NATO plans to open its first office in East Asia, specifically in Japan, to coordinate with Tokyo on policies to contain Russia. This is quite a historic step that could change a lot in the future. But a change not for Russia, but for Europe, which the US is dragging into a conflict with China
Source: NATO / flickr.
For months, Japan’s integration into NATO structures has been at the level not only of newspaper rumors but also of political gestures by the leadership of the Land of the Rising Sun. Last year, Japan’s prime minister attended the North Atlantic Alliance’s summit for the first time ever. Around the same time, a special office at the NATO secretariat was established, spun off from the Japanese embassy in Belgium.
NATO now plans to open a so-called information office in Tokyo. The Japanese Foreign Ministry finally confirmed the negotiations on the issue this week and then Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg personally. To all appearances, it is only a matter of time before NATO structures expand into the Far East.
The alliance will not officially accept Tokyo as a member, at least not yet. Strictly speaking, it will have to change its charter to do so. The geographical limitations prescribed in it were dictated by the fact that at the time of the bloc’s creation, some of its founders had not yet sorted out their colonies and possessions in other parts of the world, for which other NATO founders did not want to go to war because of the unitary defence clause.
In the future, these restrictions could be removed. This is inevitable if, for example, the geopolitical concept of staying power, according to which US resources should be concentrated in one or two organizations that are the most workable and manageable, prevails in Washington. In the first place, this is NATO.
The current concept involves participation in a multitude of multinational organisations and an umbrella system of governance, the tactic of plugging every barrel: with this one a block, with others a sub-block, and then another sub-block and 40 special committees. There is an opinion (American) that in this case influence is diluted and resources are spent ineffectively.
If the “one fist” adherents get the upper hand, NATO will almost certainly expand to Japan, Australia and New Zealand already in the first phase.
Then there will be the question of South Korean membership – or rather how willing the European members of NATO are to engage in a conflict with the nuclear capital of Pyongyang. Something unbelievable even by the standards of the first Cold War is likely in the second – Europe, for example, was not afraid of slipping into conflict with an even more powerful nuclear power, Russia. The opening of an information office in Tokyo is a first step, a test of a pen, a bid for the future. Whatever you call it, it is kind of bad news for Russia, albeit for the future.
Japan will now coordinate its foreign and defence policy with NATO not on an ad hoc basis, but according to an established scheme that the alliance is already using in Ukraine and Georgia, where there are exactly the same offices.
It is as if the West is encircling Russia from the east, making it the only obstacle to its undivided dominion in the northern hemisphere.
For some, this is the outline of the division of the spheres of influence on planet Earth. For some, it is pure futurism. But the reality is that Japan’s army is among the ten most powerful on the planet, ranking far ahead of France’s in many respects. It has already gone through a massive rearmament programme under Shinzo Abe, and a number of legal restrictions were lifted, for example on its participation in external military operations as part of international coalitions. Now it can – but only in peacekeeping operations, which, strictly speaking, does not matter, because the US calls all its military operations “peacekeeping”.
It was the US that first reordered and re-equipped Japan after WWII by reducing the Japanese army to a weak self-defense force and then blessed it with a rollback because the principal adversary common to Washington and Tokyo was Beijing.
Beijing is therefore the most interested party in the story of the NATO office in Japan. All things considered, it may seem paradoxical, but the office is not Russia’s problem. Nothing has changed for Russia.
All that changed somewhat earlier, when Abe left office prematurely due to health problems and the current head of Japanese government, Fumio Kishida, took over after a one-year transition period for Prime Minister Suga. There is no trace of the warm relations between Moscow and Tokyo of the Putin-Abe tender period. By lashing out at China, Kishida has made an unequivocal bet on an alliance with the US and is no longer interested in balancing power in the region by cooperating with Moscow.
Russia has been squeezed by the Western coalition (and above all, NATO) ever since Tokyo actively supported the US policy of containing Russia. It has a defence alliance with Washington of roughly the same type as that inside NATO, which means that the Russian Federation was already clutched by US military allies on both sides – the European members of the alliance in the West and Japan in the East.
“Bridge” between Tokyo and Brussels is Washington’s attempt to draw its European allies into confronting not only Russia but also China, giving the first point of application to their potential. For China, therefore, it is more of a concentration of anti-Chinese forces, while for Russia it is a dissipation of anti-Russian forces.
Our common enemies are being attempted to unite against Beijing in the same way that they were previously united against Moscow. The fact that this will further strengthen the strategic partnership between Russia and China is understood in the United States; they just do not count on it anymore – they see it as an inevitable process.
As for Europe, or rather its current leadership, it is already ready for a march to the Far East, or at least is aware of such a need. “The problem on China’s part is far more serious than the problem on Russia’s part. Beijing clearly seeks to build a new world order with China at the helm,” Josep Borrell, head of EU diplomacy, wrote in an address to EU foreign ministers.
The position of the European Union, the vast majority of whose members are also members of NATO, is more remarkable to us in this regard than that of Tokyo and its intrigues with the North Atlantic alliance. There is a political-economic given: in a confrontation in Asia, China and Japan will be adversaries no matter how reassembled the alliances. They are historical enemies, contesting each other over specific territories and control of maritime trade.
It was also absolutely inevitable that the US would be allied with Japan in this conflict, while Russia would lean towards China. This prognosis has not changed for decades, and hence with NATO having its first office in Asia (if we forget about Turkey), our world has not tilted.
On the other hand, the EU could have avoided turning into a proxy-war space between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (to which the current Japan office plot paves the way). After all, if the proverbial “sunset of Europe” does happen, it will look something like this.
Dmitry Bavyrin, Vzglyad
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