addressed Congress <\/a>in a joint meeting a year ago during his state visit to Washington.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is the crowning partnership of the Quad,\u201d the administration official said about Japan. \u201cThis suggests how the president views the Quad, how important it is, how central it has been to his vision of a deeper Indo-Pacific engagement. And at the heart of that \u2026is Japan. Everything that we\u2019re doing of purpose on the global stage, we\u2019re doing with Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tokyo moves away from pacifist policy<\/h3>\n
Beginning under Abe and picking up speed over the last decade, Tokyo has steadily moved away from its postwar pacifist defense policies. It agreed this year to purchase hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles and ended in late 2023 restrictions on the export of lethal weapons that are foreign-designed and Japanese-made. Tokyo has increased defense spending by 50 percent in the last two years, putting it on track to reach 2 percent of GDP in 2027, a level that would give it the third-largest military budget globally after the U.S. and China.<\/p>\n
Those changes, as well as a list of over 70 \u201cdeliverables\u201d that will be announced over the course of the Kishida visit, have combined to permanently alter the nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance, the Biden administration says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is probably the largest set of substantial, significant deliverables that we\u2019ve seen of its kind,\u201d the official said.<\/p>\n
The deliverables include an agreement to modernize the two countries\u2019 handling of command-and-control operations between U.S. forces deployed to Japan and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Japan hosts around 56,000 active duty U.S. troops, more than any other country.<\/p>\n
There are also agreements related to building an integrated missile defense network between Australia, the U.S., and Japan.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Japan will become the first outside nation invited to explore potential collaboration in joint technology development efforts under the trilateral security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., as was announced earlier this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe AUKUS partners are excited to begin their consultations with Japan towards possible inclusion in Pillar II,\u201d a second administration official said on the call, referring to next-generation military technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons that the trilateral arrangement hopes to cooperatively develop, produce, and use.<\/p>\n
It is not yet clear what, if any, Pillar II military technologies Japan would be involved in as part of AUKUS.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will take a portion of the 2024 calendar year before \u2026 the AUKUS Pillar II vision is fully fleshed out, that is with us being able to assign specific partners to specific Pillar II projects,\u201d the second official said. \u201cJapan brings a great deal to the table. That\u2019s why we are announcing that AUKUS partners want to begin consultations with Tokyo as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
AUKUS has broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers pressured the Biden administration last year to relax regulations that slowed-down the ability of British and Australian defense companies to collaborate with the Pentagon and the U.S. defense industry on developing new military technologies under Pillar II. Lawmakers are expected to be similarly eager to see U.S. regulations tweaked to allow Japan to participate in Pillar II.<\/p>\n
And with Tokyo easing restrictions on the export of Japanese-made weapons, Biden and Kishida are set to announce the formation of a joint military-industrial council that would evaluate areas where Japan can manufacture and sell weapons abroad at a time when U.S. domestic manufacturing capacity has been severely strained by multiple wars.<\/p>\n
\u201cJapan\u2019s industrial capacity and strength that had always been on the sidelines will come to bear on one of the weak points right now that we have, which is, we don\u2019t have really the bandwidth on the defense production capacity that we need for our strategic applications,\u201d said a third administration official.<\/p>\n
The Biden administration\u2019s desire to focus on defense manufacturing interdependence with Japan muddies the national security arguments of some congressional critics who don\u2019t want to see Japan\u2019s Nippon Steel Corp. acquire Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel Corp.<\/p>\n
Those critics, who include Democratic and Republican senators from Ohio and Pennsylvania, fear the Nippon-U.S. Steel deal could damage the U.S. defense industrial base if it eventually leads to the shuttering of domestic steel plants.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear whether the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the Treasury-led panel that reviews the national security implications of proposed foreign purchases of U.S. companies, has scrutinized the steel deal. CFIUS doesn\u2019t disclose what proposed foreign investment deals it is reviewing, but President Joe Biden said in a statement last month that it was \u201cvital\u201d that U.S. Steel \u201cremain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Administration officials on Tuesday said Biden wouldn\u2019t raise the U.S. Steel issue with Kishida and emphasized they see the bilateral relationship as much bigger and durable than whatever happens with the steel deal.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
\u00a92024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com<\/a>. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.<\/p>\nKeyWords:: 8b8f5fcb-8c63-4e36-91c6-b3d33ce2217a
\n8b8f5fcb 8c63 4e36 91c6 b3d33ce2217a
\nBC-CONGRESS-KISHIDA:CON
\nBC CONGRESS KISHIDA CON<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON \u2014 Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida\u2019s address to a joint meeting of Congress Thursday, along with the White House\u2019s red-carpet welcome for a state visit, is expected to underline how much the ground has shifted to bring the two nations closer together in a way that few thought possible when a previous Japanese leader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147111,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147110\/revisions\/147111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}