U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are spitting at each other and threatening to undermine a defense-alliance triumvirate.
By Steve Clemons
These times are tense, and few are looking to America any longer to save the day.
U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched an embargo against Qatar, which hosts America’s largest military base in the Middle East. The British are quitting Europe. The Turks are buying Russian air defense systems and giving the middle finger to the U.S. and NATO. Hong Kong is boiling, its democracy in peril. China and the U.S. are firing escalating tariffs at each other and seem bent on resurrecting Smoot-Hawley nightmares.
And, now, U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are spitting at each other and threatening to undermine a defense-alliance triumvirate that largely has kept North Korea contained and stood as a bulwark against Russian and Chinese adventurism in Northeast Asia.
Add to all this that President Trump is mad at the Danes over Greenland, and 20 percent of the Amazon forest in Brazil is ablaze, and the chaos of the times truly has reached new heights.
In the past, I speculated that a blanket U.S. security guarantee towards regions composed of otherwise antagonistic nations created a moral-hazard problem. As long as America kept the peace and buffered the edges between neighbors, they could engage in reckless, nationalistic rhetoric that otherwise might be destabilizing and lead to wars.
Japanese political leaders could flirt with dark nationalist impulses channeling pre-World War II militarist values with visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan’s military leaders are interred, or whitewashing the horrors of its mass murder, rape and pillaging of the Chinese and Korean people then under Japan’s control.
Korean politicians could engage in virulent anti-Japanese rhetoric with leaders trying to root their legitimacy in continual replays of crimes by their onetime Japanese overlords.
The same is true of China, whose school textbooks have almost a singular obsession with the Japanese as monstrous villains in their history. To be clear, the Japanese did awful things in Asia and have bad bouts of historical amnesia — but China’s textbooks and TV productions have an overwhelming, distorted fixation on Japan.