Pacific Partners: Forging the U.S.-Japan Special Relationship 太平洋のパートナー：アメリカと日本の特別な関係の構築 Arthur Herman December 2017 Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute Research Report Pacific Partners: Forging the U.S.-Japan Special Relationship 太平洋のパートナー：アメリカと日本の特別な関係の構築 Arthur Herman Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute © 2017 Hudson Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. For more information about obtaining additional copies of this or other Hudson Institute publications, please visit Hudson’s website, www.hudson.org Hudson is grateful for the support of the Smith Richardson Foundation in funding the research and completion of this report. ABOUT HUDSON INSTITUTE Hudson Institute is a research organization promoting American leadership and global engagement for a secure, free, and prosperous future. Founded in 1961 by strategist Herman Kahn, Hudson Institute challenges conventional thinking and helps manage strategic transitions to the future through interdisciplinary studies in defense, international relations, economics, health care, technology, culture, and law. Hudson seeks to guide public policy makers and global leaders in government and business through a vigorous program of publications, conferences, policy briefings and recommendations. Visit www.hudson.org for more information. Hudson Institute 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Suite 400 Washington, D.C. 20004 P: 202.974.2400 [email protected] www.hudson.org Table of Contents Introduction （イントロダクション） 3 Part I: “Allies of a Kind”: The US-UK Special Relationship in 15 Retrospect（パート I：「同盟の一形態」：米英の特別な関係は過去どうだったの か） Part II: Understanding the US-Japan Special Relationship 54 (パート II：アメリカと日本の特別な関係についてはどうとらえられるか) Part III: How the US-Japan Special Relationship Can Change Asia 101 （パート III:アメリカと日本の特別な関係はアジアをどのように変えることができる か） Conclusion（結論） 136 About the Author and Acknowledgements （著者紹介と謝辞） 144 End Notes（脚注） 145 This page intentionally left blank (this text will be removed before publishing) Pacific Partners: Forging the US-Japan Special Relationship INTRODUCTION n a speech in Fulton, Missouri on March 6, 1946, Winston Churchill coined one of the Imost famous phrases in the history of foreign policy. “Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.” The historical record shows this was not Churchill’s first mention of the term “special relationship.” It surfaces in his correspondence as early as 1943. But the Fulton speech was the first public acknowledgment of a bilateral strategic alliance that would persist for the next seventy years—an alliance, one can forcefully argue, that won both World Wars I and II, and then kept the peace in Europe for four decades during the Cold War. By any measure that is an impressive, nearly seventy-year record. Yet Churchill’s use of the term was more than simply descriptive of the successful wartime alliance between the UK and US, which led to Germany’s defeat and which Churchill foresaw would be needed again to confront Soviet aggression in the postwar period. (The Fulton speech also coined another phrase of great significance for the future: the “iron curtain” that Churchill portrayed as having descended upon Eastern Europe thanks to Soviet occupation.) Churchill’s use of the term was also clearly prescriptive. The true purpose of his speech, given in the aftermath of World War II to an overwhelmingly American audience, was to lay out an ambitious agenda for both countries. This agenda would keep peace while constraining the twin threats the former British prime minister saw looming on the horizon: war and tyranny. “If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths,” Churchill emphasized, “be added to that of the United States, with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure.”1 There can be little doubt that Churchill’s prediction largely came true over the next seventy years. In 1950, four years after the Fulton speech, the US-UK special relationship (in which Churchill included Canada) became the foundation of NATO, the security organization that halted Soviet aggression in the Cold War and that still maintains the balance of power between East and West in today’s Putin era. In addition, security and defense cooperation between the US and Britain would reach levels unprecedented in modern history—levels that have persisted through the war on terror and will no doubt grow stronger in the wake of Brexit. No one can doubt, either, that the Anglo-American alliance is built on more than perceptions of long-term common interests. There is also a deep foundation that rests on a common history (the United States having been originally a British colony), a 3 Arthur Herman common language, and shared commitment to common values such as liberty under law, individual freedom, and liberal democracy. Therefore, while both countries have other security treaties and alliance partners, if the term “special” does not apply to the US-UK security relationship seventy years later, then it applies nowhere. Seventy years, as it happens, is almost exactly how long the US-Japan strategic alliance has persisted since World War II. As we will see, this alliance has served to keep peace in East Asia and served as a powerful check on regional aggressors and a potent conduit of economic, cultural, scientific, and political interchange between the two countries. That interchange has, arguably, drawn the two countries as close together as possible, given that they are separated by a 4000-mile-wide ocean and a singular lack of any common language, history, or cultural tradition. In the final analysis, neither has a stronger or more reliable ally in Asia and the Pacific Rim than the other—just as neither the UK nor the US has a stronger and more reliable ally than the other in Europe and the Atlantic Basin. So is there a US-Japan special relationship analogous to the one Churchill identified between the US and UK in 1946? And if not, why not? What ingredients are needed to raise the US-Japan alliance to that level? And what advantages, strategic or otherwise, would flow from raising the US-Japan alliance into that special relationship status? These are the three questions this monograph sets out to address. The operative assumption here is that such an alliance is both possible and desirable. It is also axiomatic that the future of the relationship is also the future of peace and stability in Asia, just as US-UK cooperation became the anchor of peace and stability in Europe through the Cold War and beyond. In addressing these questions, then, the first step is seeing what can be learned from the US-UK experience—or perhaps more properly, the UK-US experience since, as we will see, Britain was the original suitor in this trans-Atlantic partnership and has remained so since. It is Britain above all, and its political leaders, who have made preserving the alliance at its “special,” even unique level a major priority. After World War II the US steadily emerged as the stronger and more dominant partner. It has generally been conceded ever since that if either party would suffer more from the severing of the relationship, it would be Britain. Yet as we will see, the US has learned that it, too, enjoys additional leverage in world affairs by cultivating and extending the special relationship. While Churchill and other British politicians had no illusions and realized that Britain had more to gain in a strong postwar partnership, US politicians have also discovered that keeping the former colonial superpower and “mother of all parliaments” close has important benefits. So while Churchill, because of his prestige as a war leader and statesman, undoubtedly propelled the phrase special relationship into the political vocabulary in ways a less- regarded figure could not; and while historians still disagree about Churchill’s 4 Pacific Partners: Forging the US-Japan Special Relationship intentions in injecting the phrase into a speech ostensibly about postwar Europe, there is no doubt that the speech described an alliance that has continued to shape global reality and served as a foundation for regional peace and stability, regardless of how fanciful or cynical Churchill’s intentions may have been. The US-UK alliance has been unlike any other in modern history. Except perhaps, the alliance between the US and Japan. As we will see, that alliance has served as a foundation for regional peace and stability. It, too, has deep roots that are very different, yet at least as rooted in historical reality; and it, too, has benefited both partners in tangible and undeniable ways. Moreover, in the past seventy years it has suffered fewer major disruptions and confrontations over foreign policy goals than the British-American special relationship. While there were important disagreements between Tokyo and Washington over the Vietnam War, and there has been occasional friction over whether Japan has been carrying its share of the mutual defense burden and over US bases in Japan, there has not been a Japanese version of the Suez dispute or the public strain placed on the alliance like the strain on US-UK relations triggered by the Falklands crisis in 1982 (see part I). At the same time, it is certainly true that unlike the US and UK, the US and Japan do not share the same language or culture. It is also true that they do not share the same ethnic or racial stock, although as the US has become increasingly multi-racial since 1945, including 5.6 percent Asian-American,2 that distinction, which would have meant a great deal to Winston Churchill, has become virtually meaningless.