U.S. and Japan to Announce “Historic” New Military Agreement

News Analysis

Though the summit where all this will be announced does not happen until April 10, news is already beginning to break regarding an expansion in U.S. military linkages with Japan, but some are wondering if it is really about security or just more war profiteering.

A third party, the President of the Philippines, is also involved supposedly because of increasingly threatening skirmishes between Chinese military and coast guard vessels and Philippine ships located in the South China Sea. 

Dementia-ridden Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishido are meeting next Wednesday in Washington for the first part of these formal discussions. They will be joined on April 11 by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of former deposed Philippine criminal dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to fill in details for expanding the U.S.-Japan security alliance to include the Philippines as well.

This new security pact is being created at the urgings of the United States as it finds itself increasingly unable to engage effectively with China on multiple levels of dialogue and outgunned and outsmarted militarily due to the actions of the current and former occupants of the White House. The gaps in those connections show up in China successfully undermining the U.S. in geopolitical leadership issues, especially including the BRICS group where China is actively seeding the growth of an alliance which began as purely economic and has grown far beyond that and increasingly threatens American hegemony.

They also manifest in trade relations, which continue to deteriorate despite both countries existing in a codependent relationship where China needs American business to thrive, and the U.S. has built an economy dependent on China’s lower-cost-base for goods. The trade conflicts are growing now in previously unexpected territory, with China building a range of manufacturing plants in Mexico, including new auto factories  which could end up distributing much lower-cost EVs and other vehicles with high enough quality to undermine U.S. automakers, while leveraging the lower trade barriers of the USMCA trade agreement to evade direct tariffs if they were shipped directly from China.

Another prominent example of the trade challenges is the U.S. having proved completely ineffective in blunting the growth of Chinese electronics tech giant Huawei, despite what the Treasury and Commerce Departments under both Trump and Biden arrogantly thought would be wholly crippling sanctions that would drive the company out of business. Huawei has of course bounced back stronger than ever. 

The struggles with U.S. power are showing up further as China grows its military might with advanced aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles, and stealth fighter jets which challenge America’s supposed supremacy in weapons, not to mention in its strategic leadership in global alliances. In addition, China has stolen and improved upon America's most advanced deep black technology that Americans and the Chinese people know nothing about.

The new partnership with Japan is expected to result in the design and production of weapons for U.S. war contractors in Japan where security is higher, lower manufacturing costs and higher quality. 

China has also continued to undermine that military via its ongoing approach to theft of trade economic and military secrets. While the U.S. has attempted to address that with ongoing criminal charges against the few individuals it has chosen to make an example of, and meaningless sanctions against the distant “bad actors” involved within mainland China itself, those approaches have proven ineffective and the U.S. remains an easy target, with tens of thousands of Chinese agents embedded in universities and major corporations and siphoning off America's most important tech and discoveries. 

Seemingly with the assistance and full support of the treasonous occupants of the White House, tens of thousands of what appear to be Chinese soldiers and Triad criminals have been walked across the Southern border as migrants. Many of them end up at China's many thousands of legal and illegal cannabis farms that federal authorities refuse to raid. Others work with Mexican cartels and urban American gangs to not just traffick more drugs and humans but to also carry out riots, looting and high level home robberies.

For the past year, a group of high level retired FBI Counterintelligence officers have been warning of the threat of Biden's open border policy, which has allowed millions of people to pour into the U.S. without visas or any background checks. While many are decent people merely seeking a better life, many are also criminals, agents and foot soldiers of America's many enemies. In a letter earlier this year, they warned:

“The threat we call out today is new and unfamiliar. In its modern history the U.S. has never suffered an invasion of the homeland, and, yet, one is unfolding now. Military age men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands – not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane bur rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.”

“It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown. They include individuals encountered by border officials and then possibly released into the country, along with the shockingly high estimate of ‘gotaways,’ meaning those who have entered and evaded apprehension.”

China has also of late chosen to pick on the Philippines, with a naval fleet which is grossly outmatched, in the South China Sea, where recent maritime conflicts with that nation have resulted in collisions, damage to equipment, and injured crew, as China asserts its dominance over the Southeast Asian nation. One of the more recent examples of this came just last month, when Chinese military vessels fired water cannons at Philippine military ships, in a region near the Philippines' Second Thomas Shoal where China claims principal sovereignty.

It only makes matters worse that the person in charge of the country, President “Bong Bong” Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is grossly ineffective in managing his country’s internal affairs, which have gone downhill by all economic metrics including an exploding growth of national debt since he took power almost two years ago, as well as his international affairs, which seem to be focused more on traveling than landing any substantial new trade agreements. Bong Bong seems to be using the China threat to extort money from the U.S. while selling out his country to the Chinese at the same time. He continues to allow China to gain control over strategic control of the Philippines telecom and power industries. Chinese companies are also taking over other key industries in the Philippines in a colonization by investment approach. 

The U.S. has supposedly stepped in to assist the Philippines, with more American troops coming to Philippine military bases and an expansion of its navy. It may bolster the appearance that Marcos’ nation is in a stronger position to defend itself, but what it only proves is how America’s allies have also fallen behind in navigating their own futures. 

In the last few years America has also attempted to establish numerous new military relationships in the Asia-Pacific region. Those include the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) alliance which for the moment is tied to the building of new nuclear submarines for Australia, the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific alliance strategy linking it with multiple smaller nations, and an attempt to link together Japan, South Korea, and the United States in a military alliance which stops short of pledging support if any one of the three are attacked. During the same period, the U.S. worked to engage the Quad alliance bringing it together with Australia, India, and Japan, as well as to make better use of its “Five Eyes” intelligence operation which connects the CIA and U.S. Department of Defense with equivalent operations in Australia, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The meeting on April 10 in Washington with Biden and Kishida was announced in January by White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. At the time she described the upcoming summit as wide-ranging, with a focus on “efforts to strengthen our political, security, economic and people-to-people ties” in the Indo-Pacific region.

Further information regarding the new arrangements between Biden and Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida was revealed during a public discussion yesterday by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. The comments came at the Centre for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

Campbell, seen as a prime creative force in U.S. national security policy, categorized the changes in the nature of the U.S.-Japan relationship as “seminal and historic” and a major “upgrade” in the way the two nations work together on military and security issues.

He referred to the partnership between America and Japan as "the cornerstone of our engagement in the Indo-Pacific.”

“What you will see next week is both the culmination of a recent period of intense activity but also launching a period that really underscores that the U.S.-Japan relationship is entering a fundamentally new phase that will both bring new capabilities to bear … [and] clear responsibilities” each nation will be providing as part of their new partnership.

Key to the new partnership with Japan is a kind of multilevel linkages already mastered to a significant degree by America’s major foes in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific region, according to intelligence information provided by senior state department personnel in recent months. In a special briefing by Director of U.S. National Intelligence Avril Haines to the Senate Intelligence Committee in March, for example, she described in some detail how “Growing cooperation and willingness to exchange aid in military, economic, political and intelligence matters [via Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran] enhances their individual capabilities.” This has been especially evident as the commodity trading and military supply chains of each of the four countries have intertwined – and benefited from one another – over the last several years.

“Russia’s need for support in the context of Ukraine has forced it to grant some long-time concessions to China, North Korea and Iran, with the potential to undermine … long-held non-proliferation norms,” Haines continued.

In Campbell’s address, he spoke of how the changes in the upcoming relationship with Japan have come about only after observing how adept Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have become in reaching out to and supporting each other, in ways only now becoming fully understood.

“In the past, we have been … wary of certain kinds of co-production arrangements,” he went on. “The circumstances increasingly demand that we work with trusted allies and partners even on the most sophisticated weapons that will increasingly be part of our combined arsenals.”

The Deputy Secretary of State expanded on this in a later comment in his talk, when he said that “one of the lessons that we've learned through COVID is that some of these supply chains on the military side are so narrow and easily clogged that we are going to need to have more capacity in play."

Campbell likened the changes in how the U.S. will be working with Japan going forward as similar to how the Australia-United Kingdom-U.S. alliance is currently working, two-and-a-half years after that alliance was first announced in September 2021. He spoke of AUKUS as based on two “pillars” of cooperation. Pillar 1 was all about building nuclear-powered submarines for Australia via sharing of U.S. technology and production facilities in all three countries. Pillar 2, Campbell explained, is based on cooperating on the edges of new technologies including “quantum, AI [artificial intelligence] and autonomy, hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, electronic warfare, undersea warfare and cyber.”

"One of the things that I think you'll see next week [are] steps for the first time that will allow the United States and Japan to work more collaboratively on joint development and potentially co-production of vital military and defense equipment," Campbell explained further.

While Campbell was cautious about revealing too much, these comments dovetailed well with comments he had made last month in another forum that Japan and the U.S. might soon be working together on a new command-and-control infrastructure for activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

In his talk yesterday Campbell also hinted countries other than Japan may soon be joining this advanced security technology sharing ecosystem but did not give details.

“What we find as we scan the Indo-Pacific and other areas is that there are a number of countries that are undertaking critical research and development in areas that frankly could be very valuable,” Campell continued. “I think it was always believed when Aukus was launched that at some point we would welcome new countries to participate.”

When Philippine President Marcos joins the discussions on April 11, Campbell went on, the trio of leaders will jointly unveil “an unprecedented trilateral engagement between [the] three nations.”

How that will work is still unclear, but parallel disclosures from Washington and Tokyo suggest the three countries may launch a joint cyber defense initiative as part of their cooperative work. Japan’s Self-Defense forces set up their own advanced cyber defense military operation two years ago, in March 2022, with the goal of developing technologies capable of preemptive software and electronics tech which can be deployed once early warnings of potential attacks are detected. The U.S. has its own high-end military defense capabilities of this kind, and the Philippines recently started its own cybersecurity operation as part of its national security operations. Sources say the three countries could begin working to connect their early warning and cyber defense systems, with a joint announcement about that possible next week.

The U.S. has also previously disclosed it considers the Philippines a possible site for developing advanced chip technologies the Southeast Asian nation might contribute, as part of a broader defense supply chain in the Indo-Pacific region.

The three countries are also planning joint maritime patrols in the Asia-Pacific areas and specifically in the South China Sea. These are expected to be like ones the U.S. has carried out in the past with Japan and other player such as South Korea and the United Kingdom.

Those who question the deeper meaning of these moves might conclude that if the U.S. was really concerned about security it would secure its own borders first and then deport the enemy agents within. The Philippines would stop selling itself to China. Since none of these simple actions have been taken one might conclude that the new arrangement is not really about security but profits for the war industry. It may also be about the failing U.S. war industry finding a way to make better weapons that actually work by partnering with Japan.