Real deterrence against the near-term possibility of Chinese aggression is a complex puzzle. Thankfully, one important piece fell into place last week with the release of a series of new documents in Japan’s strategy to bulk up its defenses.
While the new national-security strategy and its other components, announced last week by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, cleaves to the post-war pacifism of the sort that Tokyo has embraced for decades, it also reflects Japan’s newfound and appropriate recognition of the fact that life in a dangerous neighborhood comes with expanded responsibilities.
The strategy is clearly all about China, which it calls Japan’s “greatest strategic challenge.”
It states that Japanese defense spending will reach 2 percent of GDP within five years, shedding the previous cap on military expenditures that had kept it at merely a percent of GDP. At the end of that period, annual defense spending will be close to $75 billion, giving Japan the third-largest military budget in the world.
Crucially, Japan will also develop “counterstrike” capabilities allowing it to target foreign bases — presumably, within China — and purchase Tomahawk missiles from the U.S. That would complement a process Japanese officials announced last month to field hypersonic missiles by 2030, as well as recently unveiled plans to jointly develop a fighter jet with the U.K. and Italy.
These commitments, and other changes that come with it, are welcome and long overdue. Whereas once Japanese rearmament with such capabilities would have caused debate among its allies, Washington is rightly all-in for the plan. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement, “We applaud Japan’s commitment to modernize our alliance through increased investment in enhanced roles, missions, and capabilities and closer defense cooperation with the United States and other Allies and partners, as outlined in these new documents.”
The Biden administration’s high-profile praise of the Japanese strategy is, on the one hand, not unexpected, since Washington has moved swiftly to integrate its top partners into various regional security arrangements in the Indo-Pacific, such as the Quad and AUKUS. The emphasis is on building up a new security architecture, with China front of mind, and leaning on America’s allies to pull their weight.
Blinken’s team has also worked assiduously to shore up the bilateral relationship with Japan and South Korea, which is rocky due to World War II–era historical controversies. Foggy Bottom has made some critical progress over the past year and a half, assisted by the election of a new president in Seoul. And although South Korean officials objected to language in the new Japanese strategy about islands that Tokyo and Seoul both claim, there doesn’t seem, importantly, to be any general reticence about Japan’s buildup.
Given North Korea’s apparent alignment with Beijing, and a suite of renewed missile tests, a truly successful U.S.-led strategic alignment in the Indo-Pacific requires that Seoul and Tokyo maintain a stable enough rapport.
PHOTOS: Japan Self Defense Forces
Notably, Japan’s planned defense buildup underlines the fact that Taiwan’s security is viewed in Tokyo as a core Japanese national-security interest. The new strategy labels Taiwan as an “extremely important partner” which holds values in common with Japan.
That’s hardly a surprise. The murder of Shinzo Abe this year left the Japanese statesman’s work unfinished — but it seems to have, in concert with new worries about China and North Korea, turbocharged progress on the initiatives he had pursued between the end of his final stint as prime minister and his death. As he put it: “A Taiwan contingency is a contingency for Japan.”
Of course, last week’s strategy also — inadvertently or not — calls attention to the most significant Abe legacy item yet to be fulfilled: the revocation of Japan’s constitutional provision imposing outdated pacifism on the country.
In that respect, the new approach and defense-spending boost, critical as it is, points to work still left to do.