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Political games have no place in security policy

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In Brief

In hindsight, the April 12 conversation between outgoing Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and US President Barack Obama was a watershed.

Seated beside each other at a dinner held during the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, the two leaders talked for about 10 minutes mainly about relocating the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Obama told Hatoyama he had not made any public comments until then because Hatoyama had said, ‘Trust me,’ when the two met last November.

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However, Obama also said he could not afford to delay a decision much longer because of concerns raised not only in Japan and the United States, but also among neighboring nations in the Asia-Pacific region. Obama said he hoped Hatoyama understood the situation.

Hatoyama told Obama: ‘I will resolve this issue by the end of May. I want to reach a conclusion by then. I ask for your continued cooperation.’ With that comment, Hatoyama had established the end of May as the deadline for resolving the Futenma relocation issue.

Last week, the Hatoyama Cabinet decided to move Futenma to an area near Henoko in Nago, also in Okinawa Prefecture. While that decision indicates that Hatoyama kept his promise to Obama, the area chosen is almost the same as the site included in the 2006 agreement between Japan and the United States on the Futenma relocation. Details must still be worked out, such as the runway construction method.

The political damage from the Social Democratic Party’s decision to leave the ruling coalition over the Futenma issue resulted in Hatoyama announcing his resignation Wednesday. And it still remains unclear if a relationship of trust between Japan and the United States can be restored.

The government led by the Democratic Party of Japan has lacked gravitas when dealing with the Japan-US alliance, which is a life-and-death matter for Japan’s foreign affairs and national security. Hatoyama’s own words underscored that shortcoming when he promised during the campaign for last year’s Lower House election to relocate Futenma out of Okinawa Prefecture, at the minimum.

After his ‘trust me’ pledge to Obama, Hatoyama explained he was leaning toward the Henoko move because he learned about the important deterrent role played by US Marines based in Japan. In addition, the Hatoyama administration was not thorough in its analysis of the situation and overly optimistic about how matters would play out. Those factors, along with a shallow understanding of the issues, led to a deep rift in the alliance with the United States.

The alliance cannot be maintained without trust, and the crisis arising from that lack of trust continues between Japan and the United States.

There were several crucial moments in the process of reaching a decision on Futenma.

The first stumbling block for Hatoyama was last November, when he uttered his ‘trust me’ comment. Hatoyama later exacerbated matters when he flip-flopped and said a Futenma decision would be delayed. At a meeting held in Tokyo on December 3-4 between Cabinet-level officials, Japanese officials suddenly told their US counterparts that a decision on Futenma by year-end was practically impossible. The officials explained they had to change course to maintain the ruling coalition with the SDP, which had long called for moving Futenma either out of Okinawa or out of Japan and was opposed to the 2006 agreement.

US officials could barely conceal their frustration, asking their Japanese counterparts, ‘Which are you going to choose, the Japan-US alliance, or the SDP, which opposes that alliance?’

US officials had taken Hatoyama’s ‘trust me’ pledge as a secret pact between the prime minister and president to resolve the Futenma issue by year-end along the lines of the 2006 agreement.

On the evening of December 4, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa told Akihisa Nagashima, a defense parliamentary secretary: ‘Until yesterday we were discussing policy, but from today the focus is on the politics. Mr. Nagashima, our job is to protect the prime minister.’ Behind the Japanese decision to put off resolving the Futenma issue was the DPJ’s need to obtain the cooperation of its ruling coalition partners in compiling the fiscal 2010 government budget by the year-end.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano reflected on what went on in December.

‘The judgment that a year-end resolution of the Futenma issue was impossible was made because priority was placed on compiling the government budget by December 25,’ he said. ‘If we had let the SDP go, discussions in the Budget Committee would have been impossible. We had to ask for cooperation on the budget even if it meant prostrating ourselves. We were thinking about what happened to the Hosokawa administration.’

Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa’s government, in which Hatoyama served as a deputy chief Cabinet secretary, lost momentum when it failed to compile the government budget by the end of 1993.

For its part, the United States began having grave doubts about the Hatoyama administration. Last December, a high-ranking official of the Obama administration told me about the ‘fundamental doubt’ held by the United States. ‘We are uncertain about how committed Prime Minister Hatoyama is to the Japan-US alliance,’ the official said. ‘Doubts began to grow that there were completely different strategic views of the alliance between Prime Minister Hatoyama and the United States.

‘Secondly, there was the casualness of his words and a lack of consideration for the effect that his own comments would have. There was also the matter of leaving Japan’s national security policy mortgaged to the SDP, which had taken a hostile stance on the alliance.’

Hatoyama’s next blunder was trying to have Tokunoshima island in Kagoshima Prefecture serve as an alternative relocation site. The Nago mayoral election in January was won by a candidate opposed to having Futenma functions moved to the city. That made the possibility of implementing the 2006 agreement much more difficult.

For those reasons, moving the Futenma functions outside of Okinawa and to Tokunoshima must have appeared even more appealing. However, the United States rejected moving the helicopter group to Tokunoshima because it was unworkable from a military operational standpoint. While the United States showed flexibility about moving some training exercises to Tokunoshima, that was likely designed to show Washington taking a conciliatory stance.

The Hatoyama administration described the 2006 agreement made while the Liberal Democratic Party was in control of government as being ‘immersed in vested interests and harmful to the environment.’ While administration officials ran around in search of a ‘magic wand’ that would produce an alternative relocation site, they failed to conduct an expert evaluation of whether candidate sites were feasible from a military standpoint.

In that sense, the Tokunoshima proposal was a symbolic example. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano led another effort to dig up an alternative relocation site, which resulted in a proposal to move Futenma functions off the coast of White Beach in Okinawa. However, the United States never took that proposal seriously, and it died quickly.

With Hatoyama pushing Tokunoshima and Hirano trumpeting White Beach, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, who was in favor of retaining the 2006 agreement, remained on the sidelines. In other words, the key players of the Hatoyama Cabinet were not working in sync.

The final turning point was the 10-minute conversation between Hatoyama and Obama.

In late March, Okada told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in Washington that it might be difficult to return to the 2006 agreement because of the various proposals being raised. US officials would make no further concessions, and the 10-minute talk was, in effect, Obama’s ultimatum that the issue had to be resolved by returning to the 2006 agreement.

What lessons can be gained from this Futenma process?

The first is that policy must be finalised before any consideration is made of politics. In that process, policy experts must be relied upon, and the policy decision-making process must be strengthened. Any government in which Cabinet ministers make separate proposals and comments cannot be called a government.

The second lesson is to learn from the wisdom contained in old ideas and to develop an immunity to the toxins that may lie within new ideas. That means correcting the habits developed as an opposition party of opposing each and every policy pushed by the previous government and jumping on the bandwagon for any new policy framework.

The third lesson is that any coalition government should conduct detailed discussions in advance and reach agreement on the core elements of national security policy.

The drift in the Japan-US alliance should not be solely blamed on the ‘loopy’ nature of Hatoyama’s personality. The lack of interest in national security policy as well as a lack of policy realism may be nothing more than a reflection of ourselves as a people who have failed to deal seriously with the national security of Japan and the world, while being placed under the protection of the United States–and on the sacrifices made by Okinawa–throughout the postwar era.

It is obvious that the DPJ government was ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal adequately with foreign affairs and national security policy. Before taking on their roles, the Cabinet ministers placed in charge of foreign affairs and national security did not meet with prime ministers, foreign ministers or defense ministers of LDP governments for briefings.

If this latest crisis has the effect of educating not just the DPJ, but also the Japanese people, about the importance and dangers associated with national security policy, then it will not have been an entirely negative experience in the long run.

It is desirable to have a bipartisan consensus between the largest ruling and opposition parties on the core elements of national security policy, in particular the Japan-US alliance.

That will be a strategic issue for developing greater trust in a Japan that has entered an age in which a change of government is the norm.

his article was first published here at the Asahi Shimbun.

Yoichi Funabashi is Editor-in-Chief of the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo.

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