WSJ: Japan’s Responsibility to Uphold Global Order

Those who oppose Abe’s new security bill must ask: What is their duty as a rich and blessed country?

By Michael Auslin

September 29, 2015

The Wall Street Journal

When Japan’s Parliament approved Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s controversial security legislation earlier this month, Asia’s most powerful democracy took a large step toward embracing a new reality. Yet with public opposition continuing on a scale not seen in decades, Mr. Abe faces a more enduring test of his leadership than simply using his parliamentary majority to approve his bills.

In announcing the end of postwar Japan’s self-imposed isolation from formal global-security cooperation, Mr. Abe must now convince his own countrymen of the rightness of his cause. So far, he has failed.

Mr. Abe may perhaps be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. By any measure, his legislation to allow the exercise of collective self-defense is modest in scope. Unlike the militaries of the world’s other leading democracies, Japan’s will remain under such tight restrictions that it’s questionable whether the well-trained and well-equipped Self-Defense Forces (SDF) will ever end up fighting shoulder to shoulder with an ally or partner.

The use of Japan’s military abroad will be limited to cases where the “survival” of Japan or its people is at stake. And even then, as widely reported, the use of force will be restricted to a “necessary minimum.”

Yet even this minor use of force requires more than a hundred pages of densely typed legislation, none of it yet translated into any other language. It probably never will be, according to a Japanese official in Washington who showed me the document. But almost all of it serves to define, down to the most specific instance, how and when Japan’s soldiers, sailors and airmen might go into battle.

Still, the majority of Mr. Abe’s countrymen are opposed to the changes, and have made their anger known in demonstrations not equaled since 1960, when the last major revision of Japan’s security laws allowed the current U.S.-Japan alliance to come into force. The huge crowds of protestors were unmoved by Mr. Abe’s claims that Japan will never again wage war. They seemed unconvinced that Japan should pledge to help the U.S. or other partners if they come under an attack that also threatens the lives of Japanese citizens.

It would be a mistake, however, to interpret public opposition to Mr. Abe’s plans as unreconstructed pacifism. A Cabinet Office poll taken earlier this year showed overall support for the military at 92%. Fully 30% of respondents thought the SDF should be strengthened, double the figure from 2009, before tensions with China began over the East China Sea. Just as importantly, 83% of those polled supported the U.S.-Japan alliance.

The problem Mr. Abe faces is partly of his own doing. Despite a more receptive public, he has not adequately explained how isolationism threatens Japan’s security. The U.S.-Japan alliance is not a one-way street. But a majority of Japan’s citizenry still wants to rely on U.S. defense promises. Mr. Abe needs to explain why true partnership requires Japan’s commitment to help its allies in need.

In all likelihood, the protesters will trickle away once they see that, despite all the doomsayers, not much will change in Japan’s defense posture. No Japanese army will be sent to fight America’s wars or set foot on the Asian continent again.

But Japanese citizens must also ask themselves: Could they, as a free people living in a rich and blessed country, sit by and watch the military of an ally, one that has pledged for decades to defend it, suffer attack and destruction by a common enemy?

The question is not hypothetical. It goes to the core of how the Japanese see themselves as a nation that upholds international order in an era of rising revisionist powers such as China.

This is the question that Mr. Abe has yet to put to his people, to challenge them to accept the responsibilities of their global position and wealth. It is not a light issue. But as a country that has gained immeasurably from the post-1945 liberal world order, it is one that should be at the center of Japan’s national debate over defense and security.

Article Link to the Wall Street Journal:

Japan’s Responsibility to Uphold Global Order

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