Post by Deleted on Oct 18, 2013 8:25:22 GMT 7
Resetting priorities in the land of the rising sun
Jonathan Eyal
The Straits Times
Asia News Network
Singapore October 18, 2013 1:00 am
Onlookers wave the flags of Japan and Myanmar as they welcome three Japan Training Squadron ships at Thilawa port in Yangon, Myanmar, on September 30, to promote friendship between Myanmar and Japan.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to reassert Japan's military capability and boost its international prestige, but in fact this process has been going on for decades
Japan is back" amounts to more than just a marketing effort to rebrand a country. For Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, it is becoming a rallying cry for the revival of a nation, for Japan's assumption of what it considers its rightful place at the world's top table.
Nowhere is Abe's determination clearer than in his push to boost the country's military power. Japan stands accused of seeking to revive its militaristic past. But most of these fears are misplaced: far from moving ahead purposely, the Japanese are fumbling into a strategic competition they scarcely comprehend.
The scale of Japan's rearmament ambitions is no longer in doubt. The country is already America's biggest and closest technological partner on missile defence, outstripping the contributions made by Europeans in this field, an astonishing reversal of military alliance arrangements which would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
Tokyo also decided last year to purchase the US F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as replacement for its obsolete F-4 and F-15 jets, giving Japan a long-sought-after ground attack capability by the end of this decade. And it recently launched the 19,500-tonne Izumo, a ship the Japanese prefer to classify as a "destroyer" despite the fact that it has a 250 metre-long flight deck which makes it look suspiciously like an aircraft carrier.
For the first time in more than a decade, Japan's defence spending is growing. If current budget plans are implemented, defence expenditure will rise next year by 3 per cent, the highest such single yearly jump since the 1990s, when the Japanese economy was booming.
In sheer numbers, Japan's military remains puny in comparison to that of its immediate big neighbours: it only has 243,000 soldiers, half of South Korea's standing army and only a tenth of China's. Japan also has only 700 serviceable aircraft, less than a third of the Chinese air force's inventory.
But the Japanese compensate for quantity with quality: despite all the sabre-rattling over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, military planners in Beijing know that their navy is still no match for Japan's, despite the fact that China has four times as many vessels.
Besides, there is more to enhanced security than just hardware, as Abe has shown by presiding over a whirlwind of diplomatic initiatives in Asean Europe and the US.
And the political tsunami continues. Last week in Tokyo, Abe devoted a whole afternoon to telling a senior British delegation of his desire to forge closer military links with Britain, and a further full day to the US-Japan strategic dialogue, attended by foreign and defence ministers from both nations. He successfully pushed for a visit of Japan’s imperial couple to India next month, a rare event given the Japanese monarch’s advanced age.
Japan also lifted restrictions on the sale of military technology to other nations by offering India its indigenously made US-2 amphibious aircraft.
And if this is not enough, Abe has pledged to amend his country's pacifist constitution, thereby removing any restriction on the deployment of Japanese forces overseas. The Japanese premier seems determined to smash all previous political taboos, and all at once.
Seen from the outside, Abe's campaign to reassert Japan's global footprint, not only in economics but also in security, seems both imaginative and coherent. Sadly, however, much of this is taking place in an intellectual vacuum. The military changes are real, but they remain incoherent and are years if not decades away from giving the country a true long-range military capability.
Nothing illustrates the distinction between vision and reality better than the dispute over amending Japan's constitution. Much of this debate is irrelevant, because the restrictions the constitution places on Japan's military have already been ignored, while those which are implicit can be readily changed without laborious amendments.
Japan's constitution, for instance, decrees that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained", but the country has had all three for decades. Yet at the same time, the constitution does not explicitly say that Japanese defence budgets should stay below 1 per cent of the nation's GDP, or that Japan cannot sell weapons to others.
All these are restrictions imposed by politicians, and amenable to being cancelled by politicians. So the claim that Japan now requires years of heated legal debates plus a referendum on constitutional changes before it becomes a "normal military power" is just a smokescreen for the fact that no domestic political consensus exists on where Japan needs to be.
Officially, Japan has no intelligence service; in practice, it operates plenty of electronic listening devices and a network of overseas agents. But Tokyo has no centralised system of digesting the collected information and transforming it into an analytical assessment to help politicians make informed security choices.
Abe would like to create a national security council akin to that in the US. But Japan has a parliamentary system similar to that of Britain, rather than the American presidential system. Abe has therefore sent advisers to London to see whether the British model of intelligence assessment, concentrated around the Cabinet Office, can work better.
Meanwhile, Japan has no official secrets act, so civil servants who leak documents are never prosecuted; at worst, they lose their jobs. Only recently were Japanese media correspondents banned from milling around the same floor in the government building where cabinet meetings take place. The confidentiality of strategic decision-making is decades behind that of other countries.
And the poverty of strategic thought extends much further. Abe's preference for creating a web of regional friendships is shrewd. Nobody in Tokyo believes this web can or should contain China, even if this was possible. The hope is that the network of potential allies Japan currently nurtures will at least persuade the Chinese that they cannot push Japan around too much, or that Beijing will have to pay a great price if it continues doing so.
But the Japanese don't seem to grasp that the more they expect their network of regional allies to counter-balance China, the more these allies will shy away from such a task. What Japan needs is to create a regional system of cooperation that is more than an ill-disguised anti-Chinese club.
The biggest and most important step in this regard must be a Japanese-South Korean reconciliation. This will transform the strategic map of Asia, and have a profound impact on Chinese military behaviour, which currently assumes that the Japanese and Koreans will always remain at loggerheads. For the moment at least, the Abe administration has preferred to bypass the issue. Nor has anything been done to tackle emotional historic disputes.
The outcome, therefore, is not a Japan which is "back" but a country which is tiptoeing towards a new starting line without knowing if it should then sprint, or just halt there.
The danger for global security is not so much a revival of militarism in Japan but of a world economic workhorse frustrated by its strategic marginalisation and incapable of escaping it. In short, while Abe may have broken Japan's economic paralysis, he has yet to break the country's strategic drift.