KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
It is 7,000 miles from Washington to Beijing, but it is only a little more than 1,000 miles from Tokyo to Beijing. If it sometimes seems that Japan is taking China seven times more seriously than is the United States, the explanation may be as simple as that.
Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, is on his way out, and his most likely (though not certain) successor is a former foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, who embodies the increasingly assertive national-defense mentality of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Kishida has suggested that Japan requires, among other armaments, missiles that could be used to preemptively disable Chinese missiles that might be directed at Japan.
If you will forgive a little inside baseball, here is an anecdote that might be instructive: A Japanese diplomat, in a conversation reported by China analyst Gregory Kulacki in the Diplomat, expressed skepticism about the credibility of the so-called nuclear umbrella offered by Washington, and declared that “the only cooperative nuclear arrangement that would satisfy him would be for the United States to supply Japan with U.S. nuclear weapons, train the Japanese military to deliver them, and give the Japanese government the authority to decide how and when they will be used.” That diplomat, a Kishida ally, went on to become vice minister of foreign affairs with a portfolio that included the issue of “extended deterrence,” suggesting that his ideas are not seen as off-the-wall.
But even if Kishida does not become the next prime minister, it is likely that whoever does will take a much more hawkish view of China, because hawkish views of China are increasingly common within the LDP.
Japan had a great deal for which to atone after World War II, and, because it is the only country against which nuclear weapons so far have actually been deployed, its people and its politics are especially attuned to the dreadful nature of such instruments. But it may also be the case that the Japanese have overcorrected in the direction of pacifism — and in the direction of a reliance on the United States that at times is politically electric in Japan, which already is in the process of expanding its military capabilities, and whose leaders have declared the situation in Taiwan a “red line” for Japan–China relations.
As Kulacki notes, Japan has twice formally reconsidered its national posture vis-à-vis nuclear weapons, and has twice rejected the pursuit of them. But the last such review was in 1995, and much has changed since then. The China of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin was a brutal, single-party police state, as it is today, but it was one that much of the world mistakenly expected to develop in another direction. Xi Jinping’s China is a different thing and apparently, from Tokyo’s point of view, a more worrisome one.
Japan is one quarter of the “Quad,” the informal grouping of four countries — the United States, India, and Australia are the others — intensely concerned about Beijing’s neo-imperial ambitions and working to coordinate responses to them. Japan has a great deal of power — economic power, cultural power, technological power, and even some military power. But its military capabilities are artificially constrained by historical considerations that have been overtaken by events. A well-armed Japan — possibly a nuclear-armed Japan — would be good for the Japanese, good for the United States, good for the Quad, and good for the world. It would need a defter touch than U.S. diplomacy has exhibited in recent years — our position toward Japan’s military normalization should be one of support and encouragement, not one characterized by the petty hectoring with which we too often treat our NATO partners.
Japan is not the only country with a leadership change imminent.
It hardly makes the news in the United States, but the Leader of the Free World is about to retire: German chancellor Angela Merkel, who for 16 years has been an anchor of liberal-democratic values, has reached the end of her career, and it is far from obvious that her conservative Christian Democratic Union will hold on to power after she exits the stage. Her anointed successor, Armin Laschet, made an ass of himself after deadly floods earlier this summer; the Green candidate, Annalena Baerbock, took off like a rocket before promptly crashing into a couple of petty, Bidenesque scandals (income reporting, plagiarism), and now is third in the polls; Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the finance minister and vice chancellor and a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, finds himself, against expectations, the most popular candidate. Though there are some concerns that Scholz might align himself with far-left elements, there is little reason to think that the election of any of these candidates would presage a radical change in German foreign policy. But some major changes might be to Washington’s liking: Baerbock’s Greens are implacably hostile to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and have suggested that it could be shut down for political reasons even once it is operational.
Our European allies are dismayed by developments in Afghanistan. They had believed, naïvely, that the end of the Donald Trump administration would mean a more cooperative model of foreign relations in Washington, but President Joe Biden undertook the panicky and headlong U.S. surrender to the Taliban without even pretending to consult them, threatening Europe with, among other things, another refugee crisis.
The Europeans, like the Japanese, are increasingly of the opinion that the United States is no longer reliable as an ally or — worse — credible as an enemy. With U.S. foreign policy having been almost entirely subordinated to day-by-day domestic political calculation, the Europeans are, like the Japanese, looking to expand their own capabilities and their capacity to maneuver independent of the United States. And we should encourage our allies to do so.
Post-Brexit, France is the only EU country with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and the veto power that goes with that. The EU would like to see Germany added as a permanent Security Council member, and this project deserves the energetic support of the United States. A more powerful European Union serves U.S. interests generally, and, in this case, the move would dilute the power of permanent UNSC members China and Russia — a win-win for Washington.
If the events in Afghanistan have made anything plain, it is that the American people — not Washington, not the Biden administration, but the American people — are no longer prepared to “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. It is not even clear that the American people are prepared to pay any price and bear any burden in the pursuit of their own interests against their confirmed enemies. In such a situation, the intelligent course of action is to bolster our allies and those nations around the world that share our values.
A cynical argument for this is that an assertive and well-armed Japan is a terrifying problem for Beijing and that a confident and competent European Union is our best bet for keeping Vladimir Putin and his heirs in check. As noted: Tokyo is a lot closer to Beijing than Washington is, and Berlin a lot closer to Moscow. A less cynical, but also true, argument for it is that American interests do, in fact, have a universal aspect, that the interests of the free world are also our interests.
To understand this is not sentimentalism — it is pragmatic. Because the rest of the 21st century is going to be dominated by one set of values or the other: Either liberal-democratic values will prevail because the liberal democracies work together to ensure that they do, or authoritarian nationalism will prevail because the liberal democracies die from exhaustion.
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