Underwriting the US-Japan Alliance

Introduction by Dr Michael J. Green

The United States Studies Centre is pleased to work with the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies to publish this collection of seven decades of bilateral agreements and joint statements that underpin the unbreakable US-Australia alliance.

I have research, taught, and published on the US-Japan alliance and served in positions responsible for alliance management in the Pentagon and the National Security Council since the 1990s. I wish I had been able to utilise exactly this sort of volume over those years. Now thanks to the efforts of John Bradford and Michael M. Bosak at the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies, students and alliance managers will have quick access to seven decades of foundational agreements and joint statements that underpin the US-Japan Alliance.

Whether the reader is a student in international relations at a small American liberal arts college or the Chief of the Japan Maritime Staff Office, we hope this resource contributes to a more historically and institutionally informed appreciation of the alliance – including the internal and international challenges both countries have had to navigate over the years to establish what large majorities in both publics now recognise to be a pillar of stability for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

When I began studying the US-Japan alliance, the Cold War was ending and many scholars warned me that I would be working on a historical relic. How wrong they were. But as the strategic environment becomes more contested and the United States and Japan come to depend on each other even more for deterrence, forward presence, missile defence, and defence production – and to compete together in new domains like economic security, space or cyber – there will be much more work to do.

The historian Richard Neusdtadt argued that good strategy requires “thinking in time.” Not every reader will go through this volume from beginning to end, but if they do, they will gain insights into the evolution of the alliance that will better inform their thinking about strategy and policy going forward. A case in point – when I was tasked by Assistant Secretary of Defence Joe Nye with developing an approach to reviewing the US-Japan Defence Guidelines in the 1990s, I was encouraged to begin with a thorough review of history to understand how the Guidelines had been constructed in the 1970s. Most officials were focused on the immediate demands of the emerging strategic environment or their recent history with the frustratingly inadequate Guidelines then on the books, but Nye understood that we needed to “think in time” to make a case for reviewing the Guidelines that took into account the institutional context. We interviewed the retired action officers responsible for the original negotiations, gained access to the bilateral documents, and worked with colleagues across the Pentagon to develop a theory of the case for revising the original 1978 Defence Guidelines that aligned with the trajectory of strategic thinking but accounted for institutional and political constraints. When the Guidelines were reviewed again two decades later as part of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s recognition of Japan’s right of collective self-defence, the case was again made in that historical and institutional context.Abe did not throw away precedent – he aligned legal interpretations and policy with modern circumstances.