PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE : U.S.-Japan Treaty Can Turn Things Around : The Soviet bear once made us huddle together. He’s gone, now we must introduce reciprocity to our dealings.

Some commentators explain the continuing degradation of U.S.-Japanese relations as the natural result of the current U.S. recession, while others blame the recent diplomatic errors of President Bush and Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. That the Bush visit to Japan in December was an ill-prepared disaster is not in doubt, and neither can it be denied that Miyazawa has persistently refused to employ his famous English-speaking skills to communicate with the American public, leaving the field clear for other, insulting, voices.

Yet one need not be a fanatical Hegelian to dismiss both explanations as utterly inadequate. Mere words said or unsaid could not threaten U.S.-Japanese harmony if far deeper causes of strife were not at work. Nor can the recession be blamed. Tensions between the United States and Japan had been mounting long before the recession started. In any case, the resentment is just as great on the Japanese side.

Finally, not even the trade imbalance is a sufficient explanation. U.S.-German trade was just as unbalanced for years, without causing any political tensions to speak of. If we are to overcome the very real threats to U.S.-Japanese amity, we must first recognize that the United States and Japan are on a collision course because of a fundamental change in the structure of world politics, and not because of superficial or temporary irritants.

That fundamental change is, of course, the end of the Cold War. So long as the Soviet bear was outside the alliance hut, clawing at the door, Americans and Japanese could only huddle inside. Mistaking our forced cooperation for a consensual union, we never did negotiate a “marriage,” that is, a broad treaty ensuring a perfect reciprocity, as the members of the European Community have done. Instead each side tolerated the blatant lack of reciprocity.

While the United States continued to disregard Japanese foreign-policy interests (lately by opposing Tokyo’s legitimate desire for a seat on the U.N. Security Council), the Japanese have continued to slight American economic interests, notably by failing to relax pervasive import and investment barriers except after the most insistent demands, item by item. Naturally U.S.-Japanese tensions began to increase as soon as Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies began to reduce the Soviet threat. But it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that the bear finally and abruptly left the scene.

No longer confined to the forced intimacy of the alliance hut, each side immediately began to recoil from the other. The large presence of corporate Japan in American markets, academic and research institutions and even American politics that had previously been accepted with equanimity were suddenly seen as intolerably intrusive.

In Japan, likewise, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu was ignominiously removed from office for being too obedient to Bush during the Gulf crisis. And yet long after the country’s rise to great prosperity, Japanese prime ministers had been equally obedient to American foreign-policy wishes without arousing serious complaints.

But what was tolerated before, when both sides were still huddled inside the hut, has now become quite unacceptable. That is why Miyazawa, the English-speaker, remains so silent: He fears that any courting of U.S. opinion would be considered servile at home.

That same “interdependence” that was supposed to ensure U.S.-Japanese amity has now become the very source of tension. Unless we are prepared to withdraw from it--paying the huge cost of cutting the accumulated links of decades of political and economic interaction--we must now legitimize the interdependence inherited from the Cold War years. That can only be done by negotiating a broad treaty of cooperation that guarantees reciprocity in all economic matters, and genuine before-the-fact diplomatic consultations.

It is because they have the reassurance of a guaranteed reciprocity that the French would not now protest even a German purchase of the Eiffel Tower, just as a French company has won the Berlin subway contract without evoking any protectionist complaints.

The United States and Japan could not of course contemplate anything as broad as the European Community’s original Treaty of Rome, let alone the subsequent integration agreements. But the present security treaty is certainly much too narrow. Once all-important, strategic cooperation between Washington and Tokyo is now almost irrelevant to each country’s primary concerns. Nor can the multilateral rules that provide a sufficient framework for U.S.-Bulgarian or Japanese-Bolivian trade bear the weight of increasingly complex U.S.-Japanese economic interactions, each one of them an actual or potential source of friction in current circumstances.

Enormous obstacles would have to be overcome to successfully negotiate a treaty of cooperation. Japan would have to finally abandon its badly outdated poor-country mercantilism (dozens of measures originally designed to save foreign currency absurdly remain in effect) while the United States would have to finally recognize that Japan is no longer its ward, but rather a great power whose global partnership could be uniquely valuable.

The difficulties may seem insurmountable, but for both sides nothing more is ultimately required than that they belatedly recognize long-established realities. The alternative is a hugely damaging geo-economic Cold War.