THAAD in South Korea and the China Target

I have a piece up at Asia Times Online...only at Asia Times Online! on the ROK's discussions with the United States over the THAAD missile defense system.

Here's the link.

Long story short, THAAD is ludicrous as missile defense for South Korea against the DPRK.  It's the US government's way of getting anti-missile assets closer to the PRC.   Understandably, the PRC is unhappy and has openly objected to the South Korean government.

IMO the main reason South Korea is considering THAAD is to vigorously yank the PRC's chain to "do something" about the DPRK and take the heat off President Park.

Please read and enjoy!

Anxious Hours in Pivotland: Where's My Sailthrough?!!

This was an anxious week in Pivotland© , the Beltway district in which milsec types congregate to formulate, promote, and profit from the forward strategy toward the PRC.

President Obama has been laggard in executing a cherished pivot initiative, the defiant US Navy sailthrough within 12 miles of the PRC’s faux-island holdings in the South China Sea.

Bonnie Glaser, the Princess of the Pivot at CSIS, all-capped her frustration in a tweet on October 16:

US-China confrontation looms in troubled waters of South China Sea. Stop talking and DO THE FONOP ALREADY!

“FONOP” as in “Freedom of Navigation Op.”  I might point out that a naval sailthrough within a country’s claimed 12-mile territorial limit is not automatically a piece of sovereignty-repudiating outrance.  Naval vessels are free to sail within other countries’ 12 mile limit in innocent passage from Point A to Point B.  

In fact, the PLA Navy just did that, sending flotilla through US territorial seas in the Aleutian Islands, pointedly, in September just prior to Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States.  And the US Navy was good with that:

“The five PLAN ships transited expeditiously and continuously through the Aleutian Island chain in a manner consistent with international law.”

 The Chinese stunt appeared to me to be a successful piece of inoculation by the PRC, one that neutralized the “presumptuous Chinese humbled by superior U.S. power in the place they wish was their back yard” narrative that I think the China hawks hope to advance by executing a South China Sea sailthrough.

And it emphasized the unwelcome point that any South China Sea sailthrough under international law is meaningless in terms of the territorial, island-building, and sovereignty assertions the U.S. is purporting to challenge.

So, sailthrough upside rather limited.

What about the downside?

Perhaps President Obama is mindful that a sailthrough, in addition to serving as a polarizing piece of anti-PRC theater for the military pivot, will provide the PRC with a further pretext for overtly and irrevocably militarizing the islands.

Which is already happening.

[O]fficials with China’s foreign ministry are claiming military facilities on a series of artificial islands are “for defense purposes only” in reaction to “high-profile display[s] of military strength and frequent and large-scale military drills by certain countries and their allies in the South China Sea …”

Referring to the U.S. and its several multi-national maritime security exercises in the region, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying statement came a day after a joint U.S. and Australian statement issued on Tuesday in which Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Australian Minister of Defense Marise Payne urged caution on militarizing the South China Sea region.

He is also, I imagine, mindful that sailthrough enthusiasm among our allies is not strong or even universal, despite a flurry of statements and articles that appear to be attempting to logroll the White House by pre-emptively declaring that U.S. credibility is at stake if the much-bruited, never officially announced, and tactically and strategically dubious sailthrough doesn’t happen.

I would guess that allies’ enthusiasm for sending naval vessels to participate in the sailthrough, thereby exposing themselves to the PRC’s economic and diplomatic retaliation, is not high.

On October 15, this unpromising report came out of Australia (bear in mind it's from the Trade minister.  Logrolling cuts both ways; let's see which way Australia actually jumps after the Ministry of Defence has had its say):

Australia wouldn't take part in any U.S. naval patrols aimed at testing China's territorial claims in the South China Sea and isn't taking sides in disputes over one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, Trade Minister Andrew Robb said.

Robb's remarks came after foreign Minister Julie Bishop met U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry this week and said Australia is "on the same page" with the U.S. on the sea, a $5 trillion-a-year shipping route that the American navy has patrolled largely unchallenged since World War II.

And for some allies, even providing lip service to U.S. efforts to uphold the international order against Chinese encroachments seems to be a challenge.

ROK President Park’s recent visit to Washington apparently did not yield all that the US desired in terms of pivot-related enthusiasm.

Park has worked to warm up ties with China and raised some eyebrows in Washington when she attended Beijing's military parade to mark the end of World War Two last month. 

Obama said the United States wanted to see a strong South Korean relationship with China, just as it wanted such a relationship itself, but Washington wanted to see Seoul speak out when Beijing did things that weakened international rules. 

Obama was apparently referring to China's behavior in pursuit of maritime claims in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, which has alarmed Asian neighbors.

President Park took a decidedly different tack:

Ms. Park said several times during the press conference that China’s cooperation is needed with the U.S. on issues such as nuclear talks with North Korea to economic development. She said her government wants to “fully utilize” China’s influence in regional issues.

The conventional narrative is that the ROK’s current tilt toward the PRC results from a combination of fear and greed.  

But a third reason is that the United States is locked into a deep-tongued, slobbery embrace with Shinzo Abe’s Japan as America’s indispensable pivot partner.

South Korean hostility toward Japan is, of course, partly related toward Prime Minister Abe’s ostentatious nostalgia for a powerful Japan of the kind that killed Korea’s men, raped its women, and sought to obliterate its culture during the 1930s and 40s.

But it has more to do with the fact that the ROK and Japan are locked in a zero-sum economic battle   and Abe is doing his best to eat South Korea’s dosirak:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is continuing with "Abenomics," an economic policy based on massive quantitative easing and weakening of the yen, which Japan claims will save it from its "lost" two decades.

While Japan has partly succeeded in boosting its economy, that seems to be based on the sacrifice of other countries, of which Korea has been hit the hardest.

Korea is concerned that it will be the biggest victim of Japan's "beggar thy neighbor" policy.

…

"Countries like Korea and Germany, where exports take a huge part and the domestic market is relatively small, are damaged most. Korea is especially so, as its export items overlap with those of Japan," Lee said.

Korea has been suffering from the massive quantitative easing by Japan as the won/yen rate has fallen to the lowest level in more than seven years. The Hyundai Research Institute warns that Korea may see its exports, the only sustaining pillar of an economy that has lost steam, decrease by 8.8 percent due to the weak yen. 

And:

[T]he international community seems to be tolerating Japan's manipulation as it has been in such a long slump.

For “international community,” read “United States” in my opinion.   The Obama administration is completely in the tank for Abe since keeping Abe happy is essential if he is going to push unpopular  pivot-friendly initiatives like constitutional reinterpretation and Futenma relocation down the throats of the Japanese electorate.

In self-defense, the ROK has little choice but to tilt to the PRC, thereby seriously complicating the US pursuit of regional leadership status not only on the South China Sea issue, but on North Korea as well.

So far the pivot, in addition to delivering tensions with the PRC, has done a good job of revealing divisions and uncertainty among America’s allies.

And it will be rather difficult for the sailthrough to deliver the galvanizing “freedom (+ Vietnam) vs. PRC despotism” confrontation that papers over the rifts, something that I imagine weighs on President Obama’s mind as he considers his options.

If the sailthrough happens—and even if it doesn’t—the United States will continue to wrestle with fundamental and intractable contradictions within the alliance.

And undoubtedly, the Beltway consensus will be that the only way out is more, better, and more resolute escalation.

Or, as the busy pivoteers at the Pentagon and think tanks put it: Ka-ching!

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.