Striking the right balance

Kerry has since added fuel to fire by stating the islands are covered by the US' mutual cooperation and security treaty with Japan. This was no doubt intended as a deterrent, as the US does not want to throw itself into a war with China. But this attempt at coercive rebalancing has backfired as Japan has only become further emboldened, pushing the tensions to the brink of physical confrontation, truly threatening the Pax Americana in East Asia.

The White House and State Department should be critical of Abe and curb his historical revisionism, if only in the US' self-interest, as Abe's militarist ambitions threaten the US geopolitical interests.

Meanwhile, Kerry has said the Air Defense Identification Zone that China recently established in the East China Sea is destabilizing. However, he failed to mention that it was Tokyo that first introduced an air defense identification zone in the region in 1969, and that in 1972 it aggressively expanded this zone to include the Diaoyu Islands. Given this, the US' biased stance toward China's Air Defense Identification Zone, especially in the context of Chinese legitimate sovereignty, is counterproductive to its rebalancing in East Asia.

But despite the US' misguided approach to the territorial dispute between China and Japan and China's Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea, China and the US can still find common ground on the issue of DPRK's nuclear weapons program. Along with Russia, the ROK and Japan, they share the same interest in peacefully dismantling that program, on terms which DPRK finds acceptable.

Since 2003, China has taken the initiative in finding a solution to the issue with the Six-Party Talks, attempting to find a mutually acceptable solution to common security without nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. Though this solution has not yet been attained, the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia have been less turbulent than they would be otherwise, especially given the dramatic spike in tensions following the DPRK's third nuclear test last spring.

China has taken a more prominent role in lowering the temperature on the peninsula, and there is room for collaboration in this regard should Kerry strike the right note in the US' rebalancing.

The author is a professor and associate dean of the Institute of International Studies, Fudan University.