Zbigniew brzezinski

JAPAN: NOT REGIONAL BUT INTERNATIONAL 
How the American-Japanese relationship evolves is thus a critical dimension in China's geopolitical future. 
Since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, America's policy in the Far East has been based on Japan. At 
first only the site for the occupying American military, Japan has since become the basis for America's 
political-military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and America's centrally important global ally, yet also a 
security protectorate. The emergence of China, however, does pose the question whether—and to what end—

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the close American-Japanese relationship can endure in the altering regional context. Japan's role in an anti-
China alliance would be clear; but what should Japan's role be if China's rise is to be accommodated in some 
fashion even as it reduces America's primacy in the region? 
Like China, Japan is a nation-state with a deeply ingrained sense of its unique character and special status. Its 
insular history, even its imperial mythology, has predisposed the highly industrious and disciplined Japanese 
people to see themselves as endowed with a distinctive and superior way of life, which Japan first defended by 
splendid isolation and then, when the world imposed itself in the nineteenth century, by emulating the European 
empires in seeking to create one of its own on the Asian mainland. The disaster of World War II then focused 
the Japanese people on the one-dimensional goal of economic recovery, but it also left them uncertain regarding 
their country's wider mission. 
Current American fears of a dominant China are reminiscent of the relatively recent American paranoia 
regarding Japan. Japanopho-bia has now yielded to Sinophobia. A mere decade ago, predictions of Japan's 
inevitable and imminent appearance as the world's "superstate"—poised not only to dethrone America (even to 
buy it out!) but to impose some sort of a "Pax Nipponica"—were a veritable cottage industry among American 
commentators and politicians. But not only among the Americans. The Japanese themselves soon became eager 
imitators, with a series of best-sellers in Japan propounding the thesis that Japan was destined to prevail in its 
high-tech rivalry with the United States and that Japan would soon become the center of a global "information 
empire," while America was allegedly sliding into a decline because of historical fatigue and social self-
indulgence. 
These facile analyses obscured the degree to which Japan was, and remains, a vulnerable country. It is 
vulnerable to the slightest disruptions in the orderly global flow of resources and trade, not to mention global 
stability more generally, and it is beset by surfacing domestic weaknesses—demographic, social, and political. 
Japan is simultaneously rich, dynamic, and economically powerful, but it is also regionally isolated and 
politically limited by its security dependence on a powerful ally that happens to be the principal keeper of 
global stability (on which Japan so depends) as well as Japan's main economic rival. 
It is unlikely that Japan's current position—on the one hand, as a globally respected economic powerhouse 
and, on the other, as a geopolitical extension of American power—will remain acceptable to the new 
generations of Japanese, no longer traumatized and shamed by the experience of World War II. For reasons of 
both history and self-esteem, Japan is a country not entirely satisfied with the global status quo, though in a 
more subdued fashion than China. It feels, with some justification, that it is entitled to formal recognition as a 
world power but is also aware that the regionally useful (and, to its Asian neighbors, reassuring) security 
dependence on America inhibits that recognition. 
Moreover, China's growing power on the mainland of Asia, along with the prospect that its influence may 
soon radiate into the maritime regions of economic iniporl.nicc lo Japan, intcnsilics the Japanese sense of 
ambiguity regarding the country's geopolitical future. On the one hand, there is in Japan a strong cultural and 
emotional identification with China as well as a latent sense of a common Asian identity. Some Japanese may 
also feel that the emergence of a stronger China has the expedient effect of enhancing Japan's importance to the 
United States as America's regional para-mountcy is reduced. On the other hand, for many Japanese, China is 
the traditional rival, a former enemy, and a potential threat to the stability of the region. That makes the security 
tie with America more important than ever, even if it increases the resentment of some of the more nationalistic 
Japanese concerning the irksome restraints on Japan's political and military independence. 
There is a superficial similarity between Japan's situation in Eurasia's Far East and Germany's in Eurasia's Far 
West. Both are the principal regional allies of the United States. Indeed, American power in Europe and Asia is 
derived directly from the close alliances with these two countries. Both have respectable military 
establishments, but neither is independent in that regard: Germany is constrained by its military integration into 
NATO, while Japan is restricted by its own (though American-designed) constitutional limitations and the U.S.-
Japan Security Treaty. Both are trade and financial powerhouses, regionally dominant and also preeminent on 
the global scale. Both can be classified as quasi-global powers, and both chafe at the continuing denial to them 
of formal recognition through permanent seats on the UN Security Council. 

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But the differences in their respective geopolitical conditions are pregnant with potentially significant 
consequences. Germany's actual relationship with NATO places the country on a par with its principal 
European allies, and under the North Atlantic Treaty, Germany has formal reciprocal defense obligations with 
the United States. The U.S.-Japan Security Treaty stipulates American obligations to defend Japan, but it does 
not provide (even if only formally) for the use of the Japanese military in the defense of America. The treaty in 
effect codifies a protective relationship. 
Moreover, Germany, by its proactive membership in the European Union and NATO, is no longer seen as a 
threat by those neighbors who in the past were victims of its aggression but is viewed instead as a desirable 
economic and political partner. Some even welcome the potential emergence of a German-led Mitteleuropa, 
witli Germany seen as a benign regional power. That is far from the case with Japan's Asian neighbors, who 
harbor lingering animosity toward Japan over World War II. A contributing factor to neighborly resentment is 
the appreciation of the yen, which has not only prompted bitter complaints but has impeded reconciliation with 
Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even China, 30 percent of whose large long-term debts to Japan are in 
yen. 
Japan also has no equivalent in Asia to Germany's France: that is, a genuine and more or less equal regional 
partner. There is admittedly a strong cultural attraction to China, mingled perhaps with a sense of guilt, but that 
attraction is politically ambiguous in that neither side trusts the other and neither is prepared to accept the 
other's regional leadership. Japan also has no equivalent to Germany's Poland: that is, a much weaker but 
geopolitically important neighbor with whom reconciliation and even cooperation is becoming a reality. 
Perhaps Korea, especially so after eventual reunification, could become that equivalent, but Japanese-Korean 
relations are only formally good, with the Korean memories of past domination and the Japanese sense of 
cultural superiority impeding any genuine social reconciliation.7 Finally, Japan's relations with Russia have 
been much cooler than Germany's. Russia still retains the southern Kuril Islands by force, which it seized just 
before the end of World War II, thereby freezing the Russo-Japanese relationship. In brief, Japan is politically 
isolated in its region, whereas Germany is not.