In the 21st Century, China is Our Main Adversary and Japan is Our Most Important Ally

Francis P. Sempa

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What a difference a century makes. In the 20th century, Germany and the Soviet Union were the main adversaries of the United States, and Great Britain was our most important ally. In the 21st century--at least in its early stages--China is our main adversary and Japan is our most important ally. But the fundamental geopolitics underlying both centuries is remarkably similar despite the scientific and technological changes. And that is so because of the centrality of Eurasia to global politics.

In his book The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that “Eurasia . . . is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” Eurasia contains most of the world’s people and resources, and is “the location of most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states.” Brzezinski called it the “megacontinent” and wrote that America’s security depended upon the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. And he described the most dangerous post-Cold War scenario as “a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran.”

A quarter-century later, that “grand coalition” is emerging. China’s economic and military power has grown faster than even Brzezinski thought likely. It has become a peer competitor of the United States and has formed a strategic partnership with a revived Russia that is flexing its muscles again in Eastern Europe. Iran, meanwhile, sees itself as the preeminent power in the Middle East and has formed strong economic and political ties to China and Russia. This has led some commentators to label the China-Russia-Iran relationship (and some add North Korea) an “axis” that threatens the global balance of power.

The United States, however, cannot and should not confront all three powers simultaneously. Contemporary strategists call this approach “strategic sequencing,” and the logic behind such a strategy is to concentrate resources on the most significant challenge and, if fighting breaks out, to avoid a multi-front war. Strategic sequencing harkens back to Walter Lippmann’s prudent advice for ensuring that commitments do not exceed resources. As Hal Brands has noted, today China, Russia, and Iran, even though not formally allied, “are aligned in a critical area--the Eurasian heartland.”

Brands compares today’s strategic predicament to the global threat faced by the United States in the period before World War II. “The basic pattern of geopolitics,” he writes, “look painfully familiar.” Although the Axis powers in the 1930s--Germany, Italy and Japan--signed the Tripartite Pact at the end of the decade, Brands describes their association as a “loose agreement to blow up the existing order and build separate empires amid the rubble.” But even that “loose agreement” created what Brands describes as “a deep, destructive synergy” for expansion. And therein lay the global threat.

With conflict raging in Eastern Europe, storm clouds gathering in the South China Sea, and Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and its perpetual meddling in the broader Middle East, the United States needs to sequence its responses to these multi-region challenges. This means “playing for time” in less important challenges while focusing resources and efforts in the most important region. And today, that region is the Indo-Pacific.

And that means that Japan today is our most important ally--more important than England, more important than Germany and France, and more important than Israel and Saudi Arabia. Japan, like Great Britain in the 20th century, is the key island offshore of Eurasia. As Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute has noted, “It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Japan as a U.S. ally” due to its “unique role in the security of the Indo-Pacific region.” This is a result of geography, economics, and Japan’s increased military power. Japan is like an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which the United States--itself a global island power--can project power onto the Eurasian landmass against China, the main adversary.

American policymakers, of course, cannot control the actions of other countries. Although China is the main adversary and should receive the most attention from U.S. policymakers, if Iran, for example, acquires nuclear weapons and threatens the U.S. or its allies in the region, we would have to respond. Likewise, if Russia invaded or attacked a NATO ally, the U.S. would have to respond. But barring such developments, the Indo-Pacific should be the “first” region in our strategic sequencing.

And this strategic sequencing strategy could include efforts to exploit potential divisions within the China-Russia-Iran axis. We must not let our distaste for the nature of those regimes to prevent us from reaching an accommodation that may benefit us in our struggle with the main adversary. Vladimir Putin has waged a war of aggression in Ukraine while killing and imprisoning his political enemies within Russia. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States courted Mao Zedong’s China in order to combat the greater and more immediate challenge posed by the Soviet Union. At that time, Mao was providing military supplies that the North Vietnamese armed forces used to kill American soldiers and was killing and imprisoning his political enemies and ordinary Chinese citizens in the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. Just as during the Second World War, when Germany was the main enemy, U.S. policymakers courted Stalin’s Soviet Union despite the fact that it had seized the Baltic States, half of Poland, parts of Finland, and was killing and imprisoning Stalin’s political opponents--real and imagined--by the millions.

Vladimir Putin’s crimes do not compare with those of Mao and Stalin. We can deplore what he has done and is doing in Ukraine, but sentiment and emotion should not guide our foreign policy. To paraphrase Britain’s Lord Palmerston, America has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.