Remembering two titans in Japan-U.S. relations

Japan Times

09-05-2025

If the Japan-U.S. relationship has felt a little unstable in recent weeks, that's understandable. Two of its pillars, Richard Armitage and Joseph S. Nye Jr., have died.
Those two men labored for decades to advance that partnership, working in academia, business and the policy-making worlds to protect and promote our two nations' interests. Perhaps as no two other individuals have done, Nye and Armitage guided a bilateral relationship, creating a vision, using their knowledge, expertise and connections to bring it to life and then nurtured a generation of scholars, experts and officials who would give it substance and durability.
Joe Nye will probably be most remembered for conceptualizing the notion of 'soft power,' the ability of a country to win the hearts and minds of others through its culture and values rather than coercion, but he worked and wrote on a variety of issues and topics. He and political scientist Robert Keohane are credited with founding the international relations theory of liberal institutionalism, which argues that cooperation between states is feasible and can reduce competition and is one of the two leading fields in that discipline.
While Nye was invariably introduced as 'Harvard professor,' he served several times in government, in the Departments of Defense and State and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Intimate knowledge of how power actually flowed through those buildings informed his work and his thinking. It also explained why he was recognized as one of the most influential international relations scholars of his time and one of the most influential scholars in American foreign policy.
Armitage had an equally distinguished record of government service, serving too in the State Department, Pentagon and as special envoy to Jordan and Central European states in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Armitage Associates, his consulting firm, helped governments in those regions build military capacity to address changing security realities.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. meets with then-Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada in Munich, Germany, in February 2009. |
JIJI
Nye authored the Nye Report, a 1995 initiative launched during his tenure as assistant secretary of defense for international affairs in the Clinton administration. It famously warned that 'security is like oxygen: You do not tend to notice it until you begin to lose it.' It provided an anchor for the U.S. military presence in Asia at a time of geopolitical churn.
Concern that its message of partnership with Tokyo was being abandoned amid Japan's economic woes — the country was halfway through its first 'lost decade' — and the rise of China — then U.S. President Bill Clinton famously visited China for 10 days in 1998 and returned home without visiting Japan, prompting the notion of 'Japan passing' — Nye teamed up with Armitage to head a group of experts who pleaded for bipartisan support for the Japan-U.S. alliance before the 2000 presidential election.
The tone of the message shifted over the six Armitage-Nye reports issued between 2000 and 2024. The first were akin to wish lists for Japan, urging Tokyo to break out of its self-imposed reticence and assume a more prominent security role in the region, both on its own and in partnership with the United States. When several of its members joined the George W. Bush administration, Armitage among them (he served as deputy secretary of state) they were well placed to push that agenda. By the time the last report was issued, the emphasis had shifted. The authors applauded Japan's resurgence and commitment to protecting the regional order and their concern then focused on a seeming readiness of the U.S. to abandon the principles and policies that had secured regional peace, prosperity and stability.
Less visible, but no less important, was participation by Nye and Armitage (after his last job in government) in the track 1.5 Japan-U.S. security seminar that Pacific Forum co-hosted with the Japan Institute for International Affairs, a project that I ran for over a decade and, in retrospect, laid out a blueprint for the alliance that was eventually adopted. At those meetings, I observed firsthand their commitment to the alliance, their work to promote the partnership and the incredible regard that participants from both countries had for them.
My former boss, Ralph Cossa, likes to tell how, when he pressed a senior Japanese official to reconcile the man's call for Armitage to speak out on a particular issue with Tokyo's disdain for gaiatsu (foreign pressure), the official replied, 'when other Americans say things it's gaiatsu, but when Armitage says it, it's gospel.' (For the record, Armitage and Nye were the honorary co-chairmen of the Pacific Forum's International Advisory Board, where Cossa was president and I was executive director.)
At those meetings, I also saw their readiness to build an enduring partnership across generations. While the conferences included the major figures in both countries who worked on the alliance — both scholars and officials — Nye and Armitage invariably made time for our young fellows, setting aside meetings just for them to field questions and share perspectives. Those insights transcended the dry offerings typical of such conversations and instead drew on personal experiences that offered understanding of how such relationships really work.
Their good humor, unflagging optimism and commitment to building a stronger Japan-U.S. alliance continues to shape that partnership. It's evident not only in the documents that bear their names, but in the inspiration they provided to a generation of scholars and experts who have assumed positions of influence in this vital partnership.
Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. His new book on the geopolitics of high tech is expected to come out from Hurst Publishers this fall.