Author: Peter Drysdale

The U.S.-Japan relationship is at a crossroads, write Tobias Harris and Doug Turner, two American Japan-watchers:

Despite the bonhomie between President Bush and former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, they say, recent events suggest that the relationship is fundamentally unhealthy. In truth, Japan has become marginalized, its value to the United States measured largely in terms of token contributions to operations in the Middle East. . . Left unchanged, the alliance will drift into irrelevance, and the United States will lose an important component of its Asia policy just as the region becomes the world’s most important.

Harris and Turner reckon

the alliance’s structural problems are familiar to both governments. Despite efforts undertaken since the mid-1990s to ‘redefine’ the alliance, Tokyo and Washington have been happy to let the fundamental flaws be. For Japan, the United States has provided a cheap substitute for its own defence spending and enabled Japan to avoid tackling the thorny question of acquiring a nuclear arsenal of its own. The alliance has allowed it to opt out of power politics and has saved Japan from having to think about its national interests. For the United States, Japan has been a reliable ally and provided low-cost bases for power projection throughout Eurasia.

Japan’s Yoshida Doctrine continues to apply: Japan will do as much as necessary, but as little as possible. Today, it gladly pockets the U.S. security guarantee and all the benefits that accrue from it, while making token contributions to distant U.S. operations and tolerating the presence of U.S. forces in Japan. The amount of support the United States considers “necessary” and the amount of support some Japanese politicians are willing to give have increased, but the basic formula remains.

Before the United States and Japan can forge a new bilateral consensus, Japan needs to forge a new foreign policy vision. It should reflect the views of the Japanese public, not just the wishes of a handful of conservative, Washington-friendly politicians who are advancing their vision of an assertive Japan in a vacuum.

They conclude that

the emergence of the US relationship with China as, in Hillary Clinton’s words, ‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world in this century’ does not mean the end of the US-Japan relationship. On the contrary, China presents an opportunity for the allies to work together to moderate Chinese behaviour and create an open order in East Asia. But for the alliance to play a dynamic political role in the region, the allies will have to return to basics and consider why the alliance exists in the first place.

These arguments should have resonance with Australian Prime Minister Rudd as he seeks to define new roles for the Australia-Japan relationship.