Asian security doctrines: Japan steps up
By Graeme Dobell
The Japanese Prime Minister came to Singapore to announce Japan will have a military and security role in Asia’s future. Shinzo Abe told the Shangri-La dialogue: ‘Japan intends to play an even greater and more proactive role than it has until now in making peace in Asia and the world’.
Japan, he said, would offer its utmost support to ASEAN ‘to ensure the security of the seas and the skies, and thoroughly maintain freedom of navigation and freedom of overflight’.
In the Abe description of what’s happening in Asia, China is challenging the status quo while Japan is standing up for the law.
Shinzo Abe knew the history he was making and the history he was stepping away from. During questions, a PLA Lieutenant-Colonel asked how Japan could speak about regional peace given its history of war and Abe’s visit in December to the Yasukuni Shrine. The Prime Minister replied that he had repeatedly expressed remorse for the war and that Japan had changed to become a peaceful, democratic nation that respected law.
In the Abe telling, the hierarchy of support for Japan’s new security role reads: the US, Australia, India and ASEAN, marked by US-Japan trilateral efforts with both Australia and India:
Recently President Barack Obama of the United States and I mutually reaffirmed that the US-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone for regional peace and security. President Obama and I also mutually confirmed that the United States and Japan are strengthening trilateral cooperation with likeminded partners to promote peace and economic prosperity in Asia and the Pacific and around the globe.
When Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott visited Japan at the beginning of April, we reaffirmed this exact stance, namely that in security affairs, we will further the trilateral cooperation among Japan, the US, and Australia. We clearly articulated to people both at home and abroad our intention to elevate the strategic partnership between Japan and Australia to a new special relationship.
Listening to Abe deliver his keynote address, I compared his tone and content to that of previous Japanese Prime Ministers I covered in Southeast Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
At that stage, Japanese leaders were getting the polite, correct reception accorded to the richest man in town; no more deadly riots of the sort that greeted Prime Minister Tanaka when he arrived in Jakarta in 1974.
By the time I was following Japanese PMs around Singapore, KL and Jakarta, the script was well established. At each ASEAN stop, the PM would promise Japan’s leadership for Asia’s bright economic future, apologise sincerely for WWII and then be bombarded with questions about how much more local management there could be in the new Japanese factories springing up across the region. The apology was never quite enough, nor was the promise of greater local influence in Japanese companies. ASEAN was more worried about being dominated by Japanese managers than any return of the Japanese military.
In a more explicit way than the other ASEAN leaders, Lee Kuan Yew would marvel at what the Japanese had achieved and ruminate on the dark places in the Japanese soul he’d seen during the war. Japan had to be careful about its prerogatives. When Malaysia’s Mahathir proposed an East Asian Caucus (a caucus without the Caucasians) he wanted Japan as its leader. The rest of ASEAN wasn’t too keen and, just as importantly, Japan wouldn’t step up to accept. Then, relatively suddenly, the tide turned. Japan meandered off to wallow in a lost economic decade while China, shaking off its pariah moment after the Tiananmen massacre, hit cruising speed.
The weight of history means Abe had to come to Singapore to give his Asian security speech. He couldn’t do it anywhere else in Northeast Asia; in China the protests would be huge, Korea would be deeply chilly, even Taiwan wouldn’t risk it.
Abe was able to make history here because ASEAN has been so deeply shaken. The fear around here isn’t about the echoes of history but of tomorrow’s next provocation or push. Rule of law sounds like a great idea. China being nasty to the Philippines is par for the course; but when China does the same to Vietnam—rending recent repair efforts with Hanoi—ASEAN goes beyond spooked towards terrified. That framed Abe’s cascading headline for his speech:
Peace and prosperity in Asia, forevermoreJapan for the rule of lawAsia for the rule of lawAnd the rule of law for all of us.
It works better as an extended headline than the way Abe put it in his conclusion—the new banner for ‘the new Japanese’ will be ‘Proactive Contribution to Peace’.
Graeme Dobell is the ASPI journalist fellow. He is reporting from the 2014 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Image courtesy of Flickr user U.S. Pacific Command.
This article first appeared on the ASPI "The Strategist" Blog and is reposted here under a Creative Commons license.
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Asian security doctrines: the biggest question
By Graeme Dobell
The biggest question facing Asia is becoming even starker because leaders are giving such different answers. The leaders of the US, China and Japan have just illustrated the conundrum that Rod Lyon outlined in his piece on Asia’s fraying order. Simply stated, the biggest question is: who rules? Or, in slightly expanded form, it asks: what is the Asian security system and how will it run?
Mind you, Asia is lucky that it has graduated to the point where this is the major security quandary it faces. In recent memory, the problems were even bigger: will the new nations of Asia form and unite? Can Asia modernise and deliver a better life for its people?
Having climbed those huge mountains, a rich and powerful Asia can afford a naval arms race as part of this new power contest. Before donning the gloom-and-doom persona that strategists share with economists, it’s worth pausing to reflect that Asia’s new big question is the product of success. As China’s President remarks: ‘Asia today, though facing more risks and challenges, is still the most dynamic and promising region in the world. … Such a sound situation in the region has not come easily and ought to be doubly cherished’. Hear, hear!
After that unusual always-look-on-the-bright-side moment (well, unusual for The Strategist), let’s turn to the conflicting answer that leaders of Japan, China and the US are serving up to the big new conundrum.
As the previous post (above) reported, Shinzo Abe agrees with the Chinese that Asia’s prosperity is shining and expanding, but Japan’s Prime Minister sees China as a threat to that status quo.
China, too, has laid out its views about how the system is shifting. Xi Jinping went directly to the systemic level (and who rules it) with his Shanghai security speech. The speech is here and is worth a read. You’ll find nothing in the text directly about high-sea dodgems, fighting fishing boats, coral confrontations, reef raids or roving oil rigs. But Xi’s fine words about how Asia’s new security system should work—and his proposal for new institutions—are valuable, if merely because the region can play them back to China, asking it to meet such standards.
Xi serves up much of what has become the usual Chinese boilerplate on Asia’s security system over the previous two decades, but adds in fresh strokes to be expected from a new leader starting to paint with confidence. The traditional frame is in place—that Asia needs new security thinking (Xi’s ‘new security concept’), not the old, Cold War security thinking. In that Chinese analysis, though, the US bilateral treaty system in Asia is the oldest of old thinking.
The jabs at old thinking are getting sharper. Thus, this whack from Xi: ‘To beef up and entrench a military alliance targeted at a third party is not conducive to maintaining common security’. That sets the scene for the widely-quoted Yankee-go-home call by Xi for an Asian system run by Asians:
In the final analysis, it’s for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia. The people of Asia have the capability and wisdom to achieve peace and stability in the region through enhanced cooperation.
The problem for Xi in offering Chinese leadership to that bright Asian future is he’s getting precious little Asian followship.
Across the Pacific, Barack Obama’s West Point speech looks like his Guam doctrine moment, offering balm to a war-weary America. Thankfully for Asia, Obama’s doctrinal moment has been far more carefully structured than Richard Nixon’s; unveiled at an impromptu press conference at a flight stopover in Guam on the way to Asia in the dog days of the Vietnam war. Even Kissinger was amazed that Nixon had publicly launched, in Guam of all places, their private ruminations on post-Vietnam strategy and the call for allies to do more of the heavy lifting.
Obama did his foreign policy big picture immediately after a four-nation tour of Asia that didn’t include China. And the promises he made in Asia must be weighed against the Asia-lite content of the speech. The fact of that Asia tour counsels against the fevered commentary that Obama has rebooted foreign policy by giving the boot to the Asia pivot. Even in a speech where Asia hardly figured, there was still room for three mentions of the South China Sea and a warning to China to play by the rules.
Going to Asia but not to China was both a nod and a jab at Beijing. The nod is that China’s now in a category of its own at the top of the mountain—the G2 perspective. Or as I put it last year when Obama and Xi met, render it as the g2, because both sides deny that they’d ever connive at condominium.
The jab is in the understanding—shown in the planning rather than the words—that China has become the default enemy in Asia.
Back to that big question: what is the Asian security system and how will it run?
Graeme Dobell is the ASPI journalist fellow. He is reporting from the 2014 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Image courtesy of Flickr user The White House.
This article first appeared on the ASPI "The Strategist" Blog and is reposted here under a Creative Commons license.