There is a Japanese proverb: Tsuki to suppon (The Moon and the Turtle). Both are round, but one illuminates the world while the other crawls in the mud. The proverb warns against the laziness of false equivalence and of confusing superficial resemblance with substantive likeness. It is a warning that the democratic middle powers — Japan, Canada, Australia and the nations of Western Europe — urgently need to hear.

The United States of America is a deeply flawed country. This is not a controversial claim; it is a historical and empirical observation. The nation was built on the original sin of slavery and its legacy of systemic racism continues to shape outcomes in housing, policing and incarceration. American capitalism, unleashed and often unregulated, has produced staggering inequality. Gun violence claims roughly 45,000 American lives annually. The fentanyl crisis has killed more Americans in five years than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. U.S. foreign policy is littered with catastrophic misjudgments — Vietnam, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan and now the military campaign against Iran, which has further strained alliances and international law. Washington preaches the rules-based order while selectively exempting itself from its constraints. The hypocrisy is real and it is not trivial.

No one articulated the case for American self-destruction more presciently than Wang Huning, the Chinese Communist Party's chief ideologist, who in 1991 published the book “America Against America” after a six-month tour of the United States. Wang observed a society of extraordinary material abundance hollowed out by what he called a “spiritual crisis,” arguing that America's radical individualism and internal contradictions would generate centrifugal forces that “would eventually shake the very foundation of the nation.”

Wang saw a country at war with itself — its freedoms producing fragmentation, its pluralism breeding paralysis, its materialism corroding community. Three decades later, with U.S. politics and society highly polarized in ways Wang predicted, his thesis has become required reading in Beijing and a source of quiet confidence that the American century has truly come to an end.

And yet the inconvenient truth — inconvenient for those who have built careers and political brands on anti-Americanism — is that Wang’s diagnosis, however penetrating, is only half the ledger. The same contradictions that threaten U.S. cohesion are inseparable from the freedoms that make the U.S. the anchor of the international system from which middle powers derive their security and prosperity.

It is the U.S. that underwrites the alliance structures enabling Japan to spend modestly on defense while becoming the world's fourth-largest economy. It is U.S. naval power that keeps the sea lanes open through which Canadian resources and Japanese manufactures flow. It is U.S. technological innovation — from semiconductors to mRNA vaccines — that drives the global frontier. It is American universities that educate a disproportionate share of the world’s governing and scientific elite.

The relationship is not merely strategic; it is comprehensive. The educational exchanges, the people-to-people ties, the cultural cross-pollination, the shared commitment — however imperfect — to rule of law, gender equality, freedom of expression and democratic governance: These constitute a web of mutual reinforcement that no alternative partnership can replicate. As G. John Ikenberry argued in Foreign Affairs in his influential 2020 article “The Next Liberal Order,” the liberal international order is not an American gift to the world but a bargain in which middle powers have agency, voice and protection — a bargain available nowhere else.

Now consider the alternative. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his Davos address this past January, placed the United States alongside Russia, China and Iran as a disruptive force in the global system. The rhetorical equivalence was striking. Is it warranted?

The data says no — definitively.

Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World 2024” report scores countries on a 100-point scale for political rights and civil liberties. The United States scores 83. Japan scores 96. Canada, 98. Now consider the so-called CRINKs — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. China scores 9. Russia, 13. Iran, 14. North Korea, 3. These are not marginal differences; they are categorical distinctions between open societies and closed ones.

Reporters Without Borders’ most recent “World Press Freedom Index” tells the same story. North Korea ranks last in the world, 180th out of 180. China ranks 172nd. Iran, 176th. Russia, 164th. Can a journalist in Moscow publish an investigation into defense ministry corruption without risking imprisonment or death? Ask Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya — except you can’t, because she was murdered in 2006. Can a Chinese citizen post criticism of Xi Jinping on Weibo without triggering detention? Absolutely not. Sarah Cook's research for Freedom House, “The Battle for China’s Spirit,” first published in 2017, documents a systematic apparatus of government-controlled censorship, surveillance and coercion that has only intensified since.

On gender equality, the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report” consistently ranks Iran and China among the worst performers in political empowerment and economic participation. In North Korea, the U.N. has long documented “systematic, widespread and grave human rights violations” by a totalitarian state that “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” Those violations include systematic rape, forced abortion and political imprisonment across three generations of families.

In Iran, women are beaten and killed for removing a headscarf. In Russia, domestic violence was partially decriminalized in 2017. Can you vote in China? No. Can you vote in Iran? Only for candidates pre-approved by an unelected Guardian Council. Can you vote in Russia? Technically, but opposition candidates are jailed, poisoned, banished or barred. Can you criticize the government in North Korea? The question answers itself.

Is the administration of Donald Trump's transactional diplomacy disruptive? Unquestionably. Is its approach to alliances unorthodox, sometimes bullying, often incoherent? Yes. Are its immigration policies harsh? They are. But does the United States under Trump imprison journalists for reporting? Does it operate concentration camps for ethnic minorities? Does it assassinate defectors on foreign soil? Does it execute citizens for apostasy? It does not. The American system — with its courts, Congress, free press and raucous, often infuriating democratic contestation — remains categorically and structurally distinct from anything on offer in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran or Pyongyang. To deny this distinction is not sophistication. It is moral confusion with strategic consequences.

What the Trump administration is actually doing, however clumsily, is demanding a recalibration of burden-sharing that has been deferred for decades. As Michael J. Mazarr wrote a decade ago in a groundbreaking Foreign Affairs article, “The Once and Future Order,” the post-1945 order was built on assumptions of U.S. surplus power that no longer hold. Allies that spend below 2% of gross domestic product on defense while enjoying U.S. security guarantees are not partners; they are passengers. The recalibration is overdue. The method is objectionable. Both things are true.

So what should Japan, Canada and other middle powers do? First, they must reject the equivalence fallacy publicly and repeatedly. Placing the U.S. in the same category as the CRINKs is not principled neutrality; it is an analytical failure that degrades the moral foundations of middle-power societies. 

Second, they must invest in their relationships with the U.S. even when — especially when — it is difficult. This means increasing defense spending, deepening intelligence cooperation, expanding joint technology development and engaging American society at every level — congressional, state, academic and civic. Alliances are not maintained by communiques; they are maintained by contact.

Third, they must build their own capacity to say no to Washington on specific issues without pretending they can walk away from the partnership itself. Disagreement within an alliance is healthy. Strategic fantasy is not. Following the United States does not mean following blindly; it means understanding that the CRINKs offer no alternative order worth living in.

An old American ideal, etched into the first sentence of the Constitution, is the aim to form “a more perfect Union” — not a perfect one, but one that is always striving. The United States has never been perfect. It has been, and remains, perfectible. That is precisely what distinguishes it from regimes that have abolished the very possibility of self-correction.

The moon has its craters. But it is not a turtle.

© The Japan Times