http://www.progressive.org/mag/pal090309.html
The new Japanese leadership is causing palpitations within the U.S. establishment.
There is deep anxiety that the incoming government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is questioning two lodestars of U.S. foreign policy: free-market neoliberalism and its security alliances worldwide.
In an astonishingly strong op-ed penned for the New York Times on the eve of his victory, Hatoyama savaged “market fundamentalism” for the current parlous state of the Japanese economy.
“In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism, people are treated not as an end but as a means,” he wrote. “Consequently, human dignity is lost.”
Hatoyama asked, “How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens?” For an answer, he turned to the French Revolution and its ideals of fraternity, liberty, and equality.
Hatoyama’s indication that he won’t bow at the altar of the market has caused apprehension. Western apologists cannot figure out why the Japanese people rejected the free-market turn initiated by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, an Elvis-loving hipster adored abroad.
“Japan is now more reluctant than ever to use market forces to raise productivity,” a New York Times reporter quoted a Britisher at an Australian securities firm (with no counterargument offered). “But these changes are crucial.”
In addition, Hatoyama has challenged—in his op-ed and otherwise—the U.S.-Japan military partnership, suggesting that Japan will reorient itself toward its Asian neighbors.
“Mr. Hatoyama has signaled a foreign-policy quest for a balanced equation with the U.S., Japan’s longtime military ally,” writes The Hindu newspaper of India. “He is guided by the perception of a potential sunset on the globalism that the U.S. has so far presided over. At the least, Mr. Hatoyama is keen to take a close look at America’s military and geostrategic footprint across Japan and its neighborhood.”
This may affect the United States in a number of ways.
“Specifically, the newly elected Democratic Party says it may recall the Japanese naval forces from a mission to refuel American warships near Afghanistan,” reports the New York Times. “And it wants to reopen an agreement to relocate a Marine airfield on Okinawa, which requires Japan to pick up much of the cost for moving thousands of Marines to Guam.”
Over the past half a century, the constant backing of the Liberal Democratic Party by the United States (so that its left-leaning opponents wouldn’t come to power) helped perpetuate its reign. And when the first non-LDP government, headed by the Socialists, ascended to victory in 1994, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher expressed his anxiety. The U.S. foreign policy elite is still holding on to that mentality.
An Obama Administration official described the change in Japan’s outlook as a “seismic event,” while the conservative American Enterprise Institute said that there was “fear of dramatic change in the U.S.-Japan alliance.” And the New York Times showed how much it is joined at the hip with the establishment with its statement in an editorial that there was “cause for concern” about some of Hatoyama’s proposals.
You’d think that there’d be widespread expressions of support that only for the second time in Japan’s post-war history, the nation has been able to break out of the one-party stranglehold of the Liberal Democratic Party (the name being an oxymoron). And that there’d be near unanimity that it’s a good idea for a country with Japan’s awful history to retreat into a less militaristic stance. But no.
The U.S. bases in Japan have anyway been a blot ever since the United States imposed them on the country in the aftermath of World War II. Chalmers Johnson, an expert both on Japan and U.S. military bases, has written about how much resentment they have caused among the Japanese.
“Sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago,” he writes at TomDispatch.com. “That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor.”
Regardless, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos, said after the election that he wanted to “make it abundantly clear” that the base deals are non-negotiable.
But a Japan that becomes less aggressive and not so much in thrall to the market is good not only for itself but also for the United States. Alas, the strong U.S. reaction is already causing Hatoyama to retreat from the welcome changes he had pledged to implement, revealing how difficult it is for even countries as ostensibly strong as Japan to wriggle out of the U.S. grip.
“A notion that you can have Japan essentially subordinate, a puppet of American interest, controlled by us on all fronts, I think, is a recipe for disaster down the road,” says Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute and the New America Foundation. “And we’ve been seeing, until this election, a kind of nasty, rightwing, history-denying conservatism and sort of nationalism in Japan that I felt was sort of a reaction to this control. So this vote is about the healthiest thing that one could hope for, if you were hoping for sort of a healthy balanced nationalism and a more constructive and healthy US-Japan relationship.”
But the United States doesn’t want its own nationalism healthily balanced. It prefers dominance.
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