Asia's odd couple.

• Author: Ezrati, Milton
• Position: India-Japan cooperation

India and Japan are drawing closer to each other. Senior representatives of both governments have praised each other at high-level visits and have signed a remarkable number of security, trade and investment agreements in a relatively short time. Doubtless, this embrace has its origins in China's provocative--some might say aggressive--behavior. But, having drawn together for security reasons, the two countries now realize how closer relations will also bring powerful economic and investment advantages. There are, of course, limits to how intertwined India and Japan can become, but the mutual advantages--diplomatic, military, economic and financial--certainly invite an extension of the recent trend.

At the same time, the decline in America's diplomatic and military profile has intensified Indian and Japanese anxieties. Washington, of course, has spoken endlessly of its "Asia pivot," which both Japan and India would welcome if it had substance, but there is little sign of that so far. Though the United States possesses overwhelming naval superiority, with a fleet of more than one hundred large surface ships, it is also clear that Washington's huge obligations elsewhere in the world limit how many of those ships it could commit to Asia at any one time. Comparative trends in naval power have added to the unease. The U.S. fleet has shrunk by more than half since 1990, when it possessed 230 large surface vessels, and seems poised to shrink further. In this turbulent security environment, India and Japan have much to offer each other. Even a loose cooperation between these two countries would blunt Beijing's military advantage, since Beijing, in confronting one, would have to hold military resources back to cover the possibility of trouble with the other.

China has tailored its recent actions to raise anxieties throughout Asia. Its army has repeatedly challenged India in the Himalayas, while its navy has behaved in a high-handed way in the Indian Ocean, and still more so in the East and South China Seas. Beijing has issued the usual raft of diplomatic equivocations, stating, for instance, that the construction of air fields on disputed islands should trouble no one, that such structures have no aggressive intent but are merely an effort by the People's Liberation Army to improve working conditions for the rescue workers stationed there.

Strains between China and India are, of course, long-standing. The two countries fought a brief but bitter war along their common Himalayan border in 1962. Though no major action has taken place since, Beijing steadfastly refuses to reach a permanent border settlement and constantly tests the mechanisms put into place to stop small incidents from escalating. New Delhi counts no fewer than six hundred incursions by Chinese troops during the last three years and complains of sometimes lengthy Chinese deployments in Pakistan and, particularly sensitive, in the Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir. India's navy counts twenty-two troubling Indian Ocean encounters with Chinese submarines in a recent twelve-month span. Nor does it help that China has been caught stealing classified documents from India's Eastern Naval Command, that rumors have surfaced about the construction of a Chinese submarine base in the Maldives or that China is developing port facilities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. "Everywhere around us, we see an eighteenth-century expansionist mind-set," Indian prime minister Narendra Modi said in a recent speech. It was understood he was talking about China.

Japan's Chinese anxieties are of more recent vintage but are no less intense. There is the dispute over the East China Sea islands that the Japanese call the Senkakus and the Chinese call the Diaoyus. Both countries claim them, both from time to time have behaved in provocative ways and both have confronted the other's naval power around the islands. But if these events dominate the headlines, they are hardly the whole story. In recent years, Chinese warships have navigated unsettlingly close to Japanese shores, including in the Osumi Strait in...