IS Barack Obama's United States imperialistic, too, in its designs in East Asia, where China's tryst with destiny as a possible superpower is on course at this stage? Alternatively, is Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Japan so fragile that it has to give up its goal of reducing the U.S. military footprint in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa?
As on other major questions of international concern, there are surely no easy answers. However, by May 10, hours before Hatoyama was to begin consultations with his key ministerial colleagues to firm up a proposal for Obama's consideration, two clear trends were evident. Obama's U.S. would not brook genuine dissent by Hatoyama's Japan, which, in turn, began relearning the basics of the military alliance that the two countries fashioned in the early 1950s, revised in the early 1960s and continued thereafter to update now and then. What do these trends imply?
Shorn of the elaborate arguments about details of the overall U.S. military presence in Japan, a direct outcome of the Second World War, the political implications of the awkward Obama-Hatoyama engagement were not complicated at all. The U.S. was still the military lord of all that it might wish to survey in Japan, not just Okinawa. And, Tokyo was still feeling too self-constrained to ask the U.S. to scale down, if not close, at least some of its high-profile military facilities, which are, nonetheless, disliked by sizable sections of the Japanese population. The result, as this is written, is a stalemate that suits Obama's somewhat-unlikely gung-ho image and deeply hurts Hatoyama's sense of political self-respect besides exposing the limits of Japan's foreign-policy options.
Early in May, Hatoyama visited Naha, the capital of Okinawa, and profusely apologised to the people there for his inability to negotiate a reduction of the U.S. military footprint in the prefecture. His apology was punctuated by waves of public protest over the prolonged American military presence in Japan. But he wanted to prepare the people for what he saw as inevitable: the need to admit that he would fail to honour a key election promise by the end of May, his recent but self-imposed deadline to make good on the pledge. At the time of the Japanese general elections last August, he promised to lessen the burden on the people of Okinawa by securing the relocation of a key U.S. military base outside the prefecture or even outside Japan altogether.
Since the end of the Second World War, Okinawa has remained particularly important to Japan's foreign-policy considerations. After holding the prefecture for more than two decades after the Second World War, the U.S. returned Okinawa to Japan as late as 1972. Such a piece of contemporary history is only a part of the continuing saga of a high degree of popular sentiment against, or indeed resistance to, the U.S. military's aims in Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan.
Significantly, Hatoyama assumed office last September on a groundswell of popular support across Japan after he promised to stand up to the U.S. and be counted. Obviously, such a pledge was not the only factor behind his stunning success. Of critical importance to his electoral triumph, nonetheless, was his promise of an equal relationship with the U.S., different from the deferential attitude of almost all previous Japanese governments towards the U.S. since the end of the Second Wold War.
The political drama of Hatoyama's pledge was heightened by two basic ground realities. In place, as of early May and at the time of last year's general elections, was an accord with the U.S. on several military aspects, including, in particular, the future status of the U.S.' Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in a densely populated zone within Okinawa. The official bilateral deal was to relocate the controversial Futenma facility to a less-inhabited stretch of the Okinawa prefecture. Also agreed upon by a previous Japanese government was the relocation of some U.S. troops outside Japan.
Against such a general political background, magnified in the eyes of the Japanese people by some logistical detail not recounted here, Hatoyama sought and secured a hero's stature at the time of the elections. His resounding refrain then contained two specifics of considerable relevance to the early May context in Japan-U.S. interactions. He promised to renegotiate with the U.S. so as to secure the shifting of the facility. Such a specific pledge was also portrayed as a doable proposition in the light of his other definitive promise, to try and secure for Japan a more equal equation with the U.S. albeit as its partner still.
In Hatoyama's emerging world view last August, pledges of such magnitude were feasible on two interrelated counts. Of primary significance in that subtext was his willingness to take at face value Obama's then-prevalent image as a kinder and gentler statesman who might be willing to give Japan some genuinely autonomous space within a U.S.-led multipolar world-in-the-making. And, the subtext was complete with the relatively secondary assessment by Hatoyama that the U.S. was already on a downward trajectory as the main player because of the inherent failings of its globalisation strategies. These and other views of candidate Hatoyama were based on his firm belief that China, with which Japan already had a complex neighbourly relationship throughout much of history, was now unmistakably rising as a potential global-scale superpower.
In a sense, candidate Hatoyama wanted Japan to stand up to the U.S. if only because such a posture might, in his view, benefit Tokyo in its future dealings with Beijing. In fact, some Chinese analysts recently argued that his election-time foreign-policy preferences were not as clear-cut a stand for autonomy in Japan's interactions with the U.S. as they were made out to be in numerous interpretations in either country and elsewhere too. According to these analysts, Hatoyama was actually seeking to play a balance-of-power game in East Asia. The idea was that Japan's U.S.-related autonomy would please China, while Japan's China-oriented goodwill might prompt the U.S. to take the Japanese government more seriously.
However, all such interpretations of candidate Hatoyama's foreign-policy wizardry began to look unreal in the light of his own self-deprecatory stand on Japan's ties with the U.S. in early May.
In his early May visit to Naha, Hatoyama cited two reasons for his apology to the people of Okinawa: the current state of Japan-U.S. ties and the continuing relevance of U.S.-activated and Okinawa-based deterrence for Japan's protection and for peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. In making such a case, though, the Japanese leader succeeded only in acknowledging that he had singularly failed to change the basic dynamics of Japan-U.S. ties in the eight months he had been in office by May 10. And, as for the argument about the centrality of U.S.-activated deterrence from out of Japan, Hatoyama should have known on the basis of the U.S.' globalised military capabilities, including its immense nuclear arsenal that there was nothing really new about such a perceived ground reality. In any case, the U.S.-activated deterrence for Japan's protection was not something that came into play only after Hatoyama assumed office.
By deductive logic, and on the basis of this correspondent's off-the-record conversations with North-East Asian diplomats, it became clear by early May that candidate Hatoyama had underestimated Obama's pursuit of America's interests as the global superpower in distress. Standing critical scrutiny, of course, are the views of experts such as Michael Mandelbaum that the current fiscal condition of the U.S. explains the signs of a retrenchment in Washington's global-scale power. Some of these experts do not rule out the possibility of the U.S. having too little of such power in the coming decades to be able to stay on at the helm of global affairs. Closely linked to these perceptions in the specific Japanese context is the view of other experts such as Yusuo Takao that Tokyo's own evolving military security policy has been marked so far by a great deal of restraint. The cumulative effect of such perceptions, including those about Obama's unsuspected tenacity in trying to keep the U.S. afloat as the world's solitary superpower of the day, should explain Hatoyama's early May predicament.
Also inevitably linked to the future of the current asymmetry in the Japan-U.S. equation is Japan's move to befriend China and South Korea in the overall North-East Asian security environment. Obviously, any kind of military-related equation between Tokyo and Beijing, except perhaps some mutual confidence-building measures, is unthinkable as long as the U.S.-Japan security alliance remains credible in whatever form. Nonetheless, and even before Hatoyama's rise as Prime Minister, Japan had taken the initiative for what can be described as the Fukuoka consensus, after the name of the Japanese place where Japan as also China and South Korea began a diplomatic process for their trilateral engagement on a regular basis at the highest political level.
With the Fukuoka consensus holding firm, the leaders of these three countries were scheduled, as this was written, to meet for their third trilateral summit. On the face of it, the Fukuoka consensus originally a matter of economic coordination among these countries during the recent global financial crisis can evolve, over time, into a political framework of coordination among these North-East Asian powers. This will, in turn, be of interest or even concern to the U.S. mainly because there is much potential for China to team up suitably with Japan and South Korea to hedge against the U.S. during its now apparent phase as a global superpower in some form of decline. It is in this sense that Obama's stand-firm posture towards Japan makes a lot of geopolitical sense.
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