Obama pays a visit to his country's banker

I think Saturday Night Live captures the worst fears of many Japanese elites in this sketch.

But, then again, as John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said, "If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has."

"We are supposed to be the problem solvers"

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Asia Society in New York on Friday on the eve of her departure for a trip to East Asia that will include stops in Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, and China.

Her speech is worth a look, because I do think she succeeds at indicating how the Obama administration will differ from the Bush administration in its approach to Asia.

During the presidential campaign, I suggested that the difference between an Obama administration's and McCain administration's Asia policies would be the difference between problem-oriented and partner-oriented approaches.

At that time I wrote, "Mr. Obama...seems to share the outlook of Mr. Fukuda and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, among others. Disinclined to divide the region into democracies and autocracies (or non-democracies), Mr. Obama would seek to work with any and all appropriate partners, not just formal allies, in addressing regional challenges — necessarily meaning more cooperation with China, because as the Bush administration has learned, few of the region's most intractable problems can be solved without China's involvement."

It bears recalling because the theme of "solving problems" ran throughout Mrs. Clinton's speech Friday.

The United States, she said, "is committed to a new era of diplomacy and development in which we will use smart power to work with historic allies and emerging nations to find regional and global solutions to common global problems."

This is a marked shift away from the "values diplomacy" used by the Bush administration to bind democratic US allies closer together, which in practice appeared to be a means of isolating China, banishing it to the rogues' gallery with Burma and North Korea. Mrs. Clinton did speak of shared values, but it was in the limited context of Southeast Asia, the values that bind the countries of ASEAN. She did not use the word democracy, and while she did speak of religious freedom for Tibetans and Chinese and political freedom for North Koreans, it is clear that Japan's leaders are not wrong to anticipate greater engagement with China by the Obama administration.

"As members of the Asia Society, you know very well," she said, "how important China is and how essential it is that we have a positive, cooperative relationship. It is vital to peace and prosperity, not only in the Asia-Pacific region, but worldwide. Our mutual economic engagement with China was evident during the economic growth of the past two decades. It is even clearer now in economic hard times and in the array – excuse me – in the array of global challenges we face, from nuclear security to climate change to pandemic disease and so much else."

In short, despite the lack of shared values — at least by the previous administration's assessment — the Obama administration sees in China an indispensable partner in solving the problems facing the region.

That does not mean that Japan will be ignored.

If anything, the Obama administration will challenge Japan. Mrs. Clinton signalled that the administration will shift the focus away from security; aside from mentioning a new accord regarding the relocation of US forces to Guam, she mentioned Japan's civilian contributions abroad, and said, "We anticipate an even stronger partnership with Japan that helps preserve the peace and stability of Asia and increasingly focuses on global challenges, from disaster relief to advancing education for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan to alleviating poverty in Africa." In other words, it seems that the new administration will accept the political difficulties Japan has in sending its armed forces to contribute abroad, but it will ask for other, perhaps more meaningful contributions instead. The Japanese government may find that dealing with the Bush administration was easier, in that the previous administration set a fairly low bar for Japanese contributions, being more content that Japan was "showing the flag" and "putting boots on the ground" than in the gains from Japan's contributions. The Obama administration appears less interested in how Japan contributes than in the fact of Japanese involvement in solving regional and global problems.

While Mrs. Clinton will be meeting with the families of the abductees (an unfortunate legacy of the Bush administration), with this speech it does appear that the Obama administration is making a clear break with a Japan-centered Asia policy. Japan's value will not be valued intrinsically, as a bastion of democracy in East Asia, but for the role it plays in solving problems.

The LDP may have a problem with this, accustomed as the LDP's conservatives have become in recent years to using the alliance as a means to promote the long-standing revisionist agenda of remilitarization, constitution revision, and a hawkish foreign policy towards China and North Korea. They may find the idea of contributing abroad for the sake of solving global problems hard to swallow.

Obama already passing Japan?

The US State Department has told the Yomiuri Shimbun that it intends to initiate a high-level "comprehensive strategic dialogue" with China that will address political, economic, and security issues and will include an exchange of visits by Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

Naturally, Yomiuri's report is quick to note that many Obama administration officials worked in the former Clinton administration, conjuring up memories of "Japan passing." Yomiuri also includes the requisite quote from Michael Green, who warns that "it gives the impression of bipolar rule in Asia, causing a great disturbance among Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia, US allies."

The problem with this view is that it only tells one side of the story. Of course, governments in the region worry about a US-China condominium that might lead to their interests being slighted. But do they really worry more about the US and China talking than they worry about war between the US and China? This is the reality of life for the region's middle powers, Asian countries with close and important ties with both China and the US (in many cases security relationships with the US of one form or another): they want China and the US to be cordial, but not too cordial; the US should be involved in the region as a force for stability, but should not try to encircle China.

Japanese officials should welcome efforts by the US to open new channels of communication with China, just as the US should welcome Japanese efforts to do the same. This idea that Japan loses just by the US government talking with China is a relic of the cold war that needs to be retired.

Tokyo has no reason to be dissatisfied with the Obama administration, despite Komori Yoshihisa's fears about President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton "being in agreement" about putting China first. (His analysis reads more like American conservative talking points than genuine analysis that considers what's happened during the transition and the early weeks of the new administration.) The Obama administration — apparently after months of hearing reports about Tokyo's fears regarding the incoming administration's ideas regarding Japan — has done more than enough to reassure Japan's leaders that the new administration will not deviate from the Washington establishment's Japan consensus. Most recently, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, told her Japanese counterpart that the president and secretary of state are in agreement about the need to strengthen the US-Japan alliance, and indicated that the Obama administration will basically continue the Bush administration's Japan agenda: requesting help in Afghanistan and in regard to other international crises, while promising US support on North Korea and UN security council permanent membership. Even more than that, the State Department has announced that Secretary Clinton's first foreign trip will be to Japan, in mid-February.

All of this is on top of a host of appointments favorable to Japan. The national security adviser, the director of national intelligence, and the secretary of the treasury are all familiar with one aspect of the bilateral relationship or another. Most of the major Asia-related jobs have gone to Japan specialists. And now Secretary Clinton is taking every opportunity to reassure Japanese officials that she does not intend to "pass" Japan.

If anything, the Obama administration is doing too much to reassure Japan.

The US needs the aforementioned dialogue with China; there is too much to discuss to wait or to defer to the fears of select members of the Japanese establishment and their allies in Washington.

I hope on her visit to Japan Mrs. Clinton emphasizes the importance of direct talks among the US, China, and Japan. I hope she makes clear that smoother Sino-US relations are actually in Japan's interests, even if some Japanese think otherwise. I hope fears of angering a portion of the Japanese establishment do not lead the Obama administration to back away from reorienting US Asia policy from being overly focused on the US-Japan security relationship.

This administration needs to exorcise the ghost of Richard Nixon from the US-Japan alliance: it needs to make clear to Japan (and China) that the US-Japan and the US-China relationships are not zero sum.

Alliance addenda

After seeing the response to my recent post on the US-Japan alliance, I find it necessary to develop a few ideas further.

First, MTC rightly points out that an alliance based on the partnership of Japanese conservatives and their counterparts in Washington is by no means doomed, because the organizations pushing this line "deal death as a matter of course. They will not be deterred by mere logic, economic constraints or human feeling." I fully grant this point. Just because history (or perhaps, History) does not favor their argument does not mean that the conservative grip on the alliance will weaken. The advocates of an alternative vision of the alliance — a vision of the alliance that does more than prepare for a worst case scenario with China that may never come (or that may be hastened by the decisions of the alliance) — must push back, fighting back in the halls of academia and think tanks and in the pages of journals.

Second, I must correct myself: technically speaking the 1996 alliance is not rooted in an alliance between Japanese and American conservatives. It is rooted in an alliance between Japanese conservatives and the American foreign policy establishment (FPE). There is sadly a dearth in creative thinking on the alliance in Democratic corners of the FPE, the think tankers and academics who will likely fill important Asia policy positions. In particular, Joseph Nye, who as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the mid-1990s gave his name to the initiative that produced the 1996 bilateral security declaration and with it the 1996 alliance, and Kurt Campbell, who worked deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia during the late 1990s, are the Democratic Party's senior Asia hands and both view the alliance along similar lines as Richard Armitage and Michael Green, their Republican counterparts. Campbell has in fact praised the work of his Republican successors in strengthening the alliance.

Jun Okumura captures precisely this reality on this post regarding a meeting between senior DPJ officials and the "U.S. Democratic Party," as reported in the Yomiuri Shimbun. On a visit to Tokyo, Nye and John Hamre, president of CSIS (home to Michael Green) and an undersecretary of defense in the Clinton adminstration, as well as Green and James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific in the Bush administration, met with Hatoyama Yukio, Kan Naoto, and other DPJ officials. The point of the meeting, as Jun notes, was to deliver the message to the DPJ that the bipartisan consensus on the alliance is intact — the DPJ should not expect that it will get much traction in its desire to redefine the terms of the 2006 realignment agreement.

The reality, however, might be more complicated. As Jun notes, none of the aforementioned mandarins is in President-elect Obama's inner circle. Is this a message from Mr. Obama? From the Democratic Party? From the FPE? Perhaps we should read this meeting and its message as a message from the guardians of the 1996 alliance, nothing more, nothing less. Confident that they remain responsible for the alliance in Washington, they are apparently planning for the possibility that their conservative partners are forced to cede power to the DPJ. While the media is reporting this as the beginning of an exchange of opinions between the US and Japanese Democratic parties, the presence of Messrs. Green and Kelly suggest that it was nothing of the sort: the alliance mandarinate was issuing a warning.

Finally, I want to respond to comments to my previous post.

First, one anonymous commentator argues that the idea that China has any influence over Washington as a result of its debt holdings is "ridiculous." A second commentator argues that the fundamental arrangement of the alliance — bases for protection — is unchanged, and that not too much has changed with the decline of the 1996 alliance. I will address these comments together because they're linked.

The alliance today is about China. The 1996 alliance was one way of thinking about China. While the alliance managers vary in the extent to which they support engagement with China, they uniformly support strengthening the security relationship, extending the alliance to distant conflicts, improving alliance interoperability, and broadening the alliance to include cooperation with other US allies in East Asia. They are in agreement about the importance of dismantling domestic constraints on Japanese security policy, although naturally they respect the Japanese democratic process. It is an approach to the alliance that sees the alliance as "the core of the United States’ Asia strategy." (For an outline of the consensus on the alliance, see the second Armitage-Nye report — discussed at length in these posts.) They believe that the alliance is important as an end in and of itself, because of shared interests and shared values, which is another way of saying that no matter how much it appears that the US and China have common interests regionally and globally, the Sino-US relationship can never replace the US-Japan relationship because of shared values.

I think the "shared values" approach to the alliance is mistaken. It seeks to create distance between the US and Japan on the one hand and China on the other when what the three countries must be do is find a way to bridge the wide differences that separate them. As the current economic crisis is illustrating, the fates of the US, China, and Japan are linked. The US-Japan-China strategic triangle is a non-zero sum relationship. America's loss is Japan's loss is China's loss; and the impact of the economic crisis within China will likely be felt in Japan and the US.

None of this is to say that the nineteenth-century liberal argument that free markets will lead to perpetual peace is right. What the liberals failed to appreciate is that while global commerce may transform national interests, those interests are not translated into policy without concerted effort on the part of national elites. Elites have to recognize that economic links have transformed their nations' interests and then act to protect those interests. Both Japanese and American conservatives — especially Japanese conservatives — have chosen to minimize the significance of their countries' dependence on the Chinese economy. Accordingly their vision of the alliance emphasizes the security hedge against China rather than efforts to diminish the need for a hedge against China.

I am not arguing that the US-Japan security relationship is dead. Nor am I arguing that it should be dissolved. The alliane is an important aspect of US Asia policy, but for too long the US FPE has failed to asked why. If it is important only because Japan gives the US bases, then frankly the alliance is a necessary but insufficient guarantor of the future stability of the region. The value of the alliance must be measured by how it contributes to regional stability, namely the incorporation of China into a leadership position in East Asia with as little friction as possible. The 1996 alliance has strengthened those actors in Japan most averse to cooperation with China, which has the ironic consequence of diminishing Japan's importance to the US as an ally.

What is needed now is a new alliance that seeks more than just a hedge against a violent turn in China's rise. Accordingly, the alliance needs to be more than just a partnership of national security elites in the US and Japan. Japan and the US ought to be talking about more than just the proper arrangement of US forces in Japan or how Japan can make its token contributions to missions abroad; the focus of every US-Japan bilateral meeting of any significance should be finding new ways to build a trilateral relationship with China. An alliance that's simply a matter of bases for forward-deployed US forces and some tactical and operational cooperation between US and Japanese armed forces is an alliance that increasingly irrelevant to the future of East Asia.

The alliance is dead, long live the alliance

Barack Obama's inauguration is just about a month away. His transition team is gradually filling in cabinet-level positions. His Asia and Japan policy teams are as of yet unknown, however, leaving Japanese elites to continue to fret about Japan's place on the Obama administration's agenda.

They have good reason to worry.

The reasons to worry have nothing to do with the myth of the Democratic Party's hostility to Japan and predisposition to China. After all, Richard Nixon, the pioneer of Japan passing, was a Republican, and Bill Clinton inherited his trade agenda from George H.W. Bush. No, the reasons for concern are far greater than the Japanese establishment's irrational fear of Democrats.

The post-cold war US-Japan alliance, born in 1996, is dead. It is far from certain what will take its place.

The 1996 alliance — born out of the 1996 reaffirmation of the alliance signed by President Clinton and the late Hashimoto Ryutaro — sought to restore security to its position of prominence in the alliance and rebuild the Chinese wall that had separated security and economics in US-Japan relations until the 1980s. Japan's economic slump made it a less worrisome partner, and China's bullying of Taiwan appeared to provide a target for greater security cooperation, with North Korea's playing a supporting role.

The process of bolstering the alliance stalled after the conclusion of the new guidelines for security cooperation in 1997, but the Clinton administration bequeathed to the Bush administration a framework for deeper security cooperation with Japan. Specifically, it was bequeathed to the group of alliance hawks, led by Richard Armitage, who assumed important positions in the new administration in 2001. Mr. Armitage and his colleagues took the baton passed from their predecessors and developed a particular form of security cooperation following 9/11. As the US prepared for the global war on terror, the US would treat Japan as a first-rank ally, akin to the United Kingdom; learning the lesson of the Gulf War, the US would not issue marching orders to Tokyo but would appeal to Japan's conscience as a major world power to do the right thing by supporting US efforts in some form. The material value of Japan's contribution was inconsequential; what mattered was Japan's showing the flag, not how much oil it was pumping in the Indian Ocean. In exchange, Japan under Koizumi Junichiro became a trusted ally of the Bush administration, which after 2003 needed all the friends it could get. Of course, the US wouldn't be perpetually satisfied with refueling missions and unarmed humanitarian relief missions, but by encouraging Japan with high praise (the frequent refrain during the first half of this decade about the alliance being "the best ever") the US could gradually push Japan in the direction of a more active security role.

This new partnership was cemented not in the Middle East but in Northeast Asia, as the US and Japan moved in lockstep in the six-party talks after 2002, taking a hardline against North Korea on nuclear weapons, missiles, and Japan's abductees, a pact sealed by Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer's March 2006 visit to Niigata — to the beach from which North Korea abducted Yokota Megumi — and President George W. Bush's meeting with Megumi's mother Sakie in April 2006. In the background loomed China, resulting in the inclusion of the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan Straits crisis as a common strategic objective for the first time in the February 2005 Security Consultative Committee (2+2) statement. It was also cemented via ever deeper cooperation on missile defense in Japan and broader cooperation between US Forces in Japan (USFJ) and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF).

This partnership was not nearly as durable as it appeared. First, it was more a partnership of elites than a partnership of nations. Alliance hawks in the US forged a strong relationship with their resurgent Japanese counterparts to promote an alliance agenda that served both their interests. As William Overholt wrote in Asia, America, and The Transformation of Geopolitics (reviewed here):

As the 21st century began, the United States decided to bet its entire position in Asia on the alliance with Japan. In effect, it has bet not just on the Japanese nation but in particular on a newly assertive national-security elite that represents a rather narrow and unrepresentative slice of Japanese society. In all of American history, the United States has never before made such a bet anywhere in the world, with the arguable exception of the bet on Britain in World War II. The current bet is not on the Japan of 1945 or 1975 or 1989 (the year before the bubble burst) or 2000, but on a rearming Japan with an economy, a polity, a foreign policy, and a military evolving faster and more unpredictably than those of any other advanced country, under a new and increasingly right-wing leadership that wants to rebuild national morale by reengineering a failed vision of the first half of the 20th century rather than through an inspiring new vision of the future. Rarely in world history has such a power made such a consequential bet.

Abe Shinzo was the symbol of the US bet on the Japan's neo-conservatives. As Sunohara Tsuyoshi, a Nikkei reporter, documented in the introduction to his book Japan Hand, Michael Green, then National Security director for Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, saw potential in Mr. Abe, who was deputy chief cabinet secretary at the start of the Koizumi government. Mr. Green effectively made Mr. Abe a project, working to give the future prime minister a direct pipeline to the top of the US government. While serving as LDP secretary-general, he visited Washington in April 2004, where he delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute hailing the alliance's new golden era and making the case for constitution revision. On that visit he also met with Mr. Green, Mr. Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and Republican congressional leaders, at which time he was effectively branded a future prime minister of Japan. Mr. Abe had to still be selected by the LDP, of course, but the backing of the US administration surely helped propel Mr. Abe to the premiership despite having no ministerial experience aside from serving as chief cabinet secretary. Mr. Abe, in short, was a direct product of this alliance between US conservatives and Japan's "newly assertive national-security elite."

The death of the 1996 alliance began with the decline and fall of Mr. Abe. The conservative partnership did not expect the Japanese people to deal so harsh a blow to Mr. Abe in the 2007 upper house elections. They failed to appreciate that the Japanese public would have little interest in a debate on constitution revision while Japan's regions stagnated, while the pensions system collapsed, while the national debt prompted questions about how the government would meet its liabilities. (See this post for a discussion of the binational conservative establishment's shock at Mr. Abe's defeat.) They also didn't expect that the DPJ would have considerable success in undermining the illusion of the robust security alliance by forcing a debate on the MSDF refueling mission. The DPJ ultimately lost the battle to block the mission's extension, but in their opposition they exposed how farcical the whole thing was: the lack of accountability in how the mission was conducted and the mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality of the mission (i.e. the contrast between rhetoric that focused on Japan's responsibilities to the international community and the reality of heavy-handed US pressure on Japan to extend the mission, spearheaded by Ambassador Schieffer). By forcing a debate on the refueling mission, the DPJ punctured the image of a golden era. Far from being a sign of how far the alliance had come, the refueling mission became a sordid affair, marked by the whiff of corruption on the part of Japan's defense trading companies and the newly formed ministry of defense and the cowardice of the Japanese establishment, which despite bold rhetoric about contributing to the war on terror was actually not prepared to make real sacrifices to help the coalition in Afghanistan.

But the 1996 alliance was doomed for reasons beyond Japanese domestic politics. The post-1996 security partnership was designed for a unipolar world. Naturally it flourished after 9/11, in the heady days of "shock and awe," as the Bush administration swaggered and flexed the US military's muscles. Accordingly, in some sense the 1996 alliance was a casualty of the Iraq war.

First, US difficulties in Iraq altered the US calculus globally. Would the Bush administration have made such a drastic about-face on North Korea had Iraq gone successfully? If the US could still credibly threaten regime change in North Korea, would Christopher Hill have been given the freedom to negotiate a new agreement? The shift on North Korea, occurring in the immediate aftermath of both North Korea's presumed nuclear test and the aforementioned US-Japan "pact" on North Korea by which the US signaled that the abductees were a priority for the US, has had profound consequences on the alliance, not least of all on the neo-conservatives who now wonder whether they can rely on the US security guarantee.

The shift on North Korea coincided with a pronounced softening in Sino-US relations. The US increasingly needed China as a "responsible stakeholder." With the US bogged down in the Middle East, it needed calm in East Asia — and found that China was the key to maintaining the status quo in North Korea and the Taiwan Straits, the two greatest flashpoints. Accordingly, US North Korea policy increasingly amounted to beseeching China to intervene with Pyongyang to keep North Korea committed to the six-party talks and leaning on Taiwan not to provoke China. At the same time, the US became increasingly indebted to China, thanks in part to the Bush adminstration's decision to finance the Iraq and Afghanistan wars via deficit spending, creating what Niall Ferguson has called "Chimerica." As Admiral William Fallon, formerly head of US Pacific Command, noted in an interview with the Boston Globe last month, China's position as the number one creditor for the US alters the Sino-US agenda. As Fallon said, "The size of the country and its influence is staggering. So we've got to figure this out. There were people who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here because sooner or later we're going be at war with China. I don't think that's where we want to go."

With both the US and Japan economically interdependent with China, the 1996 alliance's vision of a security partnership that would essentially be preparing for the big war with China has become increasingly unrealistic. Indeed, the global economic crisis may completely transform the strategic landscape by making it clear just how much the three corners of the East Asian triangle need each other. How can the 1996 alliance possibly survive a new system in which China plays "the role of a vigilant creditor" vis-a-vis the US? Negotiations on trade imbalances and the relative values of the dollar, renminbi, and yen will be thorny, but next to these issues the security agenda pales in significance.

And so the 1996 security-centered alliance is dead.

The shell of the alliance will continue to exist, barring the outbreak of war in Northeast Asia. (I don't think the alliance would survive a shooting war.) But will the Obama administration and the Japanese government — whoever is at its head — be able to find a way to build a new alliance?

There are a variety of opinions on how the allies should proceed. Japan's conservatives may be the most confused about the future of the alliance. They had invested their energy in using the alliance as a vehicle for promoting their desire for an independent Japan — greater security cooperation with the US would lead to constitution revision, collective self-defense, and normalization — and a de facto cold war with China, but with the US shift in its relations with North Korea and China the US appears to be as less reliable ally for the Japanese right. Under the Obama administration, conservatives will likely shift to a position on the alliance akin to General Tamogami Toshio's, arguing for a more independent Japanese defense posture and more vocal disagreement with the US, particularly on issues like North Korea. Indeed, General Tamogami may literally become the posterchild of this line of argument. As he argued in his APA contest essay, while "good relations between Japan and the United States are essential to the stability of the Asian region," Japan needs its own preventive strike capabilities and greater diplomatic clout. It is difficult to imagine what the alliance would look like were this scenario to come to pass, but I can imagine that one consequence of Japan's developing independent deterrent capabilities (conventional or nuclear) would be to push the US closer to China, in effect balancing between the two.

If the Obama administration decides to press Japan on history questions — which Sakurai Yoshiko believes is in the offing — it will give the Japanese right a convenient excuse for pressing for a more independent defense posture, but the seeds of that shift were planted in the Bush administration's about-face on North Korea.

It may take years before we learn the extent to which the Bush administration's shift on North Korea affected Japan's hawks, who were "shocked" by the US decision earlier this year to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. But judging by their initial reactions, the impact has been profound. The impact has also been felt at the popular level. The Cabinet office's annual foreign policy attitudes survey, released earlier this month, recorded a new low in respondents who view US-Japan relations favorably: 68.9% said they see the relationship favorably, compared with 76.3% who answered favorably last year, and 28.1% who see the relationship unfavorably (an increase of eight points from 2007). Mainichi claims that the US government attributes the drop to the US shift on North Korea, hardly surprising considering that the greatest source of concern for the Japanese public in Japan's relations with Noth Korea remains the abductions issue (among respondents, 88.1% see this as an object of concern, compared with only 69.9% who see the nuclear issue as a cause for a concern, a five-point drop from 2007). A recent Yomiuri poll on the US-Japan relationship recorded a similar slip in Japanese public trust in the US, with North Korea explicitly cited as a reason for lower trust in the US.

In the short term, however, it is difficult to say what impact any of this discontent will have on the relationship. Aso Taro is handicapped by the crumbling economic situation and is in no position to devote considerable effort to reimagining the alliance. The LDP is working to build ties with the new administration, but it seems to be driven more by the need to build links where none exist than any particular policy agenda. The DPJ, anticipating that it will have the opportunity to work with Mr. Obama, is working on deepening its links with the incoming administration; Okada Katsuya, possibly Ozawa Ichiro's successor as DPJ president, visited Washington earlier this month for meetings with people in Democratic foreign policy circles.

The Obama administration and a DPJ administration might cooperate well in building a new alliance less focused on purely security matters. The challenge is calibrating the right level of security cooperation so the allies can focus on other, more pressing matters. Security cooperation must be downgraded to but one conversation among several in the alliance. Getting Okinawa and Guam right will help — I'm encouraged by reports that Mr. Obama's Japan team is open to renegotiating the 2006 realignment agreement. Seeing as how the 2006 agreement is already delayed, the US and Japan might as well get it right. This point will undoubtedly be debated at length in the debate over the 2009 budget, which will include a request from the ministry of defense for 100 billion yen for realignment. I expect that DPJ will strenuously resist this request, perhaps using the economic crisis as an additional pretext for opposing it.

But there is still the need to develop a bilateral agenda that encompasses more than security. With the 1996 alliance dead, what will take its place?

My problem with the new AEI report from Michael Auslin and Christopher Griffin is that the answer they provide to this question is basically to deny that the 1996 framework is dead. While acknowledging that the alliance is in a new era, their answer is more of the same: ever greater security cooperation whether in East Asia or globally. Rather than seeing the golden age of the 1996 alliance as having passed, never to return as the result of structural changes, they maintain that the problem is the Japanese domestic political situation, which has halted the process of reforming Japanese national security policy and the national security establishment. The task is to press forward with more and closer security cooperation, creating what they call a "normal alliance." This normal alliance would be a vehicle for the promotion of liberty in East Asia, in cooperation with other democratic alliances in the region (reminiscent of Mr. Abe's arc). As they write, "...The U.S.-Japanese alliance should reorient itself to become an active promoter of political, social, and economic liberalization. Tokyo and Washington should seek to enhance and promote the goal of making democracy, free markets, and transparent security policies the norm in Asia."

This statement is wholly at odds with Asia as it exists today. I'm not certain that the alliance is capable of promoting democracy in Thailand, let alone in Burma, North Korea, or China. And China, as the region's leading trader is a more critical partner as far as free markets for goods and investment are concerned. Of course, Auslin and Griffin are largely concerned with China. In their words, "China is also the only legitimate military threat to long-term stability in the Asia Pacific." They cite China's plans to build a blue-water navy, a distant prospect at best and something that does not necessarily threaten the US or Japan. They acknowledge economic interdependence, but are much more interested in preparing for the worst-case scenarios with China than with getting the trilateral relationship with China right so to stave off the worst-case scenarios. They are trying to resurrect the partnership between conservatives in Tokyo and Washington that produced the "golden age," only it is unclear who is still willing to sign on to this agenda in either Washington or Tokyo. Having been burned in North Korea, I suspect Japan's neo-conservatives will be less enthusiastic about ever deeper security cooperation that has proven to be one-sided in favor of the US. Moreover, I'm not clear whether there is public support in Japan for the kind of alliance they envision. The Japanese people may view East Asia as a frightening neighborhood — see the aforementioned Cabinet Office poll — but that doesn't mean that they're ready to support remilitarization and more vigorous security relationships regionally and globally.

In Washington, the pendulum appears to have shifted away from the China hawks, particularly with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slated to stay on in the Obama administration. The emphasis appears to be increasingly on stability and order in Asia, instead of the "freedom" agenda desired by Auslin and Griffin. Of course, the greater the emphasis on stability, the greater the need to cooperate with China.

It is still unclear to me what the US-Japan alliance will become, but I'm convinced that what it won't become is the normal alliance outlined by Auslin and Griffin. It may ultimately be the case that the alliance is destined to be limited to ensuring the defense of Japan but little more, with Japan providing token contributions internationally and playing a slightly greater role in providing for its own defense, but little more. As long as Japan is hamstrung by structural problems — its demographics, its shambolic economy, its public finances — it will be unable to be the vigorous partner that, as Sheila Smith argues, Washington needs in the midst of the crisis. But if Japan cannot find a way to overcome its problems, it will not be the partner Washington (and Beijing) need in Asia as they try to build a new, stable regional order.

Two crises

In the comments section of this recent post, I have been accused of overstating Japanese decline and understating the US decline.

I have actually said very little about the economic crisis in the US — and what I have said about Japan is not particularly new. For the most part I have simply updated an argument that I have made since the early days of this blog to take new circumstances into account: Japan is in the midst of systemic, secular decline, akin to the bakumatsu, the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the mid-nineteenth century. I am far from alone in making this argument; Ozawa Ichiro himself is fond of making it, with the implication that he and the DPJ will be the instrument of Japan's restoration. (Among foreign observers, Michael Zielenziger has made a similar argument.) Japan's decline long predates the current financial crisis. It arguably goes back to the bursting of the bubble and the onset of the "lost decade." The decline has institutional causes, demographic causes, and leadership causes, but these factors all add up to an unmistakable and precipitous drop in the state of the Japanese economy, the post-2001 "boom" notwithstanding.

The current crisis has served merely to illustrate just how fragile the post-2001 "recovery" was and just how little the Japanese economy has changed. As an article in this week's Economist notes, "In the long run, what Japan needs is as clear as it has always been: less dependence on export-led manufacturers, more productive and internationally minded service companies, and a more flexible workforce that welcomes women, older workers and immigrants...For the time being, where the world economy goes, so goes Japan." The Koizumi revolution was still-born. Structural reform was left incomplete before Mr. Koizumi departed. Even worse, Mr. Koizumi failed to destroy the old LDP. He dealt it what may ultimately prove to be a mortal blow, but in the short term he gave the party enough of a boost to ensure that a largely unchanged LDP would continue to hold power during this critical period. But not only did Mr. Koizumi serve to prolong the life of the LDP, he also dealt the DPJ a serious blow. Not only did he steal the opposition party's better ideas, but he also served to draw reformist candidates to the LDP. With Mr. Koizumi as party leader running as an LDP candidate was palpable for young, idealistic reformers. By doing so, Mr. Koizumi deprived the DPJ of candidates who would naturally belong to the DPJ's reform wing. The DPJ's leadership crisis can at least partially be laid at the feet of Mr. Koizumi. The young reformers — now orphaned in the LDP by Mr. Koizumi — may yet leave, but I think that when we assess the impact of Mr. Koizumi's tenure, we must consider this line of reasoning as one of the negative consequences. As a result, Japan now has a ruling party which in the three years since the last general election has turned its back on structural reform (and paying down the debt) and an opposition party that is not nearly as reformist as it could be.

Is it really necessary to spell out again the crisis facing Japan today? The dying regions? The bleak demographic outlook? The national debt? It is hard to overstate the impact of Japan's national debt problem. According to this list, Japan ranks third in the world in debt/GDP ratio at 170%, behind Zimbabwe and Lebanon. The next highest G8 country is Italy, in seventh place at 104%. The numbers will change somewhat in light of various stimulus packages in response to the crisis, but in Japan's case it will only get worse. Granted, the US has a major debt problem of its own, which barring drastic action in the coming years will only worsen. But the US has one important advantage that Japan doesn't have: the dollar remains the world's reserve currency. Despite the crisis, governments and investors are still willing to hold US dollars. This doesn't mean that the US can avoid adjustment (more on this momentarily), but it does give the US government more room for maneuver. Japan's situation is not hopeless — as an anonymous commentator to my earlier post notes (scroll to the bottom), Japan's debt/GDP ratio includes prefectural debt and most of it is held domestically, which gives the government a cushion that the US government may not necessary have.

The consequences of Japan's debt are clear. The government is trapped. How will it revive economic growth, foot the bill for a greater portion of welfare provisions (effectively building a welfare state), and cut its debt to more sustainable levels so that it will be able to do more for its retiring baby boomers? Japan is not alone in this dilemma, but it is feeling the pain particularly acutely.

What about the US?

First, let me say that US elites have been no less incompetent (ideological, short-sighted, arrogant, etc.) than their Japanese counterparts. The biggest difference is that Japanese elites have had years to correct their mistakes. Say what you will about President-elect Obama, but at least American voters had the good sense not to reward the Republican Party with another presidential term. I've seen few signs that the Democratic Party is any better equipped to deal with the crisis, but at least the Republican Party has been sentenced to some time in the wilderness, which one hopes it will use productively.

I have no doubt that this crisis is dire, and that the US has yet to hit bottom. There is still the risk that the recession will become a depression. It is still unclear whether the banking crisis has passed. The Paulson Treasury appears to have mishandled the bailout package.

And then there are the structural problems. To say that America has been living beyond its means is a gross understatement — America has been living as if the very idea of limits didn't exist. No limits to energy consumption. No limits to the US government's ability — by means of its unrivaled military — to reshape the world and provide extended security for the American people. At the same time, the US has neglected its infrastructure, its health care and pensions systems, and, most important for future growth, its education system. Above and beyond these serious problems, Americans and their government have acted as if there were no limit in the rest of the world's demand for US debt.

Americans are now learning the meaning of limits. The question, as Paul Krugman notes, is what the post-crisis economy will look like. He looks at the balance of consumer spending, nonresidential investment, residential investment, government purchases, and net exports and concludes that a smaller trade deficit should step in for lower consumper spending, which means that the US may become more dependent on exports than it has been in the past. Meanwhile, as Niall Ferguson argued in Monday's Washington Post, central to this transformation will be the US relationship with China, a relationship Ferguson describes with the unfortunate word "Chimerica."

"In essence," Ferguson argues, "we need the Chinese to be supportive of U.S. monetary easing and fiscal stimulus by doing more of the same themselves. There needs to be agreement on a gradual reduction of the Chimerican imbalance via increased U.S. exports and increased Chinese imports. The alternative — a sudden reduction of the imbalance via lower U.S. imports and lower Chinese exports — would be horrible.

"There also needs to be an agreement to avoid a rout in the dollar market and the bond market, which is what will happen if the Chinese stop buying U.S. government bonds, the amount of which is now set to increase massively."

The very word Chimerica undoubtedly keeps Japanese officials awake at night, as it captures what has long been the worst nightmare of many Japanese elites: ever closer cooperation between Washington and Beijing. The thought of the economic crisis bringing the US and China closer together, perhaps under the watch of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is surely causing a spike in the blood pressure of certain Japanese. (That said, Ferguson does not mention that Japan holds more US treasuries than China, meaning that surely US-Japan bilateral negotiations are no less necessary thank US-China negotiations.) (Correction: As of September, China became the largest holder of US treasuries.)

The adjustment will undoubtedly be painful, particularly for my generation — the so-called millennial generation — which has known only good times (indeed, perhaps the most prosperous period in human history). But America still has, to use Aso Taro's favorite phrase, "latent power," starting with comparably favorable demographics. Interdependence also works in America's favor, as it may have plenty of help from other governments in shifting to a more sustainable footing. The rest of the world still catches America's flu.

Ultimately it is foolish to argue that one country's problems are worse than another's. The developed countries have their collective back to the wall, and not for the first time does the world run the risk of watching an age of unprecedented prosperity collapse into an "era of fear." (It is worth revisiting a Tony Judt essay to which I linked nearly a year ago.) Japan's and America's problems are both severe, but different. For the past two decades, Japan has fallen from a great height, and barring adjustments, it may have further to fall. The US may yet experience a similar decline.

Finally, I must repeat what I said in the comments to the earlier post: I do not celebrate Japan's decline. I lament it, and wish its leaders had done more sooner — and failing that, I wish that they be held responsible for their failures. I don't believe that Mr. Aso is wrong to believe in Japan's latent power, and hope that the government finds a way to release the energy of the Japanese people.

Komori on US China policy

Komori Yoshihisa, veteran correspondent and Washington-based editor of the Sankei Shimbun, was invited to speak to Nakagawa Shoichi's "True Conservative Policy Study Group" last Friday, where he explained the reality of US China policy and contemporary attitudes in Washington towards the US-Japan alliance.

He provides a summary of his remarks at his blog.

For the most part, they're innocuous. He notes that Congress and Washington in general are alarmed about China on a number of fronts: China's military modernization, trade practices, intellectual property violations, and human rights violations are causes for concern among US elites. (Indeed, according to Pew's November 2005 survey of public and elite foreign policy attitudes, US elites are far more concerned about China than the public at large. This may have changed after several years of media reports about shoddy Chinese imports, but I still expect that the US public as a whole remains more sanguine about China than Washington.) He reports that while the US-Japan alliance is rarely discussed in the media, it enjoys a solid bedrock of support from both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Broadly speaking, Mr. Komori's picture is accurate.

But there are a few problems. First, whatever the fears of US elites about a multi-dimensional Chinese "threat," I think US policymakers, especially in the executive branch, are willing to silence their fears and work with China when necessary. This is consistent with the enduring pattern of Sino-US relations since 1972. Congress has been obsessed with threats from China and aggressive in its criticism of human rights violations, threats against Taiwan, etc.; the White House, whatever its unease with China and regardless of the party affiliation of the president, has sought closer coordination with China. There is an enduring realism in US China policy that is entirely absent from Mr. Komori's remarks.

This realistic tendency will likely become even more pronounced in coming years, because — and this is my second qualm with Mr. Komori's remarks — the US obsession with Iraq and the Middle East more broadly will not abate anytime soon. Mr. Komori seemingly provides no context for US thinking about China, which for most of Washington remains of secondary importance to more urgent Middle Eastern questions, meaning the US will be ever more inclined to work with China on a range of regional and global problems.

While naturally there are China hawks in Washington who share the views of Mr. Komori's audience, it would be a mistake to suggest that their viewpoint is dominant and commonly accepted. Their viewpoint certainly hasn't been dominant under the Bush administration, despite early indications to the contrary, and the next administration will be forced to embrace a sort of "resigned realism." Even if a McCain administration were to talk about the importance of cooperation among democracies in Asia, such rhetoric would most likely not be backed by a decisive shift in how the US-Japan and US-Australia alliances interact with China.

I would add that Mr. Komori and other Japanese China hawks, much like their American compatriots, have nothing constructive to say about how the US and Japan should deal with China. Mr. Komori says that it is "appropriate to identify and criticize, frequently and clearly" China's military activities and human rights violations. Maybe so, but that cannot be the sum of a China policy, especially for Japan. As Fareed Zakaria argues, criticism and outrage can backfire if they promote a popular backlash among the Chinese people. A China policy that amounts to little more than jabbing China repeatedly with a pointy stick is no China policy at all.

Meanwhile, Mr. Komori has not been paying enough attention in Washington. He notes that he concluded his remarks saying that in other countries principles like "building a country in which the people have pride in their country" and "steadily defending the national interest" are not conservative at all: they are accepted by all as a matter of course. I wonder what country Mr. Komori has in mind. China maybe? Both examples cited by Mr. Komori are fiercely contested in US public discourse. Both the definition of the "national interest" and how to defend it are in constant flux. As for a country of which people can be proud, once again, "pride" means different things to different Americans. To some, including Senator Obama, being proud of the US means being proud of its ability to correct its own flaws; as Senator Obama said in Montana earlier this month, "I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection."

If anything, Japan needs more of this: more discussion about what its national interests and more discussion about how to secure those interests, but above all, more discussion about what it really means to be proud of one's country — and what it means for a Japanese to be proud of Japan.

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?

Hold steady on China

Following the ASAT test conducted in January of this year, the behavior of the PLA is once again providing China hawks in the US with reason to bang the war drums (or perhaps just the containment cymbals, not that those are any less distressing). The latest incident, of course, involves China's last-minute rejection of a planned visit by the USS Kitty Hawk to Hong Kong, where the crew would meet with family members for Thanksgiving. This followed on the heels China's denial of safe harbor to US Navy minesweepers that were seeking shelter from a storm, contravening centuries of maritime custom.

The Pentagon, reports the BBC, has protested to the Chinese government, which responded by claiming that the Kitty Hawk incident was the result of a "misunderstanding." The FT suggests that the two incidents could jeopardize ties between the two navies, which have matured in recent years. Remember earlier this year when Admiral Timothy Keating, the new commander of US Pacific Command, suggested that the US might help China develop aircraft carriers?

There are two separate but not mutually exclusive theories floating around to explain these incidents. Some suggest that Beijing is retaliating for the Dalai Lama's receiving the Congressional Gold Medal. Others talk darkly of the PLA's being beyond the control of the Communist Party (an argument I considered here).

If it's the former, there's nothing to worry about — the issue will have passed, and Sino-US relations will continue to be as positive as the People's Daily says in an article about a meeting between President Bush and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Meanwhile, even if this incident is part of a pattern along with the ASAT test and reports of Chinese cyber raids on the Pentagon, that still should not preclude a deepening of defense ties between the US and China.

The US has no choice but to deal with China. A PLA unaccountable to any authority, while worrisome, does not change this fact. Indeed, the greater the independence enjoyed by the PLA, the greater the need for regularized interaction between the military officers and government officials not just from the US and China, but from the other countries in the region. Scaling back or cutting security ties with China and its military will simply make the PLA more hostile and less cooperative, reaffirming the impression surely common in certain circles within the PLA that the US and its allies seek to encircle China.

Yes, China's behavior is maddening and hard to understand. But the US, as the maintainer of stability and order in the region, has the duty to ignore the slight and focus on the task of coaxing China into acting as a pillar of order, not an unpredictable actor and potential menace. Clearly, the signals from China are mixed — interesting that this incident has unfolded just as a PLAN destroyer arrives in Japan for a historic visit. Decisions made by the US and its allies still have the ability to affect the direction of China's emergence for better or worse.

Here's hoping that cooler heads within the US Navy and the defense establishment prevail, despite those inside and outside the government who look for incidents like this to confirm their worst fears about China (like, say, Lou Dobbs, as mentioned by Tom Barnett).

Perhaps it's time for that Organization for Security and Cooperation in Asia.

Does the CCP still hold the gun?

The FT has reported on a significant break-in to Pentagon systems in June, with a recent DoD investigation finding that the incursion most likely originated from China's People's Liberation Army. This follows recent reports of break-ins to German government systems.

The Chinese defense ministry said nothing; the foreign ministry, meanwhile, said, "We have explicit laws and regulations in this regard...Hacking is a global issue and China is frequently a victim."

Readers know that I am relatively sanguine about the rise of China. At the same time, however, stories like this give me pause, because if the PLA is free to do what it wants, then all bets are off. If the civilian ministries are useful only to provide convenient cover for the PLA — such as the aforementioned foreign ministry statement — then it is impossible to plot China's trajectory, particularly in the event of a crisis.

It also means that if the US and its partners in the region are to avoid a hegemonic war with China, it will depend on not sending signals to the PLA that reinforce its paranoid world view; in short, forestalling crises at all costs.

For better or worse, the US, Japan, and others in the region are partners with civilians in the CCP in managing China's rise.

Bush talks sense on China

This week is the 2007 APEC summit in Sydney, and in advance of the week-long summitry, President Bush has been talking Asia — and saying the right things.

In a round table discussion with foreign journalists (hat tip: The Swamp), Mr. Bush spoke of the "complex relationship" between the US and China, but also noted, "...I view China as a positive opportunity." He did not hesitate to mention the economic friction or US concerns about human rights, but the overall picture suggests that as the Bush administration wanes, it increasingly recognizes the importance of China as a partner in the Asia-Pacific region, the single most important bilateral relationship in the region, judging by the time spent talking about it in this press conference. The days of Ambassador Mansfield's bar-none ranch are long gone.

Compare the above interview with an interview Mr. Bush had with NHK's Okushi Kensuke. The NHK interview focused on a couple of bilateral issues — the anti-terror special measures law and the six-party talks — before turning to US policy in Iraq. Both of the above-mentioned issues are trust issues: Washington's (overblown) concerns about the reliability of Japan's commitment to participate in Afghanistan, Tokyo's concerns about being abandoned in the six-party talks (and regarding Afghanistan, fears that the US security guarantee will weaken if Japan doesn't demonstrate its loyalty by contributing to US-led campaigns). The Sino-US relationship, for all the friction and feuding, is a relationship whose concerns are regional and global in scale. The US-Japan relationship, for all its significance for both countries, often amounts to the US doing heavy lifting for Japan on various security issues and occasionally cajoling Japan on trade and monetary issues.

When Mr. Bush meets with Hu Jintao, the agreements reached and decisions made have the potential to be hugely significant for the region, but can one say the same about the outcomes of the meeting between President Bush meets Prime Minister Abe this week?

This isn't to say that the US-Japan relationship is irrelevant or that the US and China are prepared to run the region in a sort of bilateral concert, but it does suggest that the US is increasingly seeing Asia policy through the prism of China policy (as opposed to seeing it through the prism of Japan policy), and that the value of a bilateral relationship to the US will increasingly be the value it has in contributing to "stability" (read a positive and mutually beneficial relationship with China).

China gazes into an American mirror

A commentator on my recent post on the China threat spoke of the "deliberate contamination of pet food," suggesting some kind of plot hatched in Beijing to flood the world market with dangerous goods. In other words, China's liberalization is a kind of trojan horse project by which China will undermine the global order and win without a fight.

Stepping back into reality, I found Joseph Kahn's article in the New York Times' Week in Review on Chinese regulatory reform interesting, because Kahn explicitly notes an idea that I have mentioned here before, namely that the best parallel for China's rise may in fact by the rise of the United States in the late nineteenth century.

To wit:

Phony fertilizer destroys crops. Stores shelves are filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose is passed off as honey. Exports slump when European regulators find dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.

More product safety scandals in China? Not this time. These quality problems prompted a sluggish United States government to tighten food and drug regulation 101 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the act that created the Food and Drug Administration.

Like America’s industrializing economy a century ago, China’s is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act like pirates. Both countries suffered epidemics of fatal fakes, and both have had regulators who were too inept, corrupt or hamstrung to do much about it.

While Americans and others are right to be concerned about products imported from China, it is not as if Chinese are not suffering from a woefully inadequate regulatory environment. Take the recent explosion at a karaoke bar that killed twenty-five people, another in a string of man-made catastrophes that has plagued China of late.

China is belatedly discovering that a liberal market economy is not simply a function of the state's stepping back and letting the market do its thing. The state must use its power not to pick winners and losers, but to ensure transparency and enforce proper conduct within the marketplace — punishing transgressions as necessary. The rule of law is, of course, an essential tool for fulfilling these roles. The question is whether the regulatory state outlined in Kahn's article is possible in a market in which all actors are not, in fact, equal: privileges of CCP membership and outright corruption by minor party officials are substantial obstacles standing in the way of an economy grounded in the rule of law.

Nevertheless, in domestic governance as in international affairs, China has much to learn from the rise of the superpower across the Pacific, and considerably less time in which to figure it all out.

Combating the China threat thesis

Japan's Ministry of Defense has issued its first white paper as the Ministry of Defense, and it seems that this year's edition is unique in its focus on China as a threat to Japan.

And it seems that the Yomiuri Shimbun is quite pleased by this, according to its editorial today. Citing America's debate on the same matter, Yomiuri notes the report's calling attention to China's pursuit of blue-water naval capabilities and long-range aviation capabilities. (Interestingly, Yomiuri published this editorial on the same day that Asahi devoted its entire editorial space to an editorial marking the seventieth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which is recognized as marking the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War — pointing at the need for Sino-Japanese reconciliation.)

Not having read the report yet, I will limit my judgments to Yomiuri's position, which blithely talks about the threat posed by China's rapid military modernization without actually bothering to note what threat China poses exactly. It seems fair for a reader to ask whether Yomiuri has specific scenarios in mind, or if it's just peddling the same hysteria found in some quarters of American policy debate. As I (and others) have argued before, the casual assumption that Chinese military modernization — especially at sea — is necessarily a threat to the region is inappropriate, and ought to be challenged by those interested in maintaining peace and order in the Asia-Pacific. Rather than issue the occasional alarmist report, the US, Japan, Australia, and other powers in the region should be thinking about how to co-opt China's military strength, not making self-fulfilling prophecies of military struggles to come.

Indeed, given the deepening mutual interdependence between China and the region's powers, none of them can afford to be too antagonistic. (Australia's recent publication of a defense report that peddles the same line as Japan's is baffling, given that Australia is, if anything, more dependent on maintaining a healthy relationship with China.) Washington, Canberra, and Tokyo surely don't need to be told that. So why these reports?

Arguably it has as much to do with the need to justify expensive defense programs (creating a budgetary enemy), as with the actual threat posed by China to their interests. Australia of late has been having an active debate about its future defense doctrine, rooted in having the ability to defend Australia alone if necessary (see this article at Defense Industry Daily on Australia's new airpower thinking). Hmm, defense of Australia — what country would Australia have to defend itself against, and what expensive technologies would it need to purchase in order to do so?

In Japan, meanwhile, the government has, despite a decade of falling defense expenditures, focused on enhancing its naval capabilities and airpower. Indeed, Prime Minister Abe has approached the US once again about purchasing F-22s as Japan's next air superiority fighter — despite oft-stated US doubts about selling. (These doubts can be found spelled out in a recent Congressional Research Service report, available for download here.) For the Japanese government, approaching the US about the F-22, it can't hurt to have a thick report in hand showing the threat posed by China to Japan (and a newspaper headline or two reinforcing the threat).

Level heads in these three governments must steadfastly resist the alarmist rhetoric emanating from China hawks and their allies in the media and the defense industry. The region is too complicated — and the stakes too important — to fall into simple fear-mongering.

A cure for Japan's fear of Democrats

While Asia has been largely absent from debates among Republican and Democratic candidates for their respective parties' presidential nominations — much to my chagrin — the Washington Post reports that John Hamre of CSIS organized a dinner for Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo to meet with the foreign policy advisers of a number of leading presidential candidates, in response to Chinese interest in such a discussion.

This is a remarkably sound idea. Rather than waiting for the next administration to roll into the White House — and with it the inevitable "new course" in Sino-US relations — China has insinuated itself into the discussion, ensuring that its concerns have been laid on the table before candidates are even nominated. Hopefully this will forestall the appearance of a straw-man China (or a scapegoat China) in campaign debates.

One wonders why Japan hasn't tried to do this, instead of sitting in Tokyo shaking in fear that — gasp! — a Democrat might win the election and immediately begin bashing and/or passing Japan. What an idea, actually talking to candidates...

Ending US Navy dominance?

So suggests the headline on an FT article (subscription only) by Mure Dickie and Stephen Fidler on Chinese naval modernization that is actually more considered than the headline would suggest.

Acknowledging that China is "a big beneficiary of the “Pax Americana” enforced by the US Navy that keeps its sea lanes open," the article seeks to explore the means by which China seeks to take its maritime security into its own hands.

The conclusion? China, while en route to becoming a more significant regional naval power, has yet to decide just what that means. How far does the PLAN plan to be able to reach? Will the relatively localized "string of pearls" ultimately reach into the Persian Gulf and the African shore of the Indian Ocean?

They write:

Mr Wang [Xiangsui] of the University of Aeronautics says Chinese defence planners have themselves yet to achieve consensus either on what their naval strategic goals should be or how they should go about achieving them. Indeed, he hopes Beijing will end up agreeing with him that the navy’s aim should not be to oppose the US but to fit into a stable international security system.

“China has a need to guarantee access to maritime key points – but does not need to do this by confronting the US Navy,” he says, suggesting instead that the main aim should be to work alongside Washington.

Nonetheless, US defence planners are likely to continue to find it hard to take China’s good intentions on trust while the country remains an authoritarian and avowedly communist one-party state. Beijing meanwhile still shows little willingness to embrace the level of transparency that might allay their suspicions.

Given the different messages emanating from different corners of the US defense establishment on China, it may be premature to conclude that the US has made up its mind on how to interact with China.

And for that reason it is incredibly important the the candidates vying for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations spend a great deal of time explaining how they would resolve the many paradoxes of China, and mold a security environment that will encourage China to opt for a navy development plan that upholds, not undermines regional order.

Building a new relationship in Shangri-La

Contrary to coverage of the Sino-US relationship that greeted the publication of the latest Pentagon report on Chinese military power, Secretary of Defense William Gates is in Singapore, setting out the terms of Sino-US security cooperation (and building on visits to China by General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Timothy Keating, head of US Pacific Command).

At the Shangri-La Dialogue, convened annually by the International Institute of Strategic Studies in Singapore, Secretary Gates gave a speech that focuses mostly on trying to convince East Asia's powers that the fate of Central Asia is as much their interest as the interest of the US. But it concludes by summing up the US-China defense relationship for all in attendance:

The United States shares common interests with China on issues like terrorism, counter proliferation, and energy security. But we are concerned about the opaqueness of Beijing’s military spending and modernization programs issues described in the annual report on the Chinese armed forces recently released by the U.S. government. But as General Pete Pace, our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out, there is some difference between capacity and intent. And I believe there is reason to be optimistic about the U.S.-China relationship.

We have increased military-to-military contacts between all levels of our militaries, most recently dramatized when General Pace sat in the cockpit of the top-of-the-line Chinese fighter during his last visit. We obviously have a huge economic and trade relationship. Indeed, I have been told that if just one American company Wal-Mart was a country, it would be China's eighth largest trading partner. The second meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue concluded last week in Washington, D.C. a process designed to improve our economic bilateral relationship. As we gain experience in dealing with each other, relationships can be forged that will build trust over time.

As the New York Times reports on Gates's speech, this supposedly contrasts with former Secretary Rumsfeld's speech at Shangri-La in 2005, when he essentially reiterated the contents of the Pentagon report on China's military modernization. But the Times is misleading: the new embrace of China by Washington has been a long time in coming, even if Rumsfeld's stance on China was ambivalent at best.

Reiterating his ideas in a press conference following his speech, Gates said in response to a question from a PLA colonel:

I’ve always believed that the years-long negotiations on strategic arms limitations may or may not have made much of a contribution in terms of limiting arms. But they played an extraordinarily valuable role in creating better understanding on both the Soviet and American sides about what the strategic intentions of each side were, what the strategic thinking was, what their motives were, where they were headed. That dialogue that continued intensively for something like twenty years built a cadre of people who were accustomed to working and talking with one another, who were on opposite sides of a major conflict, and I think that -- while we have no conflict at this point -- this kind of transparency, this kind of discussion is the kind of thing that prevents miscalculation and helps each side understand where the other is headed and what its intentions are.

This is by no means revolutionary change, but it suggests a Sino-US relationship cushioned from the thorny issues surrounding human rights, democracy, Tibet, Taiwan, etc. Whatever events shake the relationship, whatever outside actors (the US Congress, NGOs, etc.) do to raise issues of concern, the relationship will rest in the hands of a "cadre" (how funny that Gates used that word in the Sino-US context) that will keep things on an even keel. Come to think of it, not altogether unlike the US-Japan relationship for most of the cold war, in which alliance managers successfully cordoned off the security relationship from other concerns.

What will be the basis of security cooperation? This People's Daily article suggests that the PLA at least knows what the US wants to hear, with General Zhang Qinsheng, the PLA's deputy chief of staff telling the Shangri-La gathering that China is interested primarily in stability in the region. Zhang said, "International relations in the region are generally stable. Regional cooperation continues to deepen. Economic cooperation and trade is more active than ever. Multiple cultures prosper side by side. Security dialogues are increasingly pragmatic to maintain peace, avoid confrontation and promote development have become shared goals of the Asia-Pacific countries." While that might sound like pablum, for all the tension surrounding maritime claims and energy resources, Asia is shockingly peaceful — barring the Taiwan Straits — considering that the region is home to some of the most significant military and economic powers in the world. To date, Aaron Friedberg's "struggle for mastery in Asia" (PDF) has not quite come to pass.

And what of Japan? Japan was but a footnote in Secretary Gates's speech, grouped with South Korea in a passing reference to how the US is updating old alliances for the new security environment. I cannot help but wonder if that's increasingly how Japan looks to Washington: potentially useful if it gets its legal and constitutional act together (although constitution revision may not be an unmitigated boon for the alliance, as discussed here), but otherwise a distraction for the US as it considers the shape of the broader region and the world. Gates does not strike me as a man who has the time or the patience to indulge Japan's neuroses — and with no Japan hands in other senior positions in the Pentagon (or at State), it seems that Gates has plenty of company.

So military-military cooperation may continue, but as I have argued before, the strategic direction is withering, with the US no longer looking at Asia through a Japanese lens.

More retrograde thinking on China from Gertz

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times finally got around to commenting on Admiral Keating's offer to help the Chinese — which I have been told by someone who would know that it was more a "half-joke" and thought experiment than serious offer — develop aircraft carriers. Gertz noted, "Critics say the comments are a sign that the U.S.-China military exchange program is spinning out of control under Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chief of naval operations."

Got to love that — "critics say."

I have written about Gertz's utterly blinkered Sinophobia before, but Tom Barnett lays into him here with far greater anger than I could ever muster, expertly smashing the thinking of Gertz and others who look at the rise of China as a replay of the rise of Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union all rolled into one.

As for me, I like that Keating made the offer. I like that someone in a position of tremendous responsibility for US Asia policy has moved beyond the linear thinking that characterizes so much of how Washington views the world. Ours is a world marked by ambiguity and contradiction, and China hawks like Gertz, rather than embracing ambiguity, reject it, claiming that nothing has changed, that China is just trying to lull the US into passivity before it strikes.

Since when did the world have to make sense, neatly divided into friends and foes?

As Barnett notes, and as I've discussed before, outside of Taiwan, the chances of war with China are nil, and the more US policymakers come to recognize that and make policy accordingly, the greater the basis for Sino-US cooperation on the shared goal of maintaining regional stability.

Seeing the world through China's eyes

Susan Shirk, author of China: Fragile Superpower, noted in an interview at China Digital Times:

To get anywhere diplomatically you have to put yourself in the shoes of the person sitting across from you at the table. I traveled with Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji when they visited the U.S. and joined many meetings with them. I have met Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao as well. In their informal comments as well as their formal statements they make no secret of their worries about China's political stability. But the leaders do try to hide differences of opinion over foreign and domestic policy which undoubtedly exist.

I'm with Shirk. How the US, or any country, can make foreign policy without trying to understand how an interlocutor sees the world is beyond me. As such, I think that was the thinking behind Admiral Keating's offer of help on aircraft carrier development; looking through the eyes of the PLA Navy, Keating seemed to recognize that China might have legitimate reasons for wanting an aircraft carrier, and from there sought to provide practical advice from a navy that has been operating carrier groups for decades.

A recent article by Richard Halloran spells out Keating's thinking in more detail, and notes that among the five reasons why China might develop an aircraft carrier — international prestige, power projection, defending lifelines, regional rivalry, and relief operations — attacking Taiwan is not one of them. Indeed, there seems to be little in Halloran's list that would result in war. Rather, after decades of watching US carriers show the flag, especially in the Taiwan Straits, it should hardly be surprising that China wants a similar platform.

So China's reaction to the Pentagon report is understandable: the US report is drafted from the perspective that the decision by China to develop its conventional and nuclear forces is an insult, as well as a threat, to the US. Clearly we're not threatening you, it thinks, so why should you need to modernize your armed forces? (Ed. — How can a report think? Quiet, you.)

But is the Pentagon really incapable of appreciating the fact that China might have legitimate reasons for military modernization that have nothing to do with threatening the US directly? And, does the Pentagon realize that the US pursuit of military predominance can last only as long as other countries are deterred? Once a country decides to develop an advanced military the jig is up; the US needs to think of more creative approaches to a country with a sophisticated military, other than insisting, "From where we stand, you're not threatened." It seems that's what Admiral Keating is groping towards.

To connect Keating to Shirk, the admiral is trying look at the world through Beijing's eyes and alter the US Military's approach to China so that it acknowledges that China has legitimate interests that may require an advanced military. That does not mean acquiescing entirely — Keating clearly communicated American concerns, after all — it simply means acknowledging that the world looks different from Beijing than it does from Washington.

I should note that I do not think that the US will be helping China with aircraft carriers anytime soon — nor should it, at least not for now. But this is yet another sign of a new flexibility in US Asia policy; the old San Francisco system of bilateral alliances is simultaneously being agglomerated, as the US, Japan, and Australia seek to deepen trilateral ties, and de-prioritized, with the US less inclined — in practice, if not in rhetoric — to view the region as marked by stark, clear divisions.