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Multipolarity: Be Careful What You Wish For

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by Arthur Waldron, Ph.D
Published on October 5th, 2004
LOOKING FORWARD

The report of the Japan Council on Security and Defense has hit the media today. According to the Financial Times [“Japan call to reshape defence capabilities” 5 October 2004 p. 3] the official panel of “wise men” recommended that “Japan should respond to the changing threats to its security by reshaping its defence capabilities and possibly acquiring the technology for pre-emptive strikes against foreign missile bases.” It also called for redefining “its security alliance with the US.”

This is major and profoundly important news, in particular for those who have rested their hopes for power in the world on the emergence of “multipolarity”—a situation in which a group of powers counterbalance one another (read: offset the United States) thus making it possible for a smaller power to exercise disproportionate influence by using what is technically called “the strategy of the decisive weight.” (Italy’s policy, quite unsuccessful, in both world wars).

In search of multipolarity, China has cultivated relations with Europe, Russia, African states, and so forth—but has taken a hard line against Japan, rebuking the Prime Minister every time he pays a visit to the shrine to the war dead and sending “research vessels” into the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Island chain, among other things. France, another enthusiast for multipolarity, has worked hard to cultivate China, but paid very little attention to Japan. In fact, even the United States, which should know better, has a tendency to neglect Japan: we have only a handful of scholars and diplomats who really know the language and the country, and we have failed even to inform Tokyo of several of our major China initiatives, let alone coordinate with them.

With the important change in Japanese thinking signaled by the Japan Council report, that oft-longed-for multipolarity is now coming into being in Asia, but not exactly in the form its votaries wished for. What we look to be getting is the “wrong kind” of multipolarity, with democratic countries such as Japan and India beginning to complicate the strategic ambitions of such undemocratic states as China and North Korea. This “wrong kind” of multipolarity may strengthen the free world—rather than force it to make concessions to the unfree, as is generally imagined.

Now it is clear, contrary to much opinion, that China may not in fact be the emerging and dominant new pole in a multipolar Asian or global system of power. Japan, it turns out, has not been asleep at the wheel as the security environment around them has changed—with the overextension and relative decrease of US power, with the development by North Korea of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and above all, though this is evidently soft-pedaled in the report, the emergence of powerful Chinese military that periodically pokes at Japan, for example through oil drilling in disputed maritime areas.

With respect to China, an almost certainly spurious quote, attributed to Napoleon, is regularly invoked, about what happens to the rest of the world when “the dragon [China] awakens.” So far this has remained hypothetical, but with Japan we know exactly what they do when faced by a threat: they discuss it among themselves, and take a decision about how to deal with it. Militarily we may expect them now to become very capable indeed. Japan has, after all, a strong martial tradition (something China, for example, with its tradition that “good iron is not made into nails, good men do not become soldiers” lacks) as well as technological capabilities that even in the 1930s were producing aircraft—the Zero fighter—and other weapons better than anything then possessed by the United States.

The only reason Japan today is not a nuclear superpower, bristling with missiles and with carrier battle groups patrolling the seas is that she made a decision, after World War II, to foreswear military ventures. Now, however, circumstances have changed so much that she can no longer pretend that real threats do not exist, or imagine that the United States will happily fight a nuclear war, with the destruction that would wreak on America itself, in order to defend a pacifist Japan. Remember, even our oldest friends, tied to us by family and blood shed together repeatedly, France and England, both maintain their own nuclear deterrents—because they do not fully trust the United States. Nor do they or anyone else trust missile defense as the sole answer to the missile threat.

So what may be involved in the still-modest (the committee rejects nuclear weapons) changes recommended for Japan’s security policy? The ability to strike a missile base preemptively requires excellent intelligence including real-time satellite imagery, etc. as well as highly reliable force projection capabilities—such as cruise missiles—having, of course, sufficiently destructive warheads to accomplish the mission. Can Japan develop these capabilities? Of course: she is the second largest economy in the world and has superb scientific and technological capabilities. She already possesses the most powerful navy in Asia and an excellent air force, but until now her military has lacked force projection capabilities.

With the addition of carefully tailored offensive military capabilities to the rest of her national endowments, Japan looks to become again what she has traditionally been since the Meiji Restoration of 1867: namely, the most capable state in Asia. Furthermore, one can have some confidence that today’s democratic Japan has learned the lessons of her disastrous attempt, beginning in the 1930s, to secure herself militarily in a unilateral fashion.

Japan is moving steadily toward becoming the strongest Asian pole in a multipolar world, but because Tokyo has always sought alliances, we may expect that her emergence will strengthen the democratic states of Asia. Japan as a powerful pole will thus be welcome to many American friends and allies, but not to China—and possibly not to Russia either.

Clausewitz pointed out in the nineteenth century that just as in physics, so in international politics and war, actions elicit reactions. The problem is that while the physicist can calculate exactly what the reaction will be, the strategist cannot, as the reaction will be the freely-conceived product of the mind of the adversary.

The report of the Japan Council marks a major step in the all-important Japanese reaction to a worsening security environment. The free states of Asia should welcome it, despite horrors they may have suffered at the hands of an earlier and quite different Japan. Washington should read it as a reminder that we cannot and should not attempt to serve as the ultimate guarantor of security for Japan, or for that matter any number of other states. Instead, we should encourage democratic states to take responsibility for their own security within alliance structures. And in Beijing and Moscow, this message from Tokyo should be read as a reminder that military buildups, such as the one engaged in by the former Soviet regime or the one China is now pursuing, tend not so much to enhance the power of the state building up the military, as to constrain it, while poisoning trust and thus crippling diplomacy.

For Asia, Japan’s slowly shifting security policy is as full of potential consequences as the two other key events of the past decade or so, with which it is of comparable importance: namely, India’s decision to become a major military power, and North Korea’s entry into the nuclear club.

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