Pacific Tensions Being Ratcheted Up

February 9, 2013 • 1:44PM

Despite efforts by the new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to finally reach a territorial settlement with Russia over the Northern Islands, a conflict left over from World War II, the conflict heated up yesterday as the Japanese air force scrambled four jet fighters against two Russian fighters that allegedly violated Japanese air space near the northern tip of the northern island of Hokkaido. The Japanese government lodged a "severe protest" with the Russian Embassy in Tokyo and demanded that the Russian government investigate. The Russians, for their part, denied there was any airspace violation and said that their aircraft had been flying in international airspace that they have routinely used for years. In fact, they were participating in a combined naval and air exercise around the disputed Kurile Islands that the Russian Ministry of Defense had announced on Feb. 5. Russian troops first occupied the Kuriles at the end of World War II and the two countries have disputed sovereignty over the islands ever since.

The incident followed by a week an incident in the East China Sea where the Japanese Defense Ministry claimed that a Chinese naval vessel locked on to a Japanese naval vessel with radar intended to guide weapons, but then turned off the radar without firing. The incident occurred near the Senkaku Islands, claimed by both Japan and China. "One step in the wrong direction could have pushed things into a dangerous situation," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters on Feb. 5 about the use of the radar. China denied that the radar was of the weapon-directing type.

While all this is going on, the United States, Japan, and Australia have been staging joint exercises, known as Cope North, this week, from the U.S. territory of Guam. Officers leading the exercises claim they are not aimed at China, but rather at improving their own ability to inter-operate. "The training is not against a specific country, like China," Japan Air Self-Defense Force Lt. Gen. Masayuki Hironaka said, according to the Associated Press. "However, I think [the fact] that our alliance with the U.S. and Australia is healthy is a strong message." The Associated Press report puts the exercise squarely in the context of President Obama's Asia Pivot, reporting that exercises like Cope North are a "key element" of Washington's evolving strategy there. That the Chinese might be taking away a different message from the one that the United States, Japan, and Australia wish to project is known. "I think the P.R.C. has a tendency to look at things in a different light," said U.S. Pacific Air Forces Commander Gen. Herbert Carlisle. "I think they may take this as something different than it is intended."