President Trump graciously and warmly welcoming Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the White House, and flying him on Air Force One to Florida for a golf game, was a replay of President George W. Bush’s reception of then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in June 2006, when Bush gave Koizumi a ride on Air Force One to Memphis, Tennessee, for a tour of Graceland because Elvis is a musical hero of the former prime minister.
The Japanese promises of billion dollar investments in America that will generate hundreds of thousand jobs cannot hold a candle or compare to what China can do. Whatever Japan has promised to do for America, China can do bigger and better. Not only can, but wants to but is repelled by America that insists on embracing Japan as a partner for all the wrong reasons – reasons I have written at length about in Feasting Dragon, Starving Eagle and Custom Maid Revolution for New World Disorder.
Chinese State Enterprises, companies and business men like Jack Ma of Alibaba, Terry Gou of Foxcomm, can out-invest and employ by many multiples whatever Japan has promised.
Now that President Trump called China’s Xi Jinping and confirmed the “One China” policy, on the eve of the Japanese prime ministers visit, it is time America re-considers its alliance with Japan and partner with China.
Two Chinese astronauts floated into the country’s orbiting space lab in October 2016, after Shenzhou-11, China’s sixth manned spacecraft, docked with the Tiangong-2 research base. Meanwhile, an experimental Japanese mission to clear “space junk” from orbit ended in failure, the latest embarrassment for Tokyo’s space program.
Japan’s industrial incompetence was highlighted by the Fukushima Nuclear power crisis that followed the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Chinese coolies helped build America’s first national infrastructure – the railroad – and today supply the steel girders for bridges and buildings. Its high speed trains can beat Japanese prices and financing. The list of factories, services and investments China and America can bring to each other is a lot longer than Japans’.
A good example – and metaphor — that best demonstrates these self-evident truths is the automobile industry.
The three big Japanese car makers, Toyota, Honda and Nissan, produce about 20.6 million cars a year. The Japanese domestic market buys about 4.9 million cars a year. The rest are exported.
The three big U.S. automobile manufacturers, GM, Ford and Chrysler produce about 17 million cars a year for a market of 17.6 million a year. They don’t make enough domestically and hence don’t export many cars. They set up joint venture factories in foreign countries where there is a market for American cars. None of the big three U.S. auto makers has set up a factory in Japan. Why, because there is no significant market in Japan for American cars because it is dominated by the local three and high import tariffs.
On the other hand, one of the largest and most profitable such joint venture is that of General Motors in China. Shanghai GM reports annual sale increases of up to 75 percent annually, buoyed by the top-selling Buick brand and minivan.
Japan has been unable to reform domestically to open up its markets to foreign imports or foreigners. China on the other hand, has opened its markets and can open them more as it continues to have Chinese firms invest in America. An investment win-win for America and China in the two largest consumer and industrial markets. The American trade deficit can be reduced dramatically.
Japan has been in an economic recession for more than three decades while China has been growing economically in leaps and bounds annually – and replaced Japan as the number two world economy. It won’t be long before it replaces America as number one.
China is now challenging and marginalizing America’s role as the dominant industrial and geopolitical player.
With America’s enemies, North Korea and Iran – China’s friends – going nuclear, a major geopolitical realignment is taking place that America must come to terms with.
The only solution to avoid Armageddon is for America and China to partner, cooperate and for America to accept the fact that the center of gravity has moved to Asia in the 21st-century with China at the controls. Not Japan.
It makes no sense for America to keep upgrading its relationship with Japan in the hope that together they can contain China.
The more the U.S. flexes its muscle into Asia in support of Japan, the tighter a reluctant China embraces Russia. Is that what America wants or needs?
Today America and China must develop a new successor model to free market capitalism and military alliances. Globalization is benefiting only a handful of the richest people and impoverishing the rest of the world. China, the leader of the impoverished world, has re-emerged as a global economic and military power. It is a power America should embrace in a strategic alliance. The alternative is a futile and costly exercise of containment and encirclement that is doomed to fail.