On April 16, 2021, the Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga arrived in Washington; making him the first foreign leader to meet President Joe Biden at the White House. He and Biden spent nearly three hours in talks, focusing heavily—though not exclusively—on the China challenge. Suga’s confidence walk to the National Mall and the Lincoln Memorial, several aides and a few photographers in tow, to take stock of his whirlwind visit to Washington D.C., at a sunrise after face to face meeting with Biden, was, perhaps, a bold statement to remind the public at home that the strategic importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance had been given a breath of fresh air.
During the Cold War, the decades-long stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, a former Japanese Prime Minister proudly described his country as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Pacific, one strategically located off the enemy’s coast. It was the threat of Soviet expansionism that made the post-World War II alliance between two former enemies the bedrock of U.S. security in East Asia. Without that threat, after the Soviet Union imploded, the alliance foundered. For a time, economic rivalry displaced strategic cooperation, and under Obama administration, Japan pouted as the U.S. focused its attention on wooing Beijing. That all changed in the past four years. Under Trump administration, the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s view of China changed dramatically. Beijing is now viewed as a strategic adversary, if not an outright enemy of the U.S. and its allies in East Asia. And that means Japan is back in a big way.
The US former National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster postulates that; “The U.S.-Japan relationship is the most important alliance the United States has,” and thus countering China’s increasing clout in East Asia is impossible without Japan.
For decades, it has been diplomatic conventional wisdom that the U.S. and the United Kingdom shared a “special relationship,” closer even than Washington’s ties to Canada, Australia or Mexico. The reinvigoration of the US-Japan alliance, driven by shared interests in containing and competing with China, means the U.S.-U.K. is no longer Washington’s only special relationship. After the meeting, Suga straightforwardly acknowledged that meeting was the evidence of the high level of importance that President Biden and the U.S. government attach to Japan.
However, the ball is right in Suga’s hands to define what the relationship will be. Reshaping the U.S. Japan alliance for the 21st century will not be easy. Confronting the Soviet Union was child’s play compared to the challenges Beijing presents to the U.S. and its allies, Japan chief among them. While China does not yet have the military power Moscow once had, its huge economic clout complicates any containment strategy the West may contemplate, and gives Beijing a huge strategic card to play that the Soviet Union never had. The U.S. and Japan must compete with Beijing economically, deter it militarily in what both countries call the “Indo Pacific,” and figure out how to confront China for its egregious human rights abuses.
And none of that will be easy. China today is Japan’s largest trading partner, having surpassed the U.S. in 2017. Tokyo’s economy is far more intertwined with Beijing’s than the U.S.’s is. Japan exported $141.2 billion of goods to China in 2020, accounting for 22 percent of its exports. The U.S. exported $124 billion to China: just seven percent of U.S. exports. Japan’s foreign direct investment into China in 2019 was $14.4 billion; U.S. foreign direct investment into China was just $7.5 billion. And though Abe, while prime minister, began to pay Japanese companies to move supply chains out of China, that program has had limited success so far.
The country last year budgeted just over $500 million in subsidies targeting just 87 companies—relatively small numbers given Japan Inc.’s large presence in China.
Disentangling Japanese and U.S. economic interests from China is difficult. Their companies are there to serve a massive market, or to use it as an inexpensive export platform, or both. General Motors wouldn’t dream of “decoupling” from China because it knows Toyota and BMW wouldn’t either. The focus for both countries is to ensure supply chain resilience in key selective industries, including those that drive artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which have key defense applications that are only getting more important.
The Suga-Biden summit came amidst palpable nervousness on both sides of the Pacific. The concern: China’s “coercion and destabilizing behavior in East Asia”. Specifically, the concern centers on Beijing’s incursions near Japan’s Senkaku islands, threats to Taiwan as well as human rights violations in Hong Kong and the mostly Muslim region of Xinjiang in China. In other words, “the security environment surrounding the country,” Suga acknowledged, “is increasing in severity.”
Against that backdrop, the summit ticked off the standard security commitments between the two nations. Dedication to, a “free and open Indo Pacific”—a formulation that former Prime Minister Abe originated, which was adopted wholeheartedly by the Trump administration and, now, by Biden; the U.S. reaffirmed its treaty commitment to defend Japan if it is ever attacked, and it specifically referred to the Senkakus (a chain of islands in the east China Sea also claimed by the People’s Republic of China). The message to Beijing: Don’t even think about using force to retake the islands.
As a matter of fact, just like his predecessor, Suga needs to step up his defense spending so as to ably meet the matters of mutual focus with the US in the region. Under both Trump and Biden would like Japan to think not just about defending itself against both China and North Korea—the two obvious threats—but of participating more in what defense analysts call “area denial”: working with the U.S to defend the disputed islands in the east and South China seas by various means, including by acquiring land-based missiles that can strike Chinese forces. Thus, the more missiles they have in place in the region that could strike Chinese forces in defense of the various island chains, the greater the deterrent for them and their allies, will be.
Furthermore, Suga signalled that he is not going to be shy in publicly voicing Japan’s commitment to the core principles of the United States and its democratic allies across the world. He postulated that it is the strong policy of the Japanese government to uphold fundamental and universal values, including freedom of democracy, human rights, as well as the rule of law, and sent a clarion call to China should uphold similar values. That, to put it mildly, will not go over well in Beijing. But it’s a message the Biden administration welcomes as it seeks to stiffen the spines of like-minded nations to more publicly challenge Beijing when necessary.
Conclusively, thus, the world anxiously waits to enjoy the fruits of the 21st century’s ‘special relationship’ of the two men who seem to have been inextricably bonded together by the fact that both share relatively modest backgrounds; in regard to containing and pacifying the increasingly tense security environment in East Asia. However, it also comes with responsibility, and that now falls on the shoulders of the 72-year-old, who started as a city councilman in Yokohama and is now Joe Biden’s Ally-in-Chief.
