Biden and the Japanese-American alliance
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.
Saturday 6th of February 2021
Joe Biden's China policy is one of the main challenges of his presidency. He inherits a degraded Sino-American relationship - it is at its lowest point in 50 years. Some rightly point to the responsibility of his predecessor, Donald Trump, for having spilled oil on the fire; but it was the Chinese rulers who lit it and then rekindled the flames.
Over the past decade, the Chinese leadership has abandoned Deng Xiaoping's moderate policy and his motto, "Hide your forces, bide your time": they built and militarized man-made islands in the South China Sea, they did incursions into waters near Japan and Taiwan, as well as along the Himalayan border with India, and they responded with economic pressure when Australia dared to criticize China.
On the commercial front, by subsidizing state-owned companies and forcing foreign companies to transfer intellectual property to Chinese partners, the Middle Empire has not played fair. Trump has reacted awkwardly by imposing tariffs on everything. both to its allies and to China; but he received strong bipartisan support when he shut the door on companies like Huawei, whose 5G network projects posed a security threat.
Yet the USA and China remain interdependent, both economically and on ecological issues that transcend the bilateral relationship. Completely decoupling their economy from that of China would come at a huge cost to America.
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union had virtually no economic relationship and were not dependent on each other. On the other hand, trade between the United States and China amounts to some 500 billion dollars per year, and the exchange of students and visitors between them is massive. Most importantly, China has learned to harness the power of the markets for authoritarian control - far better than the Soviets ever did. In addition, China has more trading partners than the USA.
Given the size of China's population and its rapid economic growth, pessimists believe that it is impossible to shape the behavior of the Chinese. But this is not true if one thinks in terms of alliances. Taken as a whole, the developed democracies (the USA, Japan and Europe) are much richer than China. As a result, the Japan-US alliance plays a major role in the stability and prosperity of East Asia and the world economy. At the end of the Cold War, many on both sides viewed this alliance as a relic of the past; it is vital for the future.
There was a time when American leaders hoped that China would become a "responsible actor" in the international order. But President Xi Jinping has led his country down a more confrontational path. A generation ago, the United States supported China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WHO), without much reciprocity. For its part, China has unbalanced the rules of the trade game to its advantage.
In the United States, critical voices often accuse Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush of naivety, because they believed that a policy of an outstretched hand would satisfy China. This is the bet that Clinton made, while reaffirming the US security link with Japan as a key element in managing the geopolitical rise of the Middle Kingdom. There were three great powers in East Asia, and Clinton believed that if the US remained aligned with Japan (the world's third-largest economy), the two countries could shape the environment in which China's power would thrive. .
In addition, if China was trying to push the US back into the Pacific as part of a military strategy to expel them from the region, Japan wanted to make the best possible contribution to the stay of some 50,000 US troops based there. Today, the principal coordinator of US policy for the Indo-Pacific region within Biden's National Security Council is Kurt Campbell - the diplomat who ably implemented Clinton's policies in this region.
The alliance with Japan enjoys strong support in the USA. Since 2000, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage and I have published a series of bipartisan reports on this strategic relationship. In our fifth report released on December 7, 2020 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-partisan body, we say that like many other Asian countries, Japan does not want to be dominated by China. It now plays a leading role within the alliance: it sets the regional agenda, champions free trade agreements and multilateral cooperation, and implements new strategies to shape a regional order.
Wanting to strengthen his country's defense capabilities within the framework of the United Nations Charter, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reinterpreted Article 9 of the post-war Japanese Constitution. After the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership decided by Trump, Abe replaced it with a comprehensive and progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. He also conducted quadrilateral consultations with India and Australia on the stability of the Indo-Pacific region.
Fortunately, the Japanese regional leadership is expected to continue under the leadership of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the former secretary general of Abe's cabinet who is likely to pursue the same policy. Common interests and shared democratic values continue to form the bedrock of the Japanese-American alliance, and opinion polls show that Japanese confidence in the United States has never been greater. It's no surprise that after his inauguration, one of Biden's first phone calls to foreign leaders was to Suga. The American president wanted to assure him of the continued commitment of the United States in favor of their strategic partnership.
The US and Japan need each other more than ever and their alliance remains popular in both countries. Together, they can balance the power of China and cooperate with it in areas such as climate change, biodiversity and pandemics, as well as to rebuild the rules of the international economic order. For all of these reasons, as Biden develops his strategy in the face of China's continued rise to power, the alliance with Japan will remain a top priority.
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