Northeast Asia in flux due to Japan’s sharp right turn

Posted on : 2013-04-25 17:49 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent negation of history added further tension to a region already complicated by N. Korea

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer and Seong Yeon-cheol, Beijing correspondent

Northeast Asia has been unsettled by the North Korean nuclear issue in recent months, and now Japan has started causing problems, too. By making comments denying Japan’s past acts of aggression, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has added another variable to the web of alliances and rivalries in the region.

On Apr. 23 (local time), Patrick Ventrell, deputy spokesperson for the US Department of State, spoke about China and Japan’s territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China). “[The US has] said…many times that we do not take a position on the question of the ultimate sovereignty over the islands,” Ventrell said.

The comment indicates that the US will not take sides on the question of whether China or Japan should have the right to control the islands.

While Ventrell’s remarks might initially sound like a reiteration of the US’s standard position, they represent a departure from the recent behavior of the US government. In 2012, the US had made it known directly and indirectly that it regarded the Senkaku Islands as falling under the terms of the US-Japan security treaty. This suggested that the US could intervene as provided for in the US-Japan security treaty if the Senkaku Islands were attacked, and it also suggested that the US recognized the islands as Japanese territory.

The US adopted this noncommittal stance just once day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made remarks denying Japan‘s past acts of invasion.

In the Japanese Diet, Abe claimed that the definition of “acts of aggression” depended on one’s perspective. “It would be natural for us to expel by force the Chinese if they were to make a landing [on the Senkaku Islands],” he also said.

These are the most extreme statements that a Japanese Prime Minister has made to date in regard to the Senkaku Islands and the acts of aggression of the Japanese Empire during the Second World War.

The Global Times, the English edition of the state-run People’s Daily, criticized Japan in an Apr. 24 editorial. “Japan is like a marijuana smoker, who enjoys the excitement of the moment but is ultimately damaging itself at the same time,” the editorial said.

Chinese state-run media carried extensive coverage of the meeting of Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during Dempsey’s visit to Beijing on Apr. 23, even running a picture of the two. This indicates that there has been a significant compromise on military issues between the two countries.

On US Secretary of State John Kerry’s tour of South Korea, China, and Japan, Kerry suggested that the US could reduce the missile defense system that it is currently setting up in Northeast Asia if North Korea abandons its nuclear program. The US seems to be suggesting that, since it is putting this missile defense system in place in Northeast Asia ostensibly because of the North Korean nuclear threat, it is willing to yield to China’s concerns about the missile defense system once that nuclear threat is removed.

For the past two to three years, the US administration under the leadership of President Barack Obama has sided with the countries of Southeast Asia in the territorial dispute in the South China Sea, which is of critical importance to China. The US has also openly pursued a policy of containing China.

The US has in effect been trying to resurrect the so-called “southern alliance” of the US, South Korea, and Japan, which was established to counter the Soviet Union during the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. This time, though, the alliance would be aimed at China.

However, the US was taken aback by the acceleration of North Korean missile and nuclear development this year and the increased talk of war. With the policy of “strategic patience” that the US had pursued in regard to North Korea only leading to more nuclear bluster from Pyongyang, and with Iranian nuclear development also accelerating in the Middle East, the US decided to work with China in an effort to deal with these problems.

Even the conservatives in South Korea were infuriated by Abe’s remarks denying Japanese acts of aggression. Moreover, he made it difficult for the Park administration to move to strengthen the cooperative relationship with Japan as part of forming a trilateral regime of cooperation between the US, South Korea, and Japan.

The US is placed in a paradoxical situation where it must seek the cooperation of China to check North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons even as it seeks to strengthen trilateral cooperation between the US, South Korea, and Japan - which is aimed, of course at countering China.

Amid these machinations, Japan, under the leadership of Abe, is making a hard shift to the right that is undermining the foundation of the trilateral cooperation that the US is seeking to establish.

On Apr. 24, Abe once again defended lawmakers who paid their respects at the Yasukuni Shrine, saying that it was a completely natural thing to do.

North Korean development of nuclear weapons is serving as a pretext for the US to tighten its net around China, but it is a double-edged sword, as it also makes it possible for China to extract concessions from the US.

Both the US and China are finding it hard to move through the labyrinth with their respective efforts to forge a new southern alliance between South Korea, Japan and the US and to establish a coalition between North Korea, Russia, and China.

 

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