The supremacy of the United States in Asia has been a constant in U.S.-Japan relations since the end of WWII. With China’s rise and leadership fatigue in the United States, that may be changing. What will be the consequences for Japan’s foreign policy and for the U.S.-Japan alliance?
Much depends on not just the relative shift in power but how these shifts are interpreted by different schools of thought within Japan and the United States. The Worldviews of Aspiring Powers project1 at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies’ Rising Powers Initiative addressed this question of domestic foreign policy debates in five different countries, initially in a volume published by Oxford University Press in September 2012, and then in followup conferences in Washington, D.C. On June 18, 2013, it held a follow-up conference on Japan – “Japan as a Global Power: Contending Views from Japan,” co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations Japan Program and the M.I.T. Center for International Studies.
This Policy Report outlines competing viewpoints expressed at the event as a means to identify likely trajectories of Japan’s foreign policy and behavior in the years ahead.
