A Brewing Storm: Why America and China Are On a Collision Course in the Pacific

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Nevertheless, the Pacific Pivot has intensified the already intense militarization of the area. Sixty percent of U.S. naval strength has been shifted to the Western Pacific. This has been accompanied by the accelerated deployment of U.S. Marine Corps units from Okinawa to Guam and Australia. U.S. Special Forces  continue to participate in the campaign against radical Islamists in the Southern Philippines, while conducting amphibious and naval exercises with Philippine military units near the disputed Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal. The most recent development is that the Philippine government will allow greater U.S. access to Philippine bases, including the former massive U.S. naval complex at Subic Bay. Twenty years after giving up its bases in the country, the United States is back with a bang in the Philippines.

The U.S. build-up in the Philippines, some Filipino commentators have pointed out, is self-defeating, since the dynamics of conflict between the superpowers have set in, marginalizing any effective resolution to the territorial disputes that Washington’s military presence was supposed to facilitate in the first place.

Tokyo’s Opportunism

U.S.-China sparring is worrisome enough, but there is a third source of destabilization in the region: Japan. Right-wing elements there, including the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have taken advantage of China’s moves in the West Philippine Sea and Japan’s dispute with Beijing over the deserted Senkaku Islands to push for the abolition of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which prohibits war as an instrument of foreign policy and prevents Japan from having an army. The aim is to have a foreign and military policy more independent from the United States, which has managed Tokyo’s external security affairs ever since Japan’s defeat during the Second World War.

Many of Japan’s neighbors are convinced that a Japan more independent from the United States will develop nuclear weapons. They fear the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan that has shed its post-war pacifism and  not yet carried out the national soul searching that in Germany embedded responsibility for the atrocities of the Nazi regime in the national consciousness. This failure to institutionalize and internalize war guilt is what allowed the mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, to assert recently that the estimated 200,000 Korean, Chinese, and Filipino “ comfort women“—women captured into sexual slavery by Japanese troops in the Second World War—were “ necessary” for troop morale.

The Osaka mayor’s remarks came in the wake of another scandal: a mass visit in April by some 170 sitting legislators and members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet to the Yasukuni Shrine, the home of Japan’s war dead, which includes among its honorees 14 convicted war criminals.

Japan’s neighbors have long condemned the ritual visit of Japanese leaders to Yasukuni as a sign of the country’s unrepentant attitude for its conduct during World War II. Yet there are disturbing signs that long held stances toward Japan’s remilitarization are softening. The Foreign Secretary of the Philippines, Albert del Rosario, for instance, has gone on record recently to support Japanese rearmament in order to contain China’s hegemonic behavior.

China’s aggressive territorial claims, Washington’s “pivot,” and Japan’s opportunistic moves add up to a volatile brew. Many observers note that the Asia Pacific military-political situation is becoming like that of Europe at the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of a similar configuration of balance of power politics. It is a useful reminder that while that fragile balancing might have worked for a time, it eventually ended up in the conflagration that was the First World War.