December 2008

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Executive Summary

For nearly five decades, the U.S.-Japanese alliance has underwritten peace and security in the Asia Pacific. The alliance has allowed for the forward basing of tens of thousands of American troops and cooperation between the two countries on a wide range of security issues. The alliance is being tested today by the economic and military rise of China, the continuing crisis in North Korea, and the struggle to maintain the tide of democratic reform in the Asia-Pacific region.

As Asia undergoes these changes, the United States and Japan must reorient their partnership to cooperate in supporting political and economic liberalization in the region. Washington and Tokyo should seek to enhance and promote the prospect that democracy, free markets, and transparent security policies become the norm in Asia during the twenty-first century. In short, the U.S.-Japanese alliance should be the primary instrument of both countries in managing, hedging against, and taking advantage of the myriad changes in Asia.

The principal tasks for Washington and Tokyo are to develop new capabilities, tear down barriers to security cooperation, and develop shared concepts of military operations to meet new challenges in Asia and beyond. This agenda is an ambitious one, but it is also necessary.
Over the past decade, the United States and Japan have taken the first steps in responding to these challenges, gradually transforming the alliance to address a new agenda. However, this attempt at alliance transformation has been obstructed consistently by the regime of restrictions placed on Japan's security policy in its postwar constitution more than six decades ago, and it has lost steam since the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi. From this base of punctuated progress, it will fall to members of the next U.S. administration, working with their Japanese counterparts, to reestablish progress and reform.

If the United States and Japan address the capability gaps within the alliance, they will find that the weaknesses in planning are reflected in an inability to execute. Most of these capability gaps reflect upon the historical decision to differentiate between U.S. and Japanese roles in the alliance, a bifurcation that has been reinforced by a system of domestic legal restrictions on Japanese security operations.

There are four areas in which there is a growing or nascent requirement for combined operations between the United States and Japan: missile defense, the maintenance of air superiority, maritime security, and strike operations. These are the most sophisticated fields of contemporary military operations, and as the United States and Japan work to deepen cooperation in them, their actions will force them to address such fundamental questions in the relationship as the Japanese ban on collective self-defense.

Ultimately, deploying a jointly capable military force is in the service of a political goal: nurturing a stable and productive Asia-Pacific environment. One way to achieve that goal is to adjust the hub-and-spoke alliance system toward a more multilateral arrangement among U.S. allies. The alliance must be the bedrock for organizing discussions, coordination, and even planning among two different trilateral groupings: South Korea-Japan-United States and Australia-Japan-United States.

Japan has made impressive progress in reforming its national security mechanisms over the past decade. Tokyo today has far more tools with which to define and protect its national interests and more experience and willingness to work with its American partner. Yet there is much more that Japanese policymakers can do to realize the vision of becoming a fully capable actor engaged in regional and global security and political issues.

Tokyo should address legal barriers by adopting general legislation for the international deployment of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, reform and reorganize the national security bureaucracy from the prime minister's office through the Ministry of Defense, organize a secure and efficient intelligence-sharing mechanism both within the government and in the alliance, and organize the defense committees of the Diet to manage a more transparent and informed debate of Japan's national security. Most important, perhaps, Tokyo must address the obstacle of its restrictions on collective self-defense, a range of prohibitions that mean that Japan is today largely incapable of providing assistance legally to the United States and other security partners, even in the dire event of a missile attack against the American or Japanese homelands.

For its part, the principal challenge for the United States is to facilitate Japan's transformation while maintaining its commitment to provide forward deterrence to Japan. These two roles are not only mutually compatible, but they also provide the only path to achieving shared security objectives.

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Michael Auslin is a resident scholar at AEI. Christopher Griffin is a legislative assistant in the Office of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-D-Conn.)