Authors: Henry Kissinger
At the same time, an element of implicit threat is ever present. China affirms explicitly, and all other key players implicitly, the option of military force in the pursuit of core national interests. Military budgets are rising. National rivalries, as in the South China Sea and Northeast Asian waters, have generally been conducted with the methods of nineteenth-century European diplomacy; force has not
been excluded, though its application has been restrained, if tenuously, as the years go by.
Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere (an art still remembered and practiced today in some quarters).
In Asia’s historical diplomatic systems
, whether based on Chinese or Hindu models, monarchy was considered an expression of divinity or, at the very least, a kind of paternal authority; tangible expressions of tribute were thought to be owed to superior countries by their inferiors. This theoretically left no room for ambiguity as to the nature of regional power relationships, leading to a series of rigid alignments. In practice, however, these principles were applied with remarkable creativity and fluidity. In Northeast Asia, the Ryukyu Kingdom for a time paid tribute to both Japan and China. In the northern hills of Burma, tribes secured a form of de facto autonomy by pledging their loyalty simultaneously to the Burmese royal court and the Chinese Emperor (and generally not straining to follow the dictates of either). For centuries, Nepal skillfully balanced its diplomatic posture between the ruling dynasties in China and those in India—offering letters and gifts that were interpreted as tribute in China but recorded as evidence of equal exchanges in Nepal, then holding out a special tie with China as a guarantee of Nepal’s independence vis-à-vis India. Thailand, eyed as a strategic target by expanding Western empires in the nineteenth century, avoided colonization altogether through an even more elaborate strategy of affirming cordial ties with all foreign powers at once—welcoming foreign advisors from multiple competing Western
states into its court even while sending tribute missions to China and retaining Hindu priests of Indian descent for the royal household. (The intellectual suppleness and emotional forbearance demanded by this balancing strategy were all the more remarkable given that the Thai King was himself regarded as a divine figure.) Any concept of a regional order was considered too inhibiting of the flexibility demanded from diplomacy.
Against this backdrop of subtle and diverse legacies, the grid of Westphalian sovereign states on a map of Asia presents an oversimplified picture of regional realities. It cannot capture the diversity of aspirations that leaders bring to their tasks or the combination of punctilious attention to hierarchy and protocol with adroit maneuver that characterizes much of Asian diplomacy. It is the fundamental framework of international life in Asia. But statehood there is also infused with a set of cultural legacies of a greater diversity and immediacy than perhaps any other region. This is underscored by the experiences of two of Asia’s major nations, Japan and India.
Of all of Asia’s historical political and cultural entities, Japan reacted the earliest and by far the most decisively to the Western irruption across the world. Situated on an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing, Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic near homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people’s divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the
West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.
Japan for centuries existed at the fringe of the Chinese world, borrowing heavily from Sinic religion and culture. But unlike most societies in the Chinese cultural sphere, it transformed the borrowed forms into Japanese patterns and never conflated them with a hierarchical obligation to China. Japan’s resilient position was at times a source of consternation for the Chinese court. Other Asian peoples accepted the premises and protocol of the tribute system—a symbolic subordination to the Chinese Emperor by which Chinese protocol ordered the universe—labeling their trade as “tribute” to gain access to Chinese markets. They respected (at least in their exchanges with the Chinese court) the Confucian concept of international order as a familial hierarchy with China as the patriarch. Japan was geographically close enough to understand this vocabulary intimately and generally made tacit allowance for the Chinese world order as a regional reality. In quest of trade or cultural exchange, Japanese missions followed etiquette close enough to established forms that Chinese officials could interpret it as evidence of Japan’s aspiration to membership in a common hierarchy.
Yet in a region
carefully attuned to the gradations of status implied in minute protocol decisions—such as the single word used to refer to a ruler, the mode in which a formal letter was delivered, or the style of calendar date on a formal document—Japan consistently refused to take up a formal role in the Sinocentric tribute system. It hovered at the edge of a hierarchical Chinese world
order, periodically insisting on its equality and, at some points, its own superiority.
At the apex of Japan’s society
and its own view of world order stood the Japanese Emperor, a figure conceived, like the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of Heaven, an intermediary between the human and the divine. This title—insistently displayed on Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese court—was a direct challenge to the cosmology of the Chinese world order, which posited China’s Emperor as the single pinnacle of human hierarchy. In addition to this status (which carried a transcendent import above and beyond what would have been claimed by any Holy Roman Emperor in Europe), Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited another distinction, that Japanese emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess, who gave birth to the first Emperor and endowed his successors with an eternal right to rule. According to the fourteenth-century “Records of the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns,”
Japan is the divine country
. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun Goddess left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and nothing similar may be found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.
Japan’s insular position allowed it wide latitude about whether to participate in international affairs at all. For many centuries, it remained on the outer boundaries of Asian affairs, cultivating its military traditions through internal contests and admitting foreign trade and culture at its discretion. At the close of the sixteenth century, Japan attempted to recast its role with an abruptness and sweep of ambition that its neighbors at first dismissed as implausible. The result was one of Asia’s major military conflicts—whose regional legacies remain the subject of vivid remembrance and dispute and whose lessons, if heeded,
might have changed America’s conduct in the twentieth-century Korean War.
In 1590, the warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi
—having bested his rivals, unified Japan, and brought more than a century of civil conflict to a close—announced a grander vision: he would raise the world’s largest army, march it up the Korean Peninsula, conquer China, and subdue the world. He dispatched a letter to the Korean King announcing his intent to “proceed to the country of the Great Ming and compel the people there to adopt our customs and manners” and inviting his assistance. After the King demurred and warned him against the endeavor (citing an “inseparable relationship between the Middle Kingdom and our kingdom” and the Confucian principle that “to invade another state is an act of which men of culture and intellectual attainments should feel ashamed”), Hideyoshi launched an invasion of 160,000 men and roughly seven hundred ships. This massive force overwhelmed initial defenses and at first marched swiftly up the peninsula. Its progress slowed as Korea’s Admiral Yi Sun-sin organized a determined naval resistance, harrying Hideyoshi’s supply lines and deflecting the invading armies to battles along the coast. When Japanese forces reached Pyongyang, near the narrow northern neck of the peninsula (and now North Korea’s capital), China intervened in force, unwilling to allow its tribute state to be overrun. A Chinese expeditionary army estimated between 40,000 and 100,000 strong crossed the Yalu River and pushed Japanese forces back as far as Seoul.
After five years of inconclusive negotiations
and devastating combat, Hideyoshi died, the invasion force withdrew, and the status quo ante was restored. Those who argue that history never repeats itself should ponder the comparability of China’s resistance to Hideyoshi’s enterprise with that encountered by America in the Korean War nearly four hundred years later.
On the failure of this venture, Japan changed course, turning to ever-increasing seclusion. Under the “locked country” policy lasting
over two centuries, Japan all but absented itself from participating in any world order. Comprehensive state-to-state relations on conditions of
strict diplomatic equality
existed only with Korea.
Chinese traders were permitted to operate
in select locations, though no official Sino-Japanese relations existed because no protocol could be worked out that satisfied both sides’ amour propre. Foreign trade with European countries was restricted to a few specified coastal cities; by 1673, all but the Dutch had been expelled, and they were confined to a single artificial island off the port of Nagasaki. By 1825, suspicion of the seafaring Western powers had become so great that Japan’s ruling military authorities promulgated an “
edict to expel foreigners
at all cost”—declaring that any foreign vessel approaching Japanese shores was to be driven away unconditionally, by force if necessary.
All this was, however, prelude to another dramatic shift, under which Japan ultimately vaulted itself into the global order—for two centuries largely Western—and became a modern great power on Westphalian principles. The decisive catalyst came when Japan was confronted, in 1853, by four American naval vessels dispatched from Norfolk, Virginia, on an expedition to flout deliberately the seclusion edicts by entering Tokyo Bay. Their commanding officer, Commodore Matthew Perry, bore a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan, which he insisted on delivering directly to imperial representatives in the Japanese capital (a breach of two centuries of Japanese law and diplomatic protocol). Japan, which held foreign trade in as little esteem as China, cannot have been particularly reassured by the President’s letter, which informed the Emperor (whom Fillmore addressed as his “Great and Good Friend!”) that the American people “think that
if your imperial majesty
were so far to change the ancient laws as to allow a free trade between the two countries it would be extremely beneficial to both.” Fillmore clothed the de facto ultimatum into a classically American pragmatic proposal to the effect that the
established seclusion laws, heretofore described as immutable, might be loosened on a trial basis:
If your imperial majesty is not satisfied that it would be safe altogether to abrogate the ancient laws which forbid foreign trade, they might be suspended for five or ten years, so as to try the experiment. If it does not prove as beneficial as was hoped, the ancient laws can be restored. The United States often limit their treaties with foreign States to a few years, and then renew them or not, as they please.
The Japanese recipients of the message recognized it as a challenge to their concept of political and international order. Yet they reacted with the reserved composure of a society that had experienced and studied the transitoriness of human endeavors for centuries while retaining its essential nature. Surveying Perry’s far superior firepower (Japanese cannons and firearms had barely advanced in two centuries, while Perry’s vessels were equipped with state-of-the-art naval gunnery capable, as he demonstrated along the Japanese coast, of firing explosive shells), Japan’s leaders concluded that direct resistance to the “black ships” would be futile. They relied on the cohesion of their society to absorb the shock and maintain their independence by that cohesion. They prepared an exquisitely courteous reply explaining that although the changes America sought were “
most positively forbidden by the laws
of our Imperial ancestors,” nonetheless, “for us to continue attached to ancient laws, seems to misunderstand the spirit of the age.” Allowing that “we are governed now by imperative necessity,” Japanese representatives assured Perry that they were prepared to satisfy nearly all of the American demands, including constructing a new harbor capable of accommodating American ships.