With newly re-elected President Barack Obama having chosen Southeast Asia as his first foreign destination, where he also attended the much-anticipated pan-Pacific East Asia Summit, the U.S. has underscored its commitment to its so-called strategic ‘pivot’ to the Asia-Pacific region.

Months after the 2011 U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, President Obama signaled the formal launch of the pivot in a November speech to the Australian parliament: “As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.”

The U.S. already has around 320,000 troops stationed in the region, as well as 50 percent of its formidable global naval assets. Under the pivot strategy, the U.S. is set to commit several thousand additional troops and increase its naval strength by another ten percent in the coming few years.

The Obama administration has repeatedly denied that the pivot is a containment strategy aimed at Beijing, arguing it is simply a logical ‘rebalancing’ towards the region in light of Asia’s stunning economic growth and the increasing importance of maintaining U.S. interests there.

However, more than two years into the so-called U.S. pivot, many strategic commentators across the Pacific have raised major questions as to its real intentions, actual impact, and practicability, given the United States’ deep fiscal constraints ahead of scheduled defence-spending cuts.

Reacting to lingering uncertainties over the U.S. strategy, China, which views the pivot as an act of provocation, as well as other countries in the region such as Vietnam, Philippines, and Japan, have stepped up their territorial claims in the Western Pacific – indirectly testing America’s resolve to uphold its strategic commitments.

In this sense, the pivot – purportedly to reinforce the United States’ role as an ‘anchor of stability and prosperity’ in the Pacific – has ironically contributed to greater uncertainty, turbulence, and belligerence vis-à-vis the festering maritime disputes.

In a recent op-ed for the Singapore-based daily The Straits Times, Barry Desker, the dean of the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), called for ‘mutual restraint’ by all disputing littoral states to ‘diffuse’ tensions, while contending that all parties are “guilty of occupying uninhabited islands and land features.”

And a recent report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says: “With tensions on the rise, Manila is eager to pursue closer military cooperation with the U.S., and Hanoi (as a strategic partner) is keen to carefully bring in and balance U.S. influence in the region.

“If these countries frame any U.S. assistance as being directed against China, it will be harder for the former to persuade the latter that it will not get involved in territorial disputes.”

The pivot can be traced as far back as the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Hanoi, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton injected the U.S. into the centre of decades-long territorial disputes in the South China Sea by announcing that her country had a ‘national interest’ in the freedom of navigation across the Western Pacific, including the South China Sea.

As a result, allies such as Japan and the Philippines have repeatedly sought U.S. re-assurance vis-à-vis existing bilateral mutual defence treaties, especially in the event of military confrontation with China over disputed maritime features in the Western Pacific.

The Philippines and Vietnam are mired in bitter maritime disputes with China over a whole host of features in the Spratly and Paracel chains of islands in the South China Sea, while Japan is contesting China’s claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu chain of islands in the East China Sea.

Meanwhile, Washington’s allies in Northeast Asia, Japan and South Korea, are locked in a separate territorial dispute over the Takeshima/Dokdo islands in the Sea of Japan.

In last month’s Australia-U.S. Ministerial Meeting, Clinton sought to calm Chinese nerves by stating, “We (the U.S.) welcomed a strong, prosperous and peaceful China, which plays a constructive role in promoting regional security and prosperity… We do not take a position on competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.”

The U.S. Navy also invited China to join the large-scale, U.S.-led ‘Rim of the Pacific Exercise’ by 2014.

Yet an unconvinced China, under its new leadership, has nudged up its claims. Recently, authorities in the southern Chinese Island of Hainan have issued new laws, whereby beginning next year, they will have the authority to intercept and board any foreign vessel seen to violate China’s ‘sovereignty’ over all claimed features in the South China Sea.

In response, Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Surin Pitsuwan warned that such a decision “…has increased a level of concern and a level of great anxiety among all parties, particularly parties that would need the access, the passage and the freedom to go through.” Beijing subsequently insisted that the new authority was not aimed against sea-borne commercial traffic.

China’s new passport design, incorporating disputed territories in the South China Sea under the country’s official map, has also sparked renewed concerns among some of its southern neighbours.

In the face of what it sees as Chinese provocations, however, a deeply divided ASEAN has failed to make any meaningful progress in crafting a legally-binding regional Code of Conduct to resolve disputes, as strongly urged by Washington.

If the pivot is seen in Beijing as a provocation, it has also encouraged greater assertiveness on the part of some of its neighbours.

While the Vietnamese have stepped up their energy exploration projects in disputed territories, and the Japanese government decided to purchase from its private owner one of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, the Philippines has pushed to upgrade its military ties with the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea to defend its own claims.

“While we are all aware that the U.S. does not take sides in disputes, they do have a strategic stake in the freedom of navigation, unimpeded commerce, and the maintenance of peace and stability in the South China Sea,” Filipino President Benigno Aquino stated at last month’s East Asian Summit, prodding further U.S. involvement in the South China Sea disputes.

How Washington will react to these kinds of pressures, particularly given its own fiscal challenges that have already resulted in nearly 500 billion dollars in cuts to its projected military budgets over the next ten years, adds yet another level of uncertainty to the calculations of the contending parties in the region.

Already, the pivot is being attacked by the U.S. right as insufficient. “This reallocation of military and diplomatic resources was supposed to guarantee stability in a region seeking to balance China’s rise. In reality, this strategic shift is less than it appears,” argued Michael Auslin in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. “In reality…it won’t solve Asia’s problems and may even add to the region’s uncertainty by over-promising and under-delivering.”

Participants of Duan Yuezhong’s Chinese language class conducted in a local park. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Sep 29 2012 (IPS)

While the 40^th anniversary of the normalisation of Japan-China relations passed under a dark shadow of rising tensions and bitter territorial disputes in East Asia, a strand of citizen-based diplomacy at the grassroots level is emerging in Japan as a path towards regional reconciliation.

Sabre rattling between Japan and its neighbours – namely its primary economic competitors, China and South Korea – reached new heights at the United Nations General Assembly currently underway in New York when Chinese president Hu Jintao dismissed Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiko Noda’s claims to a disputed chain of islands as “illegal and invalid”.

The uninhabited archipelago in the East China Sea, which may shelter large deposits of natural gas, are known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, Diayou in China and the Tiaoyutai Islands in Taiwan.

The possibly resource-rich cluster that lies below Japan’s southernmost island of Okinawa has long been a major bone of contention between China and Japan, with Taiwan, too, laying claim to the territory.

The Japanese government’s proposal to buy the islands from a private owner sparked a wave of protest across 50 cities in China earlier this month.

The violence, which included the destruction of several Japanese establishments, forced a number of staff members to relocate back to Japan, while hundreds of Japanese tourists cancelled their visits to China.

The Senkaku Islands were not the only source of conflict at the U.N. this week. On Thursday, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak rejected Noda’s vow to protect Japan’s sea and land space – an obvious reference by the latter to the dispute with South Korea over ownership of Takeshima, a pair of rocky islets known in Korean as Dokto.

A street poll conducted by the Tokyo-based Nippon Broadcasting Corporation this month indicated the Japanese public wants the government to take a stronger stance in these territorial disputes, particular where South Korea is concerned.

East Asia political experts here view these tensions as a further threat to the rocky bilateral relations that have existed since diplomatic ties were established with China in 1972 and with South Korea in 1965.

But a growing number of concerned citizens are convinced that grassroots efforts and local diplomacy can help defuse tensions between the agitated neighbours.

These concerned voices are calling for a cooling down of the situation in an attempt to prevent mutual economic losses, trade boycotts or suffocation of the free flow of students, professionals, artists and information between the various countries.

A citizens’ movement for change?

Duan Yuezhong, a Chinese national living in Tokyo, is very dedicated to this movement. Undeterred by political hot-headedness, he is conducting a discussion group for the Japanese public.

“Nothing can stop my efforts in Japan towards a citizen-based approach to nurture closer ties between China and Japan. To withdraw now is to give up on the future,” he told IPS.

Yuezhong, a former journalist in China, has spent almost two decades in Japan. He owns a publishing company that prints books specialising in Japan-China relations and also conducts popular Chinese-language classes at a local park.

Yuezhong has great faith in the fledging citizen’s movement that highlights the need for political restraint and the importance of objective negotiations between countries.

Akiko Ozaki, a Japanese businesswoman who set up a travel agency in China two years ago, echoed these sentiments. She appealed to participants of her annual tour to Dalian, a major port city in the northeast of China, to go ahead with their visit scheduled for next month.

“My tour may survive. For ordinary people like us who have developed close business ties with China it is very difficult to throw away (our) hard work because of political (stubbornness),” she told IPS.

While economic ties have cemented East Asia as a formidable bloc — China has now overtaken the United States to become Japan’s top trading partner — mistrust is deep-rooted due to Japan’s history of colonisation in the region.

“There is a huge perception gap when it comes to understanding Japanese colonisation in all the three countries,” according to professor Masao Okonogi, an expert on Japan-Korea relations at Kyushu University.

“Against the growing international clout of China and South Korea, Japan must seek to put the past behind it,” he explained.

In an effort to do just this, Okonogi participated in several joint study programmes on history that took place on an annual basis between Japan and South Korea until the project was disbanded two years ago.

“Political interference on both sides dealt a severe blow to crucial attempts to foster a deeper sense of mutual understanding of the historical past but we must persevere,” he explained.

Yoichi Tao, scientist and manager of Global Voices – a website that hosts a myriad opinions including those of Chinese and Korean students in Japan – says space for wider debate on differences between Japan and its East Asian neighbours is crucial.

“Pursuing economic development has pushed the vital importance of bridging (misunderstandings) to the back burner. The latest upheaval has (proven) that the economy alone does not bring stability in East Asia,” he told IPS.

Kao Hui Fen, a Taiwanese national in Tokyo, cannot agree more. Fen says after fifteen years in Japan she has become more outspoken about Japanese colonisation of her country, an approach that has not caused her problems.

“I tell my Japanese friends that colonisation is bad. They do not respond angrily and some are even willing to discuss the past objectively,” she said.

Tao believes that sharing honest opinions at the civilian level can weaken conservative and narrow political agendas that have long divided Japan and its closest Asian neighbours.

“People can lead the way forward in East Asia where emotional historical issues have bogged us down for too long,” he said.

(END)