extension of the Diet session, Ozawa Ichiro, DPJ president, will still be going to China with nearly fifty DPJ members of the Diet from 6 to 8 December. Mr. Ozawa will meet with Hu Jintao and mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.

Mr. Ozawa's visit comes just as turbulence in Sino-US relations continues following China's denying port visits to US Navy vessels. The Chinese government has evidently explained its reasoning for its decisions, suggesting that US arms sales to Taiwan led China to turn the warships away.

Foreign Minister Yang's purported explanation that the denial was the result of a "misunderstanding" has been dismissed, but I wonder whether Foreign Minister Yang was being sincere, in that the decision without the Foreign Ministry's input, leaving the foreign minister to try to explain it in Washington. In other words, the decision to welcome the Kitty Hawk, then the decision to turn it away, then the last-minute decision to permit its entry could reflect not Chinese inscrutability but infighting within the government and between the CCP and the PLA fueled by Chinese insecurity. Now, granted, it is reasonable to question whether Beijing's sense of insecurity is justified, but I still think it would be a mistake for the US (and Japan) to overreact to China's actions.

And so will Mr. Ozawa address this affair, which has drawn in Japan, when he meets with President Hu? Will Mr. Ozawa use the occasion to present a positive vision for Japanese Asia policy that aims to coax China to play a more responsible security role in the region? Perhaps Mr. Ozawa and Mr. Fukuda could work together on an Asia initiative, seeing as both see the value of reorienting Japan's foreign policy away from the US to some extent. In doing so, will he be able to strike the proper balance, approaching Mr. Hu not as a supplicant but as a fellow great power interested in the maintenance of order and stability in the region?

Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao

Speaking of rural troubles, I have just finished reading Chen Guidi's and Wu Chuntao's Will The Boat Sink The Water?, which documents the poverty of rural China and the hardships imposed on peasants by a bloated bureaucracy. (This book was briefly available in China, but has since been blacklisted.)

The first half of the book is comprised of anecdotes from Anhui Province, showing episodes of the struggles of rural Chinese as they fought for justice against corrupt officialdom, while the second half using the anecdotes to make a broader argument about how to change conditions in rural China.

The entire book has the feeling of a morality play from an earlier period of Chinese history. The actors are the same — downtrodden peasants, the occasional righteous advocate within or outside the bureaucracy, corrupt taxmen and their goons, and the distant imperial government — but the setting is Mao's New China, in which the peasants were to be liberated from oppression. Ultimately, Chen and Wu provide a glimpse at what lies behind the glittering skyscrapers hugging China's coast and suggest that without rapid and systematic change, the entire growth process will come crashing to a halt.

The book is effective because it presents the problem from the bottom up. Rather than viewing political and economic change from the usual Beijing-centered perspective, Chen and Wu illustrate how the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens interact with state and party. And it's not pretty. The growth of the bureaucracy in China — thanks in no small part to the country's having five layers of government — has given a class of knaves, thieves, and criminals extraordinary power over the lives of millions at the township and county levels. Not unlike the image of the state in Franz Kafka's "The Great Wall of China," the central state and party organs play a small role in the tale, a distant presence that has promulgated decrees that make defending rural Chinese from oppression state policy but has little ability to exert control over the officials responsible for executing the policy (who also happened to be the target of said policy).

Accordingly, rural "revolts" and unrest cannot necessarily be construed as being directed at Communist Party rule. In fact, in the anecdotes related by Chen and Wu, the peasants who raised concerns about excessive taxation and misrule by officials often have official party policy on their side; their desire is to see "the law" implemented. They seem to look to Beijing with hopeful, not accusatory, eyes.

It remains to be seen how long they will place their hope in the central government and the party's senior officials.

Meanwhile, another problem briefly identified by Chen and Wu is that of rural migrants to the cities, who are second-class citizens at the very least, who enjoy few legal rights, who struggle to find work, and who have no access to public services. This is what prompts them to use the phrase "one country, two nations." How long, they ask, can this system prevail, wherein urban Chinese, who have enjoyed a disproportionate share of economic growth, enjoy a set of privileges denied to hundreds of millions of rural Chinese (either still living in rural areas or having migrated to cities)?

The persistence of rural poverty does not, of course, diminish the impressive achievement that is China's development since the late 1970s — but awareness of what remains to be done should temper more enthusiastic accounts of the rise of China.

The three stooges

At the tail end of the APEC summit, Messrs. Abe, Bush, and Howard met for a much-vaunted security summit that came in the wake of the US-India-Australia-Japan-Singapore exercises in the Indian Ocean (the "quad" + one?).

Commentator Richard Halloran believes that the quad is shaping up to be a "informal defensive pact based on shared national interests and democratic values."

But how durable is the quad? India, for one, remains as committed to pursuing an independent course as ever, maybe even more so as it becomes a political and economic giant. (India has just announced naval exercises with China and Russia — why do exercises with the democracies mean India is joining an informal grouping, but exercises with China and Russia lack larger significance?)

Beyond India, whose commitment to the quad is the weakest, what of the "emerging" US-Japan-Australia triangle? I think things would look considerably different under different political leadership in each member state.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a group of leaders more harried at home than Bush, Abe, and Howard. Mr. Bush (30% approval, 64% disapproval), of course, has been universally recognized as a lame duck — a lame duck choking on the sands of Iraq — for months. Mr. Abe (negatives in the sixties) has been more or less written off, holding on to power simply because no one is in a position to force him out of office (or no one wants to). Mr. Howard, meanwhile, might be headed for an election defeat at the hands of Kevin Rudd's Labor Party, which has just widened its lead in public opinion polls in advance of the general election expected for later this year.

Would the quad look the same if it was, for example, a meeting between Mr. Rudd, Mr. Ozawa, and Mrs. Clinton (or substitute a Democrat of your choice)? Would these leaders pursue integrated cooperation with the same gusto as the current trio? Would they place the same emphasis on shared values, which serves little other purpose other than to separate them from China?

That's my problem with this whole project. If it is just an "open network" that recognizes the important ties each member has with China, what values does it add? Is Japan's security improved all that much by new security ties with Australia? What can Australia contribute that isn't already provided by the US, if not pressure on China? The same is the reverse, even more so, for Australia — what can Japan possibly contribute to Australia's security? I fear that, intentionally or unintentionally, this arrangement subordinates regional objectives to Japan's needs, given that Japan is perhaps the most insecure of the participating countries. As Halloran writes, "In Japan, strategic thinkers have pointed to open hostility from North Korea, barely concealed hostility from South Korea, and anxiety over long-term threats from China despite recent moves by Beijing to reduce the antagonism."

But why risk raising tensions with China now when the arrangement provides so little in practical terms?

So I remain dubious that this meeting was "historic," as the Sankei Shimbun writes in an editorial today. More like one last caper for a group of leaders facing the ends of their political careers.

Asia's future seen in Sydney

At the OPEC APEC summit in Sydney, the leaders of APEC's twenty-one member states have been holding bilateral talks in the run-up to the final summit this weekend. I don't put much stock in APEC as an organization that will be able to deliver concrete results — it's simply too big and too diverse — but as a forum for the region's leaders to sit down in the same room and talk about Asia (for the most part) for the better part of a week, it's irreplaceable.

President Bush, taking a break from Iraq, spoke at length about freedom and democracy in Asia, but at the same time, in reiterating the importance of the US security commitment to the region, made clear the limits of US power to deliver political change:

Today, our alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, and our defense relationships with Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and others in the region form the bedrock of America's engagement in the Asia Pacific. These security relationships have helped keep the peace in this vital part of the world. They've created conditions that have allowed freedom to expand and markets to grow, and commerce to flow, and young democracies to gain in confidence. America is committed to the security of the Asia Pacific region, and that commitment is unshakable.

This is a fairly accurate description of what the US presence in Asia over the past sixty years has achieved. The US could do nothing more than give its allies the space to change domestically, but as South Koreans, Filipinos, Taiwanese, Indonesians, and others can attest to, the US by no means guaranteed the democratization of their countries, and in fact stood in the way of democratization for most of the cold war. The US role was and is providing the public goods of peace and security that have made it easier for the region's countries to liberalize. (This post at The Marmot's Hole, which wonders about the relevance of American power in Asia, misses this point completely.)

The US will continue to play this background role, enabling a dense web of connections between all the region's countries — even among those presumed to have confrontational relationships. And so talk of a community of Asian democracies is not only irresponsible, creating the impression of ideological battle lines in Asia, but it also ignores the reality of life in twenty-first century Asia.

The Pacific democracies cannot solve the region's problems without China, and they better get used to that fact. President Bush recognizes this on some level, based on the expansiveness of the agenda for his talks with President Hu. Australia, too, is aware that there is no avoiding China, agreeing to convene annual security talks with China from next year. Undoutedly, if Kevin Rudd becomes Australia's next premier, Australia will be even more careful to avoid the impression that it is part of a de facto alliance to contain China — as MTC notes, Rudd, fluent in Mandarin and well versed in Chinese affairs, would hardly be an enthusiastic participant in the democratic community.

Indeed, political change in Australia, the US, and Japan could make the "Asian spirit" more apparent. Mr. Ozawa and the DPJ are obviously not enthusiastic proponents of "values diplomacy," and would presumably highlight political cooperation with China (Mr. Ozawa's trip to China in December will be interesting to watch). In the US, it is difficult to imagine Mr. Bush's successor being as heavy on the rhetoric of democracy, even if a Democratic president might feel pressured to lean on China economically.

The Pacific rim and the Asian littoral is, in fact, much more peaceful than many observers admit (or want to admit). There is always the potential for misunderstandings, of course, but prudent, far-sighted leadership, not least by the US, could do much to diminish the potential for conflict.