Seoul, South KoreaCNN — It’s an arms race bigger than anything Asia has ever seen – three major nuclear powers and one fast-developing one, the world’s three biggest economies and decades-old alliances all vying for an edge in some of the world’s most contested land and sea areas.
In one corner are the United States and its allies Japan and South Korea. In another corner, China and its partner Russia. And in a third, North Korea.
With each wanting to be one step ahead of the others, all are caught in a vicious circle that is spinning out of control. After all, one man’s deterrence is another man’s escalation.
“We’ll continue to see these dynamics spiral in East Asia, where we have no measures of restraint, we have no arms control,” Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN.
The visit of Japanese leaders to Washington over the past week only served to highlight the point. On Friday, fresh from a meeting with US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed his concern over China’s military activities in the East China Sea and the launch of ballistic missiles over Taiwan that landed in waters near Japan in August.
Kishida warned Beijing against trying to “change the international order” and said it was “absolutely imperative” for Japan, the US and Europe to stand united on China. His words came just days after US and Japanese ministers had spoken ominously of the “ongoing and accelerating expansion of (China’s) nuclear arsenal.”
Yet according to North Korea and China, it is Japan who is the aggressor. They have seen Tokyo pledge recently to double its defense spending while acquiring weapons capable of hitting targets inside Chinese and North Korean territory. And their alleged concerns will only have grown with the announcement just days ago of plans for new US Marine deployments on Japan’s southern islands, including new mobile anti-ship missiles meant to thwart any first strike from Beijing.
To the US and Japan, such moves are about deterrence; to Beijing, they are escalation.
Digging up the past
China claims its concerns are based on historical reasons. It says it fears Tokyo is returning to the military expansionism of the World War II era, when Japanese forces controlled vast swathes of Asia and China bore the brunt. Some 14 million Chinese died and up to 100 million became refugees during the eight years of conflict with Japan from 1937 to 1945.
Beijing insists the plans, which include Japan acquiring long-range “counterstrike” weapons like Tomahawk missiles that could hit bases inside China, show Tokyo threatens peace in East Asia once again.
But critics suspect China has a secondary motive in dredging up historical wounds – distracting from its own military buildup.
They point out that, even as Beijing vociferously rejects US and Japanese concerns about its own burgeoning military might, it has been growing its naval and air forces in areas near Japan while claiming the Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited Japanese-controlled chain in the East China Sea, as its sovereign territory.
In late December, Japan said Chinese government vessels had been spotted in the contiguous zone around the islands, known as the Diaoyus in China, on 334 days in 2022, the most since 2012 when Tokyo acquired some of the islands from a private Japanese landowner. From December 22 to 25, Chinese government vessels spent almost 73 consecutive hours in Japanese territorial waters off the islands, the longest such incursion since 2012.
Source: CNN