Japanese Internationalism in an Era of Upheaval

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE JAPANESE INTERNATIONALISM IN AN ERA OF UPHEAVAL DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS: MICHAEL AUSLIN, HOOVER INSTITUTION; AEI (FORMER) YUKI TATSUMI, STIMSON CENTER 2:00–3:00 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2017 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/japanese-internationalism-in-an-era-of- upheaval/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM MICHAEL AUSLIN: Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute. My name is Michael Auslin. I’m a former AEI scholar, now at the Hoover Institution, but spent 10 years here. I’m very happy to be back, first of all. It’s like a homecoming, even though I haven’t left DC, and very glad to be able to have a conversation today with my good friend, Yuki Tatsumi, of the Stimson Center on this small collection of essays about Japan. I’m very glad that all of you have decided to join us for the hour to talk about Japan’s new internationalism and what that might mean and the like. So I think the way we’ll do it is I’m going to very briefly introduce what the book is about, what this collection of essays is about, and then have a conversation with Yuki on this, and then open it up so we can have a conversation amongst ourselves. For those of you who don’t know Yuki, she is one of the leading analysts of Japan particularly on defense issues and security issues in Washington and has been at the Stimson Center how long? YUKI TATSUMI: Thirteen years. DR. AUSLIN: Thirteen years at the Stimson Center—one of the fixtures in DC— to try to understand how Japan is applying elements of national power to its foreign policy and security preferences and playing that out in the world. It’s a busy week right now. First of all, the president is in Asia. He was in Japan a few days ago. He was I think just leaving China and is on his way probably to Vietnam next and then the Philippines — a 10-day trip, so the longest since George H. W. Bush took his trip in 1991 — five countries, a lot going on. And at the top of that list, of course, is North Korea. So it’s a propitious time I think to be talking about what’s happening in Asia, and we’ll interweave elements of the US position throughout this conversation. But it’s also — it’s a significant week in other ways. Today, is the — what is it — the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the breaking through the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1999. So I think that makes it 28, right, 28 years. Two days ago was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, overthrowing the provisional government in Russia, in 1917. So it’s a week to think a lot about world-changing moments, which sort of begs the question then, why Japan? Does Japan fit into this at all? And other than the answer that this was the best time to schedule this event, I would say that, yeah, there are reasons to talk about Japan in the context of a lot of these larger issues. For those of us who work on Japan and some of the folks in the room who actually literally were doing alliance management back in the ’70s and the ’80s, you know, it’s a different world to talk about the role that Japan plays, and as you think about engaging with Japan, the height, so to speak, the glory days of Japan’s international prominence, its international presence and influence has been long over. And to our detriment, I think, we have overlooked not only Japan as a player internationally and certainly regionally, but internationally, but also have quite frankly ignored a lot of what’s been going on in Japan for the past 25 years, you know, sort of our modus operandi. You know, the second that Japan’s bubble burst, that it was no longer going to be growing at 10 or 6 or whatever percent per year, we started looking for greener fields to pay attention to. And while that may be the way that we do things around the world, it certainly doesn’t mean that Japan disappeared or that it didn’t maintain a vibrant society, an important role in Asia and a global role. And this set of essays was really a first attempt to at least try to discuss that to some degree in the shadow of China, in the shadow of Korea and, quite honestly, to tackle a topic that many people think is somewhat fusty and not all that important. In this town, what we primarily do is look at the alliance. I’ve done it, most of my friends do it, we look at, you know, is it a new era in the alliance? How do we deepen the alliance? Where is the alliance falling short? And that’s — you know, that’s natural. This is what the town does. But this is only a tiny part of talking about Japan. First of all, Japan on its own as an international player, Japan’s own set of preferences, its own foreign policies, its own security policies, how it articulates them, how it tries to pursue them, what its goals are, that’s one element to it. But then there’s a whole other element of Japan as Japan. And if you’re in this room, it’s probably because you haven’t forgotten that Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy or, as I like to call it, the second-largest free economy in the world; that it is a country of 126-something million people, which makes it very significant in a population sense; that it remains one of the most durable and enduring democracies in the world, where we have an increasing democracy deficit; that it has an articulated civil society with all sorts of civil liberties that is challenged in many places around the world; that it has maintained all of these strengths even as it has struggled for 25 years with maintaining an economy and trying to keep a vibrant economy and the like so that we to, I think again, our detriment have not paid attention to Japan as much as we should have. That was really the genesis for this set of essays, trying to understand more from a Japanese perspective, to the extent that I could, Japan’s role in the world. And if you take a look — there are copies of the book, if you don’t have it. There are copies out there so please do pick one up. There’s no attempt to make this a coherent narrative, but they are five extended essays, ranging from I think 5,000 to 12,000 words, something like that, on Japan. The first one, and I’m going to turn over to Yuki in just a second but just to let you know what the book talks about. The first one was written for the National Bureau of Asian Research and tries to take the big picture of Japan’s national power: How do you actually define it, how do you capture it, and then how does Japan use that national power to play a role out in Asia and out in the world? And that’s the longest essay. It’s about 13,000 words. Then there’s a more narrow look at Shinzo Abe himself that was a piece published in Foreign Affairs, trying to understand if Abe really was different. Was he more of the same? Was he overpromising and under-delivering? Was there really something where we could identify, this is a different leader, and therefore, this is going to be a different type of country going forward? And you’ll see my conclusions on that, and we can talk about it, but I’m certainly interested in your thoughts. Then, in the middle, there is an obligatory piece about the alliance. Where does it go from here? But it was written particularly with the view of what was happening in both Japan and the United States at the time, looking at Japan, again, with Abe — is he really a different type of actor? Is he the nationalist that people talk about and, therefore, potentially some type of danger? And, equally, this was written originally during the election campaign, looking at the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. That’s not what’s in here, but it was looking at how each of them might deal with the alliance going forward and, quite honestly, like everyone else in town, written from the perspective that we should expect a Hillary Clinton presidency and so, therefore, that’s what it might look at. It didn’t get published before the election, so obviously there was a pretty significant rewrite, which was to put in Donald Trump. But what Trump policies might look like and, more importantly, the impetus behind them. Is it really a populism and a nationalism on the part of the United States that will cause us to turn away from Asia? But already by the time I was rewriting it, we were seeing clear signs from the Trump administration that, in many ways, other than TPP, this would be a sort of steady as she goes, continue the policies of your predecessors’ type of approach. So it’s trying to understand if the alliance really would be changed by what was happening inside the countries.

Load more