Asia-Pacific Security

US, Australia and Japan and the New Security Triangle

William Tow, Mark Thomson, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Satu Limaye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134115464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The aim of this book is to explore the implications stemming from the recent upgrading of Australia-Japan-US security interactions and the implications for Asia-Pacific regional security that these represent. While a fully functioning trilateral security alliance binding Australia, Japan and the United States is unlikely to materialise or&nbsp

1 Introduction

William T. Tow

Well after the end of the Cold War the shape and meaning of ongoing structural change in the Asia-Pacific region remains unclear. Early predictions that the United States would exercise uncontested hegemony there have been overtaken by that country’s preoccupation with such emerging asymmetrical threats as international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to ‘states of concern’ and, potentially, to hostile non-state entities. The rise of China and its implications for regional order are not yet understood, even by the Chinese, much less by other regional and extra-regional actors. Asia-Pacific ‘community-building’ is proceeding, although in only painstaking ways. Regional security dilemmas or ‘flashpoints’ in the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan Strait and Kashmir remain capable of exploding rapidly and with global ramifications. The politics of energy security has assumed centre-stage as Asia’s rapidly growing economies become increasingly competitive in their quest for access to fossil fuels and other commodities. Other ‘non-traditional security’ challenges have intensified in such areas as environment, health and human rights. Too little consensus still exists, however, over how such developments are best confronted.

That the postwar US-led bilateral alliances in this region remain largely intact during such a period of change constitutes a major surprise in international security relations. Alliance theorists had argued that such relationships would dissolve if the threat that instigated their creation disappeared.¹ The United States’ alliances with Japan, and Washington’s equally enduring security relationship with Australia, survive as viable icons of strategic stability, increasingly involved in US global strategies as well as constantly relevant to US agendas in Asia. This is the case notwithstanding Japan increasingly coming to terms with its own national identity as a security actor and Australia’s geographic distance from the Middle East and Central Asia areas which most preoccupy contemporary American policy-planners.² There is currently no equivalent threat to American global primacy such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War. United States policy-makers have publicly expressed a preference for engaging with China as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ to build a stable international order rather than contesting China’s growing power in Asia and beyond.³

Given this stability and these circumstances, and the recent worsening of Sino-Japanese relations over historical and strategic issues, critics of the decision by Australia, Japan and the United States to enter into a ‘Trilateral Strategic Dialogue’ (TSD) have questioned why two long-standing alliances that have served their purposes of containing Soviet power, and, more recently, allowed a viable US balancing role in the region, are now adding a distinct three-way dimension to their security collaboration. In early May 2005, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer announced that trilateral strategic discussions previously convened by Australia, Japan and the United States at a vice-ministerial level would be upgraded to full ministerial status.⁴ By doing so, they insisted that ‘more direct discussions’ of key political elements would lead to more systematic coordination between the three allies on a wide range of regional security issues. However, critics of this decision asserted that the inaugural TSD meeting in March 2006 was ‘shrouded in speculation and opacity’ to conceal a visible difference between Australia’s relatively benign outlook on China from Japan’s and the United States’ more hardline postures. They also observed that while the United States had invited China to collaborate in building an enduring security order in Asia, it simultaneously had criticized China’s increased defence spending as a sign that that country could become a ‘negative force’ for regional security. The TSD, they concluded, would undermine the burgeoning but positive multilateral dialogue processes conducted within the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). It would instead convert the traditional Japanese and Australian ‘spokes’ in the American-led network of regional bilateral alliances into a de facto ‘little NATO’.⁵ Chinese foreign policy experts meanwhile warned that the dialogue should not view Chinese defence spending and other aspects of Chinese foreign policy with a ‘Cold War mentality’.⁶

Notwithstanding such reservations, the TSD’s communiqué issued after its first ministerial session projected China’s regional security role in a surprisingly positive light: Dialogue participants ‘welcomed China’s constructive engagement in the region and concurred on the value of enhanced cooperation with other parties such as ASEAN and the Republic of Korea’.⁷ It became quickly apparent that a more central focus for the Sydney discussions was how the three long-time Pacific allies would conceptualize and respond to global security issues as they affect the Asia-Pacific’s security environment. These included the potential erosion of WMD non-proliferation norms in ‘states of concern’ such as North Korea and Iran, international counterterrorism measures and broader ‘human security’ concerns such as disaster relief and pandemic controls.⁸ The TSD was posited by its proponents as a regionally ‘inclusive’ initiative designed to effect closer Australia–Japan security consultations and policy coordination on a wide range of traditional and non-traditional security issues. The TSD’s initial evolution appeared to conform to such expectations, incorporating what has been termed a ‘bilateralism-plus’ formula: ‘A more distinctive and active Australia–Japan component of security collaboration on a range of traditional and human security issues, TSD advocates maintain, could gradually modify Chinese threat perceptions and concerns that those two countries were merely acting as proxies for a new American containment posture directed against Beijing.’⁹ This proposition was further tested when Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, signed the Australia–Japan Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation in Tokyo on 13 March 2007. ¹⁰

What is beyond question is that the Australia–Japan–United States security relationship is gaining increasing attention in the Asia-Pacific region by both policy-makers and independent observers and has potentially important implications for the security architecture of the region. The TSD is an important development in a region that has reached an historical crossroads in determining what type of security order will emerge in the Asia-Pacific. Obviously, China’s security interests, along with those of other regional security actors, will be directly affected by any viable evolution of ‘trilateralism’ between the three long-time Pacific allies. Two major questions materialize in this context. Can future Australia–Japan–United States trilateral consultations and interactions become viewed by other regional actors as an element of ‘strategic reassurance’ by allowing the United States and its two traditional postwar maritime allies to better synchronize their mutual approaches to an evolving East Asia Community (EAC)? Or will the TSD evolve into a rival power base to other regional security entities, intent on containing Chinese power and reinforcing US strategic predominance in the region?

The latter question appears especially pertinent with the US Defense Department’s February 2006 release of the ‘Quadrennial Defense Review’ identifying China as a future ‘peer competitor’ of the United States at both the regional and global levels of geopolitical rivalry.¹¹ In the absence of careful alliance management, traditional Chinese fears of an American-led ‘neo-containment’ strategy directed against itself could be aggravated by Washington transforming its separate bilateral security relationships with Japan and Australia into a more integrated security arrangement. Other Asian states – especially South Korea (also a US ally) – could also become apprehensive of an ill-managed TSD initiative at a time when the Korean peninsula is at a crossroads in its politico-strategic identity and when the nuclear non-proliferation issue is alienating North Korea from much of the international community. This remains problematic despite the Six Party Talks negotiating breakthrough attained on 13 February 2007.

Australia and Japan could also unintentionally create or increase domestic and regional perceptions that they are acting as American strategic proxies or ‘deputy sheriffs’ in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, respectively, by affiliating with US ‘coalitions of the willing’ peace-building ventures too readily or without making clear how their independent national security interests are served by such coalitions.

The aim of this book is to explore the implications of the recent upgrading of security interactions among these three countries and to analyse to what extent the TSD compares favourably or otherwise with other regional security mechanisms as a means to pursue conflict avoidance or to achieve conflict resolution in Asia. It therefore goes beyond the recent and authoritative study edited by Brad Williams and Andrew Newman (also published by Routledge) on the widening of Australian and Japanese security ties occurring since the 1970s. It sees focus on the regional and international security problems and opportunities presaged by the Australia–Japan–United States strategic triad.¹² Incorporating extensive analysis by Japanese contributors, this study includes discussions of the ‘China dimension’ of TSD politics and of critical ‘non-traditional’ Asia-Pacific security issues such as energy security and maritime security. These issues are becoming increasingly central to the Asia-Pacific strategic environment and to the United States, Japan and Australia as regionally prominent maritime powers.¹³

This volume is also concerned with how the TSD affects the development of other new multilateral instrumentalities for Asia-Pacific regional order-building such as the ARF, the East Asia Summit and ad hoc instrumentalities such as the Six Party Talks on the Korean peninsula. Within this framework, it considers the theoretical and empirical context of ‘trilateralism’; the evolving history of the Australia–Japan–United States trilateral security relationship; its connection to and impact on the US bilateral alliance network in Asia; how domestic politics in each country relates to regional security politics; the growing ‘economic–security nexus’ linking alliance related issues; and recent initiatives by the United States to incorporate Japan and Australia as valued ‘Pacific partners’ to NATO and in US global strategy.

The study’s framework

This study is divided into three major parts: (1) assessments of the TSD’s evolution and possible theoretical and domestic policy explanations; (2) analysis of regional security dimensions and implications of the TSD initiative; and (3) considerations of selected key issue-areas that will be directly affected by that initiative. A conclusion will then offer some policy recommendations emanating from the analyses contained in these three parts.

Part I offers four chapters that develop the theme of trilateralism in Australia– Japan–United States security relations and trace the historical and domestic imperatives shaping it. In Chapter 2, Brendan Taylor and Desmond Ball provide an overarching historical framework for considering the possible advantages and drawbacks for the three allies. They describe common regional threat perceptions, policy accountability, technology transfers and how strategic orientations have matured over successive postwar decades. William Tow develops several theoretical perspectives on trilateral security politics in Chapter 3. He focuses on how triliteralism ‘fits’ with the different modes of security cooperation contending for primacy as a mechanism for Asia-Pacific security community-building, and revisits the concept of threat in contemporary alliance politics to assess why the traditional US-led bilateral security strategy of ‘hub and spokes’ alliance management is changing. In Chapter 4, Michael Wesley demarcates which elements of the Australian, Japanese and American governments will be most important in sustaining or advancing the TSD, and what domestic factors are most likely to shape their TSD agendas. Along with Taylor and Ball, Wesley underscores the importance of elite commitment to making triliteral mechanisms succeed and overcome the policy logjams that otherwise tend to mire bureaucracies in allied countries and prevent them from achieving the institutional consistencies required for policy credibility in regional security politics. Finally, in Chapter 5 Mark Thomson offers an important ‘bridging chapter’, relating the theoretical and empirical rationales underlying TSD formulation to the actual expectations and limitations of the processes and results of this security mechanism. He observes that the TSD cannot be assumed to immediately or completely replace the traditional US asymmetrical bilateral alliance system that has been in place for over half a century. It can, however, provide a cohesive basis for Australian, Japanese and American coordination of their policies towards China and in ways that can be regarded as non-threatening by Beijing.

Part II of the book concentrates on the ‘regional dimensions’ of TSD concern. In Chapter 6 Yoshinobu Yamamoto weighs how recent changes in the United States– Japan bilateral alliance have influenced the development of the TSD. He notes that US Asia-Pacific force postures have been reduced since the Cold War and that Japan has been required to adjust its own defence policies in line with this hard reality; that Japan’s overall process of defence normalization can be managed more efficiently in a framework of close allied consultation. He posits that the United States and Australia, as the Asia-Pacific’s other maritime powers that have collaborated closely with Tokyo throughout the postwar era, are Japan’s two most logical strategic associates during this time of rapid transition in regional and global geopolitics. In Chapter 7 this view is at least partially or implicitly contested by Yoshihide Soeya who argues in his assessment of ‘Trilateralism and Northeast Asia’ that Japanese security normalization must be tempered by a greater sensitivity towards China’s rise and towards the flashpoints of North Korea and Taiwan than has thus far been displayed by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Executive Summary
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Setting the Context
• Part II: Regional Dimensions
• Part III: Key Issue-Areas