A2: US-Japan relations Good- Climate

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Soviet world , Associate Professor of Soviet Studies at the Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, Maxwell Air Force Base, and taught at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and at the University of California, Riverside. "RUSSIA AND ARMS CONTROL:ARE THERE OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION?" March 2009 http://www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil]

As McDonough showed above, U.S. force deployments in the Pacific theater definitely threaten Russian nuclear assets and infrastructure as well as its territory and conventional forces.243 A second major Russian concern is the strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance in the twin forms of joint missile defenses and the apparent consolidation of a tripartite or possibly quadripartite alliance including Australia and South Korea, if not India. In that context, both Moscow and Beijing worry that North Korean nuclearization might lead Japan to build nuclear weapons. But beyond that, for both Russia and China, one of the most visible negative consequences of the DPRK’s nuclear and missile tests has been the strengthened impetus it gave to U.S.-Japan cooperation on missile defense. The issue of missile defense in Asia had been in a kind of abeyance until the North Korean nuclear tests of 2006. These tests, taken in defiance of Chinese warnings against nuclearization and testing, intensified and accelerated U.S.-Japanese collaboration on missile defenses as the justification for them had now been incontrovertibly demonstrated. But such programs always entail checking China’s nuclear capabilities and even, according to Beijing, threatening it with a first strike. Naturally those developments greatly annoy China.244 Therefore China continues publicly to criticize U.S.-Japan collaboration on missile defenses.245 Perhaps this issue was on Chinese President Hu Jintao’s 90 agenda in September 2007 when he called for greater Russo-Chinese cooperation in Asia-Pacific security.246 His remarks may have prompted Russia to act or speak out against these trends in Asia for Russia, having hitherto been publicly reticent to comment on this missile defense cooperation or to attack the U.S. alliance system in Asia, reacted quite strongly.247 During Lavrov’s visit to Japan in October 2007 and despite his strong pitch for Russo-Japanese economic cooperation, he publicly warned that Russia fears that this missile defense system represents an effort to ensure American military superiority and that the development and deployment of such systems could spur regional and global arms races. Lavrov also noted that Russia pays close attention to the U.S.-Japan alliance and was worried by the strengthening of the triangle comprising both these states and Australia.248 He observed that “a closed format for military and political alliances” does not facilitate peace and “will not be able to increase mutual trust in the region,” thereby triggering reactions contrary to the expectations of Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra.249 More recently, at the 2008 annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) in Singapore, Lavrov again inveighed against “narrow military alliances,” claiming that Asian-Pacific security should be all-inclusive and indivisible, the work of all interested parties, not blocs. Any such activity must enhance strategic balance and take account of everyone’s interests and be based on international law, i.e., the Security Council where Moscow has a veto.250 Lavrov’s complaints show what happens when bilateral cooperation breaks down and, as a result of proliferation, overall regional tensions increase, in this case in Northeast Asia. Russia has responded to 91 the U.S. missile defense program in both Europe and Asia by MIRVing its existing and older ICBMs, (that is, putting so called MIRVs [missiles] onto its missiles in silos) leaving the START-2 treaty, creating hypersonic missiles that allegedly can break through any American missile defense system, introducing new Topol-Ms mobile ICBMs that also allegedly can break those defenses, and testing the Bulava SLBM with similar characteristics. Still Moscow apparently thought this was not enough, and only 6 weeks after Lavrov’s public complaints in Japan, Vice-Premier Sergei Ivanov called for nuclear parity with Washington, even though the quest for such parity would undoubtedly undermine Russia’s economy unless he meant the retention of strategic stability, albeit at unequal numbers of missiles. Nevertheless, the real threat for Moscow here is the U.S. policy to build missile defenses and an alliance excluding Russia and China, not Japanese missile defenses. Those defenses are mainly directed formally against North Korean missiles and in reality the threat of Chinese missiles, not Russia.