Japan’s swing to the right: North Asia has become trickier

Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, may be a demon on the drum kit. She is most certainly a skilful politician. Her decisive victory in Japan’s elections last weekend shows just how deft she is in playing the China card.  

China may not be Japan’s most popular neighbour – though, come to think of it, Japan does not really have any popular neighbours. So Takaichi’s foray into China-baiting late last year, when she overturned years of strategic ambiguity by talking up the possibility of Japanese intervention in a “Taiwan contingency”, was risky. Her forthright commentary on the Taiwan issue, and the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s fumbling attempts to gloss what she ‘really meant to say”, upset Japan’s strategic pundits. But they played well into Japan’s “China threat” syndrome. 

A calculated provocation to China, her gamble reaped massive rewards domestically. She has a strangle-hold on the Prime Ministership, as does her party, the Liberal Democrats, on government in the House of Representatives. But whether her security of tenure is matched by any strengthening of Japan’s security in north Asia is much less certain. 

From an Australian perspective, that is no good thing. Takaichi has significantly thickened the strategic stew in North Asia. 

We’ve been there before, of course. Prime Ministers Abbott and Morrison, and let’s not forget opposition leader Peter Dutton, were dab hands at talking up “the China threat”. They continue to do so. In this, they were ably assisted by newspaper leader writers and “experts” who should have known better. In the estimation of The Sydney Morning Herald three years ago, Australia will be at war with China next year, and we are still not ready for it! 

To its credit, the Albanese government has steered a careful and constructive course in recalibrating Australia’s economic and political relationship with China. Albanese, Wong and Farrell have demonstrated the virtues of measured and sustained diplomacy in reconstructing a more cautious and more flexible relationship with China since Marise Payne’s unfortunate promotion of an independent international inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 virus. 

Far from simply returning to the status quo, they have engineered a relationship that deals more effectively with the new realities of China’s regional and global roles. It is, of course, tentative – due not just to the excess of caution that distinguishes the Albanese government’s approach to public policy in general, but to the massive strategic overhang of the Australia-US alliance. It is always difficult to look straight ahead when you need to keep looking over your right shoulder to see what your “protector” is doing. 

The Trump administration will enjoy having a noisy proxy in Tokyo, since anything that complicates and unbalances China’s policy options is seen as a net benefit in Washington, even if it isn’t. In such circumstances, Australia’s incoming Ambassador to Japan Andrew Shearer may wish to exercise his diplomatic skills in any commentary on China, and resist the more strident anti-China counsels of Japan’s former Ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami. Prudence and discretion are the twin daughters of diplomacy. 

But it is not just the prospect of Japanese military push-back to China’s imposition of blockades, no-fly zones and maritime interdiction zones around Taiwan that threatens stability.  

Political and strategic inhibitions notwithstanding, private support for an independent nuclear weapon capability is growing in Japan, including among senior officials. This is stimulated in part by the casual threat of tactical nuclear weapon use by Putin and Lavrov against Ukraine, and the progressive legitimization of nuclear weapon acquisition by countries like North Korea, Israel, Pakistan and Iran. It is also stimulated by the termination of arms control agreements like New START, and President Trump’s encouragement of the Department of Energy to break out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And recent US claims – as yet unverified – that China conducted a decoupled underground test in 2020 will also have heightened Japanese concerns. 

Nuclear proliferation in North Asia would change the strategic calculus in ways that are as unimaginable as they are unpredictable. Yet, for the past couple of decades, Australia’s international disarmament profile has been practically invisible. The investment made by Paul Keating and Gareth Evans to construct the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons was squandered within weeks of the Howard government’s election in 1996. And after four years in office, Labor continues to wear its disarmament invisibility cloak. 

The destruction of the international rules-based order that governments so love to trumpet leaves us all in peril. Law, and the treaties, agreements and rules it creates, mediates those who have power and those who don’t. Without law, there is only chaos, and militarisation is the ultimate retreat into dystopia. 

So, the Albanese government faces a real challenge in north Asia, with a rule breaking America, a re-arming and more belligerent Japan and a China that needs little encouragement to even up and settle old scores and historical insults. What’s the plan? If it’s Virginia class submarines, we’re simply waiting for Godot. Canada’s Prime Minister Carney has given us the hint: an energized and engaged diplomacy. 

Allan Behm is an advisor at The Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs program