14. East Asia
Tim Shorrock
When President Barack Obama was sworn into office in January 2009, important political transitions were underway in two of America’s closest allies in Asia—South Korea and Japan. They involved ideological and political shifts over the role of US military forces in these countries that had been simmering for years, and greatly alarmed defense officials and policy-makers in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Beginning in the George W. Bush administration, Washington launched an intense lobbying campaign to realign the Korean and Japanese governments with US national security priorities in East Asia. The first to feel the pressure was the South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, who had brought about a deep change in the political climate in Asia by relaxing tensions with North Korea. But the campaign soon expanded to Japan, where a new political party repudiated many of the policies of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which ruled Japan for most of the postwar period in close cooperation with the United States.
Given Obama’s new openness to the world and his global reputation as the most liberal US president in generations, observers might have expected a more progressive, understanding approach than Bush’s to these challenges. But the US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks instead show that the United States during the Obama years made a concerted effort to undermine the democratic left in Seoul and Tokyo, and to support conservative, pro-American parties like the LDP. These cables chronicle the close consensus between Democratic and Republican administrations in national security matters, and illustrate how little US policy toward Asia has changed since the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s.
In December 2007, a conservative former Hyundai executive named Lee Myung Bak was elected president of South Korea for a six-year term. His election marked a dramatic lurch to the right after twelve years of progressive rule under Kim Dae Jung, the longtime dissident leader who was president from 1998 to 2003, and Roh Moo-hyun, a 1980s-era human rights activist who succeeded him, serving from 2003 to 2008, who tragically committed suicide in 2009.
Kim and Roh had shattered decades of enmity with North Korea by introducing their “Sunshine policies,” which embraced détente and dialogue with North Korea, and led to the first successful North-South summit meetings in history (in 2000 and 2007). The two presidents further deepened the process of national reconciliation by opening investigations into war crimes committed during the Korean War—an issue that had been off-limits during South Korea’s long years of dictatorship. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission founded during the Roh administration (and modeled on South Africa’s organization that had looked into crimes during the apartheid era) uncovered 1,222 instances of mass killings, including 215 episodes in which US war planes and ground forces had killed unarmed civilians.
The changes brought by Kim and Roh had caused deep fissures in the US-Korean relationship. They had come at a time when the United States was beginning to expand its military presence in East Asia for the first time since the Vietnam War and, under George W. Bush, taking a more muscular approach to foreign policy. When President Kim visited Bush at the White House in the spring of 2001, his host publicly repudiated his Sunshine policy, declaring that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator who died in 2011, was never to be trusted.
This and other actions by Bush’s hardliners—which included identifying the North as part of an “axis of evil”—ended any chance for peace between the South and the North. They also deeply humiliated the South Korean leader, who had staked his presidency on changing the dynamics on the Korean Peninsula. Later, Roh’s war crimes commission was given a cold shoulder by the Pentagon, which refused to comment on many of the reports from the commission. Then, when US crimes were finally acknowledged in relation to a 1950 massacre of civilians at Nogonri unearthed by the AP, US defense officials blamed them on “confusion” and “fear,” and took no action to investigate further.
To the great relief of Washington, South Korea’s divergence from US policies came to an end when Lee took over in February 2008. The new president immediately began to dismantle the Sunshine policies toward the North, along with the apparatus that had guided them. Like Bush, he also took a hardline approach to Pyongyang, and relations quickly deteriorated. In May 2009, just four months into Obama’s presidency, Kim Jong Il tested a second nuclear device, leading the Obama administration to press the UN to expand economic sanctions. Pyongyang responded by expelling UN nuclear monitors, and vowed to conduct more tests. By the spring, the US-North Korea relationship was in cold storage. “The policy pursued by the Obama administration … since its emergence made it clear that the [hostile US] policy toward the DPRK remains unchanged,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry declared in a statement quoted by the New York Times; the situation remains virtually unchanged today. Over his period in office, President Obama developed a close friendship with Lee, and at one point even called him one of his “best buddies” and his “favorite president.”1
Meanwhile, as South Korea moved from left to right, Japan was undergoing an unprecedented shift to the left in its foreign policy. In August 2009, just as Asian tensions were heating up with North Korea, Japanese voters cast out the ruling LDP for only the second time since the 1950s, handing a landslide victory to the newly formed Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—a coalition of former Socialists and LDP politicians led at the time by Yukio Hatoyama. He had campaigned on a platform of redefining Japan’s Cold War relationship with Washington by negotiating a withdrawal of US Marines from Okinawa, as was widely demanded by the Japanese people, and taking a more independent stand toward Asia and the rest of the world. Worse from the Pentagon’s perspective was the fact that the DPJ (much like the Korean ruling party under Roh) had also promised to investigate and make public secret and controversial agreements between the US government and the LDP during the Cold War—particularly those that allowed US nuclear-armed ships unfettered access to Japanese ports, in violation of the country’s peace constitution and anti-nuclear principles. The DPJ had also publicly announced plans to terminate the Japanese role of refueling US ships en route to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Predictably, as in Korea during the Kim-Roh era, these reversals in policy greatly disturbed the Pentagon and the incoming Obama administration. For years, US military planners had been pushing Japan to become a “normal nation” and expand its military forces to buttress US power in the region. By the end of the Bush administration, they had nearly reached that goal. In July 2007, a New York Times reporter, writing from Guam, described Japan’s unprecedented role in a US live-bombing exercise in the Western Pacific:
The exercise would have been unremarkable for almost any other military, but it was highly significant for Japan, a country still restrained by a Constitution that renounces war and allows forces only for its defense … In a little over half a decade, Japan’s military has carried out changes considered unthinkable a few years back. In the Indian Ocean, Japanese destroyers and refueling ships are helping American and other militaries fight in Afghanistan. In Iraq, Japanese planes are transporting cargo and American troops to Baghdad from Kuwait.2
The Times emphasized the importance of the LDP to these developments, specifically mentioning then (and current) prime minister Shinzo Abe:
Abe used the parliamentary majority he inherited from his wildly popular predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to ram through a law that could lead to a revision of the pacifist Constitution. Japan’s 241,000-member military, though smaller than those of its neighbors, is considered Asia’s most sophisticated … Japan has also tapped nonmilitary budgets to launch spy satellites and strengthen its coast guard recently. Japanese politicians like Mr. Abe have justified the military’s transformation by seizing on the threat from North Korea; the rise of China, whose annual military budget has been growing by double digits; and the Sept. 11 attacks—even fanning those threats, critics say. At the same time, Mr. Abe has tried to rehabilitate the reputation of Japan’s imperial forces by whitewashing their crimes, including wartime sexual slavery.
Japanese critics say the changes under way—whose details the government has tried to hide from public view, especially the missions in Iraq—have already violated the Constitution and other defense restrictions. “The reality has already moved ahead, so they will now talk about the need to catch up and revise the Constitution,” said Yukio Hatoyama, the secretary general of the main opposition Democratic Party.
Maintaining this status quo was a serious concern to Obama’s national security team, many of whom had come to the White House and the Pentagon directly from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS)—a think tank founded in 2008 by veterans of the Clinton administration who had been seeking to re-establish the Democratic Party as a major force in US foreign policy. Its views on Asia were summarized early on by Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton defense official in Asia who co-founded CNAS and was now Obama’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. In a study on US Asia policy published in 2008, he had written a gloomy (and very US-centric) take on the continent: “Asia is not a theatre at peace,” it began, according to an account in the Weekend Australian published on September 9, 2009:
It is a cauldron of religious and ethnic tension; a source of terror and extremism; an accelerating driver of the insatiable global appetite for energy; the place where the most people will suffer the adverse effects of global climate change; the primary source of nuclear proliferation and the most likely theatre on earth for a major conventional confrontation and even a nuclear conflict.
As a postscript, the Australian’s editor added: “This is not just rhetoric. For the first time, there are more warships in the US Pacific fleet than in its Atlantic fleet. And a rarely acknowledged truth is that Japan is Washington’s most important ally anywhere on the globe.” The Obama administration wanted to keep it that way. The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables examined in this chapter underscore the deep continuity in policy between the supposedly progressive Obama Democrats and the utterly reactionary neoconservatives of the Bush administration. In particular, they show that militarism and US imperial aims in Asia consistently trump any other factors when it comes to how American officials view their Asian allies.
This was ironic: after all, the Obama administration had come to power on an antiwar platform, vowing to usher in a period of peace and reconciliation with the rest of the world after the disasters of the Bush years. This new attitude had led Norway to award President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. But the WikiLeaks cables show decisively that, from the start, Obama did all he could to support the pro-militarist right in both South Korea and Japan, and used the formidable economic and political power of the US to ensure that neither country deviated from its role as subservient ally. Most importantly, the incoming administration wanted to eliminate any barriers to the Pentagon’s long-cherished goals to get Japan to step up its military role and establish closer strategic ties with South Korea, and then establish a three-way alliance with the United States directed against China.
The stakes for the United States were spelled out in a classified cable on February 21, 2006, to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from the US ambassador to Seoul at the time, J. Thomas Schaffer. This cable predicts much of the debate going on in 2014 over Japan’s refusal to recognize its crimes during World War II and the LDP’s consistent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where many of its war criminals are buried. The ambassador’s main argument to Rice was that, recent reports of squabbling notwithstanding, Japan and South Korea were getting along just fine:
Despite headlines over the past year suggesting dramatically deteriorating bilateral ties, relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea remain firmly rooted in common ground and are thriving at most levels of society in the view of leading Korean experts resident in Japan. The country’s foremost expert on Japan-Korea affairs, a Japanese lawmaker of Korean ancestry, and knowledgeable Japanese and South Korean diplomats stationed in Tokyo all agree that while political relations between Tokyo and Seoul have become embittered at the highest level over persistent historical issues, economic and cultural interactions between the two countries are robust and on the rise.
The most attention-grabbing feature of Japan-ROK relations is the current dispute between Prime Minister Koizumi and President Roh over historical concerns, but now that South Korea has become a fully-democratized country with a highly developed economy, there is “no fundamental regime friction” between the two countries … [06TOKYO925]
But the one fly in the ointment, according to the ambassador, was South Korea’s left-wing government:
Diplomats from both countries observed that the dramatic swing to the left in South Korean politics, coincident with a definite swing to the right in Japan, has exacerbated the ideological divide between Tokyo and Seoul … [A Japanese commentator] noted that the swing to the left in South Korean politics has been so pronounced that even members of his own opposition Democratic Party of Japan have found it difficult to relate to members of Korea’s ruling Uri Party. Asked whether the ROKG’s left-leaning policy approach will likely change when a new president takes office at the end of Roh’s term, [he] replied that it is bound to swing back towards the center “because they can’t go any further left.”
Also problematic was the possible rise to power of Japanese politicians—such as Shinzo Abe, then the LDP’s chief cabinet secretary—who even rejected the verdict of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals that had convicted many of Japan’s wartime leaders:
At a lunch with the Ambassador in September, ROK Ambassador Ra Jong-il said he has noticed a “disturbing recent phenomena” [sic] in Japanese political circles, including increasingly frequent articles in the mainstream media questioning the results of the “Tokyo Tribunal.” From the Korean perspective, Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni imply that Japanese leaders are moving in the direction of denying the validity of the verdicts handed out by the war crimes tribunal. Okonogi [a Japanese commentator] disagrees, stating that Koizumi remains “within the post-war consensus,” but acknowledged that his visits to Yasukuni have confused that message.
More disturbing for the ROK, Okonogi suggested, is the fact that Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe has so far “obscured” his position on the issue by saying the interpretation of history is a job for historians. Abe, Okonogi added, may be “outside the post-war consensus.” According to ROK Embassy First Secretary Chung, an even bigger concern within the ROKG is that Foreign Minister Taro Aso might become PM. That is because the Aso family is well known for having used forced Korean labor in its mines during the war, Chung explained.
A year later, in a secret NOFORN cable [07SEOUL1670_a], a political officer in the US Embassy assured Washington that, if Lee Myung Bak was elected that year, normalcy would return to US-South Korean ties. According to a Lee adviser, Kim Woosang, Director of Yonsei University’s Institute of East & West Studies:
Lee sees a stronger alliance relationship with the US as vital for the ROK’s security in the region. He assured us a Lee administration would handle US-ROK relations much better than President Roh or former President Kim Dae-jung, and the ROK “would be an entirely different country.” However, for public consumption, Lee would likely refer to the need for “pragmatic relations” with the US, staying away from referring to the “alliance.” This would allow Lee to tighten the relationship after the election, without alienating those who chafe at too much American influence…
Lee would change the tone of engagement policy to emphasize the reciprocity that President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy” had initially envisioned. Lee’s take on engagement would entail greater penetration of western values into the DPRK, which, Kim admitted, might be difficult for the DPRK to accept. President Roh Moohyun’s version of engagement policy was “simple appeasement,” Kim scoffed. [Emphasis added.]
With promises like this, President Lee established his bona fides with the Bush administration. But the US embrace of his “anti-appeasement” policies would deepen once Obama and his foreign policy team took over. With a pro-US right-winger in control in Seoul, they would try to keep the same status in Tokyo by encouraging the still-ruling LDP to stay the course. Their first chance came in February 2009, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Tokyo. The main purpose of her trip, as summarized by the Times on February 18, was to offer “reassurance” to the Japanese government by “calling its alliance with the United States a ‘cornerstone’ of American foreign policy.”
But the overriding mission was to encourage Japan to remain on its militarized track. This is made clear in a secret cable to her from the US embassy in Tokyo [09TOKYO317]. It summarized the current state of US-Japan military ties and expresses strong hope that the right-wing LDP has managed to create a “new consensus” in the country in favor of a closer strategic relationship.
Our bilateral security ties remain robust and in this area we have good news: our two countries recently reached an International Agreement on the realignment of US Forces, which you and Foreign Minister Nakasone will sign. This agreement, scheduled for Diet vote in March, will commit Japan to completing the relocation of Futenma Marine Corps Air Station on Okinawa and providing funds for USMC-related facilities on Guam. Japanese officials believe the agreement, and the allotment of over $900 million in realignment funding during the next fiscal year, will buttress Japan’s commitment to the May 1, 2006, Alliance Transformation Agreement even if there is a change in government here.
In addition, Japan now hosts a forward-deployed nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, our missile defense cooperation is moving forward quickly and we are increasing bilateral planning coordination and intelligence sharing. While pacifism remains deeply ingrained in Japan, there is a new consensus among the public and opinion makers—due in part to the DPRK threat and the PRC’s growing power projection capabilities—that the US-Japan Alliance and US bases in Japan are vital to Japan’s national security. For example, the main opposition DPJ, while taking issue with some of the details of our basing arrangements, maintains as a basic policy platform the centrality of the alliance to Japan’s security policy. We recommend that you inform your interlocutors we intend to hold an early 2 2 (Foreign and Defense Ministers) meeting given the importance of the Alliance. [Emphasis added.]
In April 2009, the Tokyo embassy sent another secret cable encouraging the Obama administration to deepen trilateral military ties between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, emphasizing the need for US officials to take the initiative [09TOKYO837]:
Trilateral security and defense dialogue with [Japan] and ROK will require close US supervision and proactive engagement with both governments. The US Government needs to use the opportunity provided by the current positive atmosphere between Tokyo and Seoul to help the two allies strengthen mutual trust, both in trilateral and bilateral settings. The close coordination demonstrated by the Japanese and ROK governments in the events leading up to, and following the recent Taepodong-II ballistic missile launch by the DPRK is an indication that some of the barrier between the two neighbors can be broken down. Trilateral dialogue in all its various forms—especially the trilateral J-5 strategy talks—can be helpful in this process.
This cable also includes an astonishing admission. It notes that South Korean “participation in the November 2008 Defense Trilateral Talks (DTT) held in Washington was entirely due to strong US Government pressure.” The writer adds that, according to a senior aide to President Lee, there is “nearly no public support for working with Japan on defense issues in South Korea.” Yet, despite the obvious signs of public disapproval, the deepening of these ties is an absolute US priority.
A few days later, Timothy Keating, the commander of the US Pacific Command, visited Japan to meet with LDP defense minister Yasukazu Hamada, underscoring how deep US-Japan military cooperation has gone. Referring to the DPRK’s missile test mentioned in the cable above, James P. Zumwalt, the chargé d’affaires at the Tokyo embassy, explained in a secret cable to the Office of the Secretary of Defense that the cooperation included the sharing of real-time intelligence:
Keating underscored that the level of bilateral cooperation and information sharing in response to the launch has never been higher. Being able to share real-time information via Aegis destroyers and respective command centers is crucial for both countries’ forces ability to respond effectively to threats … The launch allowed the Japanese side to gain valuable experience coordinating with the United States, with many lessons learned. [09TOKYO940]
In his meetings in Japan, Keating also spoke highly of the progress made in trilateral ties with South Korea, and said that “he had discussed pursuing expanded trilateral search and rescue exercises, small-scale humanitarian and disaster relief exercises, and other areas of cooperation for the three countries’ forces.”
By now, however, Japan’s pesky voters were getting restive, and it was beginning to look like the LDP might be out of power. Suddenly, US diplomacy in Asia began to focus on “moderating” the views of the rising DPJ, which US embassy officials saw correctly was about to take over. The US arrogance toward the party—and the millions of Japanese citizens voting for the change it represented—is illustrated in a May 2009 cable from the US embassy to Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, a former analyst with the RAND Corporation. It includes an intriguing section entitled “DPJ: Friend or Foe?” The answer is clearly the latter:
Significant ideological differences within the party make it difficult to predict the impact on bilateral relations under a DPJ government. Your meeting with DPJ President Hatoyama will continue the process begun by the Secretary of building stronger ties to the party and helping to moderate its views. Despite its critical stance on a number of Alliance-related issues, the DPJ will seek positive relations with Washington and will likely steer clear [of] redlines we lay down on core issues. In this context, it will be useful to reiterate Secretary Clinton’s message to former DPJ President Obama on our commitment to implement the realignment of US forces. [09TOKYO1162] [Emphasis added.]
The Obama administration’s deep fondness for the right-wing LDP and its pro-militarist policies—and its concomitant dislike of the DPJ—was underscored a few weeks later, when Michelle Flourney, the under secretary of defense (and one of the co-founders of CNAS), visited Tokyo in June 2009. A secret memo prepared for Flourney by Zumwalt illustrates how badly the “progressive” Obama administration wanted Japanese voters to retain the LDP:
Building on Prime Minister Koizumi’s and Prime Minister Abe’s legacies, Prime Minister Aso has made progress in carving out a larger international role for Japan. Tokyo is playing a leading role in supporting stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan, most recently through hosting the Pakistan donors conference in April … In June, Japan deployed two P-3C patrol aircraft to Djibouti to join the two JMSDF destroyers already in the region conducting anti-piracy operations. Air Self-Defense Force and Ground Self Defense Force staff are also supporting Japan’s anti-piracy mission, as are Japan Coast Guard personnel. Further political support for anti-piracy efforts are on the horizon as the Diet is on track to pass legislation that will broaden the SDF’s ability to work with coalition forces and provide security to third country shipping vessels.
On the bilateral security front, the Aso administration has moved aggressively to implement the 2006 Alliance Transformation Roadmap, budgeting over one billion dollars this year for US base realignment and securing Diet ratification for the Guam International Agreement, signed by Secretary Clinton in February. Japan is also compiling its National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) as we engage in our own Quadrennial Review effort. Bilateral consultations over these efforts should help Japan focus its limited defense resources on capabilities that will enhance the Alliance’s effectiveness. Close and effective coordination in the lead-up to the North Korea Taepodong launch in April has validated the trend towards increased interoperability. Nevertheless, there are still political and business interests pressing the government to invest in expensive and duplicative satellites and offensive weapons.
A defeat of the LDP in the upcoming Diet elections will introduce an element of uncertainty into our Alliance relations with Japan. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has voiced strong support for the Alliance per se, but many leading DPJ politicians oppose funding the move to Guam, the Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) plan, and Japan’s role in Indian Ocean refueling and anti-piracy operations. It is unclear at this point how much of their policy pronouncements are campaign rhetoric and how much are serious declarations of policy shifts under a DPJ government. [09TOKYO1373]
And once again, the Pentagon’s marching orders to a visiting US delegation are to get the DPJ back in line:
Significant ideological differences within the DPJ make it difficult to predict the impact on bilateral relations of a DPJ government. The party’s “big tent” includes old-line socialists on one side and pragmatic defense intellectuals who would be comfortable in the LDP on the other. Your meeting with DPJ leaders will be an opportunity to elicit their views and to re-enforce with the DPJ importance of implementing the transformation and realignment agenda.
The agenda, that is, of the LDP. Here we have an Obama official basically telling Japan’s most important opposition party—and the millions of Japanese expected to vote for it in the next election—to abandon their principles and stick with the ruling party’s pro-American agenda.
But the strategy backfired. In late August, Japanese voters threw out the LDP and, to the consternation of the Obama administration, ushered in a new era of real progressive rule in Japan. Here is how the Times reported the election and its implications:
Japan’s voters cast out the Liberal Democratic Party for only the second time in postwar history on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to a party that campaigned on a promise to reverse a generation-long economic decline and to redefine Tokyo’s relationship with Washington. Many Japanese saw the vote as the final blow to the island nation’s postwar order, which has been slowly unraveling since the economy collapsed in the early 1990s. In the powerful lower house, the opposition Democrats virtually swapped places with the governing Liberal Democratic Party, winning 308 of the 480 seats, a 175 percent increase that gives them control of the chamber, according to the national broadcaster NHK. The incumbents took just 119 seats, about a third of their previous total. The remaining seats were won by smaller parties.
“This has been a revolutionary election,” Yukio Hatoyama, the party leader and presumptive new prime minister, told reporters. “The people have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands.” Mr. Hatoyama, who is expected to assemble a government in two to three weeks, has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party’s campaign manifesto calls for an “equal partnership” with the United States and a “reconsidering” of the 50,000-strong American military presence here … One change on the horizon may be the renegotiation of a deal with Washington to relocate the United States Marine Corps’ Futenma airfield, on the island of Okinawa. Many island residents want to evict the base altogether. The Democrats, who opposed the American-led war in Iraq, have also said they may end the Japanese Navy’s refueling of American and allied warships in the Indian Ocean.3
The Obama administration’s response was to send Kurt Campbell scurrying to Tokyo to repair the damage and impress on Hatoyama that his attempts to “reorient” Japan’s foreign policy would be opposed on every front. This reflected a deep consensus within the US national security establishment: Campbell, along with Flourney, had co-founded CNAS, and the Japanese officials he spoke with must have been aware that their messages to temper DPJ policies came not only from the Obama administration but from the broader spectrum of American political power.
Another Zumwalt cable laid out the risks for the United States, and described Campbell’s response to a senior member of the DPJ:
According to DPJ Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Kenji Yamaoka, the new DPJ government’s primary goal will be to strengthen the US alliance despite tactical differences with the previous government. Japan will not extend Indian Ocean refueling missions but is open to other ideas for how Japan could contribute to US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Base relocation efforts in Okinawa should proceed from a dialogue with the US on how Japan should fit into the overall US strategic vision. Opposition to the bases from local communities is real and the GOJ must make the case for the US bases as playing an important role in the defense of Japan. However, simply defending the status quo will weaken rather than strengthen the alliance. There must be transparency concerning past “secret agreements” on the introduction of nuclear weapons, but these will not affect current practices regarding US declaration of nuclear weapons introductions or the kinds of propulsion systems allowed in Japanese ports. [09TOKYO2196]
In his meeting with Yamaoka, Campbell made it clear that these choices were unpalatable. The United States, he said, would “listen,” but wanted the incoming party to ameliorate its views and not get “bogged down” on these matters of principle:
Over dinner with DPJ Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Kenji Yamaoka, Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell laid out the USG strategy for engaging the new DPJ-led government and asked for advice on how best to proceed. He stressed that the USG would be in listening mode, was willing to be flexible in a number of areas, but in a limited number of areas, had less flexibility requiring us to proceed with caution. Through a series of high level engagements culminating with the President’s visit in November, our overall goal will be to show that the alliance is moving forward, focused on common interests and cooperation, and not bogged down in disputes. In public we will support the DPJ’s stated goal of an equal partnership with the US and encourage a strong independent Japanese foreign policy including better relations with the ROK and China. We will also focus on preparations for the 50th anniversary of the security alliance. A/S Campbell flagged as areas of concern MOFA’s announced intention to pursue historical issues related to the so-called secret agreement on the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan, implementation of the base realignment agreement in Okinawa/Guam, revisions to the SOFA agreement, host nation support, and Japan’s decision to suspend the SDF’s Indian Ocean refueling missions.
On this same visit, Campbell also met with Naoto Kan, then the DPJ’s deputy prime minister, who would later be elected to lead Japan. Kan, who was one of the most popular members of the party, received an arrogant lecture from Campbell that sounds very much like a parent berating a recalcitrant child:
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell met with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for National Strategy Bureau, Economic and Science and Technology Policy Naoto Kan in Tokyo on September 18. The officials spoke about the historic nature of the DPJ’s recent victory and ascension to power, the definition of an “equal relationship” between the US and Japan, security issues related to Okinawa, and upcoming high-level USG visits to Japan …
A/S Campbell advised that while the DPJ worked to bring about such historic changes, it keep in mind some lessons from the recent past. One such lesson was to not only take bold actions, but also take responsibility for those actions. Trying to justify unpopular actions by blaming foreign pressure was not helpful in building a strong and equal relationship between the US and Japan, Campbell said. Such a tactic may be politically expedient, but ultimately leaves a bad impression with the Japanese public, the A/S continued. Another lesson the DPJ could learn from the recent history of bilateral relations was that Japan’s tendency to let the US take the initiative on security matters then simply responding was not indicative of an equal relationship. Campbell stated that the US also desires an equal relationship, but that a change in Japanese behavior was necessary. He said the DPJ victory represented a historic opportunity to bring about change in the relationship, and called on the two governments to work together to strengthen the alliance … Campbell said that the Futenma issue was extremely important, and pointed out that the maintenance of a strong US military presence in Asia during these difficult times was critical. The A/S pointed out that US troops in Japan were important for the Japanese as well, and implored Kan to move carefully on the Futenma issue. [09TOKYO2269_a]
Campbell continued his “listening tour” the next day in a meeting with Mitoji Yabunaka, Japan’s new vice foreign minister. This meeting is notable for Campbell’s direct warning to the DPJ that raising the issue of the secret US-Japan nuclear agreements from the Cold War would directly threaten US-Japan relations:
Touching on Foreign Minister Okada’s plan to investigate the so-called “secret” nuclear agreement between the US and Japan, A/S Campbell reiterated that the US had released all relevant documents and did not plan to comment further. He cautioned that focusing on the issue could have operational implications for US forces. [09TOKYO2277]
This comment is doubly hypocritical when you consider the fact that President Obama came into office pledging to lead the “most transparent” administration in US history. Yet here was his assistant secretary of state bluntly warning a sovereign government that exposing secret and undemocratic agreements from the Cold War past would jeopardize their current bilateral ties. Consider this rather bald warning:
Focusing on Japan’s political transition with new Prime Minister Hatoyama and the former opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) taking power, A/S Campbell said the US would publicly demonstrate its confidence in the new government and express strong support during Japan’s political transition. Publicly, the US would express support for the tenets of the DPJ platform (e.g., a more independent Japanese foreign policy, strong relations with China). At the same time, the US would be intensely focused on reading signals from the new administration …
Turning to Foreign Minister Okada’s interest in investigating the so-called “secret” agreements between the US and Japan, A/S Campbell said that the US had already released the relevant documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and that there would be little the US could add to what was already available publicly. While MOFA would conduct its own document search, A/S Campbell said it would be best if the US did not comment. He stressed that the US did not want this issue to create a situation that would require the US to respond in a way unhelpful to the alliance. [Emphasis added.]
A month later, Campbell was back in Tokyo, this time to lead a combined State and DoD delegation to meet with the DPJ on its plans for relocating the US Marine base in Futenma, Okinawa, to Guam:
Members of the US delegation countered Ministry of Defense (MOD) Bureau of Local Cooperation Director General Motomi Inoue’s suggestion that US Marines presence in Guam alone would provide sufficient deterrence capability in the region, and the airstrips at Ie and Shimoji islands might be a sufficient complement to Kadena’s two runways in a contingency. They stressed that relying exclusively on Guam posed time, distance, and other operational challenges for US Marines to respond expeditiously enough to fulfill US treaty obligations. [09TOKYO2378]
At one point in the meeting, Campbell told the DPJ that the United States regarded the LDP era of US-military ties as the standard by which all US relationships should be judged: “A/S Campbell pointed out that US allies regarded the US-Japan SOFA as the gold standard among basing agreements, and he counseled against moves to review simultaneously every aspect of the Alliance.” Amazingly, the US delegation even told the DPJ that they had a better understanding of Japan’s defense needs than the Japanese themselves, particularly with respect to China. The US side
elaborated that there might be contingencies related not just to Situations in Areas Surrounding Japan (SIASJ), but also to the defense of Japan itself … [They] also related this issue back to realignment, noting that the redeployment of Marines in their entirety to Guam would not give the US military the flexibility and speed necessary to meet its Security Treaty obligations to Japan … The dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities necessitated access to at least three runways in a contingency, noted A/S Campbell. In the 1990s, it had been possible to implement contingency plans for South Korea and China using only two runways in Okinawa, Naha and Kadena. The most significant change between 1995 (when the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) plans for the relocation [of] Futenma Air Base had been formulated) and 2009 was the build-up of Chinese military assets, explained A/S Campbell.
In the final Japan cable in this series, Campbell is back in Japan to coordinate the US-Japanese message for President Obama’s upcoming state visit to Tokyo. The message: yes, we can disagree, but please do not tell the public; all these discussions must remain secret:
In a November 5 meeting, EAP Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell, joined by the Ambassador, stressed to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) North American Affairs Bureau Director General Umemoto the importance of ensuring a successful visit to Japan by the President and provided a five-point suggestion from the White House (para. 2). A/S Campbell and Umemoto agreed that both governments should manage press reports depicting strains in the US-Japan Alliance and instead steer the press to cover broader aspects of the bilateral relationship. Umemoto said he had persuaded Foreign Minister Okada not to take up contentious nuclear issues during the President’s visit, especially a no-first use policy …
A/S Campbell asserted that US and Japan public affairs managers needed to work closely together to address press reporting that the Alliance is facing difficulties. These critical stories should be addressed directly, using a message that highlighted the process that had been put in place, the deep respect the two nations had for each other, the critical importance of the Alliance, and our shared optimism of the future. [09TOKYO2614]
This charade would continue until DPJ prime minister Hashimoto resigned and was replaced by Naoto Kan. But, due to the US pressure on them not to change policy, both governments appeared weak in the eyes of Japanese voters, and—much to the Obama administration’s relief—the LDP returned to power in 2012. Before describing that election and its implications, let us shift the scene back to South Korea, where pro-Americans were firmly in power.
In contrast to the Obama administration’s disdain for Japan’s liberal DPJ, by the fall of 2009 the president and his advisers were ecstatic about the conservative rule of President Lee in South Korea. This was particularly true as relations deteriorated with Pyongyang. In May, North Korea had announced that it had detonated a second nuclear test, “defying international warnings and drastically raising the stakes in a global effort to get the recalcitrant Communist state to give up its nuclear weapons program,” the New York Times reported.4 The test took place a few days after the shocking death by suicide of Roh Moo-hyun, Kim Dae Jung’s successor, and the Times added this summary of North-South relations:
Relations between the Koreas have plunged since Mr. Roh’s successor, Mr. Lee, took office in February 2008, promising to reverse the “sunshine policy” of promoting political reconciliation with Pyongyang with economic aid. Agreements resulting from a 2007 summit meeting called for the South to spend billions of dollars to help rebuild the impoverished North’s dilapidated infrastructure. Mr. Lee believed that such aid must be linked to improvements in the North’s human rights record and the dismantling of its nuclear facilities. North Korea has viciously attacked Mr. Lee, calling him a “national traitor,” cutting off official dialogue and reducing traffic across the countries’ heavily armed border.
In September 2009, Deputy Secretary of State Steinberg paid another visit to Seoul, prompting a secret cable summarizing US-Korean relations in the Lee era from US ambassador D. Kathleen Stephens. The cable is remarkable in its open embrace of the right-wing Lee over his leftist predecessors:
Mr. Deputy Secretary, all of us at Embassy Seoul warmly welcome you back to Korea. Your visit comes as we are in a sweet spot in the relationship, with a strongly pro-American president who has largely recovered from last year’s debacle on the importation of American beef and is committed to working with us. The ROK has placed the DPRK nuclear issue firmly at the center of North-South relations. More broadly, President Lee’s determination to build a “Global Korea” will offer opportunities to expand our strategic cooperation beyond the Korean Peninsula, although we will have to be sensitive to ROK concerns that such cooperation is not a one-way relationship determined by the US agenda …
At every level, ROK foreign policy is currently dominated by experienced America hands who believe deeply that the ROK must carefully coordinate its policies with us. Seoul has completely jettisoned the policy of the Roh Moohyun years that attempted to separate the nuclear issue from North-South relations, and President Lee has firmly told the DPRK that the nuclear issue is now central to relations with Pyongyang. Your interlocutors will repeat this position; in turn, they will want to be reassured that the United States is committed to multilateral talks on the nuclear issue and that we will not enter into a bilateral negotiation with the DPRK.
[09SEOUL1529]
By the end of 2009, the US had got its way in South Korea, with the conservative Lee—now Obama’s “favorite president”—doing America’s bidding on every front of its foreign policy, including its own relations with the North.
The end result of these policies was a return to the hardline policies of the past and another series of crises for North and South Korea:
Relations across the DMZ took a nose-dive in March 2010, when Lee’s government blamed the North for blowing up a South Korean warship off Korea’s west coast, killing 46 sailors. The DPRK denied it, but a South Korean commission and an international team of investigators held the North responsible (many in the South still question those conclusions). That incident kicked off [a major] confrontation that had the Koreas and the United States talking of war. In November 2010, the United States and South Korea staged another major naval exercise on the west coast near where the Korean warship had gone down. The DPRK issued a series of warnings, saying that if any shells landed on their side of a disputed North-South maritime border, they would retaliate. Some did, and the North struck back ferociously by shelling the island of Yeonpyeong, killing several civilians.
South Korea, stung by this cruel attack on a non-military target, vowed to continue the exercises; the North issued more strong warnings. With several dozen US soldiers on Yeonpyeong as observers and thousands more participating in the exercises, any clash was bound to draw in the United States. For a few days the world held its breath to see if war would break out. Lights were on 24/7 at the crisis center at the Pentagon … Then something unusual happened. At the height of the crisis, on Dec. 16, 2010, Gen. James Cartwright, the outspoken vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that he was deeply concerned about the situation escalating out of control. In words designed to be heard in Seoul, he made it clear that the Pentagon wanted to ratchet down the situation. If North Korea “misunderstood” or reacted “in a negative way” by firing back, he said, “that would start potentially a chain reaction of firing and counter-firing. What you don’t want to have happen out of that is for the escalation to be—for us to lose control of the escalation.” Cartwright, and the Pentagon, had no desire to be drawn into a war that was not of their own making … Cartwright’s warning apparently worked. The crisis ended. But a year later little had changed—except that Kim Jong-un was now in charge of the DPRK.5
Then, in December 2012, Kim’s military defied global warnings against his weapons program and successfully launched a rocket that actually placed a satellite in orbit. The move was quickly condemned by the United States and South Korea, but this time criticism also came from China and Russia. In February 2013, North Korea carried out its third test of a nuclear weapon, which was nearly twice as large as its previous one. A few days later, the UN Security Council imposed deeper sanctions on North Korea. Its government lashed out again, but this time the rhetoric had changed. In the past, the North had always blasted South Korea as its primary antagonist, but early in January it began to frame its problems in the context of its decades-long confrontation with the United States. The North’s primary enemy had shifted from South Korea to the United States. Yet the Obama administration, despite its pre-2009 pledge to negotiate even with unfriendly powers, still refuses to open direct lines of dialogue with the North that could lower tensions.
This was essentially the status quo with the DPRK in 2014 under the administration of Park Geun-hye, who succeeded Lee as president in 2013. Under her conservative rule, US military relations with South Korea have never been better. And as those relations have deepened, Obama’s rhetoric on Korea has become increasingly shrill and warlike. In 2013, during celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War, the president had the audacity and arrogance to call the war a “victory,” reviving a right-wing trope that has long been discredited by American historians of the war. In April 2014, during his state visit to Seoul, Obama stood side by side with President Park—the daughter of South Korea’s former dictator—and praised the US-Korean relationship. “The US and South Korea stand shoulder to shoulder, both in face of Pyongyang’s provocations and our refusal to accept a nuclear North Korea,” he said. Here was another right-wing Korean leader with whom Obama could live—and, indeed, flourish.
And now it was Japan’s turn to feel the American pressure: Tokyo was Washington’s new problem child.
In late 2009, US diplomats and intelligence officials began to speak bitterly of the DPJ, comparing its independent policies to those of the former leftist government in Seoul. Here is how Martin Fackler, the Times reporter in Tokyo, put it in December 2009:
Two months after taking power, Japan’s new leadership is still raising alarms in the United States with its continued scrutiny of the countries’ more than half-century-old security alliance. But this reconsideration is not a pulling away from the United States so much as part of a broader, mostly domestic effort to outgrow Japan’s failed postwar order, say political experts here.
More important, the analysts say, these stirrings may also be the first signs of something that both Tokyo and Washington should have had years ago: a more open dialogue on a security relationship that has failed to keep up with the changing realities in Japan and, more broadly, in Asia.
Even after President Obama’s feel-good visit to Tokyo last month, the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has begun an inquiry to expose secret cold war-era agreements that allowed American nuclear weapons into Japan and has conducted a rare public review of its financial support for the 50,000 United States military workers based here. This continues the approach taken by Mr. Hatoyama since his Democratic Party scored a historic election victory in August on pledges to build a more equal partnership with Washington. A few political analysts in the United States have compared Mr. Hatoyama to Roh Moo-hyun, the former South Korean president who rode a wave of anti-Americanism to power in 2002.6
Over the next two years, the incessant US criticism of the DPJ (and the Obama administration’s extraordinary intervention in Japan’s internal affairs during the nuclear crisis at Fukushima in 2011) led to a crushing defeat at the polls for the party and the return to power of Japan’s hard-right LDP. By 2010, Hatoyama’s DPJ folded to the US pressure, backing away from his campaign pledge to force the US Marines out of Okinawa. Here is how the reversal was reported by the Times:
Visiting Okinawa for the first time since becoming prime minister, Mr. Hatoyama asked residents to entertain a compromise that would keep some of the functions of the base on the island while the government explored moving some facilities elsewhere. “Realistically speaking, it is impossible” to move the entire base, called Futenma, off the island, he said. “We’re facing a situation that is realistically difficult to move everything out of the prefecture [sic]. We must ask the people of Okinawa to share the burden.” But Okinawans seemed in no mood for burden-sharing, heckling him after he met with local officials. “Shame on you!” one man shouted.
Mr. Hatoyama’s government could hang in the balance. He has pledged to come up with a plan by the end of this month to relocate the Marine air base and resolve a stubborn problem that has created months of discord with Washington. His delays and apparent flip-flopping on the issue have fed a growing feeling of disappointment in the prime minister’s leadership, driving his approval ratings below 30 percent.7
The Times was correct. Within weeks, Hatoyama had quit, and his farewell statement made it clear how much it hurt. “This has proved impossible in my time,” Hatoyama said in a “teary speech,” the Times reported. “Someday, the time will come when Japan’s peace will have to be ensured by the Japanese people themselves.”8 He was succeeded by Naoto Kan, the intense reformer who had cracked down on fraud and corruption within the Japanese Health Ministry in the 1990s.
In March 2011, Kan faced Japan’s gravest crisis since World War II when a pair of nuclear reactors melted down following the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami of March 11. Kan had already given up on the idea of expelling the US Marines in Okinawa, but now the Obama administration began pressuring him in another way. After the Kan government asked the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Navy for support during the nuclear crisis, the US immediately began painting a picture of Kan’s government as hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the crisis and unable to respond properly. Here is how I described the situation in a profile of Kan in The Nation:
On March 16, 2011, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jaczko openly contradicted the Japanese government by declaring that water in one of Tepco’s reactors had boiled away, raising radiation in the area to “extremely high levels.” He recommended evacuation to any Americans within fifty miles of the site—nearly double the evacuation zone announced by the Japanese government (which immediately denied Jaczko’s assertions). The New York Times piled on the next day with a major article that pilloried the Kan government. “Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more—and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed,” the reporters declared.
Among those the Times quoted was Japan expert Ronald Morse, who had worked in Washington in the Defense, Energy, and State Departments before taking a position with a government ministry in Japan. “There’s a clear lack of command authority in the current government in Tokyo,” he said. “The magnitude of it becomes obvious at a time like this.”
Under pressure from both the Japanese public and the US government to act more assertively in the crisis, Kan eventually decided to step down and call new elections. This time, Japanese voters turned overwhelmingly to the LDP and Prime Minister Abe, the most conservative leader since the early 1950s. When he returned to power in 2012, Abe once again infuriated his neighbors by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. But the Obama administration was willing to put up with that for the sake of maintaining the strong military ties between the two countries. It was back to business as usual.
With a willing Abe in command, the US stepped up its pressure to complete the 1996 agreement on returning Futenma that had been so rudely interrupted by the liberals of the DPJ. One of Abe’s first acts, according to the Kyodo news service, was to create a new cabinet-level “minister in charge of alleviating Okinawa’s base-hosting burden.” By April 2013, the Abe and Obama administrations had agreed on basic terms: the US Marines’ presence in Futenma would be substantially reduced by moving key units to the island of Guam.
But the bulk of the Marines—including the forward-based airborne elements considered so important by the United States—would move to a new site on Henoko Bay in the north of the island, near the existing US base known as Camp Schwab and close to the coastal city of Nago. In late 2013, the plan won the approval of Okinawa governor Hirokazu Nakaima, who had been elected in 2010 on a platform dedicated to relocating Futenma in five years. He signed on to the national government’s plans for Henoko after Abe promised to spend over 300 billion yen—nearly $3 billion—every year until 2021 “to promote Okinawa’s economy,” according to the Japan Times.9 The die seemed cast.
But, once again, democracy got in the way. In January 2014, Susumu Inamine, a fierce opponent of the new base at Henoko, was elected mayor of Nago City, easily defeating an LDP candidate who supported the Abe-Nakaima plan. His election reflected the strong feelings of Okinawans about US bases (75 percent of those questioned in recent polls want them removed), but also encompassed local views. Many in Nago are concerned that the landfill for the new runways to be built for the Marines will destroy precious coral reefs in Henoko Bay, and cause irreparable damage to the biodiversity of the coast.
In May 2014, Inamine led a small delegation of lawmakers and activists from Nago to Washington to plead for a change of policy. During their stay, they met with academics and NGOs who opposed the Henoko plan, as well as sympathetic groups and lawmakers closely following the debate about Okinawa. They included the Brookings Institution, the libertarian Cato Institute, and staffers for Senators Barbara Boxer (D-NY), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). But the Pentagon—which has been at the forefront of the US demand for bases—haughtily refused to meet with Inamine; the only member of the Obama administration they encountered was a deputy at the State Department’s Japan desk, members of the delegation told me.
The pain of the Okinawa struggle was clearly evident during a presentation by the Inamine delegation at an event at a Washington restaurant that I attended. Essentially, the mayor said, the US and Japanese government plans for Henoko Bay would make the area unfit for human habitation due to the danger posed by US war planes and helicopters taking off and landing, and the terrible noise from explosions of “out of use weapons and ammunition” only 300 meters from residential areas. He said that US planes at Futenma held, on average, fifty drills a day. “That’s 20,000 takeoffs and landings in a year,” he added. “This has a wide-scale impact on daily life. It’s almost like being in a front line of a war.” The construction of a new base in Henoko, he added, means “another 100 years of pain” for Okinawa.
Asked about the forces arrayed against the citizens of Okinawa, Inamine was blunt. “In a nation like Japan, there’s a monstrous power behind it—the huge corporations and their incentives. This national policy [of keeping US bases in Okinawa] doesn’t benefit normal people.” The opposition, he added, was “an expression of the people’s will.” Talking directly to President Obama, he said: “America is where human rights are respected. But this denial of democracy is a denial of human rights.” He and many other Okinawans began planning to turn November’s elections for governor into a plebiscite on the bases, and show once and for all that the island wants the US Marines moved somewhere else.
They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. As summarized in January 2015 by the Australian historian Gavan McCormack, in November 2014
the Okinawan electorate decisively rejected the Governor, Nakaima Hirokazu, who had reneged on his pledge to oppose base construction and issued the permit the government needed to commence reclamation of Oura Bay, electing in his stead a candidate [Takeshi Onaga] committed to doing “everything in my power” to stop construction at Henoko, close Futenma Air Base, and have the Marine Corps’ controversial Osprey MV 22 aircraft withdrawn from the prefecture (and therefore stopping the construction of “Osprey Pads” for them in the Yambaru forest, also in Northern Okinawa); and in December all four Okinawan local constituencies elected anti-base construction candidates to the lower house in the National Diet.10
From top to bottom, the elections were a sweeping victory for Okinawa’s anti-base forces, and a powerful expression of the prefecture’s popular will.
In response, the Abe government—with the full support of the Obama administration—has been moving decisively to make the Henoko base a permanent fixture. In April, shortly before Mayor Inamine came to Washington, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel declared in Tokyo that he was “looking forward” to the “facility’s construction beginning soon,” the Times reported. “A few weeks later at a news conference in Tokyo, President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed that progress had been made.”
For Okinawans, the “progress” was troublesome. Over the summer of 2014, construction crews began the first phase of land reclamation, drilling, and surveys of the coral reefs that are required before the new runways can be built. To keep protesters out, the Japanese government set up a “prohibited zone” around the reclamation area for the first time, and dispatched Coast Guard patrol vessels and boats “from across the nation” to enforce it, the Yomiuri reported in August. In a strongly worded editorial, the Japan Times pointed out that the moves
raised speculation that the [Abe] administration was rushing to set the work in motion before local voters have a chance to express their will on the divisive relocation issue … It almost looks as if the Abe administration is saying it will not count popular will as a factor in whether to proceed with the Futenma relocation per the agreement with the US.
We do not have any WikiLeaks cables available from these recent events. But it is easy enough to imagine the glee contained in the cable traffic between Tokyo and Washington on Abe’s forceful moves to meet the US demands to maintain its forward-based Marines on Okinawa. A hint of what might be in these communications came in the Yomiuri, which in August quoted a “US government source” on the situation. According to this source, “Japan and the United States agreed that to maintain deterrence while reducing the burden on Okinawa residents of hosting US military bases, there is no option to relocate Futenma’s functions to the Henoko district.”
There is no option. After seventy years of US military operations on Okinawa, that is an extremely revealing statement. Thus emerged the seemingly contradictory situation of a liberal Obama administration—one of the most left-leaning in history, some conservatives say—intervening in both South Korea and Japan to reverse progressive change and maintain right-wing, pro-militarist governments more to the liking of the United States. WikiLeaks’ cables have shown us how this was done—and they underscore the critical importance of whistleblowers and a free, functioning press.11