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A SENSE OF ASIA

A lesson in Asia collective security from Australia and Japan


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

Friday, March 9, 2007

The new bilateral agreement for military collaboration between Japan and Australia is a breakthrough. It is an important building bloc in collective security arrangements which have preserved peace, unprecedentedly, through NATO in Europe for more than half a century.

But Asian collective security has always eluded American policymakers. President Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign minister John Foster Dulles’s valiant efforts to create a defensive shield against aggressive Communism — his critics called it “pactomania” — bore no fruit.

In the West, his Central Treaty Organization [the Baghdad Pact], fell apart in 1958 when mobs dragged its chief promoter, Prime Minister Nuri es-Said and his Husseini king [a cousin to Jordan’s current ruler] by his heels through the streets. [Bloody Baghdad is no new phenomenon!] SEATO [the South East Asian Treaty] finally collapsed in 1975 when a petulant Congress, embittered by 56,000 American dead [and President Tichard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s pursuit of “détente” with Moscow], cut off aid to an increasingly successful Saigon government.

Always a gaping hole in Dulles’ dyke, however, was India where the mythical colossus, Jawaharlal Nehru, addled by his Bloomsbury socialist baggage, played on anticolonial sentiments for a pretended neutrality [added and abetted by Yugoslavia’s Tito and Indonesia’s Soekarno]. His rhetoric covered a cynical 50-year alliance with Moscow, even endorsing the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and facilitating Communist subversion throughout the Third World.

Although Dulles could not put together a formula for northeast Asia, the Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 and Stalin’s sponsorship of North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, reversed America’s immediate postwar idyll of a neutral, deindustrialized Japan. The absolutely essential minimum for collective defense there, however, a Japanese-South Kiorean alliance, defied U.S. efforts — though a former Japanese army officer, Park Chung Hee, reigning in Seoul, and the Japanese military’s prewar chief clerk, Japan’s Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, almost achieved it before Park’s assassination in 1974. The embittered Koreans, partly instigated by Communist elements, could not shake off memories of half century of brutal Japanese Occupation — even though their economic miracle and cultural adjustments owed as much to Japanese capital and technology transfers as to U.S. aid. [If, as now seems the case, Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, leads South Koreans conservatives back to power in December, there may be progress on that political accommodation.]

Meanwhile, a cats cradle of alliances is coming into place which could work a NATO-like protective shield against aggression [always bearing in mind a cats cradle’s capacity to quickly unravel!] It won’t be easily managed from Washington. Australia’s announced aversion to any military defense of Taiwan flies in the face of the U.S.’ commitment to assure a peaceful settlement on the Strait, and Japan’s public announcement it would consult with the U.S. for any eventualities there, given Tokyo’s traditional view of the Island as a stepping stone the archipelago. And Howard was forthright on the latest brouhaha over World War II Japanese atrocities: Chinese, Korean and European women recruited or shanghaied into Japanese army brothels.

Japan’s Prime Minsiter Shinto Abe was quick to caution the Australian media: “All these efforts are not to encircle China or [do we] have any specific country like China in mind.” Australian Prime Minister John Howard brushed off suggestions it was aimed at China: “'It is important to the future that Japan assume a greater security role in the region”.

But the Australia-Japan joint declaration — Japan's first strategic agreement other than its mutual defense pact with the U.S. — comes not only during an effort to curb North Korea's nuclear and missile potential, but with growing concern about China's growing military expenditures. The four-part agreement sets priorities for “non-traditional” military and security cooperation including counter-terrorism, maritime security, border protection and disaster relief. It also lays out shared regional concerns. It’s no secret Washington has promoted the just-short-of-alliance in an effort to bind its two most important regional allies. [Australia has been a partner in all the U.S.’ post-WWII military actions, including Iraq.]

That Japanese troops will be permitted to train in Australia is a major concession since demographics still have not wiped out resentment among Australians who came close to Japanese occupation and whose troops — as with the Americans — suffered ignominious imprisonment in bitter Pacific warfare

Overcoming this old history has been a steady if slow process. Australian and non-combatant Japanese troops worked together in Cambodia, East Timor and Iraq. Tokyo welcomed Australia stepping forward in 2005 to provide security for their engineering contingent in southern Iraq, necessary since Japan’s constitution still technically prohibits overseas combat even in self-defense. [The Japanese did not want to repeat their 1991 Iraq War much criticized dollar baleout because of their inability to join the military coalition.] All three countries collaborate in the Strategic Defense Initiative, a Washington — led effort to halt in nuclear and other WMD components traffic, now focused on pressuring North Korea to halt its overseas shipments of missile and nuclear weapons technology.

The agreement marks an effort by the Abe government — which later this year hopes to move on the long anticipated constitutional amendment formally endorsing Japanese defense and participation in UN peacekeeping — to broaden its strategic reach. Japan has renewed old efforts to strengthen economic and political ties to a liberalizing India, having abandoned Soviet-style planning with that regime’s implosion. In Southeast Asia it is trying through the ASEAN alliance to meet rising Chinese economic as well as geopolitical competition.

The new Australian-Japan agreement builds on a thriving economic relationship. Japan — at $42 billion total in the year ending June 30, 2006 — is Australia’s No. 1 trading partner, despite growing sales to China. Japan is still the biggest customer for Australia’s coal, liquefied natural gas, crude petroleum and agricultural goods at a time Canberra’s balance of payments deficit hit a 23-year record.

A highpowered Japanese delegation arrived in Australia simultaneously with Howard’s visit to Tokyo to lay the groundwork for free trade negotiations starting in April, delayed in the past because Tokyo refused to open up its political sensitive agricultural sector. It’s estimated free-trade with Japan, which buys 18 percent of Australian exports, would add more than $30 billion to Australia’s economy and $20 billion to Japan’s.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

Thursday, March 15, 2007


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