If World War III ever breaks out, its origins will not lie in the Middle East, South Asia or Eastern Europe. It will be in East Asia — where the strategic interests of China, the US and their respective partners intersect — that the geopolitical stakes, diplomatic tensions and potential for a global explosion are highest.
Because it is so obviously in every player’s interest to avoid outright conflict, there are stony handshakes like that between Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Beijing last month. However, if there is to be a genuinely durable peace, the region’s leaders need to work harder and more courageously to achieve it. Each of them could pursue game-changing initiatives if only they could summon the necessary statesmanship.
So, here — in a spirit of supreme, but perhaps not totally naive, optimism — are the new year’s resolutions that would be best for each of East Asia’s leaders to make.
Xi: “I will make it clear that any territorial claims China has in the South China Sea are based only on reasonable assertions of sovereignty over particular land features and the rights that accompany them under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. I will stop talking about ‘historical waters,’ and order the removal of the nine-dashed line from the map in Chinese passports.
“Having made Beijing’s authority in Hong Kong clear, I will find a way to let the people there have the local leader they want. A little flexibility here should also be a helpful message to those getting restless in Taiwan that China really can accommodate difference,” he could say.
“Also in that spirit, I will welcome the Dalai Lama to Beijing and negotiate with his leadership team a package of cultural autonomy and limited self-government, satisfying once and for all the reasonable aspirations of Tibetans,” he could say.
Abe: “I will invite to Hiroshima or Nagasaki on the anniversaries of the atomic blasts in the cities leaders of the six-party talks to begin serious negotiations on a Northeast Asia nuclear arms-free zone, which will embrace Japan, South Korea and North Korea and be guaranteed by the US, China and Russia.
“And I will make this year the year that the historical grievances between Japan and its neighbors are buried for good. Remembering the impact of Willy Brandt’s Kniefall at the Jewish ghetto site in Warsaw in 1970, I will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II by visiting Nanjing and accepting Japanese responsibility for the terrible massacre of 1937-1938,” he could say.
“I will also do everything I can to remove from the Yushukan Museum, on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine, all exhibits which deny, question or are insensitive to Japan’s responsibility for waging aggressive war and committing atrocious crimes in the 1930s and 1940s. I will start by removing from its pedestal the steam locomotive that ran on the Thailand-Burma ‘Death Railway,’ the display of which dishonors the more than 100,000 prisoners of war and forced laborers who perished from disease, malnutrition or maltreatment in its construction,” he could say.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye: “I will remove the May 24 sanctions placed on North Korea after its military provocations in 2010, because the sanctions are making impossible nearly all of the measures to build trust and confidence that I keep saying are necessary.
“Of course the North should continue to be named and shamed in the UN for its human-rights abuses and nuclear misbehavior. However, pariah states never behave responsibly, and no state has a bigger role than South Korea does in coaxing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s regime into normality. Serious re-engagement will be politically hard to deliver, but if I do not, I will be on the wrong side of history,” he could say.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un: “I will surprise everyone by freezing our efforts to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, and I will prove my seriousness by opening our uranium enrichment plants to inspection. That will leave no one with any credible reason to delay resumption of the six-party talks.
“We have known since the 1990s that a denuclearization settlement is the best guarantee of the regime’s security. I might have image problems, but I am not crazy. China has fallen out of love with the nation; the people know too much about the wider world; and everyone knows that to use our handful of nuclear weapons would be suicidal. It is time to reach an agreement,” he could say.
US President Barack Obama: “I will say publicly what former US president Bill Clinton was saying privately a decade ago. It might be painful for many Americans to hear and it will not impress my opponents, but if I can make it believable, it will do more to win the US friendship, respect and ultimate security in East Asia and around the world than our US$1 trillion nuclear-weapons modernization program or all the unworkable and counterproductive missile-defense systems at which we keep hurling money.
“It is simply this: The US should not use its immense military and economic power to try to stay top dog on the global block in perpetuity. Rather, it should be using that power to create a world in which the US will be comfortable living when it is no longer top dog,” he could say.
Perhaps the idea that any of these resolutions will actually be made is fanciful. And it is in the nature of New Year’s resolutions that, even when they are made, they are rarely kept. However, should any one of the resolutions come to pass, the result would be momentous.
Cumulatively, they would be transformative. People should hope that they are made, and kept, and the public should continue nagging leaders until they are.
Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and former president of the International Crisis Group, is chancellor of the Australian National University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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