Robert D. Kaplan
Over the span of the decades since World War II, the United States Navy has made Asia rich but not altogether stable. It was only the security guarantee provided by the U.S. Navy that allowed Asian countries not to fear one another and thus to concentrate on building their economies instead of their militaries. The result has been the Asian economic miracle, which began to gather force in the late 1970s and has continued to the present day. Of course, Asians themselves have ascribed their success to “Asian values”—the emphasis on order and hierarchy embodied in the Confucian ethos. But “the region’s peaceful postwar coexistence, far from being somehow organic to local political cultures,” notes Richard McGregor in “Asia’s Reckoning,” “had been underwritten by the U.S. military.”
Now the situation is changing. The rise of the Chinese navy and the arms race that it has set off across Asia have made the region’s stability tenuous. “A single shot fired in anger” in the East China Sea (where China’s claims face off against Japan’s), or in some other zone of dispute, could send financial markets tumbling, Mr. McGregor notes, and affect “trade routes, manufacturing centers, and retail outlets on every continent.”
A former Financial Times bureau chief in Beijing and Washington, Mr. McGregor has written a shrewd and knowing book about the relationship between China, Japan and America over the past half-century. Among much else, he shows how the world’s top three economies are now imprisoned by increasingly unstable dynamics, and not only in the military realm.
Though Mr. McGregor has pored over archives to put together a hard-to-surpass narrative history of high diplomacy in Asia, the strength of his book is its old-fashioned journalism, in which empathy and explanation outweigh mere exposé. Indeed, “Asia’s Reckoning” has the aura of a “tour-ender,” the kind of conspectus that foreign correspondents of a generation ago and further back would put together after they had finished a multiyear stint in some far-flung place. Here are insightful, detail-rich profiles of everyone from Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger to Kakuei Tanaka (Japan’s prime minister in the early 1970s) and Jiang Zemin (China’s leader from 1989 to 2002).
Though China was a rival and Japan an ally during Mr. Kissinger’s days as a statesman, he enjoyed wide-ranging philosophical discussions with Chinese leaders and dreaded the talks about textile quotas with Japanese officials, who operated in a democracy where power was decentralized and grand ruminations were rare. Mr. Jiang in his heyday, though known for his “ruthless accumulation of power” in Beijing, was given to impressing guests with his childlike snippets of English, Japanese, Russian and Romanian. Tanaka was the Japanese Lyndon Johnson : bawdy, rough-hewn, charismatic, with a “mastery of the dark arts of money and factions,” as Mr. McGregor puts it.
The centerpiece of “Asia’s Reckoning,” though, is the trilateral relationship, in which the U.S. “has its arsenal trained on China,” a country that is, in turn, an existential menace to Japan, which, for its part, is arguably America’s most important ally in the world. “China is the key to Asia,” Mr. McGregor writes, while “Japan is the key to China” and “the United States [is] the key to Japan.” If a conflict is triggered at any point in this circuitry, the post-World War II system in Asia and elsewhere could disintegrate.e culturally intertwined and geographically close, Mr. McGregor observes, China and Japan remain psychically remote, and Japan’s affinity with Taiwan, China’s nemesis, goes back to the late 19th century. Nobody, he emphasizes, should underestimate Asia’s ethnic animosities. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, in a meeting with President Barack Obama, denounced Japan in such strong terms that Mr. Obama had to remind him that Japan was an American ally. The old State Department hand Christopher Hill, with experience negotiating in both the Balkans and East Asia, once said after contentious discussions between the Japanese and South Koreans: “Give me the Bosnian Serbs any day!”
Economic development under China’s overtly authoritarian system and Japan’s officially democratic system (but one with covert authoritarian aspects) has done nothing to quell national hatreds arising from Japan’s World War II crimes against humanity. In China, from popular culture up to the highest leaders, it is believed that Japan should serve a life sentence of humiliation for its wartime conduct. In Japan, statements of remorse have been undermined by periodic visits of Japanese leaders to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where the souls of the 14 Class A war criminals responsible for the vast barbarity against Chinese civilians in the 1930s and ’40s are venerated along with 2.5 million others who died in Japan’s wars.
Then there has been the tendency among Tokyo officials to play down the issue of the “comfort women” pressed into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in the territories it occupied. At the same time, though, China’s behavior on these matters has been cynical in the extreme. The Chinese pick apart Japanese statements of regret in order to appease right-wing elements inside China, undercut Japan diplomatically and mask the fact that Mao Zedong, though fiercely anti-Japanese, exploited the Japanese invasion to advance the Communist takeover in Beijing in 1949.
Ethnic discord and the unresolved demons of the past have been slowly undermining the effects of democracy and middle-class prosperity across East Asia, even as the region becomes more geopolitically important and, as such, more troubling to the West. In the 1980s, Mr. McGregor reminds us, “Japan, not China, was the emerging economic superpower” and thus instilled more fear in Washington than China did. America’s economic battles with Japan back then were a “dress rehearsal” for America’s strategic rivalry with China. In 1990, at the peak of Japan’s economic bubble and just before the Soviet Union disintegrated, twice as many Americans saw Japan’s economy as a greater threat to their interests than the Soviet military. Since then, Japan has declined and China has risen. But the larger picture remains the same: American anxiety over Asian competition, a feeling that stems in part from the threat posed by a value system that is based more on order and hierarchy than on mass democracy.
Mr. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia was less an original strategic concept than something that would have happened decades ago, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, had only Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, 9/11, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars not intervened. In short, America had long wanted to pivot to the Pacific; it was the Middle East that did not allow it.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the free-trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership has weakened America’s prestige in the region. In fact, the administration’s action may constitute the greatest self-inflicted American blunder in Asia since the Vietnam War. Make no mistake: Asians are all about trade and business and thus are the ultimate realists. By leading them up to the altar of free trade and then abandoning them, the U.S. has shown itself to be unreliable—no longer a pillar of security.
Perhaps, as Mr. McGregor says, the principal calculation preventing China from going to war against Japan in the East China Sea or elsewhere is the fear that China might lose—a prospect so disastrous for China that it could result in regime change in Beijing and the end of the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly democracy and prosperity in the region have been insufficient to quell its tensions. Thus the U.S. military, principally the Navy, remains the most important factor in keeping the peace. And the U.S. Navy, as we know from recent mishaps at sea, is being stretched to the limit.
—Mr. Kaplan is the author of “Asia’s Cauldron.” He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior adviser at Eurasia Group.
No comments:
Post a Comment