With his visit to Taipei early last month as vice president of Japan’s super ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), former Japanese prime minister Taro Aso delivered a speech at the Ketagalan Forum. The Japanese mainstream media reported it with cherry-picked quotations and truncated video footage, as if he emphasized the importance of Japan’s “will to fight” alongside the US and Taiwan to deter China from waging a regional war centered on Taiwan.
A significant portion of the Japanese public felt uneasy as it sensed an abrupt change in policy without any meaningful public debate and understanding regarding the longtime normative and constitutional-legal constraints. This certainly had a limited but non-negligible negative impact on good Japan-Taiwan relations.
On the other hand, the informed public saw such a policy change as problematic, at least now, as the Japan Self-Defense Forces still lack meaningful power projection capabilities as they have just begun budgeting for the new Defense Build-up Plan, while suffering the perennial defense personnel shortage, severely compounded by the Japan’s declining birthrate and aging population.
Known to speak frankly, often with rough language, Aso, however, talked for about 38 minutes, with a solid and balanced tone while referring to Japan’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” vision and its Three Strategy Documents from December last year. More specifically, he also mentioned the importance of the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait and the common understanding thereof widely shared among liberal democracies, as exemplified by official records of the Japan-US Summit and the G7 Summit in Hiroshima in May.
Despite some rhetorical ambiguities, Aso’s overall message was clear and lucid enough in conveying that Tokyo would surely adhere to the pre-established policy. Thus, his message suggested that Japan should be determined to fight on the basis of rights to individual self-defense if there were an unprovoked attack against southwesternmost Japan — the Senkaku (Diaoyutais, 釣魚台列嶼), the Sakishima and the wider Okinawa Islands — which are in the wider Taiwan theater of operation; Japan shall provide necessary rear and logistical support for US armed forces that fight to defend Taiwan; despite strong constitutional constraints against the exercise of rights of collective self-defense, Japan shall employ its minimum necessary warfighting capability for defending such US forces as a limited exercise of its rights.
Naturally, Beijing carefully monitored Aso’s visit to Taipei and immediately gave strong criticism of his speech, especially his phrases “Japan’s will to fight” for the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait. Certainly, Aso reconfirmed, rather than changed, the pre-established policy, with more unequivocal language than ever. Yet, with his speech delivered in Taipei and in the prelude to Taiwan’s next presidential and legislative elections to be held next January, a most politically sensitive timing and place from Beijing’s view, he also committed marked risk to unnecessarily provoke China at a stage in which Japan has not yet attained necessary long-range power projection weapons and munitions, both in quality and quantity, as itemized in the Defense Build-up Plan. The state of affairs would unlikely make the country a top dog in the event of a war with China. He could have made a similar speech once Japan completed necessary arms buildups.
Consequently, Aso spoke tough, rather than speaking softly and carrying a big stick — a rule of thumb in foreign and security policy. In the speech, he made mention of the three necessary conditions for effective deterrence: possession of sufficient military capability to retaliate against a target country, unambiguous intention to do that with wide popular support if necessary and adequate communication of such capability and intention with the country. In reality, however, his speech failed to satisfy the first condition. True, it could be satisfied with the buttress of US military power, but Aso referred little to the central importance of the Japan-US bilateral alliance.
On the contrary, Aso focused primarily on Japan’s own policy line with the implicit but evident assumption that within the Japan-US alliance framework, the country cannot but play a far more active security role than before. This is because the US has undergone relative decline as a military superpower in general, and has increasingly suffered fiscal and logistical constraints consequent to the cumulative burdens from the protracted war in Ukraine in particular, and is turning inward due to entrenched domestic political strife between globalists and populists.
Aso’s speech was based on a proper and solid politico-strategic line of thinking, but failed to satisfy the very conditions of deterrence that he himself emphasized. Thus, it remains to be seen if Aso’s message had any meaningful deterrent effect on Beijing. Clearly, Aso slacked off at the end. For Taipei, there is a good lesson to learn about the difficulty inherent in utilizing informal conference diplomacy.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University (Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku) in Osaka, now with its summer research grant at the NCCU-IIR Taiwan Center for Security Studies.
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