Biography
Masashi Nishihara has been President of the Research Institute for Peace and Security since 2006. Until then he served as President of the National Defense Academy, Yokosuka, for six years. From 1977-99 he was Professor of International Relations at the Academy. He was also Director of the First Department of the National Institute for Defense Studies. Dr Nishihara was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1979 and at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York in 1981-82. Nishihara received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan after having conducted field research in Jakarta. In 1986-95 he served on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He also served on the task forces and panels under Prime Ministers Kiichi Miyazawa, Jun’ichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe.
Nishihara specializes in international security and Asian politics with his works including: The Japanese and Sukarno’s Indonesia (University Press of Hawaii, 1976), The Political Corruption of Southeast Asia (in Japanese, ed. Sobunsha, 1976), Vietnam Joins the World; American and Japanese Perspectives (co-editor, New York, M.E. Sharp, 1997), and “Regional Security Perspectives” in Asian Security (an annual report of Research Institute for Peace and Security).
Keynote Presentation
Rebuilding a Resilient Liberal-Democratic Order
The worldwide outbreak of Covid-19 is reinvigorating the rivalry between the United States and China, a source of major international tensions today. This rivalry is much more complex than that of the old Cold War period between the US and the Soviet Union. Instead, the new cold war between the US, a status quo power of the liberal-democratic order, and China, an anti-status quo power, represents their competition in trade, finance, technology, research and education, and even public health, not to mention the political and military spheres. This growing competition is seen today in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the Senkaku Islands. In addition, China’s intervention in Australia’s domestic politics and its strong measures to control Hong Kong’s democratic practices pose challenges to their freedom and democracies. This hegemonic tendency may also extend to the competition between “Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP)” strategy and the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).
Whereas the United States is seeking freedom, China is seeking control by coercion, and the onset of Covid-19 has encouraged Xi Jinping as well as to a lesser extent Vladimir Putin to reinforce their authoritarian rule and coercive diplomacy. Moreover, they are likely to stay in power beyond the 2030s, and perhaps even longer. At the same time, the US global advocacy of universal values has declined under Donald Trump’s “America First” policy, thereby allowing the balance of power to tilt toward Beijing.
Nonetheless, China and Russia will have to cooperate on such global issues as unequal wealth distribution, excessive military spending, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, and pandemic disease. A democratic consultation process is likely to provide the most acceptable solution.
The G7 nations’ total GDP is 45% of the world’s, and is far bigger than China’s and Russia’s combined (15%). The G7, which includes Japan, should thus take the lead in persuading other like-minded nations with strategic plans to reduce their dependence on China’s supply chains, to revitalize the free market economy, and to rebuild a resilient rule-based liberal-democratic order.
