Bill Emmott: Japan should lead regional collaboration to cope with Trump 'typhoon'

The Mainichi

26-07-2025

By Bill Emmott, independent writer, lecturer and international affairs consultant
During all the decades of the U.S.-Japan security alliance, which has been one of the closest security partnerships anywhere in the world, Japan has had to worry about two contradictory dangers: abandonment and entrapment. Abandonment would involve Japan's interests being ignored by its partner amid a deal with one of its enemies; entrapment would mean being forced to fight alongside the United States in a war chosen by the Americans but not by the Japanese.
These worries about extreme outcomes have tended to alternate, depending on the political mood in Washington, DC, at the time. Yet currently Japan finds itself worrying about both abandonment and entrapment simultaneously. This may be as good a sign as any that the Trump administration represents a sharp break with the postwar past.
The entrapment fear has always felt the likelier danger. It has now reared its head again in a surprising way, as senior US defence officials have been reported to have been pressing Japan and Australia to make explicit commitments about whether they would fight to defend Taiwan in the event of an attempted Chinese invasion or coercion. The surprise is that American officials are pressing such close allies for an explicit commitment when not even the United States itself, and especially not its Commander in Chief, President Donald Trump, has made its own intentions clear.
This is not a total break with recent American administrations, but it does put Japan in a potentially awkward position. During the Biden administration a mutual concern over the security and stability of Taiwan did begin to feature in the US-Japan communiques issued after meetings between the Japanese prime minister and the U.S. president, showing that some sort of explicit commitment to working together to preserve the status quo was being sought by the United States.
However, that is not the same, at least not politically the same, as actually committing yourself to fight a future war, in circumstances that cannot be predicted and without knowing what America's own stance would be. To do so would be politically extremely difficult, especially for a government that currently lacks a majority in the Diet. Beyond domestic politics, the immediate risk would not be of a war itself but rather of such a commitment causing a further worsening of Japan's relations with China, to no obvious purpose.
Abandonment has always looked the less likely of the twin dangers, for having Japan as its largest overseas military base has mattered so much to America and its regional presence in the Indo-Pacific that the idea of it deserting its Japanese ally has looked implausible. This remains true, especially given the emphasis being laid by leading figures in the Pentagon and the Republican Party on the contest with China for both regional and global supremacy.
However, President Trump is well known to be highly transactional, especially in foreign policy. He has also indicated a strong sympathy for the very 19th century idea that great powers are entitled to have "spheres of influence" in the areas around their own borders. He has, for example, expressed a determination that America should gain control over Greenland, the icy territory that is part of Denmark but adjacent to the north-east coast of the United States, has declared that Canada should become the U.S.'s "51st State," and has insisted the U.S. should regain control over the Panama Canal.
This makes it conceivable, even if still improbable, that at some point Trump could be tempted to accept Chinese control over its "sphere" of Taiwan and the South China Sea in return for China accepting US control over territories in its region. That would give China control over the main sea lanes surrounding Japan and a greatly increased ability to intimidate other countries in the region, including Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
This is, admittedly, a rather extreme scenario. The identification by most members of Trump's Republican Party of China as America's leading global adversary, and the strong support for Taiwan held by those same Republicans, makes it feel especially unlikely. Yet the fact that the idea of such a "grand bargain" with China is talked about at all simply underlines how unpredictable is the foreign policy of this American president, with the range of actions and outcomes during the remaining three and a half years of his term looking wider than under any U.S. president in living memory.
The governments of every longstanding ally of the United States are having to live with this uncertainty, one which reflects a broader question: using a meteorological metaphor, does Trump represent a temporary extreme-weather event, like an especially severe typhoon, or does he represent climate change, a trend that will endure? The safest answer is that he is a bit of both: his extreme volatility and hostile manner can be seen as personal and thus temporary, but some of the ideas he is purveying have a broader resonance in the United States that could persist after he is gone.
The central role that America plays in the security of the Indo-Pacific gives Japan little choice other than to adapt to whatever extreme weather emerges from Washington, DC. The more forward-leaning stance Japan has taken on defence, first under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then with the new National Security Strategy under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in 2022, has had the dual purpose of increasing Japan's contribution to joint deterrence operations with America and creating more long-term options for national security in case relations with Washington become more fractured. Continuing and even enhancing this strategy remains Japan's only viable plan.
What Japan could perhaps invest even more time in is in its already impressive diplomatic efforts in north-east and south-east Asia. To cope with the Trump "typhoon" and to increase Japan's own leverage over Washington at any time of crisis, it makes sense to work more closely with other countries that face the same pressures, starting with South Korea but also extending south to Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan itself.
All these countries are facing hostility from Trump over trade while also needing to invest more in their own security and economic resilience, in a region in which the two superpowers, China and the U.S., are both unavoidable presences but also habitual bullies. It therefore makes sense to work together on trade, technology, security and other issues as much as possible, to increase bargaining power as well as resilience.
Japan has a key role, as well as opportunity, to drive this regional collaboration. The contradictory fears of entrapment and abandonment can never be eliminated, but through collaboration they can perhaps be mitigated.