‘Bara-Yuki’

It wasn’t love at first sight, or a complete disaster. Pheeewww! I just don’t understand conservative fretting over Japan’s “college kid” antics.

The Hatoyama government is balking at a carefully negotiated agreement on a realignment of US military bases in Japan, which is aimed at reducing the US footprint in Okinawa. It is also suggesting that it plans to discontinue a refueling mission for the Afghanistan war. And it is pressing Washington to adopt a no-first-use nuclear policy.

More broadly, Japan’s new leadership talks of building an independent relationship with China, as well as forging a foreign policy based more on ties to the international community and international institutions than to Washington. All this would be fine, some regional analysts say, if it weren’t that Tokyo still seems to want to depend on the US for its security – and isn’t talking about an increase in military spending to pay for more of its own defense.

“Junior” is right, and Dad should listen.

Of course, that the DPJ wants to reconsider the alliance with the US is shaped by another structural change, the transformation of East Asia. To a certain extent the 1996 vision of the alliance was undone precisely because the two governments were unable to decide what role the alliance could and should play in a region in which growing Chinese influence (and interdependence) was an inescapable fact. The answer provided by the Bush administration and the Koizumi and Abe governments was “shared values” and cooperation among democracies, an approach that did not survive the Abe government. And values diplomacy notwithstanding, even Abe Shinzo recognized that jabbing the Yasukuni stick in China’s eye was a poor substitute for a China policy. Arguably Japan was already shifting in the direction of an Asia-centered foreign policy after Koizumi, but — with the notable exception of Fukuda Yasuo — its prime ministers were less explicit about the changes underfoot. They dutifully recited the mantras while reorienting Japan away from a security-centered US-Japan alliance. As I’ve argued previously, what’s changed with the Hatoyama government is that it has for the most part discarded with the alliance boilerplate and is actually trying to articulate what Japanese foreign policy should look like in an age characterized by a rising China, a still strong but struggling US, and a region populated with countries facing the same dilemma as Japan.

As Hatoyama’s frenetic Asia diplomacy suggests, his government is obsessed with carving out a leadership role for Japan. Devin Stewart is right to suggest that Japan cannot neglect the US dimension of its new realism. But I think Stewart is mistaken when he suggests “the path toward a more ‘independent’ foreign policy for Japan is not by weakening its alliance with the world’s strongest military power.” On the contrary, I think Japan’s credibility as a leader in the region is enhanced to the extent to which the Hatoyama government is able to show that its foreign policy is not dominated by its alliance with the world’s strongest military power. Which is precisely what Fukuda tried to achieve when he stressed that security cooperation would take a back seat — and what some in the US are coming to appreciate. The DPJ still has work to do answering the question of precisely what kind of security relationship it wants with the US, of course, which is why it is good that the Hatoyama government decided not to rush the National Defense Program Guidelines that were originally supposed to be issued in December. Instead the US and Japan will be conducting a bilateral review of the alliance at the same time that the DPJ-led government is conducting an internal review of defense policy going forward.

Meanwhile the Japanese people are sensitive to the need for an Asia-centered approach in Japanese foreign policy. The public had little interest in Koizumi’s approach to China. Whatever concerns Japanese citizens have about China, they have little interest in policies in provoking China. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that despite, in Stewart’s words, a “bellicose North Korea and an increasingly powerful China,” the public does not support a dramatic increase in Japan’s military capabilities, an expansion of the roles open to the JSDF, and ever closer defense cooperation with the US. At the same time there is little support for ending the alliance entirely.

Both the US and Japan have considerable room for maneuver within these structural constraints. Indeed, the US is by no means powerless in the face of Japan’s push to reorient its foreign policy. For starters, the Obama administration can reverse course on trade policy in Asia, a region which Daniel Drezner contends “has simply bypassed Washington.” Instead of viewing the DPJ’s initiatives in the region as leaving the US behind, the Obama administration should view it as a spur to join the game.

Moreover, the Obama administration ought to reconcile itself to the DPJ’s message. Thus far Washington has mishandled the transition to the DPJ, in what arguably counts as an open-source intelligence failure. Washington did not take the DPJ seriously until far too late, and even when analysts in Washington began listening to the DPJ they still thought that the DPJ was bluffing — or was trying to appease its left-wing members and the Social Democrats — when it talked about the alliance and Okinawa. The DPJ means exactly what it says. Of the examples cited by Cooper, all were articulated by the DPJ well before it won the August election, and articulated not because of the DPJ’s left but because there is a broad consensus within the party on the need to reconsider the alliance and recenter Japanese foreign policy on Asia.

I’m glad Hatoyama and Obama left on a first name basis, before conservative pride put a foot in Obama’s mouth.