Diplomacy: “Strategic alignment” of Japan and the United States against China

“We agree that China represents the most important strategic challenge” for the two countries, said the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, at the end of a meeting in Washington with his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi, as well as with the American president and Japanese defense chiefs.

Speaking at a joint press conference, Antony Blinken assured that the United States “warmly welcome” the new Japanese defense structure and clarified that the security and defense agreement between the two countries also applies to space. Any incident in space could trigger Article 5 of the defense treaty between the two countries which states that an attack on one is an attack on the other, he said.

For his part, the US Defense Minister, Lloyd Austin, announced the deployment by 2025 of a Marine rapid reaction force on the Japanese island of Okinawa to strengthen the defense of Japan worried about the growth of Chinese activities in the region. “We will be replacing an artillery regiment with this force that will be more lethal and more mobile,” Lloyd Austin said during this press conference. He believed that this force “will make an important contribution to the improvement of Japan’s defense and the promotion of a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” an expression commonly used in the United States to designate the Asia-Pacific. More than half of the approximately 50,000 US troops in the archipelago are stationed on the island of Okinawa.

Wednesday’s meeting precedes Friday’s meeting between President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who is touring Europe and North America. Fumio Kishida, whose country holds the G7 presidency in 2023, visited France and Italy, and was in Britain on Wednesday where he signed a “reciprocal access agreement” that brings their militaries closer together. He also has to go to Canada on Thursday.

In Washington, ministers welcomed this “modernized alliance” in the face of a new era of “strategic competition with China,” according to the Japanese head of diplomacy.

Japan approved in December a major overhaul of its defense doctrine, notably including a colossal increase in its military spending over five years. This is a crucial turning point for the country, whose pacifist constitution, adopted in the aftermath of the defeat at the end of the Second World War, prohibits in principle from having a real army.

The Taiwan issue and the denuclearization of North Korea were also a focus of the talks, officials said. North Korea’s missiles and China’s “increasingly belligerent behavior” require “demonstrating that you have the means to deter any potential adversary,” a senior US diplomat assured on condition of anonymity before the meeting. “The Japanese don’t want to go down the road of nuclear weapons and that’s not something we would support either, but having the ability to fight back is a deterrent,” he said.