Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

North Korean Missile Launch Invites Japanese Re-Armament

Overnight, reports came in saying that North Korea has launched yet another missile. This is the second-in-a-row that has traveled over the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The reaction of the Japanese, thus far, has been one of nervous restraint. However, the political dynamics of the region have changed a great deal in recent years. Japan's position has also changed. It is time to seriously consider Japanese re-armament in light of North Korea's new aggressive stance and China's territorial ambitions.

Japan, of course, isn't entirely unarmed. Although Article 9 of the constitution imposed on Japan by General MacArthur after World War II forbids Japan to make war on anyone, self-defense remains a right of any nation. Japanese military spending this year rose 1.5% to a record $44 billion. This represents 1% of GDP, compared to China's 2% and the 3% the USA spends. However, the US has global military commitments, and China shares borders with Russia and India, two military powerhouses in their own right of only due to their nuclear weaponry.

That said, the Japanese are loath to send troops, even non-combatants like medical staff, to war zones even under UN mandates. In November last year, the Independent reported, "Tokyo sent 350 soldiers to the UN mission in South Sudan, where they will help build infrastructure in the capital, Juba. For the first time since the country adopted a pacifist stance more than 70 years ago, the peacekeepers will have the ability to use force to protect civilians, UN staff and themselves. There are also plans for them to guard UN bases, which have been attacked during the country's civil war." These are things soldiers from anywhere else would do as a matter of course.

Unless one adopts the false and racist view that there is something inherently warlike about the Japanese people, the current arrangement is nothing more than the grandchildren paying for the sins of a largely dead generation. No one under the age of 72 was alive during the war, and one would argue that no one on the low side of 90 can bear any moral responsibility for what happened then. The shackles on the Japanese military, frankly, are the remnants of a world that is gone.

As an island nation off the Asian coast, Japan holds a unique and strategic position in the world. Like Britain, it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier and naval base from which one can intervene in the troubles of the region. Yet unlike Britain, Japan doesn't even punch at its weight in global affairs. Removing the military shackles imposed a lifetime ago would alter the strategic balance in the northwestern Pacific. North Korea is a dangerous nation, China and Russia are dictatorships with nukes, and on the other side stand the US (the only superpower), and second-tier powers like South Korea, the Philippines and Japan. If Japan moved itself up the ladder to project military power beyond the home islands, the Chinese and North Koreans might have to talk rather than threaten.

Japan's re-armament threat is a great deal like the deterrence of the nuclear threat used by other nations. It is probably most effective up until the threat is carried out. Japan is likely to get its neighbors to be far more cooperative by threatening to build a serious navy (an aircraft carrier and some nuclear-powers subs?) and a nuclear deterrent of its own that to actually do these things.

"Japan's grand strategy is deterrence against China," said retired Japanese Vice Admiral Toshiyuki Ito, who is now a professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, when speaking with UPI. "It seeks to constantly show China of the high costs of missteps in order to prevent war." One presumes the same must apply to North Korea, and deterrence often requires one to ratchet up one's capabilities and capacities.

The effect a Japanese missile flying over North Korea to land in the Yellow Sea would have on Pyongyang and Beijing may be entirely worthwhile.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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