Japan, France, and the United States will hold their first joint land and naval military exercise near one of Japan’s outlying islands next May as the Chinese military intensifies its activities in the region, the Sankei Shimbun reported Dec. 6.
The exercise, to be held on one of Japan’s uninhabited outlying islands, will focus on providing relief efforts during natural disasters, but part of the exercise could also form the basis for a defense against attack, the report said. Japan’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for confirmation. The newspaper said the joint exercise is designed to counterbalance China’s dispute over sovereignty over the waters surrounding the Diaoyu Islands, and Beijing’s rapid militarization of the South China Sea in recent years. In a separate interview with the newspaper, French Navy Chief of Staff Pierre Vandier said, “We want to show our presence in the region and send a message about Japan-France cooperation. According to Vandier, “This is a message for China. It’s a message about multilateral partnership and freedom of navigation.”
Van Dier spoke of China’s “conqueror behavior” in an exchange with Japanese defense officials during a visit to Japan earlier in the month. He said that China’s pressure is worrisome, that the balance of power (in the region) has been upset, and that “China has a very assertive, very conquering behavior in terms of territorial waters.” In his view, “there is a great deal of common ground between the Japanese authorities and the French on Indo-Pacific policy,” and so on. At this level, he stressed the importance of multilateralism and mentioned the cooperation between India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, and Japan, among others.
On October 14 of this year, Van Dijk participated in a hearing organized by the Commission on Defense and the Armed Forces of the French National Assembly on the expenditure of the defense budget for 2021, saying, “Since the beginning of 2010, it is clear that a new situation has emerged and that a number of phenomena have emerged. First, there are institutional obstacles to multilateralism. At least three of the five countries that sit on the Security Council as permanent members are often de facto obstacles to the functioning of the United Nations. At present, it is no longer possible to hope for a joint resolution of conflicts. This is an era of fait accompli policies, as the 2014 crisis in Crimea is a clear example.”
Van Dijk said, “It is also time to question international treaties, such as the Intermediate-Range Missile Treaty or the suspension of very important collective security treaties like the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Challenges to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea are also intensifying around the world.” He said, “Codes of good behavior between nations are no longer always respected: nascent islands are fortified as military bases, shameless exploration in neighboring countries’ exclusive economic zones, and the plundering of fishing resources in undefended places.”
Van Dijk says, “The most striking phenomenon in this geopolitical landscape is the massive remilitarization of the seas. China has spent four centuries behind the wall, and in 2015, the Chinese White Paper has already announced the great return of the maritime sector in the future development. China’s return to the maritime world is primarily economic. For example, the ‘One Belt, One Road’ goes all the way to Europe, as far as the port of Piraeus (Athens, Greece).”
Van Dijk continued, “From a military point of view, China has been rearming at a high rate since the 2010s. In some rankings now, if you take into account the number of naval platforms for both, the Chinese Navy is in the lead, ahead of the U.S. Navy. The Chinese navy now has an ocean-going nuclear deterrent, will launch its third aircraft carrier by the end of the year, and has announced the development of a naval version of its latest generation J-20 fighter jet. Not a week goes by that we don’t get new news on China’s developments in new weapons and various areas of naval warfare.”
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