[A-List] US imperialism & China: Henry C K Liu's analysis

[Michael Keaney]

CHINA AND THE US, Part 4
Proliferation, imperialism - and the 'China threat'
By Henry C K Liu
Asia Times, September 9 2006

To combat the spread of international communism jointly, Japan and
Germany signed an Anti-Comintern Pact on November 25, 1936. Italy joined
the pact in 1937.

The Tripartite Treaty signed by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial
Japan on September 27, 1940, in Berlin is known as the Axis Alliance
based on the concept of a Rome-Berlin Axis put forth by Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini in 1936. The alliance was subsequently joined by
Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria. The Nationalist government in
China under the Kuomintang had been advised by German military experts.
This relationship came to an abrupt end in 1936 after the Axis Alliance
as China and Japan were at war.

In August 1939, Germany broke the terms of the Anti-Comintern Pact when
it signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement
between the Soviet Union and Germany. On September 25, 1940, German
foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sent a telegram to Soviet
foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov stating that Germany, Italy and
Japan were about to sign a military alliance but claiming that this
alliance was directed not at the Soviet Union but toward potential US
hostility.

The telegram read: "Its exclusive purpose is to bring the elements
pressing for America's entry into the war to their senses by
conclusively demonstrating to them if they enter the present struggle
they will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as
adversaries." As Germany saw it, the purpose was deterrence, not
aggression, against the United States.

The Anti-Comintern Pact was officially reactivated in 1941 when Germany
launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 22. On
November 25, the pact was renewed for another five years with Germany,
Japan, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland,
Romania, Slovakia, the puppet state of Manchukuo and the puppet Nanjing
government of Wang Jingwei in Japanese-occupied China, and the
Provincial Government of Free India, a shadow government in
Japanese-occupied India led by Subhas Chandra Bose, a militant Indian
nationalist who opposed Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance to British
imperialism. All over Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, from Indonesia
to Vietnam to the Philippines, all nationalists who resisted Japanese
aggression were "communists".

In September 1940, Japan, as a charter member of the Axis Alliance,
coerced the Vichy government of defeated France into turning northern
Indochina over to Japan. From Japan's perspective, it was a natural
demand from a victorious ally to a defeated adversary. The US, through
its special relationship with British and French imperialism, retaliated
against Japanese expansion into French Southeast Asia by imposing trade
sanctions prohibiting the export of steel, scrap iron, and aviation
gasoline to Japan from the allegedly neutral and free-trading United
States.

In April 1941, Japan signed a neutrality treaty with the USSR as
insurance against possible attack from the north if it were to come into
conflict with British and US interests while expanding toward Southeast
Asia. Similar to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, the USSR entered
a neutrality treaty with Japan to avoid being involved in
intra-capitalist conflicts and to neutralize potential British-Japanese
convergence against the USSR. The Japan-USSR neutrality treaty lasted
until August 8, 1945, when the USSR declared war on Japan two days after
the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Two months after the signing of the Japan-USSR Neutrality Treaty, when
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Japanese leaders
considered breaking the treaty and joining their German ally from the
east. A statement by Ribbentrop on the declaration of war on the Soviet
Union issued in Berlin on June 22, 1941, began with the following
paragraphs:

    When in the summer of 1939 the Reich government, motivated by a
    desire to achieve adjustment of interests between Germany and the
    USSR, approached the Soviet government, they were aware of the fact
    that it was no easy matter to reach an understanding with a state
    that on one hand claimed to belong to a community of individual
    nations with rights and duties resulting therefrom, yet on the other
    hand was ruled by a party that, as a section of the Comintern, was
    striving to bring about world revolution - in other words, the very
    dissolution of these individual nations.

    The German government, putting aside their serious misgivings
    occasioned by this fundamental difference between political aims of
    Germany and Soviet Russia and by the sharp contrast between
    diametrically opposed conceptions of National Socialism and
    Bolshevism, made the attempt.

    They were guided by the idea that the elimination of the possibility
    of war, which would result from an understanding between Germany and
    Russia, and safeguarding of the vital necessities of the two people,
    between whom friendly relations had always existed, would offer the
    best guarantee against further spreading of the communist doctrine
    of international Jewry over Europe.

War against the spread of internationalism
Ribbentrop was invoking the threat of international communism against
the Westphalia order of nation-states as a pretext for war. The same
pretext was invoked by the US to launch to Cold War. Yet the post-Cold
War aim of US foreign policy adopts similar expansionist
internationalism to "enlarge democracy" to justify regime changes around
the world, challenging the Westphalia world order of nation-states. Such
an internationalist approach will again lead to world war.

Making one of the most fateful decisions of World War II if not the 20th
century, Japan chose to stay out of the European war by not attacking
the Soviet Union and instead to intensify its regional push toward the
southeast for much-needed strategic material to overcome US sanctions.
Japan had calculated that Germany would quickly defeat the USSR without
Japanese help, as it did France, since Japan had defeated Czarist Russia
in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. And Japanese occupation of eastern
China faced more threat from the direction of the Pacific. Both Germany
and Japan underestimated the positive effect of the communist leadership
on Russia.

On July 23, 1941, Japan occupied southern Indochina. Two days later, the
US, Britain and the Netherlands, the three financial powers in the West,
froze Japanese assets, making it impossible for Japan to purchase oil,
which would within three months cripple its military as well as its
economy. This act of financial war led Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in
the US Pacific island territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941, to try to
destroy the US Pacific Fleet and create a situation with which, Tokyo
hoped, to force a compromising peace on the United States. Japan
calculated that Germany would be forced by the terms of the Axis
Alliance to declare war on the United States and US preoccupation with
Europe would give Japan a free hand in expanding and consolidating its
hold on Asia.

That was exactly what happened up until the defeat of Germany. Japan's
answer to Berlin's call for Tokyo to contribute to the Axis Alliance by
attacking the USSR was that a Pacific front would achieve the same
result - to weaken Allied war efforts in Europe.

German leader Adolf Hitler admired and respected the British and
considered them to share many of the superior Aryan qualities and values
possessed by Germanic peoples, as evidenced by the Germanic lineage of
the British royalty. In Mein Kampf he argued that to achieve its
foreign-policy objectives, Germany would have to form an alliance with
Aryan Britain. No sacrifice was too great if it was a necessary means of
gaining England's friendship, Hitler wrote.

As soon as he gained power, Hitler repeatedly told visiting British
politicians, diplomats and Nazi sympathizers that he appreciated British
understanding that the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were too harsh
for a permanent peace. He was assured by many Britons in high places
that Britain was unlikely to declare war if Germany were to violate some
of the more unreasonable aspects of the treaty.

British conservatives told Hitler that traditional British antagonism
against Russia had been accentuated by that nation's having come under
communism and the revolution's regicide of the House of Romanov, which
was related by blood to Queen Victoria. Britain and Germany had a common
phobia about a Europe dominated by the USSR in terms of both geopolitics
and ideology.
Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US president Franklin D
Roosevelt had declared his country neutral in the European conflict.
Personally hostile to Hitler's Nazi philosophy, FDR was well aware of
the strong isolationist sentiments and the pro-German feelings of a
large ethnic-German population in the United States. However, Roosevelt
did all he could to let Britain receive US supplies and loans to enable
it to continue fighting the war after the fall of France.

Hitler knew Germany would eventually come into conflict with the United
States. He wanted to complete German control of Europe so that any
future fight with the US would be between equals, and not in Europe but
on the North American continent. German submarines were ordered to avoid
attacking ships with US passengers crossing the Atlantic to avoid
provoking the US. He also tried to persuade his Japanese ally to war
against the Soviet Union and not threaten US or British interests in
Asia until after the USSR had been defeated. A German attack on the USSR
to oppose international communism would give the US an ideological
incentive not to interfere in Europe.

Hitler surprised by Pearl Harbor
Hitler was flabbergasted by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, which
prematurely dragged the US into the war in Europe. Hitler, who had
previously called the Japanese "honorary Aryans", the precursor of
apartheid's categorization of Japanese as "honorary whites", was
reported to have complained that "this is what happens what your allies
are not Anglo-Saxons".

Hitler was also reported to have told friendly British diplomats before
the war that he would gladly send a few divisions to the Far East to
help Britain contain the "yellow race".

Racial contradictions in the Axis Alliance prevented coordinated unity
between Germany and Japan. Berlin was more surprised by Japan's
"surprise attack" on Pearl Harbor than Washington was. Hitler had
expected Japan to attack Singapore, not Pearl Harbor.

Fascist racism and the yellow race
Artur Silgailis, chief of staff of Inspection General of the Latvian
Legion, the Latvian Waffen-SS, in his book Latvian Legion (James Bender
Publishing, 1986, pp 348-349), describes a conversation he had with
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS (Schutzstaffel, or "Protective
Echelon") and the second-most-powerful man in Nazi Germany.

According to Silgailis, Himmler said: "After the unification of all the
German nations into one family ... to include, in the family, all the
Roman nations whose living space is favored by nature with a milder
climate ... I am convinced that after the unification, the Roman nations
will be able to persevere as the Germans ... This enlarged family of the
white race will then have the mission to include the Slavic nations into
the family also because they too are of the white race ... it is only
with such a unification of the white race that the Western culture could
be saved from the yellow race ..."

The composition of the Waffen-SS ("Armed SS"), an all-volunteer
ideological military unit, testified to the popularity of Nazism all
over Europe outside of Germany. Of the 1 million men who served in the
Waffen-SS during the course of the war, 60%, or 600,000 men, were
non-German volunteers from other European countries. Non-German
volunteers came from the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France, Denmark,
Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Byelorussia (now Belarus),
Spain, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia and even a very small group of British
volunteers, known as the Legion of St George.

The foreign Waffen-SS units were all deployed on the eastern front,
first because they had specifically volunteered to fight communism, and
second so that they would never be asked to fight their native
countrymen. All but a few thousand of the 20,000 French Waffen-SS
volunteers, organized into a division called Legion Charlemagne, were
killed in the Battle of Berlin in 1945. They were diehard ideologues
rather than opportunists, since by 1945 fascism was visibly a lost
cause.

Japanese attack helped Roosevelt enter war
President Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 9, 1941, two days
after the Pearl Harbor attack, but did not mention Germany in his "Day
of Infamy" speech before Congress. It was still possible for Hitler to
postpone the war with the US, but he was forced to preserve the Axis
Alliance by honoring German obligations to Japan. Thus on December 11,
Germany declared war on the United States. It was a major strategic
error based on Hitler's miscalculation that the US would deal with Japan
first and Europe after.

Roosevelt had other ideas. Several witnesses have commented on FDR's
determination to bring the US into the war in Europe before the Pearl
Harbor attack. According to US General Alfred C Wedermeyer:

    Franklin D Roosevelt, the professed exponent of democracy, was as
    successful as any dictator in keeping the Congress and the public in
    the dark about his secret commitments in relation to Great Britain,
    commitments which scoffed at the wish and will of the voters, who
    had re-elected Roosevelt only because he had assured them that he
    would keep us out of the war. In fact, there are few more shameless
    examples of cynical disregard of the people's will than those which
    came to light in Roosevelt's personal correspondence with [British
    prime minister Winston] Churchill, revealed in Churchill's books.
    This correspondence and Churchill's own description of his
    conversations with [Roosevelt adviser] Harry Hopkins, whom he
    described as 'mainstay and goader' of the American president, prove
    beyond doubt that Roosevelt, already in January 1941, had concluded
    a secret alliance with Great Britain, which pledged America to war.

P H Nicoll, in England's War against Germany, wrote: "Clare Boothe-Luce
shocked many people by saying at the Republican Party Congress in 1944
that Roosevelt 'had lied us [the USA] into the war'. However, after this
statement proved to be correct, the Roosevelt followers ceased to deny
it, but praised it by claiming he was 'forced to lie' to save his
country and then England and 'the world'." (Clare Boothe-Luce was a
writer and activist who became a Republican congresswoman in 1942.)

Without a German declaration of war on the United States, Roosevelt
might still face an uphill fight in overcoming US isolationism. After
the Pearl Harbor attack, the US would have to retaliate against the
Japanese, but there was still no compelling reason to get involved in
the war in Europe, which would in fact delay punitive action against
Japan. The German declaration of war solved the problem for Roosevelt.
It linked Pearl Harbor with the Axis Alliance.

Immediately after the Japanese attack, Wedermeyer at the War Plans
Department formulated a "Victory Program", which would largely determine
how and where US forces would fight World War II. The plan was presented
to Roosevelt in mid-December 1941. This policy became known as "Europe
First" despite the fact the Germany did not attack the US.

The Europe First policy called for seizing a foothold in Western Europe
by landing a vastly superior force on the European shore at the earliest
possible date after the Atlantic was cleared of German U-boats.
Wedermeyer calculated that US troops would have to outnumber the
Wehrmacht by 3-1 to make the plan a success. His conclusions were at
odds with Britain's war plans, which were focused on defending the
far-flung empire outside of Europe and let the Soviets fight the Germans
on the eastern front to soften them up before opening up a Western
Front.

The campaign to save the British Empire
In September 1940, as the British feared, Italian forces from Libya
launched an invasion into British-held Egypt to try to capture the Suez
Canal. Unfortunately, or fortunately for Britain, Italian fascism, while
vigorous in theory, was wanting in efficiency. The Italians suffered a
disastrous defeat from Britain's Operation Compass counter-attack. To
help its Italian ally in North Africa, Germany sent the Deutsches
Afrikakorps commanded by General Erwin Rommel, whom the defeated British
referred to in awe as the Desert Fox.

The North Africa Campaign did not have anything to do with defending
democracy or freedom. It was to defend British imperialism from fascist
expansion. The campaign was a strategic error on the part of the Axis
Alliance and failed to achieve its objective of cutting the British
Empire two disconnected halves. German lost 200,000 precious troops and
materiel in North Africa that could have been better used against the
USSR.

Many African-Arab nationalists, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar
al-Sadat, were openly sympathetic to the Axis powers as rivals of
British imperialism and were jailed by the British colonial authorities
during the war. Similarly, after World War II, nationalists in all
collapsing European empires around the globe developed sympathy for
communism as a resistance to postwar neo-imperialism.

The British advance failed to drive the Italians out of North Africa,
partly because of a failure to gain full Arab support. As British forces
reached Al Argheila, Churchill ordered the advance halted to divert
troops to try, without success, to defend Greece from German invasion,
giving the German Afrikakorps time to reach Tripoli and launch Operation
Sonnenblume, which turned British forces' victory into a rout.

In mid-1942, the Allies were met with defeat everywhere. In the first
half of the year, German U-boats sank 3.25 million tons of shipping in
the Atlantic carried by 465 freighters. In North Africa, Rommel smashed
British defenses, threatening the Suez Canal, stopping just 55
kilometers from Alexandria, Egypt, only because of a shortage of
supplies. In Russia, the German 6th Army captured Stalingrad, with plans
to head through the Caucasus for the Middle East oilfields and
eventually link up with the Afrikakorps to cut England off from its
empire. The Allies held Gibraltar, the approach from the Atlantic to the
Mediterranean; Malta, the strategic fortress for the control of the
Mediterranean; and Egypt, with its Suez Canal that linked the British
Empire. The Axis controlled France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and most
of North Africa.

British Malta prevented German victory
Because of the relatively short range of World War II aircraft, Malta's
strategic airfield was crucial to the British holding the Mediterranean,
but food and oil supply by sea had to get past German and Italian
bombers. After Malta was restocked with British planes launched from
aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy, the 250,000 Maltese and 20,000
British defenders were still dependent on imported food and oil and
other war supplies delivered by US freighters and tankers.

In 1942, after fierce sea and air battles with heavy losses on both
sides, the British managed to hang on to Malta with the help of US
tankers and used it as an effective base to disrupt and eventually halt
German resupply for the Afrikakorps. Rommel's spectacular offensive was
eventually halted at the small rail stop of El Alamein, 240km from
Cairo. British air attacks from bases in Malta on overextended German
supply lines forced the Afrikakorps to retreat westward back toward
Libya and Tunisia.

On October 23, British forces newly put under the command of
Brigadier-General Bernard Law Montgomery, well supplied from Alexandria,
opened an offensive against the Afrikakorps at El Alamein. The British
8th Army under Montgomery, with superiority in men of 2:1, and an even
greater superiority in materials, launched the decisive push against the
Axis forces. After 12 days of violent fighting and heavy losses on both
sides, the British drove toward Libya and eventually Tunisia.

The Africa Campaign was a predictive microcosm of the war, a testimonial
to the doctrine that wars are won by logistics. The US, with its
unthreatened military supply base, would win the war as a matter of
time.

Many Maltese nationalists were hostile to British occupation, a fact
found all over the British Empire.

When Malta was granted self-government without independence in 1921,
Enrico Mizzi formed the Partito Democratico Nazionalista and was elected
to the Legislative Assembly. In 1924 he became minister of agriculture
and posts and in 1932 was appointed minister of industry and commerce
and subsequently minister of education. His patriotism became cause for
concern to the British colonial government during World War II and in
1942 he was interned and deported to Uganda, where he remained for the
duration of the war. As a result, Mizzi was unable to take his
democratically elected seat in the then Council of Government, making a
mockery of World War II as a war to defend democracy.
Dom Mintoff, future postwar prime minister of independent Malta, was a
product of England's elitist Oxford University and a friend of Labour
Party radicals. But it was liberal Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin of
King George VI, who advanced Mintoff's political career. Mintoff's
father, a seaman cook, ran the pantry at Castille Palace in Valletta,
where Mountbatten, then flag officer heading the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's (NATO's) Mediterranean fleet, had his office, and
Mountbatten took a liking to the younger Mintoff and recommended him to
a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford to prepare him as a future leader
friendly to Britain.

Later, through Dom Mintoff, Mountbatten promoted a scheme for Malta to
seek full integration with Britain, a political initiative that had
parallels with secularized Muslim Turkey's current fantasy about being a
full equal member of the Christian European Union. The project was
eventually abandoned as another of Mountbatten's unworkable liberal
fantasies, much like the integration of India and Pakistan as one nation
out of British India. The experience made Mintoff realize that liberal
colonialism was still colonialism, with the result of his leading Malta
to the left after the war.

Under the long and forceful leadership of Dom Mintoff, the leftist Malta
Labour Party government turned an independent Malta into a strong
adherent of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the Cold War. It
strengthened cultural and trade links with Malta's North African
neighbors, notably oil-rich Libya, and also with the People's Republic
of China and North Korea, shunned as evil outcasts by the US-dominated
West.

On assuming office in 1971, Mintoff renegotiated British/NATO
agreements, mandating the dismantlement of the NATO military base within
seven years during which the base could not be used against Arab states.
Mintoff also negotiated a treaty of friendship and close economic
cooperation with premier Zhou Enlai in China in April 1972, making Malta
a member of the NAM.

El Alamein: The end of the beginning
The German strategic goal of capturing the Suez Canal to sever
communication between the British Isles and the British Empire in the
Far East and to link up German forces thrusting south from southern
Russia with those in North Africa was thwarted by the defeat at El
Alamein, the first victorious battle in World War II by a British-led
force over the German Wehrmacht.

Germany lost 200,000 of its best troops in North Africa and achieved no
strategic advantage. Those troops would have been better used in
defending Italy. Winston Churchill used El Alamein to boost sagging
British morale with his mastery of language: "This is not the end; it is
not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the
beginning."

Whatever it was, it was not the end of British colonialism, not even the
beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning of
neo-imperialism.

In a since-released secret postwar report to Labour prime minister
Clement Attlee, who replaced Conservative Churchill by popular vote
immediately after VE (Victory in Europe) Day, Montgomery, as chief of
the Imperial Defense Staff (1946-48), Britain's heroic soldier in
defense of democracy, opposed British Labour policy of encouraging
self-government in black Africa. The African, he concluded after a
two-month fact-finding tour of 11 African countries in late 1947, "is a
complete savage and is quite incapable of developing the country
himself". He did not elaborate on why, after a century of British
colonial rule, the African remained a "complete savage".

Montgomery recommended a sweeping plan to turn much of sub-Saharan
Africa into a British-controlled bulwark against communism that would be
aligned with white-ruled South Africa, which at that time was still
dominated by Britain. Montgomery and Rommel, heroes of colonialism and
fascism, had two things in common: both were congenital racists and
pathological anti-communists.

US needed the USSR to defeat Germany
In World War II, the United States, even with twice the population of
Germany, had difficulty assembling and training the necessary military
force, estimated to be up to 9 million troops, to prevail over the
German Wehrmacht and also simultaneously to fight a major war against
the Japanese. Thus Soviet resistance to German expansion in Europe was
as vital as keeping Britain from capitulating to Nazi might.

It is another geopolitical peculiarity that the US-Soviet alliance
permitted Japanese-Soviet neutrality toward each other to continue all
through the war despite the fact that US entrance into the war was
precipitated by Japanese attack on US territory. Prior to the successful
testing of the atomic bomb, the US was looking to the Soviets to fight
Japan to reduce anticipated US casualties in Asia, as the Soviets did in
Europe.

The strategy of "Europe First" was based on the view that once Germany
consolidated its hold on Europe, the US alone might not be able to win
the war against Germany as a superpower. German diplomatic inroads into
Central and South America, where strong anti-US feelings had been
smoldering for more than a century, could lead to future German bases
whence attacks on the US could be launched.

In the summer of 1940 when Britain was facing Germany alone, Roosevelt
demanded assurances from Churchill that if the British government should
seek peace with Germany, the Royal Navy would be sent to Canada to
prevent it from falling into German hands to threaten US control of the
Atlantic. Churchill refused, using the Vichy France argument that he had
rejected only weeks earlier, that the British navy would be a crucial
pawn in any peace negotiations with Germany. The real purpose of
Churchill's hardline position was to deprive the US of the option of
abandoning Britain, the penalty of which would be the loss of US command
of the Atlantic, let alone Europe.

On August 14, 1941, some fours months before the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor, the United States, not yet at war, issued jointly with a
Britain already at war with Germany the Atlantic Charter, which set out
a postwar world vision as an unspoken condition for a pending US
alliance with Britain. Among other provisions, the Atlantic Charter
emphasized British commitment to postwar international cooperation,
including support for US efforts to form a United Nations based on the
principle of self-determination for former colonies. Six months later,
in February 1942, barely two months after the Pearl Harbor attack, under
the Lend-Lease Agreement, Britain agreed to a postwar multilateral
payments system based on the US dollar in exchange for US commitment to
help Britain financially during and after the war. After the war, under
Harry Truman, self-determination was preempted by anti-communism.

Yet at the insistence of the US financial elite, US aid was only granted
in return for the surrender of British bases in the Western Hemisphere
to US control, on the sale at reduced prices of British-owned companies
and investments in the US, Canada and Latin America, the virtual seizure
of South African gold production by US warships, restrictions on British
exports and, finally, the removal of the pound sterling as a reserve
currency and the lifting of empirewide trade controls that could have
been used to rebuild the British prewar economic empire after the war.

Britain was saved from having to sue for peace with Hitler by US
intervention. After the Dunkirk troop evacuation of May-June 1940,
Britain had the choice of losing the war to Germany or to the United
States. Since then, Britain has been forced to play the role of a
subservient ally, but one that subtly turned the US into a postwar
reincarnation of the British Empire with a greatly eclipsed Britain as
top water boy for the US-led neo-imperialist team.

Japan-Soviet neutrality a geopolitical peculiarity
In World War II, a glaring geopolitical peculiarity was that Japan, a
founding member of the alliance of Axis powers, maintained a neutrality
treaty with the major enemy of the Axis alliance all through the war.
Had Japan attacked the USSR through Siberia instead of attacking the US
at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt might not have been able to go to war in
Europe, as US public opinion at the time was quite divided about getting
involved in another foreign war in Europe only two decades after World
War I. War with Japan was a total surprise to the US population even if
it was not to the US government.

Conservatives in the United States, with Churchill's blessing, might
even have forced the US government to lift its sanctions against Japan
if Tokyo had moved against the USSR in the name of anti-communism
instead of threatening British/US imperialist interests in Southeast
Asia in an intra-imperialist conflict. After all, Japanese imperialism,
modeled after British imperialism, while having begun in China, came
into conflict with Western imperialism in Asia first by defeating
Czarist Russia in 1904.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which began with a Japanese naval
attack on Port Arthur, a Russian enclave on China's Liaodong Peninsula,
was the result of Japanese and Russian competition to develop "spheres
of influence" in East Asia in the age of imperialism, mainly at the
expense of China. Japan had won a war against the crumbling Chinese
Empire in 1894-95 and imposed an unequal treaty on the Qing dynastic
government, demanding from China heavy war indemnities, the island of
Formosa, and Port Arthur with its hinterland.

Port Arthur was named after William C Arthur of the British navy. It is
known in Chinese as Lushunkou, and is situated on the southern tip of
the city of Dalian in Liaoning province. The European powers, while
having no objection to the principle of war indemnities, sided with
Russian interests in Port Arthur to win a Russian concession in Europe.
Germany and France applied diplomatic pressure on Japan, with the result
that Japan was obliged to relinquish Port Arthur in favor of Russia. Two
years later, China was coerced into leasing Port Arthur to Russia,
together with the entire Liaodong Peninsula, for an ice-free Russian
naval base in the Far East to supplement Vladivostok.

The Boxer Uprising of 1900, the Chinese name for which is Yihetuan Qiyi
(Righteous Harmony Brigade), was an extremist xenophobic movement
against Western imperialism. The decrepit court of the Qing Dynasty,
dominated by the self-indulging, reactionary Dowager Empress (Cixi
Taihou, 1838-1908) encouraged it as an alternative chauvinistic
instrument to relieve pressure for modernization and reform in domestic
politics. Yihetuan, promoted personally by the empress, was a populist
counterweight to abort the budding "100 Days" elitist reform movement of
1898, led by conservative reformist Kang Youwei (1858-1927) around the
young monarch, the weak Emperor Guangxu (reigned 1875-1908). The reform
movement was a belated and defensive attempt to resist foreign
aggression through modernization. The model was the Meiji Reform of
Japan of 30 years earlier.

The members of Yihetuan, in a burst of chauvinistic frenzy, rejected the
use of modern and therefore foreign firearms in favor of traditional
broadswords. They relied on protection against enemy bullets from Taoist
amulets, their faith in which would remain unshaken in the face of
undeniable empirical evidence provided by hundreds of thousands of
falling comrades shot by Western gunfire. The term Boxer, for unarmed
fighters, was coined by bewildered Europeans whose modern pragmatism
filled them with a superficial superiority complex, justified on narrow
grounds, over an ancient culture that stubbornly clung to the irrational
power of faith in defiance of reason.

The Boxer Uprising led a coalition of eight powers, mostly European but
also including Japan, to send an expeditionary force to punish Chinese
"barbarism". When the fighting ended, Russian troops had occupied
Manchuria with a promise to withdraw by 1903, but failed to do so,
wishing to hold on to it as a springboard for further expansion into
China. Japan and Russia clashed over competing interests in Korea, which
led to Japan forming an alliance with Britain. The terms stated that if
Japan went to war in the Far East and a third power entered the fight
against Japan, Britain would come to the aid of the Japanese. If this
treaty had held at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Britain would
have been drawn into war with the United States.

Russia and Britain were hostile competitors in the Great Game in Central
Asia and in Tibet. The Russo-Japanese War marked the first time in
modern history that a major European power was defeated by an Asian
nation, whose navy was trained by Britain and its army by Germany. The
Russo-Japanese War greatly damaged the prestige of the Russian imperial
house and set the stage for the Russian Revolution.

British neutrality in Sino-Japanese War
Up until Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia, Britain tried to
maintain cordial relations with Japan. It disallowed anti-Japanese
agitation by Chinese nationalists in the British colony of Hong Kong,
where the British ruled with an iron fist adjacent to Japanese-occupied
southern China. It also forbade aid shipments funded by overseas Chinese
to China through Hong Kong. The European war did not change British
policy on Japan, as the British hoped Japan would invade the Soviet
Union.

Without the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there would have been no US
intervention in Europe, and then there would have been no Allied landing
in Normandy and no western front for Germany. The USSR might not have
been able to survive a two-front war with both Germany and Japan. A
Germany with a single-front Wehrmacht and a formidable Japanese army
supplied from occupied China would have been highly problematic for the
USSR. If Germany had defeated the USSR, Britain would most likely have
capitulated and Germany would have become the superpower of all Europe.

Thus in an ironic twist of events, the USSR - and world communism - was
saved by a strategic error on the part of fascist Japan. Mao Zedong
reportedly said to Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka in their first
meeting in 1973 that if Japan had not invaded China and Southeast Asia,
communism might not have prevailed in China.

The Cairo Declaration
The Cairo Declaration issued by China, the United States and Great
Britain on December 1, 1943, stated: "It is the purpose of the three
great Allies [USSR was not yet at war with Japan] that Japan shall be
stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or
occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that
all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as
Manchuria, Formosa [Taiwan] and the Pescadores [Penghu], shall be
restored to China." The Potsdam Proclamation signed by China, the US and
Britain on July 26, 1945 (subsequently adhered to by the Soviet Union),
reiterated: "The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out."

On August 15, 1945, Japan declared unconditional surrender. The
instrument of Japan's surrender stipulated that "Japan hereby accepts
the provisions in the declaration issued by the heads of the Governments
of the United States, China and Great Britain on July 26, 1945, at
Potsdam, and subsequently adhered to by the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics". Potsdam defined Allied occupation of the Japanese Empire as
the USSR being responsible for North Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kuril
Islands, while the US and the British Empire would have the
responsibility for Japan, South Korea and Japan's remaining possessions
in Oceania. Only the lack of a Soviet Pacific Fleet prevented Soviet
troops from landing in Japan to partition it into two states, a
communist north and a capitalist south, as in the case of Germany, Korea
and Vietnam.

After World War II, the Soviet Union refused to send a delegation to San
Francisco to sign the peace treaty with Japan while the Korean conflict
was still in progress. As a result, the USSR and Japan, the two nations
that did not actually fight each other, remained in a state of war that
began less than a month before World War II ended and without diplomatic
relations until the USSR and Japan began working on a draft peace
agreement and the restoration of diplomatic relations in spring of 1955,
a full decade after the war.

Bilateral relations were finally restored in the autumn of 1956.
However, a declaration was signed in lieu of a peace agreement. Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev suggested that Japan shut down US military
bases in exchange for the return of two of the South Kuril Islands. The
US opposed the offer, while Japan demanded the transfer of all four
islands. The ownership of the islands is still in dispute, no maritime
border has been set yet, and no peace agreement has been signed.

Japan's postwar territorial disputes
In violation of terms of the Cairo Declaration, Japan has also
introduced postwar territorial disputes with South Korea and China.

With South Korea the dispute is with regard to islets known in Japan as
Takeshima and which Koreans call Dokdo. Control over the islets means
control over fishing grounds and possible undersea energy resources.
With China the dispute concerns Okinotori, an uninhabited coral reef the
size of a tennis court that is 75 millimeters above water at high tide.
Okinotori, 1,770 kilometers south of Tokyo, is described as a "bunch of
rocks" by China, whose interest in the area is based on its strategic
position. US naval forces based on Guam need to pass through this area
to approach Taiwan.

According to Article 121 of the United Nations Council on Law of the Sea
(UNCLS), an island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by
water, which is above water at high tide. Rocks that cannot sustain
human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive
economic zone or continental shelf. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara,
known for his outspoken ultra-chauvinistic views, wants to increase
economic activity on the rocky Okinotori islands. Japan in June 2005
installed radar, a heliport and an official address plaque, "1 Okinotori
Island, Ogasawara Village, Tokyo", China urges handling the relevant
issues through friendly consultation.

The Cairo Declaration notwithstanding, Japan has also introduced postwar
territorial disputes over a chain of islands in the East China Sea with
important gas resources near key international shipping routes, known as
Diaoyutai in China and Senkaku in Japan. Located about 400km west of
Okinawa, Diaoyutai is claimed by both Beijing and Taipei as Chinese
territory. The waters surrounding the islands are suspected of being
oil-rich.

Professor Kiyoshi Inoue of Kyoto University wrote in an article in the
February 1972 issue of Historical Research:

    The islands which are being called the Senkaku Islands in Japan and
    to which the Japanese government claims title have historically been
    definitely China's territory.

    As the victor in the 1894-95 war with Qing China, Japan seized these
    islands along with Taiwan and the Penghu Islands and incorporated
    them into Okinawa prefecture as Japanese territory. The Cairo
    Declaration jointly issued by China, the United States and Britain
    during World War II stipulates the return to China by Japan of all
    the territory she had stolen from China during and after the
    Japan-Qing China war, including Taiwan and Manchuria. The Potsdam
    Proclamation issued by the Allies stipulates that Japan must carry
    out the clauses of the Cairo Declaration.

    These islands have been automatically reverted to China as its
    territory just as Taiwan has been automatically returned to China
    from the time Japan unconditionally accepted the Cairo Declaration
    (December 1, 1943) and the Potsdam Declaration concerning Conquered
    Countries (August 2, 1945) and surrendered to the Allies including
    China. It follows that these islands are territory of the People's
    Republic of China, the only internationally recognized authority
    over all of China.

    But in collusion with US imperialism, the reactionary rulers and
    militarist forces of Japan are making a clamor that the Senkaku
    Islands are Japanese territory in an attempt to drag the Japanese
    people into the militarist, anti-China whirlwind. This big whirlwind
    is sure to become fiercer after the return to Japan of the so-called
    "administrative right over Okinawa" by the US armed forces on May 15
    this year.

    We who are truly striving for the independence of the Japanese
    nation, Japan-China friendship and peace in Asia must smash in good
    time this big conspiracy of the US-Japanese reactionaries.

Japan on North Korean non-proliferation
On the Korean non-proliferation issue, Japan has been the most obdurate
participant of the six-nation talks, demanding that all the North Korean
nuclear reactors be shut down.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi threatened to boycott the 60th
anniversary of the European victory in World War II held in Moscow to
protest Russian stance on the still-unsigned peace agreement. Koizumi's
militarist activities, symbolized by his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine,
where the most hideous World War II criminals are revered as sacred
heroes, and Japan's revisionism on the record of its aggression and
atrocities in Asia under Japanese occupation, sparked public anger and
resentment in China on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and in Korea,
both North and South, as well as all other Asian nations. Japan also
insists on a preemptive-strike option on North Korean missile sites.

A new draft of the Japanese constitution provides for the formation of a
full-fledged "Defense Army" of 60,000 troops; that number could be
increased to 375,000 in times of war repelling foreign aggression, not
just on Japanese soil but wherever interests claimed by Japan are
located, with the authority to participate in collective defense
alliances. Active monitoring of China and North Korea is part of a new
Japanese military doctrine. Under the proposed constitutional
provisions, Japan could legally export missile components to the US,
canceling the arms-export ban effective in Japan since 1967. Japan's
electricity is largely produced by nuclear power, giving Japan the
nuclear technologies to produce atomic weapons on short notice.

Echoing Israel's geopolitical game of securing US support by playing the
role of a counterbalance against communism during the Cold War and
against Islamic terrorist threats after the Cold War, Japan aims to
emerge as a regional military power in the name of counterbalancing a
rising China in the region. It may well be another Japanese geopolitical
miscalculation that will spark dire consequences. From the point of view
of China, the Koreas and other Asian nations, US presence in Asia is
tolerated only on the condition of checking any revival of Japanese
militarism.

US forces around the world
The United States has maintained the largest permanent force in
peacetime beyond its home longer than any other empire in history. These
troop arrangements are largely the result of post-World War II
arrangements and Cold War exigencies.

Fear of a massive land invasion of Western Europe from the Soviet Union
prompted the US to place large numbers of ground forces there to defend
it. US forces in Korea and Japan have been in place for a rapid response
to a North Korean or Chinese threat for the past 50 years. The current
occupation of Iraq takes about 130,000 troops, plus another 130,000 in
the Persian Gulf.

The Nixon Doctrine stated that Asian nations should strengthen their own
defense capabilities and not depend on the US for their security. After
the Vietnam War, the Nixon Doctrine reflected a desire to reduce US
force commitments to Asia. Some 20,000 US troops of the 7th Division
were withdrawn from South Korea by March 1971 as part of a strategy
under US president Richard Nixon of opening to China.

President Jimmy Carter planned to reduce US troop levels in Korea,
pledging during his campaign that US forces in Korea would be completely
withdrawn in stages over four to five years. Major-General John
Singlaub, then chief of staff of the 8th Army, protested to Congress
against Carter's withdrawal plan. The effort was abandoned in 1979 after
only 3,600 troops had been withdrawn.

The US Congress adopted the Nunn-Warner Amendment to the 1989 Defense
Appropriation Bill, which mandated a reduction in US troop strength in
Korea from 43,000 to 36,000 by the end of calendar year 1991. In early
1990 the administration of president George H W Bush announced plans to
cut 7,000 of the 42,500 US troops in Korea over two and a half years. At
that time, the US had 11,600 air force personnel and 31,600 army
personnel in Korea. As a result, the 2nd Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade
was withdrawn from Korea in 1992 and deactivated.

South Korea, having refused to sign the Armistice Agreement of the Korea
War because of the personal intransigence of Syngman Rhee, is
technically in a continuing state of civil war with North Korea. For
security, Seoul forged a mutual defense pact with Washington to keep the
37,000 troops there, the largest US contingent in Asia after Japan,
which has 45,000 troops in 39 bases. The defense treaty with South Korea
has kept the US, by proxy, technically at war with North Korea for
almost six decades, beyond the original US "police action" mandate.

The US-Japan Security Treaty was also signed during the Korean War in
1951, at the same time as the San Francisco Peace Treaty that formally
ended the Allied occupation of Japan. The security treaty with Japan
enabled US troops to remain in Japan and use Japanese facilities as
staging areas and logistics bases in the war then being waged on the
Korean Peninsula and later in the Vietnam War and other future wars in
Asia. The US-Japan Security Treaty is the technical reason Japan is
paranoid about North Korean nuclear proliferation. As a frontline
offensive base for US forces, Japan would be a legitimate target in a
war in East Asia.

US military bases in Japan were seen as essential to containing
communist expansion in Asia during the Cold War, especially since the
Soviet Union, China and North Korea were mistakenly viewed by the United
States as a monolithic threat unaffected by geopolitical contradictions.
Throughout the Cold War, the US deployed more than 500,000 troops
outside its borders, not counting troops directly engaged in shooting
wars, such as in Korea and Vietnam. Even now, after the end of the Cold
War, the US military "forward-deploys" almost 450,000 troops in foreign
bases, with large numbers in Europe (112,000), East Asia (82,000) and
the Middle East (240,000).

The US failed to prevail in the two major wars it has fought in Asia
since World War II, in Korea and Vietnam. Instead, these two wars did
enormous damage to US social cohesion, caused sharp curtailment in
domestic liberty, degraded public trust in government and created
cynicism on professed US national values.

US Forces Korea
The United States currently has some 37,000 troops in US Forces Korea
(USFK) based in South Korea under an agreement dating back to the Korean
War 50 years ago. The US is planning a major realignment of its forces
in East Asia but says it remains fully committed to the defense of South
Korea. The withdrawal of 4,000 troops would significantly weaken the
strength of the 2nd Infantry Division - the main US fighting force in
South Korea. The division currently has 14,000 soldiers stationed near
the border with North Korea.

The US announced plans in May 2004 to shift 3,600 troops from South
Korea to Iraq, the first time the United States had reduced its armed
forces in South Korea since the end of the Cold War. On June 7, 2004, a
US delegation, led by assistant secretary of defense Richard Lawless,
met with South Korean officials and reportedly proposed withdrawing up
to one-third of the 37,000 US troops in South Korea. The two-day talks
also covered plans to move about 7,000 US troops from their bases near
the border with North Korea to a new military camp well south of Seoul.

On October 6, 2004, the US Department of Defense announced that after
several months of close consultations, the United States and the
Republic of Korea had reached final agreement regarding the June 2004 US
proposal to redeploy 12,500 of its troops from Korea.

Prior to 2004, there were normally about 37,500 military personnel
stationed in the USFK Area of Responsibility (AOR), including an air
force of 225 planes. The number of troops deployed in the area does not
normally fluctuate. With the 2nd Brigade Combat Team deployed to Iraq in
August 2004, the total number of USFK troops declined by 5,000, to a
total of 32,500 military personnel.

US Forces Japan
US Forces Japan (USFJ), with army, air force, navy and Marine Corps
elements, consists of about 47,000 military personnel, 52,000
dependants, 5,500 Department of Defense civilian employees and 23,500
Japanese workers. There are roughly 350 aircraft from the US Air Force,
navy and marines in the USFJ AOR.

North Korea's missile test launches came at a time when the number of US
troop levels in South Korea and other nearby Asian nations were
declining and the Pentagon had been focusing more on alleged potential
threats from China, which it aimed to counter with the power-projection
capability of a beefed up 7th Fleet, as the US aimed to avoid a land war
with China.

As for US military strength in East Asia, the plan is to break down
large Cold War-era bases around the world, bring tens of thousands of
uniformed personnel back to the United States and move some troops
closer to potential hot spots so they can more quickly respond to
conflicts. At the same time, saying it has an eye on surges in China's
defense spending, the Pentagon is strengthening its Asia-Pacific force.

Unlike South Korea, which has always been on a war footing, US force
restructuring in Japan involves US acceptance of a revival of Japanese
militarism, with serious geopolitical consequences. While US troop
reduction in South Korea faces a government in Seoul that is
increasingly friendly to both China and its Northern brother in an
effort to avoid military conflict, particularly on Korean soil, US troop
reduction in Japan opens the Pandora's box of a revival of Japanese
militarism with ambitions to exploit regional instability to recover
territories lost after World War II.

Japan echoes Pentagon's 'China threat' theory
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who is a contender for premiership
after Koizumi steps down this month, has echoed the Pentagon's "China
threat" theory. The annual Self-Defense White Paper released by Japan
cites China's rising military strength as the main reason Japan has
increased its military spending at double-digit rates for the past 17
consecutive years.

The Japan-US "2+2" (US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld plus Japan's then minister for foreign
affairs Nobutaka Machimura and Minister of State for Defense and
Director General of the Defense Agency Yoshinori Ohno) Joint Statement
of February 19, 2005, confirms US-Japan cooperation on global security
issues beyond Asia to include Afghanistan, Iraq and the broader Middle
East. The two pairs of ministers committed the two countries to
promotion of non-proliferation, particularly through the Proliferation
Security Initiative, a proactive global effort that aims to stop
shipments of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, and
related materials worldwide first announced by US President George W
Bush on May 31, 2003.

The Joint Statement confirms Japan's acceptance of ballistic missile
defense (BMD), Japan's new National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG)
emphasizing Japan's capability to respond effectively to new threats and
diverse contingencies, Japan's active engagement to improve the
international security environment, and the importance of the Japan-US
alliance.

As a central component of its broad defense-transformation effort, the
US is in the process of reorienting and strengthening its global defense
posture to provide it with appropriate, strategy-driven capabilities in
an uncertain security environment. The Joint Statement confirms the need
to continue examining the roles, missions, and capabilities of Japan's
Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the US Armed Forces required for
responding effectively to diverse challenges in a well-coordinated
manner. This examination will take into account recent achievements and
developments such as Japan's NDPG and new legislation to deal with
contingencies, as well as the expanded agreement on mutual logistical
support and progress in BMD cooperation. The "2+2 Ministers" of the two
countries also emphasized the importance of enhancing interoperability
between US and Japanese forces.

The Joint Statement also declares a common strategic goal to push China
toward increased transparency in military spending. Yet Japan's own
official defense-spending data are purposely opaque. They do not reflect
defense-contractor output values and capital investment. Despite the
appearance of a market economy, the Japanese economic system is still
very much a state enterprise that has been aptly described as Japan Inc.

In the past half-century, China's total gross domestic product (GDP)
rose 172-fold from a very low base and Japan's 80-fold from a relatively
high base in nominal local-currency terms. During the same period,
China's military spending increased 32-fold and Japan's 47-fold. China's
population of 1.3 billion is 10 times Japan's 127 million. In 2005,
Japanese military expenditure was US$44.3 billion, or $350 per person,
while China's was $81.5 billion, or $63 per person. The increase in
China's military spending is 45% less than Japan's notwithstanding
China's faster growth rate than Japan's.

China's annual military spending rate in the two decades from 1985 to
2004 was 13.4%, and Japan's yearly military spending increase for the
two decades from 1961 and 1980 stood at 14%. This was despite the fact
that Japan's security has been guaranteed by the US, thus relieving it
from much military expenditure. The ratio of China's military spending
to its GDP has been falling, reaching 4.3% in 2005. The ratio of
military spending to financial expenditure in China has also fallen,
from 34.2% in 1953 to 18% in 1973 and to 7.7% in 2003. Japan sees the
Taiwan Strait and East China Sea regions as areas of possible conflict
with China.

US-Japan security cooperation on regional arms buildups, including
theater missile defense systems for Japan and Taiwan, means that the
Taiwan issue is not one of a simple "renegade province" in Chinese
domestic politics, but a focal point around which Sino-Japanese and
Sino-US antagonism and, ultimately, that of the entire region could
evolve. For example, Australia, which is increasingly aware of its
future as being tied to peace and cooperation with its Asian neighbors,
is doing its level best to avoid being dragged by belligerent US policy
into otherwise avoidable conflict with China. The US-Japan alliance does
not reinforce regional security but instead risks creating unnecessary
global instability.

As part of a worldwide realignment of US forces, the Pentagon is drawing
down troops at some decades-old installations in Asia, and the region's
allies are taking more responsibility for their own defense. The US
plans to compensate by building up the power-projection capability of
the Pacific Fleet. This is why North Korea says its missile program is
for self-defense against a US threat from the sea.

On September 17, 2002, Koizumi visited Pyongyang and held talks with
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. After the meeting, Koizumi told the
press unilaterally: "We confirmed that we would resolve the missile
issue through dialogue, and Chairman Kim Jong-il stated that he would
freeze all missile launchings without any time limit." There was no
mention of the conditions behind the alleged understanding or even
misunderstanding. Since it was not a joint press conference, what
Koizumi said was merely his understanding, which might not have been
Kim's understanding.

Under Koizumi, Japan, with US backing, has adopted a far more aggressive
role in the region and deliberately stirred up antagonism toward China
and North Korea as a way for reviving Japanese militarism. The North
Korean missile crisis is a useful pretext for furthering this agenda.
Japan is already involved in the joint development of an
anti-ballistic-missile system with the United States. The US has
indicated that it plans to speed up the deployment of advanced Patriot
interceptor missiles on US bases in Japan for the first time.

US promotes trilateral cooperation against China
Admiral William "Fox" Fallon, head of US Pacific Command, testified
before the Senate Armed Services Committee this March that "trilateral
military cooperation" among the US, Japan and South Korea aims to deal
not only with North Korea but also with China and terrorist threats in
Asia. Fallon indicated that US forces want the three countries jointly
to "deal with China's increasing military power, North Korea's possible
collapse and reunification of the two Koreas, unconventional regional
threats, including terrorism risks in Southeast Asia, and other regional
matters".

But the trilateral process, as well as bilateral defense talks between
Japan and South Korea, has stalled because of lingering territorial
disputes and historical antagonism between Tokyo and Seoul stemming from
Japan's 1910-45 colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula and to the
recent revival of Japanese militarism. Washington aims to keep Japan and
South Korea as allies against China and North Korea, especially hoping
to prevent Seoul from leaning toward Beijing out of similarity in
disputes with Japan.

Yet Seoul's approach to Korean unification conflicts with US policy on
North Korea. South Korea is not at all keen on preemptive strikes on the
North and views nuclear capability for a united Korea as not necessarily
an undesirable development. The natural economic and cultural ties
between Korea and China are undeniable. Anti-China hysteria is
increasingly not shared outside of the US. Beyond anti-communism
fixation, there is little that the US can argue to dissuade South
Koreans from reuniting with their brothers in the North or from forming
closer ties with China.

Fallon's congressional testimony came after the US Defense Department
issued its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review in February, singling out
China as having the "greatest" potential to militarily compete with the
US among emerging and major powers. In the QDR, which set the United
States' defense strategy and military posture for the next 20 years, the
Pentagon called for a "greater" military presence in the Pacific Ocean
and vowed to boost military integration with allies to deter hostility
from emerging and major powers.

Japan and the US agreed last October to step up integration and joint
operations between the SDF and US forces as part of their broad accord
on realigning the US military presence in Japan. Yet other than Japan
and Britain, US unilateralism has dampened the enthusiasm of Cold War
allies of the United States to support its policies of global
transformation.

Fallon praised Koizumi as having demonstrated "exceptional leadership"
in guiding the SDF through "significant change", such as sending ground
troops to Iraq and refueling vessels to the Indian Ocean to help the
US-led anti-terrorism operations in Afghanistan. "These actions clearly
show the willingness and capability of the government of Japan to deploy
the SDF regionally and globally in support of security and humanitarian
operations," Fallon said.

But such actions are viewed in most of Asia as signs of emerging
Japanese belligerence. The only thing that remains unchanged about
Japan's force structure is the name of "Self-Defense Force". Such
"exceptional leadership" is viewed as dangerous adventurism by many in
Asia.

Seoul and Washington agreed early this year on "strategic flexibility"
of US armed forces in South Korea, paving the way for US forces there to
engage in missions outside the Korean Peninsula. But the accord led to
controversy in South Korea as it could lead the nation to get involved
in regional conflicts that the US could be engaged in, including a
possible conflict with China over Taiwan. Fallon said, "We welcome
[South] Korea's adoption of a more regional view of security and
stability ... in light of the changing security environment, including
unconventional threats, China's military modernization and the potential
for reconciliation between the Koreas." Seoul is less sanguine about the
congruence of US and Korean geopolitical interests.

Such is the geopolitical dynamic surrounding the Korean
non-proliferation and missile-test issue. All the noise out of
Washington about and "axis of evil" and the "defense of democracy" is
just propaganda. It is as convincing to the people of Korea, Asia, South
America and Africa as the Nazis' noise about racial superiority and the
right to living space for Aryan nations. Just as the Nazis allowed the
Japanese to be "honorary Aryans" and South African apartheid allowed
them to be "honorary whites", the US now allows the Japanese to be
"honorary democrats" despite Japan's postwar one-party system of token
democracy. Democracy has permitted some governments of otherwise
peaceful people to be seized by extremists and militarists who use war
on evil as a pretext to dominate the world.

On what basis does the United States assert the sacred privilege to
declare nations that hold values divergent from those held by the US as
evil and not deserving of self-defense and survival? There are those in
the US foreign-policy and security establishment who view US involvement
in any military conflict in Asia, particularly with China, as
unnecessarily counterproductive and as serious a misstep for US
geopolitical interests as the Third Reich's invasion of the USSR was for
Germany's geopolitical interests. But such rational voices are muffled
in the neo-con-controlled militarist Bush administration. 


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