Seth Cropsey’s article in Foreign Affairs on a potential U.S.-Chinese naval rivalry mentions China’s perceived “core interests” in the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea and refers to “China’s path to regional hegemony.” It’s worth bearing in mind that this is what we’re talking about when we see Walter Russell Mead misleadingly comparing recent Chinese actions to Wilhelm II’s Weltpolitik. There was a significant change in German policy after 1890 that led to a more overtly aggressive Germany foreign policy, and that did result in the realignment of European powers Mead describes, but there has been no dramatic shift in Chinese policy that merits the comparison. Some of the Western commentary on this Senkaku dispute sounds similar to the hysterical warnings about Russian imperialism we were hearing two years ago during the war with Georgia. To listen to the alarmists then, you would have thought that Moscow was intent on rebuilding the Soviet Union because Russia acted in what it regarded as its legitimate self-interest in a dispute with one of its neighbors.

China has pursued its claims in nearby seas for decades. The recent dispute over the detention of the Chinese captain and Chinese claims on the Senkaku Islands happens to be with a government important enough to merit international attention. The Philippines and Vietnam have been contesting with China over claims in the South China Sea for decades. That should keep things in perspective before we start talking about the Kaiser and all of the exaggerated fears that this inspires in the American mind. Japan was willing to seize a Chinese ship to protect its territorial claims, which led to the collision and detention of the ship’s captain, and Beijing has predictably overreacted. Beijing has probably reacted this way as a means of protecting the government’s reputation at home and providing cover for an eventual de-escalation. So it is a very short-sighted interpretation of all of this to write this:

Twenty years of scrupulously patient effort at getting its neighbors to embrace China’s peaceful rise are being squandered by six weeks of aggressive diplomacy.

Mead confidently argues later in his post that almost a decade of aggressive warfare by the United States has not really had any significant effect on American power, but China has supposedly wrecked the last two decades of cultivating its neighbors because of a diplomatic row with one of its largest trading partners. China isn’t throwing “its weight around in a sterile quest for Wilhelmine Weltmacht.” As Cropsey says, China seems to be interested in regional hegemony. With regard to the dispute over the islands, China is claiming territory that it has been claiming for decades. According to the Japanese government’s own account, Japan formally claimed these islands in 1895, but this was against a backdrop of Japanese expansion in the region that took advantage of the weakness of Qing China. Even if Japan has a good claim to the islands, it is not hard to see why China would view the matter very differently. From the Chinese perspective, Japanese possession of the islands probably reminds China of their earlier national humiliations by foreign governments. That does not necessarily mean that China has a better claim. It does mean that if the U.S. goal “remains the development of some kind of stable international system in Asia that creates the same kind of long term peace and prosperity there that the European Union (with all its faults) has brought to Europe,” Americans should refrain from portraying a genuine territorial dispute based in past Japanese expansionism as evidence of Chinese regional aggression.

This is all the more important when the U.S. remains obligated to defend Japanese territory, but does not endorse the Japanese claim to the islands. Japan may be taking comfort in the U.S. alliance right now, but nothing could better demonstrate why the alliance makes so little sense for all parties than the events of the last year. As Nick Kristof pointed out earlier this month, the U.S. is not going to go to war with China to keep the Senkakus Japanese. From the Japanese perspective, what use is the alliance if the U.S. isn’t willing to back Japan on what it regards as legitimate territorial claims? For that matter, why should Americans be in the position of defending a nation that is perfectly capable of defending itself and enforcing its territorial claims? What if the U.S.-Japan alliance is actually an impediment to “the development of some kind of stable international system in Asia”?

The current ruling party in Japan came to power on the promise to re-balance the U.S.-Japanese relationship and pursue closer relations with its regional neighbors, and this was not just some accident or belated reaction to the Bush years. It reflected a significant change in Japanese attitudes that Washington has largely dismissed and ignored. The U.S. wants to keep perpetuating Cold War alliance structures that are increasingly irrelevant to the regions involved and to U.S. interests, but a steadily growing number of people in allied countries are tired of the U.S. military presence these alliances often entail and many no longer want their countries to fill the outdated role of front-line states in an international struggle that ended twenty years ago. For our part, Americans see fewer reasons than ever why the U.S. should be responsible for providing defense for countries that are able to defend themselves.