I was asked to address the provocative questions of whether the alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States is a credible model for the form that the US-Japan alliance might take in future, and what would need to happen in order for that goal to be realised.
My argument, in summary, is that although one has to be very careful to avoid getting caught up in the sometimes exaggerated rhetoric about the ’Special Relationship’ between Britain and America, many of the political underpinnings and functional manifestations of that alliance are indeed unique and cannot easily be replicated by others. The goal of achieving a close equivalence between Britain and Japan in their respective relationships with the United States at present does not appear to be a realistic one. This said, there nevertheless is scope for Japan and the United States to progress gradually in that general direction: this conference itself is testimony to the fact that there is interest on both sides in at least investigating, iteratively and incrementally, deeper strategic collaboration that stops short of what one might call ‘the British extreme‘. And because Japan must manage especially acute domestic political challenges and regional strategic dilemmas in defining the form and scope of its evolving relationship with the United States, such gradualism is probably not only prudent but desirable.
Functional considerations.
The functional components of the strategic alliance between Britain and America are the most tangible, and therefore the easiest to audit with reference to the case of Japan. There are at least four main areas that warrant comment. Firstly, in addition to the traditionally very tight contacts between respective executive branches of government, there is a unique degree of integration between the British and American defence and foreign policy bureaucracies. Intensive programmes of exchanges and secondments between ministries and departments have, alongside other initiatives, facilitated a great ease of communication and fostered a culture of constant consultation. For British defence officials and diplomats, at least, it is inconceivable to discuss a major policy question without giving thought to the likely and actual views of Washington, and how the United States can most effectively be brought into the equation. Although Japan and the US of course enjoy very strong contacts, the British-American alliance is conceived in the broadest strategic terms and thus touches on a larger number of policy issues. The bureaucratic integration is more intense and forms of collaboration are more numerous as a result.
Secondly, although there are vast disparities in the size of forces, their technological sophistication and in their range of capabilities, Britain and the United States aspire to a great degree of military interoperability or at least complimentarity. For the British, this means configuring forces to maintain a significant expeditionary war-fighting capacity that will allow Britain to contribute to regional contingencies alongside American allies, as well as conduct independent operations -- as in the case of the stabilisation of Sierra Leone, for instance -- when that is appropriate and required. The linkages between respective military services, such as that between the British and American navies, have grown famously intimate as a result of joint operations and joint planning and training. The trend in Britain’s military posture that places emphasis on expeditionary operations will be confirmed in the prospective commissioning of two large aircraft carriers. These will augment the capacity to project power globally. For well-known constitutional and political reasons, and despite recent Japanese deployments to Iraq and the South Asian theatre of operations, Japan’s very capable forces are not yet significantly configured along such expeditionary lines. And they seem unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future.
Thirdly, and related to the question of military interoperability, there exists a high level of defence-industrial collaboration between Britain and America, which is reflected in transatlantic cross-ownership of defence corporations, joint research and development programmes and coordinated production of defence technology. In the defence industry, as elsewhere, Britain has cast off any notions of techno-nationalism and sought out America as a natural commercial partner. In Japan, by contrast, well-established legal and constitutional constraints on international defence transfers and collaboration are infinitely more constricted at present.
Finally, one of the most prominent functional features of the British and American alliance is the interaction achieved between respective intelligence establishments. Again, as in the case of military forces, there are substantial disparities in scale and reach. But Britain retains a credible and competent foreign intelligence capacity that makes it able to take full part in efforts to arrive at common assessments of actual or potential threats and the measures needed to counter them. Although Japan has recently demonstrated interest in acquiring greater independent intelligence capacities, including through the development of reconnaissance satellites, it will be some considerable time before these might materialise and Japan is able to play a full and equal part in intelligence debates.
Inevitably, each of these manifestations of the British-American relationship tends to reinforce the other and give logic to the alliance. But the foundations of the alliance go beyond functional convenience, and this has to be borne in mind when considering the likely future evolution of the US-Japan alliance.
Alliance underpinnings.
The fundamental underpinnings of the British-American relationship are numerous, complex, often intangible and in many ways inimitable. Traditionally, the relationship is rooted in ethnic, linguistic and cultural affinities -- although, narrowly drawn notions of common identity have with time and demographic change in both countries lost some salience; common values and interests now matter more. Even so there remains a general, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated, impression that Britain and America today enjoy an identical, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ political economy and outlook.
Be that as it may, certain essential affinities did provide a kind of foundation on which was then grafted a history of intense diplomatic and military collaboration between Britain and America in the face of what were, to one or both of the powers, existential threats thrown up by the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War. The fact that this cooperation uniformly resulted in military victory or successes of other kinds only confirmed to each the continuing value of the relationship; in Britain, certainly, this has been the subject of a broad bipartisan political consensus for many decades. Success also produced the flexibility to redirect and recalibrate the alliance to meet new threats as they emerged.
In the case of Japan, a similar commonality with the US of values and interests, a Cold War record of successful cooperation, and subsequently useful collaboration in the ‘war on terror’, all in principle provide a strong basis for meeting future security challenges together. Yet, in practice, there are many constraints to taking the alliance forward towards ‘the British extreme’ that arise from the fact that Japan‘s national security psychology, self-image and political tolerances contrast, sometimes quite sharply, with those of both the United States and the United Kingdom.
America and Britain plainly proceed from a sense of themselves, with more justification in the American than in the British case, as truly global actors with global interests and reach. Partly because of historical experience and partly because of their assessment that the most urgent contemporary threats are trans-national in nature, they are both highly extrovert powers that deride the more parochial strategic mindsets of others as reckless and irresponsible. With this comes an appetite for decisive action and intervention; and a sense that in international security positive outcomes should be valued over prolonged and sometimes ambiguous processes. Unlike Japan, neither Britain nor America face especially onerous constitutional restrictions on such action or any insuperable historical anxieties about it -- quite the contrary, in fact.
The British-American alliance is defined by the very particular tendency of both sides not only to broadly agree in their assessments of threats but also the measures required to deal with them. While it is clear that Japan and America’s views on the hierarchy of international threats also converge, there is arguably less unanimity concerning preferred policy responses. In particular, whereas Britain and America are generally in agreement on the role of the use of force in settling international disputes and meeting threats, and of the occasional necessity of conducting military and humanitarian interventions outside of the most explicit authorisations of the UN Security Council, Japan has a rather different sense of the salience of international institutions and the balance that ought to be struck in diplomacy between coercion and enticement.
Japan’s interest in Permanent Membership of the UN Security Council demonstrates its growing desire to take up additional global responsibilities after a period when it had, at least in security if not in economic terms, tended to confine its attention to its immediate regional vicinity. The new Japanese extroversion is to be welcomed as a positive advance. But it also seems reasonable, in view of its history and its present political disposition, to assume that Japan would, in the tone and the content of its diplomacy, perhaps be a rather different kind of Security Council Member than America and Britain. And while the Koizumi administration has in its general geopolitical extroversion and activism broken new ground in recent years, this has not been an uncontroversial process either in Japan or in Asia more widely. It still seems appropriate, moreover, to question whether those recent developments in Japanese foreign and security policy are specific to the temperament and views of Prime Minister Koizumi and the exceptional circumstances of the post 9/11 period, rather than expressions of much deeper stirrings whose effects on Japan’s security posture will be radical and permanent.
Dilemmas.
Even Britain, for all the values and history it shares with the United States, always approached its deepening alliance with America to some degree in unsentimental, realist terms. As Japan contemplates the future evolution of its own relationship with the US, it too will inevitably have to keep returning to the questions of what, precisely, the alliance is for and what the broader geopolitical consequences of its further development and deepening might be.
For London, the answers were starkly clear. Its exceptionally tight alliance with the US was cemented in the face of existential threats posed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Then, after the Suez crisis, when American disapproval demonstrated the now limited scope for independent British adventurism, London acquiesced to the reality of American power and sought to influence and use that power to project Britain’s own interests and protect its standing in the world. No doubt Washington saw its relationship with Britain in a similarly instrumental light, encouraging a robust British defence posture during the Cold War to deter the Soviet Union. Britain’s emphasis on its relations with America was initially accompanied by diffidence towards the project of European integration and a marginalisation from it. It is only more recently that Britain has attempted to strike a form of balance, using its ties to Washington to gain influence in Europe, and employing improved European connections to underline Britain’s continuing usefulness to America.
For Japan, the issues are not so clear cut and the dilemmas are more acute. While at risk -- as we all are -- from terrorism and proliferation, Japan does not at present face existential threats that would argue for a revolutionary change in its defence posture and its alliance with the United States. Regional dangers, such as those that might be posed by a rising China and a nuclearising North Korea, are credible but ambiguous. In thinking about a precautionary deepening of its defence ties with the US to guard against these ambiguous threats, Japan will necessarily have to be mindful of the unwelcome reactions this process might elicit from China and North Korea, as well as from other Asian states that are not yet reconciled to the idea that Japan should more actively contribute to maintaining regional peace and security. The need to prepare regional and domestic opinion for a deepening of the alliance, and to settle on a common view of its purpose and scope, therefore all argue for an incremental approach. The transformation of the US-Japan alliance would prove more durable as a result.
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