The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)

'Negotiated Nationalism' in Japan's Democracy 2.0

Erin Drankoski — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:44:00 -0400

Whether or not the newly dominant Democratic Party of Japan succeeds or fails at the helm of Japan's political order, a new era in Japanese history has begun--and the White House should embrace it.

Clinton's Visit to Japan

Kate Schuler — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:05:00 -0500

WASHINGTON--When Shintaro Ishihara and Akio Morita urged renegotiation of the terms of the Japan-U.S. relationship in their provocative 1991 best-seller, "The Japan That Can Say No," few expected that the then less acquiescent Japan would soon disappear in the minds of many as a recognized major geopolitical force. There was a time when U.S. secretaries of state, senators and even presidents would not make a move without considering what impact it might have on Japan's purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds and whether it would hurt "the

Clinton Has Strategic Blind Spot On China

Ron Tang — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:03:00 -0400

A similar version of this article also appears on The New Republic, which features a debate between Steven Clemons and Richard Just, TNR's deputy editor, on the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics.

China's Olympics are an enticing target for "cause crusaders" who want to taunt the regime with public relations stunts while the global spotlight and attention of billions are watching every countermove China's leaders make. The "norms" of any state are not really evident unless observed after that state responds to shocks. Cause crusaders are doing their best to exploit the moment to throw China off balance and to hopefully compel China's ruling order to exhibit what they argue is a lurking monstrousness.

Lots of leading Americans are in the game, too. Former Reagan administration Defense Department official and top-tier neoconservative ideologue Richard Perle -- dubbed former President Ronald Reagan's "prince of darkness" -- wanted to quash China's bid to host the Olympic games in April 2001 after a U.S. EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese military jet. More recently, Washington Post editorial page Editor Fred Hiatt called for U.S. Olympians to skip the games in order to signal to the Chinese government displeasure with its continued support of the antidemocratic military junta in Myanmar.

And now Democratic presidential contender Sen. Hillary Clinton has prodded U.S. President George W. Bush to skip the Beijing games' opening ceremonies. The grievances she wants to punish China for are the crackdown on Tibetan independence activists and the failure to use its influence on Sudan to change disturbing trends in Darfur. Fellow Democratic contender Sen. Barack Obama took to fence-sitting and said he is "of two minds" on Bush attending the ceremonies.

Agitating for an end to the human misery in Darfur, for a higher human rights bar in Chinese prisons and the suspension of the military crackdown in Tibet are legitimate causes for citizens and global civil society institutions to protest and raise awareness about. If Olympians want to adopt any of these causes as their own, perhaps they can do something like walking backward through the ceremonies, or wear armbands color-coded to empathize with whatever cause to which they want to subscribe.

But a presidential boycott of the ceremonies cheapens the presidency and sends the wrong signals to the U.S. and global public about the complex responsibilities of the White House in global affairs. Clinton is calling for a shallow, binary act from Bush: To go or not to go to the game ceremonies.

Instead, Clinton should be discussing how her concerns about Tibet and China's potential influence over Sudan fit into the fabric of the United States' interests on many other fronts. And if these issues Clinton is agitating for rank highly, then offer a strategy to actually achieve results.

Without a strategic game plan that includes comprehensive global comment, encouragement, negotiation and perhaps some disincentives -- which could involve costs for the United States as well as China -- then Clinton's proposal is unilateral, knee-jerk foreign policy on the cheap -- a stunt designed to embarrass China at a point of significant national pride. Clinton's plan may very well backfire and stoke the embers of virulent, strident nationalism rather than encourage China to stay focused on the goal it mostly has been moving toward -- a goal former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and World Bank President Robert Zoellick coined the "responsible global stakeholder."

When sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office, a rational, thoughtful president of the United States will simultaneously see many contending potential national security nightmares. Moving on any one objective should compel the president to weigh the impact on other vital interests and objectives. That is the burden and unique responsibility of the presidency.

Clinton's disappointing willingness to throw the weight of the White House into a public relations stunt that will neither end China's tight-fisted control of Tibet nor achieve constructive action on Darfur may appeal to wistful idealists in the Democratic primary race but may raise the cost of China's working with the United States on fronts where we really need Chinese collaboration.

Clinton or any president needs to avoid the temptation to pander to the American public when crises with the key global powers emerge. A president needs to articulate and demonstrate an awareness of our core interests with China and what we most want from the Asian power in the arena of international affairs.

Stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials should be at the top of that list, and then there should be a cascading set of second and third and fourth priorities with a state like China. A new or revised economic arrangement would be second on my list, and then perhaps a serious commitment to climate changes in third or fourth place. Human rights should be on the list, but make the pursuit of Chinese subscription to a higher human rights bar a serious effort characterized by consultations, encouragement and deal-making that involves incentives and yes, disincentives. But Clinton gave no sense of a fuller, serious game plan on the human rights front.

Which battles with China do we need to stalemate on, or delay, or even lose to achieve our primary national security and geopolitical objectives? And more importantly, what battles does China really need to win to be able to work with us?

On the U.S. front for instance, the United States has a high priority in getting to an end game with Iran and North Korea that preempts further erosion of the nuclear nonproliferation regime without a war. This is absolutely impossible without China's strong support.

But what Clinton has offered by proposing stunts instead of a game plan showed a troubling absence of strategic thinking as well as the kind of emotionalism and wrong-headed priorities that helped trip Bush into the quagmire the United States is in today in Iraq.

This kind of posturing makes the United States look immature -- as if it has lost touch with the realities of statecraft and with its own important role as a global stabilizer.

Some have suggested that Clinton is the Bush-lite in this presidential contest. That is a bad course for her campaign and the country. Clinton needs to look back to the eulogy her husband, then President Bill Clinton, gave at former President Richard Nixon's funeral in 1994 and consider a new formulation of national interest-inspired foreign policy.

Surprisingly, at a time when U.S. foreign policy choices will weigh heavily in November's election, there currently is no Nixon-lite in the contest. Clinton could give her campaign a boost and take the country on a healthier national security direction if she retooled toward Nixon's foreign policy example and became the Nixonian candidate in the race.

Time for Bush to Turn Realist

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The various denominations that have demarcated the U.S. foreign policy spectrum are in serious disarray and are rapidly evolving into substantially different movements.

During the first term of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, there were three camps vying for control of the foreign policy helm. First were the neoconservatives under the lead of personalities like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, and Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The second was a realist pocket of personalities led by the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. The third was not a school of thought but rather an individual -- the soldier-statesman and then Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Today, the situation is more complex. The DNA of these classic schools of foreign policy as practiced in this terrorist-focused era is under genetic modification. Cheney's team combines the muscular Wilsonian idealism espoused by leading neoconservative ideologues with a pugnacious U.S. nationalism bordering on isolationism that former Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms typified.

Realism -- the sort of serpentine interest-calculating realism that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger personified -- has been incrementally morphing into a "kinder, gentler" realism since the time of President George H.W. Bush's administration, when then national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a clear realist devotee, began to include in his calculations the global affinity for the "American brand" -- how the United States looks to the rest of the world, what its essential ethical character and great purposes are perceived to be -- and melded these concerns into national security prognostications.

However, Rice, a protege of Scowcroft's, is clearly taking realism in new directions, adopting more mechanistic approaches to "democracy transformation" globally -- and advocating a global democratic values agenda that talks the talk of human rights, individual empowerment, and self-determination -- but which still seems rooted largely in realist calculations.

Rice, now secretary of state, for instance, is launching a new and as yet largely unnoticed initiative to get the United States back into the game of discussing international law -- everything from discussions about the rights of combat detainees and rendition practices to the international criminal court.

Rice apparently feels that even though there are serious divisions between the United States and many other global stakeholders on these topics, it has not served U.S. interests to be absent from these debates. Rice's plans to get the United States back into the discourse on international law can be seen both as a new strand of realism and liberal internationalism morphed together as well as an unambiguous challenge to Cheney's pugnacious anti internationalists.

But where is George W. Bush?

Those who note the third anniversary of the United States' Iraq war -- that began with a stealth bombing effort to decapitate Iraq's government on March 19, 2003 (U.S. time) -- believe that the president fully subscribed to the neoconservative posture of hard-edged democratization and abandoned any pretense of realist cost-benefit analysis.

But given the clear quagmire the United States has fallen into in Iraq -- and the puncturing of the mystique of U.S. power in the world in which enemies are now moving their agendas and allies are counting on the United States less -- Bush's foreign policy soul may be out for bid again.

Competition for Bush's attention was also part of the character of this administration prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

On March 19, 2001 -- two years to the day before the start of the campaign against the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- Bush was getting a tutorial on contemporary foreign policy realism from journalist Robert Kaplan -- author of "The Coming Anarchy," "Balkan Ghosts," "Warrior Politics," and most recently, "Imperial Grunts."

Kaplan had long aspired to be a modern-day Machiavelli, advising "the prince," or in this case the U.S. president, on how best to organize U.S. military and economic resources to unashamedly pursue fundamental national security priorities and interests.

Rice wanted to instill in Bush -- using policy intellectuals like Kaplan -- the importance of redesigning U.S. engagement in world affairs during a time of perceived U.S. ascendancy. Rice knew that an inertia rooted in Cold War realities rather than contemporary strategy still drove most military and foreign policy decisions, and she was trying to shake this up. Rice was also trying -- though she failed at that time -- to modernize the "realist church" of foreign policy and make Bush the first major patron of a "neorealist" movement that used realism as a vehicle for limited democratic transformation abroad.

Bush met Kaplan personally at the White House and then they enjoyed a 90-minute conversation that focused on the Caucasus and former Soviet states with Rice and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card saying nary a word.

The bottom line to what Kaplan shared with the president was that the post-Cold War world was dangerous and messy and that great states were going to vie over increasingly limited sources of oil and natural gas supplies.

That meant that the United States needed comprehensive military and economic strategies in these countries to secure our interests lest China, Russia or other unforeseen future competitors tried to tilt these nations in directions counter to U.S. vital interests.

The bottom line conveyed to Bush was that while the president had to "talk the talk of democracy," he had to deal in the real world with thugs and dictators. Democratizing undemocratic parts of the world was a time-consuming and long-term process worthy of pursuit -- but more important was that the fundamental U.S. security interests were managed and shored up as "transformative" efforts were pursued.

Kaplan's impact on Bush was evident in part when the president vetoed an effort led by Wolfowitz to use the Chinese EP-3 spy plane incident in April 2001 as a way to engineer a neoconservative takeover of the foreign policy helm. Wolfowitz wanted to feed the U.S.-China clash so as to secure the administration's commitment to a containment strategy on China. It did not hurt that the senior Bush's advice to his son ran parallel to the views of Kaplan.

But Sept. 11 broke the back of Rice's efforts, which were stymied as well in part because she did little to inculcate these neorealist views across the broad swath of foreign policy practitioners embedded across the executive branch.

An interesting contrast was former U.S. President Bill Clinton's famous "think-fests" with academics, in which Clinton would have wide-ranging discussions with policy intellectuals and invite many minds to senior level staff from the White House to sit in and actively participate -- less for his people to learn from the academic but more for his staff to sense the president's views and direction. As mentioned, the Kaplan meeting with Bush in contrast involved only three people and not disclosed to the public by the president's staff.

Now, three years after the start of the war in Iraq, new battle lines between these factions are surfacing inside the Bush White House -- and the emergence of a potential Iranian threat to the international order is raising the stakes.

The new breed of strident, hypernationalist neoconservativism is advocating an aggressive, military-dominated strategy in dealing with Iran.

In contrast, the Rice-led international realists, are promoting a package of diplomacy, democracy promotion, alliance-coordination, and a more complex program of costs and benefits to attempt to influence the direction of the Iranian regime -- or at minimum to insert wedges between different factions in Iran's political order as a way to constrain populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The battle lines are evident in a plethora of issues -- including how to deal with Iran, what the right course is in the Palestinian-Israeli standoff, how to approach China and Russia, or an ongoing struggle over the norms the United States exhibits when engaged in conflict -- particularly with regard to detaining, rendering, or interrogating enemy combatants.

The fault lines between the factions have been clear inside the Bush administration from the outset, but now, neoconservatives and realists have tinkered with their ideology, toughened up, and prepared for a new collision.

But as March 19, 2006, approaches, Bush would be well advised to spend some time thinking about his foreign policy legacy.

Does he want to leave on the books the image of a United States disdainful of the rest of the world and one that requires either complete assimilation of foreign, particularly Arab, societies -- or as a backup builds high walls and fortresses that the United States hides behind?

Conversely, is the United States going to marshal its considerable military and economic resources -- and its impressive ecosystem of democratic empowerment and civil justice -- and get back to a grand strategy that depends on enlightened -- but not naive -- U.S. global engagement?

In other words, as Bush thinks about the world's big problems in the two years and nine months left in his term, he has to choose whether he is going to be defined by the image and objectives of his vice president, or whether he is going to stand by the insurgent perspective that his secretary of state is now pushing.

Exchange Rate Politics in Boca Raton Guarantee Cynical Status Quo Prevails

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton used to open his speeches--particularly the big ones--with the line, "I was born in a place called Hope." Indeed, Clinton was born in the town of Hope, Ark.--and the concept of "hope," of optimism about the future, has often been a clarion call of the political left. In contrast, conservatives tend to live in a darker world, where realism--and sometimes cynicism--reign. Leaders on the political right such as U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi distrust optimism and instead encourage their citizens to take off their rose-colored glasses and to see the messy and troublesome world about which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote so much.

For example, Bush on Feb. 8 gave a widely watched interview with Tim Russert on the NBC television show, "Meet the Press," declaring: "I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind. Again, I wish it wasn't true, but it is true. And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is. And I see dangers that exist, and it's important for us to deal with them."

The United States is today a warrior nation, a hegemonic power that wants to redraw the global map of leaders and peoples and nations to make itself and, it argues, the rest of the world, a safer place. But it is tough to be optimistic today, either on the political left or right.

While the United States scared former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein into a hole, it is at the same time sending aid money and buying military basing arrangements in a Central Asian country, which is ruled by a thug no less wicked than Saddam.

While the United States ballyhoos the benefits of democracy and basic human rights, particularly when it comes to legal justice, thousands of detainees have been held for years in relative isolation in Guantanamo Bay without having formal charges brought against them.

While neoconservatives argue that The United States' war on terrorism is a war about values and not oil, our rapidly expanding military presence in the Middle East, the Caucuses and North Africa gives the United States a solid reach into the Caspian oil region and provides it with access to China's western border. Was the Iraq war about oil? No. But certainly the fact that the United States' hand is strengthened in the next great game for oil does not help win hearts and minds around the world.

The world's greatest mountains make their own weather, and their storms can be unpredictable. Today, the United States is making its own weather and startling those nations, such as Japan and in Europe, that are struggling with the currents of power flowing in and around the world's remaining superpower and its shifting grip on the world. At the Group of Seven meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., the United States made its own weather again, punctuating clearly and definitely something the world had already suspected: America is pursuing a weak dollar policy and has abandoned its commitment to and even the rhetoric about a strong dollar.

Since December 2000, the dollar has depreciated by 56 percent against the euro. Over the past year the dollar has slipped about 13 percent against the yen, even though Japan spent 187 billion dollars in 2003 buying all the dollars it could. With Japan and China serving as the United States' largest financiers of its current account deficit, now running at an annual rate of over 5 percent of gross domestic product, the U.S. Treasury bills and bonds held by these foreign governments are sinking in value while at the same time American exporters are enjoying a huge currency-driven advantage in world markets.

To remain competitive, Japan must keep dumping yen and buying dollars; China, on the other hand, has a currency pegged to the dollar, and it is sinking to lower and lower levels. The Europeans, who have intervened in currency markets the least and whose currency is probably the most honest, are in the worst shape.

This flip-flop in U.S. policy is intriguing, as the strong dollar policy was used by the government in the past to increase imports and to keep U.S. wages constrained by the pressures of foreign wage competition. In an election year when Bush wants to exploit every opportunity for short-term economic growth, he is helping factory workers not through Section 201 trade sanctions, which the World Trade Organization recently ruled against, but by devaluing U.S. assets, U.S. labor, and U.S. products. In other words, U.S. is telling the rest of the world that because it provided leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan when no one else would, and because it is leading the war on terrorism, the U.S. economy needs to be pumped up first, even at the expense of allies and friends.

Cynical as this move clearly is, the United States is probably right that it more than any other nation needs to generate growth. On the losing side, Japan is experienced at holding assets of diminishing value. After the 1985 Plaza Accord that pushed the value of the yen to nearly double its value against the dollar, Japanese investments in trophy properties such as the Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach Golf Course, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios, bought at sky-high prices, eventually collapsed in value.

It is ironic that Boca Raton, the idyllic getaway for the U.S.'s wealthy elite, is one of the places former U.S. President Richard Nixon disappeared to after the debacle of Watergate, and it was Nixon who on Aug. 15, 1971 repudiated the Bretton Woods agreement that gave foreign governments and central banks the right to redeem dollars for gold at 35 dollars per ounce and on the same day floated the dollar on world markets. Nixon thrived in the harsh realities of a cynical world in which the course of national interest could be charted against the competing interests of other nations. Boca Raton then was the ideal place to consider where floating rates had led the world to today.

The United States prevailed in Florida and insisted that Europe and Japan submit to U.S. "flexibility" regarding the dollar. In exchange, Japan got permission to continue to intervene in foreign exchange markets, and the Europeans earned the right to continue complaining about "excess volatility" in those markets. In other words, the status quo prevailed, but the United States. dropped the facade of arguing that it was pursuing a strong dollar policy.

Stock analysts are famed for dumping stocks they recommend their clients buy and for purchasing stocks that the y have encouraged others to sell. Perhaps the United States' confession that a weak dollar is what it wanted all along really means that a reversal is on the way. At least that is what a cynic might say.

Is Japan's 21st-Century Role to be U.S. Satellite in Asia?

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 22 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has turned out to be a pretty tame lion. Swept into office in a wave of populist euphoria that he might deliver his people and nation from economic malaise and geopolitical obscurity, Koizumi was the hope for liberal nationalism in Japan. After nearly six decades of U.S. presence in Japan, some hoped that while supporting the basic tenets of the U.S.-Japan security alliance, he might at least shore up Japan's sovereignty and general weight in the equation. Fast forward to the day of U.S. President George W. Bush's 48-hour "Get out or face the heat" warning to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the actual incursion into Iraq, and one sees Koizumi performing like one of the most sycophantic prime ministers in Japan's history, at least in matters relating to the United States.

Reacting to Bush's speech, Koizumi made clear that he supports the Bush ultimatum to Saddam and that Japan will endorse the invasion by U.S. and British troops. Reading as if from talking points scripted by the White House National Security Council staff, Koizumi embraced the plan to reach back to U.N. resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 to justify the U.S. action. It would be interesting to know whether Diet legal counsel came to this conclusion on their own, or whether this was a full intellectual import from Washington. Koizumi also remarked that Japan would not participate in any military action against Iraq "because of constitutional constraints," implying that if those tethers were not in place, Japan might be up there on the front line with the Americans and the British.

In the days before the attack on Iraq started, nearly 70 percent of the Japanese public disapproved of the imminent attack on Iraq. Perhaps Koizumi would give a British Prime Minister Tony Blair-like performance if he could, and commit Japan to this war despite the ambivalence of the international community and his own citizens. But to fall into lockstep behind Bush now while maintaining "radio silence" during the great debates in the United Nations in recent months relegates Japan to servant and satellite of U.S. interests, rather than a nation whose national identity is finally emerging from behind U.S. hyper presence.

I am not an apologist for Saddam, nor am I patently against any type of conflict that would topple him. However, the U.S. political leadership has stumbled into this replay of the Gulf War, generating numerous "friendly fire" casualties among its allies, and failing to understand that the grand theater of U.S. leadership requires that the United States appear as if it can competently manage multiple crises in the world at once. Otherwise, every thug and interest-maximizing government in the world who has a score to settle, land to acquire, or nearby nations to intimidate would use the point in time when the global hegemon is tied down and distracted by Iraq to make their moves. The unfolding debacle with North Korea demonstrates the limited ability of the Bush administration to "walk and chew gum" at the same time. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the soft underbelly vulnerabilities of civil infrastructure are any more hardened to the real threat of terrorism than they were before the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. Koizumi would be a better friend to the United States if he had articulated his points of strong support for Bush, combined with public counsel on Japan's concerns about the manner and strategy that Bush was pursuing this war.

Two astonishing trends to observe in the world today are that European power is on the rise and that China, a nation targeted early by the Bush administration as the primary object of our national security concerns, is looking like an astonishingly stable power with upward of 50 billion dollars a year in foreign direct investment pouring in. China is laughing all of the way to the bank as this U.S.-led global turmoil unfolds. Europe has chosen arenas to closely collaborate with the United States while confronting the United States in others. Japan, in contrast, has disappeared from the scene. When asked a year ago why Japan was so invisible in the great debates about global governance and in most other international policy matters, Japanese Ambassador to the United States Ryozo Kato said it was the wrong time for Japan to stick its head up and the time to support the United States was in times of crisis.

It is not in U.S. interests for Japan to appear as weak and peripheral to world affairs as it now appears to so many. Japan is a rich nation that clearly has economic challenges, but it still ranks as the world's second largest economy and maintains one of the largest and most competent defense forces in the world. Yet no leader considers Japan a credible architect in the unfolding world order. Japan's sycophantism and acquiescence to the Bush administration on its Iraq policy seem to harken back to the days when U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was sending orders to the first Occupation-era leader, Prime Minister Kijuro Shidehara.

The United States needs a strong Japan, not a "yes man." It needs a Japan that will collaborate on the realities of global governance in economic and security dimensions. While Koizumi promised a Japan with a fuller sense of itself and its national potential, the Japanese got a prime minister who is perpetuating the image of Occupation Japan, lobotomized in foreign policy and a supplicant to U.S. needs and whims.

While Koizumi might not have wanted to go the distance that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has gone in distancing Germany's interests from those of the United States, one can clearly see that Japan has still not graduated from its satellite status.

Security Framework Needs Overhaul

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 11 Mar 1999 00:00:00 -0500

After calling for a national debate on whether Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons-in the racy weekly magazine Shukan Playboy, no less-Shingo Nishimura paid the price for his frankness. In an uncharacteristic display of hyperspeed, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi sacked his defense vice minister on October 20.

Nishimura had been on the job just two weeks before publicly arguing that India and Pakistan are better able to deter each other's aggression now that both have the bomb, and that nations without nukes, such as Japan, undermine global stability. Known for his hawkishness, Nishimura argued that "the most dangerous (nations) are those that don't have nuclear weapons." In the same interview, the is Liberal Party prot