Japan’s plans for an anti-China alliance

As the world’s attention focused last month on whether to send tanks to Ukraine, Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, was on a whistle-stop tour of the West. He held various meetings with G7 leaders, including Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden. His objective was clear: to create a new alliance that can counter China.

Japan adopted a ‘peace constitution’ in 1947 when it was occupied by the US, pledging that the country would never again wage war. For the past half a century, the military budget was capped at 1 per cent of GDP, and Japan sought to project its image abroad as a semi-disarmed economic giant, an Asian Germany of sorts.

Now all this has changed. Kishida is increasing Japan’s defence spending over the next five years by nearly 60 per cent and acquiring weapons it has long avoided, such as ‘counterstrike’ missiles, long-range precision weapons and American Tomahawks. There are plans for more joint exercises with US forces in the Pacific, and Tokyo is investing heavily in its cyber-capabilities.

Kishida described this new alliance as a ‘turning point’. That was an understatement. Japan is making its military priorities clear for the first time since the end of the second world war, and is seeking to reshape Asia’s economy at a time when America’s economic clout in the region is giving way to China’s.

Kishida’s meeting with Biden was part of a wider US pushback against China. Lieutenant General James Bierman, commanding general of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force and of Marine Forces Japan, recently told the Financial Times: ‘We [America] are setting the theatre in Japan, in the Philippines, in other locations.’ That theatre, he implies, is one where the performance might be a US-China conflict.

Japan’s decision to become part of the theatre in question is inseparable from the issue of Taiwan.