At the present time, when the US once again has an unprepared and internationally novice president surrounded by unelected officials with agendas that may lock the country into dangerous positions for years to come, it may be useful to look back 50 years to the so-called peace treaty with Japan wrought by John Foster Dulles.
More than any other American, Dulles created the post-World War II system of American satellites in East Asia and committed the US people to cold and hot wars against nationalistic communists in China, North Korea, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere around the world, including Cuba.
As Secretary of State he fired, marginalized, or turned over to the tender mercies of Senator Joseph McCarthy every US diplomat who knew anything about China in order to protect his paranoid view about communists' coming to power in China because of disloyal US officials.
The jewel in the crown of Dulles's East Asian empire was Japan, which he converted from a defeated but nonetheless sovereign nation into a satellite in permanent orbit around the US. This he did through the peace treaty signed at San Francisco's opera house on Sept. 8, 1951, and more importantly, through the Japan-US Security Treaty, signed a few hours later at the Presidio of San Francisco, appropriately enough then a US military base.
Former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida and other Japanese leaders always liked to claim that they had gotten a good deal from Dulles. But 50 years later -- with Japan's economy stifled by its old Cold War arrangements with the US, the Asian countries damaged during World War II still hating Japan for its arrogance and brutality, and 1.3 million Okinawans still forced to live with 27,000 American troops and their camp followers -- Yoshida's claims are no longer evident, to say the least.
The original Security Treaty gave the US military the right "to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan" and required the US's prior consent for the forces of a third country to stay in or pass through Japan. It took the largest upheaval in postwar Japanese history, the Security Treaty struggle of 1960, to get these offensive clauses eliminated without ever actually changing the substance of the relationship.
Dulles totally outmaneuvered Yoshida on Japan's relations with China,which were, after all, the root cause of Japan's war with the World War II allies. Dulles did not invite either Beijing or Taiwan to the peace conference and forced Japan to recognize the Chiang Kai-shek regime on Taiwan even though mainland China had been Japan's leading prewar trading partner. The arrangement was so odd that in order to make Japan's restored sovereignty even slightly viable, the US had to open its markets to any and all Japanese exports and to tolerate Japan's protectionism. This in turn exposed Japan to the shock of Nixon's 1971 opening to China, which the US kept secret from Japan, and to the present-day conundrum of Japan's still trying to work out a mutually advantageous relationship with China, the world's fastest-growing economy.
The Peace Treaty itself gave Okinawa to the Pentagon as its own private colony, an imperium that lasted for 20 years until Japan and the US altered its legal status into that of a de facto colony of the US disguised by a facade of Japanese sovereignty. It is extremely doubtful that the island's current 38 American military bases have anything at all to do with "peace and security" in the Pacific, but there is no doubt that the U.S. and Japan have conspired to turn the Okinawans into Japan's poorest citizens.
The wealth of Taiwan, only a few miles further south, is evidence of what Okinawa might have achieved without Dulles' peace treaty. On April 19,1952, Hanson Baldwin, the military correspondent of the New York Times, described the treaty as inaugurating "a period when Japan is free, yet not free," which is a perfect definition of a satellite.
It would undoubtedly astound Yoshida that Japan's subordination to the US still persists 50 years after he signed the treaty. At San Francisco, Yoshida alone signed for Japan because the conservative opposition Democratic Party and the Socialists were opposed to any military alliance with the US and because he wanted to indicate to the Japanese people that he alone was taking responsibility for it. Yoshida assumed that the Security Treaty would be a transient affair.
Yoshida's daughter later told the Australian scholar John Welfield, "It was the only thing that could be done at the time, really. Yet he always knew that it was a very unnatural position for us to be in." According to John Dower, only about 20 Japanese showed up in front of the Imperial Palace to shout "banzai!" when the peace treaty went into effect.
The Bush administration says it wants to abrogate the treaty that outlaws defenses against ballistic missiles because it is outmoded, anachronistic, and belongs to the bygone era of the Cold War. If he and others in Washington really want to get rid of treaties that have outlived their usefulness, I nominate the Japanese-US Security Treaty. A change in Japan's "unnatural position" is long overdue.
Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, in Cardiff, California. His latest book is Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
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