Much has been made in current affairs, news media and foreign policy circles about the emerging frenemies-type relationship between the United States and China, with assessments ranging from guarded optimism about long-term strategies to accommodate and work with the country to more bleak assessments of potential military conflict from the various miscalculations between rising and established powers alike (as in Graham Allison's Destined for War). But what about Japan, a traditional U.S. ally in East Asia and the rest of the volatile region? What is their impact on U.S. and Chinese policy? Richard McGregor, a journalist specializing in East Asian affairs, chooses to examine the often-ignored background relationships between the United States, Japan and other East Asian nations that add further nuance and perspective to the much-reported-on U.S.-China relationship in his 2017 work Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century.
With inside access to officials in both Asia and the United States, Freedom of Information Act requests, various news publications and diplomatic archives, McGregor examines the fraught history of the major trilateral (U.S.-China-Japan) relationship in East Asia and attempts to extrapolate its affects on the future of the region starting in the late 1940s (post WWII) to the present (the beginning of the Trump administration). McGregor teases out the many different interrelating strands of both the foundations of friendship between the two countries and also the frayed areas of tension in a complicated geopolitical quilt, finding a complex blend of political dynasties, conflicting historical narratives, shifting alliances and great-power dynamics that have the potential to seriously destabilize the region as in the Middle East or usher in a new era of unprecedented cooperation.
Our story starts in the wake of WWII, where former Axis power Japan had formed a security alliance with the occupying United States, on the condition that Japan reworks its constitution to be more restrictive to the use of military power, with the idea being to weaken the more militaristic segments of the formal imperial power to stave off further conflict. This alliance formed the anchor for the modernization of the region, with economic and political alliances then allowing for the stabilization of a new postwar international order through the Cold War era. China under the victorious Communist Party (CCP), having forced nationalists into exile in Taiwan, was then biding its time as it focused on uniting the country and fueling rapid economic growth and allowed the U.S. its Asian alliances (with Japan and South Korea, for example) as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Meanwhile, the United States encouraged the Japanese economic boom through the end of the 1960s under the stewardship of the dominant and conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) while warily eyeing the rise of communism in China even as diplomatic relations were established in the early 1970s. However by the 1980s, conservative agitations in each country combined with increasing economic competitions and struggles over the historical high ground threatened the meaningful diplomatic progress made over the decades.
Yet, these alliances (formal or not) have largely persevered. Why? McGregor's book is at its best when looking at all the factors that knit countries together and those that seek to tear them apart, revealing continuity among huge changes and subtle changes underneath a seeming continuity. The underlying historical traumas largely resulting from the war were essentially buried by pragmatic factions within each of the countries (the CCP, LDP and U.S. administrations) which sought greater security and economic cooperation to stave off the threats from the Soviets and later North Korea. This pattern of pragmatism has served as the glue that held the relationships between the three powers together through various political transitions within each country, meaning that core aspects of the grand strategy (containment and appeasement of an ambitious China through its integration into the international order and in regional forums as well as greater economic cooperation) tend to be adhered to no matter the political orientation of the party in power. That doesn't mean that there hasn't been much change to the relationship over the years or moments of diplomatic deep freeze.
All of the parties involved are guilty of succumbing to nationalist moments, whether it is the U.S. in demanding protectionist policies against a rising Japan (with familiar charges more recently aimed at China by those allied with the Trump administration) in the 1970s and 80s to the ongoing toxic history war flare-ups involving an assertive China demanding Japanese apologies for wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, past colonization of parts of China and South Korea after the first Sino-Japanese war in 1895 and prime minister visitations to the controversial Yasukuni shrine (which serves as a memorial for war dead that includes Class A war criminals). The U.S. wasn't pulled in until the later 1990s and early 21st century when its role in ending the war by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brought into question by some factions in Japan and in China still wary of potential exercises of imperial power by Western nations, yet frightened by a potential resurgence of Japanese militarism.
Further complicating the toxic history debates that soured diplomatic progress was an assertive China building up its military and contesting the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which it claimed as part of a large swath of territory in the South and East China Seas, causing Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to embrace a continued U.S. military presence in the region. Sending further shockwaves through the system was Japan's reworking of its postwar pacifist constitution to allow a military buildup in response to Beijing's regional ambitions and a U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a signal of a potentially more isolationist and protectionist United States whose decreased regional presence or potential withdrawal threatened an upending of the power balance in the region.
Enter Trump in 2017 whose administration came into power espousing a similar campaign platform of economic nationalism and protectionism that espoused "retrenchment and every country fending for itself" yet contrary to expectations supported the continuing U.S.-Japan alliance and even some degree of cooperation with China on hotspots like North Korea (McGregor, 2017, p. 351). As with any work trying to predict the future by extrapolation from history, Asia's Reckoning is understandably tentative towards the future of the American power component of the title in the East Asia region, leaving such remarks to a brief afterword in which the infighting within the Trump administration's globalist and isolationist wings and Trump's own unpredictability are heavily featured, putting a big question mark at the end for readers. Ultimately, McGregor weaves together a compelling and intriguing narrative while highlighting the continuities below ever-changing foreign policy and thus equips and primes readers with the necessary historical understanding to keep watch through the Trump administration for a potential answer to the fate of American power in the Asia Pacific.
Works Cited:
Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.
Mcgregor, Richard. (2017). Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century. Penguin Publishing Group.
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