Like another remake of Godzilla, history’s once again rearing its ugly head in Northeast Asia. While news from our region has been dominated of late by China and Japan’s historical animosity, adding to the gloomy picture in Northeast Asia is Japan and South Korea’s growing bitterness over essentially historical issues. Since two Japan–ROK military accords fell through in mid-2012—partly due to their poor shared history—the bilateral relationship has plunged into a downwards spiral.

The actions of conservative politicians from each side have sparked outrage from both publics. Recently, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine, which enshrines Class A convicted war criminals and cast doubt over Japan’s culpability for wartime aggression, by saying the definition of ‘aggression’ has yet to be established. On the South Korean side, President Park Geun-hye succeeded in having a memorial honouring the Korean independence activist who killed Japan’s first Prime Minister opened in China and said that a Japan–ROK summit would be ‘pointless’ without an apology for ‘past wrongdoings’. Read more

This week, Chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (pictured above), made a bold speech that accused the CIA of hacking into a stand-alone network used for an investigation into the agency’s Bush-era rendition, detention and interrogation program (Senator Feinstein’s full statement is available here, with video here). This is the latest development in an ongoing feud between the CIA and the Senate over a report that demonstrates the CIA misled Congress, the White House and the Justice Department and overstated the program’s success. The CIA believes the Senate Committee took secret documents without permission, prompting the search of the network without the committee’s knowledge. CIA director John Brennan has defended his organisation, stating ‘nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that.’ Meanwhile, political satirist Jon Stewart has weighed into the controversy, ridiculing what he sees as Senator Feinstein’s hypocrisy as in the past she has defended the NSA’s surveillance programs and poking holes in Director Brennan’s defence in light of the CIA’s history.

IISS’ Mark Fitzpatrick is calling out what he sees is China’s hypocrisy in objecting to Japan’s stockpile of plutonium, 331 kg of which is weapons-grade. Japan has planned to return the weapons-grade material to the US (an announcement of the repatriation was to be made at the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit) yet China accuses Japan of holding onto the material as a nuclear hedge. The irony, Fitzpatrick notes, is that, Japan is compliant with IAEA verification measures but:

China possesses about 200 nuclear weapons and is cagey about nuclear transparency. There are valid reasons to criticise Japan’s stockpile of plutonium, but China’s exaggerations in this regard undermine its own arguments for pursuing plutonium reprocessing.

Read more here.

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Today ASPI has released a Strategy paper examining Chinese perspectives on Australia. Dr Jingdong Yuan has drawn from official Chinese documents, leaders’ statements, media coverage, academic analyses, and interviews with specialists to provide a detailed insight into Chinese views of Sino-Australian relations. Using this insight, Dr Yuan provides recommendations to the government on the continued development of the growing relationship between Australia and China. Here’s the executive summary:

Sino-Australian diplomatic, economic and security ties have experienced significant growth over the past four decades. The general trends have been positive, especially in the economic area, where the two countries have developed strong and mutually beneficial interdependence. China has become Australia’s largest trading partner, and its growing demands for resources will continue to affect Australian economic wellbeing. Australia, in turn, has become a major destination for Chinese tourists and a favoured choice for higher education. Canberra has played an important role in encouraging and drawing China into regional multilateral institutions such as APEC, and the two countries have cooperated on major international and regional issues. However, bilateral relations periodically encounter difficulties and occasionally suffer major setbacks, largely due to differences in ideologies and sociopolitical systems, issues such as Tibet, Taiwan and human rights, and emerging challenges ranging from cybersecurity to the geostrategic shift in the region marked by China’s rise and the US’s rebalancing to Asia. Read more

Several months ago I wrote on The Strategist about a March 2013 incident between Indonesian and Chinese maritime law enforcement vessels in the South China Sea. Local Indonesian news sources confirmed the incident but Indonesian Defense Ministry officials reportedly ‘claimed that the fishing boat incident never took place’. Several weeks after my post was published, Commander Agus Heryana, commander of the Indonesian naval base in Tanjung Pinang, stated that the situation in the South China Sea remained safe despite ‘efforts blowing it out of proportion’, noting that ‘the navies deployed in the area are not operating aggressively’.

The latter part of this statement is undoubtedly accurate: the incident didn’t directly involve any naval vessels from either nation. But one’s left wondering about the veracity of, and rationale behind, the Defense Ministry’s denials about the incident. Taken together, the comments suggest a possible effort to downplay such incidents or to limit their exposure in the media. Like its neighbour Malaysia, Indonesia has preferred to employ quiet diplomacy in regard to the South China Sea disputes more broadly, keeping any confrontations or encounters at sea out of the press for fear of needlessly stoking tensions or damaging its image of neutrality. Read more

We’re kicking off today’s round-up with a useful primer from the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) on five strategic architectures that can be applied to the case of US–China confrontation. For an illustration of one of the concepts, check out the map above (click to enlarge, source: globalita.com via CIMSEC).

Also on CIMSEC, Zachary Keck has just published a piece on the limits of AirSea Battle (ASB) and what this means for the United States. He argues that China’s recent successes in expanding influence in the South and East China Seas (known as ‘small-stick diplomacy’) using non-naval assets renders ASB inadequate. Read more here.

What’s it like to be an ‘alliance manager’? Over at War on the Rocks, Patrick Cronin from CNAS takes a look at a day in the life of Japan’s Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, who also has the unenviable task of managing US–Japan relations amidst diplomatic challenges that include Prime Minister Abe’s recent visit to Yasukuni shrine. Read more