TOKYO, Jan. 12, 2023—The U.S.-Japan “2+2” joint statement released after a Jan. 11, 2023 Washington, D.C. meeting reads ominously as a military morning assembly call to alert soldiers about an approaching war. It said that if China strives to challenge the international order in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, the United States would deploy its capabilities, ‘including nuclear’ power.
To the best of my knowledge, the word ‘nuclear’ has been rarely used or none at all in diplomatic documents exchanged between the two countries, and it shows the rising level of tension between the United States and China over the Taiwan Straits as the Chinese military invades into Taiwan airspace and waters almost daily.
‘The Ministers concurred that China’s foreign policy seeks to reshape the international order to its benefit and to employ China’s growing political, economic, military, and technological power to that end,’ the joint statement said. ‘This behavior is of serious concern to the Alliance and the entire international community, and represents the greatest strategic challenge in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.’
The meeting was between the two countries’ foreign and defense ministers. It was organized as a precursor to Japanese prime minister Kishida’s visit to Washington this week.
The statement’s language was of little surprise. Both countries have used similar expressions when they held similar 2+2 meetings with other countries, most recently between the U.S. and the Philippines.
What caught my eyes more was a paragraph that appears in the upper part of a pretty long statement:
‘The United States restated its unwavering commitment to the defense of Japan under Article V of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.’
I have known for a long time that since Japan’s surrender to the allied forces in 1945 the United States had been landing military aircraft and anchoring naval ships carrying nuclear weapons to Japan, yet both countries have never officially admitted it, let alone writing it down in official bilateral documents. The statement was intended to warn the Chinese that Washington is seriously concerned about the Chinese aggression toward Taiwan as well as in the entire Indo Pacific and East Asian regions, and that save nuclear weapons, it would mobilize all available military capacities to confront the Chinese.
How seriously the United States is handling the Chinese hegemony in the regions is underscored in language that engages Japan to discussing the internal U.S. policy on the use of nuclear weapons. The statement said: ‘The Ministers held an in-depth discussion on U.S. extended deterrence for Japan, as well as on the recently released U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), and reaffirmed the critical importance of ensuring U.S. extended deterrence remains credible and resilient, bolstered by Japan’s capabilities.
‘They reiterated both countries intend to deepen the substantive discussions at the Extended Deterrence Dialogue as well as through various senior-level meetings,’ it said.
The Biden administration released an unclassified version of the 2022 NPR in November. The latest NPR rejected no-first-use and sole-purpose nuclear deterrent policies, contrary to the president’s election campaign policy in favor of them. The flip-flop is of course in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing hegemony in the Indo-Pacific and Asian regions, though it does not mean the U.S. will prioritize the use of nuclear weapons.
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