By Ankit Panda
At what cost to the U.S.-Japan alliance will Shinzo Abe pursue his defense reforms?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems determined to push through a national security in agenda that would put to end Japan’s post-war pacifism, at least in the form that Japan’s citizens have come to know it. Despite the best efforts of Abe and his colleagues in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s public and opposition legislators are determined not to let Japan’s constitutionally enshrined pacifism go gentle into that good night. Last week’s crucial vote in the House of Representatives–the lower house of Japan’s bicameral legislature–revealed the deep fissures in Japan around Abe’s national security agenda. The legislative package passed, but at great cost–protest and opposition uproar reached unseen peaks.
A casualty of Abe’s determination to get this package of 11 security-related bills through both houses of the Diet could be nothing less than the very fabric of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Observers stateside have admired Abe’s impulse to rearrange the burdens of the alliances by letting Japan play a more active role. Abe’s dynamism has taken this alliance to a tipping point unlike one seen since Japanese Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki and U.S. President Ronald Reagan laid out the contours of the “sword and shield” alliance that stood largely unchanged for nearly three decades. (Yasuhiro Nakasone later would utter the words “unsinkable aircraft carrier” as a characterization of Japan’s islands as immutable foundations of American power projection in the Pacific.)
What Abe (and the broader LDP-Komeito coalition) seem not to have fully considered is the longer term effects of pushing through constitutionally dubious legislation on broader Japanese public opinion toward the United States and the U.S.-Japan alliance. Abe, as prime minister, should first be concerned with his duty to the Japanese people as his constituents, but he seems to be equally (if not more) concerned with his “constituents” in the United States.
Read the full story at The Diplomat