U.S., Japan to Unveil New Defense Plans

Suppose there was a war in Korea, and Japan dithered.

What if Japan couldn’t decide whether refueling U.S. jets battling North Korea or treating wounded American soldiers in Japanese hospitals violated its “peace constitution?”

Worried that such a scenario would explode the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and that trade animosities were eroding an alliance crucial to U.S. security interests in Asia, Pentagon officials three years ago set about fortifying their defense pact with Tokyo.

For the past year, they have been hashing out exactly what Japan would and would not do if conflict broke out in its neighborhood.

On Tuesday, the U.S. and Japanese governments will make public final details of the revised guidelines specifying how their alliance will function in a crisis.

Already, the defense guidelines are triggering a major political debate inside Japan and raising concerns among Japan’s ever-wary Asian neighbors. Ironically, while the Asian countries worry about Japan inching away from its purely defensive military posture, some Americans argue that Japan has not gone far enough in accepting a more equal military partnership with the United States.

The consensus among security experts is that the U.S. government deserves high marks for getting the best deal possible from Tokyo given Japanese political realities.

Even so, some warn that the guidelines will be judged “totally inadequate” in time of war.

“If American soldiers are dying on Korean battlefields, and the Japanese are providing rear support outside of the combat zone, Americans will look at this and say, ‘Wait a minute, this war is taking place next to Japan, their interests are threatened more than ours, what is going on here?’ ” said Gerald L. Curtis, a Japan expert at Columbia University in New York.

The lopsided U.S.-Japanese alliance could probably survive a short war that involved, say, a quick defeat of a North Korean invasion of South Korea followed by an outpouring of gratitude from the South Koreans and a happy glow of self-congratulation among the Americans, he argued.

But a longer, drawn-out war would probably force the Japanese government to reinterpret the “no war” clause in Japan’s “peace constitution,” which was drafted by the United States after World War II, rather than allow its alliance with the United States to collapse, Curtis said.

“But that isn’t going to happen until it has to happen because . . . the domestic political price is too high and because the Americans are so concerned about maintaining the alliance for our own purposes [that] we’re not really going to put that much pressure on Japan to do more,” Curtis said.

“And if we did, it could backfire.”

Others disagree. “Even if the alliance is spared the test of a crisis, the status quo is not sustainable,” Bruce Stokes and James Shinn of the Council on Foreign Relations recently argued. In the case of a Korean conflict, they said, “Japanese troops should be put in harm’s way.”

U.S. and Japanese officials--speaking with rare unanimity in both on- and off-the-record remarks--insist that the revisions to the 1978 guidelines do not represent any expansion of Japan’s military role, but only clarify how far Japan can go without violating its constitution and its antinuclear principles.

But judging from the headlines in the Japanese and other Asian media, the guidelines are seen here as significantly altering Japan’s military stance. A country that was dependent on the United States for protection has now evolved into a regional power that will cooperate with the United States in keeping the peace in the Asia-Pacific region and will provide some types of logistic support behind the lines in case of war--although it will not fight unless attacked.

“Essentially, the security treaty has been redefined, and the Japanese now almost take for granted that the primary purpose of the alliance is to contribute to regional peace and security--and that the Japanese have a direct role to play,” said Curtis.

Nevertheless, Curtis predicted that Japanese domestic political realities--including the deep aversion to using force as long as the Americans will use it for them--will ensure that “Japanese security policy is likely to continue to be benign, or irresponsible, depending on your point of view.”

Japan is walking a political tightrope: Offer too little military assistance to the United States and it risks jeopardizing the alliance; offer too much and it risks alienating its neighbors.

Although Japan’s historical reluctance to acknowledge its World War II aggression has receded, the Asian countries watched with concern as Japan’s defense expenditures rose from the equivalent of $29.3 billion in 1985 to $50.2 billion a decade later.

Despite the demise of the Soviet threat, by 1995, Japan ranked third in the world in defense spending, after the United States and Russia, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

And so, experts say, Japan’s neighbors are torn between the sneaking fear that the guidelines move Japan toward a more activist military stance and secret relief over a strong, reaffirmed U.S.-Japan alliance that could deter any resurgent Japanese militarism or Chinese adventurism.

The South Koreans, once subjugated by Japan, have broadcast their horror at the idea of Japanese troops--even peacekeepers--on Korean soil. Western experts see such a scenario as extremely unlikely.

But the Korea Herald noted last month that one view in Seoul is that “Japan may be taking advantage of international conflicts and the emergency scenario on the Korean peninsula to gain momentum to allow it to project its military power abroad.”

Chinese Premier Li Peng has branded the guidelines “utterly unacceptable” because they do not rule out a Japanese role in helping the United States defend Japan’s former colonial possession, Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade Chinese province.

Meanwhile, most Southeast Asian leaders want the United States to remain a guarantor of peace and stability in East Asia but are afraid that an expanding U.S.-Japanese alliance will provoke China, particularly over the question of Taiwan.

“It does not serve Japan’s interest to arouse open opposition to an alliance that China has lived with quietly for decades,” Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew cautioned in a recent speech. However, Lee said he favored preserving the U.S. “buffer” between a rising China and a powerful Japan.

After a public spat this summer between top officials in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party over whether the new defense guidelines covered Taiwan, Japanese and U.S. officials now say the guidelines do nothing to alter the long-standing position of both countries: that Taiwan is part of China but that Beijing must not use force to reunify with it.

“The guidelines refer to function, not to geography,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a former assistant secretary of Defense. “They make explicit what Japan will do to support us in times of crisis.”

Other analysts are more blunt. “To tell China that the guidelines would not be invoked would give China a green light to attack” Taiwan, said Ralph Cossa, executive director of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu.

In the final analysis, the U.S.-Japanese alliance “is in China’s interest as long as China is willing to accept the essential status quo in Asia,” Cossa said.

Despite government assurances that Japan’s actions will remain strictly defensive, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is expected to face serious opposition in pushing legislation through the parliament that would implement the guidelines.

Pundits in every Asian capital will be waiting to parse the details and debate the implications of the final guidelines document this week.

Among the important questions will be whether Japan will agree to resupply U.S. forces with ammunition in a crisis. So far, Japan has indicated that it would not do so--a stance that has drawn criticism from some Americans. Meanwhile, Tokyo has been pushing Washington to promise to evacuate Japanese nationals from trouble zones.

According to an interim report on the guidelines released in June, Japan will allow U.S. forces to use civilian and military seaports and airports; provide fuel and supplies other than ammunition and transport them to U.S. ships at sea; repair U.S. aircraft; perform search and rescue operations in areas surrounding Japan; share intelligence, and perform minesweeping.