U.S. Recruits Japan As Global Military Partner
Rick Rozoff
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara at the State Department on January 6 after summoning him and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan to Foggy Bottom a month earlier and holding a joint press conference with Maehara in Hawaii in late October. Following the last-named event, Clinton toured the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and met with Admiral Robert Willard, head of U.S. Pacific Command, before embarking on a trip to the Asia-Pacific region that took her to Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia from October 27 to November 8. In the last two countries she renewed, strengthened and expanded military ties with her hosts. [1]
Clinton’s meetings with her Japanese and South Korean opposite numbers, dealing in large part as they did with the conflict on the Korean Peninsula, intentionally – indeed brazenly – circumvented the six-party talks format which also includes North Korea, China and Russia. On October 27 she assured the Japanese foreign minister the U.S. viewed the Chinese-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain as covered by the Article 5 military assistance clause of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, and five days later her spokesman Philip Crowley referred to Russia’s South Kuril Islands as the Northern Territories, the term used by Japan, which lays claims to them. [2]
During the recent Clinton-Maehara meeting, the participants “agreed to boost security cooperation” and announced that “the goals for cooperation will be revealed during Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s visit to the U.S. in spring.” [3]
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited the capitals of South Korea and Japan on December 8 and 9 where he campaigned for both a tighter and deeper trilateral military partnership with his hosts and the forging of a Japanese-South Korean defense alliance. He advocated that South Korea and Japan accelerate that cooperation without being “hung up on what’s happened in the past,” a reference to the hundredth anniversary of Japan’s post-invasion annexation of Korea in 1910. He also “proposed joint military drills among South Korea, Japan and the U.S….” [4]
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Jan. 13, 2011