China sings a cold war tune with U.S.-Japan security tie

The Japanese Diet has ratified changes in the guidelines for the operation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty and the Philippine Senate has approved a status of forces agreement with the United States. Both moves are clearly defensive -- but China attacks both as if they were offensive. Jakarta Post Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin analyses cause and effect in the developing security situation.

HONG KONG (JP): Amidst the Sino-American furor over Chinese spying in the United States, Beijing accuses the United States of starting another Cold War. But in East Asia, amidst Chinese verbal attacks on the U.S.-Japan security alliance, and creeping Chinese territorial aggression in the South China Sea, such accusations seem a good example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In Japan, the upper House of Councillors has finally passed the bills which endorse the new guidelines for the U.S.-Japan security alliance. These guidelines were agreed in September 1997 after extended negotiations. Essentially, they make the U.S.- Japan security alliance, under which the United States defends Japan but Japan does not defend the United States, just a little less one-sided.

The bills formalize arrangements which many outsiders assume to be already in place. Thus in the event of a crisis "in the area around Japan" American forces will be able to use Japanese hospitals and airstrips. The Japanese Coast Guard and Navy will help in search and rescue operations. Japan will provide logistics support for the U.S. military. The nearest any Japanese personnel might come to any combat outside Japan would be in assisting the United States in evacuations from crisis areas.

In most countries these arrangements would be merely the subject of bureaucratic accord. Only in a Japan, where the no-war constitution is still sacrosanct, do parliamentary bills become necessary. And only in Japan would the passage of such bills through the two Houses of the Diet, after extended debate lasting over two months, be considered a considerable political victory for the Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.

The reason for these guidelines is plain. When the Korean War began in 1950, Douglas MacArthur was the Shogun, Japan was still under postwar occupation. The Americans were free to hire Japanese pilots who guided in several of the ships which brought the Marines ashore in MacArthur's famous amphibious landing at Inchon. When the distinct possibility of another Korean War briefly loomed in 1994, it was belatedly recognized that what was taken for granted in the 1950s would be best mutually agreed before another such crisis arose.

Then in 1996 China fired its missiles to the west and east of Taiwan, and also very close to the Japanese Nansei Shotto, the Sakishima Islands. The Japanese were forcefully reminded by the Chinese missiles that improving their mutual defense arrangements with the Americans was definitely in their national interest.

Those events created the need for new guidelines. When the North Koreans fired a ballistic missile through Japanese airspace last August, and when fast North Korean patrol boats recently penetrated Japanese territorial waters (and refused to stop when challenged) they made it certain that the guideline changes would be quickly passed by the Japanese Diet.

The new guidelines update and perhaps to some extent reinvigorate the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. As such they are hardly a development which need worry -- still less cause any alarm -- in any regional capital. That is not the way the changes are being viewed in Beijing.

Judged by past and present comments in the controlled presses in China, there is absolutely no chance that the guidelines will be seen in Beijing for what they are: as partly an oblique reminder that China's 1996 recourse to missile diplomacy, against Taiwanese democracy, was an unwise and counter-productive policy which alienated many more than just the voters on Taiwan. Within China, that 1996 missile diplomacy was is still being hailed as a great success.

So, in Beijing, the fact that Japan and the United States have agreed to new guidelines has been regularly attacked as a sign of "U.S. hegemonism" and the desire to encircle China. No doubt in Beijing's present mood there will be more such attacks in the next few weeks. Already there are assertions in Beijing that the new guidelines mark the development of an "East Asian NATO" aimed at China. China persists in seeing an aggressive motive in the U.S.-Japan guidelines, rather than seeing that the guidelines are partly a reaction the aggressive posture adopted by China in 1996.

China's unwillingness to see the Cold War beam in its own eye has also been illustrated by another recent and protracted parliamentary debate, this time in the Philippines. On May 27 the Philippine Senate finally got around to ratifying a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the United States. It would never have done so if China had skillfully -- and diplomatically -- avoided bringing the Filipinos face-to-face with their own military weakness.

When the Philippine Senate refused to ratify a new bases agreement with the United States in 1991, it was doing exactly what China's communist government is doing today: it was giving unrestrained voice to nationalist sentiments without stopping to count the probable cost.

One cost for the Philippines was that the departure of the Americans from their bases in 1992 exposed the extreme weakness of the Philippine armed forces. The Filipino political elite undoubtedly hoped to go on relying on the Americans and the Philippine-American security treaty. But another cost of abrogating the base agreement was that the then existing status- of-forces agreement was also abrogated at the same time.

So when the Filipinos got around to suggesting to the Americans that maybe some joint exercises were now appropriate, the Americans reminded them that a new VFA had to be negotiated first. That took time. So did the parliamentary and nationalist debate. In other nations, status-of-forces agreements are bureaucratic transactions. In the Philippines the VFA was classified as a treaty requiring a two thirds majority in the Senate.

The VFA would never have been negotiated let alone endorsed by the Philippine Senate were it not for China's current perceived need to assert itself physically in the South China Sea. This looming reality overrode the anti-American pull of Philippine nationalism..

Beijing could have gone on drawing its maritime border around the rim of the South China Sea. It could have redeemed its promise to negotiate with the Southeast Asian nations on the rival claims. But such deft Chinese diplomacy has been almost completely absent.

Instead, China first set up a so-called shelter for fishermen on Mischief Reef, roughly a 100 miles off the coast of Palawan, nearly 900 miles from the Chinese island of Hainan. The Filipinos objected. China sought to reassure.

Then the Filipinos discovered that the fishing shelter had unquestionably become a small military base, with small naval vessels anchored nearby. China said it was still a fishing shelter. The Filipinos were not reassured. Slowly it dawned on some Philippine nationalists that if they had retained the American bases, China would probably have avoided making mischief at Mischief Reef. China might also have avoided stressing its claim to the rocks of Scarborough Shoal, a mere hundred miles off the main Philippine Island of Luzon, in some ways an even more provocative challenge to the Filipinos.

President Joseph Estrada, who as a Senator voted against the U.S. bases, has insisted on the need for endorsing the VFA and reactivating Philippine-American military cooperation. Whether such cooperation will now make a difference remains a moot point.

A reliable ally with plenty of satellite reconnaissance at its command, might have given the Filipinos advance warning of what China was building off Palawan. But the same man who as Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific command, CINCPAC, failed to warn Manila of what the Chinese were up to, Adm. Joseph Prueher, has now been nominated by the Clinton Administration to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Beijing.

The State Department has been studiously -- some would say excessively -- non-committal about the rival claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

Notwithstanding these doubts, 18 Senators voted on May 27 to ratify the VFA, while only five voted against. It seems certain that in its present mood Beijing will soon be attacking the agreement as another example of the so-called U.S. policy of containment.

China may well see the passage of the VFA as yet another sign of U.S. hegemonism but the nationalists in the Philippine Senate who reversed their previous position, and voted for the agreement, knew which would-be hegemon they were voting against, and it wasn't the United States.