Special to The Asahi Shimbun
Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japanese policy elites have debated whether Japan is a Western power leading Asia, or the leading Asian power engaging with, or against, the dominant West.
During World War II, the latter view predominated. After Japan's defeat in 1945, the former view has prevailed. Tokyo's postwar governments defined the U.S.-Japan alliance as the cornerstone of Japanese foreign and security policy and have regarded the Asia-Pacific region, not East Asia, as Japan's natural backyard.
This predominant view has been the linchpin in the defining U.S.-Japan and the solid Japan-Australia relationships. As testament to this, Japan and Australia sired the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum together in 1989. In 2007, Australia was the first country outside of the United States with which postwar Japan signed a security agreement.
Japan, the United States, Australia, South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia have been the strongest proponents of Asia-Pacific as a regional bloc and continued U.S. strategic primacy in East Asia.
Japan's first full change of government in more than five decades and the Hatoyama government's first foreign and security policy forays have triggered concern that Tokyo may be shifting back to a "Japan in Asia" identity.
Ichiro Ozawa, the powerful secretary-general of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, led a massive delegation to Beijing in the early aftermath of his party's historic Diet victory. At the same time, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama floated the idea of an East Asian community focused on Japan-China relations and with no clear place for the United States.
On top of this, Tokyo is calling for a more equal relationship with its security guarantor, the United States, and it has re-ignited the Futenma airfield relocation dispute. Is the left-leaning DPJ seeking to leverage better relations with its East Asian neighbors to achieve a more equal and autonomous bilateral relationship with the United States?
The intense focus on the intractable Futenma issue and the differences in alliance politics between the Liberal Democratic Party and the DPJ may be masking a much more powerful strategic shift in Asia. This slow but seemingly irreversible re-ordering could undermine both the idea of Asia and the Pacific as a region and the basis of the U.S.-Japan and Japan-Australia partnerships.
The Cold War and U.S. naval supremacy divided the Asian continent vertically into three strategic sub-regions: the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. Each region was largely insulated from the other. For decades, Soviet, Chinese and Indian autarky bolstered this continental divide through malign neglect. U.S. primacy meant that East Asian countries looked east to the United States and PACOM (U.S. Pacific Command) and Middle Eastern ones looked west through Europe to the United States and CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command). The comparatively early development of maritime East Asian economies led by Japan and their focus on exports to the United States further strengthened the idea of Asia and the Pacific as a discernable strategic region distinct from continental Asia. APEC's membership, particularly its exclusion of India, loyally mirrors this strategic sub-division of Asia.
Yet, the re-emergence of China and India economically and strategically as major regional and global powers could well mean that Asia's strategic future will be defined by continental Asian powers and their interests in Asia. If so, the vertical sub-division of Asia into the Asia-Pacific region, South Asia and the Middle East will fade away.
The geopolitics of energy is the most powerful force connecting East Asian giant China and South Asian giant India to the Middle East. The growing energy demands of rapidly growing China and India are deepening these two continental powers' interests in the Middle East, while providing Middle Eastern energy suppliers with new continental markets with less diplomatic baggage.
In 1990, four of Iran's top five export markets were in Western Europe, with Japan the only Asian member on this exclusive list. By 2008, four of the five were Asian countries led by China. In 2009, Saudi oil exports to China nearly doubled to above 1 million barrels per day. Exports to the United States fell by more than one-third to under 1 million bpd. In February this year, Saudi Arabia agreed to double its oil exports to India, to 770,000 bpd.
Japan's own energy security interests in the Middle East have suffered from this new Asian interest, and Tokyo's ties to Washington. Japan recently lost its development rights to the huge South Azadegan oil field in Iran when Tehran shifted its gaze to China and India.
The Middle East is also becoming a new and rapidly growing export market and migration destination for India and China. Indian exports to the Persian Gulf have exploded from about $1 billion (89 billion yen) in 1990 to $20 billion in 2007. China is the largest merchandise exporter to the Middle East. Its exports to the Gulf flourished from about $1 billion in 1990 to in excess of $35 billion in 2007.
The creation and health of regional institutions also fit with this story of power and interest shifting to the Asian continent. While APEC is seen as tired and fading, China has put its regionalism resources firmly behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a continental pan-Asian regional grouping. China and Russia are its main members. India and Iran are observers. Japan and the United States are excluded.
In 2002, annual summit meetings among the foreign ministers of China, India and Russia were inaugurated, signaling that the three Asian continental giants, all committed to a multipolar global order, have put the Cold War behind them.
Asia's emerging endogenous and continental strategic order reaching from the Persian Gulf to East Asia's coast could pose the most serious challenge to the idea of Asia and the Pacific, and to U.S.-Japan and Japan-Australia relations. Japan's long debate over its identity may well shift from the present Asia-Pacific persuasion back to a pan-Asian one. Asia's strategic reconnection, not fleeting ideological differences in Japan, though, will be the reason for this change.
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Malcolm Cook and Anthony Bubalo work for the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia. This opinion piece is based on their article in the current issue of The American Interest.