Shigeru Ishiba set diplomatic pulses racing with his proposal, but the idea has been just as quickly shelved.
Shigeru Ishiba has said the creation of an Asian NATO is essential to deter China by its Western allies.Ishiba, who is not as hawkish on China as his predecessors Fumio Kishida and Shinzō Abe, has also long seen Japan’s relationship with Washington as “asymmetrical”: that Japan’s road to becoming a “normal” country again must include a more equal standing with its big ally.
It was left to Ishiba’s newly appointed foreign minister, Takeshi Iwaya, to tell reporters in his first press conference that the idea was to be “considered in the medium to long-term”. Elsewhere, Indian Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar poured the inevitable bucket of ice-cold water over it. In Indonesia, thet thundered that ASEAN “will not buy into” the idea, stressing it needs Japan “as a reliable trading and economic partner, not a military ally that would only exacerbate tensions in the region”. ASEAN leaders will no doubt ask a few more questions of Japan’s new leader when they meet him at their summit in Laos later this week.
Several interlocutors stressed that Ishiba’s proposal appeared to overlook the “latticework” of trilateral and minilateral partnerships the US has cultivated across the region in recent years, layering new arrangements across its existing alliance system. It was notable that Ishiba’s Hudson article made no mention of this “latticework”. But he did tell President Joe Biden in their first phone conversation that he was committed to the “latticework of like-minded partners” in the region.
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