Since Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office, there has been an escalation in tensions with China in the East China Sea.
Abe has overseen national security strategic shifts — establishing the National Security Conference, revising the National Defense Program Guidelines and reinterpreting the country’s pacifist constitution to allow the Japan Self-Defense Forces to exercise collective self-defense.
Many view this as an opportunity for Taiwan to rewrite its national security relationship with Japan, saying Taiwan should try to purchase submarines from Japan, or encourage Japan to enact its own version of the US’ Taiwan Relations Act. Nevertheless, amid this optimism, Taiwan must make a practical assessment of the structural limitations of any security cooperation with Japan.
Your enemy’s enemies are not necessarily your friends, especially within the complex Asia-Pacific security situation, where alienating others is not advisable. In China, Taiwan and Japan have a shared adversary, but for different reasons: The tensions between Japan and China are born of different factors from the fraught complexities plaguing cross-strait relations. The latter would prove a headache for Tokyo, while the former, with their frequent nationalist overtones, would give Taipei pause.
Therefore, even if Japan is readjusting its strategic considerations, it remains difficult, especially in the short-term, for Japan to enter into a cooperative relationship with Taiwan. To expect Japan to sell Taiwan weapons that even the US, with its legal obligations, is reluctant to commit to, is overly optimistic.
Under self-imposed constraints in Japan’s post-war constitution, Japan has limited itself to tending its own backyard in terms of military matters.
Taiwan and Japan have maintained amicable bilateral trade and cultural ties, but the two countries have been slightly cooler on cooperation on national security issues, due to differences in their circumstances. There has been little practical cooperation beyond sharing intelligence and meetings between various personnel.
Abe’s focus has been on furthering Japan’s military alliance with the US to complement cooperative initiatives with Pacific rim countries like Australia and the Philippines, reinforcing the US’ strategic shift of focus to the Asia-Pacific, but this has also annoyed a China set on being more dominant in the region.
Japan ruffling China’s feathers will not help Taiwan’s case. The thing that will help Taiwan is how it highlights anew the nation’s geo-strategic importance. Nothing has changed in Taiwan’s size or geographical coordinates, but its geo-strategic importance depends upon how other nations view it within the context of their own strategic planning.
For Tokyo, trying to reassert its geo-strategic gravity in the Asia-Pacific, Taiwan’s importance is amplified by its very proximity, compared with Guam, Washington or Canberra, and its greater significance than countries like the Philippines, despite their actually being closer than Taiwan.
Taiwan’s national defense must go beyond the traditional framework, and be expanded from just within the Taiwan Strait context to the wider Asia-Pacific, and from being limited to territorial security to encompassing regional security.
The nation needs to be more engaged internationally, maintaining security in shipping lanes in the open seas and being more involved in humanitarian aid, environmental protection and data security, and thereby gradually creating the environment and need for systematic security cooperation with Japan.
Otherwise, when friends come calling, they may be scared off by the trouble we could bring.
York Chen is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS