The Allies: Good Riddance To Arms

By JAMES WALSH

How unlike Teutonic Knights or samurai, mutter their critics, are these modern specimens of great powers. When the call to battle Saddam Hussein bugled forth, Germany and Japan begged off as conscientious objectors. Though they have flourished and grown rich behind U.S. defense cordons, both countries quailed at the call to arms. War with Iraq? The wolf that ate Kuwait was not at their door. Deterring aggression? Bonn's attitude amounted to "Let George do it." Standing fast by a security partner? Washington found it apt that Tokyo is ringing in the Year of the Sheep.

So stand the accused. Overlooked somehow in their summary court-martial, however, has been 50 years of history. Five decades ago, Germany and Japan were roundly reviled as the scourges of civilization, martial societies gone almost irredeemably mad. Amid the ashes of 1945, the two Axis allies were warned against ever taking a gun beyond their borders again. Children were taught that their fathers and grandfathers committed the worst crimes known to man. The governments were forced to rely on other nations for protection. War was wrong. Gradually, as the lessons sank in, both countries were allowed to rebuild their armed forces, but under some of the strictest self-defense limits in the world.

Should the two nations be tempted to lapse, moreover, any number of watchdogs stand ready to pounce. Japan's Asian neighbors tend to bark at the least whiff of what they suspect might be "resurgent militarism." Last March, Major General Henry Stackpole, the commander of U.S. Marines based in Japan, defended America's troop presence there: "No one wants a rearmed, resurgent Japan. So we are a cap in the bottle, so to speak."

When the two Germanys prepared to unite last year, one allied anxiety concerned what kind of extraterritorial stormtrooper the reborn Fatherland might prove to be. In July, Nicholas Ridley, then Britain's Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, publicly stated what many privately thought when he said that proposals for a European Community common currency were "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe." World War II, he added, was "useful to remember."

Now Germany and Japan are being assailed for their pacifism. Americans and Britons complain that Germany and Japan have failed to measure up as allies and as responsible members of the world community: despite their own vested interests in the gulf, they are not doing their fair share.

Stung by the criticism, Bonn and Tokyo in late January ponied up sizable additional aid: $5.5 billion and $9 billion, respectively. Germany also pledged to send antiaircraft missile units to Turkey and defensive military equipment to Israel. Japan assigned five military C-130 transport aircraft to repatriate Asian workers fleeing the war zone. Yet so powerful is their nations' abhorrence of war that Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu risked political rebellion.

Why? The victors of 1945 cultivated pacifism among their defeated enemies with a will. Under its U.S.-drafted 1946 constitution, Japan "forever" forswore recourse to "the threat or use of force" internationally. Less sweeping strictures went into West Germany's 1949 Basic Law, the covenant serving united Germany today. Both nations have fervently embraced pacifism. A January opinion poll asked Germans which country ranked as their ideal; 40% chose neutral Switzerland.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait last August knocked this comfortable quietism sideways. Kohl and Kaifu struggled to live up to allied expectations, but each soon found himself in a political minefield. Kohl had to back off from a suggestion that German soldiers might legally go to the gulf. Kaifu proposed to dispatch troops to noncombat support roles well behind the lines; Japan erupted like a reactivated Mount Fuji.

Kaifu's proposal, the Japanese decided, went beyond all bounds of the taboo on military missions abroad, and the proposal was stillborn. His new idea, of rescuing refugees with C-130s, may also get shot down -- though he insists that he is legally free to send them without Diet approval.

Yet opinion in both countries is slowly changing. While the majority of Germans still strongly oppose participation in the war, they are beginning to ponder their country's global role. To many Japanese, the crisis is no longer just taigan no taji -- a fire on the other side of the river. Support for the U.S. has firmed up, reports a leading opposition Diet member. Says she: "We take it seriously that America, our longtime ally, is in trouble."

Washington has not insisted that German and Japanese soldiers help confront Saddam. But when Germans began debating just what common-defense obligations they owed Turkey, a senior Bush Administration official says, it amounted to "shaving at the edges of their NATO commitment." London was also disgruntled. Alan Clark, Britain's junior Defense Minister, noted that "people plugging the Euro-unity notion" -- he meant Germans -- have envisaged a common defense policy. But "at the first major test," said Clark, "they ran for the cellars."

However understandable the inhibitions of Germany and Japan may be, their allies have a point. The time may have arrived when these two nations must begin to find a constructive international role commensurate with their economic strength. Some prominent Japanese agree that the country's pacifism has become in practice isolationism. Kohl echoed that view with respect to his country last week. Addressing the Bundestag, the Chancellor said, "There can be no safe little corner in world politics for us Germans. We have to face up to our responsibility, whether we like it or not."

With reporting by Daniel Benjamin/Bonn and Barry Hillenbrand/Tokyo, with other bureaus