Biden and Japan’s Kishida bolster defense ties to counter China

The United States and Japan are dramatically beefing up their military cooperation and intelligence sharing, President Joe Biden said Wednesday, in an announcement widely seen as an effort to check an increasingly aggressive China.

Standing beside Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in a Rose Garden ceremony, President Biden heralded the move as the “most significant upgrade” of the alliance in more than half a century.

Until recently, the military relationship between Washington and Tokyo has been “just about the defense of Japan,” as one senior Biden administration official put it earlier in the week during a background briefing.

Today, that relationship is undergoing a “major shift,” the official added, from “alliance protection to alliance projection” designed to disabuse Beijing of any notion that it could successfully launch an attack in the region.

It’s clear this aim is a work in progress: On the same day that Mr. Biden and Mr. Kishida celebrated their partnership in the Rose Garden, Chinese leader Xi Jinping sent his own message as he hosted the former president of Taiwan in Beijing. 

Making a pointed reference to Beijing’s vow to unify Taiwan – militarily, if necessary – with mainland China, Mr. Xi said that “external interference cannot stop the historical trend of reunion of the country and the family.”

The expanded defense cooperation is “not aimed at any one nation ... and it doesn’t have anything to do with conflict,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday, in an apparent answer to Mr. Xi. “This is about restoring stability in the region.”

Still, Mr. Xi’s remarks underscored warnings about Beijing “becoming much more belligerent,” as Adm. John Aquilino, America’s top military commander in the Pacific, put it in congressional testimony last month. 

“What we all have to understand is we haven’t faced a threat like this since World War II,” he told lawmakers.

Chinese actions have included efforts to economically isolate Japan and militarily intimidate Taiwan and the Philippines, the latter with boat rammings, water cannon blasts, and the unsettlingly creative use of acoustic devices and lasers by China’s navy. 

The Philippines will take part, along with the U.S. and Japan, in a historic trilateral summit to discuss these matters later this week.

The “fast and furious work” toward cooperation are steps “that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” a second senior administration official said.

The officials said the possibility of a Trump electoral victory – and the resulting uncertainty over alliances – lent no small sense of urgency to the proceedings.

A pacifist constitution since 1945 

For decades, cooperating with Japan was “much lower on the list” of America’s military partnership priorities, Christopher Johnstone, the National Security Council’s former director for East Asia under President Biden, said last week in a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Japan was, instead, “quite simply a platform” for U.S. operations in the region, most notably hosting some 55,000 U.S. Pacific forces.

This has been in large part because the island nation’s pacifist constitution, put in place after imperial Japan’s World War II defeat, has a “no war” clause that prohibits settling disputes through the use of military force. 

That it has existed since 1947 – longer without amendment than any other constitution in the world – speaks to widespread societal support, analysts point out. In a national survey from 2022, only 1 in 5 Japanese citizens said they would be willing to fight if their country were under attack.

This makes Tokyo’s defense posture evolution over the past decade all the more remarkable – and necessary, U.S. officials say.

Japan announced last year, for example, that it would increase its defense spending to 2% of its gross domestic product by 2027, which would give the country the third-largest defense budget in the world.

It’s a vital step because historically low spending left Japan’s defense force with aging physical infrastructure, low munitions stockpiles, and too few personnel, says Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

With the bigger budget, Japan is buying, among other things, American Tomahawk missiles to give its arsenal what’s being billed as “counterstrike capability.” That phrasing is in keeping with a defensive posture but is also “intended to signal to China that if China strikes Japan, Japan can strike back,” Dr. Kavanagh notes.

These missiles can reach Chinese ships in the Taiwan Strait and likely also the command-and-control nodes and air defense systems along the coast of mainland China.  

In order to effectively fire these Tomahawks, Japan will need intelligence in the form of, among other things, targeting assistance. “And they probably want their fires coordinated with the U.S., which requires joint command-and-control,” she adds.

For this and other reasons, the U.S. and Japanese militaries will need to engage in more day-to-day operational planning, which will be facilitated by restructuring the U.S. military command in Japan as well.

Playing defense or raising a threat?

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden said plainly that the new allied efforts will involve modernized command-and-control and expanded missile and air defense architecture.

“There’s clearly a need for a structure that enables the United States and Japan to respond more nimbly, more rapidly, more seamlessly to evolving contingencies,” says Mr. Johnstone, now the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“Contingencies” is Pentagon-speak for possible military run-ins, in this case with China, and there have been questions about whether this week’s big announcements of closer military relationships are more provocative than protective. 

Biden administration officials push back against this notion. If the U.S. and Japan aren’t considered close partners that can quickly and effectively work together, it could incentivize China to strike, they argue, much as Russia has done in Ukraine. 

Yet it’s clear that the U.S. military presence in Japan continues to be a sensitive subject, analysts say. The Pentagon has tried to make U.S. Marines working with Japanese forces in Okinawa more credible, for example, with a plan to give them more and better weapons to use in case of a Chinese attack. 

While this may make sense militarily, given Okinawa’s strategic proximity to the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, it also has the potential to exacerbate tensions with Okinawans, who already fear becoming the target of Chinese attacks, Dr. Kavanagh points out along with Kelly Grieco, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, in a piece for Foreign Policy. 

This in turn could create an opening, they add, for Chinese disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing discord among Japan’s populace.

Part of the U.S. military’s job will be ramping up military readiness while tamping down tensions.

America’s top officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., has said that he does not believe that Mr. Xi wants to take Taiwan by force.

“I do not think a conflict with the People’s Republic of China is imminent or inevitable,” General Brown told the Defense Writers Group at George Washington University’s Project for Media and National Security last month.

The U.S. military’s mission going forward, he said, will be to delve deeply into how deterrence works best in the Pacific. 

“Do we fully understand the PRC and what their intent is? I don’t know that we do as well as we probably could,” he added. “And you can’t deter what you don’t understand.”  

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this article from Beijing.