When You’ve Got a Military Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, US-China Edition

Both the United States and the PRC are displaying a disturbing predisposition toward militarizing their national security strategies.  It is understandable.  An external military threat is easier to sell and explain than a complex national challenge of economic, social, and political competitiveness, and there is a large and influential coterie of officers, natsec types, and defense contractors that welcomes a military framing.

But the devil is in the details—the actual implementation of a successful policy—something that both the US and the PRC are, one can only hope, considering.

But the publicly available data is not encouraging.

I have a piece up in the current print edition of CounterPunch on the Chinese military (you can subscribe here, or purchase a PDF of the issue).

It describes the primary dynamic of the PRC’s maritime strategy: designing its program of regional assertiveness/encroachments in a way that prevents militarization of frictions and, in particular, avoids direct military confrontation with the United States.

On the one hand, the PRC throws its weight around with oil rigs, maritime surveillance vessels, and coast guard ships; on the other hand, the PLA Navy is a virtually invisible player when it comes to PRC moves in the East and South China Seas.

At the same time, the PRC conducts a discrete bromance with the US Navy. 

Recently, the PRC participated in a US-organized naval get-together, RIMPAC, in Hawaii, and made the seemingly provocative decision to send a spy ship to shadow the exercise within the US Exclusive Economic Zone.  Not a provocation, I opined, but a concession.

Previously, the PRC argued that military surveillance within its EEZ by US Navy vessels such as the USS Impeccable was illegal and, in 2009, made a point of harassing the Impeccable as it sailed back and forth inside the PRC EEZ off Hainan Island. 

This gambit backfired spectacularly as Hillary Clinton used it as the justification for declaring the US interest in “freedom of navigation” at the ASEAN meeting in 2010, and a fulcrum upon which to hang the US pivot to Asia.

Since then, the PRC has for the most part backpedaled in order to provide no pretext for the US to accuse it of impeding freedom of navigation of US military vessels, and thereby remove "freedom of navigation" from the State Department's menu of actionable PRC transgressions in the South China Sea.

At the same time, the US Navy argued that a close reading of the Law of the Sea treaty (the US hasn’t signed it but the US Navy uses it as a guide for its multifarious activities in other peoples’ EEZs and territorial waters) did not preclude passage of US military vessels within the Chinese EEZ even if their activities were detrimental to the PRC’s security.

To strengthen its case, the US Navy also went the extra mile of confirming that it was actually tracking PLAN submarines and not just mapping the ocean floor, an activity that could be construed as having dual military/economic significance and therefore falling within UNCLOS jurisdiction.

So, I concluded, when the PRC sent a spy ship to RIMPAC inside the US EEZ it was tacitly acknowledging the US Navy's interpretation.  And, given the PRC’s current unwillingness to aggravate the US military unnecessarily, that interpretation makes pretty good sense.

Admiral Locklear, while less than thrilled about the presence of the spy ship, agrees:

“The good news about this is it’s a recognition, I think, or acceptance by the Chinese that what we’ve been saying to them for some time is that military operations and survey operations in another country’s [maritime zones] are within international law and are acceptable, and this is a fundamental right that nations have,” Adm. Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

So far so good.

However, diplomats and security brainiacs in the US, Japan, Philippines, and, potentially, Vietnam, are trying to find ways to counter Chinese non-military tactics by finding ways to redefine situations in military terms so that the overwhelming US military superiority (and its availability to Japan and the Philippines as treaty allies) can be brought to bear against the PRC.

The term of art for this repackaging is “grey zone conflicts”.  This formulation has become a standard feature of Japanese defense planning; as US frustration with PRC non-military moves in the South China Sea has grown, it has also crept into discussions of what the United States can do to up its game on behalf of the Philippines and, potentially, Vietnam.

In the Japanese context, the scenarios involve deploying military force to deal with an ostensibly non-military PRC seizure of the Senkakus, or forcing a worrisome PLAN submarine to surface near Japan.  In the South China Sea, the scenarios haven’t been fleshed out in the public sphere, but I suspect they involve things like interposing US Navy vessels between Philippine fishing vessels or oil exploration vessels and PRC ships at points of contention like Scarborough Shoal or Reed Bank.

I am pretty skeptical of the idea that PRC non-military moves should be countered with a military response and I have a certain suspicion that some within the US uniformed defense establishment feel the same way.   Japanese military boffins and the Pentagon are continually hashing over “gray zone” definitions and rules of engagement and, in my opinion, the Japanese government has been leveraging its willingness to support a US priority—Japanese “collective self defense”—in order to obtain US support in “gray zone” scenarios.

Also as a matter of personal opinion, I must say that I consider the US push for “collective self defense” a strategic boondoggle even more flawed than the “pivot to Asia”, which is really saying something.

I find the US obsession with “CSD”—the idea that Japanese military forces must engage in war stuff not directly related to defense of the Japanese homeland—somewhat mystifying.  Apparently, Pentagon planners are getting extremely nervous about the arms buildup in Asia—which tracks GDP growth and, therefore, is getting pretty darn big—and its implications for US military hegemony. 

The idea is to combine US and Japanese muscle and field a bigger, more deterrent-credible force (in fact, I wonder if AirSea Battle—the total war with the PRC from the Malacca Straits up to Hokkaido scenario—was cooked up simply to demonstrate the impossibility of the US funding and implementing a completely dominant force in Asia by itself).

Japan is supposed to contribute its local strengths in minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, and aerial surveillance, at least in the initial stage.

I guess the idea was “Japan can’t be a freerider anymore and needs to have some skin in the Asia-Pacific security game”.

Well, as far as I can tell, Japan under so-called “pacifist” constitution already had plenty of skin in the game—because it seems most credible US-PRC WWIII scenarios all involve US bases on Honshu and, in particular, long-suffering Okinawa, getting nuked.

That’s an agency problem—people on the same team but bringing divergent objectives--a problem the US avoided when it ran the military show unilaterally.  Now, by trying to integrate Japanese forces into the US command, we’re giving an operational voice to people who face an immediate threat of getting blown up during the implementation of our grand strategy.  Collective self-defense, to my mind, complicates and compromises the US deterrent posture.

In my opinion, if we feel we need to field more minesweepers and ASW and Orions to deter the Chicom menace, we should pay for them ourselves instead of hoping for a perfect understanding with our Japanese allies if and when World War III rolls around.

The agency problem has already revealed itself with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to re-establish Japan as a “normal” nation i.e. not constrained by the pacifist constitution imposed by the US after Japan’s defeat in World War II and able to necessary/useful/useless/and/or catastrophically stupid things in the realm of security affairs, just like any other regional power.

CSD—since it permitted the Japanese military to abandon a pure territorial-defense posture—was embraced by the Abe administration.

The Abe administration swung behind CSD and sold it—rather unsuccessfully, I should say, to an extremely skeptical Japanese public—with fanciful justifications like “without CSD Japan couldn’t shoot down a North Korean ballistic missile headed for the United States”.

 

Actually, the genuine attraction of CSD is that it allows Japan to pursue military relationships with neighboring countries i.e. implement a full-feature foreign policy including defense and security elements as well as the economic and other soft power carrots that sustained Japan’s regional presence over the last half-century.

And these foreign policy tools also allow Prime Minister Abe to pursue his preferred regional strategy—exacerbating tensions with the PRC just enough to push the Pacific democracies plus Vietnam away from the PRC and onto the Japanese security and, most importantly, economic side of a zero-sum equation.

Abe, it should be noted, is no America-firster. Like many Japanese conservatives, he rejects the World War II victor’s narrative and, like Putin, considers his nation’s diminished international clout as a tragedy and not a matter of geopolitical justice.  In his US preferences, Abe is politically and emotionally inclined toward the Dick Cheney end of the ideological spectrum and does not consider it his main obligation and mission to smooth the way for Barack Obama in Asia.  He’s looking out for Number 1—Japan—and caters to—and exploits—US preoccupations accordingly.

For those who pay attention, the CSD shoe dropped in July, as Japan’s ambassador to the Philippines addressed the significance of the cabinet decision that “reinterpreted” the constitution to allow CSD:

Japan’s ambassador to the Philippines, Toshinao Urabe, says the proposed “reinterpretation” of Japan's pacifist constitution would allow it to help if a country it has a “close relationship” with is attacked.

This means it would help defend the U.S., which is its only mutual defense treaty ally.  Urabe said under the treaty, Japan is not obligated to use force in helping.  The reinterpretation would enable it to do so.

But Urabe told reporters at a forum in Manila Thursday that in the case of other countries like the Philippines, which he said Japan also has a close relationship with, it would “depend on the situation.”  He said Japan is most concerned with protecting its nationals if they are in vulnerable security situations.

“But basically this is a policy to defend ourselves in various situations which were not conceived before.  And I think it’s important to make necessary preparation to various security situations,” Urabe stated.

…

Richard Heydarian is a Manila-based Asia geopolitical analyst.  He said the proposal is widely seen as a way to keep China in check.  “On one hand this will make it easier for Mr. Abe to have much more robust countermeasures against China’s territorial provocations in the Senkaku-Diaoyu,” he explained.

Heydarian said it is also a way for Japan to gain a foothold as a major security player in the region.  He points out that Japan is bolstering its image as a security counterbalance to China that the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can depend on.

There you have it.  Instead of a unitary hub and spoke arrangement by which the United States, as the big kahuna, manages its ROK, Japan, and Philippines alliances bilaterally and monopolizes the Asian security space, CSD lays the foundation for a dual-hub system by which Japan constructs its own security arrangements with the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, and India in order to advance its own diplomatic, security, and economic agenda in Asia…which may involve working with Japan’s local interlocutors to accentuate the polarity between the PRC and its neighbors even when the United States for reasons of its own might be trying to wind down tensions.

CSD, in other words, accelerates the marginalization of the United States, rather than assuring its ascendancy.  So, I don’t think the US foreign policy establishment should be slapping itself on the back for its great job in finally getting CSD on the books.

By the Peter Lee Law of Foreign Policy Verbiage—the amount of government and think tank output is directly proportionate to the bankruptcy of the policy it is meant to explain, justify, defend, repair, and/or obfuscate—I expect CSD to generate thousands upon thousands of pages of analysis and recommendations, as well as steady paychecks for hundreds upon hundreds of experts in the United States and Japan.

I also expect the new arrangement to contribute to a clutch of ugly regional crises in the years to come, especially if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and accelerates the pivot dynamic of confrontation & polarization that enlarged the diplomatic space for the US in its role as the dominant military force in Asia.

A prominent US China policy insider, Robert Sutter, made the case for putting Hong Kong democracy and Taiwan independence in play in order to generate additional pressure points on the PRC.  Actually, Sutter carefully deployed the passive voice in characterizing China’s vulnerabilities and, essentially, advocated threatening to put them in play, an important distinction since, once the US has signaled its support, local activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan will seize control of events, Japan will be tempted to stir the pot, and the United States will find itself as little more than a passenger on the freedom train.

I expect Hillary Clinton will feel compelled to demonstrate the muscularity of her own presidency in contrast to the “leading from behind” drift displayed by President Obama in his second term.  The possibility exists that the Taiwan presidential elections will produce deadlock and an atmosphere of national crisis—abetted by a Maidanesque group of “Sunflower” student activists whose anti-KMT inclination is ripe for amplification by the pro-independence DPP opposition—that Clinton and Abe might find irresistible. 

Ex-president and independence avatar Lee Teng-hui recently voiced the opinion that the Senkakus belong to Japan (Taiwan’s right to the Senkakus—a claim that, I might add, is very persuasive to anyone who looks at a map or, for that matter, knows that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger also had strong feelings about the legitimacy of Taiwan’s position-- is a central plank of President Ma Ying-jyeou’s policy). If the DPP decides to cement its already strong ties to the conservative wing of Japanese politics by repudiating the ROC’s claims to the Senkakus, or even taking the next step of agitating for independence under the assumption that the US and Japan will decide that respect for the One China policy (and for that matter, for a certain degree of stability and control over events in East Asia) must take a back seat to Taiwanese self-determination, things could get very interesting for the PRC’s Xi Jinping.

Of course, Xi Jinping has not been sitting idly by.

He has acted forcefully and pre-emptively to insulate the CCP against the kind of shenanigans the US has deployed against the Russian Federation during the Ukraine imbroglio: delegitimization in the Western media, encouragement of democratic dissent, and sanctions keyed to US dominance of the global financial system.

A Taiwan crisis, therefore, may not compel the CCP to roll the dice in an existential war to sustain its claims to sovereignty in the Han homeland.

The western borders, however, offer challenges to control that the CCP has not yet demonstrably mastered.

I believe the most interesting and disturbing developments have taken place in Xinjiang, home to almost 9 million Uighurs who might interpret a crisis over the sovereignty of Taiwan and Hong Kong as an opportunity to advance their own claims to self-determination.  Conditions have already become extremely fraught.  In recent weeks there have been multiple bloody incidents, including one involving nearly one hundred fatalities (the World Uyghur Congress, an émigré group under the leadership of Rebiya Kadeer, has claimed actual fatalities were 2000, an assertion that under other circumstances might be open to dismissal but now merits some more serious consideration) and can be spun as the massacre of Uighur demonstrators by Han security forces, an attack fomented by a group of aggrieved Islamists, or something in between. 

US incitement is currently not on the table, even though the World Uyghur Congress, which sedulously tends its relations with the US government, has taken to calling Xinjiang “East Turkestan”, thereby throwing its hat in the ring on behalf of independence.  Therefore, Western news outlets are bedeviled by the issue of whether the Chinese characterization of terrorists should be adopted, or whether the verbose formulation of “aggrieved Uighurs spontaneously venting their anger against an unjust and oppressive regime” should be employed instead.  For the time being, some outlets have compromised by using the Chinese label, but using quotation marks “terrorists” as a distancing mechanism.

The assassination of the imam of the PRC’s largest mosque, in Kashgar, may eventually convince some fence-sitters in the media of the existence of an organized movement employing terror as a political instrument.

The PRC government, of course, has already announced its conclusions.

It has poured military and security forces into Xinjiang, and also employed some measures that have attracted a certain amount of bewilderment and mockery.

The PRC government seemed to go over-the-top in rewarding locals—30,000 locals by its count!-- who supposedly assisted in rounding up the alleged perpetrators of the recent massacre:

Authorities in far west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have announced that more than 300 million yuan (about 48 million U.S. dollars) would be offered in cash rewards to those who helped hunt suspected terrorists.

More than 10,000 officials and local residents attended an award ceremony held in Hotan Prefecture Sunday, the first batch of the rewards.

Altogether 4.23 million yuan were offered at the ceremony to local residents for their bravery in hunting a group of 10 suspected terrorists.

Six people who offered key tip-offs leading to the location of the suspected terrorists were given 100,000 yuan each. More individuals and government agencies received cash rewards.

The LA Times’ Barbara Demick described harassment against students and government employees trying to honor the Ramadan fast, and a campaign against forbidden head coverings for women:

At one checkpoint near Kashgar's main mosque, three Uighur women in colorful, sequined calf-length dresses and a man in sunglasses sat under a large blue umbrella the weekend before last watching people shopping for the coming Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marked the end of Ramadan.

When a motorcycle drove by with two women and a toddler, they flagged it down and told the woman in back to dismount. The woman, who looked to be in her 40s, was wearing a long black-and-white striped dress, a patterned red scarf and a white veil that covered her mouth and nose.

Within minutes, a white van pulled up at the checkpoint with a large red sign on the side reading "Strictly Attack Terrorism and Protect the Stability of Society." The woman climbed in the van without protest and was driven off, presumably to a Project Beauty headquarters to be given a lecture on appropriate dress.

In the city of Karamay (an isolated oil outpost in the heart of the desert and, perhaps, the easiest place to test drive this kind of policy), per Reuters:

Authorities will prohibit five types of passengers - those who wear veils, head scarves, a loose-fitting garment called a jilbab, clothing with the crescent moon and star, and those with long beards - from boarding buses in the northwestern city of Karamay, state media said.

…

"Those who do not comply, especially those five types of passengers, will be reported to the police," the paper said.

By the traditional calculus of “hearts and minds” (or its Chinese variant, “hearts and minds and remorseless Han economic, cultural, and demographic infiltration”), these measures would be seen as ridiculously counter-productive.

Maybe the CCP is looking at the recent trendlines in Uighur-related mayhem and has come to the conclusion that “hearts and minds” isn’t going to cut it.

Or maybe the PRC has decided that China, as a rising world power, has to learn to play the militarized counterinsurgency game the same way the grand master, the United States, does.

I look at what the PRC security forces are doing in Xinjiang, and it reminds me of what the United States did in Iraq’s Anbar Province.

Those people determinedly engaged in Islamic practice—Ramadan, beards, headscarves—probably are self-identifying as potential security threats and end up in a database for surveillance, relational mapping, etc.  Maybe it doesn’t yet resemble the massive database of social and biometric data the US acquired in Iraq, especially in hot spots like Fallujah (Centcom still holds on to a biometric database including retinal scans and thumbprints for 3 million Iraqis, 10% of the population of Iraq), but it’s a start. 

The ridiculously over-compensated local anti-terrorist practitioners: they’re also in the system, as assets, like the Anbar tribespeople who, as a matter of principle and interest, provided tips and intel or at least passive acquiescence to the US in the war against al Qaeda.  At the height of the Anbar Awakening, in 2008, the US military was paying $300/month salaries to 91,000 Iraqis, a bill of $16 million per month.

The only thing missing from this equation: the death squads (in Iraq, the Joint Special Operations Command) and drones (AfPak) that close the circle.  I’m assuming the PRC has something similar.

I hope the PRC doesn’t believe it can crack the counterinsurgency puzzle better than the US effort that, despite multiple iterations and the outlay of tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars has failed to produce lasting gains in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I also hope the PRC is not looking at an example much closer to home, which might qualify as the only truly successful counterinsurgency/anti-separatist action in recent decades: Sri Lanka’s war of annihilation against the Tamil rebels that culminated with the obliteration of the Tamil forces and tens of thousands of civilian victims on a narrow spit of land in 2009, a humanitarian horror show made possible largely by the PRC’s steadfast, multi-year financial, material, and diplomatic support. 

And the PRC must also look at the danger of alienating the Taliban of Afghanistan and other regional Islamist actors, who have heretofore cracked down on Xinjiang-oriented activity in response to Chinese economic and diplomatic blandishments.

Militarization of disputes simplify the statement of a problem, in my opinion, but makes resolution ever more difficult and remote.  It is a temptation that, I hope, the PRC and the US can both resist.

American Rooster Prepares to Crow Atop Asian Dunghill

[This piece may be reposted if Asia Times Online is credited and a link provided.]

In other words, it’s time for the United States to engage in a full-throated celebration of the pivot to Asia with what I think is going to be President Obama’s America F*ck Yeah tour of Asian democracies in April 2014.

The trip requires more than a little spadework, given the rather fraught situation in Asia. 

It’s not just that the PRC and the Japan are at each other’s throats and the Philippines has declared that the South China Sea is the new Sudetenland, and the PRC must be met with confrontation, not negotiation.  It’s that the United States is less than completely happy with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s sharp elbows and the fractures they create in the pivot’s united front.

There has been a fascinating flurry of op-eds in US prestige media (Bloomberg, NY Times, Washington Post, and Business Week) highly critical of Abe and his provocative visit to the Yasukuni Shrine…

…a visit that took place in December 2013.  Concerned chin-stroking end-February 2014 is a little late, it would seem.

And for that matter, the highly insulting detail that Prime Minister Abe listened to Joe Biden’s importunities for an hour before blowing him off and visiting the shrine…that was leaked end January.

So why, all of a sudden, does the US have its knickers in a knot concerning last year’s display of Abe’s rather unambiguous historical-revisionist inclinations?

Well, reading the exclusive China Matters divinatory entrails (paywalled! Just kidding) I believe this furor has much to do with President Obama’s announced visit to Asia.

As of now, the PR China is not on the itinerary.  But Japan and the Philippines are.  So is South Korea, reportedly after some strenuous lobbying.

The trip looks like a celebration of the pivot, that China-containment strategy that dares not speak its name but is meant to secure America’s leading position in East Asia by pushing China’s relations with its neighbors in a more polarized and confrontational condition that plays into US military superiority.

More than that, it will make up for ground lost by the dismaying cancellation of President Obama’s previous Asia trip (because of the US debt ceiling farce) and demonstrate to a dubious world that, appearances to the contrary, the United States is still brimming with resolve, the master of events, leader of the coalition of Asian democracies, indeed the universally hailed hegemon of Asia.

I look at President Obama’s trip like one of those imperial tours favored by the Roman and Chinese emperors to demonstrate that the empire’s writ still ran in the borderlands.

However, a certain Asian democracy is openly hedging its bets against the day that the United States changes its mind and decides that its true interests lie somewhere more along the dreaded G2 axis (cooperation between the US and the PRC to order affairs in ways not necessarily to the liking of the other nations of the Pacific.)

That nation, of course, is Japan.

Prime Minister Abe, thanks to his lineage and his personal experience, is in a good position to remember the many times when the United States decided that US and Japanese interests did not necessarily coincide.

They include slights as old as the Portsmouth Treaty (when Teddy Roosevelt decided that Japan was too green a member of the imperial club to enjoy the full fruits of its victory over Tsarist Russia) to that whole World War II unpleasantness (which Abe’s revisionist group consider to be entirely the fault of the United States), to the sudden recognition of the PRC, the torpedoing of the Japanese economy by the Plaza Accord imposed by the United States, and the unnerving undertone of G2 chatter that occasionally pervades US diplomacy.

On a personal level, Prime Minister Abe undoubtedly also remembers how he loyally supported George W. Bush’s confrontational North Korea policy in 2005, only to see Japan—and Abe’s signature issue, the abductees—brushed aside in Chris Hill & Condoleezza Rice’s haste to conclude a transitory agreement with the DPRK.

On a happier note, Prime Minister Abe probably also recalls that Secretary Clinton was a staunch opponent of G2 and an avid supporter of the Asia pivot, with the underlying strategy of employing the alliance with Japan as the keystone of US policy in Asia.  The full story perhaps needs an entire book, but it is worth remembering that President Obama was reportedly prepared to drop the affirmation of the Senkakus as falling under the US-Japan security treaty —presumably in response to some Chinese blandishment—until the tag team of Secretary Clinton and Minister Maehara exploited (or, in my view, concocted) the whole 2010 Senkaku Captain Zhan/rare earth imbroglio  that led to the exact opposite outcome—open affirmation that the Senkakus were covered.  

Subsequently, it became clear that Secretary Clinton had decided to ditch engagement and treat the PRC’s maritime issues as a pretext for a confrontainment policy against China, and use the policy as the foundation of the militarized pivot to Asia.

But Secretary Clinton is gone, at least for the time being, and the decidedly less confrontational John Kerry seems to have been able to take the reins of US diplomacy.

Kerry’s focus on the Middle East has occasioned nervous/resentful mumblings from supporters of the Japan relationship in Washington, for the stated reason that his focus on the Far East is insufficient and the pivot is languishing.  An unstated reason may be that the PRC, because of its somewhat important role in Iran and Syria matters, may be inching toward a quasi-G2 relationship with Kerry that might result in some favors being done for the PRC at the expense of the pivot democracies.

One such favor, I previously speculated, might have been the US demand that Japan demonstrate its nuclear non-proliferation sincerity by returning some weapons grade plutonium it had received from the United States a long time ago.

In any case, I felt that it was necessary for Kerry to establish his tough-on-China credentials, and I believe he did that by sendingout Evan Madeiros to make a big noise about how the US would not tolerate a South China Sea ADIZ.  And the PRC, which, I believe, had already disclaimed any current intention for an SCS ADIZ, promptly said they were considering no such move, thereby allowing Kerry to shift, albeit incrementally, out of the despised Chamberlain-appeasement doghouse into the blessed realm of Churchillian resolve.

So President Obama can go to Asia secure in the knowledge that America’s “stick a thumb in China’s eye” credentials are relatively secure.

With this context, what to make of the concerted campaign to rain on Prime Minister Abe’s parade re Yasukuni?

I think it’s because President Obama wants to use his April trip to affirm the pivot and, more importantly, the indispensable US leadership role in it.

That means cracking the whip on Japan and demonstrating that the US will not allowed itself to get tangled up in the Abe administration’s hopes and dreams for a Japan that is able to exploit the US alliance as an element in its own plans to restore Japan’s sovereignty and military and diplomatic clout in Asia.

It would take a special kind of denial to ignore the fact that Prime Minister Abe is abubble with plans to expand Japan’s diplomatic and security footprint in Asia all the way from the Kuriles to Myanmar and India …or to disregard the fact that these ambitions do not fit cleanly within a hierarchical structure with the US pivot on top, with the US-Japan security alliance as the next layer, and Japan’s relationship with the other Asian democracies guided by the pivot, the security alliance, and the power and the glory of American strategic vision. 

This unpleasant state of affairs is demonstrated by the conundrum that seems to underlay the Abe-bashing: the growing rift between South Korea and Japan.  

One of the nagging problems of the pivot has been the rancor between the Abe and Park administrations, and also South Korea’s un-pivoty predilection for sidling over into the PRC economic and diplomatic camp.

Abe, contrary to the ostensible doctrine of pivot solidarity, seems happy to determinedly and systematically exacerbate the bad blood between Japan and South Korea, not just with Yasukuni but with dismissive remarks by his allies on the lessons of World War II and the comfort women.  And, contrary to the idea that the United States coordinates the pivot, Abe has also been most dismissive of US efforts to insert itself in the dispute.

According to Peter Ennis of Japan Dispatch, the Yasukuni kerfuffle played out as part of the U.S. effort to mediate a rapprochement between Japan and South Korea.

Per Ennis, Vice President Biden thought he had an understanding that Abe would not visit Yasukuni and communicated that perception to President Park.  When it transpired that Abe was indeed planning to visit Yasukuni, Biden made the infamous phone call to try to persuade him not to go, and Abe in essence told him to get stuffed.

Not only did he tell Biden to get stuffed, Abe apparently personally leaked the details of this embarrassment to one of his favorite papers, according to Ennis:

On December 12, Biden himself phoned Abe, and in a lengthy, tense conversation pressed the prime minister to not visit Yasukuni. Sankei Shimbun on Janaury 30, citing unnamed “government sources,” provided a detailed account of the conversation – an account the vice president’s office does not dispute.

(Insiders in Tokyo, citing the close ties between Sankei and Abe, believe the account of the conversation comes directly from Abe himself – an assessment shared by key US officials.)
In their conversation, Biden said to Abe: “I told President Park that ‘I don’t think Mr. Abe will visit Yasukuni Shrine.’ If you indicate you will not visit the shrine, I think Ms. Park will agree to meet you.’”

Abe has long been incensed about what he considers American hectoring against his nationalist convictions, and he told Biden that he intended to visit Yasukuni at some point.

Immediately after Prime Minister Abe maliciously leaked the intelligence that he had spurned Vice President Biden’s appeal to give satisfaction to President Park on the Yasukuni issue, a thunderous op-ed delivered by the concentrated firepower of Richard Armitage, Victor Cha, and Michael Green appeared in the Washington Post calling for President Obama to visit Seoul…

… and it was subsequently announced that South Korea had been added to the itinerary and Japan would not be acting as North Asia’s exclusive host for the Obama visit.

Take that!

Now, in addition to Abe’s desire to trample on the feelings of Biden and Park to wave his freak flag high on the issue of his nationalist revisionist beliefs, I think there were a few other forces at work.

First of all, as I’ve argued elsewhere, Abe does not have a comfortable relationship with the Obama administration.  His US avatar is Dick Cheney, with whom Abe tried to coordinate a China-containment policy during his first term, and his natural allies are the US Republican right wing and pro-Japan/anti-China hawks in the US security and defense establishment.

I think the pointed and public humiliation of Biden was a signal from Abe that he was not under the thumb of the White House, and his allies in the United States could take advantage of the Obama administration’s embarrassment to question the efficacy and execution of the administration’s Japan policy (and its effort to steer a middle course between the PRC & Japan), and lobby for the further evolution of US policy in Asia toward openly Japan-centric doctrine of deterrence and confrontation with the PRC.

Second, the ROK and Japan are direct peer competitors in Asia.  When ROK President Lee Myung-bak was in charge, he openly tried to seize the mantle of Asian leadership (and American ally numero uno) from Japan, which was flailing through its non-LDP interregnum.  Abe, with his nationalist inclinations, is distinctly hostile to Korean presumption.

If one wants to play the deep game, Japan no less than the PRC fears Korean reunification and the emergence of an Asian democracy that might dwarf Japan in economic and national vigor.  One of the less reported stories is Abe’s continual game of footsie with North Korea, with clandestine meetings between Japanese and DPRK diplomats and, in addition, the offer of Switzerland (and I suspect, India) to put their good offices at Japan’s disposal for mediation.

The ostensible context for this back and forth is to obtain closure on the miserable issue of the Japanese abductees; but I suspect the real objective is to achieve some sort of direct rapprochement with North Korea that will give Japan the direct inside track, ditch the PRC-led Five Party Talks regime, wrongfoot the US, PRC, and South Korea in the impending dash for North Korea’s under-developed mineral and human resources…and keep the DPRK alive and the peninsula comfortably split.

In other words, South Korea is welcome to explore its options as a continental power within the PRC’s sphere of influence, using Shandong as its cheap labor hinterland instead of northern Korea.  Japan will be happy to eat South Korea’s lunch in maritime, democratic Asia, thank you very much.

Third, as Abe works to recover Japan’s full military, defense, and security sovereignty, he has no interest in the United States arrogating to itself the privilege of setting Japan’s regional diplomatic agenda.  If anything, it looks like Abe wants to have extensive engagement with the United States, but he wants in the context of peer-to-peer bilateral relations negotiated through explicit mechanisms like the security alliance and the TPP.  His vision for the US-Japan relationship certainly does not entail listening to Joe Biden and the Obama administration’s brainstorms about Asia, especially when they are intended to demonstrate America’s honest-broker cred i.e. attempt to show the ROK and the PRC that the US can constrain Japan’s behavior in a meaningful way.

Abe has gone along with the United States on two rather dismal initiatives that the Pentagon adores—collective self defense and Futenma relocation.  Therefore, by his lights, he probably thinks the United States should, as a matter of mutual respect and alliance loyalty to America’s most important partner in Asia, put up with the crap he wants to dish out to the PRC and South Korea (parenthetically, the Obama administration pointedly did not go as far as Abe in instructing civilian carriers to disregard the ECS ADIZ, which was, by one perspective a matter of supreme moderation and common sense but, from Abe’s perspective, left him out on a limb looking a bit stupid—but also gave him a pretext to complain about equivocal US backing as a justification for Japan’s growing independence in security policy).

I believe that, as I’ve predicted for the last year or so, the pivot chickens are now, inevitably coming home to roost.  The decision to hype the PRC maritime threat has encouraged the frontline Asian democracies, especially Japan, to a point that US leadership is on the cusp of overt challenge.

Japan, the ROK, and the PRC may be well aware of US intentions, but are less convinced of US capabilities in delivering on the promise of a unified, carefully managed and modulated pivot strategy that empowers the US through a militarized containment strategy against the PRC, while preserving the honest broker role for the US and stifling the independent-minded initiatives of the frontline pivot allies.

Instead, it appears that Japan, especially, is quietly going rogue and will do its best to exploit the pivot to pursue its own regional agendas while calling on the US for the support at crunch time which, as the pivot advocate, it must perforce deliver.  

So instead of the implacable united front against the PRC that is the raison d’etre of the pivot, we have an alliance in flux, deterrent that is equivocal and ripe for testing by the PRC, and increasingly close and tense encounters in the maritime zone.

In other words, a recipe for…something, not sure what, but certainly not peace, stability, and shared prosperity that Hillary Clinton promised to deliver with the pivot.

Japan is sufficiently invested in the US relationship to support the alliance and even the Obama administration as it begins its long but inevitable descent into lame-duck status.

But meticulously orchestrated American announcements, initiatives, and trips to Asia can only do so much as Japan, and Asian allies that increasingly look to Japan for regional leadership, see the need and benefits of going their own separate ways.

They say the sun doesn’t rise because the rooster crows.  But in this case it did. I think President Obama is learning that the sun did rise because the rooster crowed i.e. that Japanese assertiveness is a direct consequence of the empowerment of the hawkish establishment in Japan by the US pivot doctrine.

Trouble is, now that the sun is rising, it looks like it will keep rising on its own.

And there’s little that the rooster can do about it.