Five University Conference

Nagafumi Nakamura
PhD Student, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
the University of Tokyo

I participated in the Five University Collaboration’s Sixth Annual Conference on East Asia Security Conflict and Cooperation, held in Princeton, during December 1213, 2014. This conference constituted a sustained discussion regarding East Asian security cooperation and regional governance among scholars and students from Peking University, Princeton University, Korea University, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Tokyo. The delegation from Japan was composed by the University of Tokyo Professor Kiichi Fujiwara, Professor Akio Takahara, Professor Keisuke Iida, Mr. Hitoshi Tanaka (Chairman, Institute for International Strategy, JRI), and Mr. Nagafumi Nakamura (PhD Student, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). There were five general sessions and a graduate session. This report discusses the general and graduate sessions at which students presented papers, and then briefly addresses the next Five University Conference.

General Sessions

In each session, open discussions were held after several scholars presented their research. Although every session was compelling, the following points were of particular interest in terms of their relation to my own research. Almost all the conference participants agreed that political rivalry and economic ties had been a consistent feature in East Asia, and a puzzle for international relations scholars (to borrow a scholar’s phrase “North-East Asia Paradox”) for some time. However, I cannot easily accept this idea. It seems that rather than presenting a paradox, lasting co-existence of economic interdependence and political tensions seems only natural.

This is because lasting the situation produce sense of security that political issues will not spill over into the economic area. Thus, once tensions (particularly territorial tension) occur, and anti-foreign nationalism rises in domestic opinion, governments become less concerned about adopting a hardline policy. If the intensifying political antagonism does not have a negative effect on the economy, then continued confrontation is not necessarily irrational.

If this hypothesis is correct, the question we have to ask here is why economic interdependence has no effect on controlling anti-foreign nationalism in domestic opinion. The relation between globalization and redistribution of wealth remains a matter to be discussed further.

Graduate Session

Due to space constraints, I will concentrate on my own presentation, which this year was about U.S. stability operations in the Middle East. This topic does not directly focus on East Asia because the concerned region is irrelevant to the discussion of security topics. My presentation, titled “The Dilemmas of Exit Strategy: The U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq,” tackled the question of why stability operations often last longer than the intervening state’s initial forecast.

Previous arguments attribute this result to inadequacies in exit strategies caused by the arrogance of intervening states, or opposition within their own governments. In the case of the 2003 Iraq intervention, for example, it has been argued that the U.S. exhibited a lack of foresight due to its arrogance as an unrivaled superpower, and that there were internal disagreements within the departments of defense and state, or between leaders in Washington and military commanders on the ground in Iraq. There is certainly some truth in these explanations. However, the question now arises: if the U.S. government could have cast off its arrogance and removed all internal opposition, would it then have been able to develop an adequate exit strategy? It is preferable to look beyond the issues of internal dissension and consider a primary structural cause that would have made it more difficult to design an exit strategy.

My presentation identified five dilemmas that make it difficult to decide on withdrawal. These dilemmas arise within three processes: (1) the planning process for the operation, (2) the implementation and adjustment process, and (3) the exit strategy clarification and justification process. For example, one of the dilemmas, which I call the announcement dilemma, is related to both the second and third of these processes. If the timeline for ending an operation is not announced, then the local forces that support the intervention may not perceive a need to take responsibility for governing their state, as they may come to depend on the assistance of the intervening state. On the other hand, disclosing an exit strategy at an early stage of an operation could give forces opposed to the intervention (the spoilers) a strong incentive to resist, in the belief that the situation could significantly change if the spoilers can just hang on until the scheduled time of withdrawal. The termination faction asserts the dangers of the former possibility, whereas the continuation faction highlights the latter risk; and their two arguments end up running parallel to each other. The existence of this type of dilemma within each of the processes makes it difficult to decide on a withdrawal and consequently lengthens peace operations.

Helpful comments and questions were offered about this presentation. However, less feedback was received from participants about this presentation than about the one that I presented last year, which discussed the escalation process of the territorial tensions surrounding the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Although the introduction of my presentation drew relevant parallels such as connecting U.S. rebalancing policy in the Asia-Pacific region with withdrawal from Iraq, this seemed insufficient to draw Asian studies scholars’ attention, which is a lesson I have taken on board for the future.

Future Work

As mentioned above, this conference yielded fascinating insights into and fresh understandings of international security. However, I was the only Japanese graduate student in attendance for two years running. I would like to recommend that other graduate students participate in the next conference to be held at Peking University, which I also hope to attend.