“China threat” is at the center of Japan-U.S. ties » Capital News
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida planned visit to the United States this week has once again elicited controversy on the super power’s meddling in the affairs of the Indo Pacific and the South China Sea. Kishida’s visit comes amid a cloud of growing tensions between the U.S. and China, particularly on the final resolution of the Taiwan question and reassertion of the one-China principle.
While still in the U.S. during the week, Kishida will be a guest in the first-ever U.S., Japan and Philippine summit which will take place in Washington. This meeting is aimed at showcasing the three countries unity in the face of what Washington claims is an increasingly assertive China. The nature of exact threat that China poses to the three countries apart from safeguarding its legitimate interests is still unclear.
Indeed, there cannot be any genuine conversation on the future of the Indo Pacific or South China Sea without China’s full participation. But this would be not in the interest of the U.S. whose aim is to isolate China and avoid any rapprochement with those that it currently has conflicts with. The U.S. co-opting of Philippine explains the latter’s increasingly provocative stance that has led to rising tension in the South China Sea.
The superpower’s strategy is to ensure that China is surrounded by many unfriendly or even hostile countries as a way to balance the power domiciled in China’s allies in the region. The tripartite meeting between the U.S., Japan and Philippines has echoes of AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia, which was formed ostensibly “to uphold peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific and to deter and defend against rapidly evolving threats to the international order and system there.”
Definitely, the unspoken threat here is China. There is no other country that can be perceived to have the kind of military and economic muscle to exert its influence in the region. Well, if these observations and allegations are valid, it can only mean that China has acquired superpower status. But the U.S. should seek cooperation rather than confrontation with its equal for both mutual and global benefit.
It is not exactly clear what the U.S. fears about China’s growing geopolitical clout, as the latter has not exhibited any signs of belligerence against its neighbors. But the envy is real. It is understandable that the superpower’s hegemony is now waning, leaving a geopolitical vacuum that the international community feels China is the best candidate to fill the global pole position.
The U.S. also urgently needs money to reverse its dwindling economic fortunes in the face of domestic and international challenges. Japan’s uncharacteristic and tremendous increase in its defense budget has risen in tandem with the U.S.’ hype of the non-existent China threat. The U.S. ally has now dropped all its previous pretensions of having a strict self-defense military policy, and export ban on lethal weapons.
Towards the close of 2023, Japan’s Cabinet approved an unprecedented 16 percent increase in military spending for the 2024 fiscal year standing at $56 billion. Most of the weapons will obviously be purchased from the U.S. and its European allies, including joint spending on research and development of weapons in a five-year military buildup program. This is a deal too good for Japan to resist. The country will rake in a fortune from all the military hardware business.
Just like Ukraine is learning its lesson the hard way, Japan risks being used as a pawn in the Indo-Pacific region to act as a bulwark in a likely confrontation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. Being used to antagonize China is a trap that Japan must avoid by all means for the sake of its own long term interests, both in Asia and globally.
Of course, Japan is confused. On one hand, it has a complicated relationship with the U.S., arising from the latter’s atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, and the subsequent occupation of the country by the U.S.-led Allies between 1945 and 1952. The U.S. has never offered an official apology to Japan for one of the cruelest atrocities in human history. Japan has never demanded one either.
Instead of flexing its muscles, Japan should own up to its war crimes against China during the Second World War. Its refusal to do so until now and its mockery of the atrocities shows remorseless and potential to commit the same crimes if an opportunity arose. However, times have changed even as Japan still lives in the past when it ran roughshod over its wartime adversary.
Japan has also benefited immensely economically under the patronage of the U.S. in the postwar period, particularly through the U.S.-backed free trade schemes allowing massive exports of automobiles and electronics. Japan was for some time the second largest economy in the world before being ousted from the spot by China in 2010. But as the two largest Asian economies, Japan and China share more and closer economic, political and diplomatic strategic interests than with the U.S.
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