JUST ahead of his arrival in Japan yesterday, US President Barack Obama assured Japan that islands at the centre of its territorial disputes with China are covered by a bilateral defence treaty with the USA.
This means that the US is prepared to go to war with China to help Japan hang onto a few piles of rocks in the China Sea. Obama said the US would oppose any attempt to undermine Japan’s control over the islands. This is the first time that Obama has given Japan any such public assurance.
Obama is not going to visit Beijing, and it is being made crystal clear that the reason behind his visit is to strengthen the Japan, South Korea, and US alliance against both China and North Korea.
He arrived in Tokyo on Wednesday just after Japanese PM Shinzo Abe visited the Yakusone Shrine where the major military leaders of Japanese imperialism, responsible for tens of millions of deaths in China and throughout South East Asia, are interred.
This visit to honour the war criminals outraged China and angered even the South Korean regime, but proved to be no problem at all as far as Obama is concerned. He arrived in Japan on Wednesday, and is due to leave for South Korea on Friday, before visiting Malaysia, and the Phillipines and then returning to the USA.
US Assistant Secretary of State PJ Crowley said yesterday that ‘Many traditional allies value a strong US presence in the region to balance against an assertive China,’ especially in a ‘period of very significant tension between America’s allies and China’.
Obama will tell Abe to be a more diplomatic imperialist as far as South Korea is concerned, while assuring Abe that the US is with Japan all the way over its differences with China, especially as far as the East China Sea islands – called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China – are concerned.
Japan controls the islands but Chinese ships have sailed repeatedly in and out of what Japan says are its territorial waters, as Beijing presses its claim. Last year, China declared an air defence identification zone over the islands, drawing widespread criticism from the USA.
One clash could well mean war between China and Japan with the USA immediately involved as Japan’s number one ally and protector. It is a war that is just waiting to happen, or be ignited at a time of US imperialism’s choosing.
As if to prove this point, just ahead of his visit, Obama wrote in the Japanese Yomiuri newspaper that the US opposed ‘any unilateral attempts to undermine Japan”s administration of these islands’. He added: ‘The policy of the United States is clear – the Senkaku Islands are administered by Japan and therefore fall within the scope of Article 5 of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security,’ he wrote.
In addition to their military alliance the USA is pushing a 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal which requires each country to strike an agreement with the other prospective members to give the USA the whip hand economically, politically and militarily throughout the region.
At the moment a difference over opening up the Japanese market to US agricultural commodities is proving to be a sticking point. Obama hopes to resolve this by giving Japan cast iron assurances that in any clash with China the US will be openly and immediately on its side.
He also wants the row between South Korea and Japan over the visit to the Yakusone Shrine to be settled. Obama has made no secret of the fact that the bulk of the US military forces are to be stationed in the Pacific with China its main target.
This war drive has been intensified by the deepening of the world capitalist crisis, the growing opposition to the bankrupt dollar being the world’s trading currency, and the growing cooperation between Russia and China to the extent of an energy pipeline being constructed between the two.
War with Russia and China to wipe out the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions is the main item on the agenda of the US ruling class. The only way that the world can be saved from this horrific prospect is by the working class of the world overthrowing both capitalism and imperialism and establishing socialism.