Japan Fears Both Trump Abandonment And Entrapment

To do so would be politically extremely difficult, especially for a government that now lacks a majority in both houses of the Diet. Beyond domestic politics, the immediate risk would not be of a war itself but rather of such a commitment causing a further worsening of Japan's relations with China, to no obvious purpose.

Abandonment has always looked the less likely of the twin dangers, for having Japan as its largest overseas military base has mattered so much to America and its regional presence in the Indo-Pacific that the idea of it deserting its Japanese ally has looked implausible.

This remains true, especially given the emphasis being laid by leading figures in the Pentagon and the Republican Party on the contest with China for both regional and global supremacy.

However, Trump is well known to be highly transactional, especially in foreign policy. He has also indicated a strong sympathy for the very 19th-century idea that great powers are entitled to have“spheres of influence” in the areas around their own borders.

He has, for example, expressed a determination that America should gain control over Greenland, the icy territory that is part of Denmark but adjacent to the north-east coast of the United States, has declared that Canada should become the US's“51st State”, and has insisted the US should regain control over the Panama Canal.

This makes it conceivable, even if still improbable, that at some point Trump could be tempted to accept Chinese control over its“sphere” of Taiwan and the South China Sea in return for China accepting US control over territories in its region.

That would give China control over the main sea lanes surrounding Japan and a greatly increased ability to intimidate other countries in the region, including Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.

This is, admittedly, a rather extreme scenario. The identification by most members of Trump's Republican Party of China as America's leading global adversary, and the strong support for Taiwan held by those same Republicans, makes it feel especially unlikely.

Yet the fact that the idea of such a“grand bargain” with China is talked about at all simply underlines how unpredictable the foreign policy of this American president is, with the range of actions and outcomes during the remaining three and a half years of his term looking wider than under any US president in living memory.

The governments of every longstanding ally of the United States are having to live with this uncertainty, one which reflects a broader question: using a meteorological metaphor, does Trump represent a temporary extreme-weather event, like an especially severe typhoon, or does he represent climate change, a trend that will endure?

The safest answer is that he is a bit of both: his extreme volatility and hostile manner can be seen as personal and thus temporary, but some of the ideas he is purveying have a broader resonance in the United States that could persist after he is gone.

The central role that America plays in the security of the Indo-Pacific gives Japan little choice other than to adapt to whatever extreme weather emerges from Washington, DC.

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The more forward-leaning stance Japan has taken on defense, first under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then with the new National Security Strategy under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in 2022, has had the dual purpose of increasing Japan's contribution to joint deterrence operations with America and creating more long-term options for national security in case relations with Washington become more fractured. Continuing and even enhancing this strategy remains Japan's only viable plan.

What Japan could perhaps invest even more time in is its already impressive diplomatic efforts in Northeast and Southeast Asia. To cope with the Trump typhoon and to increase Japan's own leverage over Washington at any time of crisis, it makes sense to work more closely with other countries that face the same pressures, starting with South Korea but also extending south to Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan itself.

All these countries are facing hostility from Trump over trade while also needing to invest more in their own security and economic resilience, in a region in which the two superpowers, China and the US, are both unavoidable presences but also habitual bullies. It therefore makes sense to work together on trade, technology, security and other issues as much as possible, to increase bargaining power as well as resilience.

Japan has a key role, as well as an opportunity, to drive this regional collaboration. The contradictory fears of entrapment and abandonment can never be eliminated, but through collaboration they can perhaps be mitigated.

This article first appeared on Bill Emmott's Global View Substack and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here .

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