Analyzing Japanese Asia-Pacific Security Strategy in the Era of China’s Rising Power: from the Perspectives of Balance of Threats Theory

Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the World has entered into the era of the post cold war and the characteristics of bipolar international system has turned into the multipolar international system. Following this, Japan has ended the containment strategy to the Soviet Union in the Asia Pacific region. In the 1990s, the Japan Defense White Paper has pointed out that the mainland China has been considered as the new raising force and the mainly potential threat enemy in the Asia Pacific area.Traditionally, the realism scholars used to study and analyze the security strategy through the balance of power approach in the fields of international security strategy. The focal point of balance of power theory is that the weaker states will get allied with each other in order to fight against the strongest state in the region. The aim of balance of power theory is to make the distribution of power into the status of equilibrium in the international system. Therefore, Japan should ally with the other states to counterbalance USA, the strongest state, in Asia-Pacific region, from the perspectives of balance of power theory. However, this kind of balancing behavior never happens in Asia-Pacific region. In fact, the weaker states don’t ally with each other to fight against the strongest states all the time. On the contrary, the weaker states will ally with the regional hegemony or the superpower to oppose against the weaker states, the most threatening states to the other regional states. In this sense, sources of threats are the states’ motivation of getting allied. This is something that the balance of power theory can not explain when talking about the states’ balancing behaviors.By applying the theory of balance of threat, this paper aims to study Japanese Asia-Pacific security strategy in the post cold war era. First of all, the paper is going to introduce the main ideas and contents of balance of threats theory including the elements of forming threats and the characteristics of balancing and bandwagon behaviors