Dispatch Japan

Okinawa: Why the Nakaima win spells trouble

Sighs of relief could be heard in Washington and Tokyo when news emerged that Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima had won reelection on November 28.

But the relief, which doesn’t run very deep, is based largely on faulty assumptions about the pliability of Okinawan politicians and the prefecture’s voters at large, which could spell major trouble for US-Japan relations in six months or so.

The stage is now seems set for the two governments to proceed with a much-needed strategic dialogue, but one with the exceedingly-tenuous premise that plans will proceed on the construction of a controversial replacement facility in the Henoko Bay area of Okinawa for the Futenma US Marine Air Station, which is scheduled to close.

According to this schedule, the two governments will issue a joint security statement of some sort, including final resolution of the Futenma replacement facility issue, when Prime Minister Naoto Kan visits Washington sometime next Spring.

The problem with this scenario is that the Okinawa gubernatorial election confirmed what everyone already knew: A large majority of Okinawans vehemently opposes construction of the Futenma replacement facility anywhere in the prefecture. The Obama administration insists that a bilateral agreement for the plan proceed. The Kan administration, which saw its predecessor collapse under the pressure of the issue, is keen on avoiding a showdown with Washington, but also lacks the political inclination or power to force construction to proceed over the objections of Okinawans.

Barring any flexibility in timing or the content of the replacement facility plan, an impasse is all but certain to prevail next Spring, raising the specter of alliance turmoil at a time when tensions with China and North Korea would seem a more appropriate focus of bilateral attention.

The Nakaima reelection could prove problematic because Washington and Tokyo are likely to unwisely invest enormous, ultimately fruitless time and effort to convince him to back the Henoko project, rather than getting on with the inevitable, arduous task of crafting alternative basing arrangements for the US Marines on Okinawa.

Washington misreading the DPJ

Part of the problem is that key Obama administration officials continue to labor under the mistaken notion that today’s problems involving the Futenma replacement facility are largely the fault of former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. The argument goes that the Futenma issue had largely been put to rest by prior, LDP-led governments, with Okinawans basically having come to accept that the replacement facility would be built at Henoko Bay. However, the mistaken narrative has it, when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power in September 2009, Hatoyama revived “false” and “unrealistic” expectations among Okinawans that there could be an alternative site for the replacement facility, somewhere out of Okinawa, which already hosts a large proportion of US military installations in Japan. It was the unnecessary, reckless actions of Hatoyama, the story goes, that led to the Futenma problem of the last year.

Luckily, the story continues, the DPJ has “matured,” a generally younger, more pragmatic and realistic crop of leaders has come to the fore, and construction of the Henoko facility can ultimately proceed after a period of wooing and cajoling of Governor Nakaima and other Okinawan political, civic, and business leaders.

Ignoring the election

The false narrative both misreads the DPJ, and dismisses the hard-to-ignore facts on the ground in Okinawa.

Nakaima is a pro-alliance conservative who, in the past, had expressed openness to construction of the Futenma replacement facility at Henoko. But Nakaima increasingly bent to the political winds in Okinawa, which have blown harshly against the Henoko project for quite some time.

Nakaima wound up running his campaign with a firm pledge to oppose the Henoko project, all the while making clear that he continues to be a supporter of the US-Japan alliance, and is not opposed to all US bases in Okinawa, or Japan overall.

His opponent, Yoichi Iha, is much more ideologically opposed to the US military presence in Japan, and was hurt somewhat by Nakaima’s campaign criticisms that he is unrealistic about security issues, especially in the midst of rising tensions with China and North Korea.

Nevertheless, Nakaima was able to garner only 52% of the vote, to 46% for Iha.

The only major candidates both firmly opposed construction of the replacement facility at Henoko, and won 98% of the vote.

In what amounted to a stunning rebuke of the US position, not one credible candidate came forward to campaign in favor of the Henoko project.

Proponents of the project are hanging on to the tiniest sliver of hope that a package of economic aid to Okinawa, and some adjustments to other US deployments on the island, will soften Nakaima’s resistance to the Henoko plan.

Even if Nakaima could be pressed into changing his stance, the overall mood on Okinawa in opposition to the Henoko plan would seem to contradict the US insistence that the replacement facility for Futenma be both operationally feasible and “politically sustainable.”

The Kan view

For Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the Futenma controversy is one more of many accumulating political headaches. With his job approval ratings in the precarious 30% range, and his chief cabinet secretary having been censured by the Upper House, Kan does not look forward to a political showdown with Okinawa or the United States over Futenma.

There have been some suggestions that Kan might be pressed by Washington to use special legislature powers for police deployments to forcibly allow construction to begin. But people close to Kan flatly reject any chance of that occurring.

More likely is that Kan will appeal to the White House that he is doing his best to bring along opinion on Okinawa, but that he simply needs more time. And that will likely turn into appeals for yet more time.

That could result in the existing Futenma facility remaining open for an indefinite period, which is less-than-optimal given that it is located in the midst of a population center.

With the Marines scheduled to begin deploying mistake-prone V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft to Okinawa in 2012, they are just one Osprey crash away from political disaster on Okinawa.

The irony is that neither Hatoyama nor other DPJ critics of the Futenma replacement project are rigid advocates of immediate Marine withdrawal from Okinawa.

The firm US air and naval presence in Japan, combined with expansion of selected Japanese air, naval, marine ground troop, and intelligence capabilities would seem to provide a solid foundation for alliance cooperation in the region, and perhaps provide an environment in which more flexible basing arrangements for the US Marines in Japan would be feasible.

By contrast, US insistence on proceeding with the existing Futenma replacement plans seems destined to run into both adamant opposition on Okinawa, and a DPJ that has not abandoned its desire for a responsible, strategic review of the alliance force structure in Japan.

 

North Korea: The real danger is Iran, proliferation

Much of the US press continues to portray recent developments on the Korean Peninsula as a “crisis” that, in the words of today’s Washington Post, “has presented the United States with a massive strategic challenge.”

The situation is serious, of course, as the two Koreas line up on opposite sides of the most militarized border in the world. Artillery exchanges between the two are no light matter. But the US and South Korea are basically in accord that further escalation must be prevented.  Seoul quickly put a stop to clumsy, inaccurate talk from the defense ministry of reintroducing US nuclear weapons to the South. There have been no further military exchanges since the flurry of Tuesday afternoon, which began when North Korean artillery shells hit the sparsely-populated island of Yeonpyeong.

The danger of miscalculation is always present when dealing with the roguish brinksmanship of the North Korean regime, and Washington and Seoul are as much on alert to prevent that as they are to monitor North Korean activities.

The Obama administration on Tuesday naturally had to put its immediate attention on the military situation on the Peninsula. The aircraft carrier USS George Washington has left its home port in Japan for the area, and the US and South Korea announced plans for new joint military exercises.

But the principle concern about North Korea remains its nuclear weapons program, especially the potential for serial proliferation of fissile materials, and machinery or components used in their manufacture.

Those concerns have grown in the wake of revelations last Saturday by Stanford University’s top nuclear weapons expert Siegfried Hecker that North Korea’s ability to enrich uranium for potential weapons use is far more advanced than previously thought.

In the coming days and weeks, attention will increasingly focus on North Korea’s secretive relationship with Iran, where the government has largely spurned international worries that it is pursuing nuclear weapons development under the cloak of a civilian nuclear energy program.

The North’s motivation

In the meantime, US intelligence officials say there are no indications North Korea is in a war mode. The country’s elite continues to carry on with fairly mundane, everyday activities.

South Korean intelligence and political analysts seem in considerable agreement that the artillery shelling was a planned provocation, coming as it did in broad daylight, shortly after South Korea had finished a militarily-innocuous live-fire artillery exercise that sent shells harmlessly into the sea. The artillery shells fired by North Korean forces over a 50-minute period were apparently aimed largely at a South Korean marine base on Yeonpyeong.

Like the sinking by North Korea last March of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan, the shelling of Yeonpyeong represents an attack in the area of the disputed maritime demarcation line between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea. However chilling the shelling was for its wanton, ice-in-the-veins disregard for human life, it is not accurate to say, as the Washington Post does today, that the Yeonpyeong shelling “marked the first time in years that North Korea has trained the firepower of its 1.1 million-strong military on South Korea’s civilian population.”

However scripted, and calculated to achieve certain objectives, a brief, limited attack such as that on Tuesday is inherently dangerous and destabilizing. There is considerable discussion in Seoul as to what Pyongyang hoped to achieve, and why the regime acted now.

Chosun Ilbo and others have mentioned some likely possibilities.

One: As part of the power transfer from Kim Jong-il to his son Kim Jong-un, the regime is trying to use military provocations and the country’s enriched uranium program to rally the military behind the son;

Two: The regime is using brinksmanship and the threat of calculated escalation to wrestle the US back to the negotiating table, in hopes of achieving a peace treaty that wins economic aid and leaves its nuclear weapons program intact;

Three: Pyongyang is trying to rally public opinion in democratic South Korea against the government of President Lee  Myung-bak, who has adopted a relatively tough line toward the North;

Four: The North’s usual calculated brinksmanship has crossed a line into irrational, reckless actions, indicating a possible power struggle within the elite.

Enriched uranium

US intelligence specialists have known for years that North Korea was working on a uranium enrichment program, which can be used for both nuclear energy purposes and potentially for nuclear weapons. The program comes on top of the plutonium-based program that has already yielded North Korea a small number of nuclear weapons.

The Clinton administration upon leaving office passed along to Bush administration successors the available intelligence on the North’s uranium enrichment program. Bush officials, in July 2002, uncovered reportedly incontrovertible evidence that the North was trying to advance the uranium enrichment program, and confronted officials in Pyongyang in October of that year.

All along, however, the consensus in Washington was that Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment program was only in a pilot stage, and that policy priority should be placed on curtailing the more advanced and therefore more dangerous plutonium-based program.

Siegfried Hecker, the Stanford scientist who revealed the North’s surprising advances in uranium enrichment capabilities, had long argued for a plutonium containment policy toward Pyongyang, based on a demand for what he calls the “three no’s”: no proliferation of nuclear technology, no production of additional nuclear bombs, and no upgrading of existing bombs. Until his recent visit to Yongbyon, Hecker believed North Korea was not very advanced in uranium enrichment technology.

As late as 2008, the then-chief US negotiator with North Korea, Ambassador Chris Hill, told members of Congress that Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment program was not seriously advanced.

Clearly the North Koreans did not develop this sophisticated uranium enrichment capability overnight. As recently as last year, visitors to the facility that now houses the advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges saw no evidence there of the current program. The machinery now present was evidently built at some other location, and later reassembled at Yongbyon.

Work on the new facility proceeded undetected by US intelligence agencies, even though Yongbyon is arguably the site in the world most intensively monitored by America’s highly-sensitive reconnaissance satellites.

Unbeknownst to the world, North Korea could very well have more uranium enrichment sites. At this point, there is simply no way to know, in large part because uranium enrichment is not detectable by the sensitive scientific instruments that make it relatively easy to identify the reprocessing of plutonium into weapons grade material.

North Korea has proven so adept at dishonesty and deceit, no nuclear nonproliferation verification regime established in the country will have much validity with the current regime in power.

The Iran connection

This, in turn, greatly intensifies concerns about proliferation of nuclear materials and technology from North Korea, either to Iran or to non-state terrorist organizations.

Moreover, it remains disturbingly unclear how North Korea advanced this far. Intelligence experts have known for years that North Korea benefited from technical and material assistance from specialists in Pakistan.

And North Korea has developed over the years extensive military technology cooperation with Iran. A nuclear reactor under construction in Syria by North Koreans and destroyed by an Israeli raid in 2007, was mostly-likely aimed at assisting Iran.

It remains unclear what, if anything, of a nuclear nature Iran provided to North Korea.

Identifying which countries assisted North Korea is critical for future efforts to block such aid, and to refine assessments of the current uranium enrichment capabilities possessed by Pyongyang.

US policy options

Options for the United States and its allies are limited.

Advocates of engagement have long argued that economic aid and security guarantees could entice Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons, and that inconsistency of US engagement efforts have convinced North Korea that Washington was not sincere. The problem with this argument is that North Korea has shown a desire for both economic aid and to be accepted as a nuclear power.

Advocates of ‘regime change’ in North Korea have long argued that engagement only prolongs the life of the Pyongyang regime and facilitates the nuclear program. The problem with this argument is that China has proven unwilling to use its enormous leverage to force change in Pyongyang, and the regime has otherwise proven capable of surviving terribly dire economic catastrophes. UN sanctions have hurt, but not enough.

The Obama administration, fully aware of the honest but ultimately fruitless arguments between these two camps, adopted a policy of “strategic patience,” which amounts to waiting for more internal pressure for change to build up inside of North Korea. The problem with this argument is that North Korea has now demonstrated a sophisticated ability to enrich uranium, and seems willing to launch targeted strikes against South Korean targets, all with the expectation of winning economic aid, security guarantees, and acceptance as a nuclear power.

Professor Hecker and others argue that attempting to “roll back” North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has not worked, and that the time has come, in essence, to accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, and to limit the damage by putting in place a tough nonproliferation verification regime.

But this argument has lost much of its zing due to the recent revelations of North Korea’s undetected advances in uranium enrichment capabilities.

For the time being, the most likely step for Washington is to boost pressure on China to discipline Pyongyang, and to redouble efforts to enforce sanctions already in place against Pyongyang.

North Korean leaders undoubtedly know that any use of nuclear weapons would result in the utter destruction of their regime.

The time is probably approaching when the US will firmly inform Pyongyang that the regime will be held similarly accountable for the use of nuclear devices by terrorist organizations it can be shown to have supplied.

 

 

Kaplan: ‘China’s buildup understandable, but worrisome’

Interview

Robert D. Kaplan

Robert Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. His most recent book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, was published last month, and involves what Kaplan says is “a way to connect the issues of Islam and China in one book,” and to look ahead to “a future when our challenges may be primarily maritime.” The book is particularly relevant in the context of President Barack Obama’s ongoing 10-day, four-nation visit to South and East Asia. Kaplan’s numerous books over the past 15 years have delved into a broad range of strategic and military issues, with a style that one reviewer says "weaves journalistic investigation and interviews, frank travelogue-style impressions, evocative historical background and futuristic predictions." The influence of his writings last year landed Kaplan a spot on the Defense Policy Board, an advisory committee to the secretary of defense.

Dispatch Japan:  Is there a ‘grand strategy’ guiding the very rapid development and modernization of China? 

Kaplan: I don’t think so. Even though China is an “authoritarian” society, there are feisty debates that take place in Chinese think tanks, and within the Chinese leadership more broadly. I am very leery of the notion that China has a grand strategy, because the Chinese are arguing about strategy, just as we debate about what our grand strategy should be.

The Chinese do recognize some obvious objectives. China as a society has grown tremendously economically over the past few decades, trading extensively with the outside world. China has developed interests in so many places abroad. So it is perfectly reasonable for the Chinese to develop a great military to defend those interests.

China today is more secure on land today than at any time in its history, so it makes sense that China now has the luxury to go to sea. Given the great length of the Chinese coastline on the western Pacific, it also makes sense for the Chinese to develop a real robust capacity up to and through the first island chain in the Pacific.

So, I don’t see the Chinese military rise as somehow illegitimate. But the buildup does conflict with the United States.

History is all about the rise of new powers, and their coming into conflict, sometimes unintended, with existing powers. That is what we are seeing now. These Chinese are not Iran, they are not threatening to bomb anyone into oblivion, or anything like that. But the western Pacific is no longer going to be the American lake that it has been since World War II.

Meanwhile, with China getting so much of its energy from the Middle East, it makes sense for China to want to have some sort of presence in the Indian Ocean for its blue water navy. That is why China is enthusiastic about helping to build major ports along Indian Ocean littoral countries.

How far the Chinese will take this is something the Chinese themselves may not know at this point.

Dispatch Japan: Do you foresee an eventual effort by China to deny the US naval access in East Asia? Is a conflict inevitable?

Kaplan: It is interesting to look at China’s procurements. China is not buying naval platforms across the board. China is emphasizing ballistic missiles, submarines, the ability to hit moving targets in space and at sea. Access denial, though it is not good for the United States, makes sense for the Chinese.

Look at the geography of the Western Pacific, particularly the South China Sea, which is vaguely similar to what the Caribbean represents to the United States. It is a marginal sea, half enclosed by an ocean, and dominated by a great power. Technically, these seas are international waters. But just as the United States sought to dominate the Caribbean, the Chinese seek to dominate the South China Sea. Therefore, access denial makes sense for them as a strategy, not necessarily to get into a conflict with the US, but to adjust the correlation of forces so that the United States will think twice before moving wherever it wants, whenever it wants.

That’s what power is in the first place: the ability to affect the behavior of your adversaries.

Dispatch Japan: Within the Chinese leadership, how do you judge the relative power of  the military, the Community Party, technocrats, and other sections of the elite? Is the balance stable?

Kaplan: This is a subject of debate and speculation among people in Washington much more knowledgeable than I am, including people in government with access to intelligence. And yet the Chinese system is so opaque and ambiguous compared to the US that the assessments often amount more to speculation than analysis.

I have heard that over the past year, military hard liners have increased their power in Chinese political circles. That is the only thing that explains the recent truculence of the Chinese, such as the inability to condemn the sinking of the South Korean warship, the statements about “core interests” in the South China Sea, driving a strike group through the Tsushima Straits, helicopters buzzing Japanese ships. This amounts to a new pattern of behavior that might only be explained by different voices near the top in the Chinese leadership.

Looking back at antiquity, the military was always kept in its place in China. The country does not have a history of coup d’etats, because of the Confucian system. This was very different from ancient Mesopotamia, or Syria, which were military-run states. Nevertheless, because China has been developing this great military over recent decades, particularly putting so much emphasis into its navy, it would make sense for some military types to have enlarged their voices in Chinese power circles.

Dispatch Japan: Are the Chinese in danger of provoking alliances in the region against them?

Kaplan: They might be. Recent Chinese behavior has actually been good news for the US. It has solved our problem with Japan, which has finally developed a post-World War II government. The Liberal Democrats are out, and there is a new government in power that initially sought to distance itself from the US. But with these recent Chinese actions, the new government in Japan is getting a dose of cold war water reality. The government realizes that to preserve the balance of power in the region, Japan needs the United States. The same goes for others in the region, including Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. China is proximate to them, and they all realize that China will be for each of them their largest trading partner, so they desperately need the United States as a balancing hedge.

China has virtually been making this argument for the United States, because of its actions over the past few months.

Dispatch Japan: It’s almost as if they have frittered away much of what they gained through their charm offensive of recent years.

 Kaplan: They can regain the charm offensive. This dynamic can shift, and probably will in the coming years. The more China acts in a non-hegemonic, benevolent fashion, the more it increases its power in East Asia, precisely because it is such an undeniable geographical fact.

Dispatch Japan: The question is whether the Chinese leadership understands that.

Kaplan: I’m sure the leadership does. At the same time, keep in mind that China in the late 19^th century and up through the mid-20^th century suffered incredible depredations against its territory, including the territorial concessions granted inside China to other nations. The result is that China is very nervous about sovereignty.

This really comes into play in the South China Sea. A glance at the map shows why it would make sense for China to feel a need to dominate this region.

Dispatch Japan: To what extent does China’s modernization, and economic interactions with the rest of the world, create vulnerabilities for China?

Kaplan: China’s biggest vulnerability worldwide is that it does not have the alliance system that the US has. The US has the Anglo sphere, involving Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which is always being degraded in the media. In fact this is a cluster of nations that shares intelligence 24 hours per day, and projects American power with very little extra effort on the part of the US. The United States has NATO, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines all as allies. India is a de facto ally of the US.

China has nothing like this. That’s why China has to make the extra effort to be “loved.”

Also keep in mind Vietnam, which in my view will be one of the most important bilateral relationships for the US in the 21^st century. Had Secretary of State Clinton not made from Hanoi her comments about arbitrating disputes in the South China Sea – instead, for example, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York – she would have elicited less of a Chinese response.

Vietnam is very concerned about China. People generally don’t realize how prepared and willing Vietnam has become to assist the US strategically. For the US, going to Vietnam is like pushing on an open door. Ultimately, the only thing that will prevent the US from once again having a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay is that it would simply be too provocative toward the Chinese. So the US won’t even ask for it. But the US-Vietnam bilateral relationship in the 21^st century could be as important as, for example, the US relationship in the 20^th century with any big European country.

Dispatch Japan: It seems the US and Japan share a lot of ambivalence toward China, a compulsion to engage China because the country is becoming so big economically, yet a fear of becoming vulnerable because of overexposure. What is the proper balance?

Kaplan:  Japan is fated to have a close alliance with the United States precisely because of the fact of China. Moreover, at some point in the 21^st century it is likely we will see a greater, reunited Korea. And a reunited Korea will inevitably have a certain hostility toward Japan, for historical reasons. So Japan’s geopolitical situation is probably going to get worse, not better. Initially, Japan was tied to the US because of the results of World War II. Now Japan will be tied to the US because of the emergence of a great military China, and because of the inevitable emergence of a greater Korea.

Dispatch Japan: The notion of Japan becoming a kind of “Finland of East Asia” is not likely to become a reality?

Kaplan: Not if the US and Japan manage their alliance well, especially with regard to military bases. Big foreign bases inevitably engender domestic hostility. So how to reduce and manage that hostility will be critical.

First, it is best to have only naval bases, which have a smaller foot print on land than do army bases. The US and Japan have to come up with a way to get Marines and soldiers away from Japan, while continuing to have Japanese ports willing to host American war ships. It is really ground troops that get themselves into trouble, and disrupt domestic life in the host nation, while naval forces do so much less.

The issue boils down to what is going to be the footprint of the future US basing arrangements in Japan. We’ve got to lighten the footprint in all sorts of ingenious ways, while still maintaining the footprint.

Dispatch Japan: Do you sense a determination in the US to maintain naval superiority over China?

Kaplan: It all depends on the US economy. Naval platforms, like air platforms, are high-budget items. War ships cost in the billions, while jet fighters and other air platforms go into the hundreds of millions of dollars. In this age, one can’t disaggregate air power from naval power anymore.

If the US economy continues wobbly into the years to come, there will be political pressure to not continue to build ships and air platforms. Just to keep the navy at its current size requires replacements, as older ships are retired. This means a fairly steady pace of shipbuilding just to keep the navy at its current size. To increase the size of the Navy would take a really big budget commitment. The politics to achieve that may not be there, if the US economy continues on its poor path.

In the 21^st century, will China at some point achieve parity with the US, or at least close the distance? This largely depends on China’s economic performance compared with the US economic performance.