At the US-Asia Law Institute (USALI) virtual event “Japan’s Once and Future Foreign Policy,” Michael J. Green examined Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s strategy to counter Chinese ambitions for regional hegemony. Green serves as senior vice president for Asia, Japan Chair, and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC think tank focused on national security issues.
In his book Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo, Green praises Japan’s strategy for competition with a China that has continued to expand its economic and military power. Under Abe’s leadership, Japan has further aligned itself with the United States, strengthened its national security system, while maintaining its business ties with China.
At the USALI event, Green analyzed Japan’s successful internal and external balancing tactics under the leadership of Shinzo Abe, and shared key takeaways for other major democratic powers.
Watch the full discussion on video:
Selected remarks from Michael Green’s talk:
“Major democracies are now acknowledging and organizing for a systemic and long-term competition with China over technology, over values, over security. But most of the major powers have started to organize themselves around this and debate this in the past few years. Japan was way ahead of us all. In 2013, four years before Trump first declared strategic competition, prime minister Abe put out Japan’s very first national security strategy from the prime minister’s office, and it was entirely premised around this idea of strategic competition.” (Video 10:10)
“Now, I think, Japan is ahead of the rest of us in figuring out how a major democratic, industrial power competes with China but also cooperates with China, protects key technologies without decoupling and breaking the advantages—economic and technological and political advantages—of interdependence. Japan is sort of outright defining how one competes without catastrophe with a rising, ambitious, and unnerving China under Xi Jinping.” (Video 11:48)