Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi took full advantage of the 19th Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore as a platform to boost Japan's diplomatic and security role in the region.
As the first Japanese prime minister in eight years to deliver a keynote speech at the Asia security conference, Kishida used his 40-minute speech to make thinly veiled criticisms of China, and made clear that Tokyo views hanging on the coattails of Washington's "Indo-Pacific strategy" as the means to counter China's influence in the region and advance its agenda of remilitarizing Japan.
Promising to fundamentally reinforce Japan's defense capabilities within the next five years and to secure a substantial increase of Japan's defense budget in order to do so, Kishida showed that his vision for peace is simply might makes right.
The vision he outlined, which he described as the vision of a rules-based free and open international order, is one in which the Japan-US alliance is the linchpin supported by other like-minded countries.
Based on Japan's long-held inferiority complex, which stems from the arrival of the US warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry that forced Japan to open up its ports to trade in 1853, it is a restatement of Japan's long-cherished dream of being accepted as a member of what it views as the global VIP club and its ambitions to play a bigger role politically, economically and even militarily in the region and beyond.
Viewing China as an obstacle to realizing those ambitions, in recent years, Japan's rightist-leaning politicians have eagerly jumped on board the bandwagon of the US' "Indo-Pacific strategy", echoing Washington's allegations of China's rules-breaking behavior as justification.
It was telling that saying Japan's vision of "a free and open Indo-Pacific" had broad support in the international community, Kishida listed the US, Australia, India, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the European Union. Of these, only the first three could be considered regional countries.
Tokyo's "Indo-Pacific" vision is its self-calculation that it can gain kudos by being Washington's lieutenant in Asia and is at odds with that of many countries in the region, which share the view aired by Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto at the Singapore forum.
Acknowledging that Asian countries have disputes and differences, Subianto said that the region had found "an Asian way" to solve the challenges by striving to solve the differences in "an amicable and in a mutually beneficial way".
Saying that Indonesia values cooperation with all partners in the region, he "urged other countries to "consider and respect" the national and rightful interests of China.
Both the US and Japan should heed such rational voices from the region as gunboats will not subject China to their will, and instead will only serve to destroy the consensus on the value of inclusive diversity that has made Asia the center of gravity of the ever-expanding global economy.