Japan-U.S. Relationship Serves as a Model for Indo-Pacific Security, a Bad Omen for China
11 MIN READApr 15, 2024 | 18:57 GMT
The recent summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida indicates the indispensability of the expanding Japan-U.S. defense partnership to both countries' Asia-Pacific policy agendas and the secondary nature of the United States' ties with South Korea, while new U.S.-Japan defense cooperation will exacerbate China's sense of entrapment, furthering Beijing's partnerships with authoritarian regimes and its long-term preparations for a Taiwan conflict. Biden and Kishida met on April 10 for an hour and a half in a closed-door meeting, followed by a joint press conference at the White House and a state dinner for Kishida and his wife later that night. A joint statement later released by both sides explored the geopolitical, industrial, and defense content of the meeting. On the geopolitical side, much ink was spilled affirming ideological common ground, including a free and open international order; opposing Chinese efforts to change the territorial status quo around Taiwan and the South China Sea; and concern about North Korea's nuclear program. Sections on industrial cooperation also followed well-trod paths of supply chain cooperation in advanced technologies (e.g. AI) and green energy, with Japan joining the U.S. Floating Offshore Wind Shot research program and the United States pledging to send two Japanese astronauts to the moon via the Artemis program. On defense matters, however, the meeting revealed developments with more actionable timelines and with more concrete geopolitical impacts.
The two sides pledged to expand their command and control frameworks for responding to wartime and peacetime contingencies. Though little detail was given, previous media leaks revealed that the United States is considering assigning a four-star general to collaborate with the new Japan Joint Operations Command (J-JOC), due by 2025.
The United States plans to begin training and ship modification for Japan to acquire Tomahawk cruise missiles, and both sides pledged to explore collaboration on co-production and co-development of missiles for interoperable air defense systems.
The two countries will explore opportunities for Japan to help repair and maintain forward-deployed U.S. Navy vessels and U.S. Air Force aircraft (including fourth-generation fighters), and will convene the first ''Working Group for Ship Repair in Japan'' by June 2024.
The members of the AUKUS defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will consider Japan's participation in AUKUS Pillar 2 regarding advanced technology collaboration, including on undersea drones and artificial intelligence.
The United States and Japan will hold an annual trilateral military exercise with the United Kingdom starting in 2025. They will also look to collaborate with Australia on ''collaborative combat aircraft and autonomy'' development, and announced a plan to work with Australia on a networked air defense infrastructure.
The meeting came amid Japan's plans to expand its security role in the Pacific and the United States' plan to grow its military partnerships to counter Chinese security threats in the waters around Japan. Ever since the United States' post-World War II occupation of and rebuilding of Japan, bilateral military relations have been governed by the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (1952), which saw Japan renounce its right to self-defense, and saw the United States pledge to defend Japan. This led to the building of one of the most extensive networks of U.S. military bases, with Japan now hosting around 53,000 overseas U.S. troops, the most of any country. Partly because of this, through the mid-2010s, Tokyo had been more or less content to let Washington guide Japan's defense affairs. However, between 2012 and 2020, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe played a large part in shifting to a mindset of restrengthening Japan's military and expanding its remit beyond just territorial defense to a leadership role in the security of the Asia-Pacific region, a shift driven partly by growing concerns about China's growing military brinkmanship in the East China Sea and South China Sea. This mindset has continued under Prime Minister Kishida, and is prevalent among most factional leaders under his ruling Liberal Democratic Party. As for the United States, the post-2017 acceleration of its geopolitical competition with China has seen the Biden administration focus on building out a network of multilateral defense partnerships in Asia, partly to offset the dilemma of the U.S. military's global remit and the necessity of deterring a regionally focused Chinese military.
These defense cooperation plans will help both countries accomplish their near-term geopolitical goals while leveraging their relative strengths: the United States' military and Japan's geography. The United States aims to empower Japan's efforts to strengthen its military as a means of achieving regional deterrence against China — particularly against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or Beijing's rule by force over the South China Sea, through which at least a third of global shipping travels — and, to a lesser extent, deterrence against North Korea and Russia (in the latter's Far East). With Japanese participation in the production and deployment of missiles, as well as joint-force coordination with and maintenance of U.S. naval and air assets, the United States aims to overcome a significant obstacle to deterring China: the tyranny of distance over military supply chains, especially in times of war. Japan, in the process, gets to accelerate its domestic arms industry and training via military exercises with regional partners to prepare for scenarios that could deeply disrupt Japan's economy, like a Taiwan war, all while preserving the ''free and open'' international system on which Japan's economic miracle was founded.
Accomplishing these defense goals will hinge on the command and control structures that Washington and Tokyo seek to build, as well as their ability to clear domestic policy hurdles. The key aspect of U.S.-Japan defense collaboration, and the one that was least discussed during the Biden-Kishida summit, is that of expanding and integrating command and control infrastructure, in particular by appointing joint command military leaders in both the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) and U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) to coordinate during and plan ahead for times of conflict. This deeper coordination is necessary to best mobilize and make effective use of defense assets and processes — e.g. naval and aircraft repairs, missile defense deployment, and drone development. In a Korean Peninsula war scenario, the guidelines and command structures are clear, with the U.S. military leading both U.S. and Korean forces in peninsular defense. In Japan, there is less clarity about cooperation during conflict, like a Taiwan war, hence the necessity of deeper planning during peacetime to better understand each country's capabilities, operational frameworks and escalation procedures, and to integrate the USFJ and JSDF operations during contingencies, even if not under a singular command, as would happen in a Korean Peninsula contingency. Policy roadblocks to these plans are likely. U.S. INDOPACOM commanders over the years have consistently requested greater funding to bolster U.S. deterrence of China vis-a-vis Taiwan and U.S. capabilities on the first and second island chains (including Japan and Guam, respectively), but this has been made difficult by contentious budget debates in the U.S. Congress. However, many of the plans outlined during the Biden-Kishida summit — e.g. Japanese repair of U.S. military assets and co-production of missiles — could actually save the U.S. government money, so budgetary impediments will be reduced. Japan's side, too, has legal impediments, primarily centered on a limited military remit as dictated in Japan's pacifist constitution, but Tokyo has recently shown a willingness and ability to overcome these barriers in the legislature.
After months of debate between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its pacifist coalition partner Komeito in Japan's legislature, Tokyo was finally able to tweak defense exports rules in March 2024 to allow Japan to export sixth-generation fighter jets developed jointly with the United Kingdom and Italy, overturning a longstanding ban on exporting lethal equipment.
The U.S.-Japan partnership serves as the cornerstone of deepening U.S. military engagement in the region, meant to deter Chinese military expansion, and highlights the secondary nature to Washington of the South Korean partnership (relative to Japan), and thus of Washington's commitment to deterring North Korea (relative to China). One theme of the joint statement, and of recent U.S. military engagement in the Asia-Pacific, is trilateral groupings for military cooperation. Aside from the U.S. and Japanese trilateral defense cooperation with South Korea on missile threat monitoring of North Korea, Washington and Tokyo are engaging in new trilateral naval cooperation with the Philippines, aimed at preserving freedom of navigation and countering Chinese military coercion in the South China Sea. The joint statement also noted regular U.S.-U.K.-Japan military exercises and repeatedly mentioned U.S.-Japanese aspirations to deepen military cooperation with Australia, including on advanced air combat capabilities. The key theme in these groupings is Japan, the hub of the United States' ''hub and spoke'' model of deepening security engagement in the Pacific, a model that capitalizes on long-standing, strong U.S.-Japan bonds and assists Tokyo in pursuing regional military engagement beyond Washington. This theme also indicates, however, that South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol's efforts to compete with Tokyo to become the top U.S. military partner in Asia — as evidenced by Seoul's artillery provisioning for Washington to backstop U.S. support for Ukraine — remain insufficient, as do Seoul's efforts to elevate Washington's commitment to countering the North Korean threat (relative to China). Despite this disappointment on Seoul's side, the United States will still push to deepen the U.S.-South Korea and U.S.-Japan-South Korea partnerships, as both contribute to Washington's security policies in East and Southeast Asia, even if Washington prioritizes regional threats differently than Seoul.
Part of the reason for Washington's choice of Japan, as opposed to South Korea, as the centerpiece of its multilateral military engagement in Asia is political consistency. South Korea's government sees regular turnover between the conservatives, who favor defense ties with Washington, and the liberals, who favor better relations with China and North Korea while deemphasizing U.S. military ties, resulting in inconsistent support from Seoul on U.S. security policy in the region. A prime example of this dynamic is Seoul's initial acceptance and then cool reception of Washington's deployment of the THAAD missile system in South Korea in 2016. Tokyo, by contrast, is consistently run by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which staunchly supports U.S. military ties.
The strengthening U.S.-Japan and multilateral partnerships will also contribute to China's growing sense of entrapment by the U.S.-led military ''containment'' net, pushing China closer to authoritarian partners like Russia, steeling Beijing's resolve to eventual unification with Taiwan, and putting Japan and its citizens more at risk of Chinese economic coercion. China sees all of these Asian tie-ups with the United States — and especially the U.S.-Japan partnership — as indicative of the ever-tightening U.S. ''containment'' net around China, both economically and in the strategic (military and territorial) space. In response to this perception, and the increasing U.S. alignment of countries like the Philippines and South Korea, whose former leaders supported balanced ties with Beijing, China will deepen its military and diplomatic partnerships with Russia and North Korea, despite the incumbent risks of Western secondary sanctions due to these partners' actions, such as those that come with Russia's war in Ukraine and North Korea's expanding missile program. These partners provide China with a geographic buffer space to U.S. bases, its own military partnerships to counter the U.S. containment net, and support in international fora for China's expansive maritime territorial claims. As this U.S. containment grows, Beijing will also commit more fully to its long-term preparations for a Taiwan war — in contrast to the deterrence aims of the U.S.-Japan defense partnership — as Beijing perceives that Taiwan could serve as an ''unsinkable aircraft carrier'' for the U.S. military, i.e. a conduit for U.S. air power projection into China's geographic heartland and a naval base from which the United States could impede China's critical north-south coastal trade routes. Growing U.S.-Japan military ties will also raise the chance of additional Chinese economic coercion against Japan — in the form of export bans on key industrial inputs (e.g. rare earths), arbitrary inspections into Japanese companies, and exit bans on Japanese employees in China — as Beijing tends to reserve its most severe economic coercive tools for countries, like the United States, that do the most to counter China's economic and security interests.
