Alliance minders in Washington and Tokyo are feeling some anxiety today. Shigeru Ishiba has won the contest for leadership of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which means he will become Japan’s next prime minister, succeeding Kishida Fumio — probably Tuesday. […]
Ishiba, who is 67 and was first elected to the Diet in 1986, has vowed to shake up the 72-year-old security alliance between the United States and Japan, a bilateral alliance that in recent years has focused on maintaining U.S. primacy in East Asia and blocking China’s rise. He views it (correctly, I think) as “asymmetrical,” with Washington largely dictating Japanese foreign policy.
“I don’t think Japan is a truly independent nation yet,” Ishiba, the former defense minister, wrote in a book published just before the leadership race.
Some have called Ishiba a Gaullist; he certainly is a nationalist. In his fifth run for the top party position, he suggested that Japan share command and control over U.S. troops on Japanese soil, and even raised the possibility of stationing some Japanese soldiers on American territory (Guam).
Most controversial, though, has been his sweeping call for an “Asian NATO” that would include not just Japan but also South Korea and several Southeast Asian nations. This proposal, if adopted (and that’s unlikely anytime soon), would replace the hub-and-spokes pattern of bilateral and mini-lateral alliances that emerged after World War II and that are dominated by the United States.
The U.S. has about 85,000 troops stationed at military bases throughout East Asia, primarily in Japan and Korea. It also leads bilateral alliances with the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. And it has been trying to draw India, which shares American hostility toward China, into its web by, for example, including it in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) with Japan and Australia.
Ishiba’s proposal for a multilateral security alliance in Asia has fostered strange bedfellows in opposition. Beijing repeatedly has condemned any NATO-like framework that would try to contain or confront China. But Washington, too, dislikes a proposal that could undermine its central position in Asian security networks. A Biden official, speaking anonymously, dismissed it as “fantasy,” while Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, criticized it as hasty. “It’s too early,” he told a forum in Washington, “to talk about collective security in that context.” Läs artikel