Obama can ward off potential N-E Asia crisis

FORMER deputy foreign minister of Japan Hitoshi Tanaka made a startling observation during a briefing in Tokyo last week - that fully 50 per cent of the audience at a presentation he gave in South Korea recently expected "conflict" to erupt between their country and Japan and also between Japan and China in the not too distant future.

This is alarming because it means that if intelligent and informed people such as those in the audience have now the possibility of military conflict between North-east Asia's biggest powers in their calculations then we could be on the brink of a calamity. There are numerous "experts" from outside the region who are ready to brush off such dangers as overblown, but the reality of what is happening within the region does not justify such complacency. Even as Mr Tanaka suggested that military confrontation is not the aim of the nations concerned, he admitted that the danger of "accidents" is high.

Data released recently showed that the number of times that Japanese fighter jets are scrambled nowadays to ward off real or imagined intrusions by their Chinese counterparts runs into the hundreds each year. With nationalism running high in Japan, China as well as in South Korea, tensions seem far more likely to increase than to diminish in the foreseeable future. Thus the key question that springs to mind is who, if anyone, has the power to intermediate and ward off a potential crisis.