日米外交関係に関する内外メディアの論調

私はエコノミストの大学教授という、まったく専門外ながら、一応、外交官として大使館勤務も経験していますので、今週から来週にかけて日米外交関係が、ある種の正念場を迎えるような気がしています。もうすぐ始まるサンプロでも激論が予想されます。サンプロなどの国内メディアの論調には接しやすいんですが、海外メディアのオピニオンについては目につきにくいこともあり、私自身のためのメモ代わりに内外メディア5社の論調をノートしておきます。また、海外メディアは国内論調と違って、必ず中国を引合いに出しますので、その面からも注目すべきであると考えています。日本でも、朝日新聞のサイトや読売新聞のサイトで、中国の習近平副主席と天皇陛下との会談を1か月ルールを無視してゴリ押ししたとの話題がメディアを騒がせ、今も小沢民主党幹事長が訪中の真っ最中であることは分かり切っているハズなんですが、なぜか、日米同盟に中国を加えて考えることは意図的に避けているように見受けられます。

最初に Financial Times から。特に、ショッキングなのはマンガだったりします。日本は米国と中国の間で三角関係を形成しつつあるようです。

US-Japan: an easy marriage becomes a ménage à trois
By Philip Stephens
Tokyo these days is full of Americans with furrowed brows. US pre-eminence in Asia is being challenged by the rise of China. Barack Obama's administration is searching for a grand strategy to safeguard its place as the region's pivotal power. Now, Japan is challenging the terms of its long-standing security alliance with Washington.
The proximate cause of the angst is an argument about the relocation of one of the US military bases on the island of Okinawa. Behind the spat, however, is an emerging divergence of perspective. Bluntly put, the new generation of politicians that has swept to power in Japan is unwilling to accept the subservient role allotted to them by Washington.
The election victory in September of Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan marked a revolution in Japanese politics after half-a-century of virtually uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. The US has struggled to grasp the significance of the transfer of power from its faithful allies in the LDP to a party of political insurgents.
The military base dispute has become a lightning rod for differences about how to respond to a changing geopolitical landscape. The strategic challenge shared by Washington and Tokyo is how to engage a rising China while balancing its regional ambitions. The difficult question is how.
The US-Japan relationship has thus far been defined by US occupation, the imperative of cold-war unity, and, until recently, by unchallenged US hegemony in Asia. But the world has moved on. China has entered the bedroom, turning a comfortable marriage into an awkward ménage à.
No one is talking about tearing up the 50-year-old security agreement between Washington and Tokyo. The US military presence and nuclear guarantee offer Japan security against the immediate threat from a nuclear-armed North Korea and reassurance against China's military modernisation. The alliance simultaneously provides reassurance to Beijing about Japanese intentions and the US with a big military "footprint" in East Asia.
The psychology of the bargain, though, belongs to the world before China's rise, a disjunction evident in the base dispute. Mr Hatoyama campaigned on a pledge to revisit an agreement to relocate the Futenma marine helicopter base. Much to Washington's dismay, he has so far kept his promise.
Many in Tokyo believe a compromise will be found. Japan's defence minister has broken ranks with his boss to calm US anxieties. One senior official in Tokyo told me that a deal may be struck when Mr Obama and Mr Hatoyama attend the Copenhagen climate change conference. Yet the US administration's maladroit diplomacy has exposed deeper discord. By demanding that the DPJ elevate the former government's promise to Washington above its own pledge to Japanese voters, the US has sounded an unabashed hegemon. The scolding tone of Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has echoes of General Douglas MacArthur's postwar imperium.
Other US officials, including Kurt Campbell, the US state department official responsible for East Asia, have been more emollient. Mr Obama offered soothing language during his Tokyo visit. However, behind the scenes, the Americans have been playing hardball by suggesting the DPJ government is calling the alliance into question.
Mr Hatoyama has added to Washington's irritation by calling for a recalibration of the US-Japan relationship to give Tokyo a more "equal" say. For good measure, he has criticised US-style "market fundamentalism" as a trigger for the global crash and suggested that Europe offers better social and economic models. The controversy over Futenma meanwhile has stirred long-standing popular unease about the rights enjoyed by the US forces.
The DPJ government has also announced that it is ending its support for the Indian Ocean naval mission supplying US-led forces in Afghanistan - though it will offset this by expanding financial aid for Afghan reconstruction.
What really seems to have alarmed Washington, however, is Mr Hatoyama's intervention in a regional debate about the architecture of a new Asian multilateralism. The prime minister's proposal for a new East Asian Community centred on China and Japan seems to exclude the US. Washington has made it clear that it does not like being excluded.
The US-educated Mr Hatoyama is not anti-American. Nor is he a born radical - he hails from a wealthy establishment family. His great grandfather, grandfather and father all held high office. Japanese politics is still substantially hereditary.
Nor, as far as one can tell, is Mr Hatoyama proposing fundamentally to weaken Japan's alliance with Washington. Listening this week to an impressive line-up of experts, ministers and officials at a series of seminars organised by the Tokyo Foundation and the German Marshall Fund of the US, the impression I took away was of a politician voicing a set of impulses rather than offering detailed policies.
Mr Hatoyama has a reputation - even among some supporters - as a big-picture politician. He seems uninterested in detail and unperturbed by inconsistency. There are plenty of people in the Tokyo political establishment who predict that, while the DPJ is here to stay, Mr Hatoyama may prove a shooting star - his present brightness prefiguring a fleeting presence.
For all that, the prime minister has been articulating an inevitable strategic shift: China's rise is forcing Japan to become more of an Asian and less of a western nation. It fears China, but is also inclined to be less submissive towards Washington. Mr Hatoyama's vision of a re-engineered partnership with the US may be hazy, but his premise is surely right.
As of now, the Americans and Japanese have a different view of their roles in the ménage. The US wants to combine its alliance with Tokyo with a strategic relationship with Beijing, acting as the region's balancing power. Japan favours a different model, acting as conciliator between America and China. Real life, of course, is unlikely to allow such simple constructs, not least because the Sino-Japanese relationship has yet to escape the dark shadows of history. But things cannot be as they were. Those brows will be furrowed for some time.

続いて、Washington Post です。

Does Japan still matter?
By Fred Hiatt
U.S.-Japan relations are in "crisis," Japan's foreign minister told me Thursday -- but I would guess that few Americans have noticed, let alone felt alarm. As China rises, Japan's economy has stalled, and its population is dwindling. The island nation -- feared during the last century first as a military power, then as an economic conqueror -- barely registers in the American imagination.
But Japan still matters. And despite the "crisis" set in motion by the electoral defeat of the party that had ruled for half a century, the United States has more to fear from Japanese defeatism -- from its own uncertainty about whether it still matters -- than from the assertiveness of its new government.
At a seminar here this week organized by the German Marshall Fund and the Tokyo Foundation, and in separate interviews, one Japanese after another delivered variations on gloom, doom and pessimism. Polls confirm that this is no anomaly; in one taken by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last spring, the three words offered most often to describe the current era were "unrest," "stagnation" and "bleak," as the paper's editor in chief, Yoichi Funabashi, noted recently in Foreign Affairs.
"Japan's presence in the international community is rapidly weakening and waning," one prominent businessman said this week. "We have to bring Japan back to high growth, but that possibility now is nil. . . . There are heaps of difficulties facing Japan . . . insurmountable . . . Japanese people are so anxious. . . . We don't need to remain a major country. . . . 'Small-nation Japan' is my thinking."
Japan's fiscal challenges are daunting, as is its declining birthrate. Yet the negativity seems overblown. Japan retains the world's second-largest national economy and will be third or fourth biggest for decades to come. It is the world's second-largest aid donor, the fifth-biggest military spender (despite a constitution that bars the waging of war) and a technological powerhouse. It is a crucial player, and frequently America's closest ally, in international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And as the longest-standing and most successful democracy in the non-Western world, it is a hugely important role model, and potentially a leader, in supporting freedom and the rule of law.
That potential was sharply enhanced by the landslide victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in August, ending what one speaker at the seminar called the Liberal Democratic "shogunate." The Democrats have promised to disrupt the cozy relationship among bureaucrats, the ruling party and industry, and to govern with more public input and accountability.
But they're also disrupting the U.S.-Japan relationship. An agreement to realign U.S. Marine bases in Okinawa has been put on hold, despite what U.S. officials took as a promise from Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama ("Trust me," he privately told President Obama, according to Japanese officials) to implement the deal. The Democrats' coalition partners, as well as voters in Okinawa, loathe the pact.
"So we are in a situation where the U.S.-Japan alliance is being tested," Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada acknowledged.
Democratic Party officials have said they want to put the U.S.-Japan relationship on a more equal footing, and Hatoyama and others have at times gone further, suggesting a desire to improve relations with China while downgrading those with the United States. But Okada dismissed suggestions that the suspension of the base agreement reflects a deeper-seated resentment of America or a fundamental questioning of the alliance.
Citing North Korea's nuclear weapons and China's growing military, Okada said, "I don't think anyone would think that Japan on its own can face up to such risks. That is why we need the U.S.-Japan alliance. I don't think any decent politician would doubt that as a fact."
Frustrated by Hatoyama's amateurish handling of the issue, Obama administration officials are scrambling to come up with the right mix of tolerance for the coalition's inexperience and firmness on implementing an agreed-upon deal. They're right to insist on the importance of the military alliance, long a force for stability throughout the region.
But they shouldn't lose sight of the larger picture. For years now the United States has been trying to engage China's government in strategic dialogues and high-level commissions. It should do no less with Japan, its most important democratic ally in Asia, and the advent of an untested government still feeling its way provides both reason and opportunity to do so.
So far, Japan's new government has not defined policies that could restore economic growth and lift the country out of its funk. But America should be hoping that it can. And if it wants Japan to regain some confidence, it makes sense to treat Japan as though it matters. Because it does.

海外メディアの最後に、New York Times です。

Obama's Japan Headache
By Roger Cohen
President Obama has a Japan problem. I know, it's not an issue that keeps him up at night. But when U.S. ties with its most important Asian ally get ugly over security rather than semiconductors, the world must be changing.
Certainly Japan is. Having voted out the shoguns of the Liberal Democratic Party who ruled for more than a half-century, and declared war on the bureaucracy that greased the pork-barrel deals of that long dominion, the Japanese are taking a new look at the power that wrote their Constitution and underwrote their assumptions: the United States.
As a result there are troubles. Reliable Japan is now restive Japan. It's talking about a more "equal partnership" - read less subservient. Acquiescence has given way to argument.
I find that normal in that Japan has just gone through a political change as dramatic in its way as any post-Cold-War demolition of a single-party dominated, American-backed status quo.
Still, the troubles between the world's two largest economies are proving unexpectedly sharp. Ministers here shake their heads and mutter "really bad." On the face of it, Obama and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who guided the upstart Democratic Party to victory last September, have much in common, including change. Bad blood was not inevitable.
Both leaders swept into office on the back of middle class malaise at falling incomes and job insecurity. The Japanese salaryman and the American working stiff have shared a lousy decade.
Both leaders hover in the center despite left-of-center inclinations and ideals. Both face the task of adjusting their countries' expectations to a world in which their relative power is eroding. True, Obama was the ultimate outsider whereas Hatoyama is the scion of a Kennedy-like political dynasty (and heir to the Bridgestone tire fortune). But shared concerns might have trumped differences of background.
Instead, trust has dissolved faster than wasabi in soy sauce. The spark has been the future of a Marine air station in the southern island of Okinawa, where local feelings run high over the noise, crime and pollution many associate with the U.S. military presence. The deeper issue is more complex: growing Japanese restiveness over postwar dependency on Washington of which the most visible symbol is the 37,000 American troops here.
Hatoyama has given voice to that chafing. He campaigned with a pledge of greater assertiveness, questioning a 2006 deal to relocate the Futenma air station to a pristine site in the north of the island (environmentalists in his party are incensed), suggesting the base should be moved off the island or even out of Japan. He has also talked about a revision of the Constitution whose Article 9 denies Japan a full-fledged military.
"We take the U.S.-Japan alliance very seriously, it's the heart of our foreign policy, although Hatoyama used to talk about an alliance without permanent bases and that may confuse our U.S. friends a bit," said Akihisa Nagashima, the vice minister of defense. "Now I believe Hatoyama does not think we should kick out U.S. troops - never, not at all."
But doubts have been sown on the American side. They've multiplied through misunderstanding. When the president was here last month, Hatoyama appealed for trust, Obama said sure, but they never cleared up what the mutual trust was about. To Hatoyama, it was the future of the alliance. To Obama it was the implementation of the $26 billion 2006 Okinawa accord.
That was a disastrous little ambiguity. Now everyone's unhappy. A high-level working group on the Marine base, announced by Obama, has fallen apart.
My conversations here suggest Hatoyama's not going to make a final decision for months, perhaps not before upper house elections next July that could liberate him of his left-wing junior coalition partners. Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state who's been running around town, is only the most visible expression of U.S. impatience. Obama shares it.
"I can't change the political situation here," Nagashima said, referring to the Okinawan anger and coalition pressure on Hatoyama. "I really want our American friends to accept and work with us despite these difficulties."
That's sound advice. Having just taken 90-plus days over an Afghan decision, Obama can't dismiss Hatoyama as a ditherer. He's taken the reins after more than five decades of the L.D.P shogunate. He needs time - and the whiff of a campaign financing scandal is not helping him.
The deeper forces behind Hatoyama's victory and the Futenma imbroglio are these. Japan, like Germany before it, wants to move out from under American tutelage. Unlike Germany, however, it inhabits a part of the world where a Cold War vestige - nuclear-armed North Korea - endures and fast-rising China with its growing military is just across the water.
In short, the need for the Japan-U.S. alliance is real even if the Japanese urge for liberation from its more demeaning manifestations is growing. That says to me that everyone should take a deep breath. U.S. impatience should be curbed along with the pie-in-the-sky "world of fraternity" musings of elements in Hatoyama's party. Be flexible on Futenma but unyielding on the strategic imperative binding America and Japan.

注目すべきなのは、Financial Times を除いて、Washington Post と New York Times は東京特派員が解説していることです。中身については、私もこれに似た経験があるんですが、試験の前に質問に来た学生に対して、「こんなことも分からないのか、アホ、バカ、マヌケ」と叱り飛ばすわけにもいかず、それなりに親切丁寧に解説を加えるものの、「どうして、こんなことが理解できないんだろう」と極めて強い苛立ちを覚える心境が、行間によく表れています。きわめて辛抱強い文章の典型といえます。

次に、国内メディアに目を転じて朝日新聞です。

普天間問題―日米関係の危機にするな
米海兵隊の普天間飛行場の移設問題が一段とこじれてきた。
鳩山由紀夫首相が先週、移設問題の結論を来年に持ち越す方針を示したことが直接の発端だ。名護市辺野古への移設案に連立相手の社民党が強硬に反対したことに配慮したものだった。
だが、その結果、首相がオバマ米大統領との間で合意した、辺野古案を検証する閣僚級の日米作業部会は宙に浮いてしまった。首脳会談で確認した来年の安保条約改定50周年に向けた「同盟深化」の協議にも入れそうにない。
日本政府関係者によると、辺野古案以外に現実的な打開策はないとする米政府側の、先送りに対する反発が底流にある。こうした展開に、岡田克也外相でさえ「日米関係の現状に非常に強い危機感を持っている」と語る。
なぜこの事態なのか。日米関係の基盤は安保条約であり、日本が基地を提供するのは不可欠の要件である。移設問題はその重要な一環だ。この基本認識では日米に大きな違いはあるまい。
米側が既存の合意の実施を求めるのは、米国の立場としては当然だろう。同時に、政権交代を踏まえた鳩山政権が過去の経緯を検証し、沖縄の過重な負担を軽くするための方途を探ろうとすることも否定されるべきではない。
問題は、同盟国間の外交らしく、在日米軍の抑止力をどう維持するのか、日本としてそのコストをどう分担するのかという観点からの率直な意思疎通がうかがわれないことだ。
これで同盟そのものが壊れるかのような議論は短絡的に過ぎるが、コミュニケーションが不全なまま混迷が深まるのは不幸なことだ。
オバマ大統領は東京での演説で「この半世紀、日米同盟は安全保障と繁栄の基盤であり続けた」と述べた。今必要なのは、その「基盤」を保ち、管理していくための意思と知恵である。
いったんは年内決着を探りながら、連立への配慮を優先し、結論を先送りした鳩山政権に対する米国側のいらだちは理解できる。
一方で朝日新聞の世論調査では、日米合意を見直して再交渉すべきだという人が半数を超えた。沖縄県民だけでなく、こうした世論の動向も軽視されるべきではない。
防災や医療、教育などの分野で重層的な協力を広げていくという首相の「同盟深化」論は、地球温暖化対策や核不拡散の取り組みを重視するオバマ政権の方向性と一致するものだ。日本国民も、ともすれば軍事面のみが強調されがちだった従来の同盟像が刷新されることを歓迎するに違いない。
この流れを大事に育むためにも、普天間問題をめぐるあつれきをできるだけ抑え込むことが首相の責任である。まずはどのような「方針」なのか、それを早く出してもらいたい。

最後の最後に読売新聞です。

普天間協議中断 同盟の危機回避へ決断せよ
その場しのぎの優柔不断な対応を重ねた末、連立政権の維持を最優先するという鳩山首相の判断が、日米同盟の危機を招いている。
このまま放置すれば、安全保障だけでなく、政治、経済などの分野を含め、日米関係全体に重大な影響を与えかねない。
岡田外相が「日米同盟が若干揺らいでいる」との懸念を表明するほど、現在の日米関係は憂慮すべき状況にある。鳩山首相は、この事実をきちんと認識し、建設的な対処方針をまとめるべきだ。
沖縄県の米海兵隊普天間飛行場の移設問題を協議する日米の閣僚級の作業部会が中断されることになった。日本側が、与党の社民党の反対を理由に、年内の決着を先送りするよう伝えたためだ。
来年の日米安保条約改定50周年に向けて、同盟関係を深化させるための日米協議についても、米側が延期を通告してきた。
首脳会談で「迅速に結論を出す」と確認しながら、国内事情から年内決着を一方的に断念する。これでは、信頼関係を基盤とする日米の共同作業は成り立たない。
政府は、年内決着を先送りすることの重大な意味を真剣に考えねばなるまい。
年内決着が実現しなければ、現行計画は事実上頓挫する。新たな移設先を探す作業は極めて困難で、膨大な時間を要する。
その場合、市街地に隣接し、危険な普天間飛行場が現状のまま長期間存続し、固定化する恐れが大きい。海兵隊8000人のグアム移転と米軍6施設の返還も白紙に戻る可能性が高まる。
政府内では新たな対処方針として、普天間飛行場の危険除去など沖縄の負担軽減策を優先して米側に要請する案が浮上している。だが、日本側にだけ都合のいい案に米側が同意する可能性は低い。
現行計画を容認しないまま、移設費用を来年度予算に計上しても米側の理解を得るのは難しい。やはり、日本政府として、現行計画を推進する立場を早期に明確にすることが欠かせない。
普天間問題や予算編成などをめぐり、民主党が少数与党の社民党や国民新党に振り回される事態が目立つ。首相の指導力の欠如と相まって、連立政権の政策実行能力に大きな疑義を生んでいる。
社民党は「重大な決意」に言及して連立離脱をちらつかせ、現行計画に反対した。鳩山首相こそ、連立解消も辞さない「重大な決意」で普天間問題の早期解決に取り組むべき時である。