“The U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty of 1960 obligates the United States to treat any armed attack against any territories under the administration of Japan as dangerous to America's⅜own peace and safety. This would cover such islets as the Senkakus also claimed by Beijing.”
So this author wrote 15 years ago in “A Republic Not an Empire.”
And so it has come to pass. The United States, because of this 53-year-old treaty, is today in the middle of a quarrel between Japan and China over these very rocks in the East China Sea.
This Senkakus dispute, which has warships and planes of both nations circling each other around and above the islands, could bring on a shooting war. And if it does, America would be in it.
Yet why should this be America's quarrel?
The USSR of Nikita Khrushchev and the China of Mao Zedong, the totalitarian communist states against which we were committed to defend Japan, are dead and gone.
“The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies,” said Lord Salisbury. Of no nation is that truer than 21st-century America.
For some reason, we cannot let go. We seem so taken with our heroic role in the late Cold War that we cannot give it up, though the world has moved on.
Following China's declaration of an air defense identification zone, South Korea declared its own ADIZ, which overlaps upon those of both China and Japan.
South Korea also is in a quarrel with China over a submerged reef in the Yellow Sea. Seoul has built a maritime research station on the reef, the value of which is enhanced by the oil and gas deposits in the surrounding seabed.
These clashing claims of Beijing and Seoul could present problems for us — for, under our 1953 mutual security treaty, an attack on South Korean territory is to be regarded as “dangerous to America's⅜own peace and safety.”
Thus far, China's response to South Korea's ADIZ has been muted. For Beijing's focus is on Japan.
But South Korea also has a long-running dispute with Tokyo over an island chain in the Sea of Japan.
What we have here are three overlapping ADIZs and three territorial disputes. And all three nations claim the right to fly warplanes into these zones and to deny access to foreign warplanes.
America has little control over these countries, all of which have new governments that are increasingly nationalistic.
And this week there appeared an even more ominous cloud.
North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who has been purging his party and army, is now massing ships and planes along his western sea border with South Korea, a site of previous clashes between North and South.
Any collision between North and South could instantly involve the United States, which, 60 years after the end of the Korean War, still has 28,500 troops on the peninsula, with thousands right up on the Demilitarized Zone.
Neither U.S. political party has shown the least interest in reviewing these open-ended war guarantees, though it seems certain that one of these 50- or 60-year-old commitments will one day drag us into a confrontation if not a major war.
U.S. foreign policy today appears rooted less in U.S. vital interests than in nostalgia for the Cold War. As Dean Acheson said of the British half a century ago, so, it seems to be true of us: The Americans have lost an empire — and not yet found a role.
Pat Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
