Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

One problem with this theory is that the United States has long pushed Japan to build up exactly the military power it is supposed to be containing. The government sells more advanced weapons to Japan than to any other nation or territory except Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. It has allowed the licensing of the technology of General Dynamics’ F-16 fighter plane (a derivative of which in Japan became the FS-X); it has sold Japan advanced Aegis ship missile-defense systems, ultrasophisticated AWACS command and control aircraft, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and with highly publicized threats about the dangers of the “rogue state” of North Korea has even gotten the Japanese to agree to help fund research for an antiballistic missile system. And that only scratches the surface of U.S. arms and technology transfers. In addition, administration and Pentagon officials have urged their Japanese equivalents to be strategically bolder in deploying Japanese defense forces in Asia—far bolder, in fact, than most Japanese would like their country to be.

The Pentagon is today the most important political force inside or outside Japan calling for a greatly expanded Japanese military role in world affairs. In a public-opinion poll conducted by the Asahi newspaper, 43 percent of the Japanese public opposed and only 37 percent approved the expanded Guidelines on U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation that the two countries signed in 1997.³⁸ These commit Japan to supporting American troops in times of “emergency” with many forms of assistance—opening up Japan’s civilian airports to American military operations, collaborating with American forces in removing mines, enforcing naval embargoes, and other types of direct military operations. These guidelines, as the Asahi newspaper declared editorially, have, in effect, rewritten the security treaty without consultations either with the Japanese Diet or Congress.³⁹ Such ongoing American policies undoubtedly serve to maintain American hegemony in the Pacific but bear no relation to a supposed “watchdog” role.

As former Okinawan governor Ota commented, “What’s actually happening in Japan is that, with practically no public debate, hypothetical enemies are produced one after another, and potential threats are loudly proclaimed. People talk of the need to maintain an American military presence and to pass legislation to deal with national security emergencies, without making any move to accept bases in their own communities.”⁴⁰ The Pentagon understands that it cannot come up with a credible threat to Japan or any other nation in East Asia that would demand the forward deployment of American troops. As mentioned in chapter 1, it has therefore decided to rely on something comparable to the old domino theory used to justify the war in Vietnam. According to that theory, nations all over Asia and elsewhere would “go Communist” if North Vietnam were allowed to win its civil war. With communism long gone as an enemy, the new, abstract danger is “instability.” Grave dangers, it is said, will result from the “destabilizing” act of withdrawing American troops from Asia. This new, exceedingly vague doctrine indirectly acknowledges that the purpose of American forces in Japan is neither to defend nor to contain Japan but simply by their presence to prevent the assumed dangers of their absence. The Japanese are being propagandized to believe that in these unknown future conflicts they will have a huge if unspecified stake.

In 1995, this new domino-like theory was given a classic formulation in a series of essays by former assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye. With very little in the way of specific scenarios or threats, he argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that “security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice it until you lose it.”⁴¹ In the Washington Post, he put it this way: “Our forward presence provides for the stability—the oxygen—that has helped provide for East Asian economic growth.”⁴² And in a Department of Defense publication, he offered, “Having United States forces in Asia also promotes democratic development in Asia, by providing a clear, readily observable example of the American military’s apolitical role.”⁴³

Such formulations have since entered official Washington culture and are now served up as catechism. On March 24, 1997, for instance, Vice President Al Gore told American troops and their families at Yokota Air Force Base near Tokyo, “The peace and security of the Pacific region rest on your backs.”⁴⁴ And the Pentagon has come to like this idea so much that it has announced its intention to keep troops in Korea indefinitely, even after North and South Korea have been unified. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has also defended the continued presence in Japan by insisting that any pullout would create a dangerous power “vacuum” that “might be filled in a way that would not enhance stability but detract from it.”⁴⁵