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US-japan relations Good-Democracy
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US-japan relations Good-DemocracyUS-Japan cooperation is critical to democracy promotionRapp 04[ Lieutenant Col. William E Rapp PH.D in IR from Stanford “Paths Diverging?” Janurary 2004 http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pdffiles/PUB367.pdf)Finally, the alliance can provide the continuity of peace and trust necessary for the growth of liberalism throughout the region. Success for the United States and Japan will increasingly be measured in terms of an increased community of vibrant, pacific, free-market democracies in Asia. Making the two publics aware of the idealistic benefits of the alliance will make more headway toward acceptance of a deepening partnership than simply focusing on the alliance’s role in power politics in the region. Creating the conditions for that liberal development and tamping down the anticipated frictions that will arise along the way can best be accomplished in tandem. In the long run, this liberalism backed by the concerted power of the United States and Japan will bring lasting stability to the region. Democracy is critical to preventing extinction Diamond 95 [Larry, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s”] This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built. US-Japan relations Good- Middle East/RussiaRelations Key to Middle east and Russian StabilityCalder 09[Kent E. Calder, Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. “Pacific Alliance” 2009 pp165-167 ]To begin with, the stability of the Middle East and particularly the Persian Gulf must rank high on any list of shared global concerns. Three countries there—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran—possess nearly two-thirds of world oil reserves, while the region as a whole likely holds three-quarters of the global total. Fully a quarter of the world's natural gas supplies also likely lie beneath the Persian Gulf and its littoral nations. Just as important for the U.S.-Japan relationship, Japan is overwhelmingly dependent on the Gulf for its oil and, to a lesser degree, for its gas supplies. It gets 90 percent of its oil and slightly more than 20 percent of its gas from that volatile tegion.10 Those ratios are among the highest on earth and have been steadily rising over the past decade. The United States is much less dependent, getting only 21 percent of its oil in 2007 and virtually none of its gas from the Persian Gulf." Washington has, to be sure, crucial interests in the stability of the broader global energy regime and also in the security of Israel. These strategic concerns transcend its narrower national energy stakes and provide a crucial rationale for some sort of continuing American geopolitical involvement in the region. Japan, by contrast, clearly has a strong energy and economic interest in the stability of the Middle East, especially the Gulf, and few political-military means to assure it. This transpacific asymmetry regarding Middle East affairs—entering on the stability of the Gulf and access to it—provides one of the most important political-economic rationales for the U.S.-Japan alliance, especially from the Japanese side. Russia also figures importantly in the Middle Eastern stability equation, especially in its geopolitical dimensions. It is a neighbor to the Middle East, as shown in figure 7.1, bordering both Iran and Turkey to the north. This geographical propinquity is a matter of utmost importance in global terms, especially when viewed in conjunction with the energy equation. Russia is also a strong complement to the Persian Gulf in the world of energy, with roughly one-third of proven world gas reserves and another 10 percent of global oil. Russia and rhe Middle East together thus hold around 70 percent of proven world oil reserves and 67 percent of global gas, as indicated in figure 7.2. Together, they have the potential to exercise a controlling influence on a resource of vital importance to both the United States and Japan, which are the two largest energy importers in the world. The former Soviet "near abroad"—-primarily Central Asian states over whose energy access to the broader world Russia continues to hold substantial sway—contributes another 6 percent to the world gas and 4 percent to the world oil equation, thus compounding Central Eurasian dominance with respect to global energy supply.12 Several of the most crucial emerging security issues that confront the United States and Japan in the unitary global political economy now emerging thus relate to stability in the Persian Gulf and surrounding regions. There is, first of all, the question of political-economic stability in the countries concerned. This is a crucial question with respect to Iran, the largest of the nations bordering the Persian Gulf, and also Saudi Arabia, which holds a quarter of the worlds oil reserves, not to mention Iraq. These countries face enormous looming demographic and employment challenges and joblessness over 10 percent in some Persian Gulf countries. Yet the GDP of all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)13 nations combined—oil wealth notwithstanding— remains less than that of Spain alone.14 Apart from this stability issue, there is the pressing question of how Russia and the Middle East, immediate neighbors that they are, will relate to one another politically and diplomatically in future years. Confrontation and en-flamed relations between Russia and the world of Islam are not, in the post-Cold War era, in the interest of either the United States of Japan, as they could exacerbate the already delicate and volatile ethnic balance of the region. Yet neither has intimate and plausible understandings with the other, especially with respect to energy pricing and supply. 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