AsiaTimes,
TOKYO: This is just the beginning of a war of nerves of military strategy among the world's three most powerful countries, based on real hardball politics, military hardware and spyware. The theater is the East China Sea, surrounding Taiwan and Okinawa. The actors are Japan, its ally the United States, and an increasingly powerful China that already is an economic powerhouse and is expanding and upgrading its military on the sea, on land and in the air.
This perceived Chinese “threat” – vehemently denied by Beijing – is a factor in the gradual transformation of Japan from a pacifist nation, with pacificism enshrined in the US-imposed constitution, to one that assumes a more powerful role on the world stage – and will not countenance a perceived threat from its formidable neighbor to the west. To handle this seeming “threat”, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is rushing to change Japan's traditional pacifist military posture – urged on by Washington to play a larger role and expand its military operations in the so-called “arc of instability” stretching from Northeast Asia to the Middle East.
Faced with China's strengthening military power, the United States and Japan are reinforcing bilateral security relations by changing Tokyo's pacifistic military posture for their common interest – to prevent an ever-stronger China from emerging as the global and regional superpower, especially militarily, in the coming decades. For the US, China is the only country that has high potential to threaten US global dominance in the 21st century. For Japan, China could jeopardize political and economic stability in Asia, threatening Tokyo's credibility as the leading economic power in the region. To cope with this “China threat”, Tokyo is adopting a more muscular military posture, one that causes alarm to its neighbors in Beijing, Seoul, Manila and elsewhere.
A recent defense policy guideline by the Japan Defense Agency also for the first time names North Korea as a potential threat and cites the tensions in the Taiwan Strait that could draw in the United States, and quite possibly Japan.
China, of course, maintains that it is not a menace or a threat to anyone and that its much-touted “peaceful rise” is for the political, economic and security good and unity of Asia. Not everyone thinks so, especially not Japanese hawks and some hard-headed Japanese military planners and politicians who want Japan to assume its rightful role on the world stage.
Last month Japan adopted a new defense-policy guideline that for the first time names China as a possible threat. “China, which has significant influence on the region's security, has been modernizing its nuclear and missile capabilities as well as naval and air forces, and expanding its area of operation at sea,” the new outline stipulated. “We have to remain attentive to its future course.” (See US FY04 Report to Congress on PRC Military Power – note p 20 “Use of Force”, p 46 “Taiwan Strait” – and Japanese Defense Agency website.)
Full Report:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/GA13Dh01.html
