Brad Glosserman » Japan Peers Into the Abyss

China is an equally troubling issue. Japan’s confidence was sapped by the “lost decade” of the 1990s and China’s rise as Japan stagnated. There is a deep-rooted fear that the U.S. will reassess “the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none,” and seek a great power condominium with Beijing. The close consultation with China in the Six-Party Talks is seen as a harbinger of the future.

Nuclear dynamics contribute to the uncertainty. In the Cold War, the U.S. accepted mutual vulnerability with the Soviet Union to create strategic stability. Both superpowers knew that in a crisis each could inflict unacceptable damage on the other; that provided the foundation for stability through mutual deterrence.

The U.S. and China have not reached a similar arrangement. The U.S. might decide that it won’t accept mutual vulnerability with China and would counter Chinese attempts to create such a relationship. That would threaten an arms race and could create regional instability. But if the U.S. accepts vulnerability to Chinese missiles, that China will have the ability to strike the U.S. in a crisis, there will be doubts in Japan about Washington’s readiness to trade Los Angeles for Tokyo. Neither outcome is satisfactory for Tokyo.

Collectively, these developments contribute to growing unease in Tokyo about the credibility of the U.S. commitment to defend Japan. And those doubts, rather than any nationalist sentiment or discontent with Japan’s international status, will be the drivers of and the most important factors in Japanese national security debates about nuclear weapons.

What options does Japan have? It could decide to build a nuclear weapon, but all the countervailing considerations outlined previously still apply. Going nuclear is not in Japan’s national interest. Missile defense is another option, and Japan has deployed Patriot missiles and Aegis-equipped destroyers. But this technology is still relatively young and most governments see it as part of a multilayered defense strategy.

A complement to passive defenses is a conventional offensive strike capability that would allow Tokyo to destroy threats before they reach Japan. Tokyo has shunned the acquisition of such capabilities even though lawmakers conceded five decades ago that they are constitutionally permissible. Defense specialists consider this an increasingly attractive option after the North Korean missile and nuclear tests. Such capabilities would likely be destabilizing and elevate concerns about Japanese intentions, however. The possibility of a preemptive strike could raise a potential adversary’s readiness to use its own forces, fearing that it had to “use em or lose em.”