By Yo-Jung Chen
Abe’s diplomatic successes are being constrained by his ideological leanings.
As the world casts a wary eye on China’s rapid and aggressive expansion in the seas to its east and south, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, who does little to hide his ambition of rallying the world to a ring of containment around the Middle Kingdom, is pursuing an active program of diplomacy that has been unusually wide-ranging.
Although Abe’s outreach has had its successes, there is scope for debate as to whether Abe’s diplomacy has been as successful as the Japanese media tend to portray it. Overall, it is not clear whether those countries Abe has courted are entirely won over to his grandiose design of a “ring of democracies” encircling Communist China. (Never mind that not all of these partners are exemplary “democracies” themselves.) In fact, many of them appear to be only too happy to benefit from the rivalry between the world’s second and third largest economies.
Besides, as long as Japan’s sticks to its traditional allegiance to its U.S. ally, Abe’s diplomatic overtures, however active, will inevitably be seen as a proxy of American interests.
In a sense, Japanese diplomacy’s loyalty to America may be seen as the diplomatic manifestation of what Robert Dujarric recently described in The Diplomat as Japan’s parochialism. Here is a great advanced nation, rich in culture, widely esteemed as the world’s third economy, and with a fine record as a peaceful nation during the seven decades of its democratic rebirth after the war. And yet this economic giant has so far shied away from becoming a political power, preferring to remain in the shadow of America, as if it were still under postwar U.S. occupation. As Dujarric aptly pointed out, Japan sees the world uniquely through the prism of the United States while consistently constraining its diplomatic options to those acceptable to Washington.
This overreliance on America has at times caused Japanese diplomacy to act in a way seemingly at odds with its own interests. One recent such case was when Japan, which never misses an opportunity to proclaim its status as the only nation to be the victim of an atomic bombing, inexplicably abstained in early November from voting on a United Nations resolution calling for a treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons. Although Japan ended up supporting a revised version of the resolution, critics suspect that the untold reason for its initial abstention was simply U.S. opposition to the resolution in question.
By focusing exclusively on the United States, Japan has excluded many diplomatic possibilities, among them that of building normal friendly ties with its neighbors. In doing so, it has isolated itself from the rest of the world and finds itself without reliable all-weather friends.
Read the full story at The Diplomat