World War on Asia’s Doorstep: Yano Yoshiaki's Geostrategy for a New Global Paradigm

Half a millennium of geopolitical time is coming to a close. The globe has been increasingly dominated by European and American polities since Spain and Portugal first began to rule the waves, and then foreign lands, at the end of the fifteenth century. More than two decades into the twenty-first century, this global order—now overseen by Europe’s successor power, the United States—is disintegrating. Japan must understand that a new and unfamiliar age is dawning and adapt accordingly.

So argues Dr. Yano Yoshiaki, a special visiting professor at Gifu Women’s University, a former major general in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, and the president of the Japan Forum of Security, a research group based in Tokyo. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Yano articulated his view of geopolitical history in the longue durée, Japan’s place in a changing global order, and how intensifying security challenges are accelerating the shift away from a monopolar world.

Farewell to Mahan, Hello to Eurasia

“Spain and Portugal long ago began to rule the seas,” Dr. Yano Yoshiaki tells us in a clear, deep, authoritative voice.

We are in a small meeting room in downtown Tokyo. Outside, the spring is struggling to break the winter’s grip on Japan’s capital. Inside, however, time stands still as Dr. Yano takes us on a sweeping tour of the past five hundred years of geopolitical vicissitudes.

“The Iberian powers ruled the seas with guns and ships,” Dr. Yano continues. “Then they developed colonies wherever they landed in those ships, and after that forced indigenous peoples, and later Africans, to work in those colonies. From the spoils, the Iberian powers, and soon other European states, further strengthened their military prowess and shored up their rule over various non-European regions.

“Spain and Portugal, and also the Netherlands, France, England, America—these and others have been following the same basic set of imperialist practices for five centuries. Sea power and extractive domination have allowed the West to control much of the globe.”

But in Dr. Yano’s view, this is all coming to an end. The age of sea power is drawing to a close, he tells us, and the age of land powers is at hand.

Particularly indicative of how the geopolitical tables are turning, he emphasizes, is the recent harassment of shipping traffic in the Red Sea by the Yemen-based Houthis.

“A2/AD [Anti-Access Area Denial] Strategy is advancing rapidly,” Dr. Yano says. “It is now possible to use land platforms to restrict sea power, and to do so in a way that is asymmetrical in favor of the land-based forces.”

This, Dr. Yano tells us, is a turning point in geopolitical history.

“For example,” he continues, “drones are proving highly effective against Western vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis are using cheap weaponry to counter complex naval and air forces maintained with big national budgets. Both the Western powers and the Houthis, the latter provided intelligence support by the Iranians and the Russians, can access ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] networks. The Houthis have the advantage in several areas.

“Western forces are being forced to respond disproportionately simply because of the tremendous budgetary gap between, say, the United States Navy and the Houthi guerrillas. It costs very little to harass ships with drones. By contrast, it involves an enormous outlay of funds to build and equip US Navy ships and then to fire expensive missiles into Houthi-controlled territory. With each such disproportionate engagement, the Houthis extract from the West a much greater price than the West extracts from the Houthis.”

And it isn’t just the Houthis, Dr. Yano emphasizes. Russia, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Iran, and other states at odds with the American-led global order are also finding ways to wear the West down at a rate unsustainable for America and its European allies (and Japan).

“Western culture floats, as it were, on the notion of free trade, which in turn is made possible by open seas,” Dr. Yano tells us. “But all of this is being lost. Even in space, methods such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and cyberattacks are reducing the dominance of the West in a realm once considered to be wide open and freely accessible.”

We think of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval strategist whose 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660-1783 has long been a foundational text of geopolitical thinking—including in Japan.

Now, however, Dr. Yano is painting a portrait of a completely different world, one in which the sea powers do not dominate the land, but, conversely, those on land dominate the sea. Land-based powers can more and more deny access to the old array of Western naval forces, using drones and various kinds of missiles, including hypersonic weapons.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Eurasia, where many different kinds of non-Western land powers are ascendant. Russia’s and China’s arguments for a new, multipolar, non-interventionist world order are increasingly backed by technology capable of keeping Western forces at bay.

World War on Asia’s Doorstep

American power may be declining, but one would never know it from the actions of Japan’s political center. In recent weeks, Japanese prime minister Kishida Fumio has been steering Japan even deeper into Washington’s orbit than the country was under long-serving former prime minister Abe Shinzo. Abe was widely seen as a friendly and cooperative American ally, but Kishida has all but offered Japan’s treasure and soil to Washington to use as needed.

In April, Prime Minister Kishida visited Washington and pledged that he and his country would be the United States’ “global partner.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Yano sees a geopolitical process developing that belies the current headlines about tightening US-Japan interaction.

“The United States will probably leave Japan before the Japanese people call for independence from America,” Dr. Yano tells us. “The United States is undergoing an ideological shift, losing its identity and being subsumed in wave after wave of cultural Marxism. Globalization has gutted the country economically, and has even undercut America’s ability to produce weapons to sustain its worldwide military presence and interventions.

“Parallel to this, North Korea and Russia will probably develop their relationship, eventually becoming a direct threat to Japan. Any conflict that breaks out in or around the Korean peninsula will necessarily draw Japan into the fighting. And China is said to have some five hundred nuclear warheads, plus two thousand missiles aimed at Japan—not counting its more than one thousand short-range missiles aimed at Okinawa and Taiwan.

On June 19, 2024, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed, in Pyongyang, a bilateral pact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledging mutual aid if either party were attacked. This development, which came after our interview with Dr. Yano, reaffirmed his analysis of the developing Russia-North Korea relationship.

“And then there is Ukraine and NATO,” Dr. Yano continues. “It appears that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces may be at the Dnieper River by the summer of 2024. NATO is facing internal opposition to any more fighting in Ukraine, with, for example, Poland and the Czech Republic turning against ongoing engagement in the war there. The United States has been pushing Japan to send money and materiel to Ukraine, and Japan has responded. But Ukraine is taking heavy losses while losing ground, and the Russians have the momentum and the advantage.

“The United States has very limited resources now to devote to Ukraine, and the political winds in the United States continue to favor supporting Israel, while support in the United States for Ukraine is dwindling. It is possible that Ukraine will be split up between Russia and the West or become a neutral country.

“The trend is toward the ongoing and accelerating decline of America, which, although it will remain a world power, will increasingly have to contend, along with its also-weakened G7 partners, with a strengthening Russia and China.”

Dr. Yano also mentions the boiling-point tensions between Israel and Iran after Israel’s bombing-run assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard brigadier general Mohammad Reza Zahedi in the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April 1, 2024. Dr. Yano views Iran as a nuclear power and therefore sees the fighting between Israel and Iran—which counter-attacked Israel on the night of April 13—as capable of spiraling into uncontrollable violence. In addition, he calls our attention to the ongoing Chinese incursions into Philippines territorial waters in the South China Sea, as well as to similar Chinese incursions into Japan’s territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands (Ishigaki City, Okinawa Prefecture).

On both ends of Eurasia, in other words—from Ukraine to North Korea, the Philippines, and Japan—there is the possibility for war to explode, eventually igniting a global conflagration.

Japan’s Way Forward

The five hundred years of Western rule have been centuries of dominance and war, Dr. Yano argues. The Japanese ideal, though, is peaceful coexistence, he adds. Dr. Yano sees this cultural understanding fitting into the matrix of the emerging world order.

Many Russian thinkers on the new Eurasian paradigm, for example, have emphasized what might be called a kind of Westphalian cultural relativism, that is, a refusal to interfere in other countries’ affairs on human rights grounds out of a respect for how society operates differently in different places.

“The multidimensional society which Japan has long enjoyed is a hint to how the world is changing,” Dr. Yano says.

“Take the Straits of Malacca, for instance,” he concludes, ending on a note of muted optimism. “While the United States often emphasizes that losing the Western-dominated world order and the freedom of navigation that has underpinned it would lead to China’s cutting off the choke point at the Straits of Malacca, I think Asians will rediscover how to cooperate through loose and flexible networks to ensure access for all.”

As Japan’s government goes all in on its bet that Washington will continue to dominate in Asia, will others in Japan be able to steer the country, as Dr. Yano suggests, towards a more multipolar future? Time will tell, but as the world changes dramatically by the day, it seems that we will find out much sooner than later.