Not in the Same League

I don’t see the developments that George Will calls out in his Washington Post column in quite the favorable light that he does but I did find them interesting:

The Queen Elizabeth, one of only 18 large carriers worldwide, is the largest ship ever built for the Royal Navy. Before it left Britain in May, the government said the strike group would be “confident but not confrontational” in the South China Sea, where China illegally claims near-total sovereignty. Unfortunately, “nonconfrontational” means that the group will not sail through the Taiwan Strait. Beijing will surely interpret this avoidance as a flinch. Still, with the British Army now smaller than at any time in more than three centuries, the Royal Navy, Europe’s most formidable naval power, augments the complications confronting Chinese as well as Russian war planners.

The Financial Times recently reported U.S.-Japan joint military exercises — presented as disaster relief training — in the South China and East China seas, and “top-secret tabletop war games” in case of “a conflict with China over Taiwan.” Presumably someone thought the no-longer-quite-so-secret games should be publicized, perhaps for the edification of China. The westernmost island in the Japanese archipelago is 68 miles from Taiwan. The Senkaku islands in the East China sea are administered by Japan but claimed by China.

Heino Klinck, a Pentagon official who oversaw military relations with Japan and Taiwan late in the Trump administration, tells the Financial Times: “The Japanese government has increasingly recognized, and even acknowledges publicly, that the defense of Taiwan equates to the defense of Japan.” Evidence of this includes the Hudson Institute’s June 28 virtual event on “The Transformation of Japan’s Security Strategy,” at which Japan’s State Minister for Defense Yasuhide Nakayama described the Taiwan Strait as a “red line of the 21st century.”

He said, “We have to protect … Taiwan as a democratic country.” He called Taiwan more than a “friend,” a “brother,” and said, “We are family.” Emphasizing the increasing collaboration of China and Russia in military exercises near Japan, he stressed the importance of European militaries “exercising in Asia.”

Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso was recently quoted (in remarks at a political fundraiser) saying that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would threaten Japan’s “survival,” so “Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.” This, even though Japan officially adheres to the “one-China policy” — the increasingly threadbare fiction that Taiwan and People’s Republic of China are somehow part of a single polity.

The Wall Street Journal noted, “In the balance of power between the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and China, the world’s third-largest economy, Japan, is critical.” And retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO, says that “over time” the U.S. policy is to confront China with a “global maritime coalition” that includes, in addition to Japan, “Australia, New Zealand, India, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.”

We’ll see if such a coalition actually emerges. I don’t believe it’s reasonable to put Russia and China in the same category. Yes, both China and Russia are pursuing their own national interests. Yes, they both have national interests. But China is behaving increasingly aggressively while Russia has responded to what they deem to be Western aggression.

The key point to understand is that neither the United Kingdom nor Japan do much of anything at the behest of the U. S. If they’re acting, it’s because they’re becoming increasingly nervous. While I think it’s an interesting development, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing. Just as I think that the U. S. has interpreted its national interest far too broadly I don’t think that the Chinese authorities should be interpreting China’s interests as broadly as they rather clearly are.