Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

Their relatives were on opposite sides of the Sino-Japanese...

The fact that the United States has a security treaty with Japan means that China will never accept America’s claim to be an honest broker.

For the United States, the emergence of Shinzo Abe was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Abe promised to revive the Japanese economy and to revise its pacifist constitution, to allow Japanese forces to fight alongside the United States—both of which are long-standing goals of American foreign policy. But the flip side of Abe’s dynamic nationalism is an ambivalent attitude to Japan’s imperial history that threatens to alienate not just China but also key U.S. allies such as South Korea and even Singapore. That, in turn, complicates America’s efforts to build a united front that could face down a more assertive China.

By the time Abe took office, there was little doubt that Japan was in need of radical reform.

unless economic growth can be revived, Japan risks being caught in a downward spiral of debt and depopulation.

Any sharp rise in interest rates threatens fiscal Armageddon, since the cost of paying interest on Japan’s national debt would soar—crowding out all other forms of spending.1

“Abenomics.”

The idea is that Japan must do everything to break the cycle of deflation (falling prices), which discourages spending and investment—since in a deflationary environment, consumers and businesses hold on to their money in the expectation that prices will keep falling.

The goal of Abenomics is deliberately to encourage inflation of at least 2 percent, in the hope that Japanese workers will get a pay rise, consumers will spend, and ...

At the same time, Abenomics promises to push through structural reforms, to make it easier for Japanese firms to hire and fire and to encourage Japanese women into the workforce. By allowing Japan’s central bank to print money in previously undreamed-of quantities...

For Abe, radical economic policies are ultimately needed to make Japan robust enough to stand up to China.

Abe’s determination to strengthen Japan for the coming struggle with China has also entailed playing with some of the most incendiary material in Asian politics—Japan’s history as an imperial power that colonized Korea, invaded China, and rampaged across Southeast Asia.

Yasukuni shrine

Controversially, the veterans commemorated at Yasukuni include some who were convicted at the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946.

Many in Tokyo argue that it is now China, not modern Japan, that is in danger of reenacting the horrors of the 1930s, by attempting to impose its will on the rest of Asia.

Japan is haunted by the fear that an increasingly powerful China is out to avenge the affronts of the 1930s and that, given free rein, it might seek to exact a terrible revenge on Japan. A successful assertion of Chinese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands would be the symbolic assertion of the new hierarchy in Asia, with Japan reduced to the status of a tributary power.

Okinawa,

“731 moment”

The 731 incident was just the most startling of a series of diplomatic gaffes with a nationalist theme during the Abe administration.

“Both Tokyo and Beijing are determined to play to nationalist sentiments.”

Article 9 of Japan’s 1947 constitution,

country had renounced forever the right to wage war.

U.S. policy makers sometimes seem to switch between a concern that an aggressive Japan might drag them into a confrontation with China and a worry that, at some point in the future, a weak Japan might lose its will to resist Chinese hegemony over the western Pacific.

South Korean resentment of Japan threatened to grow with the passage of time.

All of the major Pacific powers are threatened in different ways by North Korea.

All of these countries have reason to fear the disorderly breakup of a nuclear North Korea.

For both Japan and the United States, the overriding strategic concern in the Asia-Pacific is now clearly the assertive behavior of a rising China.

Singapore,

the most important trade route in the world.

Every year, one-third of the world’s traded goods pass through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore—the main sea route connecting East Asia to Europe and the Middle East.

giant casino,

Sheldon Adelson,

fund hawkish Republicans

right-wing newspapers supporting Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

Singapore is now a global crossroads.

Its rise to that status is recent and owes a lot to its position astride the main trade route between Asia and Europe.

Portugal was attempting to revive its economic fortunes by peddling residence visas to foreigners who were willing to spend $500,000 on a property.

The reversal of fortunes between Singapore and Portugal is emblematic of the migration of wealth and power from West to East.

The goods that flow through the Strait of Malacca have become a foundation of Singapore’s prosperity and a symbol of a peaceful era of booming global trade.

Three times as much oil passes through the Malacca Strait every year—en route to East Asia—as goes through the Suez Canal.

China’s great vulnerability is its dependence on seaborne imports—oil, above all, but also other crucial commodities, such as grain and iron ore.

The role that the Strait of Malacca plays in the strategic thinking of both the Americans and the Chinese reflects the wider position of Southeast Asia in the struggle for dominance of the Asia-Pacific.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, Southeast Asia has gone through a golden era. Foreign trade and investment have boomed, and countries as different as the city-state of Singapore and the vast archipelago of Indonesia have enjoyed many years of rapid economic growth. Even nations that were once isolated by communism or military dictatorship—such as Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma)—are now emerging as serious trading nations and as important destinations for foreign investors and tourists.

Japan’s capture of Singapore on February 15, 1942, “shattered the myth of white invulnerability” and dealt a catastrophic blow to Britain’s international image—setting the stage for the end of empire after the war.

Yet from the 1980s on, Southeast Asia began to put its blood-soaked past behind it.

“It was not really until the 1980s with the economic renaissance of Japan, the rise of Singapore and Malaysia and the transformation of Asian Communist regimes toward free-market capitalism that Asia began to claim its place in the sun as the dominant continent of the twenty-first century.”

For a brief period in the 1980s and 1990s, the nations of Southeast Asia were at the hub of the development of Asia—and were even showing the way forward for China and India.

But after two further decades of rapid growth, the sheer size of the Chinese and Indian economies now means that Southeast Asia is once again overshadowed by giants.

The continued “peaceful rise” of the Chinese economy holds out the prospect that the nations of Southeast Asia can continue to surf the wave of rising Asian prosperity. But the growth of Chinese nationalism also raises more alarming prospects—above all, the threat that war could return. The region’s most thoughtful politicians are acutely aware of this potential vulnerability.

To safeguard its future, Singapore has cultivated warm relations with the regional giants. Indeed, it is perhaps the only country in the world that could claim to have a special relationship with both China and the United States.