Japan is poised to emerge as a military industrial heavyweight to help the United States counteract China, President Joe Biden’s administration believes.
“Our military industrial capabilities are not equal to the challenges and commitments we have,” Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, the lead U.S. envoy to Japan, said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Japan … [is opening up] an industrial capacity of Japan to be part of a solution that is a global challenge.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida opened the door to that cooperation in November by easing a ban on defense technology exports, a long-standing restriction anchored in the pacifist Japanese constitution adopted after the Second World War. That shift could allow Japan, one of the largest economies in the world, to activate its vast manufacturing capacity for arms production.
“We see Japan as an underutilized resource,” an unnamed U.S. official told Nikkei Asia Review last week. “Japan’s manufacturing as a percentage of [gross domestic product] is twice what the United States’ is. Japan has a very impressive industrial base, but it’s underweighted on the defense side.”
BIDEN TO MEET WITH JAPANESE AND PHILIPPINE LEADERS TO STRENGTHEN DEFENSE COOPERATION
Kishida boarded a flight Monday to begin a week of high-level diplomacy in Washington, where he will make a state visit to the White House and participate in a trilateral summit with President Joe Biden and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Those meetings are taking place at “a turning point in our history,” as Emanuel’s counterpart in Washington put it, spurring Japanese officials to embark on a plan to take a more active role in providing security in the Indo-Pacific.
“We’re in the midst of the process, saying, OK, is the structure we had for the last 60 years really right for the next 60 years? And the answer is, no. … We have different challenges today, multiple different challenges,” Emanuel said. “We’re going to have a different structure. What shape that takes, that’s not going to be resolved.”
That overhaul reflects a shared anxiety over China’s foreign policy intentions. Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has prosecuted territorial disputes with several neighbors, including Japan and the Philippines, raising the specter of Chinese Communist control over vast swathes of the South China Sea and an initiative to expel the United States from the Indo-Pacific. And Kishida has been explicit about his fear that Xi, or even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, could take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a model power play.
The apparent threat from China helped to galvanize Biden’s team to broker a deal with Australia and the United Kingdom known as AUKUS. The first pillar of that pact involves an arrangement for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarined, courtesy of technology shared by the British and Americans. A second pillar, focused on “the delivery of advanced capabilities,” could expand to include Japan, according to a new statement from the three governments.
“Our objective remains to further the delivery of advanced military capabilities to our respective defense forces in support of regional stability and security; we are confident that engaging like-minded partners in the work of Pillar II will only strengthen this pursuit,” the defense ministers of the AUKUS countries said Monday. “Recognizing Japan’s strengths and its close bilateral defense partnerships with all three countries, we are considering cooperation with Japan on AUKUS Pillar II advanced capability projects.”
Japanese officials eased the defense technology exports in November for the immediate purpose of facilitating a plan for Japan to partner with the United Kingdom and Italy to develop a next-generation fighter jet. Kishida acknowledged, in the lead-up to his visit to Washington, a desire to expand that precedent.
“Pushing ahead on cooperation with like-minded countries on security, including defense equipment and technology, will lead to the establishment of a multilayered network, and by expanding that we can improve deterrence,” he told the Japan Times in remarks published Monday.
Chinese officials bristled at the acknowledgment of Japan’s potential involvement in AUKUS, which Beijing claimed could drive an “escalating arms race” in the region.
“China is gravely concerned about it,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Monday. “We oppose relevant countries cobbling together exclusive groupings and stoking bloc confrontation. Japan needs to earnestly draw lessons from history and stay prudent on military and security issues.”
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U.S. officials, for their part, are delighted to see a “latticework” of American allies that could stretch from the Indo-Pacific to the Atlantic.
“I actually think it’s gratifying that a number of countries have expressed interest in working with us in these common pursuits, and I think it basically underscores our belief in this general idea of developing an architecture of allies,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said last week.