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11. Disengaging from Taiwan

Author:
Douglas Paal, Charles Glaser, and Shyu-tu Lee
Publication Date:
07-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
MISREADING CHINA'S INTENTIONS Shyu-tu Lee According to Charles Glaser, the prospects for avoiding war between the United States and China are good ("Will China's Rise Lead to War?" March/April 2011). But by ignoring China's history and economic policy and other relevant factors, Glaser arrives at policy prescriptions that would increase the chance of a Chinese nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. Glaser misjudges Chinese motives. China's military modernization is not primarily motivated by insecurity, as he asserts. China is not threatened by the United States or any of its neighbors. It is advocating its model of governance -- managed capitalism combined with one-party authoritarianism -- as a more efficient alternative to a free-market economy and democracy. China's mission is to regain its place as the dominant superpower so that the country can cleanse itself of the humiliation it has experienced at the hands of the West. The rise of China poses grave challenges to U.S. security. Beijing implements a mercantilist trade policy and artificially sets a low value on its currency to promote exports, thus creating a large U.S. trade deficit with China year after year. Its army has been modernizing at a rapid pace, developing anti-access, area-denial weapons and cyber- and space-warfare capabilities. Meanwhile, China wants to integrate Taiwan because its democracy threatens Beijing's autocratic and repressive rule. In addition, Beijing needs Taiwan as a military base from which to project power into the Indian and Pacific oceans. To keep the peace, the United States must discard the culture of excessive deference to Beijing and implement policies to maintain U.S. military superiority, stanch the flow of U.S. wealth to China, steer China toward democratization, strengthen its alliances with Japan and South Korea, and engage China in an economic and strategic dialogue to promote fair trade and avoid misunderstandings.
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, and South Korea

12. Earthquake, Tsunami Hit Japan: Assessing the Economic Impact

Author:
Sheila Smith
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan will have a severe, lasting impact on the Japanese economy, says CFR's Sheila Smith, Senior Fellow for Japan Studies.
Topic:
Economics, Energy Policy, and Natural Disasters
Political Geography:
Japan and East Asia

13. Japan's Nuclear Crisis: Global Implications for Nuclear Energy

Author:
Michael A. Levi
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
A week after Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, Japanese officials struggle to contain a widening crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. CFR's Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment, Michael A. Levi, discusses the global responses to Japan's nuclear crisis, and what it means for the future of nuclear energy.
Topic:
Energy Policy and Natural Disasters
Political Geography:
Japan

14. Japan's Nuclear Tremors After Quake

Author:
Jayshree Bajoria
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The devastation wreaked by Japan's worst-ever earthquake and the accompanying tsunami continues to widen. Officials put the death toll at thirty-five hundred (UPI), while some reports say more than ten thousand have died (AP) in Miyagi prefecture alone. Tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for, and the number of casualties is expected to rise, as large numbers are believed buried under rubble. Millions of survivors struggle without electricity, food, and drinking water. Fears of a nuclear meltdown from reactors damaged by the quake prompted Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan to declare the disaster the country's "most severe crisis" (BBC) since World War II.
Topic:
Natural Disasters and Nuclear Power
Political Geography:
Japan, East Asia, and Asia

15. The United States-Japan Security Treaty at 50 Still a Grand Bargain?

Author:
George R. Packard
Publication Date:
03-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
On January 19, 1960, Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter signed a historic treaty. It committed the United States to help defend Japan if Japan came under attack, and it provided bases and ports for U.S. armed forces in Japan. The agreement has endured through half a century of dramatic changes in world politics -- the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spread of nuclear weapons to North Korea, the rise of China -- and in spite of fierce trade disputes, exchanges of insults, and deep cultural and historical differences between the United States and Japan. This treaty has lasted longer than any other alliance between two great powers since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Given its obvious success in keeping Japan safe and the United States strong in East Asia, one might conclude that the agreement has a bright future. And one would be wrong. The landslide electoral victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) last August, after nearly 54 years of uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, has raised new questions in Japan about whether the treaty's benefits still outweigh its costs. LABOR PAINS Back in 1952, when an earlier security treaty (which provided the basis for the 1960 treaty) entered into force, both sides thought it was a grand bargain. Japan would recover its independence, gain security at a low cost from the most powerful nation in the region, and win access to the U.S. market for its products. Without the need to build a large military force, Japan would be able to devote itself to economic recovery. The United States, for its part, could project power into the western Pacific, and having troops and bases in Japan made credible both its treaty commitments to defend South Korea and Taiwan and its policy of containment of the Soviet Union and communist China.
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, South Korea, and Vietnam

16. Top of the Class

Author:
Richard C. Levin
Publication Date:
05-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The rapid economic development of Asia since World War II -- starting with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, then extending to Hong Kong and Singapore, and finally taking hold powerfully in India and mainland China -- has forever altered the global balance of power. These countries recognize the importance of an educated work force to economic growth, and they understand that investing in research makes their economies more innovative and competitive. Beginning in the 1960s, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sought to provide their populations with greater access to postsecondary education, and they achieved impressive results. Today, China and India have an even more ambitious agenda. Both seek to expand their higher-education systems, and since the late 1990s, China has done so dramatically. They are also aspiring to create a limited number of world-class universities. In China, the nine universities that receive the most supplemental government funding recently self-identified as the C9 -- China's Ivy League. In India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development recently announced its intention to build 14 new comprehensive universities of "world-class" stature. Other Asian powers are eager not to be left behind: Singapore is planning a new public university of technology and design, in addition to a new American-style liberal arts college affiliated with the National University. Such initiatives suggest that governments in Asia understand that overhauling their higher-education systems is required to sustain economic growth in a postindustrial, knowledge-based global economy. They are making progress by investing in research, reforming traditional approaches to curricula and pedagogy, and beginning to attract outstanding faculty from abroad. Many challenges remain, but it is more likely than not that by midcentury the top Asian universities will stand among the best universities in the world.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and War
Political Geography:
Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea

17. The Best Defense?

Author:
Abraham D. Sofaer
Publication Date:
01-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
After 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush announced his determination to do whatever was necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States. Following the lead of several countries that had recently come to similar conclusions after their own bitter experiences -- including India, Israel, Japan, Russia, Spain, and the United Kingdom -- the United States tightened its immigration laws; increased the protection of its borders, ports, and infrastructure; criminalized providing "material support" for terrorist groups; and tore down the wall between the intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, which had crippled counterterrorist efforts for decades. Washington did not authorize preventive detention, as other countries had, but it used other measures to hold persons against whom criminal charges could not be brought -- thereby preventing terrorist attacks. The U.S. government also led or joined various international efforts aimed at warding off new dangers, such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, through which over 70 states cooperate to interdict the movement of nuclear materials across international borders. But the Bush administration's call for preventive action went further: it endorsed using force against states that supported terrorism or failed to prevent it. This was a particularly controversial position, since using (or threatening to use) preventive force across international borders is generally considered to be a violation of international law: the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and most international legal authorities currently construe the United Nations Charter as prohibiting any use of force not sanctioned by the UN Security Council, with the exception of actions taken in self-defense against an actual or imminent state-sponsored "armed attack."
Topic:
Security and United Nations
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Washington, Israel, and Spain

18. The Digital Disruption

Author:
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Publication Date:
11-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.
Political Geography:
Japan and China

19. The Default Power

Author:
Josef Joffe
Publication Date:
09-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Every ten years, it is decline time in the United States. In the late 1950s, it was the Sputnik shock, followed by the "missile gap" trumpeted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign. A decade later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sounded the dirge over bipolarity, predicting a world of five, rather than two, global powers. At the end of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech invoked "a crisis of confidence" that struck "at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." A decade later, academics such as the Yale historian Paul Kennedy predicted the ruin of the United States, driven by overextension abroad and profligacy at home. The United States was at risk of "imperial overstretch," Kennedy wrote in 1987, arguing that "the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously." But three years later, Washington dispatched 600,000 soldiers to fight the first Iraq war -- without reinstating the draft or raising taxes. The only price of "overstretch" turned out to be the mild recession of 1991. Declinism took a break in the 1990s. The United States was enjoying a nice run after the suicide of the Soviet Union, and Japan, the economic powerhouse of the 1980s, was stuck in its "lost decade" of stagnation and so no longer stirred U.S. paranoia with its takeover of national treasures such as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center. The United States had moved into the longest economic expansion in history, which, apart from eight down months in 2001, continued until 2008. "Gloom is the dominant mood in Japan these days," one Asian commentator reported in 1997, whereas "American capitalism is resurgent, confident and brash." That year, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that "the defining feature of world affairs" was "globalization" and that if "you had to design a country best suited to compete in such a world, [it would be] today's America." He concluded on a triumphant note: "Globalization is us."
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Washington

20. Tokyo's Trials

Author:
Yoichi Funabashi
Publication Date:
11-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The rise to power of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after half a century of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) could bring profound changes to Japan. One change will surely be generational: the new leaders, including Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, will be the first with little memory of World War II. Another could be substantive: the DPJ's stated objectives suggest significant shifts in both Japan's domestic policies and its external relations, especially with the United States and the rest of Asia. Since 2007, the DPJ had already been maintaining a majority coalition in the Diet's upper house, the House of Councilors, alongside the People's New Party and the Social Democratic Party; its August victory in the lower house, the House of Representatives, gave it full control over the government. Another win in the next House of Councilors election, which is scheduled for 2010, would further consolidate its power. Japan now stands a better chance of becoming a two-party system, with real political competition, than at any time since 1890, when it held its first election -- the first free contest anywhere in Asia. The economic crisis that has plagued Japan for two decades has allowed the DPJ to grow into a viable alternative to LDP rule; Barack Obama's campaign mantra "Yes, we can!" echoed across the Pacific. The DPJ has real potential to be different. And with its landslide victory, it enjoys the backing of a vast range of constituencies, including traditional supporters of the LDP.
Political Geography:
Japan and Tokyo