Kissinger, Japan, and Okinawa
A conversation with Dan Sneider
As I looked back at Henry Kissinger’s thinking about Japan, I repeatedly encountered Richard Sneider’s name. Sneider, a career foreign service officer, who, as country director for Japan during the Johnson administration and as a member of Kissinger’s National Security Council staff and an adviser at the US Embassy, was a key player in negotiations for the reversion of Okinawa. I immediately thought it would be worthwhile to speak with his son, Dan Sneider, currently a lecturer at Stanford and has had a long career as first a foreign correspondent in Asia, who is working on a book on his father’s career and his relationships with his Japanese counterparts. In this conversation Dan and I discuss Okinawa reversion as a revealing illustration of Kissinger’s view of Japan and foreign policymaking in the Nixon White House. It is particularly striking how many issues from that period remain relevant today. The video can be watched below. It is also available on Youtube. I have also provided a transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
Tobias Harris
So once again I have the privilege of having a conversation for the Observing Japan substack with a friend, a mentor and really a genuinely insightful scholar and reporter. And that is Dan Sneider, currently a lecturer and scholar and writer based at Stanford, who has been a foreign correspondent in Tokyo Moscow, I believe, in Delhi, correct me if I'm wrong, Dan and is currently also doing some work on a book on his father's career. His father, Richard Sneider shows up over and over again, if you read accounts of Asia policy during the 1960s and 1970s, and course, it's of great interest now in the aftermath of Dr. Henry Kissinger's death. And so that is why we are speaking today. So thank you Dan, thank you for joining me. It's really looking forward to this conversation.
Dan Sneider
Always a pleasure to talk to you, Toby.
Tobias Harris
So, Dan, I want to start just where I started with the short note I wrote about Kissinger's death and Japan over the weekend, which is with the brief statement that Prime Minister Kishida issued, which was a little puzzling. As you'll note, that the Japanese government did not issue anything other than some brief remarks in a press conference when Secretary of State George Schultz passed away, which he certainly, I think, had a better record as far as the US-Japan relationship was concerned. So what did you make of Kishida's statement?
Dan Sneider
Well, it's a kind of a ritual paean to Henry Kissinger and, you know, to some degree I'm not that surprised because he's such a huge figure in American foreign policy so he gets that kind of attention and respect from everybody. And the reference to Kissinger as the author of the Okinawa Reversion is somewhat of what people credit Kissinger with doing because he was the National Security Advisor that was there, oversaw the process to some degree, but it's a somewhat mythical idea, which I can talk about a little bit, but it's also an alternative to talking about what Japanese really remember Kissinger for, which is the Nixon shocks, which were a tremendous, I think, still reverberating moment in Japanese foreign policy and Japanese relations with the US.
So Japanese have been pressed for two decades not to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. Dulles did it, the Kennedy administration did it. Everybody pushed the Japanese to stay in line even though they wanted very much to normalize relations with China. And always the fear in Japan was that the Americans were going to turn around one day and leave them high and dry. And in fact that's what they did. And Kissinger did it in typically arrogant fashion, which is that he didn't tell the Japanese in any way until like moments literally minutes before the announcement was made of his secret visit to Beijing. And it was a huge just massive shock throughout the Japanese system and it literally led to the fall of a government. I mean, you could argue that Satō ceased being Prime Minister the moment that happened. And it's really interesting to think about how quickly the Japanese turned around. Within weeks, months, Tanaka rushes to Beijing, normalizes relations with China. And actually it was the Japanese who made the formula on Taiwan, not the US. But they didn't do till much later. So it tells you that Kissinger in some sense opened up, he revealed really deep gaps between the United States and Japan that had been papered over for a long time. I think that's what Japanese really remember Kissinger for, but then they are very polite people. They sort of give a little nod to what he nominally supposedly did.
Tobias Harris
Kishida's statement really was as much about what it didn't say. And really when you think about Kissinger as a player in the US-Japan relationship and certainly in what you've sent me from your work in progress, it is not a good look. And it is not a good look even when you look at Kissinger's own writings. I mean, this is not someone who I think genuinely respected Japan as an important power in its own right. Certainly at that point, as an economic power that was finding its footing in the Cold War world and trying to figure out how to be a power even without traditional military power, that he clearly did not value it all that much. And so I want to actually dig into what you talk about and you write extensively about your father's role in the process of Okinawa reversion and the debates within the US government and then between the US government and the Japanese government.
And so before we even get to Kissinger, I mean, you tell this story throughout the Johnson years as debates within the United States government, sort of this collision between the reality that if the US doesn't find a way to return Okinawa to Japanese control, that it's going to be a much bigger problem for the bilateral relationship as a whole, because the politics of the issue. Retaining this colony was going to get uglier. But at the same time, and this sounds very familiar to people who know the politics of the Okinawa issue now, that the US Military was not in any hurry to surrender control and of know it had absolute control, it was fighting a war in Southeast Asia. And so you have these two — an immovable object meeting unstoppable force, I suppose, of Japanese domestic politics at the moment. So maybe talk a little bit about pre-Nixon administration, sort of the backdrop to this debate about Okinawa, that your father was deeply involved in.
Dan Sneider
My father sort of ended up in this somewhat unique position of being the principal alliance manager in the State Department, of the security relationship in particular. And it goes back to the mid 50s when he arrived. He was a Japanese language officer during the war, during World War II. He fought in the Battle of Okinawa, as it happens, served in the occupation, was in the State Department Intelligence for quite a while before he became a Foreign Service officer and he was the political military officer. He sort of ended up as a young Foreign Service officer in the embassy in the mid 50s in Japan. That's when I first went to Japan as a little kid. And I always tell people I remember Japan when there were still 250,000 American troops stationed in Japan, which was the case when I arrived there as a small child, that's a Japan that probably nobody remembers anymore.
So he ended up actually being, through his relationship, particularly with Ambassador MacArthur, the nephew of General MacArthur, being the drafter of the US- Japan Security Treaty, the revision of U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, along with another young Japanese officer who also was rising through the same process by the name of Togo Fumihiko, who was the adopted son of Togo Shigenori, the wartime Japanese foreign minister. And the two men really created this bond. And I think to some degree was rooted in both of their own experiences in World War II and in their determination to avoid the mistakes of World War II, to build an alliance that was enduring. And they were determined to create a post, if you will, a post-colonial, post-occupation relationship between the United States and Japan. And that really is embodied in the security treaty, which, after all, sought to create a more equal partnership. Not fully, because Japan is dependent on the United States for its security. And that dependency is really fundamental to the tensions, if you will, in the relationship. But they drafted that treaty under the leadership, obviously, of Ambassador MacArthur and other people above them and on Japanese side as well. And the key to that was to deal with the very delicate issues of nuclear weapons.
For one thing, I go through this in my book, but this is, of course, an issue that remains all the way through, even to some sense to today. They engaged in a somewhat delicate and to some degree deceptive dance on the status of US nuclear weapons in Japan. So they are the creators of this concept of what the meaning of introduction of nuclear weapons are, that the US pledged not to introduce nuclear weapons into Japan except that they had an understanding. And this was actually a very secret document that still the text of which is still not found. But I found references to it that Togo and my father created. That introduction did not mean permanent stationing of nuclear weapons in Japan. So the idea that nuclear weapons could transit through Japan , and there's this phrase that major changes in equipment which was meant to refer to nuclear weapons had to be subject to prior consultation. And how that phrasing was understood was a matter of dispute later on between Japan and the United States. But I think it was pretty clear at the time. And later on, American officials went out of their way to make sure the Japanese accepted their understanding of that.
I'm going through all this to say that there was one giant loophole in this thing. There were many loopholes, but the giant loophole was, of course, Okinawa, because to some degree, Americans could make that agreement, because Americans were interested in stationing nuclear weapons, because they had control of Okinawa, complete control. Okinawa was under the literally the control of the US. Military. There were not even US civilian authority there. And we were free to move nuclear weapons in and out of Okinawa without any involvement of Japan. And Japanese knew this. So it sort of relieved the pressure on this question. And so the reversion of Okinawa to some degree came up during the revision of the treaty. But basically the Japanese didn't press it because it allowed them to have a nuclear-free mainland Japan, mostly nuclear free, except for the US ships coming in and out with nuclear weapons on them. And it avoided that question, but it left the reversion of Okinawa in some sense as the sort of last, if you will, the last phase of this process.
So in some sense, you have to understand Okinawa reversion follows clearly and logically from the revision of the security treaty. When Prime Minister Satō came into office in 1965, he declared that that was his primary goal. He was sort of following the footsteps of his brother Kishi, that Kishi accomplished a revision of the security treaty. His task was to finish the job with the reversion of Okinawa. And the process really of negotiation begins then 65, 66, and my father, who had been dispatched off, he had been the Japanese country director after he was in Tokyo. He had been involved in all the last phases of the negotiation of the security treaty. Then he went off to Pakistan for a few years. He came back and Bill Bundy was the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. And he put my father back. He was back in the job of being the country director again in Japan, but he was put in charge of something called the Ryukyu Islands Working Group, which was created to try and deal with the issue of the reversion of Okinawa within the US Government. And my father created a kind of small team of people from Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, White House was involved, but they weren't very active in it, and to come up with an approach, a plan for the reversion of Okinawa.
My father always used to say he said it to me, there really were two Okinawa negotiations. There was a negotiation between the United States and Japan, and there was a negotiation between the civilians and the military in the US Government. And the second negotiation was actually the more difficult one. So the goal of that process was to persuade the Joint Chiefs to accept giving up control of Okinawa. And they did not want to do that. This was not only did they have their own sort of personal colony, if you will, but they had complete freedom of action so they could move weapons in and out. They stored thousands of nuclear warheads, chemical weapons, nerve gas, all sorts of stuff on Okinawa. And starting in 65, 66, Okinawa becomes a really key logistics hub and military hub for the war in Vietnam, including mounting B-52 bombing missions out of Okinawa. So that process is really the real negotiating process on Okinawa.
And in that my father had two really important partners. I think Ambassador Reischauer was an important figure because he set the stage, he pushed very hard for the US to face the reality of return of Okinawa with the argument that you just cited, which is the crucial argument that without returning Okinawa, we were going to put the larger prize, if you will, the security alliance with Japan at risk. And he looked ahead, Reischauer looked ahead to the 1970 was the date for the, there was a ten-year period for the security treaty, had to be reinstalled, if you will, reinstated. And the fear was that the rising power of the left in Japan and the issue of Okinawa reversion could actually lead to the loss of power of the LDP, of the Liberal Democratic Party. And that we had to do this for the sake of keeping in power our allies in Japan, namely Satō and the Conservatives and the LDP, but also to preserve the alliance. That was the tradeoff.
But to persuade the military to give up what they had was a really difficult task. Reischauer wasn't up to that task. He had very bad relationship with the military. He was pretty well known to be an opponent of the Vietnam War, so his leverage was zero with the military. But then comes in Alex Johnson, who replaced Reischauer as ambassador, who was much more conservative and establishment figure, who had a much better relationship with the US Military. And the other key figure in this was Morton Halperin, who had been appointed to be the Assistant Secretary of Defense in the McNamara Defense Department. And he and my dad ran that Ryukyu Islands Working Group and they basically ran that negotiating process. And they came close to a deal at the end of the Johnson administration, late 67 when Satō came to Washington and they pushed all along for a non nuclear status for Okinawa. They understood that there was no way to return Okinawa with nuclear weapons, but they had to maneuver their way to get the Joint Chiefs to accept that. And they came close, but in the end, the Joint Chiefs opposed it. And Johnson was not willing to challenge the Joint Chiefs and their allies in the Senate because he was in the middle of the Vietnam War. This is late 1967. The war was fierce, and so they had to back off.
And then, ironically, Nixon gets elected in late 68. And Nixon actually had a vision. I have to say that the credit never should have gone to if there is credit to go to someone, it's not to Henry Kissinger, it's to Richard Nixon. Because Richard Nixon came into office with an idea of the importance of Asia, the importance of Japan, actually, which he had some sense of having visited there. And he had his focus on war in Vietnam, and he had a sense that American priorities had to shift to Asia and the Pacific. He articulated that in a very famous prescient article he wrote Foreign Affairs during his election campaign. He came in actually understanding that Japan was important and Okinawa reversion had to take place. He had that idea.
Tobias Harris
Can I just pause you there because I think that was a great contrast that you make in what you sent me.
I think it's William Manchester's biography of MacArthur. There's one point this quote has always stuck with me, that the Atlantic was the Democratic ocean and the Pacific was a Republican ocean and the Republicans often more oriented towards the Pacific, towards Asia, and, of course, concerns about a lot of the concerns about the loss of China stem from that sort of traditional preoccupation with Asia. And criticizing the Democrats for overlooking that, but also just noting how much of that milieu actually, the Kissinger came out. Of being much more oriented towards Europe and the Soviet Union, Asia not really figuring much in his thinking. I thought that was striking and the fact that Nixon perceived that so clearly and actually did have a pretty sophisticated understanding of Japan as it was and as it could be.
Dan Sneider
Don't forget, Nixon is a Californian, not an Easterner. And Japan didn't exist for Kissinger. Actually I think all of Asia didn't exist for Kissinger and I'm not the only one to say that. And everybody who interacted with him knew that he was a complete Europeanist and he also had this very traditional idea of power and as you pointed out, I think in what you wrote and what you said here today, Japanese didn't have the attributes of power that he understood. They weren't a military power and they also had a system of governance the way that know it was in many ways such a bureaucratized consensus oriented decision making process it was anathema to Kissinger. He was always looking for the big guy, the leader that you connect to.
And of course he and Nixon did share one other thing, which is that they loved secrecy, they hated the bureaucracy in the US. They hated the State Department. They always looking for ways to go around the State Department and the Defense Department to some degree and they loved to find these secret channels. They had a penchant for that. So that really shaped what happened. But I think the irony is that Kissinger hired Mort Halperin to be on his National Security Council staff before they even moved into the White House because he had known Mort from Harvard. And Mort persuaded Kissinger to hire my father as the principal Asia guy on the National Security Council staff. It was a small staff in those days, not like today, where there's hundreds and hundreds of people. And my father later berated Mort for having sucked him into that world. But he had his own ambitions. He loved the idea of being in the center of power, too. So he regretted it, but he was attracted by it as well. So when the two of these guys came in, Mort and my dad, they had the agenda they had been working on already for how to negotiate the reversion of Okinawa in their head, and Kissinger wasn't thinking about it at all.
In his memoir, Kissinger claims that he's the one who came up with the first set of National Security Memorandums, which is, by the way, a system that Mort Halperin created, not Henry Kissinger, included Japan, and my father and Mort drafted the first what is called NSSM-5 on Japan. That was in January, early in the Nixon administration, which set out the goal of reversion of Okinawa. But that wasn't in Kissinger's mind at all. He had no idea about this.
And in fact, the story really that's interesting is that my father was at a dinner that was organized for General Goodpaster before Nixon took office, and Nixon came up to my father and started talking to him about Okinawa. So Nixon had it in his mind. So as I said, Nixon gets the credit, I think, for driving the process. Mort and my dad ran it inside the White House. And the whole decision making process that went on through the spring into the decision that was made in April, basically, to return Okinawa without nuclear weapons, that decision was made early on inside the US Government, but they never told the Japanese. And even though I think Mort and my dad signaled in various ways that that was where things were headed in a very careful way, because they weren't allowed to say anything.
The Japanese were never sure whether, and Satō particularly, was extremely nervous about whether or not he was going to get Okinawa back on terms that were politically viable within Japan. And they had a visit sort of planned for November of 1969. So they had this target. The maneuvering process of the negotiations was a very strange one because Kissinger, Nixon, they all agreed they would not give that concession until the end. But why they didn't give that concession to the end was quite different, depending on who you talk to. So for my father and Mort and I think and Alex Johnson, who was by then the undersecretary of state, the idea, the goal, they had was to trade nuclear weapons, which weren't necessary. And they had established that they weren't necessary to be in Okinawa. They had established that with McNamara back during the Johnson administration, to trade that for what they really wanted, which was to push Japan to play a larger security role in the region and particularly to allow the ongoing use of the US bases in Okinawa for regional security purposes. Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. I mean, it's ironic because we're having the same conversations today.
And in fact, this leads to the famous Nixon-Satō Communique of 1969, which, by the way, was drafted by Togo and my dad, which mentions for the first time the security of Korea and the security of Taiwan as being essential to Japan. And that was part of also a speech that Satō delivered to the National Press Club where he talks about that. And by the way, the language of that speech was actually negotiated. It wasn't a Japanese speech. It was a negotiated document. That definition of Japanese security and the idea of pushing Japan to take that larger responsibility for security in the Far East -- Taiwan is not mentioned in any US-Japan document until for another 50 years, until the Biden meeting with Suga. So we established that principle, and it was a huge accomplishment and that was their goal and that was the center of the negotiations. But they had to hold back. They had to use the nuclear weapons thing to some sense as leverage. That's what they were doing.
However, there was another game going on, which is that Nixon wanted something else. First of all, Nixon wanted to be the one who gave the concession. And everybody understood this was something that the president should do. It shouldn't be done by the level of negotiators of my father and Togo level Foreign Ministry and State Department officials. It had to be done at a leadership level. And that was fine. And they actually understood that and proposed that.
But Nixon had another game entirely, which was he was launching his Southern Strategy to rip the South from the Democratic Party and bring it into the Republican Party. And a key part of that was textiles, because the textile industry was really important in South Carolina and North Carolina, and the flood of Japanese textile imports was destroying the textile industry. So he was demanding that the Japanese impose what we later used to call voluntary export restraints on their textile shipments to the United States. And that was what he wanted. So he wanted to use the nuclear issue for this purpose. There's a whole study that was done of this by the Brookings Institution under Mort Halperin's direction, actually later. I mean, it was a debacle in many ways because of course, Japanese never actually carried out whatever vague promises they made, including the ones Satō made to Nixon. But it almost blew up these careful negotiations that went on.
And that's where Kissinger got involved so Kissinger opened up this little secret channel. It was a backdoor channel that is the story of which is fascinating in and of itself. Satōto sent this -- he didn't really send him actually -- Satō approved the dispatch of this envoy named Wakaizumi, a Japanese academic who was friends with my father and other people and who had been used in the past as a kind of a back channel. But he wasn't meant to be a negotiator. But Kissinger embraced him. Oh, he found the secret pathway to power in Japan and that separate parallel negotiation, which is the one that Kissinger claims credit for in his memoirs as having been the author of the Okinawa Reversion, almost actually blew up the very careful negotiations that have been going on for years, really. So it's a really interesting story of alliance management, mismanagement, but also of Kissinger's own complete lack of understanding of Japan itself. I mean he never really understood who he was dealing with and what was going on.
Tobias Harris
So picking up on that because and actually your mention of the Southern Strategy is interesting because sometimes when you look at Kissinger's writings it's almost as if other countries don't have domestic politics, right or that is essentially not a factor and one thing from having read US Embassy cable traffic from the 50s and 60s, foreign service officers like your father had a very nuanced understanding of Japanese politics and understood where they could push, understood where some of the limitations were obviously, were alert to the politics of Okinawa and why this was sort of a ticking time bomb for the relationship. And maybe that's not everything, but clearly if you want to understand and understand what you can get from Japan as an alliance partner, that you have to have that there. And that seems almost completely and I pointed this out in the note I wrote, that Kissinger falls back on these cliches about the inscrutable Japanese and you can't understand how they make decisions. And it just seems like, well, no, it takes work, but you can understand how the Japanese political system works and the interests of Japanese decision makers. And there didn't seem to be any interest in doing that on Kissinger's part.
Dan Sneider
No. Kissinger saw all that as sort of clientitis problems and that wasn't just about Japan. I remember my father was ambassador to Korea the same kind of tensions existed. You know, alliance managers that is their role, their role is to find solutions know reflect not only our interests which are always primary, but to some degree the interests of our ally. And that's not always easy to do I'm afraid that that type of skills of alliance management are less present these days than they used to be and maybe also because the people who used to be empowered to do this kind of thing are no longer empowered to do that. We've really collapsed the decision making process to some degree to very everything gets done at the top. But I think that was always the argument and of course it's an argument that leaves you open to the charge that you are lawyering on the part of your client, the ally.
But always the argument was we had to do this in a way that would allow the Japanese to feel like they had their own agency here. Either you have alliance means not only that you're partners but it means that you understand that your ally has some equal share in how policy gets formulated. Often, of course, it's an unequal alliance, an unbalanced alliance between the United States and Japan. And that creates the tension that's there Japanese always wavering back and forth between the fear of abandonment and the fear of entanglement being drawn into conflicts they don't want to be involved in. And you can see that playing out today. I mean, look at the US- China policy. I mean, I'm watching our allies, Japan and Korea trying to figure out how to maneuver between China, with whom they have deep engagement on many levels and the United States on whom they are completely dependent for their security. And this tension has been going on for a long time. That's why I think it's important I've sort of worked on this book partly with the idea that understanding alliance management is actually one of the most important things that we really almost always fail to do. We really focused on adversarial relationships, how do we deal with a foe. But we don't really look that intensely on the managing of alliances. And of course only I think probably because of Donald Trump's assault on our alliances, you know, we've had kind of a reinvigorated appreciation for alliance management under the Biden administration. I think they've done a pretty good job actually in this respect. But still, I think it's a skill set that's kind of atrophied in our foreign policy.
Tobias Harris
So with the time we have left I just wanted to ask also your father was on the National Security Council staff for, I believe was it two years and did not not two years? [Sneider: Not two years.] Not two years, no.
Dan Sneider
My father was the first person to leave the National Security Council staff. Kissinger, famously, in an interaction with a friend said called him the first defector. No, he fled the National Security Council staff in July, I mean, within seven months. And then he was followed by many others. And he was one of the people that was wiretapped by the White House and Henry Kissinger and the FBI in their search for leaks. It's a famous case that only emerged out into the open after Watergate. But my father was, when he understood what happened, was quite bitter about it. But he really couldn't live in that environment of paranoia and secrecy for very long. I mean, he was a diplomat and a negotiator. He wasn't built for that world. And I think he went then to Japan where he finished the negotiations on Okinawa, including the negotiations of the actual treaty, which was finally signed in 1971, and that led to the formal reversion in 1972.
Tobias Harris
I think I was thinking of that latter part where he went to Japan, but certainly did not leave the National Security Council on the most favorable terms. And as you said, when you look at Seymour Hersh's book about Kissinger from the early 80s, that your father's name shows up a lot in that book.
Dan Sneider
I think my father kept secrets pretty well. He was a well trained Foreign Service officer, and he only talked about all this after he retired from the Foreign Service, and certainly one of the people he talked to was Seymour Hersh. And there's a lot of my father in that book, and I do recall seeing the two of them talking together in the living room in my parents'apartment in New York. You know, he unloaded a little bit, and Kissinger, you know, for Kissinger, loyalty was everything. That was the first thing he demanded was personal loyalty. And so my father broke that bond and had to live with a kind of difficult relationship with Kissinger for many years. Kissinger was Secretary of State. My father was really loyal to the Foreign Service and to the State Department, and Kissinger was constantly putting him in a position of, you know, you got to choose me or the State Department. And he was used because he was a senior State Department official on the National Security Council, he [Kissinger] constantly tried to use him as a point man against the State Department. My father was really uncomfortable with that role, and he paid a personal price for it in his career path. But anyway, he was very proud, and I think all the people Mort Halperin and Alex Johnson and everybody else who was involved felt that the reversion of Okinawa was one of the great triumphs of American diplomacy. We gave back a strategic colony, if you will, for the purposes of preserving and deepening an alliance, an alliance which endures to this day, and I think it sits on that foundation of the security treaty revision and Okinawa reversion. Those remain the two underpinnings of our alliance to this day. And that's, I think, was a great achievement. Not Henry Kissinger's achievement, however, that's yeah.
Tobias Harris
The important note that this was not a Kissinger achievement. It's a great note to end on. And, Dan, I certainly look forward to seeing the final version of the book.
Dan Sneider
Me too.
Tobias Harris
Thank you. Good luck finishing that. And thank you for carving a little time out of your day to talk about some of this stuff. I really appreciate it.
Dan Sneider
I apologize for going on and on.
Tobias Harris
Thank you. Take care.
Dan Sneider
All right.
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