Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Japan Rearm Turns US/China War

Japanese rearming would cause Asian instability that would lead to the destruction of American hegemony and cause China – US war
Johnson 05 (chalmers, Pres of Jap Policy Institute, Tom Dispatch , http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2259/chalmers_johnson_coming_to_terms_with_china)ET

I recall forty years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O. Reischauer once commented, "The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer served as American ambassador to Tokyo in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, the United States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even accelerate Japanese rearmament. Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future Sino-American conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand what they are unleashing -- a possible confrontation between the world's fastest growing industrial economy, China, and the world's second most productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation which the United States would have both caused and in which it might well be consumed. Let me make clear that in East Asia we are not talking about a little regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Cheney advocate. After all, the most salient characteristic of international relations during the last century was the inability of the rich, established powers -- Great Britain and the United States -- to adjust peacefully to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan, and Russia. The result was two exceedingly bloody world wars, a forty-five-year-long Cold War between Russia and the "West," and innumerable wars of national liberation (such as the quarter-century long one in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of European, American, and Japanese imperialism and colonialism.

US – China war would escalate into nuclear extinction
Straits Times 2k ( Strait Times, main asian news source, 5.25.2k) ET

THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilisation.

Japan Rearm Turns China War

A nuclear Japan will push China to a buildup its arsenals
Hughes 7 (Llewelyn, poli sci PHD @ MIT, International Security vol 31 no 4, 7) ET

This article reassesses the state of the evidence on the nuclearization of Japan. There are at least three reasons for doing so. First, changes in the regional and international security environment add credence to arguments that Japanese nuclearization will occur sooner rather than later. Most notably, the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state increases the threat to Japan, while the salience of the two central components of its strategy to defend against nuclear threats—multilateral regimes and the United States' extension of its nuclear deterrent to Japan—have been undermined.3 [End Page 67] Second, a decision by Japan to pursue an independent nuclear deterrent would undermine the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, which is already viewed by some as "teetering on the brink of irrelevancy."4 Such a decision would also worsen regional security relations, possibly leading China to bolster its nuclear weapons force and South Korea to reconsider its nuclear weapons policy.

Japanese rearmament would provoke China
China Post 5 (China Post, 9.19.5, Newspaper that’s popular in China) ET

One other thing Koizumi is planning to do is to revise the MacArthur Constitution of 1946. General Douglas A. MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Japan, gave the country the pacifist constitution, which in its Article 9 abolishes war as an instrument of national policy. He has already made an exception to that article to send Japanese troops to Iraq for peacekeeping, and its removal to make Japan a "normal country" is expected to antagonize the People's Republic of China and to a lesser extent South Korea. They are afraid of a resurgence of ultranationalistic militarism, which goaded Japan to expand its empire after the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931.

Japanese rearmament could lead to war with China

Plate 5 (Tom, Prof @ UCLA, “Koizumi's success hinges on transparency” ,12.5.5) ET

Japan should become a model nation in openness. Otherwise, people will suspect the worst. As Taniguchi writes, "Japan's qualitative defense buildup is not a consequence of the nation's becoming a more rightwing or freelance power." It is the result of the natural political and global evolution of one of the world's largest economies. As the diplomat puts it, "The more information the nation discloses, the less room will there be for its neighbors to misunderstand its intentions." He goes further: "The Japanese government must invite Chinese defense planners to Tokyo regularly so they can scrutinize Japan's defense buildups and developments. This attempted transparency should be unwavering and unilateral, with or without reciprocal action from the Chinese side, in order for Japan to achieve the moral high ground." Japan is not looking to develop a new way of invading its neighbors. What Japan is looking to do is to carve out a role on the world stage that's commensurate with its achievements. Bumping and pushing against China is inevitable, but all-out war is not. Tokyo believes that its military buildup will deter this from happening. Let's hope so. But bad public diplomacy by Japan could raise tensions throughout the region. No one could say for sure what this might lead to.