The Link Between Military Security and Economic Development in the Pacific
Mr. Yukio Okamoto
President
Okamoto Associates, Inc.
Military Security in the Asia Pacific: A Japanese View
Governor Cayetano, Distinguished Guests.
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak at this forum. It is indeed an honor and a privilege.
I would like to start my discussion on military security with a fish story, a true fish story.
Japan and Russia, to break the forty year deadlock over the Peace Treaty by the end of year 2000 to formally end World War II, began a series of summit meetings. And, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and President Boris Yeltsin developed a close, personal relationship. You may have seen photos of them decked out in fishing gear in Krasnoyarsk and later on, at Kawana, south of Tokyo. It is a famous story that a good-natured rivalry developed, where in Krasnoyarsk Mr. Hashimoto caught one fish and Mr. Yeltsin none and in Kawana Mr. Yeltsin caught two fish and Mr. Hashimoto none.
Well, when I went out drinking with Mr. Hashimoto a few weeks ago, I heard the rest of the story.
In Krasnoyarsk, Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Yeltsin were handed fishing poles with the lines already in the water. After about 15 minutes, Mr. Hashimoto got bored and reeled in his line. At the end of it, to his surprise, was a half-dead fish tightly hooked. Mr. Yeltsin, who was not informed of what his intelligence people had done, kept on fishing. He tried, but in the end he caught nothing and was visibly frustrated.
Later on, the Japanese Embassy in Moscow found out that normally at 3 P.M., the time when the two of them were fishing, that particular stretch of river has no fish in it at all.
When it was time for the reciprocal visit of Mr. Yeltsin to Japan, Mr. Hashimoto wanted to ensure that this time his counterpart caught a fish but in a little less obvious way. So his aide contacted the local fishing cooperative for help.
Two days before Mr. Yeltsin was to arrive, the cooperative, using radar, located a large school of fish and started to chase it. Whenever the school would stop to feed, the fisherman would bombard it with sound waves to keep the fish moving. After two straight days of this, these fish were very tired and very hungry and were driven right up to the boat where Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Hashimoto were fishing.
Now in the boat, Mr. Yeltsin was the only person with a live shrimp on his hook. A large fish immediately jumped on the bait. Mr. Yeltsin was exuberant; he had his fish! He even caught a second fish.
Others in the boat, however, were less happy. Boris Nemtsov, one of Yeltsin's chief aides , started to complain that he didn't have any bait on his hook. "In the end," Mr. Hashimoto explained to me, "I had to kick him."
I suppose the moral of this story is that where there is no common security framework in place, one has to go to enormous lengths to get territorial disputes resolved --- and still not get it.
At the simplest level, all economic development has its genesis in safety from war. No factories will be built, no ships launched without some sort of guarantee that they will not be destroyed in the foreseeable future.
Looking around Asian side of the Pacific, the most vibrant economies are the ones that possess the most ancient form of defense of all: a moat. Island and peninsular economies are wealthy but many of the continental nations are still poor.(Pardon me for calling Australia also an island.)
Curiously, the island/peninsular versus continental divide is reflected also in the structures of the economies: the former is consistently free-market while the latter have largely command economies.
Some have argued that the presence of coastlines and harbors made the island and peninsular nations more amenable to create wealth through ocean-borne trade, but an assurance of security extended by the US Navy in the region, in my view, has been one decisive factor in enabling this prosperity.
What I mean is this:
While some have derided the Pacific economies as being just various flavors of "crony capitalism", all the Pacific economies are different from each other; some of which hew a way far from the laissez faire ideal of the Chicago School. The capitalism that developed in South Korea is very different from the capitalism of the Philippines, which is in turn very different from the capitalism of Singapore. For many of the fastest growing nations, the indigenous capitalism that developed was a mix of capitalist theories, socialist practices and local conditions.
More than perhaps realized, the security envelope let the governments of the region adopt individualistic roads to economic development suited to respective needs. Through the stability and security brought about by the presence of US Forces in the region, for which several Asian countries including Australia and Japan are playing crucial roles, the countries in the region took to the capitalist road and made it work through diversified avenues tailored to their domestic settings. And, I stress again that it has been the American umbrella that made this possible.
The end of the Cold War has changed the rest of the world. But in Asia, however, the picture is different. Military threats remain and are even being aggravated because the security dynamics of the region have been indigenous in character and as a result far more difficult to manage.
And we come to the issue of China. The unique nature of China is that it is the only country in the region trying to have a global impact in all of the military, political and economic spheres;
The manifest of the White Paper by China last month is a source of new concern. And of course we now have Mr.Cheng Sui-bing as the new leader of Taiwan. Despite the remarks by some Chinese leaders to downplay the White Paper's ramifications, its impact on the People's Liberation Army that "the continuation of the status quo means a war" does not seem to have been retracted.
Hank encouraged us to be provocative. So let me try this. As much as we praise the efforts of the United States to secure peace and stability in this region, I will not be honest if I do not discuss whether the United States had taken a really right policy in dealing with China. President Clinton during his trip to China stated that the United States was seeking to develop a "strategic partnership" with China. Some wondered, "a strategic partnership against whom?"
Mr. Lee Teng-hui made rather controversial statement describing there was "special state-to-state" relationship between Taiwan and China. This was partly because Mr. Clinton casually manifested the three No's on Taiwan. Mr. Lee's statement in turn provoked the Beijing leadership which would have perhaps been more willing to let the current stalemate stand if it did not have to respond to Mr.Lee's position.
The danger lies for a regime without the legitimacy that comes through elected office to use nationalism as a unifying tool of the country. The danger becomes greater in China when there is no delivery of economic results, as its internal discrepancies increase. Nationalism has anti-foreign complexion, and in case of China, this especially means anti-U.S. and anti-Japanese. Relations are going to be more difficult if and when that happens.
The environment for US-Japan military alliance is changing. During the Cold War, Japan contributed directly to the security of the United States. The Soviet Strategic Submarine Fleet had to pass through waters patrolled by Japanese Self Defense Forces to approach the US coastlines. Japan and the United States had a very close military cooperation then.
But as the hulks of the Soviet Union's Pacific fleet lie rusting in Vladivostok's harbor, the value of the Japan-U.S. alliance seems to be less felt by the United States. I personally hope this is not the case.
On the Japanese side, the number of people who are more assertive and do not want to be patronized by the United States is increasing.
Until late yesterday evening I was attending the annual conference in San Francisco on the Japan-US Security System. Officials and experts who attended the meeting did not conceal the feeling that the management of the alliance is now necessitating more prudence and effort than ever before.
However, the importance of the US-Japan Security Treaty remains realistically unchanged, as Ambassador Foley just said, in serving as the credible cornerstone of security framework and the deterrence throughout East Asia.
I would like to finally take a moment and ask you to consider the contribution made to all our prosperity by the inhabitants of small islands throughout the Pacific. For the most part, the prosperity that has been generated on both sides of this great ocean has bypassed the islands in between.
One such example is Okinawa. In between November 1996 and March 1998, I served as the Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on Okinawan Affairs. Okinawa is about three quarters the size of Oahu with the population of 1.2 million. It is the smallest prefecture of Japan, representing only 0.6% of Japan's total land area. Yet this small island hosts 70% of all the U.S. military bases in entire Japan.
All across the Pacific, the pursuit of military security for the many has seen the simultaneous creation of misery for the few: archipelagoes that are weak economic dependencies, environmentally ravaged and often deeply injured in spirit. The suffering of small islands of the Pacific is the negative obverse side of the otherwise positive relationship between military security and the economic development in the Pacific. Though mere dots in terms of regional economic output, their contribution to the overall Pacific economy has been great. They deserve our recognition and thanks for their contribution into the bright but still precarious century that lies before us.
Thank you very much.