When an Alliance is not an Alliance

The press these days routinely refers to the security relationship between Japan and the United States as a “military alliance.” Following the interim agreement to realign forces in Japan last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the agreement would “ensure a durable and surely more capable alliance.”

In fact, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security is not an alliance at all. Strictly speaking Japan is not an ally. It is a close friend, a partner, a collaborator on the world stage. But it is not an ally. That is strictly a courtesy title.

The current treaty obligates the United States to defend Japan should it be attacked. But Japan does not have an equal obligation to help defend America if it is attacked. That’s because Article 9, the war-renouncing clause written into Japan’s post-war Constitution, has been interpreted as barring any kind of “collective defense.”

Here is the deal. The U.S. promises to defend Japan in the event of an attack. Japan provides the U.S. with bases which it can use as it sees fit in advancing its strategic interests. Hence American B-52s from Kadena AFB on Okinawa flew bombing missions over North Vietnam during the war.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a real alliance. After the attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, Washington invoked the mutual defense provisions. That is why Germany, France and Canada, countries not often thought of as being helpful in the war on terrorism, sent troops to Afghanistan. Japan did not.

Last week, senior officials of both governments reached agreement on some sweeping changes in the disposition of forces in Japan. The changes are designed to promote better cooperation between the military of the two nations and to .lessen the burden on host communities, especially on Okinawa. The watchword is “interoperability.”

One of the changes that particularly caught my eye was a plan to move the Japanese air defense command center from Fuchu to the big American base at Yokota. The Ground Self-Defense Forces rapid reaction forces headquarters is also to move to the American army base at Camp Zama in the interests of closer coordination.

When I was a young air force officer at Yokota in the late 1960s, the U.S. Forces, Japan and the Japanese Self Defense Force (JSDF) might as well have existed on different planets. In nearly two years, I never met a JSDF officer. To my knowledge there was no liaison or close coordination. No contact. Nothing.

When the American forces dealt with Japanese, it was usually with local civilian authorities over such mundane matters as off-base housing. When contingencies arose, such as capture of the U.S. Pueblo or the shooting down of an EC-121 over the Sea of Japan, Japanese forces were not a factor in any war plans.

That began to change in the 1990s, the catalyst being the Gulf War. Japan poneyed up billions of dollars to support the coalition, but, consistent with its anti-war principles, provided no troops. Tokyo was stunned afterwards at how ungrateful Washington and others were for their generous financial support.

That began a slow evolution in Japan’s use of its military. The Diet passed laws that allowed Japanese to participate in international peacekeeping missions in Cambodia and elsewhere. In 1996 Washington and Tokyo inked the Joint Security Declaration in which Japan promised to provide logistical support for U.S. forces stationed in Japan. Joint research in missile defenses was authorized.

The reality and the paperwork have now gotten so out of whack that Japan is now seriously considering for the first time revising its Constitution in a way that officially recognizes the existence of the Self-Defense forces. The draft, to be unveiled later this month, reportedly allows for the exercise of all rights of self-defense, includingforming alliances with other countries and deploying Self-Defense forces overweas.

Does this portend a revision of the existing security treaty turning it into a real alliance? In all likelihood, neither side would want to awaken that sleeping dog. Even though nearly 50 years have passed, memories remain of the riots surrounding the last revision of the treaty in 1960, riots that forced President Dwight Eisenhower to cancel his proposed state visit.

A lot has changed in Japan over those years. The radical student movement that provided so many of the foot soldiers then hardly exists today. And it seems doubtful that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would have to ram any revisions through the Diet at midnight, like his predecessor Nobosuke Kishi.

Koizumi has a huge majority in the Diet, and the main opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan abandoned knee-jerk opposition to the security treaty in the interests of electability.

That leaves perhaps only the tiny Social Democratic Party to carry the flag of traditional Japanese pacificism. Seiji Mataichi, the party’s secretary general, said of the latest defense agreement, “it goes beyond the contents of the U.S. Japan Security Treaty.”

Mr. Mataichi is almost certainly correct in his statement. But his party holds only six seats in the Diet.