Last week’s Japan-U.S. summit has been rightly called historic and the beginning of a new era. It was a big deal for Tokyo and the alliance — if its long list of deliverables is realized.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. President Joe Biden will get a lot of credit for the outcomes, and so too should the two bureaucracies that labored for months (in some cases years) to put together the final product. Those officials weren’t just massaging language; they had to come up with ideas, make them realizable and get them approved. Given the range of the 70 items in the fact sheet, that was a lot of work.
While Kishida deserves applause, in fact he is the beneficiary of a long evolution in Japanese policy. Gil Rozman, the emeritus Musgrave professor of sociology at Princeton, argued in an email that “this is not a turning point but the culmination of a process continuing for over a decade.” For him, “more interesting than focusing on the deliverables on one occasion is the story of how the process unfolded. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo built the foundation; Kishida constructed a new security framework when Japan was tested most seriously.”
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