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Securing Japan
Japan has been America’s ally for a remarkably long time. Insisting that they have no option but to depend on the United States for national security, Japanese leaders have now made the military relationship more intimate than ever. An alliance once designed to protect Japan, help contain the Soviet Union, and reassure Japan’s neighbors is now openly redirected toward the maintenance of global peace and security — and increasingly toward potential containment of China.
This, because the tectonic plates of global and Asian security are shifting. With the Soviet Union gone, the United States is unchallenged and there is no longer a global balance of power. Meanwhile, China is rising. It has displaced the United States as Japan’s largest trading partner, and has begun to display, if not flex, coercive muscle. North Korea has become a de facto nuclear power with demonstrated missile capability to reach all of Japan, while U.S. forces are being reduced and redeployed in the Republic of Korea. Japan is reacting to these growing uncertainties by hugging the U.S. closely, while actively developing capabilities of its own to hedge against the risks of a rapidly changing security environment and by optimizing possibilities for economic gain.
Domestic politics have also been transformed in ways that affect Japanese security policy. Public support for the Japanese military — and for constitutional changes that will provide it more legitimacy — have never been stronger. Both the newly reinvented LDP and its major opposition party, the DPJ, support revision of Article Nine and the Japanese defense industry appears finally to be gaining traction in its effort to participate in global markets.
Given these fundamental changes in international and Japanese domestic politics, we witness an evolution in Japanese security strategy and, consequently, in the US-Japan alliance. Japan’s junior partnership with the United States is slipping into history. The question, then, is how a more muscular Japan will position itself. The answer depends on whether Japan comes to see itself as a great or middle power, and whether it will define its role in regional or global terms. It also depends on the way Tokyo balances its need to hedge against risk against its chance to optimize for gain.
Professor Richard Samuels is currently working on this research project which will result in a book, Securing Japan.
