By Jake Douglas
The debate over whether the U.S. would aid Japan in a fight against China misses the crucial question.
These pages recently saw the latest round of a familiar debate: Will the U.S. defend Japan in the event of war with China? Paul Sracic says maybe not; Jun Okumura says yes. The authors’ contributions are certainly valuable. Yet fundamentally they did not address the right question.
Japanese political leaders do not lay awake at night worrying in binary terms whether America will abandon them. What really animates them is not if, but how the U.S. would aid Japan. Framing the discussion in this way better explains American strategic ambiguity and Japanese military hedging.
Start with the assumption that if there was a serious crisis, skirmish, or war in the East China Sea, America would do something. The United States’ security relationship with Japan stretches back seven decades. It stations around 50,000 military personnel on Japanese soil. President Barack Obama clearly stated back in April that the Mutual Security Treaty covers the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, calling the American security guarantee “absolute.” If armed conflict erupted with China, it is almost inconceivable that the U.S. would not provide some kind of military assistance to its most important ally in Asia.
So if America’s commitment demands that it defend Japan, why the enduring ambiguity? Although the State Department did so immediately, the president himself waited two tense years after the original 2012 nationalization spat to clarify U.S. treaty obligations. He was quick to soften the blow when he finally did. In a joint press conference with Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe, Obama was asked if the U.S. would consider using force to help Japan defend the islands against a Chinese military incursion. He gave an awkward response, implying that if his previous statement was a “redline,” then his administration was not responsible for drawing it. If Obama had wanted to send an unambiguous signal of resolve, he could have simply answered, “Yes, we would.” It is because of this evasion of definitive answers that we keep having these debates about U.S. credibility. But it would be a mistake to think the equivocation is accidental or the result of policy confusion.
Read the full story at The Diplomat