scholarly journals Le Japon, sa politique de défense et l'avenir de son alliance avec les États-Unis

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-119
Author(s):  
Alex Macleod

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War have forced Japan to question its defence policy. In the past this policy has been firmly based on a purely defensive posture which relied totally on Japan's alliance with the United States. Because the Cold War dragged on in East Asia for much longer than in Europe, Japan could carry on the same defence policy as before. Japanese defence planners found it convenient to emphasize the « Soviet threat » as a way to maintain annual increases in the military budget, and refusing to normalize their relations with the Soviets, until the question of the Northern Territories had been settled. They can no longer ignore the various signs of détente in East Asia. Yet they have had limited effects on Japan's defence policy. The Americans have called on Japan to play a role more commensurate with its economic power but want to avoid any hint of an autonomous Japanese defence policy. They pressured Japan into playing a more active part in the Gulf crisis and the ensuing war, but the government failed to muster sufficient support, at home and amongst the other countries of East Asia, for any role for its military outside Japan, even in a non combat capacity. So Japan has sought other regional and global security policies to compensate for this handicap and has met with mixed success. The recent failure to pass legislation allowing its Self-defence Forces to participate in UN peacekeeping operations has seriously jeopardized Japan 's search for a more active role in regional affairs. But will the Japanese continue for much longer to play a second role in the United States' System of bilateral alliances in the Asia-Pacific region which that country can afford less and less ? This is the real dilemma of Japanese defence policy : it can neither remain as it is nor can it easily change direction.

Proxy War ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 182-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone L. Groh

This chapter presents a case study for how India initially supported the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) covertly to protect ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka and then later had to overtly intervene to stop LTTE’s operations during efforts to broker peace. For the duration of the conflict, India’s support remained covert and plausibly deniable. Inside Sri Lanka, the character of the conflict was almost exclusively ethnic and involved the government in Colombo trying to prevent the emergence of an independent Tamil state. Internationally, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most other global powers, for the most part, remained sidelined. Domestically, India’s government had to balance its foreign policy with concerns about its sympathetic Tamil population and the threat of several different secessionist movements inside its own borders. The India-LTTE case reflects history’s most costly proxy war policy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-273
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI

This special issue highlights one of the important subjects of this journal, Japanese politics and international relations, as studied in Japan's neighbors, Korea and China, and Japan itself. The aim is to elucidate the angles taken by these three countries when examining Japan. Before going into the similar and different angles taken, it may be helpful to note two noteworthy features of their interactions and transactions. They are, first, the steady integration of these economies and societies; second, the tenacity of ill-feelings held toward Japan. First, if the lifting in 1991 of the embargo imposed on China for its Tiananmen massacre of 1989 is a key benchmark for the steady and swift regional integration in East Asia since, it did not take a dozen years before the intra-regional trade ratio over total trade went beyond 50%. As compared to parallell figures for Europe at various time points, say 1962 when the Rome Treaty was signed and 1990 when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, the number of years necessary for intraregional trade over total trade to exceed 50% are a dozen years for East Asia versus thirty odd years for Western Europe. It has a lot to do with the pattern of inclusion in East Asian regional integration. It includes China and the United States. In Europe regional integration was meant to enable Western Europe to stand alone. Bothvis-à-visthe United States andvis-à-visthe Soviet Union, Western Europe wanted to band together and bind together those with shared values. East Asian regional integration differs from this European model. The East Asian model is first to strengthen themselves, while seeking opportunities regionally and globally to attain, as a result of their self-strengthening strategy, high regional strength and high regional integration.


1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred H. Lawson

Diplomatic historians of all persuasions agree that the Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 played a considerable part in initiating the Cold War. For revisionist writers, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during these months resulted from American efforts to carve out a sphere of influence in the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. By the autumn of 1945, according to this view, U.S. firms had gained controlling interests in the consortia holding exclusive rights to work the extensive petroleum deposits located in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; more importantly, Iranian officials were making repeated overtures to American concerns in an effort to counterbalance established British interests with more dynamic ones based in the United States. When the Red Army prevented the government in Tehran from suppressing separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in December 1945, the Truman Administration manipulated the Security Council of the United Nations into mandating a Soviet withdrawal from northern Iran.


Author(s):  
Ivan Desiatnikov ◽  

The article focuses on the analysis of US-Vietnam relations during the period from 1945 to 1975. The aim of the article is to trace the changes that took place in the US-Vietnam relationship over that period, to identify the factors that influenced them, as well as the approaches used by the heads of the countries to tackle their foreign policy objectives in the region. The author traces the evolution of US policy in Vietnam pursued by Presidents H. Truman, D. Eisenhower, J. Kennedy, L. Johnson and R. Nixon. The United States had diametrically opposed position on relations with the Vietnamese governments, namely, confrontation and military conflict with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and cooperation, military and economic aid to the Republic of Vietnam. The author concludes that the US attitude towards Vietnam was determined by the international situation at that time, including the beginning of the Cold War. The policies of Presidents D. Eisenhower and J. Kennedy were to restrain the expansion of the Communist bloc's sphere of influence. The direct involvement of the US military in the Vietnam conflict, initiated by L. Johnson, pursued the goal of enhancing the prestige of the United States in the global confrontation with the USSR. The split between the Soviet Union and China was used by the US to get out of the Vietnam War and mend relations with China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union in the Asia-Pacific region. Instead, the Republic of Vietnam, which had been the "junior partner" of the United States, was left to its fate.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135-160
Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.


1971 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 439-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Weakland

It is clear that the Government of the Chinese People's Republic is very concerned about national defence and possible foreign attack – especially from the United States, but increasingly from the Soviet Union also. Obviously, such concerns are largely relatable to both historical and current political and military realities – such as 100-odd years of western and Japanese encroachments on China, the Vietnam war, American military bases around China, Chinese-Soviet border clashes, and both ideological and practical political conflicts between China and the United States, and China and the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, these practical realities alone cannot provide a full basis for understanding the nature and strength of Chinese concerns about potential invasion. In the first place, such attitudes are both too deep and too wide. Traditionally, from long before the West became powerful in Asia, China has been concerned to keep foreigners out or at least carefully restricted, and long before the bitter attacks by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on “cultural imperialism” this concern extended to economic and cultural as well as direct military or political influence. Second – more generally, but more fundamentally – political behaviour and attitudes are never so neatly and completely rational and compartmentalized as to depend only on the “real” political circumstances. As with anyone else, both what the Chinese perceive as “real” and as “political,” and the significance attributed to these perceptions, depends also on the lenses they use to view the world. And the nature of the lenses used to view international affairs may be shaped by matters that at first seem remote from international relations, and by unconscious and emotional as well as conscious and rational calculations.


1988 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 452-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Nincic

The notion that the attitudes of the American public vis-a-vis the Soviet Union are driven essentially by emotion, and that they are more extreme and volatile than those of the government itself, is widely believed but may not be valid. While the public typically desires a combination of tough and conciliatory policies, it also tends to express, at any given moment, particular concern about whichever of the two it feels is most slighted in U.S. policy. Thus, the public will tend to seek conciliatory behavior from hawkish administrations while preferring a tough stance from administrations it deems dovish. By so doing, the public is likely to have a moderating effect on official behavior toward Moscow. The proposition is tested with reference to shifts in public approval of presidential Soviet policy, and certain implications are suggested for the manner in which political leadership perceives of its mandate.


1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Aaron Wildavsky

I wish to consider the possibility that a good part of the opposition to the main lines of American foreign policy is based on deep-seated objections to the political and economic systems of the United States. This is not to say that existing policy is necessarily wise or that there may not be good and sufficient reasons for wishing to change it. Indeed, at any time and place, the United States might well be overestimating the threat from the Soviet Union or using too much force. What I wish to suggest is that across-the-board criticism of American policy as inherently aggressive and repressive, regardless of circumstance – a litany of criticism so constant that it does not alert us to the need for explanation – has a structural basis in the rise of a political culture that is opposed to existing authority.To the extent that this criticism is structural, that is, inherent in domestic politics, the problem of fashioning foreign policies that can obtain widespread support is much more difficult than it is commonly perceived to be. For if the objection is to American ways of life and, therefore, “to the government for which it stands,” only a transformation of power relationships at home, together with a vast redistribution of economic resources, would satisfy these critics. If the objection is not only to what we do but, more fundamentally, to who we are, looking to changes in foreign policy to shore up domestic support is radically to confuse the causal connections and, therefore, the order of priorities.


1959 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 630-634 ◽  

Case concerning the Aerial Incident of November 7, 1954 (United States v. Soviet Union): On July 7, 1959, an application instituting proceedings against die Soviet Union was filed in the Registry of the Court by the government of the United States. In its application the government of the United States alleged that on November 7, 1954, one of its aircraft was attacked and destroyed over the Japanese island of Hokkaido by fighter aircraft of the Soviet Union. It requested the Court to find that the Soviet Union was liable for the damages caused and to award damages in the sum of $756,604. It also stated that it had submitted to the Court's jurisdiction for the purposes of this case and that it was open to the government of the Soviet Union to do likewise. In accordance with Article 40 of the Statute of the Court, the application was thereupon communicated by the Registry to the government of the Soviet Union.


1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan

Involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960 illustrates dramatically an American dilemma in foreign policy: the apparent incompatibility between the nation's emotional rejection of colonialism and the burdens of world leadership which include the consequences of anticolonialism. In 1960 the United States joined the Soviet Union in expediting the removal of the NATO partner, Belgium, from the Congo, helped to increase the power of the United Nations in the Congo at the expense of Belgian interests, and used its influence to destroy the Western-oriented regime of Moise Tshombe of secessionist Katanga. But in 1964 the United States was largely responsible for replacing the United Nations' forces in the Congo with Belgian troops; in 1965 the United States supported Tshombe's government in Leopoldville; and in 1966 and 1967 the United States joined Belgium in an uneasy vigil over the government of General Joseph Mobutu. It is not surprising that its efforts should have been interpreted by communists as American imperialism, by Africans as neocolonialism, and by many allies either as incorrigible naiveté or as hypocrisy.


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