Under the Bush administration, the Japan-U.S. alliance has undergone a quiet but important transformation in the eyes of most Japanese people: It has become a global alliance instead of a regional or bilateral one.
Such a transformation can be witnessed in at least two aspects: the strategic and the ideological. The strategic aspect was most clearly manifest in the role of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Iraq and in the Indian Ocean. Though they were not involved in military operations in combat areas, their role cannot be said to be limited to "peace building" in the narrow sense of the term.
The more important change in the alliance, though it was more subtle and invisible, was the alliance's bearing a more ideological tinge. The ideological aspect of the alliance has been much emphasized under the Bush-Koizumi-Abe period, particularly by the catchword of "sharing values," which later crystallized into Taro Aso's expression of the "arc of freedom and prosperity," which was assumed to stretch from Japan to Australia.
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