The newly elevated military initiatives of Japan’s alliance with the US are overstating camp confrontation, increasing the chance of conflict and threatening regional peace and stability.
In the April 2024 address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress by a Japanese leader in nine years, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stressed “unprecedented challenges” from China. China’s current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented challenge and the greatest strategic one, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large,” he stated.
Before his address to Congress, the Japanese prime minister and U.S. President Joe Biden revealed a series of initiatives aimed at heightening military and economic collaboration between their nations. Currently, Japan is not just pursuing the lead of the United States. Instead, Japan wants to recreate a leading role in its relationship with China and the United States, recalling the so-called ‘autonomy,’ and deepening the competitive relationship between China and the United States.
Japan also plans to use such rhetoric to break through the constitutional rules and become a country with the right to initiate war. For Japan, one of the most important attractions is the issue of “sovereignty” over the Diaoyu Islands. The problem dates back to 2012 when the cabinet of former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda unilaterally declared the “nationalization” of the Diaoyu Islands. Since then, Chinese law enforcement patrols have been standardised for more than a decade. Japan saw China as its most significant strategic challenge and was incapable of stopping it at the time, so it incorporated a larger strategic net to cover China, such as building up its military power to gain local advantages.
Japan persists in playing up the “China threat theory” because it wants to utilise it to break through constitutional limitations and become a country that “has the right to initiate wars. During Kishida’s journey to the U.S., an announcement, made by the White House signalling the review of collaboration with Japan “on AUKUS Pillar II developed capability projects,” has raised anxiety in the international community. This is the first time since the building of the alliance in September 2021 that the three countries have made such a statement. Japanese officials responded by stating they “recognized” the importance of AUKUS.
AUKUS, a trilateral security cooperation for the Indo-Pacific region between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US, encompasses two main pillars. While the first pillar circles around the deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia and the joint action and construction of the next generation of nuclear submarines, the second pillar concentrates on delivering advanced capabilities and sharing technologies across a range of dimensions including quantum computing, undersea, hypersonic, artificial intelligence and cyber technologies.
At the strategic level, these nations also have their motives. The United States regards AUKUS as a critical part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, and wants to draw more allies, especially Japan, which owns advanced technology and is always breaking through constitutional constraints, to achieve its purpose of “containing China.”
Japan, on the other hand, desires to use AUKUS as a new tool to follow its military agenda in the Asia-Pacific and to control China. Australia has not been very involved in the past because it was worried that a new member would hinder its own submarine research and development program. However, due to the severe delay in the progress of the first pillar of partnership, the Australian side had to look forward to the second post of cooperation and decided to keep the inclusion of Japan.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell suggested that AUKUS submarines could be deployed in a variety of scenarios, including in “cross-Straits circumstances.” The U.S. attempt to connect the AUKUS situation to “cross-Straits circumstances” is a means to expand its control over the Asia-Pacific region and its partners, and also to intensify conflict and an arms race in the region. The ultimate purpose is to leverage resources from other nations to increase U.S. nuclear submarine technology and support deployment in the region. Instead of caring whether Australia receives nuclear-powered submarines or not, the U.S. only oversees how much money it can pull from these countries and whether it can facilitate the development of its nuclear submarine industry.
