US President Donald Trump’s comments have created a potentially volatile policy atmosphere in Asia, raising a flurry of questions on what the new leader plans to actually do.
Among them: How will the US respond to Pyongyang’s latest missile test? Does Trump have a plan to replace the scrapped Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal? Would a rapprochement with China involve giving Beijing a free hand in East Asia? Will Japan tiptoe closer to China?
Asia Times ran some of these questions by Daniel C. Sneider, an associate director of research for Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and an authority on US, Japan and Korea relations. The comments have been edited for brevity.
Q: On a long strategic view, can China and Japan ever get on the same page? For that to happen, does the US have to get out of the middle?
While I think rivalry fundamentally remains the driver of relations between China and Japan, framing that story only in terms of rivalry is incomplete. The Chinese are trying to assert that they are the dominant power in the region. There’s almost a psychological element to this — to remind the Japanese that they are the inferior party and to drive wedges between Japan and the US. A Japan that’s isolated from the US is exactly what China seeks. It’s a Japan that’s more likely to bandwagon with China and it weakens the American strategic posture in the region.
The Japanese are desperate to preserve their alliance with the US. It’s the only guarantee of Japanese security. Unless the Japanese are willing to go nuclear — they can’t ever afford to give [that alliance] up, and I don’t think the Japanese are ever going to go nuclear — though they retain that latent capability.
But does that mean the China-Japan relationship means only rivalry? Of course not. These are two countries that are intertwined with each other in countless ways, not just the economic one. It’s not wholly a hostile relationship. They have a lot of overlap. So can they ever get on the same page? No. But they could be reading the same book now and again.
Q: Is it possible that China will be given the run of the region under Trump?
In Japan there is this worry, and I’ve heard it repeatedly in Tokyo, about a G2 redux — the idea that Trump will make a deal with the Chinese and that this is why he fleetingly put the One-China policy on the table. The Japanese think this because Trump is a guy who believes that he’s a great dealmaker. The fear is that he would be willing to sit down with the Chinese and that part of that deal would be a kind of let’s talk about [dividing] East Asia between us. The Japanese have this fear of abandonment. It’s deep-seated in Japanese strategic thinking.
But do I believe that the Chinese will be handed the keys to the palace? I think that if Donald Trump ever tried to do that it would probably trigger a coup d’etat in the United States, I just don’t see that.
Q: What are Trump’s options on North Korea following Pyongyang’s February 12 missile test and what is he likely to do?
I think the options regarding North Korea today are no different than they were under the Obama administration, or for that matter, the Bush administration. It’s an unpalatable set of limited options. It’s the same options that are on the table and being considered by the Trump administration.
The first is the broad engagement option — let’s go back and resume negotiations with the North Koreans with the aim of gaining some form of freeze on the missile and nuclear programs. Then there’s the let’s get the Chinese to do it option; let’s persuade the Chinese or pressure the Chinese to pressure the North Koreans to whatever end, whether it’s a freeze or something more ambitious than that. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raise the same argument to his Chinese counterpart recently, saying, ‘we would like the Chinese to put more pressure on the North Koreans.’
Q: What are the other options?
The other two options are the ones that make most people uncomfortable. But they are the ones to which we’re heading for lack of anything else. One is the military option. That is, responding to the possible test of a North Korean ICBM missile by either attempting to take it out on the launch pad or shoot it down through anti-missile defense systems which hopefully might work, though we don’t know that they will. Or some form of fostering regime change. I prefer the word regime “transformation.” Some way of trying to bring about internal change in North Korea that makes it more likely they’ll give up their nuclear option.
The last option is the one that I wish we were thinking about more, and more creatively. It could include elements of engagement, but also pressure. Sanctions, for example, have encouraged the forces of change from within North Korea by forcing them to pursue economic reforms that they’d have to do if they were really cut off from sources of capital and trade on the outside.
Q: Did Trump discuss North Korea with Abe during their summit and how aware is Trump of the North Korean nuclear issue?
I don’t know what [Abe and Trump] talked about. But I do know this — the president and people around him — if they weren’t aware that the North Korean nuclear missile program was a serious security issue when they were campaigning, they became aware of it very quickly after the election was over. I think from [Trump’s] first meeting with president Obama it was conveyed that this was going to be a problem that it would be pretty much at the top of his agenda. I believe that Trump made some reference to North Korea after that meeting — almost with surprise.
I don’t think [Trump] had thought much about the issue until then. I have the sense from conversations I’ve had that [the administration] was mainly worried that North Korea was going to force them to respond to some kind of provocation and disrupt their planning for other things regarding their foreign security policy.
Q: Is Trump mulling a policy change toward North Korea?
There was a report that [the administration] has ordered a review of North Korea policy, but I see no evidence of a review going on. When you do a review, you have a sense that it’s going on because experts on the outside are being drawn in. But to my knowledge, it hasn’t taken place.
Q: What are the military steps, in concert with Japan and South Korea, that Trump should take to strengthen deterrence against North Korea and a Chinese military buildup in the region?
This should be a very important element. Most importantly, it should be part of our review of our overall force posture in the Western Pacific. It relates to the problem of base issues in Japan — the still determined effort by the US with the support of the Abe government to relocate the Marine air station at Futenma to another part of Okinawa.
I think it’s high time that we looked at the foreign base issue in Japan in a broader context. The problem is we have an inertia about an investment we’ve made in fixed facilities that is hard to change. If you look at the base structure in Japan and South Korea, it’s pretty much unchanged since the Cold War.
The people I talk to who think about these issues have brought up whether we want to augment our naval and air forces based in Japan and Korea, [as opposed to] preserving our ground presence, even a Marine infantry presence in Okinawa. The purpose would be to make more credible our extended deterrence commitments to both Japan and South Korea.
For instance, there is the idea of adding a second carrier battle group to be home ported in the Western Pacific — that’s a big shift and we’re probably talking about Japan. We’re already increasing somewhat our nuclear-powered submarine basing in Japan, and that is an area from a deterrence point of view where we should be thinking of adding capability. [That would include] attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines.
We should think about adding an entire strike fighter wing to the air base in Misawa, Japan, which has a capacity to take an added presence. That would give us added capability against both China, North Korea and also to deal with increased activity by the Russian Air Force in that area.
This would, in some ways, compensate for a decision I would like to see to finally take most of the 3rd Marines out of Okinawa and move them to Guam. That’s a long-delayed move that needs to be accelerated. The obstacle to that reflects an inability of our services to cooperate with each other rather than any technical or even political problem on the island. We need to re-think more broadly where our force structure ought to be.
Q: How has Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile deployment in South Korea complicated US relations with China and what is Trump likely to do about the political/military issues that the deployment has raised?
I don’t know what Trump is likely to do. Is [THAAD] something he would trade off for something else? I have no idea. [Secretary of Defense James] Mattis during his brief visit to Seoul reiterated the US desire to and commitment to go ahead with the THAAD deployment. The latest missile tests show the North Koreans want to demonstrate a survivable capability to deliver nuclear weapons. The logic of deploying THAAD is even stronger than it was before.
Q: Will anything of substance replace TPP?
I noticed in an Abe-Trump joint statement [after the summit] that they referred to discussions, both on a bilateral basis as well as some regional framework. I gather from friends that that was language the Japanese wanted in there. This was to give the Japanese the freedom to continue to pursue a TPP without the US or a revival of the TPP with the US , or [in the context of] other regional trade structures.
The Japanese feel very strongly that TPP without the US is useless, so the big question is can you find other kinds of formulations that would be politically acceptable to Trump? The door is open for some kind of bilateral discussion. [But] I don’t see much enthusiasm in Tokyo for a full-scale, bilateral Free Trade Agreement.
Q: Can you give an example of something that might replace the TPP?
There could be a mini-lateral structure, for example, one that could include Vietnam and Japan. I hope somebody is thinking creatively about this.
Q: What stands out about the recent Trump-Abe summit?
I was frankly stunned that Abe comes to Washington and you have these people [on the US side] who had said, ‘We want to raise currency manipulation and market-access issues.’ They signaled this, including the president, and they did nothing. From what I’m told, the Japanese came prepared and were ready to talk about currency issues, for example and they were surprised that nobody [on the US side] raised it. Even on something where the Trump administration seemed to have a cogent policy view — there was no implementation.
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As a strong trump supporter who understands his policies very well I would be happy to answer the specific questions the article asks. My first comment will focus on critical background information that those outside the United States may not understand then I will turn to answers to the specific questions in a second comment based on the rationale in the first comment.
1. Trump’s focus is overwhelmingly on domestic policy aimed at rebuilding the United States whose industry has been hollowed out by very stupid policies over the last 20 years and particularly through the Obama administration.
2. The single largest problem has been the growth of the regulatory state – the many federal agencies passing innumerable rules and regulations that US industry must comply with, a thicket of regulations that are incredibly expensive to comply with – a cost of over $2 trillion a year exceeding the US’s exceptionally high real corporate and personal tax rates. overregulation is exacerbated by the irrational, highly politicized, very destructive US tax system, a system that particularly under Obama has come to intentionally penalize savings and investment. The self-inflicted wounds of hyper regulation and excessive and irrational taxation are further aggravated by a long series of stupid tax treaties that allow other countries to sell freely into the US market while denying their own market to US sales. China Japan and Mexico are perhaps the greatest violators. The $500 billion trade deficit of America with China in the $80 billion trade deficit of America with Mexico cost something on the order of 20 million American jobs.
3. The Democratic Party in particular with support from industries that benefit from the policy has adopted a policy of importing tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants, 90% of them from failed Third World kleptocracy economies, almost none of them with useful skills or capital, many of them becoming dependent on the US welfare system, and none of them actually understanding American history and values. The Democrats have imported them as their way of demographically outnumbering the pesky American population that keeps insisting on concepts of limited government, free enterprise, low taxation, and empowerment of the individual not the state to make the important choices in their lives. The Democrats know that they can buy the boats of these Third World immigrants to promote their own vision of an overwhelming nanny state controlling all important aspects of life for all Americans, and that nanny state being controlled by the Democrats. Trump understands that this policy has been economically ruinous, has destroyed the job prospects of tens of millions of underclass and working-class Americans producing great social damage, and is inconsistent with the United States remaining a leading economy in the future. His three step solution to this is to first, in parallel, establish full control of the border through a combination of a wall, enhance border forces, and other technical means such as E-Verify, second, deport all illegal alien criminals, gang members, welfare dependence, and to create a guest worker program to allow lawful productive aliens to remain in the US without right to citizenship – maintaining the legal system where all application for citizenship have to be made at the US embassies outside of the US in their own native countries, and third to work aggressively to assimilate legal and residual illegal immigrants into becoming Americans. Trump does not want to see an American Kosovo on our southern western border.
4. Historically the United States has been inwardly focused and economically focused and has from our very beginnings been uninterested in foreign wars – seeing them as corrupting of our democracy and a waste of money and lives. During World War II and the Cold War America had to step forward as the leader of the free world at great expense to prevent Europe and Asia from being overrun. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century changed. Trump sees that we are entering into a multipolar world where there will be many nations that are regionally powerful. Trump understands that because the US for reasons of internal politics adopts a very benign rules of engagement to protect local civilian populations, our great military force is essentially neutered. For example opponents can put their headquarters in hospitals elementary schools and render them completely in vulnerable to attack by our airpower. Trump realizes that trying to maintain our current role as world policeman is financially infeasible given our $20 trillion of national and is a waste of money and lives because living within our values and our current rules of engagement precludes victory. For this reason Trump is very interested in having other nations pay the full cost of their own defense and having the US moving into an indirect role.
So to answer the specific questions:
1. Will China and Japan get together – No because getting together can only mean Chinese domination, something no Japanese would tolerate. The Japanese are too proud and too economically strong to tolerate dominance. Japan will become the center of an alliance to contain Chinese.
2. What will Trump do with North Korea? put in anti-missile defenses to block any offensive North Korean threat. Let China know that the concept of a nuclear North Korea with ICBMs is unacceptable to the US and if China does not act to curtail this, the US will take direct action by undertaking a spoiling attack on North Korea – destroying their nuclear and missile facilities and capacities, destroying their air force and navy, destroying their command and control system – basically doing what we did in the first Gulf War to Saddam Hussein. This will doubtless lead to an attempt by North Korea to retaliate using artillery against South Korea. But US counter-artillery is incredibly sophisticated and within hours such an attack would lead to the elimination of North Korean ground forces and artillery. Unlike other politicians, Trump is a man of action and cold-blooded. He will take whatever action is necessary to de-fang North Korea. He would prefer to keep his focus domestic. But he is all about protecting America. He knows destroying North Korea militarily will probably lead to civil war in North Korea and much destruction, but that is a small price to pay to prevent a nuclear strike against the US.
3. The TTP will be replaced with a series of bilateral trade treaties. Trump understands that international organizations are inevitably controlled by people not interested in the interests of the US. Bilateral treaties are much easier to enforce.
4. The Trump-Abe summit was not devoted to substance because at this point Trump’s focus is deregulation, tax reform, border control, and capital repatriation. Trade renegotiation will probably commence in the next quarter – although re-negotiation of the NAFTA treaty with Mexico has already commenced.
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