Japan’s expanding role as a strategic hub across East Asia and in the growing links between the Atlantic and Pacific is coming into sharper focus this week as it prepares to host a high-stakes Group of Seven summit.
Japanese media reported last week that the missile defense radar networks of Japan and South Korea are to be interlinked via the United States. The connection signals the emergence of a tangible, U.S.-sponsored trilateral defense cooperation bloc off China’s eastern flank.
Separately, Tokyo’s foreign minister revealed last week that NATO is discussing the establishment of a liaison office in Japan, a tightening of ties between the Western military alliance and Europe and the budding East Asian defensive coalition.
Both moves are likely to generate high-fives in the Pentagon. They signal that the push to build an effective partnership between the often-squabbling East Asian democracies is bearing fruit, and they mark milestones in Japan’s incremental but unmistakable evolution from a pacifist nation to an active security partner with Washington.
In 2015, Tokyo amended its post-World War II constitution to expand the role of its military and allow the defense of allies. Since 2018, Japan has been mobilizing expeditionary assets beyond its borders, notably with marine brigades and F-35 aircraft carriers. In 2022, Japan announced the acquisition of long-range cruise missiles and plans to double its defense budget by 2027.
Japan has not acted in a vacuum. The actions of potential adversaries have empowered the arguments of Tokyo hawks: China’s arms buildup, North Korea’s ever-expanding arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles and Russia’s shattering of the status quo with its invasion of Ukraine.
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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will host President Biden and the leaders of other leading industrial nations for three days starting Friday in his constituency, Hiroshima. That city was obliterated by the U.S. atomic strike in 1945, but the anti-nuclear message that G-7 leaders hope to project now is aimed squarely at Moscow.
“While Russia implied the use of nuclear weapons in its aggression against Ukraine, the 77 years of history since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, during which time no nuclear weapons have been used, must not be ignored,” Mr. Kishida wrote on the Japanese Foreign Ministry website.
Thin red line of radars
In a widely noticed article this month, Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported that Japan, South Korea and the U.S. would link their missile-defense radar networks via the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, allowing real-time data sharing on threats such as North Korean ballistic missile tests.
South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Jeon Ha-gyu told reporters that discussions are continuing, but reports say an agreement could be reached by June.
South Korea and Japan have a long, fraught political, cultural and diplomatic relationship. No alliance unites Seoul and Tokyo, forcing Washington to step in. The proposed trilateral linkage would eliminate blind spots in radar coverage and the time lag in transferring and sharing data.
While ostensibly aimed at North Korea, the coordinated radar cordon looks likely to unsettle China, which reacted furiously to the 2017 deployment of a U.S. THAAD anti-missile battery in South Korea as a threat to Beijing’s nuclear deterrence capability.
That year, South Korean President Moon Jae-in floated the “three nos” to Chinese President Xi Jinping to calm the diplomatic waters: no more THAAD, no signing up with a U.S.-led missile defense system and no joining a trilateral alliance with Japan.
The formality of the “Three Nos” remains unclear, but Beijing warned Seoul last year that it expects the Moon pledges to be honored. Conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, who succeeded Mr. Moon in 2022, apparently does not feel bound by his predecessor’s offer.
The development is the fruit of warming ties between Seoul and Tokyo, largely pushed by Mr. Yoon. The South Korean president visited Tokyo last month, and Mr. Kishida traveled to Seoul this month.
Tokyo and Brussels
On another front, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi confirmed in an interview with CNN on Wednesday that Tokyo plans to invite NATO to open the organization’s first Asian office. He said discussions are underway but the details have not been fully worked out.
Mr. Hayashi said, “The reason why we are discussing this is that since the aggression by Russia to Ukraine, the world [has] become more unstable.”
According to Japanese media, Mr. Kishida and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg first discussed the liaison office during Mr. Stoltenberg’s Asia tour in January. Japan also plans to open a mission to NATO, led by an official at the ambassador level.
European and East Asian defense ties already extend to joint cybersecurity, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had diplomatic and military reverberations in both theaters.
NATO invited Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to attend its Madrid conference last year. Because of their defense treaties with the U.S. and thousands of American troops in their territories, Japan and South Korea already use many U.S.- and NATO-standard systems.
That enables NATO forces to work smoothly with Japanese and South Korean counterparts. Small contingents of British troops, including marine commandos and paratroops, have drilled with Japanese and South Korean forces this year.
Crucially, the increasing interoperability also allows the two Asian manufacturing powerhouses to sell weapons and equipment to the armed forces of NATO members.
South Korea last year announced an arms sale to Poland worth as much as $18 billion. It includes combat aircraft, fleets of tanks and self-propelled and rocket artillery. Seoul is sending a reported 500,000 155 mm artillery shells to the Pentagon.
As Tokyo ramps up its defense sector, Japan’s Mitsubishi has entered a commercial alliance with NATO members Italy and Britain to jointly design and build next-generation stealth fighters by 2035. The three have agreed to merge their separate stealth-fighter programs into one.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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