Rishi Sunak with Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida
Military cooperation between Britain and Japan has accelerated rapidly in recent weeks amidst spiraling arms races and provocative military activities in East Asia.
A Reciprocal Access Agreement signed by Fumio Kishida and Rishi Sunak earlier in January allows British forces to be deployed to Japan. This has followed hard on the heels of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a UK-Japan-Italy partnership to deliver next generation combat fighter jets.
From London, Kishida flew straight to Washington to further upgrade the US-Japan alliance – even as the Biden administration pushes at China’s red lines to provoke it into using force first, Japan seeks to align itself more closely into US plans for the defense of Taiwan.
According to Sunak, the new agreements will ”cement the UK’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific”. Japan for its part has just adopted a new National Security Strategy to counter China as ‘the greatest strategic challenge’ the country has ever faced, backing this with a vastly increased war fighting commitment and a massive lift to the military budget from some $50bn to $318bn over 5 years. This would make Japan the third or fourth largest military power in the world.
Kishida repeatedly warns “East Asia is the Ukraine of tomorrow”, linking the security of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific in line with the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept. The UK-Japan pact now fixes this strategic axis in place: the quasi-alliance between Britain, the key Transatlantic US ally, and Japan the key Transpacific US ally, effectively marks a historic shift in the international security order. With the UK, US and Australia all now having access agreements, few barriers remain for Japan to join AUKUS. And the UK, as the first European country to forge military links with Japan, opens the door for other NATO members to follow, moving ever closer to a Global NATO.
British and Japanese forces deepened cooperation with the visit of the Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group in 2021. In November 2022, a ‘Vigilant Isles 22’ joint exercise simulated the retaking of an island under enemy control. With the RAA set to regularise such exercises in ‘island defence’, alarm bells should be ringing – to be clear, this means potentially bringing British forces into direct conflict with China given the Sino-Japanese dispute over islands in the East China Sea.
This dispute has been building over recent years with coastguards from both sides on regular patrol. The islands – known by the Chinese (and the Taiwanese) as the Diaoyutai and the Japanese as the Senkaku Islands – lie 100 miles to the north of Taiwan and less than 300 miles from the massive US airbase in Okinawa, making them critically important in the event of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan. To defeat such a move the US would need a coalition of forces and it appears that Britain has just joined this together with Japan.
Meanwhile GCAP further deepens Britain’s military cooperation with Japan and Italy, ‘harnessing the strength of our world-beating defence industry’. BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and MBDA in the UK, will together with Leopard in Italy and Mitsubishi in Japan build a new fighter jet, the Tempest, to replace the Typhoon aircraft by the mid-2030s. The Tempest’s capacity to carry hypersonic missiles will significantly increase Japan’s capabilities in joining a US war with China.
The government has committed an initial £2bn to the project claiming it will create high-skilled jobs, strengthen our industrial base, and drive innovation. The trilateral arrangement will open markets in both Europe and Asia. Pricewaterhouse Coopers calculates the programme could support some 21,000 jobs a year and contribute an estimated £26.2bn to the economy by 2050.
The ‘security threats of the future’ – that is China – are now seen to be of such an order as to demand an entirely new response, not only for all US allies to pull together but also for a New Cold War style approach with economic and technological resources fused into the structure of military pacts and alliances.
GCAP’s hi-tech programme for unmanned aircraft and cutting-edge weapons represents an ‘unprecedented international aerospace coalition’ designed to sit alongside AUKUS.
The new mantra – ‘creating jobs, saving lives’ – explicitly ties future economic prosperity in with military production and arms exports.
Downing Street, shockingly, wants to draw parallels between the RAA and the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. Forged to counter Russia’s expansion to the East at the time, the twenty-year alliance oversaw Japan’s rapid military industrialisation which was to drive a particularly brutal aggression across Asia, on which it accelerated after 1936 when Japan joined the Nazi Germany-Italy axis.
Now once again, along with the US, the UK is indulging the aspirations of Japan’s right-wing leaders to regain the country’s pre-WW2 military position. Specifically, by developing counter-strike capabilities to destroy enemy missile and other bases, the fighter jet project actively subverts Article 9 of the Japanese constitution – the peace clause – which declares “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes”.
The UK-Japan deals add to the destabilisation of a region vital to the world’s future prosperity and the battle against climate catastrophe. Other Asian nations, whose memories of Japan’s WWII barbarism and military-colonial occupations live on, may be far more wary of the country’s rearmament. The Japanese public themselves, despite rising concerns over Chinese assertiveness, do not support tax rises to pay for the increases in the military budget.
But as Japan prepares to host the G7 in Hiroshima in June, the mind boggles as to what new initiatives might be announced next.
The RAA is expected to be laid before Parliament shortly. The key question to be asked is: how far will the UK go in aiding and abetting US hostilities towards China?