|
The U.S.-Japan Security Alliance and the PRC The Abandonment-Entrapment Dynamic, the Balance of Threat and National Identity in the Trilateral Relationship Vincent A. Pace Enosinian Honors Senior Thesis Program Elliott School of International Affairs George Washington University May 3, 2003 1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology East Asia is currently the only region in the world where military conflict among major powers - the People's Republic of China, Japan, and the United States1 - remains as a possible outcome of international affairs in the short to medium term. The primary tripwire is the Taiwan issue which pits the PRC against the US and to a lesser degree Japan as well. Beyond this lie a series of issues such as missile defense and the Senkaku Islands issue that further exacerbate the security relationship between these three regional powers. Structural factors in East Asia alone make a major power trilateral security relationship in the region a forgone conclusion. Taking lessons from the trilateral security relationship between the Soviet Union, the PRC, and the US that dominated East Asian security during the last half of the Cold War, some analysts have looked at the newer trilateral relationship through the same realist prism that guided the former:2 Triangular relationships, by their nature, reduce international relations to a zero-sum game: any of the three powers is apt to suspect the other two of colluding to augment their bargaining power. A triangle made up of [the PRC, Japan, and the US] ... could be a dangerous one.3 Yet despite such provocative statements, the PRC-Japan-US trilateral security relationship is far from a recast repetition of this classic Cold War trilateral security relationship. Even if we stay within a strict realist framework, the relative power distribution of the three powers would suggest a strongly different dynamic than the one at work during the Cold War. In the Cold War trilateral relationship, the USSR and the US were two relatively equal superpowers and the PRC was a regional power whose collaboration was useful for one superpower to gain an edge vis-à-vis against the other. In the new trilateral security relationship, the US stands as the only superpower with a large advantage over both the PRC and Japan and a hegemonic military position in the region. In such a situation, structural realist thought would predict a balancing of power against a hegemonic US by the PRC and Japan, yet this is clearly not happening and does not seem likely to occur in the short or mid-term. The key structural factor that throws structural realist theory on its head is the US-Japan Security Alliance that aligns the dominant power with a lesser power against the third even lesser power. Here there is a strong correlation between the alliance, identity and the level of threat. A state will not enter into an alliance with another state from which it feels a threat unless that alliance would help the state counter another even greater threat. Thus we can conclude that the US-Japanese alliance there is no mutual sense of threat or that there is a third and greater threat or both. During the initial stages of the alliance, a strong argument can be made for the latter; the US may have felt a threat for the potential resurgence of Japanese militarism, but the greater threat was communism. During the course of this alliance, the relationship between the US and Japan has produced a largely positive perception of the other and the threat perception is minimal. This was encouraged by the convergence of identity between the US and Japan in the postwar period as industrialized democracies. Thus, even if we reject the PRC and other nations as the possible greater threat, there were significant reasons to maintain this alliance. Walt's balance of threat theory modifies the structural realist argument to suggest that a state will ally with another state not based purely on relative power, but also on geographic proximity and aggressive intentions. Since geographic proximity is essentially a factor in relative power, which can in any case rendered irrelevant with the technological abilities of power projection such as the US possesses, the key factor is a state's perception of threat. Walt argues that states make ongoing assessments as to what threats exist and create alliances against them rather than just balance power. The key question thus becomes how does a state determine what threats are faced from other states. Since elites determine the course of a state's policy, their perceptions are a key factor in the international security relationship.4 Elites first priority is always to maintain their domestic hegemony. Thus, they will give concessions to those they rule over by consent and use force over those who will not consent. In democracies like the US and Japan, the major concession to those ruled over by the elite is the right to select which elites are the ruling elites. In contrast, the PRC's major concession in the post-Mao era has been economic progress. At the creation of state, elites will attempt to define the national identity and successive generations of elites will modify this over time. Ultimately, a state's national identity becomes the basis for elite perception and thus the basis for behavior in security relationships. To demonstrate this, it is most informative to start at a basic action-reaction analysis of international relations (see Figure 1 below). In reacting on any given situation, a state must answer two basic questions. First, what capability does the state have to act? This is an assessment of resources available to react and is therefore an economic issue. States are constantly maintaining certain resources to allow a certain range of policy options. A set of resources that is of key import in a security relationship is the state's military capabilities, a prominent subset of economic capabilities. The broadest limitation of policy possibilities will be set by capabilities.
A state will assess both its own capabilities and the action of a second state through the prism of its identity. Identity is defined broadly in political, economic and military terms and is an amalgamation of the national self-image held by elites, civil society and the masses. The fundamental question of political identity is how decisions are made, the major variation being the method of determining which elites will make the decisions. The US and Japan rely on the consent of the masses to make the final decision between competing elites while the PRC relies on negotiations between elites that leaves the masses out altogether except in the concession that elite decides to provide them. The two key factors in economic identity are who owns the capital and who makes decisions about that capital. Ownership can be looked at as a spectrum ranging from complete private ownership to complete public ownership. The US has the most complete implementation of private ownership in the trilateral relationship, followed closely by Japan. The PRC's move from a planned economy to a market economy and the privatization involved has been continuously reducing the differences between the PRC and the others on this point. The question of who makes decision about the use of capital can also be placed in a range of the amount that the state allocates on behalf of the private sector. Here again the US is the most extreme in keeping the state out of decision-making, followed by Japan. The PRC continues a transition from the total exclusion of the private sector from decision making to a greater inclusion. Here again there is increasing convergence. Militarily the fundamental identity question is when can force be used legitimately.5 The answer to this will lie in the interpretation of national identity by elites. A state that supports a broad interpretation of the legitimate use of force domestically is likely to keep the use of force open as a policy option when the elite perceive that national interests are at stake, even if no direct threat is felt. The PRC behaves in this way. The US and Japan, in contrast, react strongly when they feel threatened but are less likely to invoke their military threat otherwise. The interpretation of national identity will formulate elite perceptions. The nature of identity and elite perception will be debated domestically, but these debates will remain within a limited range. Should the range widen too greatly, the debate can go beyond interpretation of a given national identity become a competition of competing national identities, such as in the US Civil War, in which only one will emerge victorious. The results of these limited-range debates lead to a decision to take actions, the amalgamation of which is a state's behavior. When this behavior emerges (even if the "actions" consist of doing nothing at all), other interested states observe this through the veil of their own identity. These states will then use the same approach as the first state to formulate a response to the action. In this way, international relations are the endless sum of a series of actions and reactions. These actions come in three basic forms - political, economic, and military - which all have a national and an international manifestation. The primary goal of political actions is to change the nature of the decisions being made. Domestically, this is done among elites internally through the hammering out of elite perceptions and by influencing national identity. Internationally, the primary means through which elites try to influence elites is diplomacy, although globalization is leading to wider elite dialogue that includes important members of civil society in a broader range of countries. Nations may also attempt to influence foreign elites indirectly by urging change in the national identity of other nations, but a number of issues make the efficacy of this marginal at best. Political means are by far the most common means to an end in foreign policy due to their comparative cost effectiveness. The primary goal of economic actions is to accrue economic benefit to the actor. In a situation where a state cannot or will not enforce his will on a second state, the latter must perceive a fair benefit from the action or the former will face retaliation. In other words, an economic action must be perceived as mutually beneficial. This has led to a burgeoning of mutual beneficial economic relationships since the demise of colonialism that often carry some degree of interdependence. This has the potential to undermine a secondary goal of economic actions: affecting the decision making process or weakening the military capabilities of the target nation. If a state has a mutually beneficial or interdependent economic relationship with another state but could benefit politically or militarily from economic actions, it will think twice before implementing such actions due to the negative effect it would have economically. Thus, even while economic actions are often used in retaliation for other economic actions, they are used less commonly for political or military ends. Domestically, nations all seek to maximize their economic capabilities and thus increase their overall capabilities. This is essentially a truism that plays little role in international relations as it is a constant, even though the question of how the domestic economy is maximized can play a significant role. The primary goal of military actions is the protection of the national interest from violent threats. International military actions range from espionage to outright hostilities. Domestically, this includes the economic decision of how much of the economic capabilities will be given to developing military capabilities and how the military should be developed. Military actions, just as economic actions, have been limited by the growing interconnectedness between nations. At the low level, such as espionage, military actions are constant and ongoing but direct hostilities remain comparatively rare due to the extremely high cost. Within this framework, security relationships can be defined as those in which military capabilities are a significant factor. In such a relationship, there are two main independent variables and one key dependent variable coming directly from the two. The first is economic capabilities, as it will determine the possible levels of military capabilities. The second is elite perception. Elite perception will produce the decisions that set the amount and means by which economic capabilities are transferred in to military capabilities, the third key variable. The elite's perception of capabilities and the national interest will create the decisions that determine the actions of the state and thus its behavior in the security relations. The dependent variable is thus the individual political, economic or military action or combination thereof that a state takes in response to an action taken by another state. The trends in two of these variables - economic and military capabilities - have long been constant in the PRC-Japan-US trilateral relationship and in all likelihood will continue to be in the short to mid-term. Economically, the US and Japan are strongly on top as the first and second largest economies in the world, but the PRC is gaining in economic power relative to both of them. Military capabilities closely follow this. The US maintains military superiority primary through their technological dominance and Japan partakes of the same benefits to a lesser degree. But again, the PRC is gradually eroding the relative advantage they possess. This dynamic is a fundament in looking at the dynamics of the trilateral relationship. A second important factor is that identity has not made any significant changes in the recent past nor is it likely to in the near future, barring any unforeseen cataclysmic developments, making identity a constant. The key independent variable is thus elite perceptions of national interest which will change in reaction to its perceptions of the actions of other states. In the trilateral relationship, this process, based on the perception of little threat, has led to a decision on the part of elites in both the US and Japan that their alliance is the best means to achieve their respective national interests. Analyses of the trilateral relationship must thereby be modified to incorporate this. This forecloses the possibility of drawing major parallels between the USSR-PRC-US trilateral relationship and the PRC-Japan-US trilateral relationship. The primary difference is that the latter must incorporate an analysis of alliance dynamics. The classic analysis of this is Glenn Snyder's article "The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics."6 Snyder argues that in any alliance there is the possibility of abandonment and entrapment. Driving these are states' levels of trust, the convergence of national interests, and asymmetries in the levels of interdependence. If one state perceives itself as more dependent than the other, it will fear abandonment. If a state perceives its national interests as significantly different that the other's, it will fear entrapment. A high level of trust can mitigate both of these extremes. This has several implications in the US-Japan Security Alliance. Based on identity and historical factors, we already know that the level of trust between the US and Japan is high, so there will be at least some dampening affect on the abandonment-entrapment anxieties in the alliance. Second, the US towers over Japan in both military and economic capabilities, leading to the possibility that Japan may perceive itself has the more dependent of the two and thus increase a fear of abandonment. Finally, identity will lead to some similarities in the perception of national interest, although by no means does this guarantee national interest conversion in security affairs. Security conflict and cooperation in the dyadic relationships between the US and the PRC on one hand and Japan and the PRC on the other provide an opportunity to look at the abandonment-entrapment dynamic in the US-Japan Security Alliance. Application of this theory leads us to some tentative hypotheses. First, security cooperation between an alliance member and the PRC will lead to a fear of abandonment and will prompt the member fearing abandonment to shore up the relationship with the other. This fear will be greatest on the part of Japan due to asymmetric levels of independence. Second, security conflict between an alliance member and the PRC will lead to a fear of entrapment and will prompt that state to make moves to stave off the conflict. To test this I will look at a number of case studies that look at cooperation and conflict in both of the dyadic security relationships with a member of the alliance and the PRC (see Table 1 below). Each of these case studies will focus on decision-making in tense security situations. For PRC-US security conflict, I will analyze the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis as arguably the key security crisis between the US and the PRC in recent history and the 2001 EP-3E incident for a more current case. The issue that that I will look at for the PRC-Japan security dyad is the dispute over the Senkaku Islands, which has flared up several times and continues unresolved to this day. For PRC-US security cooperation, I will look at the cooperation engendered by the US-led war on terrorism. Finally, the last section of the matrix - PRC-Japan security cooperation - is for all relevant purposes a null set; there are no prominent cases of recent PRC-Japan security cooperation that would carry any major weight in the trilateral relationship.
The trilateral security relationship under study in each case makes the above ideogram more complex by necessitating the addition of a third state. Each case study will begin with a given action by one of the states. This action will be observed by both of the other states that will react in turn. Each of these reactions will be observed by the other two and the process will repeat itself until the crisis has been resolved. While selecting the initiating action and declaring an end of a crisis involves a bit of arbitrariness due to the action-reaction nature of international relations, I will rely on the general scholarly consensus in making my selection. These case studies serve as snapshots of relationship behavior at a particular period of time and thus differing times can be compared to see if there has been any change in the nature of behavior. The Taiwan Straits crisis and the Senkaku Islands crisis are both focused on 1996 while the EP-3E incident and the war on terrorism both began five years later in 2001. Moreover, the Senkaku Islands dispute, in its most recent manifestations, is looked at from 1990 to the present, proving further basis for comparison. The case studies will be used to detect patterns and trends in the behavior of the security relationship over the time period under scrutiny. I will then use these results to assess the abandonment-entrapment dynamic of the US-Japan alliance vis-à-vis the PRC in the context of a balance of threat approach based on national identity theory. Finally, I use this to make some tentative predictions about the future of the trilateral relationship.
<< Previous | Next >> |
