Studies in Asian Security. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xvii, 245 pp. (Tables.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503611696.
In the early 1990s, uncertain of where its relationship with the United States would go after the end of the Cold War, Japan moved from reticence to activism in the formulation of new multilateral security mechanisms in Asia. In Overcoming Isolationism, Paul Midford explains why Japan suddenly charged ahead of a more cautious US government to advocate regional security forums, and how Tokyo won unexpected support for its new vision from across the region—and eventually from the United States.
The change in Japanese diplomacy in the early 1990s was dramatic. Throughout the Cold War Japan had always opposed proposals for region-wide security mechanisms. When John Foster Dulles suggested the formation of a Pacific Pact of regional democracies in 1950, Japan resisted out of concern that collective security would pull the country away from pacifism and a national focus on economic recovery. Towards the end of the Cold War, Japan objected to Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1986 proposal for an Asian multilateral security mechanism because of concerns that the Soviet leader was trying to weaken Japan’s bilateral security relationship with the US. This history of rigid resistance to multi-lateralizing security in Asia makes all the more compelling Midford’s rich description of how a handful of policy entrepreneurs in Tokyo developed the 1991 Nakayama Proposal and helped usher in a new era of regional multilateral security dialogue centered on what became the ASEAN Regional Forum.
Yet as Midford explains, the shift was actually one of means rather than ends and was based on two continuous objectives in Japan’s postwar foreign policy strategy. First, Tokyo had always pursued policies that would reassure the rest of Asia that Japan was not returning to the militarism of the past. During the Cold War that reassurance towards Southeast Asia came in the form of the 1977 Fukuda Doctrine and non-threatening engagement through “heart-to-heart” diplomacy and generous official development assistance. Reassurance was also achieved through Japan’s commitment to the US-Japan alliance, which ensured the region that Japan itself would never again have to become an aggressive military state. Now Japan was reassuring the region that it could lead in non-military dialogue on security problems after the Cold War, and the region was receptive.
Regional multilateralism also emerged as an important tool in Japan’s constant postwar effort to calibrate security dependence on the United States. As Thucydides noted during the Peloponnesian Wars, smaller states face a dilemma when allied with major powers: if they move too close to that power they risk being entrapped in unwanted wars but if they seek too much autonomy they risk abandonment by the larger ally. Multilateralism had been a key part of Japan’s toolkit for managing this dilemma ever since Japan’s entry into the United Nations in 1956. However, regional security multilateralism during the Cold War risked handing the Soviets a tool to weaken the US-Japan alliance. With the end of the Cold War, Japan suddenly had more latitude to strengthen its influence and independence in multilateral security dialogue without playing into these Soviet designs or weakening US security guarantees.
The early 1990s seemed to offer a propitious new beginning for regional security cooperation and improvement of Japan’s own diplomatic image. During the first major conflict of the post-Cold War era, the 1990–1991 Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush had declared the birth of a “new world order” centered on the UN and international cooperation. Japan was enthusiastic, but had been woefully unprepared to play any diplomatic or security role in the Gulf War and was desperate to demonstrate that it was capable of leadership on more than just international economic issues. The Bush administration was actually skeptical of Japan’s sudden ambitions for regional security dialogue, which it saw as challenging rather than supplementing the new US-centered global order envisioned by the US president. However, the Clinton administration came into office in 1993 with a far more progressive view of regionalism in both Europe and Asia and embraced the new ASEAN Regional Forum, declaring that it complemented American bilateral security treaties like “overlapping plates of armor.” By the mid-1990s Japan had won both the region and the United States over to its vision. That story is extremely well told by Midford and offers important opportunities for theorizing and comparison with the diplomatic practice of other states seeking non-military regional leadership.
Moreover, the legacy of this transitional period in Japanese diplomacy remains overwhelmingly positive. Today multiple surveys show that Japan is the most trusted nation in Southeast Asia. If the objective of the Nakayama Initiative was reassurance, Japan succeeded magnificently over the subsequent two decades (backed by generous amounts of aid and investment over the same period, of course). The US-Japan alliance also emerged stronger: not only did Japan avoid a clash between regional security multilateralism and the critical bilateral alliance with the United States, Washington and Tokyo are today more closely aligned than ever on regional diplomacy, often with Japan in the lead. Indeed, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy adopted by both the Trump and Biden administrations was developed by a new generation of policy entrepreneurs within Japan’s Foreign Ministry.
The problem is that regional multilateralism has been dealt a devastating blow by China’s coercive and revisionist behaviour in Asia over the past seven years. The ASEAN Regional Forum could do nothing to stop Beijing’s artificial island construction and militarization of the South China Sea, let alone the dramatic increase of the People’s Liberation Army’s military operations in Japan’s own backyard. It is now Xi Jinping who is advancing the vision of a broad multilateral security order of Asians for Asians “without foreign blocs”—as he put it in a speech in Shanghai in April 2014 aimed at US alliances. The lessons from the 1990s continue to inform Japan’s efforts to sustain a rules-based order in Asia, and Tokyo is urging the new Biden administration to return to ASEAN-centered multilateralism in Asia after four years of neglect by Donald Trump. However, Tokyo is doing so not in the hope of building some new multilateral concert in Asia, but simply to avoid ceding the field to Beijing. Meanwhile, the core of Japan’s strategy has shifted once again—this time to tightened collective defense with the United States and the strengthening of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the US, Japan, Australia, and India—tools that may prove more effective at countering China’s increasing resort to raw power than the hopeful multilateralism of the 1990s.
Michael J. Green
Georgetown University, Washington, DC