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Concerns over the durability of the US-Japan alliance and the threat of tariffs will loom large in Tokyo this week as Donald Trump’s defence secretary visits for high-level talks.
Pete Hegseth will meet defence minister Gen Nakatani on Sunday to discuss deeper military collaboration in a meeting that Nakatani said would have “great significance” for Japan’s security. Japanese officials said the talks could cover whether Tokyo would raise its planned spending on defence.
Hegseth’s trip comes a month after Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba met the US president at the White House. Tokyo viewed that meeting as a big success, but officials and foreign policy experts said Japan, as with US allies from Canada to Germany, has grown more nervous about their alliance.
“It’s an unsettled time in Tokyo, and the euphoria over Ishiba’s visit to the White House in February is a distant memory,” said Christopher Johnstone, a former top National Security Council now at The Asia Group consultancy.
While Tokyo is worried about Trump imposing tariffs on Japan on April 2 — when the US president has vowed to unveil levies on trading partners — officials are also nervous because of recent comments from the administration about burden sharing.
“Secretary Hegseth’s visit this week will spotlight the fundamental question of whether a meaningful alliance agenda is possible with the threat of tariffs looming in the background,” Johnstone added.
In Washington, Trump and Ishiba vowed to “pursue a new golden age for US-Japan relations”. Weeks later, Trump made Tokyo anxious by resurrecting previous concerns about the countries’ mutual defence treaty.
“We have a great relationship with Japan, but we have an interesting deal with Japan that we have to protect them, but they don’t have to protect us,” Trump said.
One Japanese official said Tokyo was facing a difficult time because some of the country’s assumptions about the alliance in recent decades “suddenly look like they are not supported by the language coming out of the White House”.
He said officials in Tokyo were splitting into one camp that believed any potential problems for the alliance were further in the future, and a second that believed the alliance was already in a serious crisis.
“It is very hard to say that you can definitely rely on the US now, and as soon as you allow that thought to exist, you have to admit that Japan needs to do a lot more to defend itself,” the official said.
In another bad omen, Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for under-secretary of defence, said Japan should boost defence spending beyond the current target of 2 per cent of GDP by 2027. George Glass, the nominee for US ambassador to Japan, said Washington would talk to Tokyo about paying more to defray the cost of keeping American troops in the country.
In an interview, Japan’s finance minister Katsunobu Kato said Tokyo would “relentlessly look into ways to reinforce deterrence and response capabilities at its own initiative”. But setting a target now would be premature, he added.
“[Setting] a numerical target first is not how it works,” Kato told the Financial Times. “We will have to take into consideration how the security model will evolve over the next 10 years, and we will add up necessary and concrete defence spending that will be necessary for Japan over the next 10 years.”
Ken Weinstein, a Japan expert at the Hudson Institute, said Trump was putting more pressure on Japan than in his first term, when he developed a fondness for then prime minister Shinzo Abe.
“Trump’s deep respect for his late friend, Shinzo Abe, makes him instinctively sympathetic to Japan. But the Trump 2.0 agenda makes significantly higher demands of our allies,” he said. “Trump is asking Japan to step up on a number of issues — investment, tariffs and Alaskan LNG — in order to turn Japan into our closest partner.”
US media recently said the Pentagon might reconsider an existing plan to upgrade the alliance with Japan to bolster joint operational planning. This raised eyebrows in Tokyo, but people familiar with the situation suggested it was a routine evaluation by an incoming administration.
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“After the president questioned the logic of the security treaty earlier this month, Tokyo will be looking for an affirmation of the US commitment to Japan’s defence — including next steps in strengthening the command relationship between US and Japanese forces,” said Johnstone at The Asia Group.
Japan was stunned last week when Trump said that the US would sell a toned-down version of the F-47, a new fighter jet being developed by Boeing, to allies because “someday maybe they’re not our allies”.
“In the past, Japan would have taken a phrase like that and guessed or hoped that Japan was not included in the theoretical list of non-reliable allies,” the Japanese official said. “The difficulty now is that we just don’t know how to translate what is being said.”
AloJapan.com