Securing the "anchor of regional stability"? The transformation of the US-Japan alliance and East Asian security.

• Author: Bisley, Nick
• Position: Report

The forward deployment of US military power in East Asia is thought by many scholars and policy-makers to be the key factor behind the region's sustained stability over the past twenty years. (1) It is underwritten by a range of formal and tacit bilateral agreements and alignments of which the most important is the alliance with Japan. In the past ten years this alliance has been both strengthened and transformed. From the mid-1990s, when the alliance was clearly troubled, through to the accession and sudden resignation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the relationship has been fundamentally strengthened. Both sides share a sense of the global and regional threats which they face, have institutionalised mechanisms to underwrite this consensus and to cope with the on-going challenges of alliance management, and key policy elite have excellent working relationships. Notwithstanding Japan's recent prevarications over its contribution to the Afghanistan operation, the relationship is the best it has been since 1945.

The purpose of this article is to critically analyse the transformation in the alliance and to consider its regional implications. It examines developments from the mid-1990s up to the May 2007 Joint Security Consultative Committee meeting and their consequences for the region. The article draws a number of conclusions. First, the US-Japan alliance is becoming a genuine security partnership and has distinctly moved away from its Cold War rationale. Second, changes to the alliance have not been as security-promoting as many think. For the partners, the risks of entrapment due to the alliance have increased. For the region, alliance enhancement is unsettling the strategic status quo and promoting destabilizing security dilemma responses. In this sense, the tightening of the alliance is a conservative move in that it tries to maintain the broader strategic status quo, but the changing security landscape means that such conservatism is not resolving regional insecurities. This is more notable in Northeast Asia, but its consequences for Southeast Asia are also not as benign as many assume.

On the Road to Graceland

America's series of Cold War bilateral alliances and security arrangements have been the centrepiece of East Asia's security and stability. With the end of the Soviet challenge, the ongoing normalization of China and the stabilization of regional conflicts, particularly in Indochina, it seemed that the Cold War security structures would be dismantled. The closure of US bases in the Philippines in 1991-92 appeared to indicate a wider shift in America's thinking about its place in East Asia. Many in the region feared that a large-scale reduction in the US presence would be dangerously destabilizing and significant diplomatic effort was put into convincing American policy-makers to maintain the status quo. This led to the 1995 and 1998 Nye reports which set out the strategic rationale for maintaining the same basic force presence and political structure for American power that had seen out the final quarter century of the Cold War. (2) Although the immediate concerns of key East Asian allies had been assuaged, the underlying problems had not been addressed. Without the Soviet Union, with China undergoing rapid economic growth and a diplomatic normalization programme, as well as the emergence a host of "new" security challenges, it seemed a little odd that American interests would be best served by the Cold War status quo. The recent shift in the US-Japan alliance is a somewhat overdue response to the changing landscape of East Asian security.

Strengthening and Reshaping the Alliance

For the bulk of the Cold War there was a settled view about the structure and purpose of the relationship. In return for the "easy ride" on American security public goods, Japan was a vital industrial centre safely out of Soviet hands and a geostrategic asset of high value to America's Cold War interests. By the late 1980s, however, this consensus had begun to break down. Japan's growing self-confidence, and a recognition of the vulnerabilities associated with its dependence on the United States, led to debate within Japan about its security policy. (3) A series of trade and basing problems, as well as the absence of a clear strategic purpose, meant that by the mid-1990s the alliance appeared to be, as the title of a leading study put it, "adrift". (4) In spite of this many on both sides shared the view that an alliance of some kind was necessary. (5) What form it should take and what roles the partners should play, however, was a continuing source of disagreement both within and between the partners.

The 1995 National Defense Program Outline concluded that the alliance remained the foundation of Japan's security, (6) and led on to a recalibration of the relationship embodied in the Security Declaration made at the April 1996 US-Japan summit in Washington. (7) The Declaration placed the alliance on a slightly different footing; the advancement of common security goals explicitly defined in regional terms was said to be its new purpose. Following this, the 1997 Defense Guidelines specified the operational expectations of the alliance commitments with three situations in mind: cooperation under ordinary conditions; cooperation relating to an armed attack on Japan; and cooperation arising out of situations in "areas surrounding Japan". (8) The final point controversially made plain that Japan would become involved in military activities, even if in circumscribed terms, beyond the immediate territory of Japan?' This was seen by many, particularly the Chinese, as a none-too-subtle reference to a conflict over Taiwan.

Although the new direction had a neat rhetorical ring, it lacked strategic clarity and its deliberate diplomatic ambiguity produced a fuzzy strategic rationale. The demands within Japan for more autonomy and more equality had not been met, nor had American insistence on increased Japanese military capacity. Also, while the economic concerns of the late 1980s had abated within the United States, the frictions deriving from the legal status of US forces in Japan, and Japanese financing of these forces, continued to hinder the relationship. Finally, there was a sense within Japan that America was increasingly preoccupied with its efforts to improve its strategic relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC). (10)

Between 2002 and 2007, however, the alliance was strengthened and retooled. In part this was due to better alliance management, but was primarily due to a number of important changes in the character of the political relationship, the alliance's strategic rationale and its operational dimensions.

Although much store has been put in the role that the personal relationship between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has played, the strengthening of the alliance is not simply due to personalities. A number of bureaucratic measures and operational dimensions established a longer-running foundation for a closer-knit alliance. The most important aspect of this process was the revitalization of the Joint Security Consultative Committee meetings (SCC). These meetings have been held, periodically, since the mid-1970s. However, those held since 2002 have been the central place in which the political, strategic and operational aspects of the relationship have been improved. Sometimes referred to as "2+2 meetings", as they are usually comprised of the two foreign ministers and two defence ministers of both sides, (11) the SCC also includes a small number of senior bureaucratic officials meeting to fine tune the ministerial commitments. The first key meeting was held on 16 December 2002 in Washington, D.C. and established the framework which was to drive the process. This involved recognition of the fundamental change to the strategic environment, both global and regional, which the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had presaged and emphasized the shared values that they now saw as being at the heart of their cooperative efforts. It also flagged missile defence, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, North Korea and the uncertain regional security environment as key features of the new security landscape over which cooperative action was going to be necessary. It underlined political commitment to the relationship and established the SCC as the primary arena in which the alliance would be changed. (12)

The subsequent meeting, in February 2005, re-iterated the double function of the alliance as its underlying purpose, with the declaration describing it in a manner that was to become a catechism in the coming meetings: "the bedrock of Japan's security and the anchor of regional stability". (13) It also specifically identified a string of common regional strategic objectives which included increasing the transparency of the PRC's military spending and the encouragement of "the peaceful resolution of issues concerning the Taiwan Strait through dialogue". (14) Not surprisingly this received considerable Chinese opprobrium. Finally, it spelled out a joint commitment to six common global objectives. (15) For the first time the alliance was being publicly linked to a set of common global strategic objectives and operationally configured to advance these ends. The US-Japan security relationship had begun as a function of America's Cold War strategy, itself a global endeavour, but in that guise Japan was an entirely passive player. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's "unsinkable aircraft carrier" metaphor neatly captured this passivity. From 2005, Japan and the United States explicitly moved their relations to a formally articulated alliance serving strategic aims that were global in ambition.

A follow-up meeting, in October 2005, sought to reduce the diplomatic heat that had come out of the February meeting and to spell out the operational consequences that were...