Okinawa and the new domino effect

[FarCenter]

By John Feffer

For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for United States military power. We couldn't have fought wars in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1959-1975) without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally. Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what's left of America's Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.

You'd think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn't make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the US Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa - an island prefecture almost 1,600 kilometers south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen US bases and 75% of American forces in Japan - is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to stake its reputation and its relationship with a new Japanese government on the fate of that base alone, which reveals much about US anxieties in the age of President Barack Obama.

What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the George W Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the US was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is insisting, over the protests of Okinawans and the objections of Tokyo, on completing that agreement by building a new partial replacement base in a less heavily populated part of Okinawa.

The current row between Tokyo and Washington is no mere "Pacific squall", as Newsweek dismissively described it. After six decades of saying yes to everything the United States has demanded, Japan finally seems on the verge of saying no to something that matters greatly to Washington, and the relationship that Dwight D Eisenhower once called an "indestructible alliance" is displaying ever more hairline fractures. Worse yet, from the Pentagon's perspective, Japan's resistance might prove infectious - one major reason why the United States is putting its alliance on the line over the closing of a single antiquated military base and the building of another of dubious strategic value.

During the Cold War, the Pentagon worried that countries would fall like dominoes before a relentless communist advance. Today, the Pentagon worries about a different kind of domino effect. In Europe, North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries are refusing to throw their full support behind the US war in Afghanistan. In Africa, no country has stepped forward to host the headquarters of the Pentagon's new Africa Command. In Latin America, little Ecuador has kicked the US out of its air base in Manta.

All of these are undoubtedly symptoms of the decline in respect for American power that the US military is experiencing globally. But the current pushback in Japan is the surest sign yet that the American empire of overseas military bases has reached its high-water mark and will soon recede.

<SNIP>http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/LC06Dh01.html

[RC]

1. How is our military defending this country, when they are scattered all over the world?

Not even Russia comes close to having as many military bases outside their country's borders as we do.