Upcoming Trip to Japan Contains Risks at Home, in Asia for Clinton

President Clinton is about to make one of the riskiest foreign trips of his term--to Japan. If he botches it, he could set back the relationship between the United States and Asian nations for years to come.

Clinton is scheduled to leave Thursday for a summit meeting of Asian leaders in Osaka and a two-day state visit in Tokyo. The trip comes at a particularly touchy time for relations between the United States and Japan. Over the past two months, in the wake of the arrest of three American GIs for the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl, Japan has been swept up in an unprecedented public debate about the merits of America’s continuing military presence in the country.

One quick way for the President to botch it would be to cancel the trip or cut it short. There has been talk at the White House that Clinton might do one or the other if the budget impasse between the White House and Congress forces the federal government to shut down.

That would be a serious problem for Washington, of course. If Clinton cancels his trip for that reason, one could credit him with a certain consistency: During the 1992 campaign, he criticized President George Bush for spending too much time on foreign policy and not enough time on minding things at home.

But if Clinton stays home, the message to Japan and the rest of Asia would be a strong and enduring one. The decision would be taken as a confirmation of something many governments overseas already suspect: that America is in retreat, too preoccupied with problems at home to exercise the kind of international leadership it wielded during the Cold War.

If the budget mess is not settled by the time he is to leave for Japan, Clinton could turn the negotiations with Congress over to Vice President Al Gore. An argument could be made that that is precisely what a vice president is paid for--to take care of things in Washington when the President leaves the country briefly for important business overseas.

Assuming Clinton goes through with the trip, however, there is still potential for slipping up. He could do that by failing to recognize the importance of the Okinawa rape case and its aftermath. What that episode requires is the most articulate explanation the President can offer--not only to the Japanese public but also to Americans--of why the United States needs to preserve its military alliance with Japan.

In the past two months, other top U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Walter F. Mondale, have moved quickly and with some skill to take the practical steps needed to defuse the immediate impact of the rape case.

They have apologized repeatedly. They have set aside “days of reflection” for American troops in Japan and instituted training classes in Japanese culture. They have agreed to revise the rules to enable U.S. officials to hand over suspects to Japanese authorities for trial in egregious cases. They have promised to settle a host of disputes over the American military presence in Okinawa.

Yet while the Americans have been good at addressing the nuts-and-bolts questions, they have tended to deflect attention from the larger ones. Why is it still important to have the American troops in Japan? What do the United States and Japan get, and want, out of their military alliance?

There is a strange case of role reversal at work here.

Japanese officials, who enjoy a well-deserved reputation for avoiding controversy and dealing in polite euphemisms, have been saying with American-style directness that relations between the two nations seem to be at a turning point and that leaders of the two countries must address fundamental questions.

“We have to define where we go from here,” Japan’s ambassador to Washington, Takakazu Kuriyama, said last week. “The public in both countries may wonder where the U.S.-Japan relationship is going. . . . Are we going to keep the alliance? Are we economic partners or are we rivals?”

By contrast, Americans are stereotyped as straightforward and blunt. But when it comes to Japan and the security alliance, U.S. officials display an Asian-style tendency to gloss over difficulties and put the best face on things. “The basic alliance [with Japan] is strong,” Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said last week.

If Clinton merely sticks to the old platitudes, he will reinforce the impression that America is a status quo power, trying to hang on to its bases and troops in Japan after the Cold War rationale for them has disappeared. Over the past few weeks, top Administration officials have stressed again and again that their bottom line is to preserve the American military presence at its current levels: 100,000 troops in East Asia, with 47,000 of them in Japan.

In fairness to American officials, it is true that the alliance between the United States and Japan has survived all sorts of strains and frictions in the past.

Three years ago, a group of American experts on Asia was carrying out one of the perennial debates about the “troubled alliance” between the United States and Japan. A Russian expert finally interrupted them. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “America and Japan are cooperating all over the world. In the Soviet Union, we used to wish we had such troubles as you have with Japan.”

But that was the past. The post-Cold War world is changing steadily, in Japan as elsewhere.

American officials highlight some of these changes in Japan: They like to point out, correctly, that it would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a Socialist leader like Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama to endorse the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

However, they do not mention other signs of change in Japan. More than 60,000 protesters turned out at demonstrations last month to demand a reduction in the U.S. military presence in Okinawa, where most of the American troops are based. Some top officials in Murayama’s party have been suggesting that the United States ought to transfer its troops from Japan to some American territory in the Pacific, like Guam.

Next week, Clinton and Murayama are scheduled to sign a document that will reaffirm the importance of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. The danger is that Clinton will be lulled into thinking that this formality is, by itself, enough. It is not. As Kuriyama said last week, the President needs to offer some cogent public explanation of the American alliance with Japan.

Are the American forces stationed in Japan to guard against the outbreak of war in Korea? If so, then will they still be needed if the two Koreas reunify?

Are the troops there to protect against China? That rationale would seem to run contrary to the Clinton Administration’s frequent claims that it does not view China as a military threat. Or are the American forces there to assure the rest of Asia that Japan itself won’t develop into a military power?

Without some answers, without some new description of a military relationship that makes sense to both sides, the American troops in Japan are in danger of undergoing a change in role once again. After World War II, they were Japan’s occupiers. During the Cold War, they were its protectors. Now, the U.S. forces in Japan seem to be turning into a nuisance.

Over the past five years, American officials have been striving to ensure that the U.S. alliance with Japan could withstand the series of 50th anniversaries of events in World War II.

In 1991, Bush Administration officials worked hard to get the two countries through the anniversary of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. This year, Clinton Administration officials breathed sighs of relief after the anniversaries of Hiroshima and V-J Day passed.

Ironically, however, now that the nasty World War II anniversaries are over, the hard part is still to come. It is six more years until the 50th anniversary of the signing of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, the pact that marked the end of the American occupation and the beginning of the alliance.

If the two nations want to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this event in the year 2001 with the alliance still intact, they have a lot of work to do. They need to make sure there is continuing public support, both among Japanese and among Americans, for the U.S. military presence in Japan.

Clinton’s trip is the place to start.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.