Japan Rearmed, With Sheila Smith

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Japan rearmed.

 

With me to discuss the recent decision by the government of Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio to dramatically increase Japan's military spending is Sheila Smith. Sheila is the John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies here at the Council. Sheila has written extensively on Japanese politics in foreign policy. Her most recent book is Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power. Two of her most recent contributions at cfr.org are Financing Japan's Defense Leap and How Japan is Doubling Down on Its Military Power. Sheila, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox, and thank you for letting me borrow your book title for the title of today's episode.

 

SMITH:
Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be with you, and also it's great that you're borrowing the title. I appreciate it.

 

LINDSAY:
Hey, I know where greatness resides. I want to discuss Prime Minister Kishida's ambitious plan for upgrading and expanding the Japanese military. But before we jump into that, I would love for you to put the decision in a broader historical context. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which was forged in the aftermath of World War II, and shaped by the U.S. occupation, renounces the right to wage war and bars Japan from having a military with war potential, a position reflected in the fact that what we would call Japan's military, they refer to as the Self-Defense Forces. So help us understand the constraints that Japan has operated under since end of World War II.

 

SMITH:
Wow. I'll try to do it very briefly, Jim. Thank you. I think many outside observers of Japan believe that Japan is largely a pacifist nation as a result of Article 9. It doesn't have a military that gets to behave. Some people think it doesn't have a military at all, which is obviously a mistake, but it doesn't have a military that gets to behave the way other militaries behave. So a lot of policymakers will think about Japan on this new trajectory of normalizing its military. And in fact, in my book I talk about why I think in the post Cold War era, Japan is moving towards recognizing the importance of the military as an instrument of state craft. But the domestic politics at home have been very contentious over any kind of policy shift on the military through about, I would say the last decade or so, decade and a half.

 

There's still contention. There's still debate and financing. Prime Minister Kishida's jump to 2 percent of GDP will be a huge political debate. But what I think is interesting about this round of strategic review and the documents that were produced by the Kishida cabinet last month, I think what's interesting is you got nary a ripple on the domestic political opposition inside Japan. So opposition political parties are all about how are you going to do it? Not the goals themselves, and the public is... some people don't like it, to be sure, it's a democracy after all, but about 70 percent of the Japanese public think it's unavoidable given the neighborhood that Japan lives in. So I think you've seen a kind of ingestion or digestion, if you will, of the world out there beyond Japanese borders. It looks more dangerous and neighbors have more weapons. Their militaries are coming closer to Japanese territory. And of course, like every democracy around the world, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has also been shocking, I think, to the Japanese public.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. There's a lot there that I want to unpack. Before we get to that though, just a little bit more on context, even though we talk about Japan as in a way limiting itself on the military front, and you used the important word a moment ago about the push within Japan to normalize how its military operates. Japan for many years was limited to 1 percent of its GDP being spent on defense. But my sense is that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces nonetheless were quite capable, I think particularly when it comes to naval capabilities. So it's not as if Japan does not have formidable abilities to certainly defend Japan. There's a separate issue whether it could project power. Is that right?

 

SMITH:
That's absolutely right. And when I talk about it and when I talk about my book, I often show the SIPRI, the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, does a really fine job of the econometrics of comparing defense spending across countries. And many people are quite surprised to see Japan in the top ten of the global ranking.

 

LINDSAY:
Well it helps when you have a very large economy.

 

SMITH:
Exactly.

 

LINDSAY:
From which to finance your military.

 

SMITH:
Exactly. So in defense spending investment in military capability, of course Japan is a rich country. That it spends 1 percent of its GDP is not a sneeze in terms of many other countries around the world. That's a significant amount of money to be spending. But I think the other piece of it is the capabilities which you mentioned, especially Japan's maritime Self-Defense Force, what we would think of as Japan's navy, is a considerable power in the Indo-Pacific, which is a maritime region. And today the maritime Self-Defense Forces operate to protect sea lanes from East Asia across the Indo-Pacific to obviously over to the Middle East.

 

But also they operate in conjunction with others, other navies, ours first and foremost, obviously, but with Australia, with the Indian navies, and now increasingly with the much, much smaller and less developed navies of the maritime states of ASEAN, Philippines, Vietnam. So I think the Japanese capability is significant. Their air force, of course, has been dealing with the Russians to the north, or the former Soviets to the north. So you have a very accomplished air defense capability by the Japanese, second to none, I think in the region in terms of their long-term experience and their technological capability. The ground forces don't go abroad, and that's a distinction that's really important to be made here. The ground forces, if they go abroad, it's in peacekeeping operations. So they have some coalition experience.

 

LINDSAY:
And that's rather recent, isn't it?

 

SMITH:
That's very recent. So Japan only joined UN peacekeeping in 2001, and that was in Cambodia. It's largely post-conflict reconstruction activities that the Japanese ground Self-Defense Forces have participated in, but nonetheless, they've operated in coalition in that capacity. But they do not in the course of their operations go outside the territorial boundaries of Japan.

 

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about what Prime Minister Kishida actually announced last month. Part of it was a national security strategy, and then there was, I guess two plans for implementing that strategy, one over ten years, and one over five years. Let's begin with the strategy. What does it say?

 

SMITH:
So this is only the second document that the Japanese government has issued, second national security strategy. The first one was issued in 2013 under former Prime Minister Abe. And that document was a first, and therefore we all paid close attention to what it said. I think if you were coming at this as somebody with hard power sensibilities, you would've found it a fairly diplomatic document, not an emphasis on military capabilities at all, but rather an assessment of how the world is out there and what factors will affect Japanese interests. And so it was a pretty succinct and pretty balanced interpretation, not an overly threat driven, and that's the contrast I'd like to make with this one. This one is longer. It's more extensive. It considers threat. It begins from threat analysis, and there's a broad sense of the trends in the world not being in Japan's interest.

 

Then there's also a specific discussion, China, North Korea, Russia. Then I think the other piece about it that I think is interesting and builds upon the 2013 version is it's very comprehensive in scope. So this is what we in Washington would call a whole of government approach to thinking about Japanese national interest, but also Japanese national power. So you've got discussions of technological innovation. You've got discussions of where Japan needs to make sure that it maintains its national power. You've got demography in there. You've got a whole bunch of things. But I think the beginning and the real push is to say the world is a far more dangerous place, and very specifically, there are threats to Japan and to the U.S.-Japan Alliance, which has been the framework with which Japan has protected its security for the post-war era. So it's a pretty cutting document, but one that's worthy of some attention by people outside the country.

 

LINDSAY:
Let me draw you out then on that national strategy. I note that you say China, North Korea, Russia, is that in alphabetical order? Is that in order of priority?

 

SMITH:
I think it's in order of priority, and you would certainly, as you read through the document, you really do understand the specific challenges that China poses to Japan. Often in the world that I inhabit, the policymakers on Asia or U.S.-Japan relations, people use the word existential threat. Now, you won't see that in the document, but China permeates a whole host of areas where Japan sees its interests engaged. The behavior of China, I would say it's not just China's power or China's existence, because it's always been right there on the continent, but it's the behavior of China. It's also being taken note of.

 

LINDSAY:
What in particular about Chinese's behavior alarms Tokyo?

 

SMITH:
Well, there's several things here, and these were also pointed out in the summitry between not only Kishida and Biden, but the summitry before that between former Prime Minister Suga and President Biden. China's behavior on the human rights front, and especially the Hong Kong piece, is obviously worrisome to China's neighbors. China's coercion, both economic coercion, à la the way it behaved towards Australia when Australia took a particular stance right on the investigation of the origins of COVID, as well as China's territorial claims and the use of coercive mechanisms, its coast guard, its maritime forces, to assert those claims. So there's two dimensions of this, both the economic and the territorial coercion.

 

The question mark, I think taking it away from the document itself, the question mark that I often hear expressed in Tokyo is, to what extent is China really dedicated to changing the status quo, not just in these areas, but in the entire architecture of the post-war period? And I think this includes the United Nations structure. It includes changing the way what we think of as the Bretton Woods economic collaboration works. How much of a challenge is China willing to pose? And this goes back to our own conversation here in the United States about authoritarian versus democratic societies, but I think the Japanese tend to frame it in terms of is the architecture of the world as we know it, and this is an architecture in which post-war Japan has thrived, this is now the national identity of Japan, depends on that order. This is the order that Japan has committed itself to trying to work with others to try to protect.

 

LINDSAY:
But Japan also has deep economic ties with China. I was reading something recently which quoted, I believe it was the CEO of Suntory, the large Japanese beverage maker, arguing that Japan needs to deepen its economic relations with China, not decouple from China.

 

SMITH:
Exactly. So Mr. Niinami is quite outspoken, and so he will speak his mind, and he's quite alert to and watches geopolitical changes around the globe and always has. There are other Japanese corporate leaders who may not be as outspoken about this balancing act between the alliance with the United States and the challenge that is China. But I will say that in response to Prime Minister Kishida's comments prior to these strategic documents being revealed, the head of Keidanren, the large association of Japanese companies, sort of the status quo, the Fortune 500s of Japan, he basically said, "Be careful." He alluded very careful language to the fact that Japan should not compromise its identity as a global economic investor.

 

So I think there is a lot of concern about how much the current engagement on this strategic front by the government is really going to impinge upon Japan's ability, and the Japanese private sector's ability, to trade and invest 300 and something billion dollars annually. I don't know where the actual number is now post pandemic, because we're still all recovering from that. But so much of Japan's economic growth could be tied to this investment and trade with China that I think there's a thought process that also needs to take place here.

 

LINDSAY:
And always the challenge is economic entanglement creates opportunity, it also creates vulnerability. And over the last decade, we have seen China on occasion use its economic interactions with Japan to punish, of course, Tokyo, and I imagine that's also not lost on the prime minister. I think most people listening to us chat would clearly understand why Japan would worry about North Korea, given the behavior of the governing Pyongyang, the pursuit of nuclear weapons, the relatively frequent tested ballistic missiles, a number of which have been flown over Japan or tested over Japan.

 

SMITH:
Almost all of.

 

LINDSAY:
But what about Russia? I think many people have a sense that Prime Minister Abe had long sought to try to improve relations with Russia. Most people don't think about sort of a Russia-Japan confrontation. So help me understand why Russia would be on this list.

 

SMITH:
So I would say to our listeners, close your eyes and imagine a map of Japan, or go take a peek at a map of Japan because it's really important.

 

LINDSAY:
I would show a map of Japan.

 

SMITH:
Yes, if we could.

 

LINDSAY:
Cause we're a very visual podcast.

 

SMITH:
Could put one up next to the podcast. But if you stand at the northernmost part of Hokkaido, you're going to look out at the islands that the Russians and Japanese are still contesting, whose sovereignty should-

 

LINDSAY:
These are islands that Japan lost to the Soviet Union, now Russia, during World War II, or at the end of World War II.

 

SMITH:
Right. And the Russians refer to them as the Southern Kurils and the Japanese refer to them as the Northern Territories. So that territorial dispute has been ongoing, as you point out, since World War II. Former Prime Minister Abe thought that he had an opportunity with President Putin and met with him, I don't know, upwards of nine times perhaps during his time in office.

 

LINDSAY:
He brought some very nice gifts along, as I understand it.

 

SMITH:
He did. Both of them got nice gifts. You may know, but President Putin really loves Japan and Japanese martial arts and judo in particular, and so was very respectful of Japanese culture. But the thing is, what Prime Minister Abe was trying to do is get to the point where they could finally conclude a peace treaty, which on paper is a great thing to have, but really what Abe-

 

LINDSAY:
Peace treaty ending World War II.

 

SMITH:
Ending World War II, exactly. And they have a full range of diplomatic ties and economic ties, but they did not conclude that state of hostilities. The thing that Abe was trying to do though, and this is important, is to try to see if he had leverage to try to entice Mr. Putin away from too close of a reliance on China. So I think in Abe's mind, it wasn't just about the islands, in his mind was they created 2+2 strategic dialogue, which has gone nowhere. But what Abe was really trying to do is to make sure that Putin wasn't going to just look to Beijing as he looked at the region. In the end, of course it was not successful, but it is the reason why Prime Minister Kishida has been so forthright on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They have abandoned the effort to try to find a way forward with Moscow that's more constructive.

 

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about these two action plans. Again one is over ten years and then there's one over five years, which I believe is the procurement plan. In theory, this would double spending on defense over a span of five years. The one thing I've seen in all the reporting is that Japan were to acquire long-range strike capabilities, but maybe there's more in that procurement plan I should pay attention to.

 

SMITH:
There's so much more. I mean, this is the first time I can... I've been watching these plans for more than I should admit on the radio.

 

LINDSAY:
Your experienced in this issue.

 

SMITH:
Most of my career has been watching this evolution in Japanese defense and military planning and thinking. But what was so striking to me, first of all, the ten-year defense plan, how comprehensive it was. So it ranged, yes, from the standoff capabilities, how the Japanese refer to it, but longer range strike capability, and we can talk about that in a second. But all the way down to the nuts and bolts of fuel and air shelter hardening and making sure civilian ports were accessible to Japanese destroyers. I mean, all kinds of things that were sort of in the wishlist of the Self-Defense Forces, but never on the budget, the things that got taken off the budget because there wasn't enough money.

 

So the comprehensiveness of the kinds of upgrades for the Self-Defense Forces was really impressive. The second was the operation, the organization of the Self-Defense Forces themselves. So there is now going to be a permanent joint operational command created for the three services that we call the Self-Defense Force. And this is something that came out of thinking all the way back in 2011, after the Great East Japan earthquake. And they were just not prepared to come together as an integrated command.

 

LINDSAY:
So you have basically land forces, navy forces, air forces that didn't have a structure to coordinate.

 

SMITH:
They have an administrative structure, but they don't have an operational command structure. So if there was a crisis, if there was something like the earthquake, if there was a war, they wouldn't have a operational command.

 

LINDSAY:
They start inventing these things from scratch.

 

SMITH:
Right. They have to start from scratch. And so this is something that they feel very strongly about needs to happen now. This will also be the springboard, so to speak, through which there'll be an ability for a combined operational conversation between our Indo-Pacific command and Japan's military. So organizational factors are changing the way in which they're planning no longer just for peacetime presence, but obviously this has to do with the idea that war fighting might be closer than they've imagined in the past. So lots going on there. On the strike, just a short note, they've got coastal defense missiles of their own, go out 100 miles or 200 miles, maybe. They're purchasing for the F-35, an air version, which goes out maybe 300 or 400 miles from the Norwegians. What they're looking is 1,000 or more kilometers. So miles...

 

LINDSAY:
600 miles.

 

SMITH:
Thank you. So they're really looking to project in a way that is unusual and different in the past because it goes onto the continent.

 

LINDSAY:
How did the Japanese square that with Article 9?

 

SMITH:
Well, I think, I went all the way back in one of the article I wrote a little while ago to look at the debate when the Self-Defense Forces were created in the fifties, and they have never limited themselves on what kind of weapons in the government interpretation. They used way back then modern weapons was the English translation, which is referenced to nuclear, but they've never limited themselves to any kind of weaponry. The debates that implemented defense planning over the years, the Diet in the parliament, their parliament, they often limited what they could get or couldn't get, but not the government interpretation of Article 9.

 

LINDSAY:
So why are we seeing this new national security, this new embrace of defense spending normalizing, to borrow the word you used before, was long an ambition of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. He had some successes on that front. My sense is not nearly as much success as he hoped for. Prime Minister Kishida is known for having a deep and personal commitment to disarmament. He was foreign minister for a number of years. He doesn't seem to be the obvious prime minister to lead this sort of pivot in Japan's approach to the military. So why? Why did it happen now? Is it purely a function of Ukraine? Is it something the Chinese did, other developments in Japan's domestic politics?

 

SMITH:
So I think there's so many variables. Let me highlight a couple that I think are crucial. One is the capabilities that the self-defense force and the civilian planners in the Ministry of Defense have thought Japan probably should consider. These have been on the board for a decade or so, as neighbors around Japan began accruing certain capabilities themselves. So for example, the North Koreans we talked about earlier. Japan thought it could handle the North Koreans with a sophisticated ballistic missile defense system that we used and we used with them. But obviously the kind of capabilities the North Koreans have acquired make it very clear that a ballistic missile-

 

LINDSAY:
And are going to continue to acquire.

 

SMITH:
Yeah, exactly. A ballistic missile defense system alone is not going to do the trick.

 

LINDSAY:
It'll be overwhelmed.

 

SMITH:
Right. It'll be overwhelmed by multiple and all kinds of different ways of managing the incoming missiles. So that's that. So there's this movement to counterstrike as part of that decision, that retaliatory capability is going to deter better than a defense system is going to protect. There's other things, China obviously, I mean, we can't underestimate the influence of Chinese behavior and Chinese capabilities. I think the third variable, of course, is us. We have had since the, I would say probably earlier, but since the 2016 presidential election, we've had a pretty significant shift in the way we think about our alliances, and it has raised its head in our politics. And the president of the United States, President Trump himself raised this question often as president of the United States.

 

And of course, burden sharing with our allies has long been part of our foreign policy going back to the sixties with Europe and then with Japan in the eighties as it got more rich. But I think that was rattling to our allies. Probably rattled our Asian allies a little bit less than our European allies. But planners inside the government in Japan, I think were well aware that our politics were shifting in fundamental ways, and that Japan needed to be able to demonstrate that it was willing to pull its weight, do what it needed to do, to make sure that it was playing a responsible role in the alliance.

 

LINDSAY:
So the Japanese wanted to answer the criticism quite common on Capitol Hill about free riding.

 

SMITH:
Exactly.

 

LINDSAY:
And I guess potentially worried that the same attitude would take root in the White House. President Trump, as you mentioned, showed the way.

 

SMITH:
And again, the second piece of that era of the Trump administration, that's important. And again, this is not partisanship so much as the events themselves also led to some real rattling realizations. So the negotiations between President Trump and the DPRK, North Korea's Kim Jong-un, in Singapore after they met in that first meeting, the president went out on microphone and said, "Our exercises with our ally South Korea were provocative and we should pull back." And of course, this is all about the Korean peninsula, but listening to that language in Tokyo was a little bit of a shock.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense, diplomats in Seoul and in Tokyo were in horror. They may have been very polite, but they were very displeased or alarmed.

 

SMITH:
Right. So they watched that conversation about North Korea, about the peninsula, about burden sharing with the South Koreans very closely because of course eventually that would be a conversation that they may have to have as well with us. So I think there's been... I don't think that it's necessary that we are less reliable. Some people think that that's driving this, the Americans aren't reliable. I think it's a number of factors. I think the crucial point to remember though is threat or potential threat to Japan is coming at the same time that Americans are starting to reevaluate their post-war alliance structure and capabilities. It's simultaneous.

 

LINDSAY:
So it sounds like you're saying that Tokyo is trying to take steps so that Washington won't rethink its alliance commitments, in essence, to make a good faith down payment. Which leads me to the question, are we going to see the Japanese follow through on this very ambitious plan? The easy part, certainly not if you're the author, but the easiest thing to do is to articulate a national strategy and the steps to implement. The hard thing is to actually drive that through the budget process over several years, given that budgets are finite and you may have to give up something or go to your people and say, "You have to pay more." And my sense is the Japanese prime minister is trying to get the Japanese to pay more with a new defense tax, and my sense is that hasn't gone down very well.

 

SMITH:
There's a whole host of domestic interests that have to align here for these goals to be realized, not to put too fine a point on it. And Japan is a democracy like all of our democracies, not an easy path forward. So two pieces I think are going to be critical to implementation inside Japan. One is a lot of what is in that defense plan has to do with indigenization. So marshaling Japanese innovation and technology for the purpose of military procurement.

 

LINDSAY:
And Japan is a very robust industrial technological base, not necessarily well connected to its military.

 

SMITH:
Exactly. Almost specifically not organized in a way that is designed to enhance its military capability. So there's a lot of private sector state negotiation that's going to have to go on there. The second piece, as you point out, and this is the piece that you kindly referenced at the opening, I wrote about the politics of financing. Prime Minister Kishida came out very early, even before the documents were announced, which many people thought was a political mistake, to say that this should not all be financed via debt by government bonds, that we shouldn't ask future generations of Japanese to pay what we need to do now. And so he raised the defense tax and got all kinds of opprobrium, mostly from his own party. I mean, a lot of people who were very close to Prime Minister Abe really took issue with him because Abe himself thought it should be debt financed. So there's the Ministry of Finance's concern about Japan's government debt as a percentage of GDP, which is a long-term challenge for Japan.

 

LINDSAY:
More than 200 percent, correct?

 

SMITH:
240 something percent, somewhere in that ballpark now coming out of...

 

LINDSAY:
It's a big number. I think it's the biggest-

 

SMITH:
It's the largest.

 

LINDSAY:
... among all the OECD countries, think the United States, EU.

 

SMITH:
That debt is largely held by Japanese interests. Japanese are more sanguine about it because it's Japanese held debt. But that's not necessarily always going to be the case. And there you have it. So financing this with a defense tax or adding to other kinds of taxes in order to pay for the defense budget has created quite a blowback for Prime Minister Kishida. I think that's where the politics of this are really going to focus in the months to come. In fact, he has said recently that he thinks that it would be wise to hold an election to get the mandate for raising taxes.

 

LINDSAY:
Is that a wise thing for him to propose?

 

SMITH:
It's a tricky thing for him to propose, him personally, because it's the timing of when do you have a snap election, when is it a good idea, and who else in his party may have a different viewpoint?

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I think it's an important point to stress. The LDP is a party, but it has very important powerful factions that struggle or compete to lead the party.

 

SMITH:
Right. And one leader of that faction was former Prime Minister Abe, who was tragically gunned down last summer. So there's a little flux inside the Liberal Democratic Party at the moment and some pushback about the way that prime minister has handled this.

 

LINDSAY:
So he has to worry about creating a mandate for a different prime minister.

 

SMITH:
Yeah, exactly. He may have his snap election, and the LDP may win that election, and in fact is likely to win that election because the opposition is not strong enough to challenge the LDP. But he may not be the prime minister as a result of it. So stay tuned. There's more politics ahead.

 

LINDSAY:
Domestic politics are a fact of democracies.

 

SMITH:
Yes. Yes. And party politics, factions within parties, are pretty intense politics in Japan.

 

LINDSAY:
So let's assume that this defense buildup goes forward, it's not derailed because of domestic politics, though perhaps it's turbulent over the course of the next several years, what does that mean for the future of U.S.-Japanese military cooperation, and particularly this question that might be called coordination or integration? The United States and South Korea, for example, have an integrated military command. My impression is the United States and Japan don't, even though a considerable number of U.S. troops are positioned in Japan. Any change in the thinking by Japan on that score?

 

SMITH:
So it's an important point, Jim. Our NATO alliance has a NATO command. Our U.S.-ROK Alliance has a combined command, and of course there's attachment there to the UN mission as well. But the structure of the Japanese... U.S.-Japanese military relationship over the post-war period, because there hasn't really been a war fighting mandate. I mean, implicit in Article 5 of our treaty, like our Article 5 protections for other allies, is that United States will help deter, and if necessary, defend Japan. But there hasn't been a lot of planning really around contingencies and how the two militaries would operate in a war fighting context, not a deterrent context.

 

To be sure, they exercise. They exercise regular. I think we've got six, maybe eight, somewhere around, of bilateral military exercises ongoing every year, and that number just increases. But the real question for Japan has... there's been a real political pushback on the idea of integrating the Japanese military in a combined command. And the reason for that, of course, is back to Article 9, is that civilian control over the military and subscribing to the intent of Article 9 means the civilian leadership of Japan is the only leadership that should be sending the Self-Defense Forces to fight. So there you have another way in which Article 9 has restrained the way the Japanese have integrated with us. Today, however, there's two ways, this is important, one is the potential for wars I think is probably felt to be closer crisis, if not conflict.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense is that the public opinion polls in Japan show that the Japanese public is greatly concerned, particularly about the threat from China.

 

SMITH:
Yeah. So you've got threat perception, obviously among the public, but the reality is the behaviors that our militaries are observing out there on the seas, in the air, already require integrated intelligence, integrated intelligence sharing, all kinds of things that they didn't before. Technologies are changing, which means ballistic missile defenses. When the 2+2 met in January, one of the things that was on the agenda there was Article 5 protection for Japanese space assets. So here we go. I mean, we're in these new domains, as they say. So cyber, space, in addition to the traditional ways we think about how our militaries operate together. So technology and technological advancement matters. But the last piece, and this is the piece I would like to emphasize as what's coming for the alliance, is that counterstrike capability, the ability of Japan actually to reach out and touch its neighbors offensively if necessary, puts a heavy burden on the alliance now to figure it out.

 

Figure it out in two ways. One, can we have an integrated contingency plan, whether be it for something in the southwest of Japanese islands, or do we have to think simply of mission to mission coordination, which has really been the way it's done in the past? And the second is a very simple point is when and who is going to use force? How? So our military's understanding of how Japan would use that counterstrike, under what circumstances, the Japanese military has always wanted to know how and when we would use our strategic offensive capability in a conflict. To a certain degree, we exercise together, so we see it, but with this added capability on the part of the Japanese, it becomes much more imperative that the alliance develop a strategy for integrating that capability into a shared idea of how the alliance would work in a conflict.

 

LINDSAY:
The dynamics in these instances for having an offensive military capability, it's not necessarily to initiate war, but to deter war by conveying to any adversary that you can inflict harm on them, and hopefully they will not respond. But of course, the great danger there is what you see as designed to deter, they see as a threat, and you get into this action-reaction cycle. So I have to ask, Sheila, are people in Japan worried about that, that in re-arming or becoming more normal that they could end up encouraging the problem they're trying to prevent?

 

SMITH:
I would say in some sectors you would get that point of view. I think that conversation is unfolding. I think what's happened is you've got a very small group of new next generation thinkers, security thinkers in Japan, that are engaging with concepts like deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial. These are terms that we have developed in our academic scholarly thinking about how deterrence functions. And so now you're getting a generation of Japanese thinkers who are conversant with these concepts, but are also trying to think about applying them to Japan and Japanese defenses.

 

So that group is already thinking about these questions. They're not necessarily making policy recommendations. And I think what's going to happen is the capability enhancement for the counterstrike is going to come before the alliance then comes together to say, "All right, let's think about this more clearly in terms of our understanding of each other and different scenarios that you point out." I'm not sure that the Japanese public yet has wrapped their head around this dilemma. Intuitively I think people will understand it, but I think they also see that the capabilities of their neighbors are such that Japan has to have its own, you know what I mean?

 

LINDSAY:
Well, I think Chinese behavior can be determinative in all of this, and much of it is driven by the fact that China has been for the last five to ten years acting belligerently. And not just the Japanese have noticed that.

 

SMITH:
And the danger as we all know in any society, democratic or otherwise, is that public sentiment, public fear, public, we could call it nationalism, but I want to be more specific, like fear and anxiety about your own security often propels public sentiment to go in directions that not always rational thought processes about what's the best policy. So I'm not saying Japan is any more vulnerable to that than we are, or the Chinese are, but I think we are entering, or we have begun to see in northeast Asia, but perhaps Asia writ large, an arms race, if you will, that will ultimately be reverberating throughout the publics of all of our countries. And so policymakers are going to have to be very astute and listen keenly to the tone and tenor and not just focus simply on what makes military sense over time. So we've got a lot of things to talk about in the U.S.-Japan alliance going forward.

 

LINDSAY:
It sounds like, Sheila, we're going to have occasion to come back into the podcast studio and chat about U.S.-Japanese relations.

 

SMITH:
I hope so. Thank you, Jim, for having me.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I want to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Sheila Smith, the John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. And again, Sheila, just a delight to chat.

 

SMITH:
Always a pleasure, Jim. Thank you.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the hosts or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.