Militarized Japan and the Biden-Kishida Summit: A Signal Moment in the New Cold War
Commentary by Joseph Gerson, January 11, 2023
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida came to Washington on Friday, January 13. Unlike in Japan, his summit with President Joe Biden will not garner much press attention in the United States, but it marks a signal moment in Japan’s rise in military power and in the implementation of the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS). The NSS, which prioritizes Chinese and Russian challenges to the so-called “rules-based order,” a euphemism for U.S. primacy which is rife with contradictions, prioritizes the centrality of alliances to U.S. global power, stating that “our alliances and partnerships around the world are our most important strategic asset.”
The revitalized 70-year-old U.S.-Japan alliance has renewed importance in enforcing U.S. defense of Taiwan and resisting the expansion of Chinese influence across the South China/West Philippine Sea. This Sea is the geopolitically critical expanse of ocean across which 40% of world trade—including Middle Eastern oil which fuels East Asian economies—flows. Similarly, further integration of the Japanese and U.S. economies and technological resources are encompassed by the alliance and seen as essential to the power and wealth of both nations.
Prime Minister Kishida stated that the summit would be a “very important” opportunity to “demonstrate at home and abroad the further strengthening of the Japan-U.S. alliance.” The alliance is not a new development. In 1952 the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (AMPO in Japanese) was secretly imposed on Japan as a condition for ending the postwar military occupation. Since then, contrary to Japan’s “peace constitution,” the island nation has served as the center of the United States’ hub-and-spokes Asia-Pacific alliance structure. It reinforced the Cold War containment doctrine in Asia, and in the 21st century it plays a critical role in containing and managing China’s rise and its challenge to U.S. regional hegemony.
Misconceptions About the Peace Constitution and the Growth of Japan’s Military
Misconceptions about Japan’s “Peace Constitution” abound. The document’s Article 9, which has been fervently defended by most Japanese, states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” It goes on to commit that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
Yet, in the tradition of law being what those with power say what it is, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and courts have been “elastic” in their interpretation of Article 9. Over recent decades, Japan’s military spending has grown to $50 billion a year and is about to be doubled. Japan currently ranks as the world’s eighth greatest military spender, well behind China, but significantly ahead of U.S. allies like Israel, Italy, Australia, and Canada.
During the Korean War, to protect the rear flank of its military bases across Japan, occupation forces compelled the Japanese government to take its initial steps in what was to become its military, euphemistically branded as the “Japan Self Defense Force” (SDF). In 1952, what had been a minimal national police force was renamed the National Safety Force and expanded to 110,000 personnel. Two years later the Safety Force was rechristened the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, shattering essential constitutional restraints. Over time the SDF would grow, as did its capabilities and regional roles.
Until recent decades, the U.S. and Japanese militaries operated with a division of labor. The SDF was responsible for guarding Japan and the more than 100 U.S. military bases and installations across the Japanese archipelago, including the massive Yokota Base in the Japanese capital and the massive concentration of bases in Okinawa which have transformed Japan into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the United States. Washington’s “responsibility” has been to ensure “peace” through the exercise of its regional hegemony. This has included defense of Japan via “extended deterrence” – Washington’s nuclear umbrella over Japan, which has also served as a check on the nuclear ambitions of segments of the Japanese elite and military.
Given strong Japanese pacifist commitments as a consequence of the country’s disastrous 15-year war of aggression (beginning with the 1931 invasion of China, not the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor), the military and the elite have pursued a “salami strategy” by expanding the Japanese military and its roles one slice at a time. By 1989, the SDF moved to increase its capacities for overseas military deployments under cover of participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations from Cambodia and East Timor to Haiti and South Sudan.
Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi invoked Japan’s “responsibilities as a member of the international community” as necessitating operations by Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces in providing logistical support to U.S. forces. And in 2003, this time under cover of a U.N. resolution for Iraqi reconstruction, a small SDF force was dispatched to Iraq with U.S. guarantees that they would not suffer casualties; while it added nothing to the U.S.-led war, it was designed to whittle away at popular Japanese resistance to sending SDF forces into war zones. In 2017, Japan joined a revitalized QUAD alliance (U.S., Japan, Australia, and India) and has since participated in joint naval operations with the U.S. and partner nations in the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf. Over the past year, moreover, it has signaled its willingness to join the U.S. in the event of a war for Taiwan.
Today, the Japanese military is anything but inconsequential, with more than 300,000 troops, an Air Self Defense Force comprised primarily of advanced U.S. fighters, and a Maritime Self Defense Force of 155 ships including destroyers and helicopter carriers, some of which can double as aircraft carriers. Japan’s rockets can reach Beijing and Pyongyang. It has its own intelligence satellites, and the Kishida government is in the process of committing to develop precision conventional missiles capable of first-strike attacks against North Korea and China.
At last count, Japan possessed 47 tons of weapons-grade plutonium in its stockpiles, and it has long been assumed that it is just “a turn of a screwdriver” away from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. Sheila A. Smith writes in Japan Rearmed that “the Japanese government has never argued that Article 9 would prevent the nuclear option.” And in 1996 the lead author of Japan’s Defense White Paper stated that for 30 years the SDF has believed that it has the right to deploy tactical nuclear weapons (which can be as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs). It was, he simply said, a right that the SDF had yet to exercise.
Responding to China’s Rise and North Korea’s Nukes and Missiles
With memories of Japan’s brutal WWII conquests and military/colonial occupations, Asian nations — especially China and Korea — have been wary of Japanese militarism and rearmament. However, China’s rise, replacing Japan as the world’s second wealthiest country and entailing a massive military buildup, along with North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, have come as massive shocks to the Japanese people and establishment. They have spurred and provided the political rationale for Tokyo’s near total abandonment of Article 9, its military buildup, and the expanding alliance with the United States.
In the face of China’s growing military power and North Korea’s increasing military capabilities, Tokyo has repeatedly increased its military budget, breaking what was the long-honored spending cap of 1% of its GDP for the SDF. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — who ruled from 2012 to 2020 — pressed the expansion of the Japanese military and unsuccessfully prioritized the elimination of Article 9, constitutional limitations be damned.
In mid-December, without national debate, Prime Minister Kishida (Abe’s successor) appears to have shattered the last vestiges of Article 9 restrictions. In the last month he has committed to doubling Japan’s military expenditures. In the words of Japan’s newspaper of record, Asahi Shimbun, the Kishida Cabinet adopted new versions of three major security policies: the National Security Strategy, the Defense Strategy, and the Defense Capability Enhancement Plan. As Asahi Shimbun editorialized, “the centerpiece of his new defense strategy is the possession of the ability to strike enemy bases, which…entails the risk of triggering a Japanese action that is seen as a pre-emptive strike in violation of international law. The policy shift could also risk provoking military countermeasures from potential enemies and heighten tensions in the region.”
Common Security Diplomatic Alternatives
All of this is taking place in the context of spiraling arms races and provocative military activities in East Asia and more broadly across the Indo-Pacific. China responded to December’s massive increase in U.S. military spending by sending a wave of 71 warplanes and 7 warships across the medial line in the Taiwan Strait. Subsequently, a Chinese warplane intercepted a U.S. spy plane threatening a collision as it came within 10 feet of the American aircraft.
Responding to renewed and massive U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which include the toppling of the North Korean regime, Kim Jung Un launched dozens of missiles near South Korean and Japanese waters and claims to have tested a new ICBM rocket engine capable of reaching the United States. In response, the right-wing Yoon government in Seoul and the Biden administration are meeting to deepen their nuclear weapons collaboration.
Were the stakes not so high, these reckless demonstrations of power could be compared to Mafia battles for street cred. Just as there are certain rules for Mafia struggles for power, there are also diplomatic rules and international law designed to prevent catastrophes in great power and other international competitions. Not the least is the United Nations Charter, which obligates states to “refrain….from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” and requires that international disputes be resolved by peaceful means. These rules were further enhanced in the 1980s by the Common Security commitments forged in Europe stating that no nation would seek to enhance its security by jeopardizing that of other nations. Common Security served as the paradigm on which the Cold War was brought to an end, and it defined Euro-Atlantic relations throughout the 1990s, the first decade of the post-Cold War era.
Today, across the Indo-Pacific, as well as in the escalating Ukraine War, humanity stands an accident or miscalculation away from the calamity of nuclear war. It is past time for the U.S., Japan, China, and the Koreas to pursue their national interests — including human survival — by backing away from and reversing their dangerously spiraling military confrontations and embrace Common Security diplomacy and solutions. The Biden Administration could renew appeals for Common Security diplomacy and solutions, urging great and lesser power collaborations — including reversal of the dangers of the climate emergency — instead of pursuing primacy.
Rather than pouring military fuel on the fire, the U.S. and Japan, each of which faces major economic and social challenges, should cease encouraging Taiwanese independence and encourage what would be difficult and extended Taiwanese-Chinese negotiations over the self-governing island’s future. As in the days that immediately followed the brief Biden-Xi summit, the two great powers could ratchet down the number and intensity of their provocative military exercises. Moreover, today’s Asia-Pacific powers could agree to collaborate in securing South China/West Philippine sea lanes, encourage ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a regional code of conduct, and share the sea’s vast resources. The U.S., South Korea, and Japan could reengage diplomacy with North Korea by signaling a willingness to reduce and then halt their escalating tit-for-tat military operations and press for a resumption of a version of the Six-Party Talks of the first decade of this century.
Reprising the words of a Japanese-American prophet, Yoko Ono, “War is over if you want.” Solutions are known. The question is if we have the will to secure them.
The original version of this commentary first appeared at Common Dreams and can be viewed here