Marie Mockett's thoughts on the problem with apologies and Joshua at OFK's thoughtful insight on the worst friend and best enemy prompt me to respond about the shortcomings of American hegemony in East Asia. Marie Mockett concludes that "...Korea, Japan, China...will need to reconcile their pasts and I suspect the West and the US is under pressure to try to help this along." Joshua at OFK I'll quote at length:

What this [February 13]agreement has really done is cemented China’s regional supremacy and highlighted the divergence of interests between all of the region’s democracies, and between them and the United States.  It has shaken the confidence of pretty much everyone in the region who didn’t despise us, which will mean that Japan and South Korea will have more cause to develop independent nuclear arsenals, command and control structures that don’t depend on ours, and robust independent air and naval power.  That’s especially worrying when you consider that Japan and South Korea have declining populations, meaning greater temptations to go nuke or to make alliances of convenience with China.  That, in turn, will allow China to divide and rule, will result in tensions and potential conflict between democracies, and it will help spur the ongoing arms race.  Perhaps an arms race to deter Chinese or North Korean threats is already established fact, but an arms race over a war for Tokdo would be a colossal waste of energy, money, and possibly, lives.

I’m all for Japan and South Korea upgrading their defenses and assuming a greater share of their own defense burdens, but there’s a right and a wrong way to get there.  We have to keep the objectives in mind:  reducing the risk of war and mitigating the harm to U.S. interests if war comes.  What has preserved the peace in Northeast Asia for the last several decades was an informal but very real alliance between the region’s democracies and the United States, with all of their defense capabilities being generally complimentary with, and dependent on, ours.  It had been an Asian NATO in everything but name until 2002.  Yes, there was an excess of dependency on U.S. manpower, but that dependency allowed us to referee disputes and keep everyone from fighting.  Loosening those ties, while simultaneously putting boots on the soil of multiple nations in the region, seems like the worst of all worlds.

China's resurgence as a regional hegemon is still incomplete, but no one would have doubted it. It's really not a question of "if", but "when" and "how". Arguably, it's best for China to regain its hegemonic status in East Asia, because given the dynamics of the region, leadership will exhaust all of Beijing's resources, and leave other regions for American attention. That's if, Washington relationship with China is workable, and the US, as Mockett concludes, "helps reconciliation along." Joshua's worst-case scenarios are very possible: nuclear arsenals, robust conventional forces, and independent C4I. The economic and demographic stakes are just as daunting. This is far from a forgone conclusion, because the US has historically done a mixed job in its leadership role to-date.

The Takeshima/Dokdo issue is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the most tangible symptom of the fact that the US never cemented its separate alliances with Japan and the ROK into at least a Japan-ROK partnership. Joshua calls it "informal but very real", but the formal quirks of the quasi-alliance between Japan, the ROK, and the US has created very real problems for Seoul and Tokyo. Firstly, there is Dokdo/Takeshima. With the San Francisco Treaty of 1952, the US had a very real chance of ending this picayune and highly manipulable quibble (as it could also have decided the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue, only less legitimately), but inexplicably allowed the emergency created by the Korean War to impair its legal judgment and diplomatic leadership.

Dokdo was excluded from Japanese territory during the allied occupation of Japan, but those documents were not legally binding.  The 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, which is the final word on the matter, neither excluded Dokdo from Japanese territory nor declared it to be Korean.  The simple fact is that there is nothing in the World War Two or Occupation documents that definitively states that Dokdo is Korean territory.

But the Treaty of San Francisco did not declare Dokdo to be Japanese either.  Since Japan's occupation of Korea was invalidated, the relationship between the nations before the occupation was restored.  Part of that relationship was contested ownership of Dokdo (see parts one and two of this series).  While that does not necessarily help Korea's historical claim, it does seem to invalidate any Japanese claims to Dokdo based on effective occupation from 1905 to 1945.  That is especially since Korea, as an occupied nation, was hardly in a position to defend its claim.

The bottom line is that Korea and Japan's competing claims to Dokdo/Takeshima are still a wash.

With every recurrence of this spat, the US has abdicated leadership, and it is now debatable whether it would now have the diplomatic clout to convince Seoul to consider its arbitration.

Indeed American clout is a commodity that rises and falls in Japanese and South Korean perspectives, and sometimes in opposite directions. When the US is focused on its quasi-alliance, which has only occurred between 1964-5 (Japan-ROK normalization), Seoul and Tokyo cooperate. When the US disengages completely, as it did in two periods, 1969-71 and 1975-9, Japan and the ROK also cooperate. But when the Washington favors one over the other, as it did in the early 1980's, Japan-ROK relations fray. So, either the US should, as in 1964-5, expend maximum effort to forge a true Japan-ROK alliance, or it can achieve the same ends by ceding its hegemony to China completely. With President Roh Moo-hyun in power, any American partnership encourages Seoul to engage Beijing, because it knows it can always fall back on American troops. Conversely, American assurances to Japan tempt it to confront Beijing for the same reasons. Of course, the recent Australia-Japan pact reduces Tokyo's need for South Korea. Therefore, if the US wants to affect Japan-ROK relations in any formal and very real sense, it needs to woe both like a randy lover looking for a menage a trois. An Australia-Japan-ROK-US (perhaps India?) alliance is a great way to foster China's maturation as a responsible regional power.

Yet, the US has never demonstrated sustained interest in East Asia, as it has in Europe, the Middle East, or Latin America. After WW2, Secretary of State Dean Acheson expended great effort to foster French-German reconciliation and the beginnings of the European Union. Unfortunately, Republicans blocked aid to Europe as a means to extort support for the Chinese Nationalists. Acheson favored a patient strategy with Beijing, allowing the Communists to consolidate power, and then recognizing them to frustrate Soviet influence. he subsequent McCarthyite purges disproportionately affected China experts, and because China experts usually had to pull double-duty in other Asian areas, a great deal of American intelligence talent was humiliated and lost irretrievably. The quid pro quo America accepted for French agreement on European matters and responsibility for Vietnam only further marginalized American moral leadership in Asia. In short, East Asia is a mess, because the US contributed to make it that way.

In hindsight, American hegemony will be remembered for the United nations and the Bretton Woods infrastructure, incredible economic expansion by American multinational corporations and trade liberalization, the impetus for the EU, and, arguably, the stability created by nuclear competition with the Soviet Union. After all, major wars did not recur. But then, there's the black box operations in the Congo (just to name one of the silliest), support for the Saudis, Iran, and East Asia. East Asia has never been a big, post-WW2 American priority, and Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo know it. In the meantime, the US is stuck making emotional appeals about redressing Asian grievances toward Japan. It's a pathetic end to a great power's untrammeled run.