Lest we forget

The US-Japan alliance turned fifty this week, and the allies celebrated by steering the conversation away from Futenma and releasing a 2 + 2 joint statement that reiterated why the alliance matters in the first place.

Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, also gave a press conference Tuesday that makes for interesting reading when it comes to thinking about the challenges the alliance faces going forward.

Campbell stressed that 2010 will be year for discussions within and between the two governments on the future of the alliance. He voiced a greater degree of understanding that the DPJ's early initiatives within the context of the US-Japan relationship are understandable given democratic politics than I think the Obama administration had done previously.

But while Campbell discussed areas of cooperation and the importance of deeper security cooperation, he did not say the US government hopes the outcome of bilateral consultations on security over the coming year will produce. To a certain extent, the US position is the same as it has been for decades and can be summarized in a single word: more. As a superpower that is facing burdens and challenges that will increasingly overwhelm its capabilities, the US needs allies like Japan to share the load now more than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today. More can be greater military spending or new military capabilities, constitution revision or reinterpretation, higher levels of foreign aid, or greater involvement in peacekeeping.

The problem, however, is that, as Brad Glosserman and Robert Madsen note in a Pacific Forum CSIS paper (not yet online), Japan may not be able to provide much more for years to come, if ever. Without substantial economic reform Japan may not be able to commit the material resources the US would prefer — and without serious economic reform the Japanese people will continue to have little or no interest in constitution revision.

In other words, despite the desire on the part of US officials from both parties to "strengthen" the alliance, the Yoshida consensus may continue to hold, in that Japan will continue to provide less security cooperation than the US prefers because its government is focused almost exclusively on economic challenges at home. The difference, however, will be that Japan's economic resources will likely continue to decline; withholding resources from the SDF today is for the sake of directing them into social security (above all) instead of using them to promote economic development as in the 1950s and 1960s. The question is whether the US will be able to live with a Japan that is, as Glosserman and Madsen note, more dependent on the US even as it is able to provide relatively less towards both its own defense and alliance cooperation.

As I've already written, fiscal constraints at home will not be the only factors preventing the realization of an "ever closer" US-Japan alliance. Whatever the latest headlines are concerning China's behavior, the lesson of the Koizumi years is that the Japanese people do not support a policy of unremittingly cold political relations with Beijing — and the lack of support for more military spending suggests that there is little stomach for an arms race. Japan is going to learn to live with a stronger, more confident China, and it will do so in part through closer relations with other countries in Asia.

Finally, while I am confident that the alliance will continue to exist in some form, it is worth considering ("lest we forget") how difficult it is to preserve an alliance aimed at an external enemy to an alliance that is, in Campbell's words, "basically aimed at no specific or particular nation." While some would off record that it is aimed at China, that would entail a discussion of what it means for an alliance to be "aimed" at a country. Given that we do not even know what Japan would do in the event of a war over Taiwan, it is hard to say that US-Japan alliance is "aimed" at China. Instead the alliance is chasing monsters of a smaller, more amorphous nature. Is there an alliance in history that has successfully transitioned from being aimed at some country or coalition to being aimed at "uncertainty" or instead of being against an enemy being for public goods? That's not to say it's impossible, but the Obama and Hatoyama governments have a difficult year ahead of them.

Here's hoping that the two governments approach the task realistically, acknowledge the limits of each country's commitment, and shape their future expectations accordingly. Perhaps it is fitting that the year began with Japan's ordering its refueling ships home from the Indian Ocean, an appropriate reminder of the continuing political and economic limits on Japan's contributions.

Butter over guns

In the Asahi survey of political attitudes discussed in this post, respondents were asked to pick which portions of the budget that would like to see enhanced and which portions they would like to see cut.

I already noted that the top three programs respondents want to see enhanced are health and welfare, economic stimulus, and agriculture.

The top programs to cut?

Public works (53%), defense (49%) and international cooperation (37%).

It is encouraging to see that the public has little appetite for more concrete, but the second figure gives me pause. Defense ranks highly despite seven consecutive years of defense budget cuts, about which Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu complained when asked at a press conference in December. It ranks highly despite the ceaseless effort by Japanese elites to alert the public to the danger posed by North Korea and by China's military modernization program. I suppose this means that Ozawa Ichiro's remarks about a sharp reduction of US forces in Japan are not so much wrong as they are irrelevant — the Japanese people have no desire to undertake the commitment implied by Ozawa's ideas, they want even less of a defense commitment.

Combining the results of the cabinet survey on defense issues (discussed here) and the Asahi survey, it seems that the Japanese people want nothing more than to be protected from foreign threats by the United States and protected from economic insecurity by their own government. Far from wanting to throw off the Yoshida Doctrine, the Japanese people want to revive it for the twenty-first century.

Something tells me that the US will be not as obliging as it was in the early 1950s.

After the Yoshida Doctrine, what?

Over at Shisaku, MTC notes in a thoughtful post on the Yoshida Doctrine, "Yet even now, sixteen years down the line, the Yoshida tradeoff rules as the master narrative underpinning all discussion of Japan's security options."

Yet I wonder if the Yoshida Doctrine lives on only as a function of the institutional and constitutional constraints that were devised to establish its position as strategic framework by which Japan acted in the postwar world — less master narrative than default option in lieu of a new consensus.

As I have argued before, for the past fifteen years the debate on Japan's security posture has been wide open. Questions that were answered in the late 1950s and early 1960s are once again on the table. Japan has yet to reach a new consensus, of course — in part for reasons identified by MTC. With the "lost decade," the casual assumption that Japan would become an economic superpower, in the process redefining the very meaning of power, has been shattered. On the home front, meanwhile, the bursting of the bubble dealt a critical blow to the other part of the postwar consensus, the "structural corruption" by which the LDP ensured that the fruits of growth were distributed throughout the country. (After all, it was Yoshida and Kishi, who, despite their antagonistic relationship, built the postwar order, with Yoshida laying out the principles and Kishi consolidating the system — this argument is made by Richard Samuels in this JPRI working paper and expanded upon in Machiavelli's Children, this month's recommended book.)

What role is Japan to play in the world? And how is Japan to be governed? Two disparate but intertwined questions, neither of which has been satisfactorily answered in the post-cold war era.

For some, the answer is more dynamic, executive leadership from the premiership, coupled with a "normal" alliance with the US in which Japan is the Asian anchor of a global democratic posse, but on this front, the rhetoric has undoubtedly ran far ahead of the reality. Indeed, for all the talk about creating an arc of prosperity and freedom across Eurasia, when it comes time to take risks to create it, Japan is as reluctant as ever: the Japan Times reports that James Shinn, incoming deputy under secretary of defense for Asia and Pacific security affairs, has had his request for a JSDF dispatch to Afghanistan rebuffed by LDP legislator Yamasaki Taku.

Despite the rhetorical commitment to Japan's becoming a significant global actor willing to put boots on the ground, Tokyo's focus remains unremittingly local, obsessed with developments in its potentially dangerous backyard (the need to guarantee US support regarding North Korea being the implicit reason for Japanese contributions in Iraq — guess Christopher Hill never got that memo). Japan is arguably more concerned with its own region than ever before, but local threats have still not been enough to solidify a new security policy consensus.

And yet even as it looks at a more uncertain regional environment — check out a good discussion of this at Coming Anarchy — constraints on Japan developing a new organizing principle for its security policy remain, at least more constraints than meet the eye. Beyond the obvious constraints of the CLB's prevailing interpretation of Article 9, the three arms export principles, the three non-nuclear principles, popular sentiment that has shown no desire or willingness to support JSDF activities abroad that might involve the use of force and the loss of life, and a defense budget that has shrunk over the past decade, the balance of forces between revisionists and defenders of the status quo may not be as lopsided as it seems.

Of course, as I wrote previously, the revisionists are ascendant within the LDP. Whereas in the past revisionists like Kishi and Nakasone were able to rise to the presidency of the party, once they got there they were reined in by the LDP mainstream's defenders of the prevailing Yoshida consensus. Beyond that, for most of the 1955 system's existence the LDP had been commanded by mainstream politicians, who worked to implement constraints consistent with the Yoshida Doctrine. But now, after Hashimoto, Koizumi and Abe, the revisionists are the mainstream, defenders of the status quo the anti-mainstream. (Incidentally, Asahi's coverage of the death of former Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi was redolent with longing for the days when the reverse was true.) At the same time that the LDP's revisionists became dominant, however, the party became dependent on coalition partners — most recently the conservative pacifist party New Komeito. The role once played by Yoshida conservatives is now played by Komeito.

Such is the argument of Jun Okumura in an article at National Interest Online.

For the moment, I think Okumura is right to point to Komeito's role in serving as a brake on the revisionists' ambitions — in part because Komeito has not yet been asked to choose between power and principle. But what happens when the government completes its study for a reinterpretation of Japan's ability to exercise its right of collective self-defense? (The study group has already concluded that it would be permissible for Japan to shoot down a missile that appeared to be headed for the US.) Will Komeito go so far as to pull out of the government to protest any changes, or will it follow meekly along?

Meanwhile, although obstacles to institutional change remain, there is nothing stopping Japanese policymakers, politicians, and intellectuals from debating the fundamental questions of Japan's global role. While debates over the overarching goal of Japanese security policy — national security strictly defined as territorial defense versus a more active role in shaping the regional security environment versus acting as a global civilian power versus becoming the Britain of East Asia (or some combination of all of the above) — and the means by which to achieve this goal have raged for more than a decade, Japan remains saddled with a security policy regime suited for a different age. But that set of policies cannot be abandoned until Japan figures out the new end of its security policy — change for the sake of change is a waste of time and energy. (And Japan's policy making process is still in need of reform to ensure that whatever consensus Japan reaches is executable.)

In fact, Koizumi's "hug the US close" approach, largely embraced by Abe, is more indicative of the absence of a new security policy organizing principle than of the existence of a new organizing principle. Cooperation to what end? With what means? With what division of labor? The allies are not much closer to answering these fundamental questions than they were in the immediate aftermath of the cold war, because until Japan knows what role it wants to play, these basic questions are unanswerable — and Japan has provided mere intimations of its strategic intentions.