Book review: Robin M. Allers on Mathieu Segers, 'The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951'

 

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Allers on Segers, 'The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Segers, Mathieu.  The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. $29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781009379427.

Reviewed by Robin M. Allers (Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies)
Published on H-Diplo (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60570

Anyone studying the European Union has come across the policymakers and planners who are commonly known as its founding fathers. Thousands of books and articles have been written about and programs, universities, and buildings are named after the Frenchmen Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the German Konrad Adenauer, the Belgian Paul Henri Spaak, the Italian Alcide de Gasperi, and a handful of others. These individuals, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, conceived and implemented the truly revolutionary plan to bring former wartime enemies together in a Western European community and to pool their coal and steel industries in a new organizational construct that combined intergovernmental and supranational elements. Textbooks and general introductions to the history of the European Union usually start with a chapter on the first steps of this integration process, which started in the late 1940s as part of broader conversations on the postwar international order.[1] Most also include some pages or paragraphs on earlier plans for a united Europe, going back to the interwar years and the Second World War, when resistance movements, as well as individuals, groups, and governments in exile, took part in discussions about the postwar international order and different schemes for European cooperation, many of them motivated by a dream to prevent future wars.[2] The lasting fame of the founding fathers, who the historian Alan S. Milward sarcastically called “the European Saints,” is due to the fact that they, with the help of the United States, designed and implemented organizational structures that, at least partly, achieved these dreams in the western part of Europe.[3]

This “pre-history of today’s European Union” is the theme of this book that seeks to “re-discover the history of the origins and beginnings of the present-day Europe of European integration” (pp. 4-5). More specifically, it wants to “open the complex genealogy” of Western Europe by analyzing the discussions about Europe’s postwar future as “a battle of blueprints” and describing the interaction of thinkers, movers, and shakers as a virtual “European Republic of Planning” (pp. 18, 3, 5).

The author, Mathieu Segers, tragically passed away after completing this work, which, according to his own account, is the product of ten years of research. With the book, he builds on his earlier studies on Dutch and German European policy while at the same time synthesizing research conducted as part of a multiyear project on the historiography of European history and European integration with a focus on emotions and ecclesiastical actors.[4] In addition to an impressive mastery of the existing literature on European integration, European and transatlantic policy networks, and intellectual debates in resistance movements among economists and in ecclesiastical circles, the book is based on a significant number of published and unpublished sources from British, Dutch, German, and EU archives. Segers aims at tackling two weaknesses in the historiography that have been identified in recent years: much of the literature remains state centrist and there is a lack of focus on ideas. By bringing together different trends, perspectives, and approaches, he wants to discover new links between the history and the prehistory of European integration. His approach builds on three insights from recent literature. First, governments were unable to control the process that emerged out of the myriads of ideas for postwar cooperation. Second, to find the roots of the integration process one needs to go further back in history, to the interwar years and to the dissolution of empires. Third, historical analysis must delve beneath the surface of day-to-day politics, diplomacy, and institution building and take a closer look at the battle of ideas and of concepts. Segers wants to enrich these new trends with the addition of two “innovative conceptual elements”: a focus on the psychological sphere of “emotions” (that is, intellectual struggles at the individual and collective levels) and more attention on leading ecclesiastics and their networks (pp. 16, 37).

The author’s ambition to combine and introduce several new approaches and concepts and to shift between different levels of analysis makes his book at times challenging to follow. Therefore, I would not recommend using it as a first introduction to the prehistory of European integration. The book’s ambitious approach and complex design are also reflected in a rather complicated structure. Following three and a half pages of acknowledgments and a ten-page prologue, a thirty-two-page introduction—titled “The Genealogy of Western Europe”—presents the book’s main themes, discusses the historiography, and outlines the book’s structure. The following eight chapters (episodes) are divided into two parts before the book ends with a conclusion and an epilogue. While this book might not be suitable for first-year college students, scholars who seek to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of which ideas influenced the first steps in the process of European integration and how these ideas transformed into concrete plans and eventually successful policy initiatives will find a trove of material that future accounts of the process of European integration will not be able to ignore.

The first part, “Beyond Americanisation (1937-1947),” looks at the battle of ideas during the Second World War and in the first years of the postwar period. Here, the reader gets a detailed understanding of how schools of thought like Anglo-Saxon market liberalism, the Austrian school of economics, Keynesianism, and ordoliberalism debated economic, monetary, and social as well as moral and ethical questions. Intellectuals like Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Walter Lippman, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Wilhelm Röpke not only shaped academic debates but also became influential policy advisers. Some moved between the academic world and official roles. The father of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), Ludwig Erhard, was a professor of economics and an adviser to the US military government in Bavaria before he became minister of economics and later chancellor of the Federal Republic. A transnational network, the Mont Pélerin Society, founded in 1947, became “an influential ideas-incubator-hub for the post-war liberal order of the west.” The Bonhoeffer Kreis, a “religiously motivated working group” named after the theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had connections to so-called Freiburg Circles in which the ordoliberal ideas that would shape both German economic policy and the blueprints of European integration developed (p. 182). At the same time, Christian democracy rose to a dominant position as a new political family to which many of the most important thinkers and policymakers of Western Europe felt attached. Somewhat surprising (although understandable given the focus on the forces that would later shape the emerging European communities), Segers says little about discussions on postwar Europe among socialists and social democrats in exile. To be sure, many of them were in opposition to the way European integration materialized in the 1950s, yet some, like the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, shared the dream of a “united states of Europe” already during his Scandinavian exile. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he became key to the process of European integration as foreign minister and chancellor.[5] The Italian social democrat Altiero Spinelli, who in 1941 co-drafted and secretly distributed a manifesto for a free and united Europe, figures on the EU’s own list of founding fathers.[6]

The second part, “The Making of European Integration (1947-1951),” analyzes how ideas became “blueprints” and follows the first steps of institution building in the context of the emerging Cold War, from the Marshall Plan and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) via the European Payments Union (EPU) to the launch of the Schuman Plan and the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In this part, the reader learns more about how ideas and discussions “converged into a pragmatic and growing transatlantic and western European consensus about the institutional design, practical planning, and moral embedding of this future Europe” (p. 19). Segers sees leading planners like Monnet as a “new elite of experts” whose “legacy ... acquired mythical quality,” and he emphasizes the role of US diplomats and policymakers in the emergence of Western Europe as an economic and political pillar of the new transatlantic community (pp. 204, 4). But this is also the story of a seminal change from bilateralism to multilateralism and from global to more regional approaches in international relations. During the late 1940s, American plans for the postwar world developed from a “One World” approach that had led to the conception of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Bretton Woods system for monetary management to more regional approaches. Under the pressure of the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, detailed, tailor-made models for “building Europe” won over “building Atlantis.” Other key developments of this phase were the United Kingdom’s disappearance from discussions about European integration and the emergence of the Franco-German “engine” as a new power center in Western Europe. The conclusion is followed by an epilogue that uses the exchange between “two highly influential friends in the transatlantic Anglo-Saxon epicentre of this extraordinary period in the history of the West and Europe”—the American diplomat George Kennan and the Oxford philosopher Isiah Berlin—to reflect on the book’s conclusions “in a more essayistic way” (p. 45).

Whether or not one finds the introduction of new terms like “European Republic of planning” or the focus on “emotions” convincing, Seger’s book makes an important contribution to the prehistory of the European integration process in several areas. It contributes to the intellectual history of the early twentieth century and it enriches our understanding of planning (and the planners behind it), it is an important addition to the study of transatlantic relations in the crucial phase of transition from postwar to Cold War, and it adds new insights to the institutional history of European and Western cooperation. Both as a synthesis of earlier research and because of its novel approaches and hitherto unpublished material, the book will be indispensable for those who want to understand how different ideas and schools of thought influenced the planning for the postwar international order and for the reconstruction of Europe. It is a must-read for scholars studying how the interaction of intellectuals, academics, planners, and policymakers contributed to the emergence of the European Union that we know today. While the book provides a detailed analysis of the prehistory of European integration, it also provokes reflection on current challenges to European cooperation and international relations.

Notes

[1]. Still one of the best introductions in English is Desmond Dinan, Europe Recast: A History of the European Union, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynn Riener Publishers, 2014).

[2]. Dinan, Europe Recast, 1-5.

[3]. Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 318.

[4]. Funded by the Dutch Research Council, the “Blueprints of Hope” project had its closing conference in early 2024. See Dutch Research Council, “Blueprints of Hope: Designing Post-War Europe; Ideas, Emotions, Networks and Negotiations (1930-1963),” accessed October 22, 2024, https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/360-52-190.

[5]. See the dissertation by Pénélope Léa Patry, “Willy Brandts frühe Europavorstellungen aus dem skandinavischen Exil (1933-1947): Entstehung und Ausformung eines außenpolitischen Bewusstseins zwischen Internationalismus und Europäismus” (PhD diss., L’université de Lyon, 2019), which was awarded the Willy Brandt Prize by the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation for 2024 (see https://willy-brandt.de/en/willy-brandt/research/research-funding/). See also Jan De Graaf, Socialism across the Iron Curtain: Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[6]. European Commission, “The Founding Fathers and Other Stories from the Past,” 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/comm/items/625131/en.

Robin Allers is associate professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS) and program director for the master’s program at the Norwegian Defence University College (FHS). He earned his PhD in history at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on German-Norwegian relations and the first enlargement of the European Communities in the era of Willy Brandt as foreign minister and chancellor. His current research and teaching focuses on European security and Norway’s security and defense relations with close allies.

Citation: Robin M. Allers. Review of Segers, Mathieu. The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today's European Union, 1937–1951. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60570

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Book review: Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution - by Timothy Lorek

 A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm.

Lorek on Rogers, 'Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution'

Rogers, Thomas D..  Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Illustrations, maps. 306 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781469670447.$29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781469670454.$22.99 (e-book), ISBN 9781469670461. 

Reviewed by Timothy Lorek (College of St. Scholastica)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60115

One of the most intriguing aspects of the recent boom in historical studies of the mid-twentieth-century process remembered as the Green Revolution is the new light cast on the emergence of crops destined not for human food consumption but for industrial purposes, fuel, and animal feed. As Thomas D. Rogers adroitly demonstrates in Agriculture’s Energy, a case study of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol production, investments in agriculture too often lead to food insecurity. Whether Brazilian sugarcane, Iowa corn, Argentine soybeans, or Indonesian oil palm, the consolidation of agribusiness through machinery, fertilizer, and pesticide markets, not to mention state subsidies and development plans, has contributed to a wide range of social challenges, for example, increased land concentration, urbanization, malnutrition, and water pollution. While anthropologists, development economists, and historians focused on the United States and Europe have long recognized the Green Revolution’s complex and intensely debated results, the recent scholarly ascendance of historians focused on new archives and actors in what was once known as the Third World has produced an array of studies that carefully unpack the Green Revolution’s impact in more localized contexts. The growing spotlight on these place-specific impacts significantly includes the ways state planning, international science, and Cold War development benefited incipient industries like Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol sector.

Agriculture’s Energy is not the only recent monograph to tackle Brazil’s ethanol industry, including the state program advanced during the military dictatorship known as Proálcool (National Alcohol Program, 1975-90). Rogers’s study is in good company with another prominent English-language text, Jennifer Eaglin’s excellent Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, also published in 2022. Where Eaglin focuses on specific conditions in Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo) and emphasizes the broader context of energy transitions, Rogers highlights international development and the above described irony linking intensified agricultural production and hunger. Rogers also provides a broad national focus to Brazil’s ethanol history, including a sustained and intriguing geographic comparison between the country’s Northeast and Center-South.

Agriculture’s Energy is divided into two parts. In part 1, “Sugarcane and Brazil’s Agricultural Modernization,” Rogers examines the policy and development contexts of ethanol production in historical sequence. Chapter 1 begins in 1918 when the country’s largest sugar mill owner publicly advocated for federal government support for agricultural research and production. Two competing assumptions lay behind this and other calls for government support. First, Brazilian agriculture was seen by many as backward and in need of modernization. Second, Brazilian agriculture, despite its backwardness, was critical to the country’s identity and future prosperity. Rogers goes on to tell the story of Brazilian agricultural modernization vis-à-vis sugarcane through the careers of northeastern sugarcane producer and politician Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho and center-southern agronomist Ruy Miller Paiva. Juxtaposing the impact of Barbosa Lima and Paiva emphasizes the regional rivalry between the Northeast and São Paulo, as the latter shifted from a dependence on coffee to a research-oriented resurgence of sugarcane. It also highlights the centralization of Brazilian domestic politics during the Getúlio Vargas era, seen through the emphasis on national planning for agricultural production, as well as the emerging embrace of international development funding and expertise.

The next two chapters unpack the contexts of sugarcane ethanol production in the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 places ethanol against the backdrop of the global Green Revolution in agricultural technologies. In this context, the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (Sugar and Alcohol Institute, IAA) released a new long-range growth plan that increased production and spurred the establishment of dozens of new sugarcane mills. São Paulo producers likewise established new research centers and dramatically expanded their use of fertilizer. Meanwhile, the federal government harnessed international aid to pump into higher education programs such as development economics. By the 1970s, the Green Revolution’s broad impact led to increased industrialization and the ascendency of an agricultural product destined for industrial rather than food usage.

Chapter 3 then examines policy debates swirling around Proálcool. The unequal development of the country during the “Brazilian Miracle” was reflected in Proálcool, a program dominated by energy and industry representatives rather than agriculturalists and one that contributed to the specific growth of private companies and large producers, especially in São Paulo (more than 60 percent of national production in 1980), who partnered with the federal government. The program was canceled amid corruption scandals and a shift from state-led growth models to privatization and neoliberal deregulation. As Rogers concludes, Proálcool should not be evaluated as primarily an agricultural or energy policy, nor as a bailout to the sugarcane industry. Instead, it was a development program. “Proálcool’s establishment was one episode in the consolidation of a mode of development that crystallized out of the domestic and international programs that had supported and nurtured agricultural transformation over the preceding decades. Development in this guise had produced the linked processes we know as agribusiness” (p. 108).

Part 2, “Proálcool’s Consequences,” includes three chapters that examine labor, environmental issues, and the gross inequality that “directed agriculture’s prodigious energy into the transportation system rather than the food system” (p. 170). As in his first book, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (2010), Rogers excels at weaving analyses of labor relations, class, and environmental conditions. In these sections, Rogers offers rich details about physical work, pollution, and policy debates, as well as thoughtful conclusions about symbolic representation and relationships. Chapter 4 focuses on the mobility of a new type of industrial worker: poor, vulnerable, urban, and increasingly female sugarcane workers often precariously employed via third-party labor contracts (the “flexibilization of the labor force” [p. 120]). Union mobilization on behalf of these bóia-fria workers (the derogatory term “cold lunch”) in the 1980s contested their marginality and cheapness.

Similarly, in chapter 5, Rogers examines another challenge to Proálcool: growing concern about the program’s environmental record. Enormous quantities of waste were produced, particularly a byproduct of the ethanol industry often termed vinhaça or vinhoto. As waste lagoons that held this sludge became increasingly common with growing sugarcane ethanol production under Proálcool, public debate over the environmental issue proliferated in the 1970s. As with union mobilization on behalf of workers, public pressure and scientific alarm forced the hand of the Brazilian government to enact broad environmental legislation in the early 1980s.

Finally, chapter 6 examines how Proálcool reflected an industrial development model that exacerbated inequality by providing incentives to shift significant land and labor toward the production of ethanol rather than food. Research produced growing evidence in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Brazil’s policies led to significant increases in industrial and export crop production at the expense of food production, which actually dropped more than 25 percent per capita between 1976 and 1980 (p. 189). All of this points to some overarching conclusions evaluated in the epilogue: for example, “what is agriculture for?” (p. 199). Rogers suggests that the development model embodied by Proálcool advanced the cause of private sector industrial growth by shifting rural populations toward precarious wage work made possible by cheap energy and cheap food, both of which were produced at considerable cost to the environment. Rogers’s analysis of the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol boom thus helps reveal the consolidation of a particular agribusiness model that depends on, even naturalizes, inequality. Seen this way, the history of Proálcool is instructive as we contend with a new era of agribusiness-led growth models and carbon markets.

Agriculture’s Energy is an important addition to a growing scholarly literature on late twentieth-century industrial agriculture. Rogers’s use of labor journals, newspaper editorials, and court documents in part 2 makes an invaluable contribution to Green Revolution scholarship and Brazilian studies. Beyond the Green Revolution and Brazil, scholars investigating energy histories, public-private partnerships, and the roots of twenty-first-century climate change debates and proposed policies will find the book helpful for its details as well the author’s ability to weave multiple themes.

Citation: Timothy Lorek. Review of Rogers, Thomas D.. Agriculture's Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil's Green Revolution. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60115

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Stephanie Huezo. Review of Jarquín, Mateo. The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews

 A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm.

Huezo on Jarquín, 'The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History'

Jarquín, Mateo.  The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024. 336 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781469678498.

Reviewed by Stephanie Huezo (Fordham University)
Published on H-LatAm (November, 2024)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60842

The year 1979 brought intense change in Nicaragua and the broader Western Hemisphere. That year, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) successfully overthrew the US-backed Somoza family dictatorship, which had held power for more than four decades. This historic moment provided inspiration for revolutionaries throughout Central and Latin America generally but also generated concern and fear for the United States in the context of the global Cold War. What followed was a decade-long struggle to fulfill the revolution’s goals of socioeconomic and political change in the face of internal and external challenges. English-language scholarship on the rise and fall of the Sandinista Revolution has primarily been told from a US perspective. But the regional history of the revolution provides us with a more complete understanding of its successes and failures as well as its impact in the rest of Latin America.

Mateo Jarquín’s book, The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, contributes to this regional perspective of one of the most well-known revolutions in twentieth-century Latin America. As the title suggests, Jarquín dives into the international history of the Sandinistas, emphasizing the role of Nicaraguan and Latin America leaders in defining the Sandinistas’ political project. This is his major contribution. Moving beyond the framework of US intervention in Cold War Latin America, Jarquín highlights the role of other regional actors like Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela in dictating the Sandinistas’ revolutionary trajectory.

His identity as the son of Sandinista diplomats and his personal experiences of learning about the revolution through an international lens while living outside of Nicaragua shaped his approach in focusing on the “thinking and decision making of national elites” (p. xvi) as well as Latin American diplomats. In order to center the narrative on these historical actors, Jarquín relies on archival sources from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and the United States as well as interviews with top Sandinista Front officials. While these documents provide evidence of the Sandinistas’ military, political, and diplomatic actions, the interviews with Sandinistas and Latin American political figures add another layer of complexity to understanding the changing views of the revolution. This impressive multisited research and access to interviewees due to his proximity to national elites through family connections allows Jarquín to argue that the “revolution was shaped [and reshaped] by how it fit within a global picture” (p. 6).

Taking a top-down approach to the Sandinista Revolution, Jarquín organizes his book in four parts that closely tie in with the three phases of the Sandinista period: “insurrection and state breakdown, consolidation in power, and civil war” (p. 6). Part 1, “Origins, 1933-1979,” provides the historical context that led to the success of Nicaragua’s revolution. As a left-wing guerrilla organization, in the 1970s the FSLN was weak and divided. The three tendencies (or factions) that made up the FSLN—the Guerra Popular Prolongada (GPP) tendency, the Tendencia Proletaria (TP), and the Tendencia Insurreccional (or Tercerista tendency)—had varied goals and approaches to taking power. And while Jarquín explains these differences, he privileges the Terceristas’ work as it reveals best the diplomatic choices made that led to Somoza’s defeat. After creating a revolutionary junta and outlining their revolutionary agenda, Tercerista leaders sought foreign support, first by Venezuela’s president Carlos Andrés Pérez. Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama would later offer support. Jarquín demonstrates that despite these leaders’ differing interests and political stance (Pérez was an anticommunist), each wanted Somoza out. They provided weapons and military expertise. Additionally, Jarquín argues that these regional leaders also isolated Somoza diplomatically while legitimizing the Sandinistas’ armed approach. In effect, Jarquín asserts that external support and political connections that helped Sandinista leaders take power.

After a detailed demonstration of the pivotal role of Nicaragua’s Latin American neighbors in Somoza’s defeat, the book moves on to discuss the challenges Sandinistas faced as they consolidated their power. The broad-based revolutionary coalition that helped bring Sandinistas to power now presented obstacles in implementing a governing style. As Sandinista leaders gained state control and carried out redistributive economic policies, the moderate and conservative members of their anti-Somoza coalition became alienated. And while internal divisions arose in the country, the FSLN government strove to create friendly diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. But their relationship with Cuba and its support to the Salvadoran guerrilla organization, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), alarmed the United States, especially under the Reagan administration, which viewed Central America as a hotbed for communism. What followed is well known among scholars of Latin America and US intervention—the Contra War—but before getting there, Jarquín reveals how countries like Venezuela and Mexico used Nicaragua’s revolution and early years of consolidating power to minimize US intervention in Latin America. Once again, the role of Latin American leaders during the Sandinista Revolution complicates the history of the Cold War in the region. Nicaragua’s revolutionary outcome and future was not based solely on US foreign policies but also on local and regional interests and desires.

It is this complexity that also animated the Contra War. In the third section, “War, 1982-1985,” Jarquín argues that the Contra War was both a war of foreign aggression and at the same time a civil war, moving away from narratives that claim one stance over the other. While the US government did heavily arm and financially support the contras to undermine FSLN power and supposedly contain communism, there were social projects like land reform that also served to push sectors of society to support the US-backed contras. Heavily relying on written personal accounts and interviews with Sandinista commanders, Jarquín demonstrates why peasant farmers joined the contras despite being a central population for the new government’s revolutionary projects. While he includes a 1991 oral history report of peasant contra commanders, this section leaves us wanting more. How exactly did rural Nicaraguans experience land reform? Did others outside of the “middle peasantry” (p. 130) support the contras as well? Of course, as in any monograph, the author must make choices, and Jarquín chose to stay within the lens of diplomacy. But the inclusion of peasant voices in a discussion about land reform would have provided a more nuanced view of this project and its connection to contra support.

The last chapter of part 3 as well as the last section of the book (part 4, “Peace, 1986-1989”) highlights once again the importance of diplomacy in the Sandinista Revolution. While the Sandinistas were fighting the US-backed contras, Latin American governments were carefully watching the potential consequences of this war. Latin American leaders worried about the United States’ view of Nicaragua as a proxy war battleground of the Cold War. If Nicaragua continued with its revolution, the United States could justify a military invasion that would affect the whole region. To quell any possible US invasion in Latin America, leaders from Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia came up with a diplomatic solution, the Contadora process, to bring an end to the war in Nicaragua. While Contadora did not lead to any substantial change when it was created in 1983, it did eventually lead to the Central American peace process ushered in by Costa Rican president Óscar Arias. Just like the Contadora, these peace negotiations limited US foreign policy in the country. Even with these changes, the Sandinistas would not continue in power; in 1990, Nicaragua democratically elected Violetta Chamorro (former member of the Sandinista junta) to become president, delivering a heavy blow to revolutionary projects in the Latin American region. Yet, some Sandinista leaders conclude that the legacy of the revolution wasn’t lasting socioeconomic changes but democracy. Considering the aftermath of the revolution and Nicaragua’s current political situation, one must consider what definition of democracy these leaders used before accepting this legacy.

For its analysis on the diplomatic history of the Sandinista Revolution, this book is a must-read for those interested in Nicaragua, Central America, Latin American relations, and even US intervention in Latin America. Ultimately, this book calls us to see the Sandinista revolution not just as a Nicaraguan event nor a Central American one but a truly regional historical moment that defined the end of Cold War Latin America.

Citation: Stephanie Huezo. Review of Jarquín, Mateo. The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60842

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Neoliberais anti-China tomam conta da política externa do Brasil - Miguel do Rosário (O Cafezinho)

 PRA: "O jornalista, obviamente, é míope, ao falar de neoliberais do Itamaraty. A política externa é a do presidente. O Itamaraty só faz diplomacia, constrangido pela política externa personalista do presidente. Como o jornalista é pró-China, não se poderia esperar outra coisa. A matéria tem pontos interessantes, pois revela o que pensam os militantes do PT em matéria internacional."

Neoliberais anti-China tomam conta da política externa do Brasil

Miguel do Rosário

O Cafezinho, 4/11/2024

https://www.ocafezinho.com/2024/11/04/exclusivo-neoliberais-anti-china-tomam-conta-da-politica-externa-do-brasil/

A política externa brasileira vai mal.

O Itamaraty, concebido como um órgão eminentemente técnico, para assessorar o poder eleito, vem assumindo posições políticas cada vez mais independentes.

É mais grave que isso: o Itamaraty está indo na direção oposta daquela apontada pelo presidente Lula, expressa em todos seus discursos, de fortalecimento do mundo multipolar e combate à desigualdade no mundo.

As consequências políticas para Lula, para o governo e para o pais serão profundas. Uma política externa confusa, medrosa, sem visão estratégica, pode comprometer a reeleição do presidente e, sobretudo, destruir por décadas os sonhos de emancipar economicamente o Brasil.

Vamos contextualizar os motivos que me levam a abrir esse artigo com declarações tão duras e críticas contra um governo no qual ainda depositamos tão ardentes esperanças.

O debate ocorrido nos últimos dias, sobre a adesão, ou melhor, a não-adesão do Brasil à Rota do Cinturão e da Seda, produziu uma intensa agitação nas comunidades que discutem a política externa brasileira, em especial aquelas que lidam mais diretamente com relação do Brasil com os Brics e com o gigante da Ásia.

A entrevista de Celso Amorim ao Globo, afastando a possibilidade do Brasil assinar um “tratado” de adesão ao projeto chinês, e falando antes em “sinergia” de projetos, pegou mal na China, segundo fontes do Cafezinho.

Amorim, brilhante diplomata, procurou contornar o mal estar criado por essa entrevista.

Procurado por mim, jurou que isso não significa nenhuma posição anti-China do governo, e que o conceito de sinergia deve ser considerado como a melhor maneira do Brasil se aproximar do projeto chinês conhecido pela sigla em inglês BRI (Belt and Road Iniciative), ou Cinturão e Rota da Seda.

Procurei também o ministro da Fazenda, Fernando Haddad, que gentilmente conversou comigo durante alguns minutos, e usou o mesmo termo de Amorim (mostrando que o governo alinhou o discurso sobre a China): o Brasil irá procurar estabelecer uma “sinergia” entre os dois países.

“A viagem de ministros e secretários de governo à China, recentemente, foi motivada pelo desejo do governo de estabelecer sinergias entre o projeto nacional de desenvolvimento do Brasil e o projeto chinês”, disse Haddad ao Cafezinho.

“Não entendo muito bem essa ideia do Brasil aderir ao projeto de outro país”, disse Haddad, para justificar a preferência pelo conceito de sinergia.

O ministro disse ainda que o governo está tentando atrair investimentos chineses para a órbita do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria, Comércio e Serviços (MDIC), em especial para os projetos vinculados à principal aposta do órgão, o Nova Indústria Brasil (NIB). “É aí que vamos tentar a sinergia entre os investimentos chineses e esses projetos mais sofisticados – energia, trens, etc – de que você fala”, explicou o ministro.

“Já está acontecendo”, disse Haddad, sobre o aprofundamento das relações entre Brasil e China, aí incluindo a famosa sinergia entre o projeto nacional e o chinês.

Entretanto, essas falas não surtiram nenhum efeito entre os observadores mais atentos, que viram nas declarações dos representantes do governo um recuo estratégico, com enormes proporções e consequências geopolíticas, na relação do Brasil com a China.

Eu entrei em contato com muitas pessoas, no Brasil e na China, que se debruçam há anos sobre as relações diplomáticas, comerciais e geopolíticas entre os dois países, para entender com o máximo de objetividade porque essa percepção foi tão marcante.

Evandro Menezes de Carvalho, por exemplo, é um dos maiores especialistas em China no Brasil. Professor de Direito Internacional na Faculdade de Direito na UFF e na FGV, tem pós-doutorado na Universidade de Pequim e na Facultade de Direito de Xangai. É professor também na Universidade de Pequim, e tem dividido sua vida entre China e Brasil. Ganhou há pouco um dos prêmios do Estado chinês mais importantes do país, o de “Amigo da China”, entregue a ele diretamente pelo primeiro ministro.

Carvalho entendeu as falas de Amorim como malabarismo retórico e como um “não vacilante” à adesão do Brasil à Rota da Seda. Ele entende ainda que o conceito de “sinergia” não faz jus à magnitude de oportunidades que uma posição mais assertiva e corajosa do presidente Lula poderia trazer ao país, caso assinasse um Memorando de Entendimento, durante a visita do presidente da China ao Brasil, Xi Jinping, entre os dias 18 e 20 de novembro.

“Considerar a relação com a China apenas na perspectiva bilateral é não enxergar as potencialidades desta parceria no âmbito regional. A China parece ter uma visão e uma execução de política externa na América do Sul mais integrada do que o próprio Brasil. Os projetos de rodovias na Bolívia, os projetos elétricos no Uruguai, a ferrovia de Belgrano na Argentina são exemplos de projetos na América do Sul inseridos no âmbito da BRI. Sem contar outros projetos no resto da América Latina tais como o porto de águas profundas em Antígua e Barbuda, o parque industrial em Trinidade e Tobago e a estrada Norte-Sul na Jamaica. Vale ressaltar que entre 2000 e 2022, o comércio entre China e América Latina aumentou 35 vezes ultrapassando, em 2023, a marca de 480 bilhões de dólares. A China se tornou o segundo maior parceiro comercial da região. Durante a APEC [Fórum de Cooperação Econômica Ásia-Pacífico, ou Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, em inglês], Lula verá a inauguração do Porto de Chancay, um megaprojeto que pode encurtar em um terço o tempo médio que os produtos brasileiros levam para chegar ao Oriente. O Brasil poderá se beneficiar deste porto se levar adiante o projeto do Corredor Ferroviário Bioceânico com 3.750 quilômetros de extensão, ligando o Porto de Santos ao Porto de Chancay, passando por Bolívia. A BRI tem algo a nos dizer sobre isso?”, diz o professor, em texto recente sobre essa polêmica do Brasil aderir ou não à Rota.

“Não colou”, diz Rodrigo do Val Ferreira, consultor brasileiro residente em Xangai, que mantém contato frequente com autoridades e empresas chinesas, sobre o esforço retórico do governo em substituir uma declaração mais clara e explícita de adesão à Rota pelo uso do conceito ambíguo de “sinergia” entre projetos do Brasil e da China.

Segundo ele, a percepção na China é de “surpresa e decepção, e isso mancha as celebrações de 50 anos entre os dois países”. A própria famosa ideia de neutralidade do Brasil, diz Rodrigo, estaria começando a ser questionada.

“A ICR [Iniciativa do Cinturão e da Rota] não exigia exclusividade, não exigia tomar partido, nem sequer se comprometer a qualquer projeto específico, e escolhemos mesmo assim a não relação. Tenho minhas dúvidas se por medo ou ideologia. E espero que por medo.

No A Governança da China, em seu primeiro volume, Xi quando se refere à América Latina, discorre: Na China há um provérbio que diz: ‘Na longa distância se conhece a força de um cavalo; no decorrer do tempo se conhece o coração de uma pessoa’. E segue tecendo elogios à cooperação com a América Latina.

Receio, nosso cavalo, justo no momento mais importante de se construir confiança, empacou”, declara Rodrigo, sem ocultar sua frustração.

O sentimento crítico em relação à política externa do Brasil, todavia, não começou agora, e as declarações de Amorim foram apenas a mensagem mais recente, e no momento mais emblemático, pois ocorre às vésperas da chegada de Xi Jinping ao Brasil.

Uma série de acontecimentos bem mais concretos, contudo, vem dando sinais da mudança de rumo na política externa do país.

Em nome da transparência, e de um debate franco e aberto que o tema merece, vamos dar nomes aos bois.

O embaixador Eduardo Paes Saboia, secretário do Itamaraty para Ásia e Pacífico, é conhecido por suas posições anti-Brics e anti-China, o que é totalmente contraproducente, quase irracional, para a importância estratégica do cargo que ocupa. Ele é o “sherpa” do Brasil nos Brics, ou seja, o principal negociador brasileiro. E é contra os Brics. Segundo minhas fontes, Saboia fala abertamente contra os Brics com seus interlocutores.

Ou seja, o representante mais importante do Brasil nos Brics e que também é o representante mais importante do Brasil na China é contra os Brics e a China. A posição de Saboia, no entanto, nunca foi desconhecida, pois ele é notoriamente um quadro de posições políticas reacionárias, motivo pelo qual foi nomeado para o cargo pelo presidente Jair Bolsonaro. O incrível é ele continuar lá sob o governo Lula.

A embaixadora Maria Laura da Rocha, secretária geral do Ministério de Relações Exteriores, não apenas tem posições abertamente contra a China, como andou militando, nos últimos meses, de ministério em ministério, para defender que o Brasil não aderisse à Rota da Seda.

Tatiana Rosito, secretária de Assuntos Internacionais do Ministério da Fazenda, também é vista como um quadro político hostil à adesão do Brasil ao projeto da Rota da Seda.

O embaixador do Brasil na China, Marcos Galvão, é igualmente um quadro conservador, com poucas luzes sobre as grandes oportunidades que se abririam para o Brasil, caso optasse por ampliar a parceria com o gigante asiático.

Ou seja, toda a máquina diplomática do Estado, com posições estratégicas na relação com a Ásia, e quase todo o pessoal encarregado de assuntos de ordem geopolítica, tem posições hostis à China, o que explica a dificuldade do Brasil em aprofundar parcerias com o gigante asiático.

Quando Lula e Xi Jinping se encontrarem, em algumas semanas, muita coisa estará em disputa. Toda palavra, símbolo, gesto, será analisado minuciosamente pelo mundo inteiro.

Para o brasileiro Rafael Henrique Zerbetto, um jovem linguista que reside e trabalha em Pequim, a fórmula diplomática encontrada pelo Brasil para não assinar um memorando de adesão à Rota, e ao mesmo tempo surfar no fluxo de investimentos chineses associados ao projeto, serão vistos como uma tentativa pouco disfarçada de ser “esperto”, embora objetivamente não o seja. Outros países, com postura mais assertiva e corajosa, acabarão levando vantagem sobre o Brasil.

Zerbetto, que é um entusiasta e um estudioso da Iniciativa do Cinturão e Rota (ICR), lembra que o memorando de adesão não é, de fato, um tratado vinculativo, tampouco exclusivista. É bastante genérico, mas também é uma grande porta que se abriria para o início de uma série de iniciativas a serem financiadas pela China, em favor do Brasil. Apenas os projetos que interessarem ao Brasil, que forem estratégicos para o Brasil, serão incluídos na parceria. Sua condução seria inteiramente controlada e supervisionada pelo Brasil.

Tanto Zerbetto quanto outros com quem conversei lembram ainda que a Rota da Seda vai muito além dos projetos em infra-estrutura. Daí inclusive a mediocridade do conceito de “sinergia”. Falar em sinergia põe de lado a complexidade holística da Rota, que incluiria abertura de mercados para produtos culturais do Brasil, como filmes, livros, jogos, além de um aumento exponencial do intercâmbio científico, profissional e acadêmico.

Iara Vidal, jornalista brasileira especializada em China, lembra ainda que o Brasil pode desenvolver laços com a China para além do comércio de commodities e parcerias em infraestrutura. “É muito importante parcerias entre a China Media Group [principal grupo de mídia do país, estatal] e empresas nacionais no campo do audiovisual”, diz ela. Outros campos a serem explorados, e que seriam facilitados com uma adesão do Brasil à Rota da Seda, seriam os setores de economia criativa, como a moda. “A China tem desenvolvido ferramentas muito inovadoras para lidar, por exemplo, com a questão do uso do poliéster, que podemos implementar no Brasil. É o caso da iniciativa de substituir o plástico por bambu. Nossa indústria têxtil poderia se beneficiar dessa ideia que está em perfeita sintonia com a neoindustrialização e a economia verde. Poderia renovar esse segmento aproveitando que o setor brasileiro de moda tem a única cadeia produtiva completa do Ocidente, em uma indústria que gera muito emprego, principalmente para mulheres e jovens.”

Uma adesão corajosa do Brasil à Iniciativa do Cinturão e da Rota da Seda poderia dar a marca que hoje falta ao governo Lula. É a oportunidade do século, pois a China tem exatamente aquilo de que precisamos nesse momento: recursos financeiros em abundância, desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico em todas as áreas, uma classe média que deve chegar a 800 milhões de pessoas em alguns anos, para citar apenas alguns.

Tanto o medo de melindrar o império, quanto uma ideologia reacionária (e preconceituosa) anti-China, uma mistura venenosa que parece ter se infiltrado no governo, são antes de tudo uma colossal estupidez, porque os Estados Unidos e a Europa apenas irão respeitar o Brasil, como já disse Lula tantas vezes, se o Brasil aprender a respeitar a si mesmo. E perder a oportunidade de abraçar esta grande nação amiga, a China, seria uma grande falta de respeito do Brasil consigo mesmo e com o futuro da nossa juventude.

Além disso, somente a China tem os recursos, a engenharia institucional, e a velocidade de execução que o governo Lula precisa para implementar projetos grandiosos o suficiente para melhorar a vida do povo e ganhar com folga as eleições de 2026. Apesar da economia estar crescendo e o desemprego caindo, mesmo isso não será suficiente para barrar a onda reacionária que vemos se levantar no país.

Um projeto Minha Casa Meu Sol, com distribuição financiada de placas fotovoltaicas e baterias de lítio para todas as casas e edifícios no Brasil, reduzindo drasticamente as despesas domésticas com eletricidade, seria uma iniciativa para ganhar no primeiro turno em 2026.

Escolher algumas cidades brasileiras para implementação de vastos sistemas de metrô, com auxílio da China, seria outra boa ideia, não apenas para ganhar em 2026 mas sobretudo para apontar uma solução para o estrangulamento desesperador em que se encontram os brasileiros que vivem em grandes cidades.

A construção de um protótipo inicial de trem de alta velocidade, ligando duas cidades importantes brasileiras, também ajudaria o governo a desenvolver uma marca e esmagar a extrema direita nas próximas eleições.

Nenhum projeto desses pode vir dos EUA, tampouco da Europa. Só a China oferece a possibilidade de realização de sonhos dessa magnitude. O governo Lula precisa meditar sobre as próprias palavras do presidente em seus discursos: quando o presidente fala em combater a desigualdade no país, deve se lembrar que isso apenas será possível com a modernização do transporte urbano, maior uso de energia solar e conquista de novos mercados para nossos produtos culturais, para mencionar alguns benefícios que uma parceria com a China nos ajudariam a desenvolver.

Se o governo Lula, porém, decidiu perder o jogo antes mesmo de terminar a segunda metade da gestão, então vai ficar muito mais complicado construir uma estratégia vencedora.

Quer dizer, pode acontecer o pior: a direita vencerá as eleições em 2026, com um candidato como Tarcísio, e um de seus primeiros atos será assinar um memorando de adesão à Rota da Seda. Se o governo do PT não quer aderir, para não melindrar nem os EUA nem os setores reacionários incrustrados na própria administração, um governo de extrema direita, que não precisará “provar” que não é hostil aos EUA, terá toda a facilidade em estabeler mais relações com a China.

Com a corrente de comércio entre Brasil e China chegando a US$ 163 bilhões de dólares nos últimos 12 meses, quase 100% de aumento em dez anos, e com a perspectiva de crescer ainda mais nos próximos dez anos, me parece evidente que os dois países estão fadados a estabelecer parcerias cada vez mais profundas e estratégicas. Se isso será feito sob o governo Lula, com foco em ciência e preocupação social, ou sob um governo de direita, com foco na construção de grandes corredores de escoamento de commodities, ainda não sabemos.

Miguel do Rosário é jornalista e editor do blog O Cafezinho. Nasceu em 1975, no Rio de Janeiro, onde vive e trabalha até hoje.

The Next World War Starts Here (Japan, China, Koreas) - Matthew Kaminski (Politico)

 The Next World War Starts Here

An aggressive China and Russia’s war on Ukraine brought South Korea and Japan closer — with lots of American help. Keeping them together to deter Beijing will be one of the most important foreign policy tasks for Harris or Trump.

Magazine, Politico,  November, 4, 2024

Matthew Kaminski is editor-at-large, writing regularly for POLITICO Magazine on American and global affairs. He’s the founding editor of POLITICO Europe, which launched in 2015, and former editor-in-chief of POLITICO. He previously worked for the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, based in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris and New York.

SEOUL — East Asia is the most serious threat to world peace. An eruption here is hotter and bigger than anything the Middle East or Europe would conceivably produce.

The Biden administration leaves behind a strong diplomatic legacy in Asia, in contrast to its failure in Afghanistan and mixed record in Ukraine and the Middle East. It built webs of security alliances across the region to deter China and forged what has proved elusive for decades — a rapprochement, if not warm friendship, between historical foes and America’s closest Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.

Huge challenges loom for Joe Biden’s successor here. The scale of the forces lining up against each other in the northern Pacific is terrifying. China is forging a deeper alliance of American adversaries in North Korea and Russia, making threats against Taiwan and staking stronger claims on territory in the South China Sea. America’s actions in other geopolitical theaters — above all Ukraine — will reverberate in East Asia.

As strange as it might seem in this moment, the next U.S. administration’s strategy is hamstrung by some old history. Japan and South Korea — which have powerful militaries, and in Japan’s case one that’s recently embarked on a major buildup — are haunted by long-running disputes from the previous century that make their entente feel fragile. It’s an open question whether it can last, even as the threats that are pulling them together grow more serious.

Over the hills that ring Seoul lies the most heavily militarized region in the world. The DMZ separates this vibrant capital from a nuclear-armed hermit state ruled by an unpredictable autocrat that weighs heavily on Korean minds.

The view from Tokyo, a quick flight across the Sea of Japan, is as unreassuring these days.

Russian military planes are breaching the country’s northwestern coastal airspace repeatedly, a reminder that Tokyo and Moscow have an unresolved, nearly 80-year-old territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands that leaves them technically in a state of war. China disputes Japan’s claim over the Senkaku Islands in the south. In the first ever known incursion, Chinese military aircraft flew through Japanese airspace in August. Chinese and Russian military ships together passed near Japanese waters in September during a joint exercise. North Korea openly considers Japan a foe and occasionally sends a missile over the country.

“Japan is now facing off against North Korea, Russia and China and that makes for a severe security environment,” Minoru Kihara, Japan’s defense minister until the government changed last month, told me in an interview in Tokyo. “We feel a strong sense of crisis considering that such incidents took place in a short period of time.”

The war in Ukraine shifted plates in Asia. After Vladimir Putin launched the invasion, Xi Jinping backed him strongly against a unified NATO — making that European conflict a test of China’s superpower ambitions. Japan is “paying close attention to China’s alliance with Russia,” Kihara added. Ukraine also brought Moscow and North Korea closer. Kim Jong Un sent thousands of his soldiers to fight there last month in return, presumably, for military technology and other goodies.

‘Drinking buddies’

The answer to this robust authoritarian axis à trois is the trilateral relationship with Seoul and Tokyo that Washington spent years trying to bring to life.

While both countries are protected by the U.S. through treaties going back over 70 years — and while both share common enemies — South Korea and Japan have long been estranged. During World War II, Japan occupied South Korea, enslaving Koreans to work in their factories and sexually service their soldiers. Japan has apologized and paid reparations to Koreans. But this remains an open nerve — and badly strained political and military ties.

During his time as the commodore of a squadron of guided missiles destroyers in the 1990s, retired Adm. Jim Stavridis recalled that during joint exercises the U.S. had to keep Japanese and South Korean vessels far away from each other — or “you’d get the on-the-sea version of ‘road rage’.” It is as if France and Germany had remained frosty after World War II. Under that scenario, Europe wouldn’t have NATO or the EU.

The Xi era in China changed Japanese attitudes about security. Ukraine is the more recent accelerant.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who stepped down this autumn, elaborated a line used by his foreign minister — “First Ukraine, then Taiwan” — to suggest the war could come here: “Ukraine may be the East Asia of tomorrow.” Russia’s biggest supporter China is the one power today openly challenging the U.S.-led order, and the only one with the ability potentially to do so.

Japan responded by unveiling plans to double defense spending — from 1 percent of its GDP to 2 percent by 2027. The budget has already gone up more than 40 percent since 2022. Under its constitution, Japan can only defend itself and had neglected the military. A previous Japanese leader, Shinzo Abe, started to change things in the 2010s. Japan built out a formidable navy and added modern weaponry. By the time the current expansion plans are in place, Japan is expected to be the world’s third-largest spender on defense, after the U.S. and China. Germany, by contrast, is reversing plans to boost defense spending.

Even for all that spending, “China is outpacing Japan’s increase of defense budget and they have four times more than we do,” said Kihara, the former defense minister. “It is difficult for us to face China on our own.”

South Korea is an obvious ally for Japan. Kishida was open to closer relations, believing Japan needed friends to resist China. What made that possible was the presidential election in March of 2022, a month after the invasion of Ukraine, that brought Yoon Suk Yeol to the presidential palace in Seoul.

The left and right swap power every five or 10 years here. The left tends to seek reconciliation with North Korea and dislike Japan. A man of the right, Yoon brought more hawkish views and something else: a genuine affection for Japan going back to his father’s time studying and teaching there.

He had his first chance to meet Kishida at the Madrid NATO summit in July of that year. “Yoon hugged him,” recalled a former Korean official who was there. Kishida was taken aback. Yoon is outgoing, Kishida circumspect. “Asian leaders don’t do hugs, unless they are communists.”

From that awkward beginning came a relationship that this former official described as “drinking buddies.”

The U.S. had been looking for an opening like this for years. Kurt Campbell, the deputy secretary of State, pushed a rapprochement strategy from Washington. Dozens of trilateral meetings followed where the U.S. did “the thing that’s unusual for America — step back and let everyone else talk,” said Rahm Emanuel, America’s ambassador in Tokyo.

Little was straightforward. Korean and Japanese ministers rarely meet each other one-on-one. Korea’s defense minister hadn’t come to Tokyo for 15 years before this July. If the Japanese defense chief goes to Seoul next year, as planned, that would be the first time in nine years. The U.S. has to play mediator and counselor to both sides.

“History is history, brother,” Emanuel said. “It has a pull on emotions and it has a pull on psychology.

“The U.S. plays an important role in keeping the plates spinning,” he added.

When Japan was hosting the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May of 2023, Washington pressed to have Korea invited. During the meeting, Yoon and Kishida went together with their spouses to pay respects at a memorial to the Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of the city. It was a first of sorts and created a lasting image.

The culmination of the courtship was the Camp David summit in August last year. Yoon, Kishida and Biden hailed a new era and announced various agreements, including on sharing data about missiles and a major exercise. “This is an all hands on deck moment in the region,” said a senior administration official in Washington, who asked for anonymity.

“When you have trust in us and in the president, you don’t do the bare minimum,” Emanuel said. “They went beyond their comfort zone. In a world consumed by war and grievance, history can catch up to the present and shape it. Camp David showed dialogue and diplomacy shaped the future.

“Now,” Emanuel continued, “the goal is to institutionalize it in the DNA of governments.”

‘Not allies’

The fact is this rapprochement is far from a done deal. Leaders in Seoul and Tokyo sound at best cautionary notes.

“I’m very pessimistic,” said a senior Japanese official who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter. The Koreans “swing from one extreme to the other.” Yoon’s opponents have called him a sellout to Japan, riding him hard on the rapprochement.

Another foreign ministry official in Tokyo recalled working visits to Seoul during the lead-up to the Camp David summit. “They would yell at us during negotiations over what happened in the war and when the meeting’s over, they say, ‘no hard feelings, let’s go out for drinks’,” this official said. “The next day they yell at us some more. It’s due to the domestic political pressure they’re under.”

In Korea, this issue isn’t purely a matter of partisan politics. Distrust crosses generations and goes deep.

While Korea has agreed to joint naval and aerial exercises, Japanese forces aren’t welcome on Korean soil. “We prefer to have them somewhere else,” deadpanned a senior Korean official.

Asked whether Japan was now an ally, this official paused and said, “Don’t think so. Partner is enough.”

The recurring pain points involve Korean demands for reparations and more apologies. The Japanese reply that these demands were settled already — and want to stay away from Korea’s messy internal politics.

Yes and no. Korea’s enthusiasm for the rapprochement may pass with President’s Yoon’s departure from office. Yet Japan’s own politics are tortured by history as well, which hinders its ability to build deeper relationships with Korea and other nations across Asia that fear China’s rise.

Japan’s 21st century awakening on defense contrasts with its former wartime ally in Germany. There is another contrast with Germany that is less complimentary. “The curious thing,” Ian Buruma wrote in his book Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, “much of what attracted [the] Japanese to Germany before the war — Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism — had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany.”

No Japanese politician, Buruma continued, has “ever gone down on his knees, as Willy Brandt did in the old Warsaw ghetto, to apologize for historical crimes.”

The Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for all but four years since 1955 and will almost certainly continue to despite losing its majority in the past weekend’s elections, has a vocal nationalist right wing. Many mornings outside LDP headquarters, trucks with loudspeakers and flags blare nationalist speeches.

These historical issues might have been settled long ago. The U.S. can share some blame, deciding, in order to get a peace deal done, to let the Japanese emperor stay as head of state but give up his divine right to rule. Japan’s military kept its flags and symbols. Germany was wiped clean of the Nazi regime and its vestiges.

“We didn’t really grow up,” said one foreign ministry official that I spoke to in Tokyo.

Yasukuni Shrine is a large complex in central Tokyo near the imperial palace. The shrine honors Japan’s war dead, among whom are 14 war criminals who committed atrocities in World War II. A large museum on the site treats Japan’s wartime histories with reverence. Models of a kamikaze plane and submarine are displayed. Exhibits for the last war suggest the Japanese were fighting Western imperialism in Asia. It’s as if a museum in Berlin displayed Nazi flags and honored Nazi leaders.

Whenever an LDP politician visits Yasukuni, Koreans and Chinese have an excuse to complain. Kihara, the defense minister, went on Aug. 15, the 79th anniversary of Japan’s surrender. He was unapologetic, saying that “those who had sacrificed should be given tribute” and that his own relatives worship there. “It is unfortunate that this has been politicized,” he said.

Just don’t call it Asian NATO

These two awkward neighbors need each other and America needs them to get along to marshal a credible response to the China-led threesome.

The security anxieties in the region are bound to grow. If Beijing acts on its threats and succeeds, the fall of Taiwan would be a huge economic and political blow to the U.S. It would also put the rest of Asia in play, so to speak. Add to that the reemergence of Russia in the region and the heightening of the North Korean threat. The war in Ukraine is sputtering along, and the outcome there might hang on what happens in the U.S. Tuesday.

The Biden diplomatic push of the past couple years in East Asia is intended to build out enough military muscle and overlapping alliances to create a kind of NATO for the region — with China in the role of the old Soviet Union. You just can’t call it NATO. The South Koreans and others don’t want to be formally allied with Japan. To be more like Germany, Japan would also become an equal partner to America and others.

The U.S. isn’t ready to reopen the postwar security deal that keeps Japan in a kind of arrested development. The current Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba used to muse about an Asian NATO and reopening the status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Japan. He had to disavow the idea minutes after winning power in late September.

Those political issues are a distraction, U.S. officials say. In practical terms, however, a lot has already changed. The region is arming up, passing Europe in terms of defense expenditures a decade ago. As they spend more, Japan’s terrible demographics limit their ability to add manpower. The money is going to buy hundreds of American long-range Tomahawk missiles, integrated antimissile systems and unmanned defenses. Japan’s navy could be “the swing vote on effective deterrence” over Taiwan, said Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House. Japan wants to develop weapons with the U.S. and train its troops there.

Earlier this year, the U.S. upgraded the commander of forces in Japan from a two-star to a three-star general officer and pledged to build a new command and control center — which Emanuel called “the largest change in our force structure” and “the most important thing we have done here in 60 years.”

Other baby steps are planned. The trio is talking about putting in place some institutional roots. Perhaps a secretariat for the trilateral relationship — that’s not exactly a second coming of NATO. 

The wartime history in East Asia feels far more alive and relevant to the future than in Europe. Beijing, naturally, exploits it. The Chinese government has managed to transfer animosity toward Japan to the next generation. A 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death in September while walking to school in Shanghai on the anniversary of Japan’s invasion of China, the latest in a string of attacks on Japanese in the country.

Beijing has another card to play against both South Korea and Japan. Both countries are deeply integrated with China economically, which Beijing has used to pressure them.

As much as the U.S. wants their friendship to build, Japan and South Korea will look primarily to Washington for reassurances about American power and its commitment to them individually.

“Beijing wants to send a signal that the U.S. is unable to support treaty allies in the region, and to send a signal to Taiwan, to portray us as hollow allies,” Pottinger said. “Xi has led himself into believing that America is in irrevocable decline and that China and its allies will paper the world in chaos.”