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11. Japan's strategic pivot south: diversifying the dual hedge

Author:
Corey J. Wallace
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Tensions between Japan and its neighbors pose a significant problem for the viability of Japan's strategic 'dual hedge' between China and the United States. Japan's response has been to embrace renewed US commitment to the region while initiating comprehensive strategic partnerships in military, economic, and political spheres with nations 'south' of its traditional domain of strategic interest. Strengthened relationships with Southeast Asian nations, India, and Australia may turn out to be crucial for Japan as it will enable Japan to manage its security affairs without having to depart from its long-cultivated maritime security policy, and will enable Japan to continue to pursue a neo-mercantilist economic policy while also supporting the socioeconomic development of other regional players essential for future multipolar balance. Japan's diplomatic activities provide a useful 'strategic contrast' with China that will likely ensure Japan is accepted in the region. Japan's strategic pivot is also domestically sustainable and, therefore, deserves scholarly attention.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, India, Asia, and Australia

12. The United States in Asia: Reflections on Deterrence, Alliances, and the 'Balance' of Power

Author:
Evelyn Goh
Publication Date:
09-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
As the focus of U.S. military attention shifts away from the Middle East and Central Asia, Washington's geopolitical weathervane appears now to point firmly towards East Asia. Given the Obama administration's recent high-profile political 'pivot back' to the region, and against the context of the upcoming Presidential campaign, the two books under review here shed helpful light on American concerns and raise urgent questions about U.S. strategy in Asia. In the noisy cottage industry of strident publications about the rise of China and the future of U.S. power, these books stand out for their considered arguments and scholarly research. Both authors are professors at Princeton, and both served in the George W. Bush administration – Aaron Friedberg as deputy assistant for National Security Affairs in the Office of the Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 – 5, and Thomas Christensen as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in 2006 – 8.
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, and Asia

13. Strategizing aid: US–China food aid relations to North Korea in the 1990s

Author:
Taekyoon Kim
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This study sets out to analyze strategic relations of two major donors – the United States and China – in delivering food aid to North Korea in the 1990s. By reviewing the historical evolution of US–China strategic relations in line with food aid and adopting a game model to verify historical findings, it addresses two significant observations. First, the North Korean food aid dynamics were constructed and crystallized by donors' strategic interactions, rather than humanitarian intention to save the famine-stricken North Korea. Both donors first took into account strategic interests in aid dynamics, and then utilized food aid as a strategic instrument for their own purposes. Second, any multilateral cooperation for delivering food aid to North Korea dooms to failure, despite the potential of aid coordination among donor states. Donors' competition for the primacy in the region of Northeast Asia hampered policy coordination for institutionalizing aid networks. It is concluded that the two donors were bound to strategize food aid as a logical outgrowth of their own interests in the wake of North Korea's humanitarian disasters.
Political Geography:
United States, China, North Korea, and Northeast Asia

14. Diplomacy in an asymmetric alliance: reconciling Sino-Australian relations with ANZUS, 1971–2007

Author:
Shannon Tow
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
There is an assumption in international relations literature that junior allies must choose between supporting a dominant global alliance partner and engaging with a rising power. Yet, Australian policy-makers have paradoxically managed to deepen Sino-Australian relations despite their bilateral alliance with the United States. They have developed a discrete China policy on the assumption that they could persuade Washington to accept it over time. They reasoned that this outcome was more likely if Australia used diplomacy to facilitate Sino-American cooperation and to develop an Australian China policy non-prejudicial to ANZUS. This article explores how this 'diplomatic formula' supported expansion of Sino-Australian relations under the Whitlam, Hawke, and Howard Governments. It explains Australia's intra-alliance influence and paradoxical foreign policy behavior and contributes to understanding the dynamics of asymmetric alliances during power transition.
Political Geography:
United States, China, Washington, and Australia

15. Rising States, Rising Institutions: Challenges for Global Governance

Author:
Isao Miyaoka
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
The global financial crisis of 2008 has strengthened the general impression that the decline of the United States and the rise of new powers such as China and India are simultaneously in progress. A shift in the balance of power must significantly affect the way of global governance. This is a subject of great importance in world politics. In the words of Robert Gilpin, 'the fundamental problem of international relations in the contemporary world is the problem of peaceful adjustment to the consequences of the uneven growth of power among states'. Since around 2010, scholarly attention has been paid to the impact of emerging new powers on global governance. One of the very first books is the volume under this review, Rising States, Rising Institutions: Challenges for Global Governance. This edited volume is the second book that was produced by the collaborative work between the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) – a Canadian think tank based in Waterloo, Ontario – and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. (The first book from this partnership is Can the World Be Governed? Possibilities for Effective Multilateralism.)
Topic:
Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States, China, and India

16. Japan's Middle East policy: 'still mercantile realism'

Author:
Yukiko Miyagi
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Japan's vital interests, both its energy security and US alliance, are at stake in the Middle East. Change in Japan's Middle East policy is charted over three periods, from a stance independent of the United States to one increasingly aligned with US policy. This is explained in terms of four variables: level of US hegemony, threats in East Asia, energy vulnerabilities in the Middle East, and normative change inside Japan. Japan's policy in Middle East/North Africa reflects its general move toward a more militarily enhanced version of mercantile realism.
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, Middle East, and East Asia

17. Something old, something new, something borrowed: rerepresentations of anarchy in International Relations theory

Author:
Marcus Holmes
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
There are many stories to be told regarding the development of International Relations (IR) theory in the United States over the last century. Some have pointed out IR's evolutionary properties, emphasizing the debates that have produced fitter theory with empirical reality. Others have argued that the development has been largely scientific with knowledge built hierarchically through time. In this article, I propose an alternative view of American IR's development. Specifically, I argue that IR theory is best understood through heterarchical organization, with core ideas and concepts rerepresented in new ways, and various levels of analysis, over time. In making this argument I trace duel processes of borrowing ideas from other disciplines and rerepresenting those ideas in new forms in order to solve vexing theoretical problems. The article demonstrates how conceptions of anarchy have been significantly affected by other disciplines and relates those conceptions to views of international security both at home and abroad, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Asia

18. Institutions and the great power bargain in East Asia: ASEAN's limited 'brokerage' role

Author:
Evelyn Goh
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This article argues that in the post-Cold War strategic transition in East Asia, ASEAN has helped to create a minimalist normative bargain among the great powers in the region. The regional norms propagated through the 'ASEAN way', emphasizing sovereignty, non-intervention, consensus, inclusion, and informality were extremely important in the initial stages of bringing the great powers – especially China and the United States – to the table in the immediate post-Cold War period. During this time, ASEAN helped to institutionalize power relations legitimizing the role of the great powers as well as the 'voice' of smaller states in regional security management. But the process of institutionalizing great power relations contains further steps, and what ASEAN has achieved is well short of the kind of sustained cooperation on the part of the great powers that is so necessary to the creation of a new stable regional society of states. Moreover, ASEAN has provided the great powers with a minimalist normative position from which to resist the more difficult processes of negotiating common understanding on key strategic norms. At the same time, ASEAN's model of 'comfortable' regionalism allows the great powers to treat regional institutions as instruments of so-called 'soft' balancing, more than as sites for negotiating and institutionalizing regional 'rules of the game' that would contribute to a sustainable modus vivendi among the great powers. As such, ASEAN's role is limited in, and limiting of, the great power bargain that must underpin the negotiation of the new regional order. This is a task that the regional great powers (the United States, China, and Japan) must themselves undertake.
Topic:
Security and Cold War
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, and East Asia

19. Securitizing trade: the case of the Korea–US free trade agreement

Author:
Min Gyo Koo and Yul Sohn
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
The Korea–US free trade agreement (KORUS FTA) of 2007 clearly shows how countries simultaneously pursue economic benefits and strategic interests in trade negotiations. This study argues that the surprise launch and the successful conclusion of the KORUS FTA illustrate the joint efforts by the United States and the Republic of Korea to re-securitize their bilateral economic relations. Security and strategic calculations held by top policy-makers on both sides catalyzed the official launch of FTA negotiations by removing a number of longstanding trade irritants such as Korea's screen quotas and ban on US beefs. At the post-negotiation stage, however, the lack of bipartisanship— particularly in the United States—to provide trade liberalization for their allies in favor of their own broader strategic interests has led to the legislative stalemate of executive efforts at re-securitization of trade relations. This study concludes that the stalemated ratification process shows the erosion, not the strength, of US power to provide security and trade liberalization as public goods.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States and Korea

20. Japan's reconceptualization of national security: the impact of globalization

Author:
Bhubhindar Singh and Philip Shetler-Jones
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Japan has steadily extended its military reach from a domestic zone of defense against territorial invasion in the late 1950s, through regional security policy in the late 1970s to what has now become a globally scaled military role. This re-expansion is perceived by some as evidence of revived militaristic ambitions, and by others as subservience to the US global strategy. However, taking the cue from Japan's 2004 National Defence Programme Guideline (New Taikō), this paper assesses the role globalization has played in this territorial expansion. The impact of globalization is evident in the double expansion of Japan's national security conception in geographical terms and self-defense forces roles in global security. These 'expansions' are studied through two key elements of globalization – the deterritorialization of complex relations of interdependence between states (security globality) and the inter-penetrating nature of these relations blur the boundary between foreign and domestic spaces (intermestic space).
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
United States and Japan