Last week¡¯s Japan-U.S. summit has been rightly called historic and the beginning of a new era. It was a big deal for Tokyo and the alliance ¡ª if its long list of deliverables is realized.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. President Joe Biden will get a lot of credit for the outcomes, and so too should the two bureaucracies that labored for months (in some cases years) to put together the final product. Those officials weren¡¯t just massaging language; they had to come up with ideas, make them realizable and get them approved. Given the range of the 70 items in the fact sheet, that was a lot of work.
While Kishida deserves applause, in fact he is the beneficiary of a long evolution in Japanese policy. Gil Rozman, the emeritus Musgrave professor of sociology at Princeton, argued in an email that ¡°this is not a turning point but the culmination of a process continuing for over a decade.¡± For him, ¡°more interesting than focusing on the deliverables on one occasion is the story of how the process unfolded. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo built the foundation; Kishida constructed a new security framework when Japan was tested most seriously.¡±
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