by Parag Khanna
Given its aging demographics, Japan is at the cutting edge of technological approaches to managing elderly populations. It is already a world leader in factory automation; now it is automating daily life. At one of the newest amusement parks outside Nagasaki, the check-in staff in the on-site hotel are robots, as are the chefs and waiters in the resort’s restaurant. Softbank’s Pepper robot is now ubiquitous in shops selling everything from mobile phones to pizza. From furry mechanical seals serving as companions in nursing homes to robots with touch-screen faces gliding through hospitals and gathering patient data, Japan is at the forefront of building a hybrid human-robot civilization, liberally spreading its technological innovations across Asia.
But global Japan must avoid repeating the country’s overly aggressive outward push from the 1980s. Its current buying spree has been considered indiscriminate, with nearly $20 billion wasted by companies such as Japan Post and Toshiba on failed acquisitions between mid-2016 and mid-2017.21 Also, though there is an admirable vanguard of outwardly oriented Japanese companies, Abenomics has yet to awaken everyday businesses. One approach Japan is taking to shake up its entrenched conservatism is demographic: welcoming foreigners on a scale never before attempted. Japan’s aggressive efforts to lure back overseas Japanese are a spectacle best witnessed at the annual Boston Career Forum (also held in Los Angeles and London), which attracts hordes of bilingual students gunning for jobs in Japan, including Chinese and Americans as well. Asians are flowing into Japan as migrants, workers, brides, and tourists. By 2016, Japan was home to a record number of foreign immigrants (nearly 2.5 million) and 1 million foreign workers. The number of Chinese has mushroomed from 150,000 in 1990 to more than 700,000 today, with many Chinese learning Japanese well enough to blend in relatively quickly. Japanese intermarriage has also risen, especially with spouses from China, the Philippines, Korea, and the United States. In the labor force, Vietnamese, Thais, and even Nepalis are growing in number.22 In the run-up to the Olympics, thousands more construction workers will come from abroad. Across the board, Asians are plugging the low-skill end of Japan’s widening labor gap, working in shopping malls and drugstores, where they service the millions of Asians who make up Japan’s recent tourism surge. In Tokyo hot spots such as Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ginza, the phenomenon of “explosive shopping by Chinese tourists” has been captured by the neologism bakugai, which was voted Japan’s most memorable buzzword of 2015.23 Furthermore, the weak yen has made Japanese real estate a popular buy among regional real estate investors. Chinese property dealers, US private equity firms, and Singaporean wealth funds are among the many investors betting on the long-term appeal of stable, sophisticated, placid Japan.
Surplus Asian engineering and computer science graduates are also a crucial remedy for Japan’s shortage of white-collar tech talent, hence the government’s recent pledge to fast-track permanent residency for highly skilled foreigners despite the cultural and linguistic obstacles. Starting in 2012, the authorities in Fukuoka, once a sleepy seaside city on the southern island of Kyushu, cut taxes on new businesses and launched a start-up visa to encourage the hiring of foreigners. In the three-year period to 2015, the city experienced a 20 percent growth rate in residents aged fifteen to twenty-nine, and in 2015 alone, 2,800 new companies were founded, the highest figure nationwide.24 Fukuoka’s mayor wants the city to become a Singapore-style “living lab” for IoT technologies. Though Japan still lags behind Singapore and South Korea as a start-up hub,25 university labs and venture capital funds have sprung up around Keio in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto, with a particular focus on biotech and pharmaceuticals.26 PeptiDream, one of Japan’s leading biotech firms, sprang from a Tokyo University lab.
Despite Japan’s technological inventiveness and cultural popularity in Asia, Japan’s strategic posture in Asia has yet to fully recover from its history of imperial aggression there. To that end, it is trying to evolve beyond the antiquated 1990s logic that the US-Japan alliance could be a meaningful anchor of East Asian stability. Both countries have tried to revive the decade-old “Quad” of more frequent consultations and military cooperation with India27 and Australia—a foursome that some liken to an “Asian NATO.” At the same time, Japan is tilting toward revising its postwar constitution to allow it to strengthen its self-defense forces and even potentially go nuclear.28 It is also fortifying its claims on certain Senkaku/Diaoyu islands by installing land-to-sea missile systems, raising the cost of any Chinese attempt to seize them. These moves go hand in hand with reducing its dependence on the semipermanent presence of US troops on its soil, for example by funding a new $160 million base on the US territory of Guam with the aim of relocating US marines there.
Yet neither Japan’s army nor even its potent navy is sufficiently trained, coordinated, or willing to take on China without the United States’ backing. Furthermore, Japan would face an economic tailspin given the likely Chinese embargo on Japanese goods and the ensuing capital flight, wiping out the rewards it has reaped from landmark investments such as Itochu Corporation’s stake in CITIC Group and SoftBank’s in Alibaba. No country has better commercial networks across China’s provinces than Japan—all of which would be at risk in the event of a serious conflict. The only upside to a Sino-Japanese war, then, would be if there were indeed a final settlement—in either side’s favor—over the status of islands which have been used to inflame nationalism for several generations. Both sides will then have to close a chapter of history and move on. Somewhere between Japan as the “rising sun” and its slide into geriatric irrelevance is a more modest middle path as a pillar of the Asian system.
Geopolitical Jujitsu: The Future of the Asian Security System
Today all of Asia’s empires and powers are seeking national revival; none will bow to the others. The future Asian geopolitical order will thus be neither American nor Chinese led. Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, Indonesia, Australia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will never collectively come together under a hegemonic umbrella or unite into a single pole of power—neither bandwagoning with China or balancing against it. Instead, they are on high alert against excessive US and Chinese influence in their affairs.
Whether under the slogan of “peaceful rise” offered in the 2000s by President Hu Jintao or the more current “harmonious world” used by Xi Jinping, China is seeking to combine Ming Dynasty expansionism with Tang Dynasty cosmopolitanism. It seeks a world order in which either its principles sit at the core, as argued in the work of the philosopher Zhao Tingyang,29 or Western hierarchy is replaced by parity among civilizations, as argued by the political scientist Zhang Weiwei.30 Neither scenario allows for a long-term US military presence in East Asia, hence China’s enormous investments in antiship ballistic missiles, stealth submarines, robotic warships, electromagnetic railguns, swarming drones, and militarized reclaimed islands and shoals in the South China Sea—all intended to push US forces east of the international date line. At the same time, China knows it is not omnipotent. Though it has enormous leverage over most of its neighbors, even military triumph in oustanding disputes may generate such adverse political and economic backlash that it is not worth the price. China cannot assure itself that seizing the multitude of disputed islands and mountains on its periphery would not lead to a blockage of its BRI projects or large-scale diversion of foreign financial and industrial activity. China has learned from Japan’s hyperaggression and the United States’ overstretch to show restraint and caution, not pursue invasion and occupation.
Meanwhile, all Asians are pursuing greater strategic autonomy, making the region the world’s largest arms bazaar. By 2020, total Asian military spending is set to reach $600 billion, double that of Europe and almost the same as that of the United States. Asians would rather spend these billions on their own militaries than underwrite the United States’ global posture. From Saudi Arabia to Japan, Asians are building their own defense capacity so they can depend less on the United States to deter nearby enemies. Deterrence among Asians in
turn reduces the need for extended deterrence on the part of the United States. Thus when Asians tell visiting US diplomats what they want to hear—that their role is essential to deter Iran, China, or some other threat—it does not mean they want US forces stationed on their soil forever. Rather, they want advanced weaponry for themselves and the ability to determine how and when, or whether, to use them—including to deter China. Furthermore, the more China itself exports advanced weaponry, from missiles to drones, the less likely it becomes that it could ever successfully force itself upon its neighbors. Blowback is as universal as empire. China is not interested in sharing Asia with the United States but will learn to comanage it with its fellow Asians.
Asia is thus not a set of dominoes but rather a dynamic strategic theater. During the Cold War, Americans failed to grasp that leaders from Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh to Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam were first and foremost nationalists pursuing their own cost-benefit calculations; their primary identity was not Western or Communist-leaning. China is learning the same today as regional powers such as India, Japan, and Vietnam stand up to China, showing that they are as proud of their history and as protective of their sovereignty as China is. These same Asian states are forging new geometries of cooperation. Some of these informal arrangements include the budding military cooperation among Japan, Vietnam, and India; between Australia and Japan; between India and Indonesia; among China, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka; and among China, Thailand, and Cambodia. Even those states that cooperate militarily with China want to be part of coalitions that are sufficiently robust not to fold under the weight of escalation with China. China and Russia have grown closer, but Russia tops the list of arms exporters to Vietnam, whose principal security threat is China. Those who are looking for either rigid lines of alliance or moral clarity among Asia’s shifting partnerships will find themselves in an Escher painting. Consistent with Asian history, then, there is much more overlap across civilizational interests than there are discrete spheres of influence. This means less hot war and more jujitsu-like maneuvering in which competitors focus on defense and leverage, allowing an opponent to overextend so it can be knocked off balance.
Asians still have a long way to go in demonstrating regional solidarity. In addition to their military sparring, they willingly shelter and abet their neighbors’ most nefarious militant groups: Hamas cells raise funds in Turkey, Indian Naxalite rebels hide in Nepal, Burmese Karen rebels hold a rear base in Thailand, and Pakistan’s intelligence services provide refuge to the Afghan Taliban. At the United Nations, Arabs have sought condemnation of Israel and India of Pakistan. Meanwhile, China has denied India’s bid to join the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) while supporting Pakistan’s nuclear program and shielding its terrorists from international sanction.
Still, Asians have thus far avoided the most catastrophic scenarios of international conflict. Though they still don’t agree on their maps, they have been able by and large to separate their political and economic objectives. East Asians in particular have realized that their intense economic integration and rising prosperity require geopolitical stability. They do not want to derail the most remarkable mass economic uplifting in human history nor destroy the world-class infrastructure they are presently spending trillions of dollars building. In every instance of bilateral tension and escalation between China and its neighbors, this logic has prevailed. Whatever their differences, therefore, all Asians agree that these tentative moves toward a pan-Asian system are worth pursuing. The lasting solution to security dilemmas is not dependence on foreigners but regional cooperation. It takes decades to build a regional strategic culture and community—but it works.
As their internal diplomacy intensifies, Asian countries’ outstanding disputes are much more likely to be solved as neighbors within the Asian system. By tying themselves together through infrastructure, trade, and finance, they are relearning how to share territory and resources as they did in previous eras of porous borders and soft sovereignty. The countries around the Caspian Sea—Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan—are close to resolving all outstanding disputes related to the demarcation of the world’s largest inland body of water, clearing the way for their shipping and undersea pipeline projects to move forward. Such functional integration makes possible further layers of mutually beneficial Asianization.
How will the United States fare in the next rounds of geopolitical jujitsu? Its historical posture across the region is fading, not least because US leaders and society want to avoid overstretch and entanglements. In West Asia, the failures of policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have demonstrated the limits to US influence, costing the country substantial credibility. In East Asia, the “pivot to Asia” failed to materialize as a successor to the Cold War hub-and-spoke alliance system, especially as the United States abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Asians still hold the United States to be important but also feel that it is unpredictable and even incompetent.
The United States’ justifications for remaining tethered to East Asia are weakening due to the incremental reconciliations under way. Since the 1990s, China has diplomatically cornered Taiwan, ensuring that almost no country in the world recognizes its independence as it becomes ever more dependent on the Chinese economy. Though the Trump administration has promoted more official visits and arms transfers with Taiwan, even the island’s current nationalist government has narrowed its political ambitions, focusing instead on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and tourists from beyond China, launching a new industrial policy around alternative energy, and even fashioning itself as a Silicon Valley–like tech hub. As with Japan, the outcome of a conflict with China, even in a scenario of a US-backed stalemate, would be a severe loss of confidence in Taiwan’s security. By the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover in 2017, a Taiwanese official commented to me that China had really become “one country, three systems” given how strategically straitjacketed both Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
Northeast Asia is another theater of reconciliation with major implications for the geopolitical landscape and the United States’ role in it. The US-sponsored dialogue to bring Pacific War antagonists Japan and South Korea closer has been one of the genuine successes of US Asian diplomacy. The two countries’ shared fear of China also dwarfs their historical animosity toward each other, nudging them toward diplomatic closure over Japan’s twentieth-century imperial brutality. Their bilateral agenda has also broadened: Japan would like Korea to join the TPP trade agreement, while Korea wants Japan to join the AIIB infrastructure fund. Both moves would give new momentum to their export credit agencies (ECAs), which push their engineering, computing, telecom, and other leading corporations aggressively across the region. The next generation is also moving all three societies in the right direction. Several thousand Japanese students are studying in Korea; they say K-pop has helped them get the hang of the Korean language. They are joined by growing numbers of Chinese students who have also proved adept at learning Korean. When the three nationalities encounter one another, they speak a mishmash of Korean and English. This younger generation across China, Japan, and South Korea harbors only foggy national memories of foreign exploitation and shame, and their ongoing socialization counters the negative perception that the older generations have about one another. They also have no living memory of a United States that has greater claims to exceptionalism than they do. They would much rather work out their differences with their regional peers than depend on the United States to arbitrate them.
North Korea will be the true test of whether Northeast Asia can move from strategic suspicion to tactical adjustments. North Korea has been thought of as an isolated failed state, but the fact that its covert nuclear program has had links as far as Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan nuclear-smuggling network, its chemical weapons program to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, its ballistic missile program to Iran, and its cybersurveillance tools to Russia, are all evidence of the s
eedier side of the Asian system. Asian states can conspire to form an “axis of resistance” to perceived US hegemony.
South Koreans are largely in favor of reunification with the North, not least because of their proximity to the North and their sympathy for its citizens’ plight. They supported both countries marching under a flag of unity (and fielding a joint ice hockey team) in the 2018 Winter Olympics and President Moon Jae-in’s overtures to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, including their agreement to formally end the Korean War. Donald Trump’s subsequent meeting with Kim Jong-un resulted in the United States’ curtailing of military exercises with South Korea in exchange for assurances of North Korean denuclearization. (This has been called the “freeze-for-freeze” or “dual suspension” approach.) At the same time, to make progress with both China and North Korea, South Korean president Moon has been reluctant to move forward with deployment of the United States’ Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, echoing a Japanese mantra from the 1980s that Korea can “learn to say no” to the United States.31 The more North and South Korea, as well as China and Japan, cooperate to manage the emergence of a reunified Korean Peninsula, the less the United States’ presence there becomes necessary. North Korean elites will accept reunification only if their security, positions, wealth, and other privileges are guaranteed. Unlike the lustration that purged many knowledgeable apparatchiks in Eastern Europe around the time of the Soviet collapse or the Iraqi de-Baathification after the 2003 US invasion, granting some degree of amnesty to North Koreans who served the regime under fear of execution would ensure that those with administrative backgrounds might continue to be useful.