The current U.S. security posture in East Asia
leaves it with few options should a crisis escalate
China and Japan are increasingly at each other’s throats.
America wants to stand between them, but because of its military presence on
Japanese soil, it can only actually stand behind Tokyo. As Japan develops
independent, offensive military capabilities, an untenable situation is taking
shape: In the future, the United States may have little control over the
outbreak of war but a virtually automatic commitment to involvement in it.
Instead, a more elastic commitment would give the U.S. greater leverage to
restrain Japan and contribute in a balanced way to regional stability.
Faced with greater diplomatic pressure from Beijing and
belt-tightening in Washington, U.S. allies like Japan have started to rearm in
earnest. Asia is quickly becoming “the most militarized region in the world.” U.S.
partners and allies in the region plan to spend 53 percent more between 2013 and 2018
than they did in the previous five-year period. Japan’s security posture in
particular is undergoing sweeping changes. Last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
reversed a decade of cuts, seeking the largest increases in defense spending since the end of the
Cold War.
This still unfolding story represents a substantial shift in
burdensharing from the U.S. to its allies. After two major wars and the Great
Recession, both major parties in the U.S. are happy to see others carry more of
America’s global responsibilities. But in a world dominated by America for so
long, there is something of an intellectual vacuum on how to approach
multipolarity.
Several Washington think tanks have stepped into this void.
The Federated Defense Project at CSIS, the Power Web at CNAS, and the Front Office/Back Office Concept at the Carnegie
Endowment are examples. Each offers a new alliance concept that outlines how
the United States can do more with less. They applaud the easing of the “free rider problem” and greater allied
participation in shared challenges, while stressing that continued U.S.
engagement and reassurance is essential. In other words, nothing fundamental
will change in the switch away from the old hub-and-spoke model.
What no one sufficiently tackles, however, are the strategic
problems of leading from behind in this way. Their Achilles’s heel is something
most strategists by now take for granted: the deployment of U.S. troops on
allied territory as a “tripwire” against aggression.
For seventy years, the United States has garrisoned soldiers
and sailors in Japan, South Korea, West Germany and elsewhere. Their principal
role is to ensure that we cannot help but be entangled in our allies’ security.
The Defense Department’s 1995 East Asia strategy report
states that a physical presence makes it “unmistakably clear that the United
States would automatically and immediately be involved in any such conflict.”
Political scientist Thomas Schelling was more morbid, but maybe also
more candid when he wrote that the Berlin garrison was never meant to defeat a
superior Red Army: “What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops?
Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner
that guarantees that the action cannot stop there.”
America is unique in having gone to such extreme lengths for
the sake of extended deterrence. To convince enemies it would defend Tokyo as
if it were Los Angeles, it purposefully gave up choice in the matter. If a war
breaks out over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, it will embroil the U.S. not
because of treaty obligations but simply because the proximity of U.S. forces
makes abandoning Japan in any major conflict impossible.
The problem is that Japan also knows this, and China is not
the only partner in this dispute with the ability to spark a war. Over the past
two years, the provocative behavior of Japan’s right-wing government has raised
the risks of Tokyo entrapping the U.S. in a conflict with China. In 2012, Japan
escalated its territorial row with China by nationalizing the islands, against
the explicit advice of the State Department that it would
trigger a crisis. It has so far refused to admit even the existence
of a dispute. Likewise, Tokyo is taking a much more hardline approach than Washington to
China’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. Last
December, Abe refused to comply with Vice President Joe Biden’s plea not to visit the controversial Yasukini Shrine.
U.S. alliance managers have been trying to restrain Japan
from taking destabilizing actions, but they are handicapped by their own
policy. American negotiators have no bargaining power over the most basic
question of the alliance: whether the United States will defend Japan.
Threatening nonsupport is not credible so long as American garrisons ensure the
unconditionality of its commitments.
Japan’s growing capabilities underline this vulnerability.
As Mira Rapp-Hooper wrote last fall in The Diplomat,
burdensharing elevates the risk of entrapment because powerful allies demand a
greater degree of independence. It reveals what we might call the
“burdensharing dilemma”: there is a tradeoff between encouraging collective
defense and maintaining control over the direction of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
America has long worried about its allies’ capacity for independent
military action. Despite wanting to arm Taiwan and South Korea in
the early Cold War, on balance U.S. policymakers were too troubled by what the
ambitious Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee might do with such weaponry. Now,
Washington is trying to dissuade Japan from acquiring long-range missile
capabilities that would allow it to preemptively strike enemy bases.
But today is not the Cold War; China’s challenge is simply
too great to discourage America’s allies from rearmament. So unless Washington
is willing to fundamentally revise the way it does extended deterrence, the
U.S. will be forced to accept an accelerating risk that Japan will act
independently in ways inimical to American interests. Rather than assets on a balance sheet, allies will count more
as liabilities, and the extent of U.S. commitments will reflect the extent of
its weakness.
Instead of waiting to cede the initiative to others, the
United States must replace its permanent bases in Asia with military access
agreements or, at most, temporary rotational deployments. This revolution would
reintroduce the freedom to threaten nonsupport for behavior that is
strategically or morally intolerable. Fear of abandonment should deliver a
healthy dose of prudence in Tokyo. Deterrence against China may prove more
difficult, and Japan will rearm at an enhanced rate, but the current
arrangement promises no balance between deterring Beijing and restraining
Tokyo.
Critics may charge that the best way to avoid
entrapment is joint training and policy coordination to get America inside
Japan’s decision-making loops. It’s overly optimistic, however, to hope that
Tokyo will just put its new capabilities at U.S. disposal. Whatever entrée
Washington currently has into Japanese policymaking, moreover, seems slight. Threatening
to force down Chinese planes or drones over the disputed territory
is hardly favorable to American policy. Robert Gates recently divulged that the U.S. prevented an escalatory South Korean airstrike
against the north in 2010. How long until America’s alliances are no longer
hierarchical enough to demand such restraint, or even be aware of a decision
beforehand?
Another argument is that there’s less automaticity in
American commitments than might appear. If a conflict erupted over the
Senkaku/Diaoyu, Japan has the capabilities to take care of itself. But if
that’s the case, then the roles of defensive “shield” and offensive “sword”
have already reversed. China and Japan, not China and the U.S., have control
over the outbreak of a war. If it escalates beyond the islands even marginally,
the U.S. is destined to fight in it nevertheless.
Jake A. Douglas is a research assistant at the College of
William & Mary.
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