Chinese Aggressions

Japan builds an ‘island wall’ to counter China’s intensifying military, territorial incursions
By Simon Denyer

An officer with Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force looks out over a new base on the Japanese island of Miyako on July 28. 

MIYAKO, Japan — A high-stakes “game of chicken” is playing out in the East China Sea, as Beijing pokes and provokes Tokyo with an intensifying campaign of aerial and maritime encroachments designed to challenge Japan’s control of its islands.
Every day, around the clock, Japan scrambles fighter jets and dispatches coast guard vessels to counter some new Chinese provocation and ward off the intruding boats and planes. 

It is also building a “wall” of defensive installations, including missile bases, along the chain of subtropical, touristed islands that make up the archipelago’s southwestern arc.
“China wants to change the status quo, but it does not want a military confrontation,” said Michael Bosack, a special adviser at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies in Japan. 

“The problem here is that miscalculation may lead to confrontation and/or escalation.”
The contest has prompted a shift in Japan’s defense strategy. 

Over the past few years, the country has significantly expanded its air force and coast guard bases centered on the southwestern island of Okinawa, which already hosts tens of thousands of U.S. troops and the largest U.S. air base in the Asia-Pacific.
A 2,100-strong Japanese Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, the first of its kind, was created in March 2018, with a mandate to defend — and if necessary, retake — Japanese islands that could be targets of invasions.
Military bases are being established on more-remote islands stretching west toward Taiwan, to house troops and missiles capable of defending territory, waterways and airspace. 

Defense experts call it the “southwestern wall.”
On the island of Miyako, among sugar-cane fields, Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force opened a new base in March that will accommodate 700 to 800 troops, anti-ship and surface-to-air missile batteries, and radar and intelligence-gathering facilities.
A similar base was established on the island of Amami Oshima at the same time. 

A smaller facility opened on the westernmost island of Yonaguni in 2016, and another is planned for the island of Ishigaki by 2021, each forming a brick in the wall.
The territorial dispute centers on five small, uninhabited islands controlled by Japan and known as the Senkakus.
Tensions over those islands have flared in recent years as Beijing has sought to assert its maritime claims more aggressively, especially since Japan purchased three of the islands from a private owner in 2012 and China declared an air defense identification zone covering the area in 2013.
Since then, armed Chinese coast guard vessels and armed fishing boats known as the “maritime militia” have been regular visitors to the territorial seas around the Senkakus and to the wider contiguous zone between 12 and 24 nautical miles from the islands. 

Between April and June, Chinese ships penetrated that area for a record 64 consecutive days, Japan says.
Not everyone on Miyako island is a fan of Japan's new military base

Experts refer to these tactics as “gray zone” operations, intended to gain an advantage without provoking military conflict.
“China engages in unilateral, coercive attempts to alter the status quo based on its own assertions that are incompatible with the international order,” Japan’s Defense Ministry said in its latest strategy paper, adding that “expanding and intensifying military activities at sea and in the air” represent a serious security concern.
China denies its moves are expansionist or aggressive but says it has an “unshakable will” to uphold its "territorial sovereignty".
It is the same language that China uses to defend similar tactics in the South China Sea, where it has built a string of artificial islands equipped with military facilities in disputed waters.
In the East China Sea, Japan and China are competing not only for control of the disputed Senkaku islands but for dominion over the broader western Pacific Rim.
The Japanese archipelago forms part of the “first island chain,” a string of island groups stretching across East Asia from Russia to Borneo. 

During the Cold War, the United States saw control of this island chain as a way to contain the Soviet Union and China; these days, Beijing wants to break the chain to gain untrammeled access to the Pacific.

Japan’s new island bases are also intended to monitor and protect two key waterways in that chain, the Miyako and Tokara straits. 

China contests Japan’s right to control those waters, and last month its aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailed through the Miyako Strait for the third time in just over a year. 

Its fighters and bombers take similar routes.
China has the right of passage under international maritime law, but Japan bristles to see so much military hardware crossing freely between the links in its island chain. 

It scrambled its warplanes a record 851 times in 2016 and 179 times between April and June this year.
The Center for International and Strategic Studies calls the situation a “slow-moving crisis”, warning that an accidental collision could easily spiral into conflict. 

The Rand Corp. warns that China’s steady escalation and increasingly provocative penetrations could “strain Japan’s capacity to respond” while avoiding the risk of an armed conflict that could potentially draw in the United States.
The standoff is already straining domestic politics in Japan, where defense spending has fallen far behind China’s in the past three decades and efforts by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to reverse the downtrend have proved controversial.
On the islands, resistance to the new Japanese bases is significant. 

On Miyako, a small but determined group of protesters says the Defense Ministry lied about its plans to store missiles there and does not prioritize the islanders’ welfare and safety.
Like the people of Okinawa’s main island who are protesting against U.S. bases, people of this once independent region remember bitterly how civilians suffered here in intense fighting between American and Japanese troops during World War II. 

Many want no part in big nations’ wars.
Similar protests and petitions signed by thousands have slowed construction of the Ishigaki base and stalled the deployment of a U.S.-made missile defense system in Akita in northern Japan and Yamaguchi in western Japan and Osprey aircraft in Saga in the southwest.
Japan’s government has acknowledged it needs to better manage local concerns but insists it will not be deterred from its strategic goals.
As well as bolstering its own defenses, Japan’s navy says it has also increased the frequency of joint exercises with friends and allies such as the United States, Australia and India as it seeks to build what it calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

The Empire Strikes Back

Japan to get first aircraft carrier since second world war amid China concerns

By Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Japan is to upgrade two of its existing Izumo-class helicopter carriers.

Japan is to acquire at least one aircraft carrier for the first time since the second world war, as it attempts to counter Chinese maritime expansion in the Pacific ocean.
The government will upgrade its two existing Izumo-class helicopter carriers so they can transport and launch fighter jets, according to media reports. 

The plans are expected to be included in new defence guidelines due to be released next month.
This week the Nikkei business paper reported that Japan was poised to buy 100 F-35 stealth jets from the US at a cost of more than US$8.8bn, a year after President Donald Trump urged Tokyo to buy more US-made military equipment.
The reported order is in addition to 42 F-35 jets it has already bought from the US.

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told President Trump in September that high-spec military equipment would be “important to strengthen Japan’s defences”.
By refitting its two 248-metre-long Izumo-class vessels, which can each carry up to 14 helicopters, Japan would in effect be acquiring its first aircraft carriers since the end of the war.
Previous Japanese governments have ruled out acquiring aircraft carriers, adhering to the postwar consensus that the vessels’ capabilities could be interpreted as offensive, in a possible violation of the country’s “pacifist” constitution.
In its latest defence white paper, Japan noted that China had acquired and built aircraft carriers to enable it to expand into Pacific waters near Japan’s outlying south-western islands.
Increased Chinese naval activity in waters far from its shores has added to bilateral tensions over Japan's Senkaku islands.
“It’s desirable that the Izumo can be used for multiple purposes,” the defence minister, Takeshi Iwaya, told reporters this week.
The carriers will be deployed to defend Japan’s remote south-western islands, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
The defence white paper, published in August, also voiced concern about Chinese military spending and naval activity in the South China Sea.

Exposed: Pentagon Report Spotlights China’s Maritime Militia

For countering China’s shadowy Third Sea Force—the Maritime Militia—sunlight is the best disinfectant and demonstrated awareness is an important element of deterrence. This year’s Department of Defense report to Congress offers both.

By Andrew S. Erickson


Finally, some good news from Washington! 

Last Thursday the Pentagon released its annual report to Congress on military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

The single most important revelation alone justifies the 145-page report’s $108,000 cost many times over. 

Even more than when last year’s report mentioned it for the first time, the U.S. government has officially deployed the formidable credibility of the world’s foremost intelligence collection and analytical capabilities to shine a spotlight and expose the shadowy People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM). 

Previously, in beltway bureaucracy, the PAFMM was mentioned by Ronald O’Rourke in his Congressional Research Service report and by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which rightly recommended that the Department of Defense address this vital subject. 

Indeed, there is no substitute for the Pentagon’s credibility in this regard. 

By releasing these important facts officially and authoritatively, the 2018 report has performed a signal service.
Beijing uses the PAFMM to advance its disputed sovereignty claims across the South and East China Seas. 

The Maritime Militia, China’s third sea force, often operates in concert with China’s first sea force (the Navy) and second sea force (the Coast Guard). 

In an unprecedented accompanying Fact Sheet, the Pentagon’s 2018 report offers a recent example: “China is willing to employ coercive measures to advance its interests and mitigate other countries’ opposition... In August 2017, China conducted a coordinated PLA Navy (PLAN), China Coast Guard (CCG), and People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia patrol around Thitu Island and planted a flag on Sandy Cay, a sandbar within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef and Thitu Island, possibly in response to the Philippines’ reported plans to upgrade its runway on Thitu Island.”
Each PRC sea service is the maritime division of one of China’s three armed services, and each is the world’s largest by number of ships. 

“The PLAN, CCG, and People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) form the largest maritime force in the Indo-Pacific,” the report emphasizes. 

First, “The PLAN is the region’s largest navy, with more than 300 surface combatants, submarines, amphibious ships, patrol craft, and specialized types.” 

It is also the world’s largest navy numerically; as of August 17, 2018, the U.S. Navy has 282 deployable battle-force ships. 

Second, “Since 2010, the CCG’s fleet of large patrol ships (more than 1,000 tons) has more than doubled from approximately 60 to more than 130 ships,” the report adds, “making it by far the largest coast guard force in the world and increasing its capacity to conduct simultaneous, extended offshore operations in multiple disputed areas.” 

Third, Beijing has what is clearly the world’s largest and most capable maritime militia. 

One of the few maritime militia forces in existence today at all, it is virtually the only one charged with involvement in sovereignty disputes. 

Only Vietnam, one of the very last countries politically and bureaucratically similar to China, is known to have a roughly equivalent force with a roughly equivalent mission. 

Moreover, when it comes to forces at sea—militia or otherwise—Hanoi is simply not in the same league as Beijing and cannot compete either quantitatively or qualitatively.
Beijing’s use of the PAFMM undermines vital American and international interests in maintaining the regional status quo, including the rules and norms on which peace and prosperity depend. 

PAFMM forces engage in gray zone operations, at a level specifically designed to frustrate effective response by the other parties involved. 

One PRC source terms this PAFMM participation in “low-intensity maritime rights protection struggles”; the Pentagon’s report describes broader PAFMM and CCG “use of low-intensity coercion in maritime disputes.” 

“During periods of tension, official statements and state media seek to portray China as reactive,” the report explains. 

“China uses an opportunistically timed progression of incremental but intensifying steps to attempt to increase effective control over disputed areas and avoid escalation to military conflict.” 

In particular, “PAFMM units enable low-intensity coercion activities to advance territorial and maritime claims.” 

Because the PAFMM is virtually unique and tries to operate deceptively under the radar, it has remained publicly obscure for far too long even as it trolls with surprising success for advances in sovereignty disputes in seas along China’s contested periphery.
Fortunately, the U.S. government is well aware of the PAFMM’s predations and monitors it closely. In providing such detailed coverage of the PAFMM in its latest report, the Pentagon has strongly validated key findings from the Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute’s (CMSI) open source research project on that subject, which is now entering its fifth year. 

In what follows, I share CMSI’s conclusions and the related text in the report.
A component of the People’s Armed Forces, China’s PAFMM operates under a direct military chain of command to conduct state-sponsored activities. 

The PAFMM is locally supported, but answers to the very top of China’s military bureaucracy: Commander-in-Chief Xi Jinping himself.
Part-time PAFMM units incorporate marine industry workers (e.g., fishermen) directly into China’s armed forces. 

As the Pentagon explains, “The PAFMM is a subset of China’s national militia, an armed reserve force of civilians available for mobilization... Militia units organize around towns, villages, urban sub-districts, and enterprises, and vary widely in composition and mission.” 

While retaining day jobs, personnel (together with their ships) that meet the standards for induction into the PAFMM are organized and trained within the militia—as well as, in many cases, by China’s Navy—and activated on demand. 

As part of such efforts, “A large number of PAFMM vessels train with and assist the PLAN and CCG in tasks such as safeguarding maritime claims, surveillance and reconnaissance, fishery protection, logistics support, and search and rescue.” 

To further support and encourage PAFMM efforts, “The government subsidizes various local and provincial commercial organizations to operate militia vessels to perform ‘official’ missions on an ad hoc basis outside of their regular civilian commercial activities.”
Since 2015, starting in Sansha City in the Paracel Islands, China has been developing a new full-time PAFMM contingent: more professionalized, militarized, well-paid units including military recruits, crewing purpose-built vessels with mast-mounted water cannons for spraying and reinforced hulls for ramming. 

“In the past, the PAFMM rented fishing vessels from companies or individual fishermen, but China has built a state-owned fishing fleet for at least part of its maritime militia force in the South China Sea,” the Pentagon expounds. 

“The Hainan provincial government, adjacent to the South China Sea”—whose important role in PAFMM development my colleague Conor M. Kennedy and I explain here, here, and here—“ordered the building of 84 large militia fishing vessels with reinforced hulls and ammunition storage, which the militia received by the end of 2016, along with extensive subsidies to encourage frequent operations in the Spratly Islands.” 

The report elaborates: “This particular PAFMM unit is also China’s most professional, paid salaries independent of any clear commercial fishing responsibilities, and recruited from recently separated veterans.” 

Lacking fishing responsibilities, personnel train for peacetime and wartime contingencies, including with light arms, and deploy regularly to disputed South China Sea features even during fishing moratoriums.

In July, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence issued the China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), Coast Guard, and Government Maritime Forces 2018 Recognition and Identification Guide. The excerpt above shows three different types of purpose-built PAFMM vessels operated by the Sansha City Maritime Militia.
PAFMM units have participated in manifold international sea incidents. 

As the Pentagon attests, “The militia has played significant roles in a number of military campaigns and coercive incidents over the years, including the 2009 harassment of the USNS Impeccable conducting normal operations, the 2012 Scarborough Reef standoff, the 2014 Haiyang Shiyou-981 oil-rig standoff, and a large surge of ships in waters near the Senkakus in 2016.”
The last of these is particularly significant, since it is now one of several publicly documented examples of PAFMM involvement in international incidents in the East China Sea, but had not been conclusively confirmed by previously known open sources. 

Other examples, as documented in CMSI research to date, include swarming into the Senkaku Islands’ territorial sea in 1978 and harassment of USNS Howard O. Lorenzen in 2014. 

So, while the vast majority of publicly revealed incidents involving PAFMM forces have occurred throughout the South China Sea, the PAFMM also clearly operates and has been empowered to engage in provocative activities in the East China Sea as well. 

Any PRC attempts to deny that the PAFMM operates in the East China Sea, including in disruptively close proximity to foreign forces, may therefore be easily disproven. 

The Pentagon is clear: “The PAFMM is active in the South and East China Seas.”
This conclusive exposure of PAFMM activities in the East China Sea should be an important reminder to policy-makers in Tokyo and Washington alike that Beijing is certain to continue to wield its third sea force as a tool of choice to probe and apply pressure vis-à-vis Japan's Senkaku Islands. 

These pinnacle-shaped features are the peak Sino-Japanese geographical flashpoint. 

As the current and previous U.S. administrations have affirmed explicitly, the Senkakus are covered under Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which states, in part: “Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.”
American and Japanese analysts and decision-makers should therefore redouble their efforts to share information and develop and implement potential countermeasures concerning the PAFMM. 

Here, as elsewhere, sunlight is the best disinfectant and demonstrated awareness is an important element of deterrence. 

Just as the Pentagon’s 2017 report was the first iteration to mention the PAFMM and this latest 2018 edition builds strongly on that foundation, it is to be hoped that the Japan Ministry of Defense’s Defense of Japan 2017 report—which likewise mentioned the PAFMM for the first time, albeit without explicit in-text reference to the East China Sea—will be followed with a 2018 edition offering far more robust PAFMM coverage, including detailed consideration of extant and potential future activities in the East China Sea.
As mentioned above, the Pentagon’s latest report also stresses PAFMM involvement in the layered cabbage-style envelopment of the Philippines-claimed Sandy Cay shoal near Thitu Island in the South China Sea, although it does not mention the fact—confirmed by commercially available AIS data concerning ship movements—that China has sustained a presence of at least two PAFMM vessels around Sandy Cay since August 2017. 

As the Pentagon emphasizes, the “PLAN, CCG, and PAFMM sometimes conduct coordinated patrols.” 

Inter-service cooperation applies in peace and war: “In conflict, China may employ China Coast Guard and People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia ships to support military operations.”
“In the South China Sea,” the report emphasizes, “the PAFMM plays a major role in coercive activities to achieve China’s political goals without fighting, part of broader PRC military doctrine stating confrontational operations short of war can be an effective means of accomplishing political objectives.” 

Other CMSI-documented examples of international incidents involving the PAFMM there that the report does not mention explicitly include direct participation in China’s 1974 seizure of the Western Paracel Islands from Vietnam; involvement in the occupation and development of Mischief Reef resulting in a 1995 incident with the Philippines; harassment of various Vietnamese government/survey vessels, including the Binh Minh and Viking; participation in the 2014 blockade of Second Thomas Shoal; and engagement in the 2015 maneuvers around USS Lassen.
In conclusion, the Pentagon deserves great credit for employing the full force of its tremendous analytical capabilities and official authority to shine a bright, inescapable spotlight on the PAFMM’s true nature and activities. 

There is no plausible deniability: the PAFMM is a state-organized, -developed, and -controlled force operating under a direct military chain of command to conduct PRC state-sponsored activities. 

Publicly revealing the PAFMM’s true nature and activities is an important step in deterring its future use. 

But far more is needed to counter the pernicious challenge of Beijing’s shadowy but fully knowable third sea force. 

As the Pentagon’s valuable new report emphasizes, “China continues to exercise low-intensity coercion to advance its claims in the East and South China Seas.”

Chinese Aggressions

Chinese lasers targeting US aircraft over the Pacific
By Euan McKirdy

A US Navy FA-18 Super Hornet, seen from a KC-135 air refueling tanker during a 2010 US-Japan military exercise above the South China Sea.

Lasers have been used to target US aerial operations in the Pacific, with 20 incidents recorded since September of last year, according to a US military official.
The military spokeswoman, who requested not to be named, told CNN that lasers had been flashed at US aircraft, and that the sources of these flashes are suspected to be Chinese.
The latest incident occurred within the last two weeks, the official said.
None of the incidents have resulted in any medical complaints or injuries, the spokeswoman said. 

The attacks appear similar to incidents that occurred in the East African country of Djibouti earlier in the year, when US military airmen were injured by lasers which originated from a nearby Chinese military base.

The latest round of suspected laser attacks have all occurred in and around the East China Sea, which is home to Japanese island chains, the Senkakus.
The area's waters are near heavy-traffic shipping lanes, and are used regularly by both Japanese and Chinese military and civilian ships, as well as a semi-autonomous "maritime militia" which defends China's territorial interests in the region.
The Wall Street Journal reported that military officials don't necessarily believe the attacks were initiated by official Chinese military sources, but would not rule out that those responsible were acting on behalf of the Chinese government.
Aviation Week & Space Technology, an industry publication, quoted a spokeswoman for the US Marines who said that the attacks had originated "from a range of different sources, both ashore and from fishing vessels."
As with Chinese territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, tensions to the north have flashed numerous times in recent years over the Senkaku islands, including face-offs between Japanese and Chinese air and naval forces that have been termed dangerous by both sides.
In February this year, US Defense Secretary James Mattis reaffirmed the US' treaty commitment to defending Japan and its disputed islands.

Similar incidents
The incidents in the region over the past several months echo similar tactics the Pentagon says were carried out by the Chinese military earlier this year, when personnel at the country's first overseas military base in Djibouti used military-grade lasers to interfere with US military aircraft from a nearby American base.
The official CNN spoke to would not confirm that the lasers used in the Pacific were military- or commercial-grade, but even off-the-shelf laser pointers can cause a hazard to pilots. 

Aiming a laser beam at an aircraft in the US is a federal crime.
In the Djibouti incident, the activity resulted in injuries to US pilots, and prompted the US to launch a formal diplomatic protest with Beijing, military officials told CNN.
Chinese state media denied the original claims by US defense officials, accusing them of "cooking up phony laser stories."
Following the East Africa incident, a US defense official told CNN that the military also believed the Chinese were using similar lasers to interfere with US aircraft in the South China Sea.
A 2015 report in the official Chinese military newspaper the PLA Daily noted that "China has been updating its home-made blinding laser weapons in recent years to meet the needs of different combat operations."
According to the report, Chinese forces have access to at least four different types of portable blinding laser weapons, all of which look like oversized modified assault rifles.
Both China and the US are signatories to the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which prohibits the use of blinding laser weapons as a means or method of warfare.

Sonic attacks
The purported laser attacks come just after a number of US government personnel in China were sent back to the United States for further health screenings after concerns over reports of mysterious acoustic incidents similar to "sonic attacks" first encountered by diplomats at the US' embassy in Cuba.
The screenings came after a US government employee in Guangzhou fell ill in early 2018 after reporting "abnormal sensations of sound and pressure" which resulted in a mild brain injury.

Chinese aggressions: Japan to bolster military base on island idyll

Island of Ishigaki is set to be the site for a substantial deployment of hardware and troops
By Kim Sengupta Ishigaki

A Japanese Self-Defence Forces' vehicle carrying units of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles leaves a port on Japan's southern island of Ishigaki, Okinawa prefecture.

If war is to break out, then Ishigaki would be the frontline. 

This is the island where Japan feels the most under threat from China and the place it will be installing missiles and troops amid clashes at sea, accusations and recriminations.
While international attention is on whether Games diplomacy in South Korea, with the presence of Kim Jong-un’s sister and henchmen present for the Winter Olympics, will lead to peace breaking out, tension between China and its neighbours have continued to grow.
Throughout last year, while Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un traded public insults, Beijing has been quietly bolstering its presence on the extraordinary chain of artificial isles it has been building in waters near and far taking advantage of what it calls "the strategic window of opportunity.”

Three airfields have been put into its seven bases in the disputed Spratly chain. 

There, and elsewhere, aerial photographs from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reveal facilities awash with fortified shelters for warships, hangers for aircraft and radar, underground bunkers and missile emplacement positions.
The Chinese calls a series of archipelagos the "first island chain of defence” stretching in an arc from the South China Seas to Russia’s Kurils. 

For Japan the most vulnerable point is the Senkaku, to which Beijing has laid claims with surrounding isles, in particular Ishikagi 90 nautical miles away seen as the obvious targets.
Hundreds of fishing boats from China, escorted by coastguard ships, or, at times, warships have been in the seas leading, at times, driving back Japanese fishermen leading to clashes with Japanese coast guards. 

There has been a recent spate of incursions into airspace by Chinese warplanes and the appearance for the first time, a few weeks ago, of a nuclear attack submarine in these waters.
The Japanese government are now finalising the deployment of missiles batteries, anti-aircraft and anti-ship, radar installations and around 600 troops to Ishigaki.
Final details are likely to emerge next month. 

The Independent understands the surface to air missiles are likely include American made MIM-104 Patriots capable of taking down Chinese ballistic missiles with enemy vessels being targeted by SSM-1s which carry up to 500lbs of high-explosives and have range of over a hundred miles. 

There are future plans for a joint missile system involving Japan and Western Europe to be installed in a project involving the British, French and Italian MBDA and Mitsubishi Electrics.
China’s attempt at ocean hegemony has led to international reaction.
The US Defence Secretary General James Mattis stressed during a visit to Tokyo that the Washington is fully committed to backing Japan over the Senkakus. 

On a broader basis, the US has been sending warships through the China Seas to underline the right to freedom of navigation. 

The British Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that HMS Sutherland, an anti-submarine ship, will be sailing through the South China Seas. 

The navies of America, India, Japan and Australia, will be holding naval manoeuvres.

HMS Sutherland

The tiny Senkakus were used in the past by a small Japanese community scratching a living out of bonito fishing and collecting albatross feathers. 

But they were then abandoned had been lying unpopulated for 78 years with basically scientific and geographical exploration groups the only visitors.
That these five islets and three barren rocks, with a total area of just seven kilometres, has become a potential flashpoint for a conflict between two modern industrialised states may be reminiscent of the Jorge Luis Borges’s view that Britain and Argentina going to war over the Falklands was “like two bald men fighting over a comb”.
In fact, there was little interest in the islands, apart from its fishing grounds, until an international survey in 1969 concluded large undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. 

The following year China began its claims of ownership.
The steady growth of Chinese presence in the seas, say the Japanese, has damaged the country’s fishing industry. 

Many of Beijing’s coast guard vessels are rebranded warships and the crews of Chinese 'fishing' boats are not fishermen at all, but peoples’ militia in disguise out to provoke. 

The confrontation means that Ishigaki fishermen like Yukihidi Higa can no longer catch the red snappers and groupers they used to off the Senkakus.
“Of course it has affected my earnings, I can no longer go there because of the Chinese and their big ships” he stated. 

“ But they are not just taking the fish, most of the coral from the sea has been stripped over the years, this is not good for marine life.”
The missile deployment comes at a time of great controversy in Japan as premier Shinzo Abe seeks to revise Japan’s post-Second World War pacifist constitution mandated, he holds, by a strong election victory. 

Last month, his cabinet approved an increase of 1.3 per cent in the annual military budget raising it to a record $ 45.8 billion for the year.
The military deployment is also going to be a key factor in Ishigaki’s municipal election next month. “This is certainly going to be part of my campaign. It is of course a very important topic and it needs to be discussed fully and the city will have to agree on providing the land ” said Yoshitaka Nakayama, the mayor.
“I am in favour of the deployment by our Self Defence Forces (SDF). We have seen the Chinese behave very aggressively, they are coming into our territorial waters, our fishermen have been prevented from fishing, our coastguards are having lots of problems, we have seen their planes fly into our airspace. Putting the missile systems here will act as a warning, it may stop Chinese aggression and a conflict in the future.”
The military was a key issue in the election in Nago, the capital of the Okinawa prefecture, last week in the defeat of the incumbent Mayor Susumu Inamine, by Taketoyo Toguchi, a candidate backed by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The Mayor had been an opponent of a US Marines base remaining in Okinawa. 

Mr Toguchi wanted them to stay and backed a plan by Washington and Tokyo to relocate it from a central urban area to one less populated.
For Yoshiyuki Toita, the secretary general of the Yaeyama Defence Association, the result showed “that attitudes are changing: people are beginning to see the dangers posed by China, which is following an expansionist policy. If the Japanese government and the SDF do nothing it will send the wrong message and the Chinese will feel even bolder.”
The defence associations across Japan are private groups which claim to be independent of government. 

Mr Toita, however, is a member of Mayor Nakayama’s campaign and will be spreading his message in support of the military deployment.

"This is about security. We have achieved good things here in Ishigaki and we must protect this community and Japan.”
Many are apprehensive, however, that the achievements may be put at risk by militarisation. Subtropical Ishigaki, with its mountains and mangrove forests, beaches and birdlife, has, somewhat surprisingly for a place not widely known, topped TripAdvisor’s “Destinations on the Rise” in the Travellers’ Choice awards.
“We have definitely seen a steady rise in tourism and this growth has taken place despite this place being so remote. The new airport has been a great plus factor” said Hiro Uehara, the owner of a bar and restaurant.-
Around a dozen coast guard ships are the current line of defence. 

Captain Kenichi Kikuchi, in command of the Taketomi, wanted to stress that they do their utmost to avoid confrontations. 

“We are careful , we are careful because we do not want to escalate matters and also have to mind that the Chinese Navy ships as well their coastguard vessels tend to be large” he said. 

“ But we also do our duty and deal with problems when they arise and make sure we are not outnumbered by the Chinese.”-
What will happen when the missiles and troops are deployed? 

 “That is a decision for the Japanese government and the Self Defence Forces. They will decide what is right. But it could become very interesting.”-

Chinese Aggressions

Japan Sees Red Over China’s Submarine Deployment
By Timothy Saviola, Nathan Swire 

On Jan. 11, the Japanese Ministry of Defense announced that two vessels, a Chinese 4,000-ton Jiangkai-II class frigate and a submarine of unknown origins, were sighted near the territorial waters surrounding Japan's Senkaku Islands. 

The Japanese government later identified the submarine as a Shang-class nuclear attack submarine, after it raised the Chinese flag in international waters. 

This is the first time China has deployed a submarine to the area. 

Specifically, the submarine was sighted in the contiguous zone of the islands—the area between 12 and 24 nautical miles from shore.
Japan formally protested China’s actions, with Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera calling it an “act that unilaterally raises tensions.” 

Japanese officials also reiterated that they are committed to improving relations with China, despite what they consider China’s actions hampering the relationship. 

Japan’s actions included directly summoning the Chinese ambassador to Japan, Cheng Yonghua, to discuss the issue.
In turn, Chinese officials claimed they had the right to enter the waters around the islands because the islands fall under Chinese ownership. 

A pro-China paid editorial in the Washington Post the day after the incident also cited that China had been safeguarding its territorial sovereignty.

The islands were uninhabited and unowned prior to 1895, when Japan annexed them into its territory. 

Japan has maintained administrative control of the islands since the end of the Sino-Japanese war later that year.
The appearance of the Chinese frigate and submarine follows the incursion of four Chinese Coast Guard vessels into the waters surrounding the islands. 

Since Japan chose to nationalize the islands in 2012, China has increased “routine” patrols of maritime law enforcement ships, as well as scrambling military flights to the surrounding seas. 

It was not until June 2016, however, that China first deployed a naval vessel to the Senkauku Island’s contiguous zone, in that case a Jiankai-I class frigate. 

 A deployment of a fleet of fishing and coastguard vessels to the region followed soon after. 

The deployment of a Chinese submarine represents a further escalation from these previous patrols. China’s decision to send a submarine to the area around the islands could therefore represent the same kind of “salami slicing” it has been using in the South China Sea to assert its authority, gradually ramping up its level of interference without taking any steps so far beyond precedent that they would force a response.
China’s actions take place against the backdrop of the two country’s agreement last month to create a new crisis-management hotline to de-escalate conflicts in the region. 

However, Japan made clear during the negotiations that the hotline would apply only to issues outside its territorial waters, so the Senkaku Islands themselves are excluded. 

Previous efforts to create this hotline had been frozen after Japan nationalized the islands, and because Japan has continued to insist that the hotline not apply to the islands.
Beyond its maritime movements, China has continued to accelerate its naval development to bolster its power in the South China Sea. 

The country has launched a new underwater surveillance network to aid its submarines in navigation and targeting. 

The project was led by the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, but has recently been handed over to the Navy for military use. 

The network covers the South China Sea, as well as the western Pacific and Indian oceans. 

The program may undercut the United States’ “asymmetric advantage” in submarine operations due to its expertise in ocean surveillance.
China also recently began construction of its third aircraft carrier, according to sources close to China’s People’s Liberation Army. 

When completed, the carrier will provide China with increased power projection due to its catapult launch system and larger size than existing carriers. 

Sea trials for China’s second aircraft carrier are expected to begin in February as part of its qualification process, but the carrier is not likely to enter service before the end of 2018.

In Other News…
United States

The United States continued its freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea this week. 

In remarks on Jan. 20, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang announced that the USS Hopper, a U.S. missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of the Scarborough Shoal on Jan. 17. 

Lu said “China is strongly dissatisfied with [the incident] and will take necessary measures to firmly safeguard its sovereignty.” 

The disputed reef is claimed by China and the Philippines. 

Philippines Presidential spokesman Harry Roque Jr. commented that the Philippines did “not wish to be part of a U.S.-China intramural,” and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana downplayed the FONOP as not a concern.
U.S. officials confirmed the patrol, and noted that it was conducted under the regime of “innocent passage” under which warships have the legal right to quickly pass through a country’s 12 nautical mile territorial sea even without the coastal country’s permission. 

The last U.S. Navy FONOP, near the Paracel Islands, was revealed last October.

Japan-Australia
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Japan this week, and met his counterpart Shinzo Abe to discuss a visiting forces agreement. 

The proposed deal would make it easier to conduct joint military exercises by providing a more certain legal framework for hosting military personnel and equipment. 

Japan has a similar agreement in place with the United States. 

The two prime ministers agreed to accelerate the negotiations and complete the agreement "as early as feasible.”
Any defense agreement or increased cooperation is predicted to inflame tensions with China, which is likely to view such action as a provocation aimed at countering its rising influence. 

Japan and Australia have concluded similar agreements in previous years as the countries’ security strategies have converged around friction in the South China Sea and Korean peninsula.

Vietnam
Vietnam has invited India to increase its investment in the oil and gas sector in the South China Sea. India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has been active since 1988 in developing wells in Vietnam’s maritime claims. 

Vietnam’s exploration activities often cause diplomatic difficulties because of the region’s overlapping claims. 

 In his Jan. 11 press conference, Lu stated his country’s opposition to the comments and use of bilateral relations as Vietnam’s excuse “to infringe upon China's legitimate rights and interests in the South China Sea and impair regional peace and stability.”
Vietnam’s building program in the South China Sea has also continued throughout 2017 as one counterweight to China’s land reclamation program. 

Vietnam has also recently held defense talks with its former colonial power France. 

France sees Vietnam as an important partner in the region due to the countries’ historical ties, and Vietnam believes engagement with France can provide it with more influence on the U.N. Security Council powers.

Analysis and Commentary: Year in Review
Recent commentary has emphasized the relative lack of engagement from Washington on the South China Sea throughout 2017. 

Writing in the Asia Times, Xuan Loc Doan reviews the Trump administration’s light-touch foreign policy approach to the South China Sea, and how U.S. opposition to China’s building projects has taken a back seat to other issues. 

The Post’s Emily Rauhala writes that though “Trump has given no clear signs that he plans to make the South China Sea a priority in 2018,” potential Chinese actions may bring the dispute back to the foreground. 

Looking ahead, Steven Stashwick in The Diplomat highlights several U.S.-China military trends to watch in 2018, including development of hypersonic weapons, focus on submarine capabilities, and new strategies for littoral combat operations.
China’s posture has also changed in the last year. 

Tom Mitchell and John Reed in the Financial Times chronicle Xi’s effort to seize the “strategic opportunity” created by the U.S. pullback. 

China has focused on reinforcing existing land reclamation in the South China Sea rather than in developing new reefs, and has expanded investment projects in countries like the Philippines to diffuse tensions over the maritime conflict.
In a recent “Centner for Strategic and International Studies” podcast, Zack Cooper and Bonnie Glaser spoke with Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative Director Gregory Poling on the outlook for the South China Sea in 2018, including China’s strategic goals for the region and how the United States could increase its engagement in the region.

Third Sino-Japanese War

• A territorial dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea carries more risk of an international conflict than the South China Sea
• One big factor that increases the threat of conflict is repeated close encounters between Chinese and Japanese vessels

By Nyshka Chandran 

When it comes to territorial disputes in Asia, the South China Sea typically commands the bulk of attention. 

But the East China Sea, a lesser-known hotbed of tensions, might be more likely to trigger an international conflict.

A Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force flying over Japan's Senkaku islands in the East China Sea.

"Despite the lower profile, the dispute in the East China Sea carries greater risk of drawing the United States into conflict with China than the various disputes in the South China Sea," Ryan Hass, David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brooking's foreign policy program, wrote in a note on Wednesday.
Both China and Japan lay claim to a set of islands in the East China Sea that cover around 81,000 square miles. 

Called Senkaku, the area is near major shipping routes and rich in energy reserves.
"There is greater risk of an unintended incident between Chinese and Japanese forces operating in the East China Sea," Hass explained, citing "the frequency of close-in operations involving Chinese and Japanese assets, the absence of mature risk- reduction mechanisms, and the lack of consensus between Beijing and Tokyo on acceptable behavior."
Japan is a close ally of the U.S so if a Chinese-Japanese conflict occurs, the world's largest economy may have to step in given that it seeks to protect allies as well keep sea and air space open, Hass explained. 

If Beijing were to deny access to ships or planes which are operating in accordance with international law, that could also trigger a reaction from the White House, he added.
Barack Obama was the first U.S. leader to state that the disputed East China Sea islands were covered by the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. 

President Donald Trump meanwhile, has frequently criticized Beijing's aggressive behavior in the South China Sea.
For China and Japan, "events in the East China Sea take on heightened significance because the dispute is perceived in both countries as a proxy for how they will relate to each other as Asian powers," Hass explained. 

Previous flare-ups have rapidly roused public emotions, resulting in "limited political space for leaders in Beijing and Tokyo to de-escalate," he continued.
In 2012, Tokyo's decision to purchase three of the five islands from their Japanese owner triggered violent anti-Japanese protests in China, forcing Japanese firms to shut down businesses on the mainland. 

The following year, Tokyo lodged a protest following Beijing's declaration of a formal Air Defense Identification Zone over parts of the East China Sea.
Moreover, "the frequency of close encounters between Chinese and Japanese ships and aircraft in the East China Sea is intensifying" and will likely continue as both countries look to improve their respective air and maritime capabilities in the zone, Hass noted.
Chinese vessels have repeatedly sailed near the islands in recent years, according to Japan's Coast Guard, while Japanese fighter jets have conducted joint drills with U.S. aircrafts over the territory.

This is in contrast to the South China Sea, where matters appear to have reached a stalemate, Hass argued.
"Washington cannot force Beijing to abandon the artificial islands it has constructed or stop China from deploying military assets on them without risking a military conflict," he said.
"By the same standard, China cannot stop the United States from operating in the area without risking a major conflict that would expose Chinese forces to significant risk of defeat and potentially result in the rapid destruction of its artificial islands."
Research last week revealed Beijing has built several new facilities around the Spratly and Paracel islands recently.
In addition, the threat of conflict in the resource-rich zone is mitigated since "risk-mitigation measures are more mature" than the East China Sea, Hass pointed out, noting that Washington and Beijing have protocols to prevent unsafe encounters. 

Japan and China, meanwhile, only just agreed to set up a communication mechanism to prevent clashes in the East China Sea, Kyodo News agency reported earlier this month.

Sina Delenda Est

China has flown bomber jets in the vicinity of Guam and practiced attacks on the island.

• Chinese military activities are causing the United States to worry about the country as the primary threat 
• Chinese bombers have also flown near Hawaii.

By Stacey Yuen

A Chinese Xi'an H-6M bomber aircraft is displayed at an exhibition in Guangdong, China, on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2014.

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii -- China has practiced bombing runs targeting the U.S. territory of Guam, one of a host of activities making U.S. forces here consider Beijing the most worrisome potential threat in the Pacific, even as North Korea pursues a nuclear warhead.
Beyond the well-publicized military build up on man-made islands in the South China Sea, China has built up its fleet of fighters to the extent that it operates a daily, aggressive campaign to contest airspace over the East China Sea, South China Sea and beyond, U.S. military officials here in the region said.

China has also taken several other non-military steps that are viewed as attempts to make it much more difficult for the U.S. to operate there and defend allies in the future.
The officials described the escalatory behaviors by China in a briefing they provided to reporters traveling with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford.
The officials said despite increased threats by North Korea as it pursues its nuclear weapons program, a conflict with North Korea is still viewed as “a fight we can win,” they said. 

With China, they said they “worry about the way things are going.”
China “is very much the long-term challenge in the region,” said Dunford, who was not part of the briefing. 

“When we look at the capabilities China is developing, we’ve got to make sure we maintain the ability to meet our alliance commitments in the Pacific.”
Over the last year Japan has scrambled 900 sorties to intercept Chinese fighters challenging Japan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ. 

In 2013 China announced borders for its own ADIZ, borders which overlapped Japan’s zone and included Japan's Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. 

Since then, increased interactions between Japanese and Chinese aircraft ultimately resulted in Japan relocating two fighter squadrons to Naha Air Base on Okinawa to more easily meet the incursions, the officials said.
“We now have, on a daily basis, armed Chinese Flankers and Japanese aircraft” coming in close proximity of each other, the officials said.
Intercepts between the U.S. and China are also increasing, the officials said.
“It’s very common for PRC aircraft to intercept U.S. aircraft,” these days, the officials said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Chinese aircraft are also testing U.S. air defense identification zones, the officials said.
Chinese H-6K “Badger” bombers upgraded with 1,000 mile range air launched cruise missiles are testing U.S. defense zones around Guam, the officials said.
The Badgers run frequent flights to get within range of the U.S. territory, they said.
“The PRC is practicing attacks on Guam,” the officials said.
Those bombers are also flying around Hawaii, they said.
The vast majority of the flights occur without an incident, for example, a report of unsafe flying. 

The officials said they follow U.S. Pacific Command guidance on how to respond in those events, so they do not further escalate.
Military-to-military relationships between the U.S. and China remain open, if guarded, the officials said. 

Both Chinese and U.S. officials meet twice a year at the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement conference, where the incursions are discussed along with other security topics.
The expanded Chinese fighter and bombers runs are just one part of the country’s effort to “win without fighting” to gradually normalize the gains China has made in the South China Sea, the officials said.
There are other pressures. 

For example, the officials said they estimate the People’s Liberation Army Navy has placed as many as 150,000 Chinese commercial fishing vessels under its direction, even though they are not official Chinese navy. 

The Chinese fishing vessels make coordinated attacks on Vietnamese fishermen, the officials said, ramming and sinking boats near the Paracel Islands. 

China took the territory from Vietnam in the 1970s and has militarized some of the islands. 

The area remains a traditional fishing area for the Vietnamese,
Taken together, China’s activities suggest it is preparing to defend expanded boundaries, the U.S. officials worry.
“I think they will be ready to enforce it when they decide to declare the Nine-Dash line as theirs,” one of the officials said, referring to the territorial line China has identified that would notionally put the entire South China Sea under Chinese control if enforced.
If unchallenged, the U.S. officials worry that China could slowly force countries away from what they describe as the “rules based order” -- essentially the standing international treaties and norms -- in the region and make them shift their security alliances to Beijing for their own economic survival.
Dunford said the U.S. would not allow that to happen.
“We view ourselves as a Pacific power,” Dunford said.
“There are some who try to create a narrative that we are not in the Pacific to stay,” he said. 

“Our message is that we are a Pacific power. We intend to stay in the Pacific. Our future economic prosperity is inextricably linked to our security and political relationships in the region.”
U.S. forces in the region are rethinking what a Pacific war would look like.
“If we find ourselves in conflict out there we will be under air attack,” the official said.
One concept they shared is “Agile Combat Employment” -- dispersing the U.S. advanced fighters concentrated at air bases in Japan and scattering them to 10-15 undeveloped and highly expeditionary airstrips on islands in the region. 

The dispersion would require the rapid dissemination of logistics support to keep those aircraft operating at their remote locations. 

The Air Force has already been practicing how to disperse the fuel, most recently in their Arctic Ace exercise, the officials said.
The idea would be that the aircraft would be so dispersed that it would make it difficult for China to prioritize what it would attack.
President Donald Trump will visit the Pacific region later this week, making stops in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. 

Dunford said he expected that some of the security and economic concerns generated by the increased incursions and economic pressures by China would likely come up.
“If people want to view that as a focus on China they can. But it’s based on a rules-based international order,” Dunford said. 

“It’s focused on our ability to advance our national interests. We’re not going to compromise in that regard.”

Sina Delenda Est

Trump’s blundering cold lead to war between China and Japan
By Richard McGregor

For news out of east Asia, it is difficult to compete with North Korea’s youthful, jocular despot, Kim Jong-un, and his near-daily threats to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at US territory. 

On Monday, Kim was pictured surrounded by his top generals mulling over maps with targets closer to home, in South Korea and Japan, while warning again that he was ready to “wring the windpipes of the Yankees”. 

The young Kim, and his father and grandfather before him, have long tossed violent epithets at their enemies, but Pyongyang’s new capabilities – to potentially deliver a nuclear warhead across the Pacific – have injected fresh danger into the crisis on the Korean peninsula.
The North Korean crisis is one of the few creations of the cold war to have outlived the Berlin Wall, despite persistent predictions that the communist dynasty would collapse. 

There are many factors driving the confrontation, chief among them paranoia in Pyongyang, where the Kim dynasty is focused above all on preventing regime change. 

In neighbouring China, Beijing is paralysed: it is caught between anger at Kim for destabilising the region, and fear that if it pushes Pyongyang too hard, the regime will collapse, and fall into the hands of South Korea, an ally of the US. 

The US itself also seems impotent, knowing that starting any war could lead to devastating attacks on its allies in Seoul and Tokyo.
Lost among the headlines is the fact that the crisis is just a symptom of a bigger drama unfolding in east Asia, where an entire postwar order, built and maintained by the US since 1945, is slowly coming apart.
While the US military bases still dotted across the region have a whiff of latter-day imperialism, for the past seven decades Pax Americana has underwritten an explosion in wealth not matched in the world since the industrial revolution. 

Since the 1950s, Japan, and then South Korea, Taiwan and China, have been able to put bitter political and historical enmities aside to pursue economic growth.
At the same time, the US presence in east Asia has papered over serial diplomatic failures. 

All of the frozen-in-the-1950s conflicts buried during the decades of high-speed economic growth are starting to resurface. 

China and Taiwan have drifted further apart than ever politically. 

The Korean peninsula remains divided and bristling with conventional and nuclear armoury. 

The Sino-Japanese rivalry overflows with bitterness, despite a bilateral business relationship that is one of the most valuable in the world.
The Chinese often quote an ancient idiom when speaking about Japan: two tigers cannot live on one mountain. 

China is in growing competition with Japan to be the dominant indigenous power in Asia, and many view this as a zero-sum game. 

Any clash between them would not be a simple spat between neighbours. 

A single shot fired in anger could trigger a global economic tsunami, engulfing political capitals, trade routes, manufacturing centres and retail outlets on every continent.
Whether these tensions play out peacefully depends not just on the two superpowers, the US and China. Japan – which has at different times threatened to eclipse them both – is also pivotal to regional stability. 

Prior to Donald Trump’s emergence, it was assumed that just about any scenario for the US in east Asia would involve broad continuity for the core elements of past policy, including trade liberalisation and a commitment to alliances, such as that with Japan. 

But Trump is also a living embodiment of the larger trend that the days of US dominance of the region are numbered.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe with Donald Trump at the White House in February. 

Today the relationship between the three powers resembles a geopolitical version of the scene in the movie Reservoir Dogs in which a trio of antagonists simultaneously point guns at each other, creating a circle of cascading threats. 

In the east Asian version of this scenario, the US has its arsenal trained on China; China, in turn, menaces Japan and the US; in ways that are rarely noticed, Japan completes the triangle, with its hold over the US. 

If Tokyo were to lose faith in Washington and downgrade its alliance or trigger a conflict with Beijing, the effect would be the same: to overturn the postwar system. 

In this trilateral game of chicken, only one of the parties needs to fire its weapons for all three to be thrown into war. 

Put another way: if China is the key to Asia, then Japan is the key to China, and the US the key to Japan.
In recent months, it has become fashionable among American journalists and foreign policy analysts to warn of the so-called Thucydides trap – the idea that a rising power (China, in this case) is destined to go to war with an established power (the US). 

But there is another geo-strategic dilemma identified by the same ancient Greek historian, which is more pertinent. 

It is dangerous to build an empire, Thucydides warned; it is even more dangerous to give it away.
This “other Thucydides trap” encapsulates the real dilemma faced by the US in east Asia.

After more than seven decades as the region’s hegemon, the US now has a choice to make. 

It could stand and fight to maintain the status quo, at potentially massive cost. 

Or it could retreat from east Asia, potentially leaving a trail of chaos in its wake.
During the presidential campaign, Trump suggested that Japan and South Korea had become over-reliant on US security, and that it was time for the US to pack and up and go home. 

But Asia’s economic rise has only magnified the dangers of an American drawdown. 

“It is not only true that China changed the status quo by getting strong,” said Yan Xuetong, one of China’s most prominent hawks, “but also that America and Japan changed the status quo by getting weak.”

George Kennan, the renowned strategist, called Japan’s partnership with the US “an unnatural intimacy”, born of conflict between two very different countries, which, over time, developed into a close relationship of its own. 

This intimacy – if that is what it is – has been hard won. 

In his authorised biography, Brent Scowcroft, a hard-nosed veteran of America’s national security establishment, called Japan “probably the most difficult country” the US had to deal with: “I don’t think we understood the Japanese and I don’t think the Japanese understood us.”

Japan to develop missile as tensions with China mount.

It is not only the Americans who feel uneasy about the relationship. 

Washington originally saw the alliance as a way to ensure that Japan was on its side in the cold war and, later, that it stayed in sync with the US’s broader global strategy. 

By contrast, for Tokyo, according to the Japan scholar Kenneth Pyle, the security pact was an “unpleasant reality” imposed on the nation after the war, but one it cleverly and cynically made the best of. 

All the while, Tokyo has harboured the fear that the US and China are "natural" partners – big, boisterous continental economies and military superpowers that wouldn’t hesitate to bypass Tokyo in a flash, if only they could find a way to do so.
Into this volatile landscape strode Donald Trump, Republican candidate and now president, a man who cut his teeth politically in the 1980s with attacks on Japanese trade practices. 

On the campaign trail, Trump criticised Japan and South Korea for free-riding on US military power, and said both countries should acquire nuclear weapons if they wished to reduce their reliance on Washington. 

On trade, he singled out China and Japan for cheating Americans, in league with the domestic Visigoths of globalisation, Wall Street and big business.
In the White House, Trump has slightly altered his rhetoric, paying lip service to the conventions of the postwar order. 

When Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, visited soon after the election, Trump repeated a commitment made by his predecessors, saying that the two countries’ bilateral defence treaty covered the Japan’s Senkaku Islands.

Diplomats in Washington told me after the meeting that Trump had only done this after being talked into it by his daughter, Ivanka.

Japan's Senkaku Islands, coveted by China

Even if Trump accepts that the US, for the moment, has to abide by its treaty obligations to Japan, and other regional allies, he has never made the argument, during the campaign or in office, as to why it should. 

On the question of the other “Thucydides trap” – the principle that it is dangerous to build an empire but more dangerous to let it go – Trump had seemed quite unconcerned; that was something for other countries to worry about. 

Far from fretting about Japan’s ability to defend itself against China, Trump seemed to believe it would do fine.
In an interview with the Economist in September 2015, Trump was asked what would happen if China started bullying its neighbours without the US being there to protect them. 

He cast his mind back to more than a century earlier, when Japan and China began to fall into conflict. 

“If we step back, they will protect themselves very well,” Trump said. 

“Remember when Japan used to beat China routinely in wars? You know that, right? Japan used to beat China, they routinely beat China. Why are we defending them at all?”
Trump, in his clumsy way, had hit on an existential point, one that he exploited brilliantly in his campaign. 

Why do Asian countries need the US in the region anyway? Why can’t they get on with each other independent of the US? 

To fully grasp this dilemma, it is essential to understand the poisonous relationship between China and Japan.
Most accounts of Sino-Japanese relations paint the two countries’ differences as the inevitable result of Japan’s invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s, and throughout the second world war, until Tokyo’s surrender in August 1945, followed by an extended squabble over responsibility for the conflict. 

Alternatively, their clash is depicted as a traditional great-power contest, with an ascending superpower, China, running up against a now-weaker rival. 

A third template takes a longer view: one of a China bent on rebuilding the influence it enjoyed in Asia in imperial times.

Japan accuses China of threatening Pacific peace.

None of these templates alone, however, captures the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. 

For centuries, China had been an empire that established a template of cultural structures that permeated the region. 

Japan’s scripts, its merit-based bureaucracy, hierarchical social relations and exam-intense education system originated in China.

The histories of modern Japan and China have much in common as well. 

Both were forcibly opened in the 19th century at the point of a gun wielded by an imperialist west. 

In the century that followed, they both battled to win the respect of the intruders who considered themselves racially superior to Asians. 

And yet, far from displaying solidarity with each other, the two nations went in different directions: Japan modernised rapidly, while China disintegrated. 

Ever since, they have struggled to find an equilibrium of their own. If one country was ascendant, the other was subordinate.
Despite their shared roots, Japan and China have remained as psychically remote as they are geographically close. 

In Europe, an acknowledgment of the second world war’s calamities helped bring the continent’s nations together in the aftermath of the conflict. 

In east Asia, by contrast, the war and its history have never been settled, politically, diplomatically or emotionally. 

There has been little of the introspection and statesmanship that helped Europe to heal its wounds.
A corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become embedded within large sections of the public. 

In turn, seemingly unavoidable political divisions have eroded trust and strengthened hyper-nationalists in both countries.

China’s economic rise and Japan’s relative decline have only reinforced this trend. 

In both capitals, the domestic tail now wags the diplomatic dog as often as the other way around. What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within the coming decades, go to war.
The enduring strains of the cold war and China’s expansionism all help to explain the region’s diplomatic tensions. 

So, too, does geopolitics, which is the furnace for Sino-Japanese rivalry. 

But at the core of their rivalry are the two countries’ wildly varying and persistently manipulated memories of the Sino-Japanese wars in Asia.
Even the most basic of disagreements over history still percolate through day-to-day media coverage in Asia, in baffling and insidious ways. 

Open a Japanese newspaper in 2017 and you might read of a heated debate about whether Japan invaded China – something that is only an issue because conservative Japanese still insist that their country was fighting a war of self-defence in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Read the state-controlled press in China, and you will see the Communist party drawing legitimacy from its heroic defeat of Japan; in truth, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists carried the burden of fighting the invaders, while the Communists mostly preserved their strength in hinterland hideouts. Scant recognition is given to the US, which fought the Japanese for years before ending the conflict with two atomic bombs.
The history of Sino-Japanese relations since the late 19th century, when the two countries first fought a war, has long had a dominant storyline. 

Japan encroached on Chinese territory, demanding and then taking bits of land here and there, before eventually launching a full-scale invasion and occupation in the 1930s. 

After its defeat and surrender in 1945, so the narrative goes, Tokyo prevaricated endlessly about apologising to China and making good for the damage wrought by its armies.
The first part of the storyline is true. 

From the late 19th century onward, Japan did set out to dismember China. 

The history of the history wars, however, is more complex, with many twists and turns that are lost in today’s shrill headlines. 

When there was much soul-searching in Japan about the war during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Beijing had no interest in seeking an apology and reparations. 

Instead, Mao Zedong and his premier, Zhou Enlai, cultivated relations with Japan in an effort to break the US embargo on their country.
In 1961, in a meeting with a Japanese Socialist Party leader, Mao perversely thanked Japan for invading China, because the turmoil created by the Imperial Army had enabled the CCP to come to power. 

“We would still be in the mountains and not be able to watch Peking Opera in Beijing,” he said. 

“The Japanese monopolistic capitalists and warlords did a ‘good thing’ to us. If a ‘thank you’ is needed, I would actually like to thank the Japanese warlords.”

Trump with Xi Jinping in Florida in April.

Mao often adopted a freewheeling, sardonic style in conversation, which seemed deliberately aimed at putting his interlocutors either at ease or off balance. 

But his statements brushing off an apology and expressing gratitude to the Japanese for their invasion are embarrassingly discordant in today’s China, and so jarring that they are invariably airbrushed by the CCP these days. 

The official explanation contends that Mao used sarcasm to underline how Japan’s invasion had “awakened” the Chinese people. 

Chinese scholars of Japan who have tried to tread a more independent path say the truth is simpler: Mao had no interest in an apology because he genuinely believed that the CCP owed its victory in the civil war to Japan.
Official policy was tailored in conformity with Mao’s views for much of the next three or four decades, even as it grated with many Chinese.

As one scholar at a government thinktank in Beijing told me last year: “This came from Mao’s mouth. There was no need for any discussion, or for him to consider outside elements such as public opinion or conflicts between past and present policies. His power was absolute.”

By the mid-1980s, when Beijing decided that Japanese "remorse" should become a permanent fixture of bilateral relations, Tokyo had come to view such demands as little more than self-serving politics. Some Japanese leaders were willing to apologise, just to deprive China of a ready-made issue to beat them over the head with. 

“We can apologise as much as China wants. It’s free, and very soon China will become tired of asking for apologies,” the former prime minister Noboru Takeshita confided to foreign ministry officials in the early 1990s.

As it turned out, the Chinese never did tire of receiving "apologies". 

They thought they were the country’s due. 

But Japan did tire of giving them. 

In the process, history disputes have become a huge obstacle to a genuine postwar settlement.
The rage expressed in China toward Japan these days over "history" is the tip of a much larger iceberg. 

Beijing’s core problem is not with the details of the war itself, but with the diplomatic deals that were agreed to settle it. 

In Washington’s and Tokyo’s eyes, the San Francisco Treaty of 1951 forms the foundation of the east Asian postwar order. 

The treaty ended the US occupation, reestablished Japan as a sovereign nation, fixed it as a security partner for the US, and gave the country space to rebuild itself into a modern, prosperous nation. 

The treaty also laid the basis for Japan’s gradual rapprochement with other former wartime foes in south-east Asia and Australia.
Chinese "scholars", in lock-step with the country’s political leaders, use a different template for the region, something that is largely overlooked in Washington. 

Their reference points are the conferences in Cairo in 1943 and in Potsdam in July 1945, at which the so-called Three Great Allies – the US, the UK and the Republic of China – set the terms for Japan’s unconditional surrender. 

In the process, as Chinese politicians, historians and activists have begun to argue more forcibly in recent years, Japan was consigned to a permanently subordinate role in the region.
Beijing favours Potsdam, because it disarmed Japan, restored the territories Tokyo had seized in the previous century, and confirmed China’s great-power status. 

It doesn’t recognise San Francisco, because it enshrines the US-Japan security alliance and the American military presence in east Asia. 

China was represented at Cairo in the form of the then-Nationalist government, but not at San Francisco in any form.
The notion that Japan should sit inert in east Asia, enduring a kind of life sentence as a result of having lost the war, absurd as it is, is given much credence by China's top leaders.

As Xi Jinping told the visiting Pentagon chief Leon Panetta in late 2012, “The international community must not allow Japan to attempt to negate the results of the World Anti-Fascist War, or challenge the postwar international order.” 

In another sign of this mindset, a nationalist book that became a bestseller in the mid-90s, The China That Can Say No, had a chapter titled In Some Respects, To Do Nothing Is Japan’s Contribution To The World!
Sheltering under America’s nuclear umbrella in the postwar period, Japan has in fact been a constrained power since its defeat in 1945. 

The Americans, after all, wrote a new “pacifist” constitution for Japan, which said it should only maintain military forces for its own self-defence. 

At times, Japan, at least in security terms, has seemed to be “inert” and willing to free-ride on the Americans.
But thanks to China and North Korea, those days are over. 

Shinzo Abe has fashioned a strong national security policy and strengthened the country’s military. 

While attention was focused on Pyongyang’s nuclear antics in early August, Japan quietly announced that it was studying equipping its military with offensive weapons, such as cruise missiles, to allow it to strike overseas enemies for the first time since the war.

An infantry unit in Japan’s self-defence force at a ceremony at Camp Asaka in 2016.

Japan presents a particular challenge to China. 

Militarily, it is not a pushover like other south-east Asian nations Beijing has clashed with recently, such as the Philippines. 

In 2012, the central government in Tokyo nationalised the Senkaku Islands in order to prevent a far right-wing nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara, from buying the islands from their private owners. 

At that point, Beijing considered trying to take the islands by force. 

A retired regional leader told me that Beijing had studied its options carefully: “They did a number of basic tabletop exercises to work out, if there was a conflict over the islands, whether China could prevail; I had many conversations with Chinese military planners at the time.” 

In the end, he said, Beijing concluded that the “co-relation of forces was not with them”. 

Unlike Japan, which has fought naval wars, China has fought only one, in 1894-5, which it lost. 

The Chinese had made huge strides as a military power, but not so far that they were confident about taking on their old foe.
Perhaps the most salient factor in China’s calculations over the Senkaku Islands was what might happen if it should lose to Japan. 

In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, of course, and the government would certainly fall. 

But that would be nothing compared with the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail. 

“That would be terminal for the CCP,” the former regional leader observed. 

“Regime change.”
Over time, though, China’s capabilities, and its confidence, are likely to outpace those of its neighbour. 

Japan knows that China is not going away, whereas one day, the US might. 

China is keen to emphasise to every nation in Asia a single truth: China’s presence is a geopolitical reality in Asia. 

The US presence, by contrast, is a geopolitical choice, one that China intends to make more and more costly.
If Tokyo continues to feel threatened, and loses faith in the US, the next step is going nuclear. 

That will be the definitive sign that Pax Americana in Asia is over, and it could come sooner than anyone thinks.