Pacific Realliances and the Future of U.S. Interests in China and Japan

In a world experiencing dramatic, epochal changes, few regions are changing more dramatically than East Asia. The past two decades have seen an historic reversal of fortunes between the two dominant economies and societies in the region, China and Japan, the consequences of which are inevitably changing global politics, especially power politics.

Japan’s relative fall and China’s not just relative, but absolute rise by every measure of national power, have fundamentally changed the geopolitical and geostrategic positions of both these countries vis-à-vis their principal counterpart, the United States. Most importantly of all, the scale and scope of China’s unprecedented global trade and financial engagement is manifested in its accumulation of over $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and other U.S securities,

How have things changed? In a new book, Chimerica—U.S.-China Collusion and the Way Forward for Japan, Susumu Yabuki, professor emeritus of Yokohama City University and one of Japan’s leading China-watchers and analysts of Japan-China relations, posits that the U.S. has inevitably accepted China as its principal geopolitical partner in East Asia, if not globally, and that other regional relationships—not least that with Japan—are going to be subordinated to this partnership in the future.

What, then, of the U.S.-Japan security treaty and the rest of the security framework of security constructed during the post-war occupation, the outbreak of the hot war in Korea and the Cold War with the Soviet Union? For Yabuki, the “alliance”lost its justification when the Soviet threat ceased to exist in December 1991. Since then, it has served no purpose and has actually harmed Japan’s security by providing an excuse and impetus for the capture of budgetary resources by the military industrial establishment in China.

Professor Yabuki’s scholarship on China, dating from 1974, is remarkable for its volume and depth. He has published exclusively in Japanese except for a translation and co-authored book (by and with this reviewer), China’s New Political Economy (Westview Press, 1995) and China’s New Political Economy— Revised Edition (Westview Press, 1999).

Chimerica is a neologism for the symbiotic financial relationship between China (as producer and lender) and the United States (as consumer and borrower) coined by Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard.

For Yabuki, the defining moment of Chimerica was the Second U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (II U.S.-China S&ED) held in Beijing in May 2010. The 100-strong U.S. delegation, led by U.S. co-chairs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Geithner, comprised the political leadership of virtually the entire U.S. government, including Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke, with most cabinet departments sending secretaries. The Department of Defense and U.S Pacific Command were represented below the level of Defense Secretary Gates who was scheduled to meet with Chinese counterparts in the Singapore “Shangri-La Dialogue” the following month. The II U.S.-China S&ED established the framework for Gates’ talks.

Discussions were not only public, but some were also held in secret. Secretary Clinton and Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo chaired a secret session at which China communicated its “core national interests” and the position that U.S. recognition and non-violation of them as the sine qua non for a positive U.S.-China political and strategic relationship. By many accounts, and according to Yabuki’s understanding, China got everything it wanted, and the U.S. was also well satisfied. In effect, the strategic framework in Asia was “reset.”

How, from Japan’s perspective, it was reset was apparent from the fact that while Secretary Clinton spent a total of five days in China, where she had two intensive dialogues with Chinese counterparts, she was able to justify only three hours in Japan to meet with soon-to-resign Prime Minister Hatoyama. In short, in the context of Chimerica and U.S. strategic interests, Japan has been and...