Japan’s Civil-Military Diplomacy

The Banks of the Rubicon

Dennis T. Yasutomo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415711296
• eBook ISBN: 9781134651931
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the early 1990s, there has been a clear evolution in the military dimension of Japanese diplomacy. From Gulf War I in 1991 to the present day, an incremental but unmistakable acceptance of, and resort to, military dispatches has taken place, and yet crucially, Japan has not morphed into a traditional military power.

Exploring Japan's involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq, this book examines the evolution and nature of the new civil-military dimension in Japanese foreign policy. It shows how foreign aid, Japan's traditional non-military diplomatic tool, was merged with the operations of the Japanese Self-Defense Force in Iraq and the activities of NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and emphasises the centrality of civilian power to Japanese foreign policy and diplomacy. However, Dennis Yasutomo argues that while a new civil-military security culture is replacing the old merchant state culture of pacifism and anti-militarism, Japan does not yet qualify as a military "normal nation". Further, the book's exploration of the increased utilization of military power within the context of civilian objectives and non-military diplomatic instruments, sheds light on the current build-up of Japanese military power in East and Southeast Asia amid territorial disputes and nuclear threats, and highlights the impact that Japan's new civil-military diplomacy may have on wider international affairs in the 21st Century.

Drawing on interviews with key actors in Tokyo, as well as with practitioners who have served on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars working on Japanese politics and diplomacy, military and security studies and international relations.

1 When Venus aligns with Mars

Japan’s new civil–military diplomacy

This is the story of how a self-proclaimed pacifist merchant state went to war in the Persian Gulf–Central Asian region. This is also the story of how a realist “normal nation” avoided war in distant lands. In other words, this is a tale of Japan’s twenty-first century new civil–military diplomacy and its implications for Japan’s national identity and future international role.

Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001 triggered what appears to be a sea change in Japan’s foreign policy. Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro (2001–6) committed not only the civil—Official Development Assistance (ODA)—but also the military—the Self Defense Force (SDF)—to the international effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. Koizumi’s dispatches represented the culmination of SDF forays abroad in United Nations peacekeeping operations and disaster relief missions throughout the 1990s in such faraway and diverse locations as Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia, Honduras, and the Golan Heights. After 9/11, in the Indian Ocean, the Maritime SDF joined a multinational flotilla, and in Iraq, Ground SDF boots hit the ground. Neither mission fell under peacekeeping or disaster relief, nor did they qualify as narrow self-defense. It is difficult to call these missions “peace diplomacy.” Japan, it appears, crossed the Rubicon and went to war—again.

On the other hand, these missions hardly seemed “normal.” In the case of Afghanistan, Koizumi dispatched MSDF vessels to the Indian Ocean on a rear-area refueling mission, eventually withdrawn by a subsequent cabinet because of its association with a war, but no ground troops were placed in Afghanistan proper. Only civilians served on the ground to implement humanitarian and reconstruction projects. In Iraq, where Japanese ground troops bivouacked for two and a half years, the non-combat humanitarian and reconstruction military mission ended without a single round being fired and without a single SDF or Iraqi civilian casualty. If it must, perhaps this is how a pacifist nation can go to war without crossing the Rubicon.

The civil–military dimension, especially the expanded projection of military power abroad, adds a new perspective to the old debate over whether Japan is fundamentally realist, pacifist, neo-mercantilist, or approaching some kind of “normality.” In reality, “none of the above” or “a little of all of the above” went to Afghanistan and Iraq. Realist approaches seem most applicable in the Cold War-like atmosphere of East Asia, with a hostile North Korea and the rising economic and military power of China. But beyond East Asia, a realist nation should have sent troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq, especially if Japan is the reactive realist state succumbing to external pressure from a U.S. seeking allies on the ground in both wars. A pacifist nation should have refused troops to both missions, not just one. A merchant state may be interested in Iraqi oil, but its dispatch of soldiers violates the basic nonmilitary thrust of “trading state” diplomacy, while Afghanistan, where Japan is deeply involved in reconstruction efforts, hardly ranks as a major trading partner. These approaches also do not adequately explain the new features of Japan’s approach, including the commitment of troops to collective missions and the enhanced reliance on normative rationales that accompany the increased use of the military.

If these explanations present a partial picture of civil–military diplomacy in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, what explanation allows us to connect all the dots? What approach can integrate bilateralism, multilateralism, neo-mercantilism, pacifism and the culture of anti-militarism, the utilization of the military, pragmatism, and principles? We seek the answer by sailing down the Rubicon, keeping both banks in sight, to our first stop in, of all places, Europe.

From civilian to centaur?

The diplomatic wrangling among the Western allies surrounding the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 spawned a cottage industry analyzing the rift between the United States and Europe. These writings filter European perspectives through American lenses and depict the rift not as a simple difference of opinion over the method of fighting global terrorism, but rather as a manifestation of a power disparity, contrasting national and regional identities, or as a clash of values and contending visions of the future. Kagan’s best seller version puts this dispute in the context of a powerful American Mars, the global hard power hegemon, challenged by a self-righteous regional soft power, a European Venus.¹

This literature basically ignores Japan’s active diplomacy immediately after 9/11. Japan is lucky if mentioned in a footnote (it isn’t).² If inserted into these analyses, we can surmise that Koizumi’s Japan might occupy a place beside Tony Blair’s Britain, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, and Jose Maria Anzar’s Spain—Atlanticists who cast their lot with the U.S. in Iraq in the spring of 2003. In many ways, it was striking to see President George W. Bush flanked by prime ministers Blair and Koizumi among the strongest supporters of the U.S. campaign in Iraq. Both earned invitations to Camp David and a barbeque in Crawford, Texas, while the French were treated to “American fries” and “American toast.” Bush cited his friendship with Koizumi throughout his administration and after, and Japan as a model for the long-term democratization of Iraq and Afghanistan. Koizumi, an Elvis Presley fan, vacationed with Bush at Graceland, an honor not accorded even to Blair.

The Bush administration’s model for American relations with Japan may have been Anglo-American ties. The report that previewed the administration’s Japan policy foresaw a special U.S.–UK-type relationship.³ Japan’s Iraq involvement seemed a big step toward the attainment of that vision, as the SDF served in the UK-administered region of south and south central Iraq. From this perspective, under British cover, Japan looks like a normal nation member of the “coalition of the willing.”

However, in Iraq, Japan was not Britain. The British engaged in the use of force against terrorist attacks and an insurgency, while Japan’s SDF humanitarian and reconstruction, not force protection, mission had been restricted to one governate and expressly mandated to avoid all combat except in the strictest definition of self-defense. As Hughes notes, “Japan clearly differs from the UK in terms of how far it is willing to even consider extending the ‘war on terror’ and the military means by which to pursue it.”⁴ If anything, Japan resembled the Venusians who refused service in Iraq but accepted the challenge in Afghanistan. Jacques Chirac’s France, Gerhard Schroeder’s Germany, and, eventually, Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero’s Spain stood against the United States in Iraq but dispatched missions to Afghanistan governed by Venusian-type “national caveats” that limited the use of military force and established excruciatingly restrictive rules of engagement.

After 2007, new European cabinets began to mend fences with the U.S., especially Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel and France under Nicholas Sarkozy. Ironically, after what many observers consider to be the strongest U.S.–Japan relationship ever during the Bush–Koizumi years, in 2009, rifts appeared between the new governments of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and President Barack Obama. One source of the gap might be attributable to the stronger Venusian impulse of Hatoyama’s foreign policy questioning the realist imperative of U.S. forces stationed in Okinawa, withdrawing the MSDF from the Indian Ocean, ending the residual air transport mission in Iraq, threatening to investigate Koizumi’s Iraq decision, and refraining from expanding its commitment to Afghanistan beyond an increased aid pledge.

In many ways, both Japan’s Atlanticist-like and Venusian response to 9/11 had distinctive features: Japan, too, stationed troops in one theater with caveats and refused a dispatch to the other, and it, too, oscillated between friendly and contentious relations with the U.S. Japan just did this in reverse order. It sent troops to Iraq rather than Afghanistan, and it opened a rift with the U.S. when others were closing theirs. If considering the Iraqi and Afghan war missions together, there is little to suggest either a consistent or pure normal nation or pacifist diplomacy. In fact, one gets the impression that Japan’s civilian involvement in Afghanistan was shaped by pacifism and Japan’s military dispatch to Iraq reflected a realist calculation. Yet, Japan did it backwards again. A pacifist Japan should have sent troops to Afghanistan, which had been considered the safer theater after the ousting of the Taliban by the end of 2001. Instead, Tokyo went to Iraq, which descended into a chaotic and dangerous civil war in 2003.

This split-screen image of Japan is symptomatic of the difficulty explaining Japanese diplomacy through a single framework. Venusian behavior has not risen to the status of an orthodox “ism,” but there is an underlying conceptual framework that provides a more comprehensive portrait of Japan’s behavioral patterns. That conceptualization is “civilian power.” The fit is not perfect, given its origin and conceptual fluctuations, but it provides a compelling explanation, once adjusted to Japan’s case, of diplomacy toward Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Civilian power reflects the aspirations of Europeans who wished to cross back from the far bank of the Rubicon after centuries of great power struggles and two world wars originating on the continent. In the words of François Duchêne, credited with devising the concept, Europe would recover from war as “the first major area of the Old World where age-old processes of war and indirect violence could translate into something more in tune with the twentieth-century citizen’s notion of civilized politics.”⁵ Duchêne, a French man of letters, worked with Jean Monnet and a group of visionary European leaders who inaugurated institutions and processes that eventually culminated in the European Union, and predicted a new diplomacy premised on the disutility of military power and steeped in cooperative and conciliatory discourse.

Hanns W. Maull, a German academic and policy adviser, has since played a formative role in defining and promoting civilian power concepts and policies. Maull, who is of special interest because of his pairing of Japan and West Germany as distinctive prototypical civilian powers in the late 1980s, provided a set of requirements for civilian power that included the acceptance of cooperative diplomacy in pursuit of international objectives; the reliance on non-military, especially economic, diplomatic instruments, with military power to be considered a “residual instrument”; and the willingness to adopt supranational mechanisms to solve international problems.⁶

The early conceptualization of civilian power assumed that the world dominated by great powers would give way to a softer form of power characterized by cooperative multilateralism. This diplomacy would promote the replication of domestic democratic values in which “the use of military force is tamed.”⁷ When used, military force must be “based on a collective decision (rather than unilaterally) and confined strictly to purposes of effective peacekeeping, peace-making, deterrence, and defense against the aggressive use of force.”⁸

Civilian power emerged more as a political aspiration than an international relations theory, but the emphasis on cooperation, domesticating nation-state behavior, and soft power was a rejection of realist tenets that focused on contentious and competitive nation-states struggling for survival through hard power. Realists struck back, spearheaded by Hedley Bull, who argued that this flight into idealism could be possible in Europe only because of the successful maintenance of a realist world. He argued that Europe could assume a civilian power identity only because of the protective cover provided by NATO and the U.S. In other words, “the power or influence exerted by the European Community and other such civilian actors was conditional upon a strategic environment provided by the military power of states, which they did not control.” Or to put it more bluntly, Europe benefitted from being a free rider.⁹

In the 1990s and early twenty-first century, the European utilization of military force in Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean seemed to confirm Bull’s criticism. Kosovo challenged the requirement of “last resort” use of the military by teaching Europe the lesson that diplomacy without the military lacks teeth. The use of force in former Yugoslavia raised the question of whether these countries were now less “civilian” and more traditional powers. With Europe seemly immobilized, the U.S. took the lead under a NATO, not a United Nations, banner. The collective military action without a UN mandate challenged the civilian power advocacy of international legitimacy.¹⁰ Perhaps we can make a distinction between “collective security,” sanctioned by the UN Charter, and “cooperative security,” a looser configuration that can accommodate both NATO missions and “coalitions of the willing.” The difference between “collective” and “cooperative” security is nominal, but as we will see in subsequent chapters, semantic distinctions become critical for justifying Japanese military expeditions to the Indian Ocean and Iraq.

The utilization of force, and especially the building of regional defense mechanisms, struck at the heart of arguments against civilian power. With the establishment of the European Security and Defense Policy in 1999, the creation of units known as “battle groups,” hardly a pacifist-sounding nomenclature, and the subsequent dispatches of EU military forces out of area, these developments seemed to indicate a major shift toward recognition of the utility of mil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 When Venus aligns with Mars: Japan’s new civil–military diplomacy
• 2 The near bank: from “strategic ambiguity” to “strategic synergy” in Afghanistan
• 3 The far bank: from “shock and awe” to “parse and awe” in Iraq
• 4 The far bank: from “two wheels of one cart” to “strategic symbiosis” in Samawah
• 5 On the banks of the Rubicon: at the water’s edge
• Bibliography
• Index