U.S. and Japan Deepen Alliance With Eye on Taiwan Strait

The top defense and foreign policy officials from the United States met with their Japanese counterparts on Wednesday to further strengthen ties and step up contingency planning to forestall a potential conflict with China.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada of Japan in Washington, D.C., for so-called "2+2" talks that reaffirmed alignment on issues of mutual concern, beginning with missile threats from North Korea and Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine in the near term, to the volatile balance across the Taiwan Strait.

The officials agreed on a modernized U.S.-Japan alliance "to prevail in a new era of strategic competition," the officials said in a joint statement released after the meeting.

In a joint press conference, Blinken said Washington "heartily" welcomed Japan's recently announced national defense and security strategies, in which Tokyo unveiled a 20 percent hike in defense spending to a record $55 billion starting this April. Over the next five years, Japan will spend 2 percent of GDP, meeting NATO standards, to push its budget to $73 billion, the third largest behind only the U.S. and China.

In a major shift from its constitutionally conservative approach to national security, Japan also intends to acquire "counterstrike" capability, enabling its weaponry to hit targets in China, which defense planners believe will act as a deterrent to North Korea, too. Tokyo has earmarked funds to develop long-range weapons capable of reaching 1,800 miles by the early 2030s, and to supplement the program with U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles in the intervening years.

Blinken hailed what he called a "remarkable convergence" in strategies between the two capitals, aimed at addressing long-running territorial disputes like Beijing's claim to the Tokyo-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, where an attack on Japanese forces would trigger American defense commitments and draw the U.S. into a conflict with China.

Beijing's plan to "reshape the international order to its benefit," employing political, economic, military and technological power to do so, "represents the greatest strategic challenge in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond," said the joint statement.

But nowhere are the allies more concerned about a military flare-up, and no issue requires more closeness and coordination, than in the Taiwan Strait, the 110-mile wide waters separating China and Taiwan. Taipei has rebuffed Beijing's claims to the island for seven decades, but the long-ruling Communist Party hasn't renounced the use of force to seize it at an indeterminate date in the future.

In recent years, officials in Tokyo have acknowledged in increasingly blunt terms that a war across the strait, through which Japan's commercial and energy supplies transit, could devastate the Japanese economy. The very real possibility of American intervention in a Chinese invasion also would conceivably involve Japan, which hosts some 50,000 U.S. troops.

Ministers at the 2+2 "reiterated the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as an indispensable element of security and prosperity in the international community," their statement said.

"When it comes to Taiwan, I think it's very important to note that what we've seen from China in recent years—not recent months, recent years—is, unfortunately, an effort to undermine the longstanding status quo, a status quo that's maintain peace and stability for decades," Blinken said.

Austin said China's uptick in military activity around the island sought to create "a new normal." "But whether or not that means that an invasion is imminent, I seriously doubt that," he said.

A series of recent war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank concluded that China would likely fail in an amphibious assault against Taiwan this decade, but that swift intervention by the U.S., aided by Japan, was among the conditions for allied success.

Wednesday's talks included a landmark agreement to extend the U.S.-Japan security treaty's Article 5 guarantees into space, in recognition of China's growing footprint. Attacks to, from or within space "could lead to the invocation" of mutual defense obligations, the resulting statement said.

For decades, officials in Washington have urged counterparts in Tokyo to contribute more actively to Japanese and regional security. With more interoperability between their forces and an even deeper political alignment between the two capitals, those concerns are no more.

"Japan also reaffirmed its determination to lead in its own defense and to expand its roles, in cooperation with the United States and other partners, to actively engage in maintaining regional peace and stability," the statement said.

Part of the stepped-up military engagement, with direct implications for a potential Taiwan contingency, involves the restructuring of U.S. Marine Corps forces based in Japan's southwestern Ryukyu, or Nansei, Islands, the closest of which, Yonaguni, lies just 70 miles from Taiwan.

On the Japanese island of Okinawa, where the bulk of forward-deployed American forces are located, Tokyo has approved the repurposing of an existing Marine unit into a Marine littoral regiment by 2025, following a similar model first established in Hawaii.

Each unit—a multi-domain force known as an MLR—will be equipped with the means to rapidly deploy across Japan's remote islands to surveil and blunt a Chinese invasion force with anti-ship missiles and other capabilities. The shake-up is part of the service's wider restructuring known as Force Design 2030.

Wang Wenbin, China's foreign ministry spokesperson, told reporters in Beijing on Thursday that U.S.-Japan cooperation "must not harm the interests of third parties or undermine the peace and stability in the region."

The wide-ranging 2+2 comes shortly before Fumio Kishida is due in Washington for his first visit to the White House as prime minister of Japan. He's currently on a five-nation tour that includes France, Italy, Britain and Canada to drum up support for Japan's presidency of the Group of Seven major industrial economies.

President Joe Biden, who visited Tokyo last May, will give Kishida much needed public backing following a decline in domestic popularity for the Japanese leader's cabinet, which hasn't decided how best to fund the extra defense spending.

A public opinion poll by Japan's public broadcaster NHK, published on Tuesday, showed Kishida's approval at 33 percent, down 3 points from last month. Some 61 percent of respondents said they wouldn't support tax hikes to finance the military budget, compared to 28 percent who said otherwise.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the U.S.-Japan alliance? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.