Japan’s strategic challenge
I am often surprised to see how much “credit” US and other foreign commentators give to Japan when it comes considering Japan’s future strategic identity, and its policy options as it now must deal, rather uncomfortably, with a U.S. now facing global resistance to the Unipolar View once offered up by the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz axis, and the inexorable revival of China as the next power within Asia.
Since the end of World War II, Japan has with almost blinding alacrity pretty much “jumped” whenever Uncle Sam wagged a finger. In very few cases has Japan really developed it own, distinctively Japanese perspective, on how to manage its foreign policy challenges and its inexorably economic decline, as the 21st century unfolds.
So I was very pleased to review a piece by Hitoshi Tanaka that candidly reviews the “stagnation” in Japanese politics, and its implications for future Japanese foreign policy. Tanaka, once a US Consul-General in San Francisco, was the point man for former Prime Minister Koizumi when Koizumi made his landmark opening to North Korean strongman Kim Jung-il.
You can read the piece here