Posted by Tobias Harris on November 12, 2009. Filed under Special Report: President Obama's November 2009 Trip to Asia , Japan, United States.
This post is by Tobias Harris of the blog Observing Japan.
Obama in Tokyo: Expect little, for now
Just one year ago, alliance managers in Tokyo were deeply concerned about the transition from the Bush administration to the incoming Obama administration. Worried that a Democratic administration would mean a return to the Japan “passing” of the latter years of the Clinton administration, Japanese leaders anticipated that the new administration’s Asia policy would be characterized be a marked shift towards China. After all, while running for president Hillary Clinton wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Our relationship with China will be the most important bilateral relationship in the world in this century,” a statement that triggered warning bells in Tokyo among officials accustomed to hearing former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield’s mantra that the U.S.-Japan relationship is “the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.”
A year later, as Barack Obama prepares for his first trip to Japan as president, the state of the relationship has changed dramatically. Now it is Washington that is worried about the reliability of its ally under the leadership of a new, unfamiliar government, the cabinet led by Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). As one State Department official said of U.S. Asia policy, “The hardest thing right now is not China, it’s Japan.”
The DPJ, the first party other than the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to wield a parliamentary majority since the LDP’s founding in 1955, has promised sweeping changes to how Japan is governed, starting with the role played by the country’s elite bureaucrats. As the new government reforms Japan’s institutions it will not be making an exception for the U.S.-Japan alliance. Indeed, during its years in opposition the DPJ made clear that it regarded the alliance as abnormal, forcing the Japanese government to subordinate Japan’s national interests to Washington’s wishes. In its election manifesto it promised to build an “equal” U.S.-Japan relationship.
The new government has repeatedly made clear that it views the alliance as important, but it is determined to recalibrate the U.S.-Japan relationship for a new era. The prime minister and Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya have spoken of a relationship less centered on security cooperation and more focused on global problems like climate change and nuclear proliferation. Not coincidentally, this vision dovetails neatly with their ambitions for Japan to play a leadership role in East Asia and spearhead the creation of an East Asian community.
But with the Hatoyama government barely two months old, naturally Hatoyama and his cabinet ministers have yet to decide how to translate their ideas into policy. Even in the dispute over the bilateral agreement to realign U.S. forces in Japan and reconfigure the U.S. military’s footprint in Okinawa, the government has not gone beyond asking the U.S. government to renegotiate the agreement. It is still debating alternative plans, although that did not stop Secretary of Defense Robert Gates from trying to close discussion of the agreement while visiting Tokyo in October.
The result is that Obama’s visit to Tokyo should be a low-key affair, even with the president arriving on Friday the 13th. After delaying his arrival so to be able to attend a memorial service at Fort Hood, the president will arrive in Japan on Friday evening and depart for Singapore on Saturday evening. Obama will meet Hatoyama and hold a joint press conference Friday, and give an Asia policy address Saturday morning before meeting the emperor and empress.
In other words, the president and the prime minister will not be spending the weekend forging a close, personal relationship. But there is nothing wrong with that. If anything, the close relationship between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro during the first half of this decade masked the structural flaws in the U.S.-Japan relationship, what a new report issued by the National Bureau for Asian Research (NBR) refers to as the relationship’s “unmet expectations.” While the Bush administration and Japan’s LDP-led governments were celebrating a “golden age” and talking about their “shared values” as a basis for alliance cooperation, the reality was that the allies were increasingly talking past each other. The U.S. continued to expect Japan to become an ever more active security partner, especially in areas outside of East Asia, even as Koizumi’s successors were increasingly focused on meeting the threat posed by North Korea, building a constructive relationship with China, and generally finding a role for Japan in the evolving East Asian order. To a large extent, the Hatoyama government’s concerns are the same. As Hatoyama wrote in the magazine VOICE, “How can Japan, caught between an America struggling to remain a hegemon and a China wanting and planning to be a hegemon, maintain its political and economic autonomy and defend its national interests? The international environment in which Japan will be placed from now on is not straightforward.”
The relationship may end up moving in the direction outlined in the NBR report, abandoning broader ambitions for a global security partnership to focus largely on the defense of Japan. In the process the DPJ government will undoubtedly try to forge a new relationship that complements their plans for cooperation in Asia.
Accordingly, it would be a mistake to expect much from Obama’s visit this week. The shift in the alliance will not be engineered over the course of a day in Tokyo. It will instead be the focus of intense discussions between the two governments as they commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S.-Japan security treaty in 2010. What better way to mark an anniversary than to consider how to extend the alliance’s life.