The US role and the wider context
The belated realization that a worsening relationship between Japan and South Korea has a negative impact on US objectives, and on peace and security in East Asia, comes after a prolonged period of silence on the issue from US policymakers. This has been consistent with the erratic attitude – well documented by a number of critical commentators – of the Trump administration to the formation of policy, the processes of government and the need to ensure the highest-quality personnel to oversee all this and speak truth to power when necessary.39
US policy towards East Asia under the Trump administration has concentrated on the following areas:
- A continued trade confrontation with China, which may result in a negotiated solution, but which has been based on mercantilist assumptions, and in which the US has not made common cause with its allies in the region or elsewhere (not least since it has picked trade fights with them as well).
- An effort, after decades of unsuccessful attempts, to kick-start a negotiated agreement on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula by raising the negotiating level to that of head of state.
- A disinclination to follow multilateral routes to solve major problems – as evidenced in the holding of talks between Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, rather than six-party talks; and in the US’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) almost immediately after Trump took office.
- A willingness to disdain the strategic objectives of the US’s major ally in the region, Japan, in spite of the care Prime Minister Abe has taken to try to build a closer relationship with the US.
Sheila Smith of the US Council on Foreign Relations has published a trenchant critique of this approach. As she argues, the trade conflict is simply aimed at shifting the imbalance in a direction more favourable to the US, with no attempt to tackle the serious structural issues. The North Korean negotiations have seen ‘no progress in getting Pyongyang to catalogue its nuclear and missile facilities nor to open its production sites for international inspection’40 – and with the US president temperamentally inclined to pre-empt developments by declaring success prematurely, eagerness ‘to create evidence of foreign policy successes … could leave the region, and the globe, less stable’.41 Unrealistic expectations and an inability to understand the other side’s priorities are also factors.
While US policy towards the region has evolved since the 1950s, the central strategy has reflected a clear set of priorities. The aim has been to preserve the alliance with Japan, and to contain any inclination on Japan’s part to become regionally assertive (i.e. in ways that might destabilize relationships) or to develop its own nuclear weapons capability. At the same time, the US has encouraged the Japanese to share more of the burden of international peacekeeping and ensuring collective security. It has also sought to deter China from challenging the status quo, while building a partnership with Japan that has enabled more effective management of global issues.
Trump has substituted a set of transactional bilateral relationships for that overall structure. He has also replaced a coherent strategic approach with a set of policies designed to play to his political base rather than to any sense of the national interest or the value of long-term alliances.42 Perhaps some of those criticisms could have been directed at President Richard Nixon’s East Asian policy, with the opening to China in 1972 and the accompanying disregard for Japan’s interests. But Nixon’s overture to China was part of a considered geopolitical strategic shift in the context of the Cold War; there is much less sense of Trump’s approach reflecting any similarly considered analysis of where the totality of US interests, in a region of conflicting power bases, might lie.
The assumption that all this is because of an aberrational US presidency is simplistic. Not all of Trump’s policies are the result of his ‘diplomacy of narcissism’43 and the dysfunctionality of the administration. There are broader trends away from the unipolar model that has maintained effective US foreign policy hegemony since the end of the Cold War, and from the assumption that the multilateral system enables rather than constrains US interests. These trends also encompass a widening gulf between the foreign policy elites and the broader electorate. Hillary Clinton had already indicated, before the 2016 presidential election, that she would not ratify the TPP. In his recent book, Japan in the American Century, Kenneth B. Pyle argues both that ‘the American Century, with the United States possessing the power and the will to rehabilitate the world … is coming to an end’ and that the US–Japanese security alliance, ‘under which Japan became a military satellite, a subordinate state’, has run its course.44 Asia, writes Pyle, ‘is now a multipolar region with … all the world’s principal military powers and several of the key middle powers … the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan and North Korea. Six of these eight powers possess nuclear weapons, and the other two are near nuclear.’45 Trump may be a symptom of a trend towards unilateralism, rather than the cause itself (just as he has reflected, rather than initiated, a wider global trend towards populism). But, as Pyle argues, ‘[if] America is to lead in this changing order, its strategies must come to terms with an interdependent but non-convergent world.’46
The dangers inherent in this developing new world order were made clear in the conference. In the second session, it was argued, as Geun Lee put it, that ‘the multilateral nature of the international order will eventually ensure that domestic unilateralism is ultimately short-lived’. Yet the consensus of the discussion appears to have been that this was a somewhat optimistic conclusion: given the growth of populism, US unpredictability, and the challenge to the hegemony of the elites (in all countries), it was not clear that multilateralism would reassert itself. And although the problem of Brexit is far from the most serious issue facing the leaders of East Asia and the US, it has an impact: insofar as it weakens both Europe and the UK, it presents as much a challenge as an opportunity for East Asian and US foreign policy, if addressed on anything other than the crudest zero-sum terms; at the very least, responding to Brexit requires a rewriting of the assumptions and business plans that have informed engagement with Europe over the past 40 years.
39 See, as a recent example, Blinken, A. (2019), ‘No People, No Process, No Policy’, New York Times, 28 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opinion/trump-foreign-policy-crisis.html (accessed 27 Jun. 2019). The continuing slowness of the State Department appointments process under the Trump administration has also been a factor. President Trump assumed office in January 2017. There was no US ambassador to South Korea until June 2018.
40 Smith, S. (2019), ‘US policy in Asia heads from bad to worse’, East Asia Forum, 10 February 2019, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/02/10/us-policy-in-asia-heads-from-bad-to-worse/ (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
41 Ibid.
42 Although some commentators, led by Victor Cha, have developed the theory that a ‘quasi-alliance model’ of relationship has been established between Japan and South Korea, in part because of fears of ‘abandonment’ as well as ‘entrapment’. See Durand, J. (2016), ‘Analysing Japan’s Role in Korean Security within the Framework of the Quasi-Alliance Model’, International Journal of Korean Studies, XX(1), doi: 1091–2932 (accessed 27 Jun. 2019).
43 To quote Ambassador William Burns in his appearance at Chatham House, 1 April 2019.
44 These quotations come from p. 382 and p. 374 respectively of Pyle, K. (2018), Japan in the American Century, Harvard University Press: Cambridge and Massachusetts.
45 Ibid., p. 382.
46 Ibid., p. 385.