{"id":37537,"date":"2018-02-26T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T19:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=37537"},"modified":"2018-02-23T15:05:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T04:05:29","slug":"hard-japan-versus-comfortable-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/hard-japan-versus-comfortable-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard Japan versus comfortable Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Japan faces a choice. Will it decide on a hard or a comfortable future? Decisions\u2014political, strategic and social\u2014don\u2019t come much bigger. What Japan\u2019s leaders and people pick will say much about our times and the Asian century.<\/p>\n

Japan can take the hard road and contend with China, or Japan can concede and settle for comfortable accommodation.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, this big choice was a topic for academic speculation and low-level diplomatic musing. The discussion was more about demography than Asian power politics. No more. In the age of Trump, Abe and Xi, the issues come into sharp and pressing focus.<\/p>\n

In a review essay for Inside Story<\/em> on who rules Asia and who will write the future rules<\/a>, I\u2019ve suggested opposed visions of Japan\u2019s future: Strong Japan versus Comfortable Japan.<\/p>\n

Marking the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration\/Revolution this year is a reminder of how Japan has twice in that time shown the ability to make huge shifts in its governance and society to respond to external challenges. Strong Japan or Comfortable Japan can both arise from today\u2019s facts.<\/p>\n

Strong Japan foresees a Tokyo that refuses to bend to Beijing as Japan reclaims its rights as a \u2018normal nation\u2019, building its military strength as America\u2019<\/span>s key Asian ally and leading Asia in both balancing against and engaging China. This is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe\u2019s vision for Japan.<\/p>\n

Strong Japan is expressed in the unusual role Abe has taken in leading Asia\u2019s response to Donald Trump, saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump dumped the trade treaty. It\u2019s expressed in Abe\u2019s reshaping of Japan\u2019s constitution, and in the fresh effort to create a quadrilateral alliance of democracies linking Japan, the US, India and Australia.<\/p>\n

The alternate Comfortable Japan sees Abe as an atypical political outlier, not the leadership model that will be followed by future prime ministers. In this version, Japan matches the decline of its population by declining gently to middle power status.<\/p>\n

Comfortable Japan embraces the peace of its pacifist strain, no longer wanting to serve as the US\u2019s unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US\u2013Japan alliance fades away, dismissed as the strange joining of two nations with vastly different histories and values. Putting aside its old nightmares about being betrayed or abandoned by a US turn to China, Japan would drift out of the US orbit. Tokyo could quietly decide that the cost of resisting Beijing is too high.<\/p>\n

Comfortable Japan would accommodate a Sinocentric future. For the Japanese, this would be portrayed as Japan turning back to Asia. In China, the Communist Party would proclaim triumph in the history war and start to turn down the heat.<\/p>\n

Hugh White\u2019s Quarterly Essay<\/em> \u2018Without America<\/a>\u2019 argues that Comfortable Japan will beat Strong Japan, feeding his conclusion that China is going to win and America is going to leave. White writes that the benefits of the alliance to Japan are falling as US support in a crisis becomes less certain. He thinks there\u2019ll come a point when Tokyo concludes that America can\u2019t be relied upon any longer:<\/p>\n

Japan is the key to East Asia\u2019s emerging order as China\u2019s power grows and America\u2019s wanes. Japan\u2019s alliance with America has been the keystone of America\u2019s strategic position in Asia. While the alliance lasts America will remain a major regional power, and when it ends America\u2019s role in Asia will end with it … For America, the costs of the alliance are growing, while the benefits are not. China\u2019s rise makes it both a more valuable economic partner and a more formidable military adversary, and so the costs to America of protecting Japan against China go up both economically and strategically.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After the US and China, Japan will be central to the contest between Pax Americana and a new Sinocentric order. The Australian journalist Richard McGregor offers a masterful account of how we arrived at this point in his book Asia\u2019s reckoning<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>charting the complex 50\u2011year dance between China, Japan and the US: \u2018The three countries have developed a profound interdependence alongside strategic rivalries, profound distrust and historical resentment.\u2019<\/p>\n

The history McGregor offers has plenty of evidence to support either the Strong Japan or the Comfortable Japan prediction. The choice becomes starker if Donald Trump cuts a deal with China or merely decides that the Japan alliance isn\u2019t worth the effort. McGregor considers the Trump effect in the ANU\u2019s latest East Asia Forum Quarterly<\/em><\/a> and offers this conclusion about Japan\u2019s options:<\/p>\n

Japan knows that China is not going away. One day, the United States might. China is keen to emphasise to every nation in Asia a single truth: China\u2019s presence is a geopolitical reality in Asia. By contrast, the US presence is a geopolitical choice, and it is one that China intends to make more and more costly. The institutional ties between the United States and Japan remain strong and deep. For the moment, Abe\u2019s artful diplomacy and flattery of Trump has restored an equilibrium in top-level relations as well. But if Tokyo continues to feel threatened and loses faith in the United States, the next step is going nuclear\u2014a policy that is now discussed openly in Japan. That will be the definitive sign that Pax Americana in Asia is over, and it could come sooner than anyone thinks.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More than at any time in the last 70 years, Japan must ponder the costs and benefits of the US alliance\/relationship\u2014and what a less America-centred future looks like. Tokyo faces a sharper, nuclear-tinged and darker version of Canberra\u2019s nightmare.<\/p>\n

When Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull met at the White House on Friday, any discussion of Asia policy would have been\u2014that word again\u2014Sinocentric. Yet any attempt at Asia prognostication must grapple with deeply different versions of what Japan might or might not do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japan faces a choice. Will it decide on a hard or a comfortable future? Decisions\u2014political, strategic and social\u2014don\u2019t come much bigger. What Japan\u2019s leaders and people pick will say much about our times and the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":37545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,135,1659],"class_list":["post-37537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-japan","tag-us"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHard Japan versus comfortable Japan | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/hard-japan-versus-comfortable-japan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hard Japan versus comfortable Japan | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Japan faces a choice. 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