Carpenter's latest cut-and-paste job is over the Senkaku Islands:
The Obama administration’s policy on the islands dispute is both contradictory and foolhardy. Even as she applied the defense treaty to the Senkakus, Clinton insisted that the United States takes no position on the substance of the dispute. But that stance makes no sense. By insisting that the mutual security treaty includes the Senkakus, Washington implicitly regards the islands as Japanese territory, so U.S. officials are prejudging the issue—a point that the Chinese have noted.
And by indicating that Japan could invoke the 1960 treaty in the event of a military incident involving the Senkakus, the Obama administration is encouraging, whether deliberately or inadvertently, the Japanese government and public to be more assertive regarding the dispute.
I'll defend the Obama administration on this. Of course our position makes sense. We don't care what China and Japan decide to do about ownership of the islands; but we do care that China not resort to force to settle that dispute, and we will help Japan if China attacks Japan. We are pre-judging the means to settle the dispute. That's what allies do.
Nor do I think that Japan is eager for war with China with or without American help.
Yet Carpenter wants to put portions of Japan outside our defensive perimeter:
President Obama should overrule the State Department’s interpretation of the 1960 defense pact and make it clear to Tokyo that, regardless of the positions Washington has taken over the decades regarding the islands, the United States is not about to risk going to war over some uninhabited rocks. It is important to take that step before a crisis erupts.
Avoiding war that way will work out swell.
I have no use for Carpenter. He simply wants to run away from China wherever China pushes:
Why is the fact that getting Taiwan is a "core interest" of China make the interest legitimate? I mean, God forbid that Carpenter should find out that humbling Japan is a core interest of China. Or letting North Korea have nukes to threaten us and Japan. Or whatever nutty thing the Chinese think is a core interest. Peking may define something as a core interest. That is their right, I suppose. But we are under no obligation to accept their core interests if they conflict with ours.
Fancy that. Only 7 short years after I wrote that, Carpenter has decided the humbling of Japan is a legitimate core interest of China.
Maybe San Francisco should rename "Chinatown" something else before it becomes a core interest of Peking and Carpenter can argue that we should explain to Californians that we're not about to go to war over some inhabited (by ethnic Chinese, no less!) blocks.
