Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and US President George W. Bush released a statement titled "The Japan-US Alliance of the New Century" during Koizumi's final visit to the US before he steps down as prime minister later this year. The statement does not significantly expand on previous joint statements issued by the Japan-US Security Consultation Committee, but it is more of a summary and confirmation of those statements. It is more in-depth and encompasses more issues than the 1996 US-Japan Joint Declaration on Security.
That declaration affirmed the necessity of a strong US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as a US-Japan security alliance. Due to concerns that such an alliance could violate the terms of Japan's pacifist Constitution, the 1996 declaration -- in delineating the structure and functions of the alliance -- focused only on what was permitted by Japan's constitutional restrictions.
The US-Japan alliance today, however, defines strategic regional and global goals, while alliance management and the division of responsibilities and duties is gradually leading to the formation of a "center for managing the US-Japan security alliance." Moreover, since the intent is to strengthen the alliance, constitutional restrictions no longer appear to be the stumbling blocks they once were to the extension of the alliance's global reach. It also means that the alliance will be an alliance between two equal partners.
Previous disagreements regarding "crises in areas surrounding Japan" have thus been resolved, and instead we could see how Japanese Minister of State for Defense Fukushiro Nukaga called for amending the Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation to further pave the way for the alliance's global development.
Extending the global reach of the US-Japan security alliance promotes not only regional and global peace, but also democratic development. That is, the alliance seeks to not only maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait, but to foster democratic development in both Taiwan and China.
Therefore, the scope of the alliance's aims includes addressing the military threat that China poses to the region while encouraging democracy to evolve in Taiwan and take root in China. These parallel objectives were stressed in closed-door and open-door meetings of the US-Japan-Taiwan Trilateral Dialogue on June 20, attended by senior government officials from all sides.
Taiwan must understand that the triangular US-China-Taiwan dynamic no longer completely defines the current strategic reality in the Taiwan Strait. We must recognize the fact that Japan, through its diplomacy and the US-Japan alliance, will become a major player in cross-strait affairs. In other words, Japan's strategic perspective and its expectations of China and Taiwan increasingly are key factors that shape reality in the Taiwan Strait.
Additionally, Taiwan must understand that the US' strategy with regard to intervention in the Taiwan Strait is changing from one of ambiguity to clarity as the US-Japan alliance establishes a more global presence and seeks stability in the Strait. Following this change, Japan's strategy toward such an intervention is also changing from one of ambiguity to clarity. However, as Taiwan's security is receiving stronger guarantees, we may see more foreign powers adopting a more intrusive "preventative diplomacy" toward Taiwan.
The US' and Japan's more clearly defined strategies will also mean that Washington and Tokyo will pay increasing attention to Taiwan's strategic choices, or, in other words, whether Taiwan will want to cooperate with the two allies to build a regional environment more conducive to guiding China towards democracy and building peace in the Taiwan Strait.
If Taiwan were to adopt an ambiguous strategy toward the triangular US-Japan-China relationship, that would be seen as a refusal to cooperate with the US' and Japan's efforts to build peace and promote democracy.
It would also make China push the bottom line for its cross-strait strategy upwards, not to mention giving the preposterous impression that such a strategy would treat cooperation with a dictatorship against democracy as a viable option. This was also the reason why the US and Japan embarked on their major strategic change after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
With the death on July 2 of former Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto -- who represented Japan at the declaration of the 1996 US-Japan Joint Declaration on Security -- that declaration also passed into the annals of history to be replaced by "The Japan-US Alliance of the New Century." If Ma and everyone else fail to move with the times and insist on dealing with today's situation in East Asia using the same ambiguous strategies as 10 years ago, Taiwan will meet with disaster, a disaster immeasurably worse than today's moribund relationship with the US.
Lai I-chung is the director of foreign policy studies at Taiwan Thinktank.
Translated by Max Hirsch and Perry Svensson
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs