ROBERT D. KAPLAN
ASIA’S RECKONING
By Richard McGregor
Viking, 396 pages
Over the span of the decades since World War II, the
United States Navy has made Asia rich but not altogether stable. It was only
the security guarantee provided by the U.S. Navy that allowed Asian countries
not to fear one another and thus to concentrate on building their economies
instead of their militaries. The result has been the Asian economic miracle,
which began to gather force in the late 1970s and has continued to the present
day. Of course, Asians themselves have ascribed their success to “Asian values”—the
emphasis on order and hierarchy embodied in the Confucian ethos. But “the
region’s peaceful postwar coexistence, far from being somehow organic to local
political cultures,” notes Richard McGregor in “Asia’s Reckoning,” “had been
underwritten by the U.S. military.”
Now the situation is changing. The rise of the Chinese navy
and the arms race that it has set off across Asia have made the region’s
stability tenuous. “A single shot fired in anger” in the East China Sea (where
China’s claims face off against Japan’s), or in some other zone of dispute,
could send financial markets tumbling, Mr. McGregor notes, and affect “trade
routes, manufacturing centers, and retail outlets on every continent.”
A former Financial Times bureau chief in Beijing and
Washington, Mr. McGregor has written a shrewd and knowing book about the
relationship between China, Japan and America over the past half-century. Among
much else, he shows how the world’s top three economies are now imprisoned by
increasingly unstable dynamics, and not only in the military realm.
Though Mr. McGregor has pored over archives to put together
a hard-to-surpass narrative history of high diplomacy in Asia, the strength of
his book is its old-fashioned journalism, in which empathy and explanation
outweigh mere exposé. Indeed, “Asia’s Reckoning” has the aura of a
“tour-ender,” the kind of conspectus that foreign correspondents of a generation
ago and further back would put together after they had finished a multiyear
stint in some far-flung place. Here are insightful, detail-rich profiles of
everyone from Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger to Kakuei Tanaka (Japan’s prime
minister in the early 1970s) and Jiang Zemin (China’s leader from 1989 to
2002).
Though China was a rival and Japan an ally during Mr.
Kissinger’s days as a statesman, he enjoyed wide-ranging philosophical
discussions with Chinese leaders and dreaded the talks about textile quotas
with Japanese officials, who operated in a democracy where power was
decentralized and grand ruminations were rare. Mr. Jiang in his heyday, though
known for his “ruthless accumulation of power” in Beijing, was given to
impressing guests with his childlike snippets of English, Japanese, Russian and
Romanian. Tanaka was the Japanese Lyndon Johnson : bawdy, rough-hewn,
charismatic, with a “mastery of the dark arts of money and factions,” as Mr.
McGregor puts it.
The centerpiece of “Asia’s Reckoning,” though, is the
trilateral relationship, in which the U.S. “has its arsenal trained on China,”
a country that is, in turn, an existential menace to Japan, which, for its
part, is arguably America’s most important ally in the world. “China is the key
to Asia,” Mr. McGregor writes, while “Japan is the key to China” and “the
United States [is] the key to Japan.” If a conflict is triggered at any point
in this circuitry, the post-World War II system in Asia and elsewhere could
disintegrate.e culturally intertwined and geographically close, Mr. McGregor
observes, China and Japan remain psychically remote, and Japan’s affinity with
Taiwan, China’s nemesis, goes back to the late 19th century. Nobody, he
emphasizes, should underestimate Asia’s ethnic animosities. China’s current
leader, Xi Jinping, in a meeting with President Barack Obama, denounced Japan
in such strong terms that Mr. Obama had to remind him that Japan was an
American ally. The old State Department hand Christopher Hill, with experience
negotiating in both the Balkans and East Asia, once said after contentious
discussions between the Japanese and South Koreans: “Give me the Bosnian Serbs
any day!”
Economic development under China’s overtly authoritarian
system and Japan’s officially democratic system (but one with covert
authoritarian aspects) has done nothing to quell national hatreds arising from
Japan’s World War II crimes against humanity. In China, from popular culture up
to the highest leaders, it is believed that Japan should serve a life sentence
of humiliation for its wartime conduct. In Japan, statements of remorse have
been undermined by periodic visits of Japanese leaders to Tokyo’s Yasukuni
shrine, where the souls of the 14 Class A war criminals responsible for the
vast barbarity against Chinese civilians in the 1930s and ’40s are venerated
along with 2.5 million others who died in Japan’s wars.
Then there has been the tendency among Tokyo officials to
play down the issue of the “comfort women” pressed into sexual slavery by the
Imperial Japanese Army in the territories it occupied. At the same time,
though, China’s behavior on these matters has been cynical in the extreme. The
Chinese pick apart Japanese statements of regret in order to appease right-wing
elements inside China, undercut Japan diplomatically and mask the fact that Mao
Zedong, though fiercely anti-Japanese, exploited the Japanese invasion to
advance the Communist takeover in Beijing in 1949.
Ethnic discord and the unresolved demons of the past have
been slowly undermining the effects of democracy and middle-class prosperity
across East Asia, even as the region becomes more geopolitically important and,
as such, more troubling to the West. In the 1980s, Mr. McGregor reminds us,
“Japan, not China, was the emerging economic superpower” and thus instilled
more fear in Washington than China did. America’s economic battles with Japan
back then were a “dress rehearsal” for America’s strategic rivalry with China.
In 1990, at the peak of Japan’s economic bubble and just before the Soviet
Union disintegrated, twice as many Americans saw Japan’s economy as a greater
threat to their interests than the Soviet military. Since then, Japan has
declined and China has risen. But the larger picture remains the same: American
anxiety over Asian competition, a feeling that stems in part from the threat
posed by a value system that is based more on order and hierarchy than on mass
democracy.
Mr. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia was less an original strategic
concept than something that would have happened decades ago, following the
collapse of the Berlin Wall, had only Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait,
9/11, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars not intervened. In short, America had
long wanted to pivot to the Pacific; it was the Middle East that did not allow
it.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the
free-trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership has weakened
America’s prestige in the region. In fact, the administration’s action may
constitute the greatest self-inflicted American blunder in Asia since the
Vietnam War. Make no mistake: Asians are all about trade and business and
thus are the ultimate realists. By leading them up to the altar of free trade
and then abandoning them, the U.S. has shown itself to be unreliable—no longer
a pillar of security.
Perhaps, as Mr. McGregor says, the principal calculation
preventing China from going to war against Japan in the East China Sea or
elsewhere is the fear that China might lose—a prospect so disastrous for China
that it could result in regime change in Beijing and the end of the Chinese
Communist Party. Clearly democracy and prosperity in the region have been
insufficient to quell its tensions. Thus the U.S. military, principally the
Navy, remains the most important factor in keeping the peace. And the U.S.
Navy, as we know from recent mishaps at sea, is being stretched to the limit.
—Mr. Kaplan is the author of “Asia’s Cauldron.” He is a
senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior adviser at
Eurasia Group.
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De THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 02/09/2017
Fotografía: OLD WOUNDS. Visitors at the Anti-Japanese War
Museum of the Chinese People in Beijing
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