於World socialist website裡載有兩篇分析中日美關係的文章: 當美國民眾傾向把美軍徹離伊拉克, 美國要重新部署新的戰略位置. 而在亞洲日本--台灣, 頓成為其籌碼. 其實中國大陸大概也心知肚明, 她首要保住的不是釣魚台, 不是油田, 而是台灣.
節錄:
Washington fuels Japan militarism
Some of the most strident support for amending Article 9 and rearming Japan is to be found in Washington, rather than Tokyo. In an interview last August, US Secretary of State Colin Powell warned that Tokyo must consider changing the clause if it wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. “If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light,” he stated. His comments reflect the Bush administration’s alignment not simply with Japan, but with the most right wing, militarist sections of its political establishment.
During her trip to Asia last month, Powell’s successor Condoleezza Rice enthused: “Japan has earned its honorable place among the nations of the world by its own effort and by its own character. That is why the United States unambiguously supports a permanent seat for Japan on the United Nations Security Council.” Speaking at Sophia University in Tokyo, Rice lauded Japan as a model for “political and economic progress in all of East Asia” and a partner in the “global war on terrorism”. She declared that US alliances with Japan and other countries were “not against China” but then added, “we want to push, prod and persuade China on a positive course”. In South Korea, she brushed off comments from reporters questioning US support for Japanese rearmament and a UN Security seat by reiterating her praise for the US-Japan alliance.
In his recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) article, Dan Blumenthal was not so reticent about the target of Washington’s strategy. After declaring that US policy makers should welcome and support Japan’s emergence as a strong American ally, he stated: “While the upgrading of the alliance serves a number of Tokyo’s strategic purposes, there is no mistaking the fact that Japan has decided to join the United States in its grand strategy of checking China’s great-power ambitions. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Tokyo has taken advantage of the US-led war on terrorism, Washington’s encouragement of Japanese efforts to bolster its defence capabilities, and the North Korean nuclear standoff to assert a defence posture commensurate to its stature in the international community.”
Blumenthal’s praise for Koizumi’s adroitness points to another feature of the US alignment with Tokyo: an increasingly open defence of the government’s efforts to stir up Japanese nationalism. Just as Bush is relying on extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists in the US, so Koizumi is basing himself on militarist layers who regard Japan’s colonial adventures in Asia as “a war of liberation” from Western imperialism and, in the manner of the pro-Nazi holocaust deniers, flatly declare that atrocities like the Rape of Nanking are a Western fabrication. It is not surprising therefore that supporters of the Bush administration have no difficulty in joining the apologists for Japanese militarism—as long as it advances US interests.
Blumenthal pays tribute to Koizumi’s cleverness in playing what he terms “the history card”—that is, visiting the notorious Yasakuni Shrine and defending the publication of history texts that whitewash Japan’s war record. “In fashioning his China strategy, Koizumi had to both build public support and overcome Chinese pressure. Koizumi has accomplished these dual goals by skillfully turning the Achilles heel of Japan’s China policy—the ‘history card’—into a political advantage.”
According to Blumenthal, Koizumi’s great skill, along with sharply polarising public opinion in Japan, has been to inflame regional tensions by promoting the symbols of wartime Japanese imperialism as a cover for his more fundamental objective of Japanese rearmament. “Because the Chinese leadership continues to emphasise this symbolic issue, Koizumi’s substantive reforms of Japan’s defence posture have received far less criticism than they otherwise would. Indeed, China has overplayed its hand by allowing Japan-bashing to boil over within the Chinese populace.”
In a comment in the Wall Street Journal on April 13, James Lilley, one of Blumenthal’s colleagues at the American Heritage Institute, makes a similar point about the latest anti-Japanese protests in China. Lilley notes that regional reactions to Japan’s territorial claims and controversial textbooks “reflect deep historic animosities and distrust” but then openly defends Koizumi’s actions, stating: “Japan has been bludgeoned unmercifully by China and Korea for its brutality during its invasions and occupations of the 20th century. Some of this represents genuine emotion, but it also reflects an attempt to put Japan on the defensive while at the same time gobbling up its goods and superior technology.”
China and South Korea clearly exploit nationalist sentiment for their own political purposes. The Beijing bureaucracy, which has presided over two decades of free market restructuring and is integrating itself into the emerging capitalist class, has all but given up its past socialist pretences. The Chinese leaders, like their counterparts in Japan, are deliberating whipping up nationalism to divert widespread and deepening hostility over poverty and unemployment as well as to push for a greater role for China in the region and internationally.
At the same time, however, there is an understandable fear among broad layers of the population in Asia, that the justifications being advanced for the past crimes of Japanese imperialism are aimed at preparing for new ones. As in the 1930s, Japan is heavily dependent on the import of raw materials, particularly oil, to feed its huge manufacturing base. After a decade and a half of economic slump and crisis, sections of Tokyo’s ruling elite support a more aggressive and expansionist strategy to secure access to cheap commodities, labour and markets. It is no accident that its territorial conflicts with China, Russia and South Korea all involve areas in the surrounding seas that are potential sources of oil and gas. To back its ambitions, Japan needs to be able to exert its military muscle.
Not all sections of the US ruling elite welcome the reemergence of Japanese militarism. Some can still recall a time when US imperialism was compelled to fight a devastating war in the Pacific to defend its economic and strategic interests in Asia. They regard the present foreign policy of the Bush administration as shortsighted and reckless. At present, Tokyo may be prepared to play second fiddle to Washington as the means for rearming and asserting its status as “a normal nation”. But alignments can change. Japanese interests not only conflict with those of China, but, more fundamentally, with Washington’s long-term plans to establish US control over the resource-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. These were the seeds of the Pacific war that erupted in December 1941. They could also become the trigger for another bloody conflagration.
In a scathing recent attack on current US policy towards Japan entitled “The real ‘China threat’”, academic Chalmers Johnson made the following observations:
“I recall 40 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 US ambassador to Tokyo in the administrations of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. 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-Japanese 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 industrial economy, China, and the world’s second-most-productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation that the United States would have caused and in which it might well be consumed.”
Washington’s reaction to the latest tensions between Japan and China, along with the record of the last five years not only in North East Asia but internationally, makes clear that, whether they understand what they are unleashing or not, the warmongers of the Bush administration are intent on pursuing a military alliance with Japan, regardless of its potentially catastrophic consequences.