As U.S., Japan Bond, China Takes Notice

No one paid much attention to Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi’s visit here this week-except, undoubtedly, the Chinese and the Russians.

Obuchi’s trip demonstrated to them how the United States is attempting to redesign its old Cold War alliances for the future-not just in Europe, where NATO is fighting a new kind of war, but also in Asia, where America and Japan are quietly establishing new sorts of military links.

Obuchi brought President Clinton a present: Last week, the Japanese Parliament passed new “defense guidelines” to spell out how Japan would help American forces, not only in Japan itself but elsewhere in Asia as well.

“In the strategic realm, we’re at the beginning of a brand new relationship with Japan,” says Richard L. Armitage, a former Pentagon official. “This gives American military planners much more confidence that if a shooting war broke out in Asia, the best-trained, best-equipped military force in the region would be of as much assistance as possible to the United States.”

Consider the remarkable transformations that this is part of.

Once, NATO and the U.S.-Japan security treaty were designed to defend Europe and Asia against the Soviet Union. Now these alliances are being redirected toward quite different purpose--to combat “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, perhaps later to combat North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

These parallel changes in NATO and the U.S.-Japan alliance extend still further.

During the Cold War, U.S. military bases overseas were at the heart of the alliances. Now, America’s willingness to share with allies its revolutionary military technology is at least equally important. In Asia, America and Japan are beginning to cooperate on missile defense. In Europe, Washington and its NATO partners are fighting a precision-guided war.

Critics argue that eventually, America’s structure of overseas alliances will fall apart.

“Obuchi’s visit to Washington is like an East Asian version of the NATO summit,” says Chalmers Johnson of the Japan Policy Research Institute. “They’re all a bunch of old flunkies dominated by the United States.” He views the current efforts as the dying gasps of the Cold War order.

Over the long run Johnson could be proved right. Perhaps in time, the isolationist sentiments of the congressional Republicans will win out, and America will pull back from both Asia and Europe. Maybe Japan will some day be governed by assertive nationalists like Tokyo’s new governor, Shintaro Ishihara.

But at the moment, the reinvigorated American ties with NATO and Japan are the dominant feature in international affairs. If you want to find out whether NATO has become irrelevant, ask Slobodan Milosevic.

Which brings us to the Chinese and the Russians. They are left out of America’s new alliance structur--and both of them wonder if the new military ties are aimed at them.

Clinton tells them not to worry. Standing beside Obuchi on Monday, the president declared: “I think that our strong defense cooperation . . . should not in any way be seen as directed against China.”

But the Chinese have longer memories than Clinton. They remember what was said when America and China teamed up against the Soviet Union.

“I knew that publicly, one had to make pious noises to the effect that U.S.-Chinese normalization had nothing to do with U.S.-Soviet rivalry,” President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in his memoirs. He confessed that he believed in private what he denied in public.

Back in the 1970s, one of the driving forces behind America’s Asia strategy was to keep Japan in check. Newly declassified files show that in 1972, President Nixon told Chinese Premier Chou En-lai that he wanted to “restrain Japan from following a course . . . of economic expansion being followed by military expansion.”

This American policy now seems to be on the wane. The United States no longer fears a resurgent Japan. With Japan’s economy in a prolonged slump, the Clinton administration seems more afraid of a weak Japan than a strong one.

The Asian financial crisis obscured these long-term changes in American strategy toward Asia. In 1997 and 1998, the Clinton administration cozied up to China, eager to persuade Beijing not to devalue its currency in a way that would destabilize Asia. The ties between Washington and Tokyo grew chilly, as the administration complained that Japan was hurting Asia by failing to stimulate its economy.

Now, as Asia’s economy revives, the broader trend of Japanese-American strategic cooperation is coming to the fore once again.

At the news conference Monday, Clinton spoke of the importance of “shared values” between countries. And Obuchi spelled out what this meant: Japan and the United States “share the common values of freedom, democracy and respect for human rights.”

America wasn’t watching. At the time, CNN was giving greater display to Jesse Jackson. But Clinton’s and Obuchi’s message wasn’t lost on China.

*

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.