U.S.-Japan: A Closing Door : DIPLOMACY : The Cost of Outmoded Security Ideas Is Trade Deficits Forever

It is fitting that baseball, our national pastime, should illuminate our naivete about other nations’ strategic ambitions with a clarity almost totally absent in the current trade and security debate.

The U.S. media cannot get enough of the unusual windup and delivery of Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo. Cheering fans ignore nationality when rooting for Japan’s strike-out king. In the United States, showcasing the world’s most skilled athletes at the highest level of competition is what baseball--indeed, sports--is all about.

But the beauty of top-flight baseball is largely lost on the Japanese expatriates filling National League ballparks wherever Nomo takes the mound. To them, Nomo is the latest in a long line of national champions doing battle for their country in enterprises--like autos, electronics and finance in the past--where foreigners once seemed invincible. Each ball and strike Nomo throws produces an exhilarating moment of national validation--or excruciating anguish.

Unlike the welcome afforded Nomo in America, Japan views hiring non-native athletes as a necessary evil for improving domestic skills, not simply because they might be better. Foreign players are used to teach and set global standards for Japanese ballplayers. They are expected to do well, but not to overshadow their employers. For example, while playing for the Hanshin Tigers in 1985, former major leaguer Randy Bass threatened to break the legendary Saduharu Oh’s Japanese home-run record. In the final two games of the season, opposing pitchers on the Tokyo Giants--Oh’s former team--elected to pitch around the American slugger, still one blast shy of the mark, rather than risk the record falling to a foreigner. In frustration, Bass stood at the plate with his bat held upside-down, daring the Giants to pitch anywhere near the strike zone. They walked him eight consecutive times.

Bass’ predicament is perfectly consistent with Japan’s fundamental industrial ideology, long enshrined in law and practice, of using foreign contacts to learn about and exploit others’ knowledge for the benefit of domestic interests. In Japanese sports, as in technology and trade, buying the best for its own sake counts for little--that’s an American conceit. Developing globally competitive, full-spectrum national capabilities, even at the cost of domestic consumption--or a winning season--is everything.

It is America’s singular failing that it cannot recognize such differences exist, let alone have serious consequences. Even when trade tensions bubble over, the debate here is dominated by those who dismiss divergent national ideologies, and the trade and security asymmetries they produce, as irrelevant to U.S. welfare concerns.

The consequences of this naivete were recently revealed in a game of a different sort, the latest in a series of crisis-simulation exercises conducted by the MIT Japan Program. Bringing together top American, Japanese and other Asian experts, this year’s scenario explored how Japan and the United States might respond to a military threat mounted by a rogue Southeast Asian nation in the period 1998-2010.

The American team was thoroughly outplayed by its Japanese counterparts. Belying its unimaginative, overly cautious image, Japan proposed a novel Asian security alliance and rapidly solved a refugee crisis that the game’s designers thought would prove intractable. At the same time, Japanese leaders insisted upon--and received--America’s continued acquiescence to mammoth annual trade deficits and the reaffirmation of the U.S. commitment to defend their nation.

By contrast, the Americans proved so inflexible that they repeatedly turned aside the game controllers’ attempts to dictate military and political constraints, insisting on acting as if the world had never changed. While Japan’s summit negotiators exchanged high-fives for utterly outmaneuvering the Americans, the “U.S. Cabinet” ended the game right where it began--lugubriously debating economic theory, locked in Cold War-era alliances and mounting a “cowboy-style,” unilateral missile strike against nuclear reactors in Asia.

Unfortunately, life sometimes does imitate art, whether in baseball or crisis-simulation exercises. Confronted with evidence of strikingly different approaches to globalization among its allies and trading partners, the United States steadfastly refuses to explore the strategic implications of this divergence. It takes refuge in international accounting theorems, savings rate differentials or security alliances conceived in a bygone era.

The failure to link the U.S.-Japan security alliance with global economic issues misrepresents present circumstances in ways that the treaty--designed to preclude post-World War II Japanese rearmament and contain the former Soviet Union in the North Pacific--never contemplated. Yet, Washington bizarrely insists that any discussion of its defense burden in Asia be divorced from the reality that the region’s prevailing industrial strategies grossly distort its economic transactions with the countries it protects. Reflecting a MacArthur-era paternalism, Washington still holds that such concerns are far too trifling to affect even the most outdated, and increasingly illogical, security relationships.

The irony is that, in the name of hard-boiled “realism,” such views actually limit our capacity to understand and respond to new challenges. Struggling to achieve some parity in auto-parts trade with Japan, for example, the Clinton Administration was once again forced--much like the American crisis-simulation team and so many U.S. leaders before them--to reaffirm national treaty commitments in ways that severely blunted a more serious discussion of how the U.S.-Japan bilateral relationship can thrive in the 21st Century.

Americans today conduct infinitely more nuanced debates about religion in schools, the morality of welfare programs, private-property rights or the hairstyles of prominent prosecutors than about the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of technology, wealth and economic power to Japan and its Asian imitators. We speak of a revolution in Congress, of creating a new America, but offer only the most shopworn platitudes when dealing with the rest of the world--a habit other countries, including Japan, find baffling but advantageous in bilateral negotiations.

The challenge for America is to recognize that its greatness is based on its openness and unalloyed appreciation of excellence--be it Japanese athletes, luxury cars or computer chips. But other countries can--and do--see and pursue their interests differently. Even the largest economies, for a period of time well beyond what economists commonly predict, can favor domestic supply over cheaper, better imports, or seek to build indigenous talent at the expense of “objectively” more skilled foreign alternatives. Trade with nations that differ in this regard will inevitably be unbalanced and potentially destabilizing.

A thorough review of Japanese and Asian relationships based on these realities, not what we pretend exists, is long overdue. Yet, the United States seems paralyzed by the thought that re-examining rules and ideas cast long ago under radically different technological and political parameters invites disaster. In fact, the failure to do so poses a much greater threat to U.S. national security.

For far too long, the United States has been comforted by simplistic assurances that everyone, everywhere is playing the same economic and social games, and that world trade and political problems will self-correct. As American baseball fans cheer a young foreigner for his talent, and while millions of Japanese stay up all night in Tokyo to watch their native son vanquish the once omnipotent foreigners, we see how profoundly mistaken this fantasy has been all along.