World War III Public Service Announcements

 A lot of matches are flying around the Chinese tinderbox.  

Fortunately, most parties involved seem more interested in scoring political points than making a genuine and risky effort to push back China.


However, as the example of Sarajevo tells us, sometimes wars happen when nations become prisoners of their own posturing.  

So it's worthwhile to take a careful and critical look at what's happening in China's backyard with U.S. allies Japan and South Korea and wannabe regional partner Vietnam, and the political circus surrounding valuation of the RMB.

1.  Let Japan Teach Us How to Start a Pacific War

I have two articles up at Asia Times in recent days.

One covers the waterfront, as it were, concerning tensions in the China and South China Seas.

Simply put, the tension in the seas surrounding China is not caused by Chinese aggressiveness; it is the logical outcome of the Obama administration's return-to-Asia strategy.  South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are emboldened to stand up to China because the United States stands behind them.  Kind of.

Most recent case in point:  the flare-up over Captain Zhan, the Chinese fishing trawler captain arrested by the Japanese for colliding with two Japanese coast guard vessels.

As my article at Asia Times points out, the hard line on the issue of Captain Zhan was pushed by Seiji Maehara, current Japanese Foreign Minister and one of the most energetic advocates of the U.S.-Japan special relationship within the DPJ.

Nevertheless, China was blamed for escalating the crisis.

An amusing sideline to the whole issue was Maehara's unsuccessful efforts to inveigle the U.S. into supporting his stand on Captain Zhan, even after Prime Minister Kan was apparently eager, nay anxious, to put the matter behind him.

Japanese and U.S. willingness to tug the dragon's whiskers is even more overt in the South China Sea, where Secretary of State Clinton and Maehara's predecessor as FM, Katsuya Okada, rather irresponsibly injected themselves in the local disputes in order to curry favor with Vietnam which, I must admit, looks like it got jobbed when the PRC seized the Paracels from a South Vietnamese garrison in 1974. 

The South China Sea is a fruit salad of flags, conflicting claims, and interested countries waving three-hundred year old historical records to advance their arguments.  As long as the principle of free transit continues to be adhered to by all parties, muddling through looks to be the best solution; promoting an adversarial multilateral process simply won't work, IMHO.

The generally godawful Western reporting on the subject demonstrates that foreign affairs correspondents of the access-journalism persuasion did not have their gullibility circuits blown by their performance in the runup to the Iraq war.  Japanese reporting on Maehara's contortions, in particular, seemed to elevate wishful thinking to an editorial policy.

The whole story can be found at Asia Times.  It seems the headline writers at AT made a slight slip, entitling the story Japan poured oil on troubled waters. It looks like Japan is doing quite the opposite.

2.  If We Can't Have a Real War, How About a Trade War

Japan also figures in the second story, which concerns U.S. handwringing over the Chinese trade surplus and the undervalued RMB.

The main justification for compelling a revaluation is the precedent of the 1985 Plaza Accord, by which the United States strongarmed Japan into an enormous revaluation of the yen, from somewhere around 250 to 120 yen to the dollar.

Paul Krugman of Princeton University argues vociferously that a punitive tariff will strengthen the yuan de facto and rebalance the trade books whether China likes it or not.

Ronald MacKinnon of Stanford University (the "Princeton of the West" as they say in Palo Alto) says that's an illusion.

My personal feeling is that in economics, as William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, "Nobody Knows Anything".

I think there is nostalgia for the Plaza Accord simply because we had enough muscle to twist Japan's arm until it cried Uncle! 

More nationalist empowerment than economic logic, that is to say.

But the Plaza Accord didn't solve America's trade deficit problem, and it totally screwed up Japan's economy.

In addition to the dismal example of the Plaza Accord, the PRC has compelling contemporary reasons not to revalue the RMB per U.S. demands. 

Two reasons, actually:  the flow of hot money that a stated revaluation policy would attract, and the dangerous effect of hot money on China's real estate bubble--a bubble that is financing anywhere from a third to half of local government spending inside China.

If the reader desires a comprehensive overview of the politics of currency revaluation--and the dismal role of the dismal science in the debate over the Chinese trade surplus--I document the atrocities at China plays by its own currency rules.


3.  Let's Turn North Korea Into Iraq.  It's the Only Place Where One Might Call That an Improvement

Finally, Korea.

Because of space and topic limitations in my AT pieces, I didn't address South Korea, the third leg of the rather rubbery tripod of U.S. allies seeking to make political and geostrategic hay from the U.S. "return to Asia".

However, a while back the Korea Times yielded a news report so magnificent that I believe it deserves special commemoration.

The backstory is that the Lee Myung-bak government of South Korea and the Obama adminstration decided to move away from the Six Party Talks, which gave considerable prestige to China but yielded negligible progress.

The alternative was apparently a policy of malign neglect, ignoring the DPRK (and China) and betting that the ROK and USA could sweep in to pick up the pieces when the Kim Jung Il regime finally fell on its ass for good.

The orchestrated reaction to the Cheonan sinking, demanding further isolation and destabilizing sanctions against the Pyongyang regime through the UN Security Council, western governments, and Japan, seems part of this policy.

And China assumed the role of the heavy, questioning both the conclusions of the Cheonan investigation (neither China nor Russia, the two nations with the best foreign understanding of North Korea's military capabilities, were invited to join the investigation) and the way the U.S. and ROK pursued the issue through the UN and outside the Six Party Talks framework.

I assume James Steinberg of the National Security Council and Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, are the American Richelieus who have conceived and executed this rather subtle policy, which has China writhing rather angrily on a cleft stick nowadays.

But whatever clever policy civilians formulate, the military can screw up with ham-fisted obviousness.

Courtesy of Korea Times: 

South Korea and the United States have executed “realistic” training exercises to respond to various types of internal instability in North Korea, the top U.S. military general said Thursday.

Such drills were held during the latest Ulchi Freedom Guardian computerized simulation exercise from Aug. 16 to 26, said Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK).

…

[W]e take lessons learned out of Iraq and Afghanistan that we think apply here in the ROK and exercise those also,” he said. “So one of the things that we have learned out of Iraq and Afghanistan is that you can be fighting and attacking at one area and defending at another area.”

The main mission is to stabilize and protect the population in the area, he said, adding both militaries are designing such exercises to ensure that they “are able to not only to defend, not only able to attack and kill, but also able to provide humanitarian assistance” to help ensure security and stability for everyone in the region.

Sharp said North Korea stabilization operations are to be conducted by both governments.

It is noteworthy that the U.S. military believes there are successful lessons from our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan that can be applied to invading and occupying North Korea.

Hey, it's not just attacking and killing!

Well, it's still mostly attacking and killing.

If General Sharp had more time, I'm sure he could have mentioned some other features of American COIN policy, such as: encouraging sectarian and ethnic division to assist pacification and security; rampant corruption; death squads; extensive use of brutal and unregulated mercenaries; and the creation of a weak, divided government unable to provide security and dependent on American good offices and continued U.S. military support.

I'll bet it's all in the latest version of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian video game: Tender Claws of Freedom!

It's Official: America Has a China-Containment Policy

Official, as far as one can get based on a carefully briefed backgrounder U.S. Tomahawk Missiles Deployed Near China Send Message to Time magazine's Mark Thompson, that is.

If China's satellites and spies were working properly, there would have been a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese navy last week. A new class of U.S. superweapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine...[which holds] up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles...capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads.


...alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing on June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-ft. U.S.S. Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay. More alarms were likely sounded when the U.S.S. Michigan  arrived in Pusan, South Korea, on the same day. And the Klaxons would have maxed out as the U.S.S. Florida surfaced, also on the same day, at the joint U.S.-British naval base on Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. In all, the Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 new Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood.

With all due respect to Mr. Thompson's skills in tracking and interpreting the movements of America's nuclear submarine fleet, I would imagine he may have needed a heads-up from sources in the U.S. government, especially in the matter of keeping a bead on the location of the Florida and defining its appearance at Diego Garcia as a message to China. 

It seems that the Florida has, as "America's first forward-deployed guided missile sub from the Atlantic fleet"  been calling at Diego Garcia and swapping crews for a couple years.  Also, Diego Garcia ("flyspeck" a.ka. supersecret military base created by secretly leasing the island and deporting all its inhabitants)  is closer to hot spots Somalia, Iran, and Afghanistan than it is to China.

Anyway.  Message received.

The move forms part of a policy by the U.S. government to shift firepower from the Atlantic to the Pacific theater, which Washington sees as the military focus of the 21st century.
...

The submarines aren't the only new potential issue of concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the U.S. and its allies in the region are now under way. More than three dozen naval ships and subs began participating in the "Rim of the Pacific" war games off Hawaii on Wednesday. Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations are involved in the biennial exercise, which includes missile drills and the sinking of three abandoned vessels playing the role of enemy ships. Nations joining the U.S. in what is billed as the world's largest-ever naval war game are Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Singapore and Thailand. Closer to China, CARAT 2010 - for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training - just got under way off Singapore. The operation involves 17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S., Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

...

China is absent from both exercises, and that's no oversight. Many nations in the eastern Pacific, including Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, have been encouraging the U.S. to push back against what they see as China's increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. And the U.S. military remains concerned over China's growing missile force - now more than 1,000 - near the Taiwan Strait. The Tomahawks' arrival "is part of a larger effort to bolster our capabilities in the region," Glaser says. "It sends a signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the region that many countries there want us to be." No doubt Beijing got the signal.

If, after all that, anybody believes that the joint US-ROK exercises in the Yellow Sea are primarily a response to the Cheonan sinking or, for that matter, part of an effort to deter the apparently undeterrable North Koreans, well, I have in my possession a stately edifice spanning the swelling bosom of the East River to link the County of Kings to the Island of the Manhattoes, available for purchase exclusively by such trusting souls.

The South Koreans get it, and Chosun Ilbo weighed in with an uncharacteristically cautious editorial on July 6:

These developments are showing signs of creating a Cold War atmosphere where South Korea, the U.S. and Japan face off against China and North Korea.

The U.S.-South Korea alliance forms the cornerstone of the South's national security and diplomacy. But China is South Korea's largest trading partner, and it also has a huge influence on peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula. The time has come for Seoul to factor into its diplomacy and security policies both China and its intensifying competition with the U.S.

The code word for "containment" in the Asian press, by the way, is "Cold War atmosphere".

The message that the Time article was meant to send was that the U.S. Navy are now devoted to defining, countering, and to some extent creating a Chinese threat in the Pacific in order to preserve the scale of its forces and protect its budget. 

The Chinese government, given the concerted efforts by the Obama adminstration to rollback China's influence throughout the world diplomatically and economically as well as militarily, will undoubtedly draw more sweeping conclusions.

I would take issue with two statements in Williams' article.

First, especially but not exclusively on the issue of the Korean peninsula, the U.S. is there as an unbalancer, not a "balancer" as Bonnie Glaser put it. 

The tilt away from the Six Party Talks structure including China to a strengthened ROK-USA security condominium is a signal that a Western response to instability on the peninsula, be it from "provocations" or the demise of Kim Jung Il, will not include China as an equal partner.

The U.S. media has largely ignored the vitriolic response in the Chinese press to America's military moves, but the Chinese clearly see that the pendulum has swung away from stability--with the U.S. presence precluding a rush to rearmament by Japan---to containment.

Containment, to China, implies that the U.S. will continue to fan fears of China's military ambitions to encourage the rise of India and the the creation of pro-American governments and policies throughout Asia and turn a blind eye or, even worse, extend an enabling hand to Asian states that develop adventurist ambitions in challenging China on the issue of the uninhabited but contested islands that dot the region.

I guess we'll find out if the Obama administration has a long-term plan sees an upside in a near-open breach of relations with China beyond giving the opportunity for the U.S. to play to its military strength in Asia and cooperate with local political leaders like South Korea's Lee Myung-bak, who want to use Washington as a counterweight to Beijing. 

My guess is that containment is pretty much a default strategy since the United States has not found a way to incorporate China as an effective partner in the U.S.-conceived international order, and the attractions of beating up on an undemocratic, opaque, and somewhat threatening--but not too dangerous--regime were too strong to resist.

I think Mr. Steinberg of the NSC et. al. decided that China was an easy mark because of its dependence on peace, global prosperity, and access to markets to advance its economics-based strategy of national development.

Also, I expect the fact that the Chinese military is a paper tiger figured into U.S. calculations.

The PLA has not fought a war since the border conflict with Vietnam in 1979.  It didn't do particularly well then, and the current generation of officers has never been "blooded" (experienced the routine chaos and catastrophe of actual battle) and is unlikely to seek out on-the-job training by engaging the world's biggest and most experienced military in a genuine conflict.

But I wonder if going zero-sum with China in Asia is really where we want to be.

I'd say that Chinese distrust of the Obama administration is now terminal, its anxiety palpable, and its determination to come up with effective countermeasures implacable.  I expect they'll come up with something interesting and, perhaps, unexpected.

Second, Mark, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, are in the western Pacific, not the "eastern".  That grinding sound you hear is Henry Luce churning unhappily in his grave.

Setting Sun: Shinzo Abe and the Diverging U.S.-Japan Relationship

One element that continues to amaze is how cavalierly the United States threw Shinzo Abe under the bus while negotiating the North Korea agreement.

The abductee issue—which Abe had ridden to power and which forms the core of his image as Japan’s new generation assertive foreign policy hard case—was dismissively pushed off to the working groups.

While President Bush poured praise on the Chinese for facilitating the deal, Japan was left as the odd man out, refusing to join the energy aid program.

And it’s not as if Abe extracted any political capital by packaging this embarrassing outcome as a piece of principled intransigence.

Unwilling to denounce the deal, he meekly asserted that, despite its absence from the North Korean consensus, Japan was “not isolated”.

As reported in the New York Times:

Critics said Tokyo’s narrow focus on [the abductee] issue, seemingly at the expense of regional stability, would leave it isolated.
...
“We must not be isolated and we are not in fact isolated,” Mr. Abe said in Parliament. “Other countries understood our decision not to provide oil unless progress is made in the abduction issue.”(Norimitsu Onishi, South Korea and Japan Split on North Korea Pact, New York Times, Feb. 15, 2007)

Despite Prime Minister Abe’s protestations, all is not rosy.

Bloomberg reported:

Opposition politicians said Japan was ``out of the loop'' because the agreement failed to address the issue most important to the Japanese public: North Korea's kidnapping of Japanese citizens three decades ago.
...
The agreement signed in Beijing yesterday ``limits Japan's options regarding the abduction issue,'' said C. Kenneth Quinones, former U.S. State Department director of North Korea affairs and a professor at Akita International University in Japan. Abe ``has virtually no leverage with either Pyongyang or other six-party talk participants.''

Now, Abe—whose government was making noises last summer about pre-emptive strikes on North Korean missile facilities in the great American tradition—doesn’t look like our sheriff in North Asia. He looks like Barney Fife.



In a February 15th article entitled With U.S. shift, Abe’s N. Korea Containment Strategy Falls Apart, Asahi drove another nail in the coffin:

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's containment policy for North Korea--a stance that helped him vault to power--is quickly crumbling.

The agreement reached Tuesday at the six-party talks in Beijing, in which North Korea would freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid, shows that Washington has softened its stance toward Pyongyang.

That is bad news for Abe.

The prime minister continues to assert that Japan will not provide energy assistance to North Korea until the issue of Pyongyang's abductions of Japanese citizens is resolved.

But Abe's words now carry less weight compared to last year, when Japan and the United States were closely consulting on containing North Korea following its missile launches and nuclear test.

"While I would not say Japan has had the ladder taken out from under it, there is no denying that there has been a change in the tide," a senior official in the Cabinet Secretariat said.


An important multi-part article in Yomiuri has explored the rapidly growing divergence between Japan and the United States, as exemplified by the negotiations with North Korea.

According to the report, it all started with the cataclysm of the U.S. mid-term elections, which forced the Bush administration to turn away from the confrontational policies of the neo-cons to a dovish negotiated track led by the State Department:

According to sources in Washington, shortly after North Korea conducted a nuclear test, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, presidential aide Stephen Hadley and other top government officials held a secret meeting with U.S. experts on North Korea and China on Oct. 25. During the meeting, they did not discuss possible diplomatic solutions to the nuclear crisis, but rather confrontation strategies, including a scenario of toppling the Kim Jong Il regime with China's involvement and cost estimates for military options, the sources said.

However, the Bush administration found itself in a changed environment after the Republican Party suffered a major defeat in midterm elections on Nov. 7.

Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph, as well as Bolton, who was the U.N. ambassador at the time, resigned or were replaced, prompting a drastic review of the Bush administration's diplomatic and security policies.

The U.S. policy on North Korea, which resulted in stalled talks on nuclear disarmament and eventually allowed the country to carry out a nuclear test, was forced to make a major shift from confrontation to dialogue.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator at the six-party talks, has been backed by dovish officials in the administration, mainly those at the State Department.

In a key parting of the ways the U.S. decided to identify non-proliferation—rather than denuclearization—as the focus of the North Korea negotiations.

Differences have become apparent between Japan and the United States over policies toward North Korea since the country's nuclear test on Oct. 9.

In early November, U.S. officials, including Robert Joseph, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, visited Japan.

The very first thing they said was they would seriously address nuclear nonproliferation.

"We were quite disappointed because the Japanese side was planning to discuss how to apply pressure on North Korea toward the country's abandonment of its nuclear programs," a source at the Prime Minister's Office said.

The suddenness of the switch, the obvious flaws in the deal, and the violence it did to the interests of our key ally in the region support my contention that the conciliatory posture of the Bush administration at the North Korean talks was a strategic fire sale: a matter of short-term tactical urgency driven by the mid-term electoral disaster.

Meant to buy the Bush administration time and diplomatic credibility, it resulted in a hastily concluded deal that will either fall apart because of its own flaws or be discarded once the Bush administration feels that its diplomatic options and freedom of action as a unilateral superpower have been restored.

What is most striking is how casually Japanese prestige and interests were sacrificed, at a time when Prime Minister Abe could least afford it.

At this juncture, facing an important July by-election that may determine whether or not he has the political clout needed to effectively rule the LDP and run Japan, the last thing Abe needed was to look superfluous and out of the loop.

An appearance of callowness, a string of scandals, and verbal gaffes by cabinet ministers who Abe is apparently unable to control or openly rebuke have combined to erode his popularity from 70% after his selection as Prime Minister, to the 40s today.

And instead of dancing a minutely choreographed minuet of bad cop and badder cop with the United States in dealings with North Korea and over Taiwan, Japan finds itself like a bum dancing without music as the U.S. strides off in search of a more useful partner--China.

A visit to Japan by Vice President Richard Cheney, keeper of the neo-conservative flame, would normally be expected to result in affirmation of the creed of confrontation not compromise regardless of the political winds blowing in Washington.

But the meetings will be shadowed by the remarks of Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, who had the temerity to criticize the Iraq was as “a mistake”.

Kyuma is an odd choice as Japan’s first Defense Minister. Born in Nagasaki and considered something of a dove, he is obviously ambivalent about the ABM project that is meant to turn Japan into the front line of defense against North Korean missiles:

The government wants to permit the defense forces to shoot down any North Korean missile headed for the U.S. Kyuma demurs, citing the constitutional prohibition against "collective defense" and technical reasons.

Hmmm.

As a result of the Iraq gaffe, Vice President Cheney refused to meet with Kyuma during his visit, effectively painting a bull’s eye on the Defense Minister’s back and begging the question, Why hasn’t Abe fired this guy? or in bureaucratic-speak, Why hasn’t Kyuma accepted responsibility for damaging relations with the United States and tendered his resignation?

Apparently, removing Kyuma from the Cabinet entails a political cost that Abe is unwilling to bear.

Is it because of Kyuma’s loyal service in promoting Koizumi’s agenda and Abe’s elevation to prime minister? The importance of his faction? The weakness of Abe’s administration, which can ill-afford another embarrassing resignation?

Or is there enough ambivalence in Japan concerning the security relationship between the U.S. and Japan that Kyuma’s remarks resonate with the Japanese public and would make his removal another indictment of Abe’s fecklessness in dealing with the United States?

In addition to the divergence on the Iraq and North Korea issues, the United States has shown itself to be less than enthusiastic in backing Japan’s campaign for a permanent Security Council seat.

Another major source of friction in the alliance is Okinawa. Chalmers Johnson describes the massive U.S. infrastructure—which is used for force projection in the region and not for Japanese defense—as follows: “thirty-eight [bases] are located in Okinawa, where they occupy some 23,700 hectares or 19 percent of the choicest territory of the main island. Okinawa is host to some 28,000 American troops plus an equal number of camp followers and Defense Department civilians”.

The Koizumi government cut a deal with the United States for a realignment plan that would send 8,000 Marines to Guam, and relocate an airfield, but leave the massive military footprint on the island group largely unchanged.

Despite efforts to depict Okinawa as a land of U.S.-Japanese amity, the bases are no bonanza for the prefecture, whose unemployment rate is twice the national average. Crime, crowding, crashes, and noise issues are continual sources of resentment. In 2006, local approval of the central government’s plans for the bases polled at 14%. The only thing that separates the various political figures in the prefecture on the issue of the U.S. bases is the relative degree of their disapproval.

Relocation of Marine air operations from an urban base in Ginowan to a new field to be built at Nago in northern Okinawa was agreed in 1996 and scheduled to be completed within 5 to 7 years, but the Okinawans have unenthusiastically dragged their feet on the issue and nothing has happened, to the undisguised anger of the U.S Department of Defense. Eric Johnston of the Japan Times provides an excellent overview of the contentious and miserable process.

When Tokyo’s chosen candidate for governor of Okinawa, Nakaima Hirokazu, won his election on November 19, 2006, the project was finally supposed to get on track. But Hirokazu immediately came down with a case of cold feet, announcing he wanted the Ginowan base closed within three years—long before any replacement base would be available at Nago. Kyuma, instead of trying to shove the deal down his throat as the central government was expected to do by Washington, criticized the Americans for being “bossy”.

In a sign that disappointment and suspicion are flowering into paranoia, the Japanese press aired a rumor that the United States dealyed the deployment of twelve F-22A Raptors—the state-of-the-art warbird that Abe hopes will serve as the symbol of U.S.-Japan military cooperation—into Okinawa in response to North Korean pressure.

In these unpromising circumstances, the Diet will begin debating legislation, sure to be unpopular, that would obligate Japan to pay up to $6 billion on relocation costs for the 8,000 U.S. troops who are to move from Okinawa to Guam as part of the realignment.

If that wasn’t enough, Japan was forced to back out of a key Iranian energy project, Azadegan—which by itself was expected to account for 6% of Japan’s total oil imports-- out of loyalty to the Bush administration’s policy of intransigence and no economic ties with the Tehran regime.

The loss of this project was followed by the dismaying news that a major Exxon Mobil gas project on Sakhalin had signed a preliminary agreement to sell its output to China instead of Japan. At the same time Russia began threatening a restructuring of another Royal Dutch Shell natural gas project in Sakhalin that was supposed to be a joint venture with Mitsubishi and Mitsui Trading.

In another looming problem, the aggressive U.S. push on sanctions against Iran that Tokyo is loyally supporting, if implemented, would endanger Japan’s access to Iranian oil, which currently accounts for over 10% of its imports.

The Japanese are supposed to be compensated with preferential access to Iraq opportunities but—in an ironic development considering that the Iraq war was intended to exclude competing powers and turn Iraq’s oilfields into a bonanza for the West—another energy-hungry power is muscling in:

Japan is clearly interested in increasing its profile in Iraq's energy sector, but the main obstacle to ramping up investment remains the endemic violence that persists in that country. Despite Tokyo’s calls for domestic firms to pump more money into overseas oil and gas projects, investment in Iraq will be difficult as violence is unlikely to cease anytime soon.

Japanese officials and analysts also worry that countries such as China might have an edge over Japan in gaining access to Iraq's energy resources, since it has more experience operating in inhospitable environments such as Sudan and Angola.

In fact, the new Iraqi government has courted Beijing because Chinese producers have been willing to invest in countries that are considered dangerous or politically isolated. Beijing had previously been thought to be out of the running for major contracts in postwar Iraq, with the best deals going to the U.S. and its allies. But the upsurge in violence there has made the country less attractive to Western producers.


Perhaps as a result of these revelations of the downside of acting as America’s sheriff in North Asia, support for Abe’s signature initiative—revision of the pacifist constitution to permit Japan to participate in hairy-chested overseas military adventures with its freedom and democracy loving brethren in the West—has evaporated.

According to Bloomberg on February 13:

Shinzo Abe's aim of revising Japan's pacifist constitution to allow the nation to assert itself militarily for the first time in 62 years may be petering out, a casualty of the prime minister's falling popularity.

``He's set himself up for failure,'' said Gerald Curtis, author of ``The Japanese Way of Politics'' and a professor of political science at New York's Columbia University. ``There's no enthusiasm for constitutional revision from society as a whole. For it to happen he has to be pretty popular, and he's not.''


An op-ed published in the Daily Yomiuru on Feb. 17 by Weston Konishi of the Mansfield Center stated:

[A]ccording to a Cabinet Office poll conducted last October, only 25 percent of Japanese respondents want their country to take a more active role in peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance and other "contributions to international society." Sixty-five percent of those polled believe Japan's contributions should either be kept at the current level or held at a "minimal level."

What about public support for a "proactive diplomacy" promoting fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law (principles that were also invoked recently by Foreign Minister Taro Aso in his call for Japan to lead an "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" among like-minded nations)? According to the same Cabinet Office poll, just 20 percent of Japanese believe that protecting universal values such as freedom, democracy and human rights should be a role for Japan in the international arena.

The prime minister's claim that "Japanese will no longer shy away" from enhanced international security responsibilities rings hollow considering statistics like these. Indeed, the very items that Abe now promises to the international community--readily deploying SDF missions abroad; actively promoting universal values; and championing the creation of "arcs," "spheres" or other geopolitical formations--are ideas that the Japanese public has not yet signed onto.

Without question, the U.S.-Japan alliance will survive America’s betrayal at the negotiating table in Beijing.

But Shinzo Abe may not.

And the hope that Tokyo and Washington would find an identity of interests that would create an impregnable united front against North Korea, China, and Russia in Northeast Asia is dead, a victim of fundamentally diverging interests and ruthless political opportunism by the Bush administration.