were impressed yesterday on your arrival at Haneda and during your ride into Tokyo by the high sea walls that have been constructed around the airport and much of the rest of Tokyo Bay. Now, in 2050, there are no longer any doubts about the reality of global warming. It has been recognized as the major national security threat for many nations, including Japan. Rising sea levels have already substantially submerged the Maldives and the Seychelles, requiring mass evacuation of their populations. Along with Tokyo and Osaka, other major coastal cities such as Mumbai, Rotterdam, and New York are literally struggling to keep their heads above water.
Today, as you walk to breakfast through the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, you are asked to pause to let the Indian Minister of Defense and his entourage pass. They are on their way to join the US Secretary of Defense and the Ministers of Defense of Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the semi-annual meeting of the PacInd (Pacific and Indian Ocean) Mutual Security Alliance that has replaced the old network of unilateral American security guarantees as the main pillar of stability in the Asia-Pacific region. As you sit down at your breakfast table, you note the Chinese and Japanese flags on a table across the room reserved for the High Commissioners of the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands Joint Government Commission, the body through which the Japanese and Chinese governments jointly administer the formerly contested island group.
This is a far cry from thirty-seven years ago when there was a serious threat of war between China and the Japan-US Alliance. Then, Japan was occupying and administering the obscure islands—really just bits of rock barely rising out of the water—known as Senkaku to the Japanese and Diaoyu to the Chinese, at the far end of the Ryukyu island chain near Taiwan. An increasingly powerful China was claiming that it had rightful sovereignty over these islets and that Japan was unlawfully occupying and preparing to colonize them. Beijing had begun sending fishing boats and naval ships into what Tokyo claimed as Japan’s territorial waters, while also declaring an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that just happened to cover the islands. Japan invoked the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty saying that the island chain fell under the US security umbrella, and Washington reluctantly assented. The swords were at least halfway out of their scabbards.
Indeed, because of its immediacy and global significance, this was one of the first issues the Extraordinary National Revitalization Commission had found itself confronting. The response of the Commission set the tone for much that was to follow. Noting that the contested islands had only become part of Japan in 1895 after China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War and had been administered by the United States from 1945 until 1972, the Commission called for settlement by arbitration through the World Court and offered Chinese energy companies the same rights to explore for and produce oil and gas as any Japanese or other international corporation.
In fact, in 2050, the Senkakus remain uninhabited and undeveloped under the shared Japanese-Chinese administration. With overlapping ADIZs that are minimally enforced by both governments, there have been no incidents for years. The islets have proven not to have significant gas and oil deposits. In any case, the whole energy issue has become insignificant for Japan as the country has become energy independent based on the development of methane hydrate, shale, clean nuclear, and renewable energy sources. Beyond that, 3-D printing, widespread use of labor-saving robots, and high carbon taxes on jet and bunker fuel have virtually ended the era of global supply chains and thus also the need for trading nations to defend them.
Beyond the acceleration of global warming and inexorably rising water levels, the main global security threats today include conflict in Europe arising from massive immigration from the disease-plagued regions of West Africa as well as from the continuing Shia-Sunni civil war in the Middle East; drug-resistant viruses; highly sophisticated and extremely wealthy international criminal groups; the destruction of the world’s jungles in Brazil, Indonesia, and Africa; and cyber disruption.
THE DECLINE OF CHINA
China has become much less important in world affairs than seemed likely thirty-five years ago. Although it was not then apparent, the golden days of China’s growth were over by 2015. Its labor force had started shrinking in 2012–2013, while the overall population began aging rapidly in 2015 and quickly became among the oldest in the world. The question had always been whether China would get rich before it became old; the answer, as it turned out, was that it would not. When that became apparent, the flaws in the Chinese system began to show. It was clear that the already wide gap between rich and poor was going to continue widening. The bill for past pollution, environmental degradation, and corruption began to come due. None of this had affected the Chinese high-growth GDP figures in the past, but now the results were clear: corrupt practices were choking growth, and pollution and environmental problems were resulting in ill health and premature deaths. Corruption in particular became a huge issue. Officials and Communist Party operatives who had become enormously rich while officially being paid normal salaries became the targets of investigation, public protest, and harassment. Such people hurried to get themselves and their money out of China and to obscure the funds they had already stashed away abroad. More important than this was the fact that China was increasingly unable to afford medical and elder care while also paying for the large military force it had been building and maintaining. Thus, like the United States before it, China began to downsize its security forces, a step that also induced it to be more cooperative with Japan and other leading countries.
Most important, however, was China’s growing internal political tension and a loosening of national unity. Large areas like Guangdong Province were demanding more autonomy, and major political, business, academic, and media figures were calling for more participative politics with much more transparency and openness. China had become absorbed with its own internal difficulties while Japan’s Revitalization Commission was leading its country toward restoration.
Now, in the middle of the twenty-first century, India has become far more important than China. As the Centre for Economics and Business Research forecast long ago, India has recently passed China to become the world’s largest economy. Having become the world’s most populous nation in 2025, it now has the youngest working population of the major countries. It also has a large, well-trained, and experienced military with its own nuclear weapons and delivery systems, as well as large modern naval, air, cyber, and drone forces. These forces were successful in compelling China to abandon its claims to Indian territory by 2025 with the Treaty of the Himalayas. It was the 2022 inclusion of India in what had been the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, and the extension of that alliance to include Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines that turned the old bilateral US-Japan pact into what has come to be called the Grand Alliance. This treaty also includes many cooperative basing, training, and visiting arrangements with countries such as Singapore and Vietnam. The Grand Alliance has become more significant to world security than NATO, and—in combination with the inward turning of China—now assures peace and stability in the entire region spanning Asia-Pacific countries, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. Importantly, it was not the United States but Japan that took the initiative to achieve this multilateral security system, and it is Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and India who take the primary first reaction responsibility for assuring security in their respective regions. Of course, US forces are always available if absolutely necessary, but they are the call of last rather than first resort.
Effectively, the mutual security system that grew out of the US occupation of Japan and the Cold War has been turned upside down. The Pax Americana has become the Pax Indo-Pacifica.
THE FADING OF THE PAX AMERICANA
The end of the Pax Americana in the Pacific had actually been foreshadowed as early as July, 1969, when then-president Richard Nixon announced the Nixon Doctrine. This stated that the United States would provide a nuclear shield to allies under the threat of nuclear attack, and that the United States would provide appropriate security assistance to allies threatened by non-nuclear aggression. But it emphasized that the United States would expect the nation under threat to assume the primary responsibility for its own defense. Coming at the height of the Vietnam War, this was an early signal that
