With Japan changing prime ministers more often than the Washington Redskins change quarterbacks, it is hard to get too excited about Yoshihiko Noda, who just won the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) presidency and will shortly be selected by the Diet as Japan's sixth prime minister in as many years.

Noda faces huge hurdles: the Japanese economy has been languishing for most of two decades; two years into office, and the DPJ still has not been able to demonstrate the ability to execute on policy; the government is checkmated by opposition control of the Upper House of the Diet; and the Japanese voters have become even more cynical and negative about their ruling class than Americans have. Most political analysts figure things will be like this until a general election (required by 2013) shakes things up. 

But I have a little spring in my step now that Noda will be in charge. For one thing, he is a genuine national security conservative in the tradition of Shinzo Abe or his better known friend, former DPJ foreign minister Seiji Maehara (who lost in the DPJ election to Noda). Noda's father was a military man (Ground Self Defense Forces), which gives him a rare appreciation of the U.S.-Japan alliance and defense issues. Chinese and Korean newspapers are apprehensive because he has challenged the legitimacy of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, as did Abe and others on the right in Japan. But I'm not too worried. Noda is known as a careful pragmatist and will reach out to China and Korea the way Abe did when he became prime minister (the Japanese version of Nixon-goes-to-China).

Moreover, Noda is an outspoken free-trader and supporter of Japan's participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and he is a fiscal conservative, advocating a prudent increase in the consumption tax as part of overall tax reform. And most encouraging, Noda won the DPJ election because he refused to kowtow to DPJ strongman Ichiro Ozawa, who continues to run interference against the internationalists even after being ejected from the party leadership in the wake of corruption charges.

The DPJ's first prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, was a dreamy populist who ruined almost everything he touched. His successor, the hapless Naoto Kan, moved away from the DPJ's original populist manifesto, but never did so with real conviction or understanding of the policy issues. Noda is a serious policy thinker who has consistently advocated the positions Japan now needs to move forward. The Japanese political system is still a terrible mess, but at least the quality of leadership is improving. 

In Today's Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria has made another spirited defense of the Obama administration's reactive, lead-from-behind approach to foreign policy. Zakaria asserts in his column that every U.S. foreign policy doctrine other than the Monroe Doctrine was formulated in the simpler bipolar context of the Cold War. Trying to construct a modern doctrine to capture the complexities of current developments like the Arab spring would be pure folly, he concludes, much better therefore for Obama to stick with his prudent strategy of restraint.

Zakaria's intellectualization of a foreign policy driven by domestic priorities ("now is the time to focus on nation-building here at home," as the President declared in a June 25 speech) has two major flaws.

The first is historical. The Monroe Doctrine was not the exception that proves the rule. There was also the Tyler Doctrine which asserted U.S. strategic pre-eminence over Hawaii and the Eastern Pacific; John Hay's Open Door, which historians consider a book-end to the Monroe Doctrine; Henry Stimson's Non-recognition Doctrine, etc.,etc.

The second flaw in Zakaria's argument is more fundamental, though. There is a difference between doctrine and strategy. Doctrines articulate aspirations for strategy and are therefore arguably expendable.  Strategy is not. Small powers can go without grand strategies. Great powers cannot.  Either the United States seeks to shape the direction of key regions like the Middle East and Asia, or it perpetually reacts to the initiative of revisionist powers and forces within those regions until friends and allies lose confidence and American preeminence is undermined.    

If there is a doctrine we don't need right now, it is the faux realism and abdication of international leadership represented in "strategic restraint."

I have been cautious about predicting the longer-term strategic implications of the massive earthquakes and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11. To begin with, years ago I lived for a summer in the part of Japan that has born the brunt of this disaster, interviewing farmers and politicians for a column I struggled to write each week in Japanese for the local Iwate Nippo Newspaper. The images of death and destruction, especially to the beautiful Sanriku Coast, have been heartbreaking for me to watch. A second reason for caution is the lesson many of us learned trying to anticipate the longer-term impact of the December 2004 Asian Tsunami. Most of us in government at the time expected that the civil war in Sri Lanka would end because the tsunami had destroyed the Tamil Tigers' fleet and coastal bases, but that the insurgency in Aceh, Indonesia would grow worse because the tsunami had destroyed the Indonesian Army's bases and lines of supply. The exact opposite occurred -- the Sri Lankan civil war dragged violently on for five more years, but Indonesian President Susilu Bambang Yudyuhono managed to sign a peace agreement with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) within six months of the disaster. A final reason for caution is that the scope of the disaster is not yet clear -- particularly at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, where a few dozen engineers bravely remain to cool the reactor cores.

Yet as Japanese scholars and citizens themselves begin considering the future -- and as American rating agencies and pundits hit a drumbeat of negative and often ill-informed predictions -- it seems both appropriate and necessary to at least frame the possibilities of what comes next for Japan.

The first thing that can be said about the disaster is that it has highlighted both the traditional strengths and the adaptability of Japanese society. The world press has marveled at the stoic resolve and orderliness of the Japanese public as they queue for hours for scarce supplies without breaking the rules or complaining. This is precisely the national character that allowed Japan to rebound from even greater disasters such as the Edo fire of 1657, the Kanto earthquake of 1923, and the aftermath of the Pacific War's end in 1945, when the Emperor announced that the Japanese people would have to "endure the unendurable"... and they did. The response has also highlighted the adaptability of Japan. After studying shortcomings in the response to the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, the Japanese government strengthened coordination with the Self-Defense Forces and created crisis management centers across central and local government. This preparation has saved countless lives, even as the government struggles on multiple fronts because of the scale of the disaster. Even more impressive has been the activism of Japanese civil society and especially of Japanese youth; frequently dismissed in recent press analysis as self-obsessed "herbivores," they have mobilized spontaneously through Facebook and other social media and have been shown carrying elderly citizens to high ground on their backs.  

The disaster will likely have at least some impact on Japanese security and foreign policy. The government's poor response to the 1995 Kobe earthquake was seized upon by national security realists to argue for changes in emergency legislation and greater acceptance of the Self Defense Forces as an instrument of national power. Fiscal realities may keep defense spending below 1 percent of GDP, but the disaster will reinforce calls to remove impediments to the SDF's rules of engagement and for greater interoperability with the United States (Operation "Tomodachi" -- the relief effort by the 50,000 U.S. personnel in Japan -- is the largest joint and combined operation between the United States and Japan ever). Japan's relations with China and Russia, which were abysmal before the crisis, may thaw somewhat now. Beijing's 15-man rescue team could take some of the edge off of the Sino-Japanese tensions -- 86 percent of Japanese said in recent polls that they do not trust China -- though the root cause of the tensions, PLA operations around Japan, are unlikely to change.  Putin's decision to set aside differences over the Northern Territories for now in order to help a "good neighbor" may have a more lasting effect, since the root causes of friction between Tokyo and Moscow were always more political than structural or strategic. Finally, many Japanese friends are telling me that the world's outpouring of support and assistance is reminding average citizens in Japan how important it is for Japan to also make its own "international contributions" in terms of ODA and security. Of course, this impulse will be in competition with the understandable desire to focus on reconstruction at home over the coming years.

Japanese economic production will definitely recover from the disaster. The damage estimates are generally well above US $150 billion, and Japanese business surveys are expecting a big hit on manufacturing output over the coming months. However, the economy is still expected to grow overall in JFY 2011 (April 2011-March 2012) once corporations adjust their supply chains and reconstruction spending begins.  Moody's Investors Service is warning that the huge financing needs may erode investor confidence in the country's ability to repay its debts, but this underestimates the likelihood that Japanese citizens will buy reconstruction bonds (over 90 percent of Japanese debt is already domestically held) and ignores the huge amounts of cash Japanese banks and corporations have been sitting on the past year. (Moody's also downgraded South Korea's sovereign debt rating when Roh Moo Hyun came to power in 2003on the dubious logic that relations with the United States would deteriorate.) However, even if production recovers, that still leaves the question of whether Japan will revitalize its basic economic growth strategy. Phil Levy rightly pointed out in his post that the Japanese political classes could become addicted again to Keynesian approaches to growing the economy. On the other hand, Prime Minister Kan had already begun to embrace measures that would unleash greater competition in the Japanese economy, including participation in the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations. That specific debate will probably be on hold for a few months, but the economic reformers behind it will seize on the reconstruction strategy to argue for even bolder measures to revitalize economic growth. Decisions about how to raise money for reconstruction -- for example, whether to include incentives for private equity and not just rely on debt -- will reveal the prevailing direction of the economic strategy debate in the coming months.

Numerous Japanese commentators had recently argued that the nation needed a shock to accelerate the kind of opening, reform and revitalization that Japan embraced after Commodore Perry's ships landed in Edo Bay on July 8, 1853 and the war ended in August, 1945. While no one could have anticipated or called for the enormity of the heart-wrenching human tragedy of March 11, the nation again finds itself at an important turning point. And history would strongly suggest that Japan will emerge stronger.

Next week Chinese President Hu Jintao will travel to the United States for his eighth meeting with President Obama, his first state visit with an U.S. president, and his valedictory call on the American people before he retires as part of the Chinese leadership transition in 2012. There will be no breakthroughs, transformations, or stirring visions for the future of U.S.-China relations, but the trip is badly needed in terms of relationship management. It will also serve as a good opportunity for a stock-taking of U.S.-China relations.

The Good News

1. Obama Gets It
The Obama administration came into office intending to continue the broad Bush policy of engaging China based on strong alliance relationships in Asia, particularly with Japan. The Obama team hoped to build on that basic approach by establishing a more enduring formula for mutual strategic reassurance with Beijing. To set the right tone early on, the White House delayed sensitive arms sales to Taiwan and a meeting with the Dalai Lama in advance of the president's first trip to China in November 2009 and then sought language in a joint statement in Beijing that would signal U.S. understanding of China's "core interests" with respect to Tibet, Taiwan, and other issues. Set against the backdrop of the financial crisis and increasing confidence in China, these gestures backfired and the administration soon found itself responding to a series of assertive Chinese moves at the Copenhagen climate summit, in the South China Sea, on the Korean peninsula, and in the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute over the Senkaku or Diaoyutai Islands. To its credit, the Obama administration adjusted and spent much of 2010 reminding Beijing of the depths of U.S. strategic power and influence in Asia, as countries from India to Vietnam and Japan sought closer security ties with Washington to re-establish a stable strategic equilibrium vis-à-vis Beijing. The top national security team -- Donilon, Gates, and Clinton -- have now replaced the administration's earlier dreamy visions of transformational U.S.-China cooperation on global issues with a much more hardheaded appreciation of the underlying power realities of dealing with Beijing.

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The pattern is sickeningly familiar. North Korea reveals (or is caught with) a previously unknown nuclear weapons program (except that the intelligence community had warned it was there all along). The United States and its allies vow that this will only lead to further "isolation" of the North (next the comfy pillow). North Korea pledges to bring all out war to the peninsula and engages in dangerous military escalation. The North then invites some well-meaning Americans to Pyongyang to profess their sincere interest in de-nuclearlizing the Korean peninsula, if only the United States would abandon its "hostile policy." Beijing calls for restraint on all sides and an immediate return to talks. The administration is skeptical, but seeing no other path agrees to return to the talks. An agreement is finally hammered out where the North freezes the least interesting part of its fissile material production (temporarily, of course) in exchange for sanctions relief, heavy fuel oil, aid or other concessions. The North waits, cheats on the agreement, creates another crisis, and continues marching towards its goal of marrying nuclear warheads to ballistic missiles and winning acceptance as a full nuclear weapons state.

....repeat as necessary.

And repeat North Korea has. With the North-South denuclearization accord in 1991 (violated); the Agreed Framework in 1994 (violated); the DPRK-Japan Pyongyang Declaration in 2002 (violated); the 2005 Six Party Joint Statement (violated) and the 2007 and 2008 Six Party agreements (violated).

But this time, according to former President Jimmy Carter in the November 24 Washington Post, North Korea really is interested in an agreement for denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

Anyway, back to what is really happening. And that is this. Kim Jong Un, the 27-year-old third son of Kim Jong Il (recently promoted to Four Star General) needs to demonstrate that he is willing to go all the way to war (in the worlds of the DPRK's Japanese language website). When Kim Jong Il had his coming out party in the 1980s, he demonstrated his bona fides by directing operations to blow-up the South Korean cabinet in Rangoon and plant a bomb in a Korean Airlines Flight, killing everyone aboard.

That is the first goal. The second goal is to knock the United States and its allies off guard after revealing to former Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Sigfried Hecker that the North had built an advanced uranium enrichment facility in violation of all its prior agreements. Sanctions and pressure? Only if you are prepared to be met with massive firepower. That is the message to the outside world.

This round of the North Korean game is more dangerous though, for two reasons. First, Kim Jong Un is on much shakier ground than Kim Jong Il was three decades ago. The fabric of North Korean society and the legitimacy of the regime are much more fragile. It is not clear whether the younger "Great General" or the aging "Dear Leader" will be able to pull back from escalation as easily as they have in the past.

The second reason this is more dangerous is because uranium enrichment opens a new production line of potentially a bomb a year to the North. This is particularly threatening when one considers North Korea's support for Syria's El Kibar reactor construction, which Israel bombed in 2007, and Pyongyang's dialogue with Burma about a similar capability. It is also worrisome since the centrifuge facility shown to Hecker may only be one part of the North Korean uranium enrichment (and probably highly enriched uranium) capability.

The Obama administration's opening response has been smart. They have not fueled the sense of crisis in a way that would give Pyongyang more leverage, but they have shown resolve by deploying the USS George Washington to the coast of the peninsula. Now comes the hard part: changing Beijing's calculus so that China deters the North from further escalation (at a minimum) and perhaps brings enough pressure to bear to change North Korea's calculus about its nuclear weapons program (much harder). Beijing's opening response- an expression of sympathy and a call for restraint on all sides and immediate resumption of the Six Party Talks--is not promising. If we are going to dissuade North Korea from repeating business as usual, we will first have to find ways to convince Beijing that the United States is no longer going to respond as usual. That means visibly enhanced defense cooperation with Japan and Korea, a refusal to return to the Six Party Talks without North Korean moves to return to the status quo ante, and enhanced interdiction operations against North Korea based on existing UNSC resolutions. That will be uncomfortable for an already heavily laden U.S.-China bilateral agenda, but so be it. 

Within a week of suffering the biggest midterm drubbing in generations, President Barack Obama will depart on a trip to India, Indonesia, Japan and Korea. How the president handles this trip will speak volumes about how he sees his agenda for the next two years and how much of an international president he really is.

The first test will be whether he takes the trip at all. Democratic Party strategists and other influential pundits have already begun questioning why he would go abroad and let Republicans seize the narrative at the most crucial point in his presidency. On CNN, former advisor to President Bill Clinton, David Gergen, warned the White House against making the same mistake Clinton made when he went abroad in the wake of Republican midterm victories in November 1994. Will they cancel? The president has already put off previously scheduled trips to India and Indonesia because of domestic political developments. On the other hand, the White House likes to claim this is the first "Pacific president," because Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii (though other presidents like William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy had plenty of experience in the Pacific as well, of course), and that the United States is "back" in Asia (though commentators across the region are asking when the United States ever left). All of this spin -- the first "Pacific president" and the "we're back in Asia" mantra -- would go flying out the window if the president cancelled his trip. Clinton was right not to cancel his international travel in 1994 -- it would have made the presidency appear even weaker. That would have been disastrous politics and worse geostrategy. So odds are pretty good that the president will go on the trip (fingers crossed).

The next test will be how the president handles ten days of hounding from the press about electoral defeats while he is in Asia. And the press will hound -- no doubt about it. Maybe if North Korea fires artillery across the DMZ during the G-20 summit in Seoul or China attacks the Senkaku Islands while the president is in Japan, the press corps might be distracted from domestic U.S. politics to focus briefly on international events. Or maybe the president will dig deep into his oratorical tool box to help shift the media's focus to U.S. interests in Asia -- the continent projected to contribute 60 percent of global GDP in our lifetime. He will have real occasion to look presidential again if he avoids the trivia of fact sheets and joint statements and presents a vision for international U.S. leadership. The visit to Indonesia -- the world's largest Muslim nation and one that proves Islam and democracy coexist-- could be a moment for articulating a real message about the compatibility of democratic values and Muslim faith. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Yokohama would be the place to remind Americans that over 50 percent of our trade is with this dynamic region, and that the United States can and must compete. The stops in India, Japan and Korea would be the right settings for explaining why investing in our strategic partnerships and alliances will pay dividends in terms of tackling the challenges we face internationally. The president must not re-fight the midterm, appear defensive, or make the narrative about himself (the last of these being the default narrative of the White House on foreign trips thus far). He must ignore what John McCain would call the "ground noise" and talk about the United States and Asia. The press might just listen. The region certainly will.

The third test will be on trade. If there is one area where the White House should be able to work with a more Republican Congress, it is on trade. And if there is one policy area Asia is watching to see if Washington is committed, it's trade. The president has said that he wants the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) ready to present to Congress (again) by the end of the year, but the administration has done no heavy lifting to get to that point (all the action has been aimed at pressing the Koreans to make further compromises). Fair enough -- there were elections coming up, and it may have been unrealistic to expect a Democratic White House to take on its labor union base when turnout was so critical to their electoral strategy. This trip is the time to demonstrate not only the hope that KORUS will be introduced this year, but the intention to do so in partnership with Republicans willing to work for its passage. It would set a tone that Asia would welcome and that Americans desiring more bipartisanship in Washington would be thankful for.

The president's Asia trip should not be seen by the White House as an unfortunate distraction, but instead as a real test of presidential leadership -- one that will help the president and the country if he approaches it the right way.

There are strange goings-on in Pyongyang these days. First, former President Jimmy Carter arrived in the North Korean capital to secure the release of Aijilon Gomez, an American human rights activist who had been sentenced to seven years hard labor after wandering across the border from China. Then, within 12 hours of Carter’s arrival, North Korea leader Kim Jong Il suddenly shows up in China for his second visit in several months. All these moves are leading to speculation that the United States is about to slide back to the pattern of engagement and concessions that has followed every other confrontation with Pyongyang over the past two decades.

I think the odds are probably against such a replay of history. But then again, the temptation of “parking” the intractable North Korea problem in slow motion talks has proven irresistible to two previous administrations nervous about sustained confrontation with the North. The Loyal Opposition would be doing the Obama team a favor by scrutinizing its next steps for similar wobbliness.

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After rumors that the Obama administration might back down in the face of Chinese pressure, the Pentagon confirmed on July 14 that the United States and the Republic of Korea would in fact go ahead with joint naval exercises off both coasts of the Korean peninsula in response to North Korea's March 26 sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan. Time will tell, but this could be the moment that Barack Obama finally found his inner realist when it comes to China strategy. 

From the beginning, the Obama administration has had a schizophrenic view of China's growing power and influence. On the one hand, realists in the administration continued the prevailing "Armitage-Nye" strategy (named after former Bush administration Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage and former Clinton Defense official Joe Nye) of engaging China while maintaining a favorable balance of power in the region through tighter relations with U.S. allies. Consistent with that strategy, Obama made a point of inviting Japanese Premier Taro Aso for the first bilateral summit in the Oval Office and Secretary of State Clinton made Japan her first overseas stop last March.   

At the same time, however, other senior members of the Obama administration argued that balance-of-power logic was inimical to the kind of accommodation the United States would have to make towards China in order to deal with new transnational challenges such as climate change. They argued in a formula that undermined the realists' approach that no major international challenge could be resolved without China's cooperation -- a message that was internalized in Beijing as meaning that China had earned a veto on all major international issues from the Obama administration. When Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao issued a joint statement last November in Beijing, the two leaders acknowledged each others' "core interests." Since then, the Chinese side has steadily expanded the list of Chinese "core interests" to include U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and suzerainty over the South China Sea while yielding virtually nothing in terms of military transparency, human rights or curbing North Korea's nuclear program. 

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