The US in Asia and the world

Princeton's G. John Ikenberry has a long guest post at the Washington Note addressing Kishore Mahbubani's arguments in The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Not having read Mr. Mahbubani's book yet, I can't speak directly to his argument, but I do want to address the points raised by Professor Ikenberry.

The crux of Professor Ikenberry's argument is that the rise of Asia does not necessarily mean the decline of the West, or, more specifically, the decline of the US. He does not deny Asia's growing influence, but he suggests that while power is flowing Asia's way, the Asian powers have not proposed new organizing principles for world order. He suggests that what might happen — and what will probably be the best possible outcome — is a modified version of the American-led postwar system, a postwar system with an Asian flavor in which China and the other Asian powers recognize that maintaining the system is in their interests. As Professor Ikenberry writes:

China may well be tomorrow's greatest supporter of the American-led postwar system. That system provides rules and institutions for openness and nondiscrimination. These are features of order that China will want going forward as its growing economic weight will be greeted by efforts by others (including some governments in the West) to close and discriminate. Rule-based international order is not a Western fixation. It is a system of governance that all states - East and West - have some interest in maintaining, China not least.

There is considerable value in this argument. Given that China most likely will not have the opportunity to remake the international order anew in the manner that the US and its allies did in the aftermath of the World War II, China, India, and the other rising powers will have little choice but to jury-rig preexisting institutions to reflect their power and their interests.

It's also possible to overstate US decline, both in Asia and globally. As an "Asian" power — the US unmistakably is a great power in Asia — the US will have a stake in shaping the "Asian" world order. Washington will have to reconsider how it exercises its power regionally and globally, of course, becoming less reliant on its military power and more willing to listen to others, but the US has not begun its Recessional yet.

The emphasis needs to change, however. Since the US expanded its role in Asia at the end of the war, its Asia policy has been schizophrenic, divided between a crusading, transformational tendency and a stabilizing tendency. This schizophrenia persists up to today, with the crusaders keen to paint China as the next great threat to the US. But the time for US crusades in Asia is past. For the first time in nearly two centuries, Asian powers are in a position to manage the region's affairs themselves. That doesn't mean there is no role for the US; in fact, it means the US role as stabilizer and pacifier is more important than ever. I think, for example, that the presence of the US military, especially the US Navy, has ensured that political tensions have risen inexorably despite the ongoing Asian arms race. In short, US power should be used less for dictating terms and more for underwriting the efforts of others to create international order. The US should participate in the latter process, but only as one country among many. Its alliances in the region should shift accordingly, measured more in terms of how the support this US role. Transformational ideas, like Abe Shinzo's and Aso Taro's "arc of freedom and democracy" have little place in this order. Asian countries are in no hurry to see the US evacuate Asia; if anything, they want the US to be more involved, to be less obsessed with terrorism and more willing to listen to their concerns. It is imperative that the US start thinking seriously about how it will play this stabilizing role in Asia over the long term.

The US role globally will be more central than in Asia, but the question will be the same: as Professor Ikenberry writes, "...the United States should be asking itself: what sort of international order do we want to have in place in 2040 or 2050 when we are relatively less powerful?" Extending US influence, if not predominance, will depend on developing foreign policy tools other than military power (and with it, a shift in attitude that acknowledges that the US is less able to dictate terms to other countries).

Meanwhile, it is a mistake to refer casually to "Asia" in this discussion. Whose Asia? Is Asia a codeword for China? For India? For ASEAN? Each of these players has a different vision for the region, which redounds to the advantage of the US. Just as the Asian regional future is unknown, so to is the future of an Asia-centered world order unknown. The US is still in a position to shape the Asian and global orders.

Japan just as invisible as always

MOFA has released its latest Gallup-conducted poll of American public and elite attitudes concerning Japan. (English summary here; more detailed Japanese documents available for download here.)

Gallup conducted a telephone poll of 1500 Americans over age 18 in February and March of 2008, and telephone interviews with 250 "opinion leaders" in "the fields of government, business, academia, mass media, religion and labor unions."

The results are more or less unchanged. Both the public and elites view Japan as the most important US partner in Asia, with China trailing by roughly ten points among the public and twenty points among elites. Japan is still seen as a dependable ally, although the number among the public dropped seven points from 74% to 67%, even as the elite figure remained strong, improving one point to a record-high of 92%. Both public and elite see Japan as more of an economic power, and believe that the US-Japan relationship is sound, and will either improve in the future or remain just as sound as they think it is today. Elites are well disposed to Japan playing a more assertive role internationally, and have a stronger sense of shared values between the US and Japan than the public at large has.

Of interest to me, however, is that in every question that gave general public respondents the option of "don't understand/no opinion," that response gained. In the "dependable ally" question, the percentage of the general public answering "no opinion" rose from 5% to 15%. Asked whether Japan is playing an appropriate international role given its economic power, the percentage of the general public answering "don't understand" rose from 6% to 14%. Asked about the importance of US bases in Japan, the number of general public respondents with no opinion rose from 3% to 11%. The number who responded "don't understand" when asked whether the US should support the current US-Japan mutual security treaty more than doubled, from 7% to 15%. And I suspect that these numbers probably only measure those who are willing to admit that they either don't understand or have no opinion. How many American citizens have opinions about these questions before being asked by a pollster?

In short, Japan became that much less familiar to the American public from February-March 2007 to February-March 2008. Interestingly, when general public respondents were asked where they get information about Japan, every category but education (improved one point from 51% to 52%), friends and neighbors (improved one point from 29% to 30%), Japanese friends (held steady at 29%), and experience of visiting Japan (held steady at 12%) fell. The big four — TV, magazines, newspapers, and Internet — all fall. TV fell from 80% to 74%, magazines from 72% to 64%, newspapers from 71% to 63%, and Internet 43% to 39%. The impact of these drops are magnified by the paucity of Japan coverage (i.e., not only are the news media providing less Japan coverage, but fewer people are seeing what little they cover). The drops were less significant or non-existent in terms of the elite, but elite awareness of Japan still suffers from the spareness of Japan coverage.

The survey ought to include a question along the lines of "did you have any opinions about the US-Japan relationship before being asked these questions." It might also have been helpful to ask about public awareness of events that transpired in the relationship over the past year (political changes in Japan, the abductee problem, the comfort women resolution, etc.). Without asking these questions, there is no context for these responses. This doesn't say much about what the American people think about the US-Japan relationship in comparison to a host of other foreign policy issues and bilateral relationships.

Komori on US China policy

Komori Yoshihisa, veteran correspondent and Washington-based editor of the Sankei Shimbun, was invited to speak to Nakagawa Shoichi's "True Conservative Policy Study Group" last Friday, where he explained the reality of US China policy and contemporary attitudes in Washington towards the US-Japan alliance.

He provides a summary of his remarks at his blog.

For the most part, they're innocuous. He notes that Congress and Washington in general are alarmed about China on a number of fronts: China's military modernization, trade practices, intellectual property violations, and human rights violations are causes for concern among US elites. (Indeed, according to Pew's November 2005 survey of public and elite foreign policy attitudes, US elites are far more concerned about China than the public at large. This may have changed after several years of media reports about shoddy Chinese imports, but I still expect that the US public as a whole remains more sanguine about China than Washington.) He reports that while the US-Japan alliance is rarely discussed in the media, it enjoys a solid bedrock of support from both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Broadly speaking, Mr. Komori's picture is accurate.

But there are a few problems. First, whatever the fears of US elites about a multi-dimensional Chinese "threat," I think US policymakers, especially in the executive branch, are willing to silence their fears and work with China when necessary. This is consistent with the enduring pattern of Sino-US relations since 1972. Congress has been obsessed with threats from China and aggressive in its criticism of human rights violations, threats against Taiwan, etc.; the White House, whatever its unease with China and regardless of the party affiliation of the president, has sought closer coordination with China. There is an enduring realism in US China policy that is entirely absent from Mr. Komori's remarks.

This realistic tendency will likely become even more pronounced in coming years, because — and this is my second qualm with Mr. Komori's remarks — the US obsession with Iraq and the Middle East more broadly will not abate anytime soon. Mr. Komori seemingly provides no context for US thinking about China, which for most of Washington remains of secondary importance to more urgent Middle Eastern questions, meaning the US will be ever more inclined to work with China on a range of regional and global problems.

While naturally there are China hawks in Washington who share the views of Mr. Komori's audience, it would be a mistake to suggest that their viewpoint is dominant and commonly accepted. Their viewpoint certainly hasn't been dominant under the Bush administration, despite early indications to the contrary, and the next administration will be forced to embrace a sort of "resigned realism." Even if a McCain administration were to talk about the importance of cooperation among democracies in Asia, such rhetoric would most likely not be backed by a decisive shift in how the US-Japan and US-Australia alliances interact with China.

I would add that Mr. Komori and other Japanese China hawks, much like their American compatriots, have nothing constructive to say about how the US and Japan should deal with China. Mr. Komori says that it is "appropriate to identify and criticize, frequently and clearly" China's military activities and human rights violations. Maybe so, but that cannot be the sum of a China policy, especially for Japan. As Fareed Zakaria argues, criticism and outrage can backfire if they promote a popular backlash among the Chinese people. A China policy that amounts to little more than jabbing China repeatedly with a pointy stick is no China policy at all.

Meanwhile, Mr. Komori has not been paying enough attention in Washington. He notes that he concluded his remarks saying that in other countries principles like "building a country in which the people have pride in their country" and "steadily defending the national interest" are not conservative at all: they are accepted by all as a matter of course. I wonder what country Mr. Komori has in mind. China maybe? Both examples cited by Mr. Komori are fiercely contested in US public discourse. Both the definition of the "national interest" and how to defend it are in constant flux. As for a country of which people can be proud, once again, "pride" means different things to different Americans. To some, including Senator Obama, being proud of the US means being proud of its ability to correct its own flaws; as Senator Obama said in Montana earlier this month, "I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection."

If anything, Japan needs more of this: more discussion about what its national interests and more discussion about how to secure those interests, but above all, more discussion about what it really means to be proud of one's country — and what it means for a Japanese to be proud of Japan.

Recommended Book: The Peninsula Question, Yoichi Funabashi

In the year since Funabashi Yoichi, editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, finished The Peninsula Question, the US and North Korea made an agreement that restarted the Six-Party talks, overcame the Banco Delta Asia obstacle, and issued a joint statement with the other parties that included a promise by North Korea to account for its nuclear program and disable related facilities, before progress stalled at New Year's. In the process, the Abe government ensured that Japan would not play a constructive role in the talks.

Dr. Funabashi's book does not suffer from leaving off at North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006. Indeed, The Peninsula Question anticipates much of what's happened over the past year.

The Peninsula Question is, according to its subtitle, "a chronicle of the second Korean nuclear crisis." This is not a polemic — Dr. Funabashi does not deviate from his measured tone except in a few spots in which he criticizes US hawks — and he provides few answers to the titular question. But as a chronicle of the Northeast Asian crisis since 2002, it is nonpareil. Dr. Funabashi interviewed dozens of policymakers in the governments of five of the six parties, providing an intimate look at how the US, Japan, China, South Korea, and Russia approached North Korea in the Six-Party talks.

The result is of interest to both general readers and international relations specialists, as Dr. Funabashi shows the constraints that impact foreign policy decision makers. Dr. Funabashi shows that neither international politics nor domestic politics is the primary constraint on policy makers: both are important, with some variance from country to country. Policy makers are also constrained by history, ideology, and geography. This is not to deny the role of human agency in policy making, but it suggests that policy makers operate exercise their agency within a narrow band. The main protagonists of Dr. Funabashi's book were further constrained because they were, for the most part, not heads of state and government. Perhaps the only figure willing and able to defy the constraints was former prime minister Koizumi Junichiro, who traveled twice to Pyongyang in pursuit of the normalization of diplomatic ties with North Korea.

As a result of his interviews, Dr. Funabashi draws special attention to the domestic constraints on each country's North Korea policy. While Washington and Tokyo were perhaps the most divided of the six parties, each government — North Korea included — had divisions that undermined the pursuit of an agreement. These domestic divisions resulted in first the rift between South Korea, and the US and Japan, and then in the rift between the US and Japan in 2007 as the Abe government took a firmer line on North Korea at the moment that the US approach softened.

Ultimately, though, it may be the international constraints that will undermine any agreement. North Korea, perhaps for good reason, believes that a nuclear weapon is the key to its security. Neither the US nor Japan is willing to live with a North Korean nuke; neither government, however, is in a position to take decisive action to end the North Korean nuclear program. China is clearly annoyed by North Korea, but appears willing to act only so far as to prevent a war on the Korean peninsula. Russia has little influence in Northeast Asia, as illustrated by Dr. Funabashi's chapter showing the failure of Russia's attempt to offer itself as an "honest broker" in the talks.

The result? North Korea will continue doing exactly what it's been doing. In the meantime, the five parties should be strengthening cooperation in preparation for the collapse of the DPRK, because post-DPRK North Korea may be the source of more trouble in the region than the DPRK itself, albeit trouble of a different sort.

To a second-rate Japan

Continuing the theme of Japan's vanishing global presence discussed in this post (and this post by Gen Kanai last week), it's worth looking at what may be this year's hot foreign policy article-turned-book (cf. Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan), "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" by Parag Khanna, a fellow at the New America Foundation.

In both this article and the forthcoming book, Mr. Khanna looks at the emerging contours of the new world order from the perspective of the second world: "Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in 'coalition of the willing'), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century."

There is considerable value in this piece, not least in its warning to US policymakers that American hegemony is finished. Over the course of the Bush administration, it has become clear that the US, for all its military strength, is woefully deficient in other areas of power, making it difficult for Washington to solve critical problems. It's not entirely the fault of President Bush, but his administration's actions made it plain the limits of American power, hastening the emergence of a new order.

Mr. Khanna makes clear that competition between the US, China, and the EU will not be primarily in the military realm, but rather over energy, markets, and natural resources. The other point of interest is that the second-world countries might actually hold the upper hand in their dealings with the superpowers. These countries can pocket concessions and aid from all three, maximizing their security in the process. This dynamic is already at work in Southeast Asia, where countries like Vietnam are happy to trade with China even as they deepen their security ties with the US (an example not lost on Mr. Khanna). As a result, this piece is not simply a reincarnation of fears from the 1980s and 1990s about the creation of three exclusionary economic blocs.

Not surprisingly, however, Japan is absent from this piece (except in passing, with Japan's interest in regional monetary cooperation cited as an example of how "Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties").

Where does Japan fit in a tripolar world? Presumably as its population shrinks over the coming decades, Japan will increasingly come to resemble second-world countries busy playing the superpowers off each other. Granted, Japan will likely remain wealthier and more politically stable than the other countries in this group, but as a result of its security and economic needs, Japan will likely engage in the same behavior. In managing its relationships with the US and China, Japan is, in fact, already playing one power off the other, one moment strengthening security cooperation with the US, the next exploring new avenues of economic cooperation with China, ASEAN, and others that exclude the US. It will take some time before Japan fully embraces this "small Japan" path — I suspect there remains too much fear of China and too much dependence on the US — but it may be only a matter of time, with the process hastened by external changes like a mellower China or a prolonged economic downturn in the US that leads it to reconsider its defense spending and foreign deployments.

The question is the extent to which Japan can remain prosperous and dynamic and preserve some modicum of influence in the competition for energy and natural resources. That will depend, of course, on decisions made today to transform Japan's moribund political and economic systems.

Haass on allies and rivals

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, had an op-ed in the Financial Times this week (excerpted from a forthcoming article in The National Interest) in which he reconsiders the nature of US relationships with traditional allies and perceived enemies.

Calling it the emergence of a "Palmerstonian moment," Haass wrote, "We are entering an era of foreign policy and international relations where countries are neither automatically predictable adversaries nor allies. They may be active partners on one issue on one day and largely inactive observers on another issue the next. Or they may carry out alternative or opposing policies."

There is considerable value in his argument, especially from the perspective of the US-Japan relationship, in light of the ongoing debate over Japan's involvement in Afghanistan operations. (Ambassador Schieffer has reminded the Japanese once again — in case they forgot — that the US thinks that it would be a "real tragedy" if Japan were to opt out of the war on terror.) A coalition of the willing is a double-edged sword: if the US is going to wage war without seeking the formal approval of its allies, then those allies are free to opt out, without Washington's throwing a tantrum (i.e., "freedom fries").

As I've argued in earlier posts, strategic flexibility is becoming increasingly important in international relations, in Asia especially. The more potential partners, the greater the ability of a great power to achieve desired ends. Haass cited the example on the role played by China in the six-party talks: "Beijing, in this case – not Nato – was and is the most important partner for Washington in its efforts to denuclearise North Korea. This does not, however, mean China is on the verge of becoming a US ally on other issues."

Haass' op-ed also touches the idea that no matter how cordial relations between the US and its allies become thanks to leadership changes, the US and its allies will not see the world the same way anytime soon. I think that the perceptual gap between a global superpower and regional powers is simply too great, making it difficult for the US and its allies to agree not just on courses of actions, but even on the shared interests supposedly underlying alliances.

A dangerous word

AEI's Michael Auslin, weighing in on the feud over China's denying US Navy ships access to Hong Kong at Contentions, argues that US credibility has suffered from a failure to respond to China's behavior other than by sending the USS Kitty Hawk back to Japan via the Taiwan Straits.

He says, "A number of my Asia-wonk acquaintances in Washington have expressed their concern that Washington is sending a signal of weakness by making no response to the Chinese provocations (sailing the fleet back through the Taiwan Straits doesn’t quite cut it)—even canceling some meetings would have been seen as something."

I would be more concerned if he was citing comments made by "our Asian allies" than by his "Asia-wonk acquaintances."

"Credibility" is a dangerous word, a word that led the US to overextend itself during the cold war, with disastrous consequences. Are US allies in Asia really worried about the US not standing up to China's unpredictable behavior over the past year? Do they really doubt that if China actually posed a threat to their security, the US would be unwilling to act? Do security treaties with Japan, Australia, and other countries in the region obligate the US to "stand up" to China, even if doing so might actually undermine the security of China's neighbors by deepening the PLA's paranoia and strengthening the hand of PLA elements in favor of more confrontational policies (not to mention potentially provoking China to retaliate in other fora)?

The emergence of China is one long, unpredictable, iterative game, and the US, as the prevailing maintainer of stability in East Asia, will not benefit from "defecting" and initiating a game of tit-for-tat that could go on for years. Indeed, as the leading power in the region, the US has an obligation to demonstrate forbearance, to refrain from retaliating against China's bewildering violations of diplomatic and maritime custom and continuing to find ways of coaxing China to play a more constructive regional and global role. To do otherwise could hasten the decline of the US as a regional power and make the neighborhood more dangerous for US allies, a perverse consequence of actions purportedly taken in the interests of US alliances in Asia.

Fukuda should mention Iran

In the past week, the Bush administration has raised the intensity of its rhetoric on Iran to dangerously absurd levels.

Last week, President Bush suggested that Iran's possession of nuclear weapons could lead to World War III, which White House press secretary Dana Perino later played down as suggesting nothing more than the seriousness with which the president views the threat posed by a nuclear Iran.

More recently, however, Vice President Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Sunday, "The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," and that Iran faces "serious consequences" for its pursuit of nuclear arms.

Between talk by Mr. Bush — head of state of a country that has somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 nuclear weapons — of World War III and Mr. Cheney's using the same language that he used in advance of the Iraq War (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan), observers in the US and elsewhere cannot be blamed for wondering whether the US will be at war with Iran in the waning months of the Bush administration. (Niall Ferguson dismisses the idea that war is imminent — imminent being a few weeks — but that's little comfort to me.) Even if the talk is bluster designed to make Iran give in somehow, the LA Times wonders whether the Bush administration, its credibility all but spent, can achieve anything but more Iranian recalcitrance with this approach.

For my part, like Fareed Zakaria, I'm not convinced that Iran is somehow beyond deterrence:

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

How does Japan enter the picture?

Prime Minister Fukuda will, of course, be in Washington next month to meet with President Bush. I think that the November summit might be a good opportunity for Mr. Fukuda to distinguish himself from his predecessors and state in no uncertain terms that Japan finds the Bush administration's rhetoric counterproductive to the resolution of the crisis, that Japan, as a state with official ties with Iran, wants to play a greater role in finding a solution, and that Washington cannot count on Tokyo's support in the event of war unless all other options are exhausted first.

In other words, for the US-Japan alliance to be more equal, Japan has to act like an equal of the US, making demands of its own on its ally.

Of course, given the Bush administration's expectations from its allies (i.e., seen and not heard), an interjection by Mr. Fukuda would probably have little impact on the administration's plans for Iran — and it's unclear to me how Japanese mediation could help resolve the crisis — but at least Mr. Fukuda could stake out a firm Japanese position now and perhaps prevent Japan from getting overwhelmed by events should a war come, all while signaling to the Japanese public that Japan's foreign policy will not be conducted from Washington.

The vanishing ally

Candidate Clinton has penned her contribution on foreign policy for the ongoing feature in Foreign Affairs on the foreign policies of the major presidential contenders.

I haven't found much of value in the contributions thus far, and Senator Clinton's is no exception. Her world view essentially emphasizes "power and principle." I'm not entirely clear how that differs from, say, Francis Fukuyama's "realistic Wilsonianism" — which perhaps says more about the narrowing of American foreign policy options in the waning months of the Bush administration than it does about Mrs. Clinton's foreign policy perspective.

But Tokyo is paying close attention, because Mrs. Clinton writes, "Our relationship with China will be the most important bilateral relationship in the world in this century." That may be disconcerting for Japan, used to hearing US officials insist on the importance of the US-Japan relationship, but it also happens to be true. The Japanese government should be more concerned that Japan receives even less attention than India, in a section purportedly about America's alliances. Note that India isn't an official ally — and is struggling over whether to accept the Bush administration's gift to India that offers civilian nuclear cooperation, potentially a kind of down payment on a more formalized partnership.

Indeed, in foreign policy statements like this, Japan increasingly appears simply as one ally among many, a tool in the US foreign policy toolbox that no longer merits special attention. This is a shame, because the US-Japan relationship could be an essential part of the US approach to China, helping smooth China's ascension to regional and global leadership (and hold China accountable). Senator Clinton hints at this — she mentions cooperation on clean energy — but no policymaker or presidential candidate has discussed a Sino-US-Japanese triangle.

Japan, it seems, will have to demonstrate its value to the next administration, at least if the Democrats win.

How did it come to this? Some may be tempted to blame Japan, particularly following the bizarre spectacle that is the feud over the MSDF refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. But the US — and the Bush administration — are far from blameless. For all the talk about deepening alliance cooperation, it is clear that the purpose of deeper security cooperation has been to make Japan better able to serve Washington. As Ambassador Schieffer's response to DPJ opposition to the refueling mission shows, the Bush administration has expected Japan to follow along quietly; under Messrs. Koizumi and Abe, Washington wasn't disappointed.

The implication of Senator Clinton's essay is that this kind of relationship, in which Japan is seen and not heard, is unsustainable and of not particular value to the US. Henceforth, for Japan to merit special attention from Washington it will, ironically, have to find its voice and learn to act more independently of the US. It will have to demonstrate its ability to undertake political initiatives independent of and even (occasionally) in opposition to the US. Meanwhile, Japan must have a serious discussion on security policy, determining just how dependent Japan should be on the US for its security as the US reconfigures its presence and just how prepared Japan is to contribute its forces abroad, if ever. Any discussion on security policy must be accompanied by a discussion on how Japan can pay for it all — no small matter.

The next administration can play a role in this discussion, not least by changing the tone: no more bullying, no more demanding. Instead, Washington and Tokyo urgently need to discuss the political ends of the alliance, the "constitution" of the alliance in the post-9/11 era. What are the ends to which the US expects Japan to contribute with the JSDF, and to what ends is Japan willing and able to contribute? The gap between the two visions must be openly acknowledged, and shrunk through negotiation as much as possible — but it is in that gap that Japan's future as a political power in East Asia lies, the role to be played outside the formal bounds of the alliance. The more the allies acknowledge that their interests diverge, the more space for Japan to articulate its own interests and carve out its own leadership role in East Asia.

Japan, of course, has often been more than pleased to free ride, because while the US has occasionally tried to cajole Japan to do more, it has never tried very hard or for very long. Demanding that Japan be independent — forcing Japan to be free, as it were — and treating Japan as an equal partner in the alliance (whatever the actual disparities) may be the only way to make Japan think about political ends and means and the role of the alliance in its foreign policy, and raise its value to the US as an ally.

Recommended book: The End of Alliances, Rajan Menon

If there is one affliction that is all too common in all places and times, it is "presentism." People latch on to reality as they know, and refuse to even conceive that another way of doing things might just be possible and even likely. Inertia governs humanity.

Rajan Menon's The End of Alliances (OUP, 2007) attempts to reimagine American foreign policy by suggesting that the postwar alliances between the US and Japan, Korea, and the countries of NATO will break down sooner or later — and that the end of alliances is a good thing.

He is quick to preempt two arguments that critics would fling in his direction immediately. First, the end of alliances does not mean the beginning of antagonistic relationships with former allies. He is talking about breaking down alliances in a strictly formal sense: the military ties, grounded in treaties and entailing forward-deployed US troops and joint commands. Moving beyond formal alliance cooperation does not preclude close and cordial relations, and in the case of Japan, it is not hard to see that the end of a formal military relationship could in fact make for healthier US-Japan relations.

Second, Menon takes care to note that parting ways with allies does not mean the US would necessarily become isolationist. Instead, he characterizes the change as being consistent with the record of paradigm shifts in the grand strategies of the great powers. Great powers respond to changing international conditions, or they cease to be great powers (or states altogether). The US, throughout its history, has had the luxury of a certain degree of insulation from international change and thus its grand-strategic paradigm has changed more infrequently than others, but when the international distribution of power shifts nothing is sacred, and the US has reconfigured its domestic institutions as well as its foreign policies (as it did from 1945 to 1950).

Japan, of course, is no stranger to paradigm shifts of its own: this is the essence of Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising, which despite the title actually looks at how Japan has changed strategies in response to systemic change. Accordingly, I actually think the Japanese are better prepared to countenance life after the alliance. Even Japanese politicians and thinkers supportive of the alliance recognize that it is useful only as long as it serves Japanese national interests. That seems to be a common thread in each of the sections in Menon's book. Elites and publics in American allies are increasingly capable of seeing that an alliance with the US might in fact not serve their interests. The Bush administration in particular has sparked fears that being close to a US intent on transforming the Middle East could have serious consequences at home (the Spanish argument).

Meanwhile, there are limits to how far the allies are willing to transform their alliances with the US, despite the best efforts of governments since the end of the cold war. NATO's commitment in Afghanistan has been disappointing at best; Japan, for all the hyperbole lavished on its recent policy changes, still is a ways away from cooperating with the US at the same level as NATO; and the US-ROK alliance seems to be ahead of the others in approaching its demise, with US troops being withdrawn, command reverting to South Korea, and Seoul pursuing an independent course with Pyongyang. In some way, each US ally is going to hedge against US entrapment, whether by underspending on defense, pursuing close ties with third countries independent of the US, or publicly disagreeing with Washington. The question is how the US will respond, because in the past the US has given considerable latitude to its allies — the US-Japan alliance would not have lasted if that hadn't been the case. Menon argues that conditions are such that the US will no longer be so tolerant of dissension from its allies, regardless of which party is in power in Washington. With growing commitments around the world, the US will increasingly expect its allies to share the burden in some form.

The problem is that inertia remains a powerful force, and that even if alliances appear increasingly obsolete, policymakers will be unwilling or unable to take the steps necessary to dissolve them. For all the facts and logic Menon musters to support his argument, he still must contend with the desire to leave things unchanged and muddle through, or to take the Lampedusan road and change so that things stay the same. Depending on the results of Korea's forthcoming election, Korea too may end up on the same path, allied to the US, but increasingly in name only. In other words, rather than the end of alliances, we may see the hollowing out of alliances — but as Menon shows, that need not be a cause for alarm.

Brave old world

Robert Kagan has come out with a new essay that is decidedly less revolutionary than his earlier "Of Power and Paradise," which captured the mood of the 2003 transatlantic feud.

In this new essay in Policy Review, Kagan comes to a realization about the nature of American power and world order that others have been arguing for years: the US, for all its power, has limited power to transform anything, and that calling the international system "unipolar" obscures more than it reveals. The only reason that this is worth calling attention to is that Kagan, of course, is a leading neo-conservative (as is this blog's policy, I use this term descriptively, not pejoratively). He has been a prominent advocate of the use of American power to promote democratization, but in this essay it seems he recognizes that American power has limits after all — and so perhaps 9/11 did not change everything after all, revealing instead the limits on America's ability to transform the world, which had been casually assumed during the 1990s.

To describe the world has he sees it, Kagan borrows a concept from the Chinese: one superpower, many great powers. The US remains, and will remain for decades to come, the single strongest power in the world on the basis of its economic dynamism and military strength (which is unlikely to change given US defense spending, and R & D as a portion of US defense spending). But the global system in which the US appears predominant is more a patchwork of regional systems and balances, with the US alone having a stake in all or most of them, often as an external balancer and maintainer of stability. The Bush administration's policy in the Middle East explicitly departed from a balancing role in the region, disastrously, and seems determined to backtrack and restore some semblance of balance after deliberately overturning it. But the US role is broad but shallow: "Predominance is not the same thing as omnipotence. Just because the United States has more power than everyone else does not mean it can impose its will on everyone else."

For all this, I find it odd that the Japanese government has ramped up its emphasis on the idealistic side of its alliance with the US, at the same time that Washington has been playing down its emphasis on values, democratization, human rights and the like. While the latter will always be a part of US foreign policy, they will clearly be stressed less in the coming years. Rather it should be the "public goods" aspect of the alliance that should be emphasized, because that is what the US brings to the Asia-Pacific; the value of the alliance is based on whether and how it contributes to providing a public goods, foremost among them stability, to the region.

UPDATE: Readers should be aware that I'm not recommending this essay because it's particularly interesting or novel — far from it. In fact, if it had been written by anyone else I would not have bothered to look at it. But when a prominent proponent of the use of American power to promote American values reconsiders and suggests that there may, in fact, be limits to what the US can hope to achieve and that it will have the face the reality of a more competitive international system, I think it is worth noting. In fact, the questions that ought to be asked are why it took someone like Kagan so long to come around to this position, and whether any of his compatriots (and family members) share his epiphany.

Adrift in a sea of information

In this earlier post, I talked about how incapable the LDP and the Abe Cabinet are at coping with a messy, complicated media environment.

I might as well have been discussing the US government's public diplomacy efforts.

This problem has vexed me for some time. Joseph Nye's soft power concept is a useful way of thinking about power in the contemporary international system, but the problem with it is that it's hard to pin down, and thus nearly impossible for governments to wield.

As such, I find that the US government's current public diplomacy initiatives are useless at best, counterproductive at worst. And thus I do not find this chart showing a decline in the number of trips abroad by Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs (hat tip: FP Passport) the least bit alarming. In fact, I think Hughes's position is irrelevant, and so her traveling abroad less can only help.

The days are gone when the US could beam radio news to a closed country and raise goodwill toward America among citizens who were told only the worst about the US. The global media environment is simply too sophisticated. How is the US supposed to get its message across when a civilian with a cell phone camera can take a video of American troops doing something wrong, hand it over to a media outlet, and create an uproar? How can the US really expect to get a fair hearing in a media environment in which every individual has tools with which to distribute his perspectives around the globe? [Ed. — Irony alert!! Irony alert!!]

As such, as an American taxpayer, and as a student of American foreign policy, I wish the US government would seriously reconsider how it goes about explaining US foreign policy to the world. It will probably have to wait for a new administration, which should have a nice honeymoon period following the departure of President Bush.

But the problem is not inconsiderable. The first step should be decentralizing US public diplomacy. The real heavy lifting should be done by ambassadors and their embassies — which means ensuring that the embassies are staffed by those with intimate familiarity with the countries in which they are based (and knowledge of the language spoken).

Any US public diplomacy strategy must also acknowledge that there is no way whatsoever to achieve universal acclaim for US policy. To be the sole superpower is to be feared and hated; public diplomacy (and Hollywood diplomacy) can soften that to some extent, but the US will never be able to make everyone happy while remaining a superpower. Given that those with grievances against the US have a host of ways through which to air them, that is truer now than ever.

If the government cannot handle that, then the US should just hang up its spurs now.

Benign neglect for the alliance?

Upon further reflection, I wonder if the Asia team that the Bush administration has assembled — which I previously discussed here — for its final years in office might be a good thing for the US-Japan alliance.

For too long, the alliance has been a cozy love fest. Even in rough patches, the alliance has been characterized by each ally stroking the other's ego, providing constant reassurance that the alliance is secure.

When I was doing research on my master's dissertation, I spoke with Carl Ford, who was at the State Department early in the current administration and was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific affairs during the administration of George HW Bush. Speaking of the differences in alliance management during the Clinton administration and the twelve years of Republican administrations that preceded it, Ford said, "The Republican Asia team pampered Japan. They regularly told Japan how important it was – the US-Japan relationship is very high maintenance. When the Clinton administration came in, things changed – not dramatically so, but noticeably so. There was less pampering of Japan."

So at what point does pampering Japan and providing it with constant reassurance stop being a good thing and become an obstacle to forming a genuine alliance, in which the allies are comfortable airing grievances or questioning the direction and extent of cooperation?

Maybe a couple years dealing with an Asia team whose attention is directed elsewhere will be good for Japan. Perhaps a couple years of not hearing how important and special Japan is for the US will help Japan get used to the idea of being a more independent, flexible actor in changing Asia. If the alliance is as healthy as both countries' leaders insist, this should not be so hard to manage. (Although there will be more pressure on US officers and diplomats in Japan and James Shinn's team at the Pentagon to push the 2006 realignment plan forward, which will perhaps be more difficult without an experienced Japan hand at the White House.)

Besides, with a new Korean administration in the offing, maybe it is best that the US give priority to patching up the bruised relationship with South Korea?

Idealism, realism, and US China policy

Over at Foreign Policy, China scholar David Lampton and journalist James Mann debate the argument presented in Mann's new book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. (The subtitle really says it all.) (Hat tip: China Digital Times)

There is no love lost between Lampton and Mann in this debate, and its implications reach far beyond US China policy.

Lampton challenges the argument in Mann's book that politicians, academics, and corporate leaders are making excuses for Chinese authoritarianism to justify close engagement with Beijing. He argues that policymakers have no illusions about China, but emphasize engagement because "there are economic, security, and intellectual gains to be made from working together."

Mann reiterates his thesis in response to Lampton, saying that his purpose is not to propose a new framework for US China policy but to expose the rhetorical compromises made by American leaders.

Mann's point is well taken, although arguably this problem is a matter of cognitive dissonance: the interests of the US, as observed by Lampton, lead the US to favor engagement in one way or another with China, but China's failure to meet political and moral standards determined by American values mean that engagement with China carries a certain sort of moral repugnance. Democracies, like individuals, often have a hard time coping with the mismatch between their ideals and a reality that falls far short of those ideals, and so they find ways to explain away the contradictions — hence the behavior observed by Mann.

I would prefer that US opinion leaders and policymakers be less squeamish about the contradictions, but their response is understandable.

I ultimately have to side with Lampton in this debate, because, as he suggests in his second contribution to the debate, there are real doubts about the ability of the US to influence political change anywhere, whether through the use of force, sanctions, or rhetorical pressure.

As Lampton asks, "...Even if democracy were to rank first among U.S. goals in dealing with Beijing, could the United States achieve or effectively promote it? Again, consider the dispiriting U.S. interventions in Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Or if it’s verbal condemnations of human rights abuse Mann prefers, consider Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Libya—all states that have blithely ignored the opprobrium of human rights advocates and U.S. politicians for decades."

As he subsequently suggests, the only way for the US — or perhaps more appropriately, Americans — to influence political developments abroad is through the patient support of individuals working to strengthen civil society and building capacity for institutions essential to the rule of law. But as for the pace and content of liberalization in foreign countries, there does not seem to be much that the US can do, which raises the question as to whether democratization deserves the priority in American foreign policy it has been given in recent years.

Does emphasizing democratization, irrespective of whether the US has the ability to advance democracy, serve any purpose other than to resolve some of the unease that comes from having to lead in a world that so often seems to fall short of the high standards demanded by American values? And does emphasizing democratization without being able to follow through undermine the value of the message?

Alliance tension out in the open

The Asahi Shimbun's English edition printed a story today suggesting that US Secretary of State Rice told Japanese officials last month that resolving the abductions issue is not a precondition for the removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

In previous posts such as this one, I suggested that Japan seems to overestimate the willingness of the Bush administration, in its feeble dotage, to stand alongside Japan on the abductions issue should a breakthrough (however unlikely) become possible. And yet Abe seems content to rely upon pablum emanating from the White House, instead of concrete signals emanating from the State Department that the US is ready to deal, with or without Japan.

As this article suggests, what seemed like a more abstract problem now looks to be very real, with an unnamed US government source quoted in the article as saying, "[this] was the first public statement that clearly separated the abduction issue from the decision to remove a nation from the terrorism list."

While the "Agreed Framework 2.0" could collapse at any time — diminishing Japanese fears of abandonment in the process — this story further supports my suspicions that for all the chummy rhetoric emanating from Washington late last month, there are genuine political problems facing the alliance that neither government seems willing or able to face.

What will happen at the first sign of a crisis? Does anyone else think that Kim Jong-il might have something in store to force the issue?

The global order election

As commentators assess the results of the first debate among the (declared) candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US presidential election (check out the summary by Slate's John Dickerson), it is becoming increasingly clear what the central question of the 2008 election ought to be.

Namely, how can the US, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius asks, midwife the complex multipolar order that is coming into being? Is it at all possible for the US, with the help of allies and rivals too, to craft the new global rules of the game?

This question went wholly unaddressed in Thursday night's debate — as Andrew Sullivan writes, "As for foreign policy, very little nuance, very little subtlety, almost no fresh thinking" — even by Senator John McCain, who gave an address at Stanford's Hoover Institution two days earlier that spoke directly to this issue. Instead, the debate seems to have been a cordial softball game, with the candidates trying to one-up each other as to who has the greatest claim to being Ronald Reagan's heir (not surprisingly, perhaps, since the debate was held at the Reagan Library).

Nevertheless, the US and the world need next year's election to be "about" foreign policy, but not a specific foreign policy issue like "Iraq" or "terrorism." Rather, the US is in dire need of a national conversation about when and how American power ought to be exercised; the manner in which the US interacts with countries like China, which may be illiberal at home but share an interest in regional and global stability; and the role of democratization in US foreign policy in the wake of the Iraq war.

The US, as the only country in the world with truly global interests matched with global reach (whether politically, economically, or militarily), desperately needs to determine what it wants the next new world order to look like, and how it hopes to achieve its goals — because no other single power can.

The US cannot, of course, shape the new order on its own, but it can present a vision and begin working with other great powers to hammer out a final version; in other words, what is needed is American leadership, not American dominance. As Ignatius wrote, "American power alone is demonstrably unable to achieve world order; we can't even maintain the peace in Baghdad. But no multilateral coalition has emerged as an alternative."

As such, it is worth looking at Senator McCain's remarks on this question.

McCain stated his theme early in his address: "Now it is our generation's turn to build." McCain is explicitly interested in institution building, domestically and globally, in a manner similar to the Truman administration in the early years of the cold war, a project that the current administration has almost willfully avoided. (And indeed, McCain paid tribute to Truman throughout the speech.)

Then he made a statement that seems like a no-brainer but in fact sets McCain apart from the Republican field: "Today the talk is of the war on terror, a war in which we must succeed. But the war on terror cannot be the only organizing principle of American foreign policy."

Finally, McCain outlined his grand proposal for international order: "a league of democracies." This idea was proposed by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, of the Brookings Institution and the University of Texas respectively, in the January/February issue of The American Interest, and debated by a number of senior foreign policy thinkers in the same and subsequent issues. In short, McCain — and Daalder and Lindsay — called for an organization of democratic allies that would be able to act when and where other international organizations, especially the UN, fail. As McCain said:

The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom. It could act where the UN fails to act, to relieve human suffering in places like Darfur. It could join to fight the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and fashion better policies to confront the crisis of our environment. It could provide unimpeded market access to t hose who share the values of economic and political freedom, an advantage no state-based system could attain. It could bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval. It could unite to impose sanctions on Iran and thwart its nuclear ambitions. It could provide support to struggling democracies in Ukraine and Serbia and help countries like Thailand back on the path to democracy.

In short, to the question of what role democratization should have in American foreign policy, McCain answered strongly in favor of its playing a central role.

But, as Scott Paul writes at The Washington Note — echoing questions raised by discussants in the American Interest — there are serious questions about the desirability of such an organization, and whether it can be formed in the first place. What role would a League of Democracies play in cooperation with authoritarian China or illiberal democratic Russia to manage global order? More fundamentally, is such an organization even possible? An organization of democracies acting as a kind of global posse assumes that every democracy acts in favor of democracies in every face of every foreign policy issue. That's obviously not the case.

Think of the manifold cases when democracies act in ways that not only don't further the spread of democracy, but actually hinder it. (Western support for Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf may be the most prominent example at present.) Realpolitik, foreign policy based on the cold calculations of a state's security interests, remains an essential determinant of foreign policy in every democracy. And then there's the influence of history, nationalism, identity, religion, and so forth, intangible factors that shape foreign policy in unpredictable ways. (As an Asia scholar, a question that immediately comes to my mind is the Japan-South Korea relationship, where the fact that both are democracies seems to be the least important element.)

And McCain doesn't even begin to tackle the question of who would qualify, with the implication being that a relatively lax definition of democracy would render the organization too large and unwieldy to be the effective international actor that McCain desires.

So McCain deserves plaudits for daring to think about the future of American leadership in an increasingly multipolar world, but cooperation among democracies is not a panacea for the world's ills.

Instead, the only way the US will be able to rise to the challenge of the new multipolarity is by becoming more flexible, less reliant on old allies incapable of mustering the will to act, more willing to talk with rivals with which the US competes in some areas while sharing interests in others, and more willing to talk with and listen to all interlocutors in pursuit of a stable, peaceful global order — to ensure, in McCain's word, "a new global order of peace, a peace that can last not just for a decade but for a century, where the dangers and threats we face diminish, and where human progress reaches new heights."

But, ultimately, if strength was the watchword of the unipolar moment, then flexibility will be the watchword of the multipolar era that is coming into being.

The hint of a worldview

Barack Obama has delivered his own "major foreign policy speech," at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. (Full text available here; NY Times article here.)

This speech is not worth reading for its policy proposals, which are more or less standard Democratic boilerplate proposals. Rather, as Scott Paul writes at The Washington Note, this kind of speech helps to reveal the candidate's worldview.

Compared to Mitt Romney, whose first major foreign policy address I blogged about here, there is the strong suggestion of an actual worldview and the beginnings of an appreciation that the world that Bush's successors face will be radically different not only from the global environment that Bush faced upon taking office, but also radically different from the pre-Iraq war environment. Obama, it seems, thinks that the changes are simply a function of poor leadership from the US.

But I disagree: while poor US leadership -- and an obsession with the Middle East -- has exacerbated the changes afoot, what's happened is the end of the unipolar era. The changes are structural, which means there's relatively little