Tokyo
Donald Trump’s various remarks about pulling out of NATO and his accusation that many American allies are “free riders” have made allies on several continents nervous. I spent last week in Japan (yes, pretty far away from Cleveland), where his name arose in every single meeting I had—with academics, at NGOs, and in sessions with government officials. At a time when the Chinese military is growing rapidly, might the United States actually reduce its own commitments? Would the “pivot to Asia” be replaced by a flight from responsibility?
In my prepared speeches, I explained the “pendulum theory” of U.S. foreign policy to the Japanese. This is the view best described in Maximalist, the 2014 book about foreign policy since Truman, written by my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Steve Sestanovich. As he described it, American foreign policy has swung like a pendulum from doing too much to doing too little. Maximalists (he lists Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush) have sought “a big package of countermeasures” against threats; retrenchers (he lists Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Obama) have wanted to “shift responsibilities to friends and allies, to explore accommodation with adversaries, to narrow commitments and reduce costs.”
In this view, the United States nearly always swings too far, and then the public becomes restive and unhappy, and events and public opinion combine to swing the pendulum the other way. If we do too little, dangers grow visibly and produce a reaction: “We must do more.” Perhaps there is an overreaction, and a few years later the pendulum swings again: “We must pull back.”
I told the Japanese we have reached the end of one swing of that pendulum now, with Obama’s policies and the cuts in defense spending reached under him—of course, with the consent of Congress. The latest polls (by the Pew Center) find that “public support for increased defense spending has climbed to its highest level since a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” And I argued the pendulum would swing under Hillary Clinton, who has generally supported a more muscular foreign policy than Obama (remember her push in 2012, along with then-secretary of defense Leon Panetta and then-CIA director David Petraeus, for more support of the Syrian rebels—advice that Obama rejected), and even under Trump, whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.”
But the Japanese pay close attention to American politics and have heard Trump say, over and over, that he wishes to disengage from the world in various ways, from building walls to stopping immigration to pulling out of commitments like NATO and NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. How could I be sure he would not do precisely what he says he will do?
The best answer I could conjure up was Jimmy Carter and Korea. Campaigning for president in January 1975, Carter told the Washington Post that if elected he would order the withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from Korea. In June 1976, he restated this intention in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. During the transition proc-ess in late 1976 Carter told the incoming secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and incoming assistant secretary of state for Asia, Richard Holbrooke, that the pace of withdrawal might be studied but canceling the withdrawal was not an option, and in January 1977 President Carter issued orders to begin the withdrawal. In a press conference on May 26, 1977, President Carter said this:
This was a disastrous proposal, sure to create tension in Asia and leave our allies in the lurch. There was broad opposition. Not only the government of South Korea but also that of Japan was strongly opposed. Members of Congress on the armed services and foreign relations committees told administration officials that the withdrawal was a dangerous error. The U.S. intelligence community and military (led by the top U.S. Army officer in Korea, Gen. John Vessey, who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs) added their opposition. Within the administration itself, many officials agreed with Holbrooke that the policy had to be reversed. Direct opposition to the policy grew, and there were many leaks of studies and assessments that concluded the withdrawal would be dangerous. In April 1979 the Joint Chiefs formally stated their opposition to withdrawal from Korea.
In July 1979, Carter reversed himself. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski read to the press a statement from the president:
After January 20, 1981, of course, Carter was no longer in a position to reexamine anything but his election defeat and the foolishness of his initial decision for withdrawal from Korea. So, I told the Japanese, Trump might find exactly what Carter found: that the world is a very dangerous place and that some of his own ideas turn out to be likely to make it more so. Like Carter, he might find that the combined weight of American allies, his own military and intelligence advisers, and key members of Congress forces him to reconsider even ideas that seemed obvious and certain to him when campaigning. Carter was stubborn, and it took him two and a half years to reverse himself; Trump might be the same way, but there could still be a happy ending. Carter was stubborn in part because he’d been a Navy officer and thought he had relevant expertise; perhaps Trump would be more—and more quickly—impressionable when top CIA officials and ranking generals tell him that some of his ideas are pretty much nuts.
This was mostly an effort on my part to cheer up the Japanese, who listened to my story without much visible emotion. I wondered if they wondered if I actually believed what I was saying—did I really think Trump would listen to expert advice and reverse about 90 percent of his comments on world affairs? They were too polite to ask such questions. I also told them that most polls anyway showed that Clinton was the likely victor, which of course they knew, but they were happy to hear it again. There are no Trump supporters among officials in Tokyo, and it seems reasonable to say there are none in any other allied or just plain friendly capital: Seoul, Taipei, or Canberra (or for that matter New Delhi) facing China, Jerusalem or Riyadh or Amman or Abu Dhabi facing Iran, Warsaw or Vilnius or Prague or Kiev facing Russia.
This political year, inexplicable to most Americans, is entirely mysterious to the Japanese. Trying to make sense of it for them was a challenge: How does one explain to Japanese audiences the meaning of “political correctness” and the role of opposition to it in propelling the Trump campaign? How does one explain that millions of Americans want to elevate to the top government job someone with zero experience in government at any level, an eventuality impossible in their system? This year, they are wrestling with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s desire to change the 70-year-old constitution, never once amended since the United States imposed it in 1946, so as to permit the creation of Japanese armed forces. Japan’s “Self-Defense Forces,” with a budget of over $40 billion and now one of the top 10 militaries in the world, are a work-around of the constitutional language, and the Abe idea is to make the constitutional text realistic and explicit about what the Japanese military can and cannot do. This is an extremely controversial proposal that may take years to implement—or may in the end fail. But how does one explain to the Japanese that they ought to make a greater contribution to our alliance and thereby help promote regional stability, exactly when one of our presidential candidates is suggesting that this alliance itself may disappear?
Just as the maps we put up in our schoolrooms and our homes show America in the center, Japanese wall maps show Japan in the middle—but that only emphasizes the size and proximity of China. As they look at Asia, there is a collection of states bound not by a formal alliance like NATO but by a common desire not to be dominated by China. Larger wall maps show India, a nation they can see as the natural balancer against China some day in the future, when it exceeds China in population and has built up its naval forces. Some day—but not today. Today China’s effort to dominate all of Asia can only be resisted by an alliance, formal or informal, with the United States at its heart.
Wary judges of relative power in the Pacific and the world, the Japanese are worried about American intentions and even American understanding of the challenges that a rising China creates. One official told me that China’s effort to drive the Americans from the Pacific reminded him of Japanese policy in the 1930s—the policy that led to Pearl Harbor and then to Japan’s shattering defeat by the United States. You refused to be driven out then, he said, and perhaps China’s policy will lead it to overextension and to the creation of a working alliance of nations pushing back against its hegemony. You would have to lead, he said. You did, last time. And you won. But now, we listen to the speeches and watch the Trump campaign, and we just don’t know. I had no more stories to tell to reassure him—or at least none that reassured me.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
