President Joe Biden hosts Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio for a state visit Wednesday, including a crucial Oval Office meeting, reinforcing his commitment to bolstering vital partnerships in the Indo-Pacific amid a militarily and economically resurgent China.
Over 70 items covering a wide array of critical sectors are expected to be announced as part of the bilateral meeting between Biden and Kishida, according to senior administration officials.
These include a commitment to changing the US force structure in Japan to improve how Japanese and US forces are integrated, establish a “military industrial council” to evaluate where the two countries can co-produce defense weapons to improve cooperation, and items related to integrating anti-missile defense between the US, Australia and Japan, according to the officials.
The announcements are all part of a major update to the nations’ military alliance but elements of them will take some time to implement – including the change to US force structure, which will take several months for both countries to work through, one senior official noted.
The leaders are also expected to detail space collaboration at a time when Japan has signaled interest in landing its first astronaut on the Moon and to lay out ways to increase people-to-people ties amid lagging student exchanges between the two countries in recent years.
Some of these include a joint artificial intelligence research initiative between Carnegie Mellon University and Keio University in Tokyo, as well as another AI-related exchange between the University of Washington and Washington State and Tsukuba University in Japan, according to the officials. This will also include creating a scholarship to fund high school students from the US to travel to Japan to study and vice versa.
But even as the US and Japan are bolstering their cooperation across a range of sectors, the two countries have seen a recent difference on the economic front with the president opposing Japan’s efforts to purchase US Steel. Despite the opposition, officials indicated that they don’t expect Biden to broach the issue directly and that they believe the relationship is larger than one commercial deal.
The meeting will be followed later this week by the first-ever leaders’ summit between the US, Japan and the Philippines with Biden working to draw Pacific allies and partners closer as the region grapples with China’s aggression and nuclear provocations from North Korea.
All of the deliverables on the agenda are part of a concerted military, diplomatic and strategic effort to try and “flip the script” and counter Chinese efforts to isolate American allies like the Philippines and Japan, according to one senior administration official.
“The idea of switching to a multilateral, lattice-like strategic architecture is to flip the script and isolate China,” this person said.
Japan has been at the center of Biden’s alliance building in the Indo-Pacific as officials have seen a willing partner in Kishida, who has significantly shifted the country’s defense posture in recent years and provided ongoing support to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kishida has committed to increasing defense spending by 2% of GDP by 2037 and acquired American Tomahawk missiles to increase its counterstrike capabilities.
Before entering the White House, the president and national security adviser Jake Sullivan tasked the transition team to tap into alliances and partnerships where they saw “extraordinary potential if only the United States turned back to it and reembraced it,” one senior administration official said.
“What we did was put together a strategy that was designed to help a wide range of allies and partners see pieces of themselves and their own objectives in our Indo-Pacific strategy,” the official said.
Even as the leaders plan to announce the lengthy list of defense and diplomatic agreements during the course of their visit, senior administration officials also sought to highlight a more symbolic takeaway. During his visit, Kishida plans to announce a commitment by Japan to provide new cherry tree saplings to replace some of the iconic plants that will be felled later this year around the Tidal Basin in Washington.
The National Park Service has said around 150 cherry trees will be chopped down later this spring to make way for higher seawalls around the basin. Japan first donated trees to Washington in the early 20th century.
A senior Biden administration official called the original gift of cherry trees from Japan one of the most important diplomatic gifts in US history – second only to the Statue of Liberty, a present from France.
“I think you’ll find that it’s initiatives like this, that may not be as significant apparently as new arrangements on military command structures or joint co-production on the military side, but they’re deeply significant to our peoples,” an official said.
Even as Biden hails the alliance with Japan on Wednesday, officials acknowledged the concern among American allies at the prospect of a potential return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, and what that could portend for US foreign relations.
“I think we all recognize that there is anxiety in capitals, uncertainty, about what the nature of the future of US policy will look like,” the official said. “Whether we will remain as engaged in internationalist pursuits and the kinds of bipartisan foreign policy efforts which have animated the last period after the Second World War and after the Cold War. There are questions and concerns there.”
