My colleague Gary Schmitt asks whether the Obama administration is overreacting to Japan’s new leadership, under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama of the Democratic Party of Japan. At issue is the flap over Hatoyama’s desire to renegotiate agreements on moving U.S. Marine bases inside Okinawa. Gary asks, not unreasonably, why Gates did not deliver his message against renegotiation privately, and not in the blunt public manner he chose in Tokyo.
As I wrote earlier today, it’s been clear that the two sides have been talking past each other for months now. Americans assumed Japanese suggestions about changing the Okinawa agreement were for domestic political consumption, while the Japanese heard only reassuring words from Washington about consultations and ignored the underlying firm line.
The reality is, though, that troubling trends have been brewing for a while. American frustration with prior Japanese footdragging on the Okinawa issue has led to repeated discussions over how to keep things on track. On the Japanese side, foreign ministry bureaucrats, in particular, felt burnt by the Bush administration in the six-party talks over both the lack of progress on the abductee issue as well as the delisting of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism. In addition, U.S. refusal to consider changing the Obey amendment, to allow for the sharing of information on the F-22 Raptor and possibly on lifting the ban against foreign military sales of the airplane, has left the Japanese, in their view, with very few options for replacing their 40-year-old F-4 fighters at a time when the North Korea threat is growing and China is rapidly modernizing its air force. On top of that, diplomatic tangling over the status of children born to Japanese mothers and American fathers erupted with the arrest last month of Christopher Savoie for attempting to snatch his children back from their mother in Japan.
Whatever Hatoyama’s position on these issues, the general atmosphere in U.S.-Japan relations has been getting slowly chillier since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi left office in 2006. Strong working relationships among key diplomats kept things from getting out of control, but two new, strong-willed administrations were apparently taken aback by the rhetoric of each other despite clear signals. As Gary points out, the common issues facing Japan and the United States in Asia should work to keep the alliance central to the security strategy of each partner, but atmospherics and politics don’t always respond to those realities. At a minimum, this episode will leave greater mistrust and bruised feelings; but if things are not solved, somehow, by the time President Obama goes to Japan on November 12, then the relationship may move to a more troubling level. Without a crystal-clear understanding (and agreement) over the next steps in the Okinawa issue on the part of both sides, the president’s trip may cause more problems than it solves. A head of state summit is no place for a mano-a-mano face-off.