There Are Already at Least Two ADIZs in the South China Sea…and None of Them are Chinese

I have a piece up at Asia Times, China has right to declare ADIZ in the South China Sea.  A bit more in your face than my proposed title but a) essentially true and b) not a bad idea improving coordination in zones abuzz with contentious military presences and missions and c) decent clickbait.

Pre arbitration ruling, the competition for traffic-driving SCS hot takes is intense, people.

And here at China Matters you get the maps.

The US ADIZ:


Here's a close-up of the US ADIZ in Alaska.  Note it pretty much abuts Russia's 12 mile territorial limit in a few places. Take that!



The North Atlantic ADIZ, until recently enforced by a US interceptor group out of Iceland (now NATO's job):

 

The East China Sea China ADIZ/Japan ADIZ/Korea ADIZ mash-up.  Note in 2013 South Korea took advantage of the manufactured uproar over the China ECS ADIZ to stealthily enlarge its KADIZ to overlap with the JADIZ (see the dotted green line for the enlarged zone).  In fact, part of the KADIZ extension is a triple overlap with the PRC and Japanese ADIZs.  Overlaps are OK!

How OK?

So OK, Japan did it in 2010, when it unilaterally and with no prior consultation extended its ADIZ to overlap with Taiwan's (yes, Taiwan has an ADIZ, too!) to provide cover for its new military installation on Yonaguni Island (and express its disapproval of the incoming Ma Ying-jeou administration's pro-mainland tilt):



Here's the "hope is not a plan" Taiwan ADIZ extending over the Chinese mainland.  This image, courtesy of the CSIS AMTI, has all the updated ECS boundaries.  I found CSIS discretion in not highlighting the absurd Taiwan ADIZ...refreshing.

And, as a revelation to me, the Philippines has its own ADIZ in the SCS:

 
And as a further revelation, Vietnam's got one too!  No map I could find, unfortunately.  Just a general statement in the Financial Times circa 2013:

But Gary Li, a senior analyst at IHS Maritime, said a Chinese ADIZ in the northern South China Sea would be “very, very sensitive”. He said it would almost certainly overlap with Vietnam’s ADIZ, which reaches north to about 100km from Hainan Island, and includes the disputed Paracel Islands.

Many, if not all of these ADIZs have roots in US flight controls (the original Japanese ADIZ, for instance, was set up and administered by the US until 1973, then the Japanese government took it over and expanded it; the Philippine and Taiwan ADIZs seem to have their antecedents in the US onetime "military assistance" operations; finally, today it's little remembered that the South China Sea was an American lake for surface, sub, & air operations during the Vietnam War, and I wouldn't be too surprised if that tradition carried on to the "VADIZ").

So maybe the Pentagon sees ADIZing as a uniquely US prerogative not available to presumptuous adversaries.

And, just maybe, the US would find it awkward from a pivot optics point of view if the PRC declared an ADIZ, everybody else revived or declared their ADIZs, and USAF was in the awkward position practicing its ironclad policy of "flying wherever it wants to whenever it wants to" outside of territorial airspace holdings , thereby telling not just the PRC but much of ASEAN to go f*ck itself.

In any case, I fail to find any strong legal justifications for denying the PRC an ADIZ in the SCS.  On the contrary, per my AT piece, my feeling is "the more communication the better".

In unfinished business, I was unable to find a map displaying the Greenland section of the ADIZ picket line between the North Atlantic section run out of Iceland and the ADIZ covering the continental US.

I would think there would have to be something, because the US went to great expense and effort to build the air base at Thule in northwest Greenland in the 1950s to host US strategic bombers that, at that time, could not reach their targets in the Soviet Union from North America.  And presumably vice versa was true, and the US had some ADIZ like protocols to control and intercept Soviet aircraft that might have an interest in taking out Thule.

However, US security relations with Denmark (which administers Greenland today as a county) are fairly murky/hinky and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some protocol turning over administration of a Greenland regional ADIZ protecting Thule to the US.

Thule's strategic importance survived the decline of the strategic bomber leg of the triad.  It operates big, big radars pointed Russia (and I guess maybe China?) way.  When the job was to pick up Soviet missiles, the radar was an analog monster as big as a football field turned on its side.  The system was directly wired into NORAD's main computers in Colorado and maintaining that link, by airborne relay if necessary, in the face of weather and fear of Soviet interdiction was a major obsession.



Tube amp aficionados will love this description of the 1960s vintage BMEWS ("Ballistic Missile Early Warning System") and the fun anecdote of the day the moon rose in the wrong place, the ultra-high energy radar painted it, and the huge return crashed the NORAD system and caused the great doors at Cheyenne Mountain to be closed for several hours "while analysts tried to determine the cause of the fiasco".

Nowadays the radars are solid state and watch the skies to track satellites and serve the Star Wars missile defense boondoggle.

 

A final note: in the first version of the AT piece, I incorrectly declared, with maximum dudgeon, that Okinotorishima Island, the stain of the West Pacific, even had its own ADIZ.  Wrong!  I misread the shadings on this map.

Oki's got its own territorial airspace per its 12-mile limit but no additional ADIZ.  The ADIZ is the lightest-green shading; Oki (the blob at the very bottom) is surrounded only by the darker "territorial airspace" green.  Apologies!  The reference was deleted a few hours after the original post went up.

Will PRC Respond to Joint US-Japanese Patrols in the South China Sea With an ADIZ?

I have a short piece on the prospects for joint US-Japanese air patrols in the South China Sea in the context of the new US-Japan defense guidelines at the new AT.  Go!  Read it! Thank you.

I draw the conclusion that the main practical application of joint patrols is to provide backup to the Philippines if/when they try to assert their EEZ rights, perhaps at the Reed Bank, site of a much-yearned-for undersea energy bonanza, after the UNCLOS ruling on the Nine-Dash-Line comes down.

One issue I’ll explore here is the possibility that the PRC will declare an ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) in the South China Sea.

I guess it needs pointing out that the ADIZ is not an exclusion zone.  There is zero tolerance by any nation for uncontrolled overflights of sovereign airspace (which covers territorial waters up to the 12-mile limit; in contrast to aircraft, foreign naval vessels can transit through territorial waters).

The ADIZ, on the other hand, as the name indicates, is a more extensive zone beyond sovereign airspace in which planes are expected to identify themselves and state their business.  It covers nearby international airspace by design and its extent is pretty much a function of the speed of hostile aircraft and the reaction time of air defenses.  An ADIZ is meant to establish a zone in which aircraft that don’t identify themselves and announce their intentions can be intercepted before they can penetrate sovereign airspace and maybe drop a bomb on somebody.  It’s actually a good arrangement for delineating zones of anxiety and, in theory, makes the world a safer and more orderly place.  National ADIZs can even overlap, as the Taiwan experience demonstrates.

Frequency of actual intercepts within the ADIZ apparently correlate with paranoia and hostility at any given time.

According to this informative piece in The Aviationist, in Europe NATO jets scramble to intercept any Russian military aircraft in the ADIZ.  Apparently over Alaska things are more casual, and in 4 out of 10 cases of lumbering Russian Tupelov bombers trolling the Alaska ADIZ in the last year, the US chose not to scramble interceptors:

The ADIZ is an airspace surrounding a nation or part of it where identification, location, and control of aircraft over land or water is required in the interest of national security. This means that any aircraft flying in these air spaces without authorization may require identification through interception by fighter aircraft in QRA (Quick Reaction Alert).

…

Military aircraft that do not intend to enter the national airspace are not required to identify themselves or otherwise comply with ADIZ procedures but it is a common practice that any foreign (namely Russian) military aircraft flying close to the U.S. or Canada airspace, within the ADIZ, is intercepted, identified and escorted.

  

In 2013, the PRC set up an ADIZ over the East China Sea to much moaning and gnashing of teeth and, I might add, a lot of crappy reporting on how unreasonable it was. In what should have been a blockbuster report but somehow, you know, vanished without a trace, the Daily Mainichi reported that, far from being blindsided by PRC ADIZ perfidy, the Japanese government had been extensively briefed by the PRC prior to declaration of the zone.  At the time I participated in the rather lonely and tedious task of debunking the ADIZ-threat canard and you can read one of my pieces below.

The US military has a consistent policy of not respecting anybody’s ADIZ notification practices and immediately dispatched two bombers from Guam to penetrate the newly-announced ECS ADIZ without prior notification.  US civilian air carriers, rather intelligently, respect the PRC ADIZ guidelines; Japanese civilian air carriers, rather less intelligently, do not.

The PRC has been politely deferential to the US on the matter of military flights inside its East China Sea ADIZ and would presumably grit its teeth and accept continuation of incessant US military flights over the South China Sea even if the PRC announced an SCS ADIZ (the PRC seems to have discarded its aggressive posture toward US surveillance aircraft over the SCS and near PRC naval facilities on Hainan Island after the P-3 incident of 2001, in which a Chinese fighter pilot died after a mid-air collision and the P-3 Orion, a turboprop, was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island).  

Japanese aircraft in the SCS would presumably be another matter.  Japanese military aircraft are frequently intercepted and dicked with in the ECS ADIZ and if Japan Air Self Defense Force (hereinafter the “Japan Air ‘Self Defense’ (heh heh) Force” start flying around the SCS two thousand miles from home and in China’s backyard they aren’t going to be welcomed by the PRC.

Which, I suppose, is the whole point of “joint patrols”.  It’s not that the US doesn’t have enough airplanes to fly around the SCS by itself or Japan likes to waste fuel & irritate the PRC by performing surveillance the US previously handled itself; it’s about bringing in Japan under the American aegis to demonstrate that the US is the indispensable big brother that makes it possible for Japan to pursue its regional ambitions under its freshly reinterpreted, somewhat bent, and no longer 100% pacifist constitution.

I suppose a subtext of the new US-Japan defense guidelines the PRC is supposed to be grateful that the United States, by codifying the involvement of Japanese forces in US-directed operations, is restraining unilateral Japanese adventurism in East Asia, but I tend to doubt the PRC sees it that way.

In any case, it would seem plausible that the PRC might push back against the appearance of Japanese aircraft in the SCS by announcing an ADIZ in the South China Sea and either routinely or selectively harassing Japanese aircraft (and their US companions) with intercepts.   

(Possibly ADIZ enforcement could be supported from airstrips popping up in the SCS as part of the PRC crash island building program though, as this good overview from Reuters points out, this gambit more likely relates to other salami slicing missions along the fisheries & maritime enforcement line.)

(Also parenthetically, Taiwan’s military has advised the legislature it plans to patrol the South China Sea outside of Taiwan’s own ADIZ to support its own South China Sea island claims.  Will be interesting to see how PRC handles that.)

I suspect the US realizes that if Japanese military aircraft appear in the SCS, there is a high degree of likelihood that the PRC will declare an ADIZ and start intercepting those planes, with a concurrent rise in tensions and the possibility of fatal incidents; only question is Is This a Good Thing?

After the break, my 2013 article on the ECS ADIZ.

Cold War Heats Up in Asia

The People’s Republic of China decided to defy the “pivot to Asia” by parking its HYSY 981 drilling platform—protected by a flotilla of various vessels perhaps not including PLAN ships-- in waters that Vietnam considers part of its EEZ.

Vietnam has been displeased, to put it mildly.  It has reached out to the Philippines, indicating that it may support Manila’s legal challenge to the nine-dash-line or perhaps institute a legal case of its own.

A Vietnamese deputy prime minister is also visiting Washington DC at US Secretary of State John Kerry's invitation, apparently to provide optics for an expected US congressional resolution condemning PRC activities in the South China Sea.  The visit also raises the specter (for the PRC) of a US return to Cam Ranh Bay, the massive US-built naval base on the southish Vietnamese coast.

Many Western observers believe that the PRC has blundered into the pivot’s clever trap, and its aggressive moves are simply driving its neighbors into the welcoming arms of the United States, enabling a more forward military presence for the US around China’s borders, and justifying US claims to a central role in the region as security guarantor.

I suspect, however, that the PRC has gamed this out and is willing to roll the dice in the South China Sea.  

The long-term view from Beijing, I think, is that China occupies enough islands to move beyond the hard to defend “cow tongue” claim to a more defensible island sovereignty + EEZ formula for pursuing its interests in the SCS; China’s growing economic and military heft, its ability to limit the terms of dispute to economic terms, the unresolved issues of EEZ ambiguity, definition, and enforcement, and the PRC’s unwillingness to budge from its positions will force its neighbors to come to terms, albeit reluctantly and resentfully, over the long haul.

East China Sea is a different matter.  

On the issue of the Senkakus, the “possession is 9/10s of the law” shoe is on Japan’s foot.  Furthermore, the islands are unambiguously included in the scope of the US-Japan security treaty thanks to President Obama’s statement during his recent pivot tour to Asia (even though the US doesn’t recognize Japanese sovereignty over the islands; that’s another story), and Japan’s military infrastructure and capabilities to defend them are increasing.  Assuming that Prime Minister Abe is able to thread the needle through the Japanese constitution and past the suspicious Japanese public and institute “collective self defense”, Japanese military power will be augmented by its ability to engage in “defensive” military activity while conducting joint operations with the US.

I read the red tea leaves and believe that the PRC does not have a realistic expectation of seizing the Senkakus or otherwise changing the status quo vis a vis Japan over the islands.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC has few serious intentions of occupying the Senkakus and foments tension simply as a “pricetag” retaliation for Japan’s increasingly overt and aggressive anti-PRC foreign policy.

With the PRC deterred from making a genuine move against the Senkakus, the dominant dynamic in the East China Sea will be of Japan trying to achieve unity of doctrine and response with the United States for a contain-China policy, while the PRC will be trying to wedge US and Japan.

The process plays out with Japan’s invocation of “gray zone crises” i.e. friction with the PRC manifested in non-military ways.  Japan is trying to establish a definition of gray zone conflicts that permits a military response to a non-military scenario such as the PRC's ceaseless salami-slicing, and thereby gets the United States on the hook to provide backup muscle for the Japanese move.  I see this as Japan's desired quid pro quo for signing on to "collective self defense".

One scenario I saw involved “armed Chinese fishermen” i.e. the idea that the PRC might try to seize the Senkakus with some kind of irregular force that the coast guard couldn't handle, and would require an SDF response even though PLA forces nominally weren't involved.  As the United States digests the Crimea annexation precedent, expect Japan to invoke this kind of scenario more frequently.

The United States, whose primary interest is to get Japan on the hook for US military adventures, not the other way around, is apparently resistant to nailing down the “gray zone conflict” definition and giving Japan a green light (or at least a blinking yellow) for pushing back on the PRC, especially in murky a.k.a. "gray" clashes between Japanese and PRC vessels on the high seas.

Indeed, the gray zone problem neatly crystallizes the whole problem of the pivot: that it creates a moral hazard (in Western terms) or emboldens US allies (the PRC formulation) to engage in reckless behavior not necessarily advantageous to US interests, specifically the US interest in not engaging in a scorched earth economic conflict with the PRC for the sake of some uninhabited rocks.

Failing a meeting of the minds on “gray zone” conflicts, Japan has to content itself with provocations against the PRC in the hope that a PRC over-reaction will compel the US to expand its de facto security guarantees to Japan.

I place the recent contretemps over the close-quarters flyby conducted by Chinese fighter jets against Japanese military surveillance aircraft in the area of the joint PRC-Russia naval exercise in the category of a provocation, committed with an awareness of growing US disgruntlement with the PRC as well as the Obama administration's need to explicitly stand with allies post-Crimea.

Western media has reliably regurgitated Japanese government spin that the flyby was some recklessly aggressive behavior by the PRC.

However, facts indicate that the Chinese military posted a no-fly/no sail notification concerning the naval exercise and Japan flew over there anyway. 

 

The only justification that Japan can offer is that it refuses to recognize the PRC ADIZ over the East China Sea.  In fact, the incident shows why it’s important to respect other countries’ declared ADIZs and in fact the reckless party in this episode was not the PRC, but Japan.  In terms of unintended consequences, it may also feed into US concerns about the hazards of letting Japan take the initiative in butting heads with the PRC in the ECS and then demanding US backing.

Interestingly, the official Japanese position now seem to be limited to the “Chinese planes flew too darn close” bleating.  

An as yet unnoted element of the ADIZ issue is that the United States is the only power that asserts the right to fly military aircraft through somebody else’s ADIZ without filing a flight plan (to refresh everybody’s memory, US-flagged civilian carriers respect the PRC ADIZ regs.  But the US immediately flew two B-52s into the ADIZ unannounced to affirm the US military prerogative).  

Now Japan seems to be asserting that same right for its military aircraft, at least within the PRC ADIZ, a “destabilizing” “status quo-changing” state of affairs, one that also places the Japanese military at parity with the United States on this issue.  I wonder if the US is terribly happy about this but will have to suck it up since Japan is currently dangling the collective self defense and TPP carrots before it.

It would seem unlikely that the United States would take Japan under its wing, so to speak, and conduct joint military flight patrols within China’s ADIZ as a show of support, but the Obama administration’s red line manhood is being questioned worldwide post-Syria and post-Crimea.  So it might happen.

And the PRC might just have to suck it up, consoling itself with the idea that getting its way in the South China Sea is adequate compensation for getting balked in the East China Sea.  

At the back of everybody’s mind, I think, is the potential real crisis in East Asia: the possibility that Taiwan will declare de jure independence at some time, and the PRC will be compelled to put up or shut up on the relatively existential issue of losing Taiwan.  That’s when military posturing, military threats, and military maneuvers become genuinely pressing issues.

In this context, I consider the most disturbing development in US-PRC relations is not the tussling over rocks in the South China Sea or the East China Sea; it is the decision to twist China’s nuts with the indictment of five PLA officers for hacking.  I expect the US national security civilian apparatus considers the indictment one of those clever, legalistic soft power moves that, again, traps China in the web of law and international norms.

But the battle lines in Asia have hardened: pivot vs. China.  The status quo is becoming confrontation, at least in regional security issues.  With the expectation that US and PRC forces will be engaging and confronting each other, it would seem desirable that both sides have a better understanding of their opposite numbers.  Indeed, the US Department of Defense has shown little enthusiasm for the White House's anti-hacking jihad which, in addition to clearing out the US government's stock of cyberrighteousness, seriously depreciated by the Snowden revelations, has scotched US-PRC military-to-military exchanges on ground rules for cyberwarfare.

Engagement with the PRC, for better or worse, has become a military matter.  And if a clash occurs, it had better be because at least one side really wants it, and not because of the main abettors of military catastrophe: FUD or "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt."

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.