North Korean Test; Japanese Awakening

By Stratfor

As South Korea and Japan join with U.N. Security Council members to debate a response to North Korea’s recent nuclear test, the limits of multilateral action once again become glaringly obvious. Despite Washington’s strongly worded statements about the need for North Korea to “pay a price” for its actions, China responded with a call for all parties to seek a “calm and proper response” and “pursue peaceful resolution of the issue through consultation and dialogue.” Even Japan and South Korea have taken different approaches: Tokyo is calling for significant sanctions and planning a complete unilateral end to trade with the North, while Seoul decided to join the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (something it had been avoiding out of concern over offending Pyongyang) but at the same time said it would not block operations at the joint economic zone in Kaesong, just inside North Korean territory.

As has been the case in the past, the United Nations’ response will be tempered by China’s unwillingness to take stringent steps against its neighbor, combined with the desire of non-Security Council member South Korea to retain some space for peaceful negotiations with the North. Even with calls for increased sanctions, China — North Korea’s major trading partner — is unlikely to participate in any major trade disruptions, and without China’s full cooperation, additional sanctions from countries like the United States or Japan would have little meaning.

While the multilateral track is subject to the same indecision, born of competing interests, as in the past, North Korea’s nuclear test has triggered some secondary actions — most notably in Japan.

On Tuesday, a defense panel convened by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) discussed the implications of the nuclear test, and North Korea’s overall nuclear and missile program developments, for Japanese security. The meeting followed up on initial discussions triggered by Pyongyang’s attempted satellite launch on April 5, which once again sent a North Korean Taepodong (Unha) multi-stage rocket flying over Japanese territory. At the LDP meeting, Gen Nakatani, who served as defense chief under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, said Tokyo needed to develop “active missile defense” — meaning the ability to attack a potential enemy before it attacked Japan. The LDP panel tentatively agreed to propose that new national defense program guidelines should include acquiring the ability and creating procedures for preemptive strikes (potentially via ship-borne cruise missiles), and requiring a further shift from Japan’s long-standing interpretation of its non-aggressive Constitution.

For Tokyo, North Korea represents a future threat, but the latest nuclear and missile tests have not fundamentally altered the current situation. Rather, they are useful foils by which advocates for a stronger and more independent defense capability — like Nakatani — can shape debate and keep Japan moving away from its post-World War II pacifism. This process is not new, nor is it necessarily even predicated on the North Korean threat. Throughout the Cold War, Japan was willing to pass up its “right” to the use of force as a foreign policy tool and instead focused on economic development. Washington provided Japan’s international defense, in return for keeping Japan as an ally and its use of bases in Japan to bottle up the Soviet Pacific fleet. Tokyo in turn offered its territory for U.S. military facilities, and it took advantage of the U.S. protection to expand its economic power — emerging from near-total economic collapse in 1945 to become the world’s second-largest economy in less than half a century.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. view of Japan was shifting: Americans feared that Japan’s economic expansion would overtake that of the United States, and Washington’s preferential economic treatment of Japan began to erode. At the same time, as the Cold War came to an end, Japan itself began to grow concerned that the United States no longer felt the strategic need to prop up its economic system or — with the Soviet threat fading — to provide for all of Japan’s defense needs. In the mid-1990s, when the Japanese embassy in Peru was occupied, Tokyo found itself impotent, having no capability to deploy security personnel overseas. A series of North Korean nuclear crises and missile tests only reinforced Japan’s near-total reliance on the United States for international defense, despite the existence of the technologically advanced Japanese Self-Defense Force.

In response to these changes in the global climate, Tokyo began more openly to debate its future and its own rights and needs to become a “normal” nation, with its own military. Initial steps included breaking down the barriers between the various branches of the services and between the military and civil security sectors, like the army and police, or the navy and coast guard. Tokyo slowly began revising its interpretation of its Constitution — allowing for more overseas activities by its armed forces, building in aerial refueling capabilities and other similar activities previously deemed offensive rather than defensive, commissioning a series of helicopter destroyers the size of small aircraft carriers, and shifting the defense agency to the cabinet-level Defense Ministry. The current debate on further expansion of capabilities, and the inclusion of preemptive strikes as another form of self-defense, is a continuation of this evolution.

While Japan perceives North Korea as a potential threat, the risk is seen mostly as stemming from the possibility of a destabilized North Korea or a serious accident with the North’s nuclear or missile programs, rather than as a peer threat of military conflict with a neighbor. North Korea’s latest nuclear test hasn’t changed that assessment substantially, and the timetable for Pyongyang to shift from testing nuclear devices to having missile-capable rugged nuclear weapons is still thought to be some way off. But the global attention being paid to North Korea’s very public actions provides an impetus (and excuse) for Japan’s own military development.

Perhaps the more significant change in the regional security environment, then, will not be the incremental improvements in North Korea’s nuclear technology, but the more substantial and accelerated adjustments to Japan’s defense doctrines and capabilities.