Why Russia has botched diplomacy with Japan: comparisons of 2013–23 and the late 1980s

Abstract

The prevailing narrative from the Brezhnev era to the present holds that Moscow’s relations with Tokyo failed to achieve a breakthrough due to a territorial dispute lingering from 1956. Japan had demanded the return of all four islands seized by the Soviet Union after Japan had announced its surrender, but Moscow had insisted on no islands or hinted at two. A different argument is made here: The primary culprit in the two periods when diplomacy took off was Moscow’s skewed thinking about Japan. Rejecting arguments for complementarity, historical parallelism, and balance of power, Russian writings in the late 1980s and 2013–2023 saw little value in Japan. Regardless of Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ and Putin’s ‘Turn to the East’, the intellectual groundwork for rapprochement never materialized. This was a harbinger of other negativity about Japanese history, the Japan-U.S. alliance, and Japan’s ‘disrespect’. Failure to assess Tokyo accurately, including its many reasons for pursuing Moscow, testifies to a warped understanding of geopolitics as well as geo-economics owing to a distorted national identity. Misjudging Japan in each period paved the way to greater hostility to the West that followed.