International alliances work best when the values and interests of their members coincide. For much of the Cold War, US presidents demonstrated a remarkable ability to build effective partnerships with countries around the world in sustaining America’s efforts to combat the ideological and military challenge of the Soviet Union and its communist partners. Among America’s alliances, the relationship with Japan has been one of the most prominent and striking success stories. In the words of former US senator Mike Mansfield, who served as US ambassador to Japan for a remarkable 11 years, from 1977 to 1988, the relationship between the two countries was ‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world bar none’.

In part, this success reflected the remarkable transformation of Japan from a vanquished wartime opponent into a vibrant democracy, economic powerhouse and a country that was firmly allied with the US and its Western partners in offsetting a range of Cold War and post-Cold War challenges.

This transformation was anything but pre-ordained, nor was it simply the result of rational, overlapping interests. Rather, it was the consequence of shrewd alliance management, psychologically astute and empathetic diplomacy, and bold leadership on both sides of the Pacific. It also relied on the two countries’ ability to weather the pressures of their sometimes fractious domestic politics, as well as their capacity to navigate sharply contrasting cultural and historical traditions, not to mention often radically different approaches to economic management.

Now, under the new Trump presidency, the strength of this bilateral partnership is open to question. Trump’s aggressive trade policy and punitive tariffs, like a destructive wrecking ball, run the risk of rupturing economic cooperation between the two countries, challenging longstanding assumptions across the political spectrum in Japan that Washington and Tokyo are natural, trustworthy partners.

Even in the military space, where security ties have long been a central pillar of bilateral cooperation, a more self-interested, transactional approach by the US is raising doubts in Japan about the long-term reliability of the United States. Notably, a recent newspaper poll in Japan indicates that 77 per cent of the Japanese public doubt whether the United States would come to its aid in the event of a security crisis in East Asia.

Understanding the potentially seismic nature of these challenges is vital in appreciating just how uncertain the current international environment is, and in order to gauge the risk of further instability in a critically vulnerable part of the world. The threats to peace and security in East Asia are several. These include longstanding territorial disputes – for example, over Taiwan, the Senkakus, or Diayou islands in the East China Sea, not to mention Japan’s contested Northern Territories adjacent to the island of Hokkaido. Added to this problem are China’s expanding military capacity and artificial island-building strategy in the South China Sea, and the existential risks associated with a nuclear North Korea. All pose a real and present danger to the region, and, by extension, to the world, at a time when Trump’s approach to Japan is threatening to disrupt decades of cooperation.

To appreciate exactly what is at risk, it is worth remembering the delicate and painstaking process by which the alliance was constructed. In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in August 1945, US policy makers in the Truman administration were preoccupied with effecting the twin goals of the allied Potsdam Declaration of 16 July 1945, which focused on the permanent ‘demilitarization and democratization’ of Japan to ensure that it would never again pose a threat to regional or global security. The early years of the Allied Occupation, dominated by the United States under the direction of a supremely confident General Douglas MacArthur, brooked no opposition from Japan and introduced a series of sweeping reforms. These included an American-authored constitution (enacted in 1947), a purge of the country’s conservative leaders, sweeping land and social reform, as well as a rapid dismantling and decentralisation of the country’s political and economic structures, including Japan’s powerful economic conglomerates, or zaibatsu.

Such a rapid weakening of the old structures of power was combined with the reaffirmation and extension of parliamentary institutions that existed in the 1920s, prior to Japan’s embrace of military government. At the same time, the new 1947 Constitution contained a new Peace Clause (Article 9), which prohibited Japan from maintaining a standing army, navy or air force for anything other than purely defensive purposes.

Taken together, these measures appeared to herald a new role for Japan as a country that would eschew Great Power politics in favour of a low-profile diplomacy and a focus on economic reconstruction. An economics-first posture also reflected the primacy of domestic politics over foreign policy. With public opinion traumatised by defeat (not least by the searing impact of the two devastating nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it was logical for Japan’s postwar public to turn sharply away from militarism and to embrace the views of the Left, in the form of the Japan Socialist and Japan Communist Parties, which preferred pacifism, neutrality, and antipathy to an overly close alignment with the United States.

Japan’s new approach was epitomised by the country’s new Yoshida Doctrine, named after the country’s most prominent and diplomatically agile of postwar prime ministers, Shigeru Yoshida (who served intermittently from the mid 1940s to 1950s). It appeared to establish the foundation for a new style of politics and international relations. Japan, in the words of Robert Cooper, the British and European diplomat and influential foreign policy mentor to Tony Blair, would eventually evolve into a post-modern state, shying away from explicit security commitments, developing a flexible approach to foreign policy free from ideological rigidity while maintaining pragmatic (sometimes semi-official) relationships with a wide range of states on opposing sides of the Cold War divide.

For example, in the early decades of the Cold War, Tokyo followed Washington’s lead in aligning diplomatically with Taiwan and refusing, prior to the 1970s, to recognise Communist China as the legitimate government of China.

At the same time, Japan’s business and political communities also maintained and indeed, expanded, informal economic ties with mainland China as a means of maximising Japan’s economic interests. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, it was a Japanese prime minister, Toshiki Kaifu, who argued in favour of sustained economic ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – a position that clashed with the views of several European countries and the United States, which adopted a more critical view of Beijing.

This foreign policy pragmatism also explains how, in the past, Japan’s leaders have maintained ties with a wide range of governments in the Middle East. Japanese governments have supported Israel, while retaining close relations with the Arab states (a necessity given energy-poor Japan’s heavy dependency on Middle Eastern oil supplies) and developing, especially recently, close ties with Iran.

Even in the face of the increased nuclear weapons threat from North Korea – particularly since the 1990s – Japan’s leaders have been careful to maintain diplomatic ties with both Koreas. The normalisation of diplomatic relations with Seoul in 1965 allowed Japan and the Republic of Korea to substantially expand bilateral cooperation – a trend that was rapidly accelerated by the recent administrations of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

This progress has not, however, prevented successive Japanese leaders from exploring ways of moderating tensions with North Korea. In 2002 and 2004, Jun’ichiro Koizumi surprised the international community by making the first and – to date – only visits by a Japanese premier to Pyongyang. Even now, Japan’s current prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, has made it clear that he is in principle open to a summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, his North Korean counterpart, such is the urgent need for Japan’s leaders to limit the conventional and nuclear security threat from the North.

Japan’s omnidirectional diplomacy (zenhōi gaikō) might suggest a divergence between a principled, or at the very least consistent, United States (when it comes to values and ideology) and a more opportunistic Japan. However, this overstates the gap between the two countries. There has always been a strong constituency of actors, including both politicians and bureaucrats in postwar Japan who have favoured the importance of rebuilding Japan’s capacity as a traditional security actor.

Often, this aspiration was expressed quietly if not covertly. Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leaders – particularly during the 1950s and 1960s – became accustomed to reassuring their US counterparts (Democrats and Republicans alike) of their commitment to the emerging US-Japan alliance, and their willingness to enhance their security preparedness, especially following the establishment of the country’s Self-Defence Forces in 1954. In some cases, such as Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi (in office from 1957 to 1960 and the grandfather of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), this reflected an aspiration to see Japan once again emerge as a decisive geopolitical actor – but a goal that was in any case tempered by the persistence of progressive anti-militarism within mainstream Japanese society.

Consequently, the leadership pursued a sotto voce diplomacy that allowed closer security convergence between Tokyo and Washington over time, but which left Japan’s conservative politicians vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy for seemingly betraying the country’s postwar anti-militarist principles. The clearest expression of this came in 1969, when the LDP government of Eisaku Sato signed a secret deal with the Nixon administration allowing the reversion of Okinawa from US administrative control (a position that had existed since 1945) to full re-incorporation within a sovereign Japanese state.

While the deal was a breakthrough moment in enhancing Japanese national cohesion (ending, partially, the sense of territorial, temporal and psychological rupture that had marked 1945), it involved a violation of the Left’s anti-militarist and anti-nuclear principles. To persuade the Nixon administration to be more flexible in advancing its strategic priorities (critically underscored by Okinawa’s pivotal geographical position close to the Asian mainland), Sato agreed that the US government would not only be permitted to maintain US military bases in Okinawa post-reversion, but it would also enjoy the right to reintroduce, secretly, US nuclear-armed missiles to Okinawa in the event of a future security crisis in East Asia.

This voluntary compromising of Japanese sovereignty was all the more striking given that Sato had, just two years before signing the secret accord in 1969, announced in the Japanese parliament, or Diet, the country’s ‘Three Non-Nuclear Principles’. According to these principles, the country committed itself to neither produce, nor possess, nor allow the transit of nuclear weapons through Japanese territory – a bold statement of foreign policy principles for which Sato had received international plaudits and eventual recognition, in 1974, through the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Over time, Japan’s leaders have become bolder in setting out their foreign policy and strategic objectives. Starting in the 1980s, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone – a long-term defence hawk who, as a young parliamentarian in the 1950s, had made the case for Japan recovering its great power status – announced that the interests of Japan and the West were ‘indivisible’, signaling a much closer and more explicit alignment between the US and Japan.

With US-Soviet Cold War tensions intensifying in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan and the end of détente, Nakasone symbolically and materially tackled a number of postwar taboos constraining Japan’s defence policy. The most notable of these was his government’s breaching of the informal, but not constitutionally mandated, limit of defence spending to one per cent of the country’s GDP. Nakasone also adopted an explicitly internationalist posture and was comfortable forging close personal ties with national leaders, most significantly with Ronald Reagan. The close ‘Ron-Yasu’ relationship foreshadowed similarly close ties between Japanese and US presidents, most notably the effective partnership between Jun’ichiro Koizumi and George W. Bush, as well as the carefully curated but genuinely positive relationship between Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump.

Incrementally, but steadily, Japan has undergone a profound transformation of its foreign and security posture, not only becoming closer to the United States, but also taking on new, expansive security roles, not merely in its immediate neighbourhood in Asia, but also globally. Under Koizumi, Japan was resolute in supporting the US in the aftermath of 9/11, providing logistical support to US forces in Afghanistan and in dispatching Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (SDF) to provide non-combat humanitarian assistance in Iraq in 2003.

The most decisive progress in the expansion and consolidation of such ties came during the second Abe administration, from 2012 to 2020. Abe’s worldview and his commitment to a more ‘proactive’ foreign policy, and one firmly rooted in close cooperation with the United States, can be traced back to the influence of Kishi, Abe’s grandfather. But it also reflected the growing importance in senior Japanese political and bureaucratic circles of an influential community of strategic thinkers, such as Shotaro Yachi (Abe’s national security adviser) and Nobukatsu Kanehara (deputy director of Japan’s National Security Secretariat, newly established in 2013).

Japan’s progressive Left has declined in influence, a reflection of demographic attrition as the country’s younger generation has become less constrained by the legacy of the Second World War and increasingly alarmed by the more challenging security environment represented by the rising threat from China, North Korea and, more recently, Putin’s Russia.

For the first few decades of the post-1945 period, left-wing aversion to seeing Japan drawn into foreign conflicts had encouraged Japanese commentators and officials, with perhaps an overabundance of caution, to refer to the US-Japan partnership simply as a ‘relationship’ (nichibei kankei). Only with time, and the emergence of a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, has it become more commonplace to refer explicitly to the US-Japan alliance (nichibei dōmei).

Under Abe, Japan’s LDP government radically transformed the country’s national security apparatus and strengthened the policy-making authority of cabinet government. Crucially, in 2014, it relaxed the constitutional limits on SDF participation in collective security initiatives with foreign countries, not merely with the United States. This has opened the door, under both Abe and his successors, to a series of minilateral and bilateral partnerships with Asian and European partners, notably with Australia, India and the UK, but also more recently with new security and joint-ministerial dialogues with Southeast Asian countries, such as the Philippines and Vietnam.

Japan’s security activism has been multidimensional, encompassing joint military exercises, development assistance, the relaxation of arms export limitations, new joint military production agreements, most notably the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to develop a sixth-generation fighter plane with the UK and Italy, and the sharing of defence equipment via the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s new Official Security Assistance (OSA) Programme established in 2022.

Above all, Japan’s leaders have demonstrated their effectiveness in thinking strategically and defining the diplomatic terms of trade when supporting the liberal, rules-based international order. Japan’s unambiguous ‘tier one status’ as a policy innovator is reflected across an ambitiously broad set of policy issues: economically, in Japan’s decisive role in bolstering free trade and regional integration by helping establish the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), or in promoting the concept of ‘economic security’ during the premiership of Fumio Kishida; and, diplomatically and conceptually, in launching the idea of a Free and Open Indopacific (FOIP) – an Abe innovation, which has now become an integral part of the diplomatic ecosystem for multiple countries, including the United States.

The new Trump administration risks undermining the close alliance with Japan that has been painstakingly developed over the course of the last eight decades. On economic issues, Trump’s image of Japan is hopelessly out of date and inaccurate. It has been shaped by a view of Japan that was dominant in US political (especially congressional) circles from the 1970s and 1980s, when the legacy of Japan’s economics first diplomacy – the long reach of the Yoshida Doctrine – had encouraged some US commentators to label Japan, inaccurately, as aggressively economically nationalist, protectionist and paying, at best, lip-service to the Bretton Woods system of free trade.

During the 1980s, Japan’s trade surplus with the United States became totemic proof, in the eyes of America’s ‘revisionist’ (shuseironsha) critics of Japan, of the country’s aggressive zero-sum attempt to undermine American economic dominance. Such critics took aim at a combination of state-led interventionist planning (an Asian developmental-state model of dirigiste capitalism), formal and informal market barriers to trade, and alleged predatory investment in the US economy (such as Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi Estate’s purchase of Rockefeller Center).

In Trump’s characterisation, such methods were deployed systematically to ‘rip off’ the US public. For Trump, 25 per cent tariffs on Japanese auto exports and a further punitive 14 per cent ‘reciprocal’ tariff on Japanese exports is a legitimate way of punishing Japan for its past economic transgressions. It is also perhaps no accident that Trump has announced a 100 per cent tariff on films made outside the United States – reflecting his misguided notion that US cultural dominance can be fostered by promoting economic autarky.

Trump’s tariffs are not only economically illiterate (failing to appreciate that Japan’s bilateral trade surpluses with the US in the 1980s reflected structural factors, including Japan’s propensity for high levels of savings and US budgetary deficits, the product of Republican tax cuts and high levels of defence spending ); they also are politically and diplomatically misguided, since they will impose acute pain on Japan at a time when the minority Ishiba government is politically weak and has limited room for manoeuvre.

Since becoming prime minister last October, Ishiba has failed to make much electoral headway. His position within the LDP is precarious, dependent on support from his de facto and ideologically misaligned coalition partners – a Buddhist (and anti-militarist) Komei Party, and the more nationalistically inclined, right-of-centre Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no kai), which has been providing support for the LDP on an ad hoc, highly conditional basis. The prime minister remains persistently unpopular, with support rates in the low 30s, having been implicated in a party funding scandal that dogged his predecessors. He also is seen by more experienced mainstream conservative politicians as ill-equipped tactically to manage the complicated process of budgetary negotiations with the main opposition parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party (Rikken Minshuto) and a more economically populist Democratic Party for the People (Kokumin Minshuto) that is pushing for cuts in Japan’s consumption tax and more generous welfare spending.

Car exports represent some 20 per cent of Japan’s overall export revenue and are vital to the economy’s well-being. Ryosei Akazawa, Ishiba’s minister for Economic and Fiscal Policy  has, so far, had little success in his talks with Trump and other senior administration officials, and has stressed that some Japanese car producers are already haemorrhaging as much as $1 million per hour given the impact of the new US trade policy. Already, the Bank of Japan has cut the country’s growth forecast for the 2025 fiscal year from 1.1 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Japanese efforts to appease Trump by promising to purchase Liquified Natural Gas from the US or to increase soybean, corn or rice imports into Japan seem unlikely to persuade the US to relax its tariffs. Expanding agricultural imports is also likely to further exhaust Ishiba’s dwindling political capital, given the LDP’s traditional reliance on support from Japan’s farmers, who remain fiercely opposed to further rice-market liberalisation.

Looking ahead to July’s upper house election, the prospects for the prime minister look decidedly unpromising. Talking to a cross section of governing and opposition politicians on a visit to Japan in late March, I was struck by the pessimism among LDP politicians, who seemed resigned to seeing the LDP lose its majority in the upper house, further compounding the government’s difficulties. Even if Ishiba is minded to gamble and dissolve both houses and call a ‘double election’ for both in order to maximise voter turnout in the hope that this will boost the standing of the LDP, some predict that this could result in a defeat for the LDP in both houses, ushering in an opposition government for the first time since 2009-12, and further complicating Japan’s efforts to manage its relationship with the United States.

If trade issues are a worrying and seemingly intensifying fracture line in the bilateral partnership, then to what extent might security cooperation help offset tensions between Washington and Tokyo? At first glance, this might be a logical area for renewed cooperation. Both US and Japanese officials share common concerns about China and North Korea. In the words of Japan’s National Security Strategy, published in December 2022, ‘China’s current external stance, military activities, and other activities… present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan and the peace and stability of the international community’. Given the strength of anti-China sentiment in Washington, then the importance of the bilateral alliance is clear. By all accounts, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s March visit to Tokyo appears to have reaffirmed longstanding key elements of the bilateral security partnership that represent continuity from the Biden Administration, including support for Japan’s creation of a new Japan SDF Joint Operation Command (JJOC), joint co-development and co-production of defence capacity, the development of a Joint US-Japan forces headquarters, as well as, in Hegseth’s words, ‘sustaining robust, ready and credible deterrence in the Indopacific, including across the Taiwan Strait’.

Given this affirmative language, there was palpable relief on the part of Japanese officials that Hegseth’s talking points had not included any explicit reference to Japan increasing its defence spending to three per cent of GDP. By contrast, Trump’s new Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (USDP), Elbridge Colby, during his 3 March Senate confirmation hearings had indicated that Japan should hit the three per cent target ‘as soon as possible’ – a politically challenging and fiscally potentially unrealisable goal for the Ishiba administration given the acute financial struggles it is already facing in reaching the two per cent target it pledged to realise by 2027.

Colby’s focus on China and the Indopacific reflects his wider thinking on the importance of the US prioritising its deterrence and defence spending commitments, shifting away from Europe and the Middle East while also encouraging Asian allies to do considerably more to take responsibility for their own defence. This focus, as well as Colby’s admission in his testimony that Taiwan was  a ‘very important… but not an existential interest’ for the United States has also raised speculation in some Japanese media commentary that the US might be retreating from its commitment to guarantee unambiguously the security interests of key allies such as Taiwan and South Korea. Some regional commentators have even suggested that the Trump administration’s posture – complicated by factional divisions between those US officials favouring a retrenched continentalist defence of the US and advocates of a more expansive commitment to Asia such as Colby – is analogous to the decision by Dean Acheson, President Truman’s Secretary of State, in January 1950 to draw a defensive perimeter line that included Japan but excluded the Korean peninsula and Taiwan. Acheson’s announcement had momentous consequences, contributing to North Korea’s decision to attack South Korea in June 1950, and the worry for some in Japan is that, with Trump no longer committed to protecting Ukraine, deterrence may be undermined  and as result North Korea and China may become emboldened to test the limits of US resolve in East Asia.

Whatever the substance of White House strategic thinking on Asia (and for now it seems reasonable to assume that, in the wake of the firing of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, it remains fluid), there is little doubt that uncertainty about the reliability of US commitments to the region is creating genuine anxiety in policy circles in Tokyo and, in the process, prompting a rethink of former verities. Within the Japanese defence community, for example, there are some who have been forceful in making the case for a sharply accelerated indigenous defence industry expansion, retooling the country’s manufacturing capacity to develop long-range missiles (of 3,000 kilometres or more) to address the China challenge, while even floating the inevitability of Japan embracing its own nuclear deterrent. Part of the motivation for these changes is not only to confront the region’s security threats but also, importantly, to bolster Japan’s defence and foreign policy autonomy and independence from the United States.

Public opinion is increasingly willing to support the idea of constitutional revision as a necessary response to a more uncertain security environment, and senior opposition politicians, such as Seiji Maehara of the Japan Innovation Party, have called not only for constitutional revision to explicitly recognise the legitimacy of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, but also for the revision of the 1960 US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. Maehara’s remarks are unprecedented given his status as a former foreign minister (he served in the Democratic Party government that briefly replaced the LDP in 2009). In making the case for revision, he advocates that the bilateral relationship shift to a more ‘symmetrical’ stance in which Japan would provide a formal reciprocal defence obligation to the United States comparable to NATO or the 1953 US-ROK Mutual Defence Treaty. Such reciprocity would potentially ameliorate Trump’s criticism of Japan for free-riding on past US support. It would also allow Japan’s government to move towards a more independent strategic posture – a position that resonates with a minority Gaullist mindset that has long existed in postwar Japan but which is likely to become more vocal and influential. For now, immediate constitutional revision seems unlikely given the high institutional hurdles that are required to effect change (a two thirds majority in both house of the Japanese Diet and support in a popular referendum), but the proposal suggests that mainstream politicians are increasingly envisioning a Japan less dependent on the United States.

Trust is one of the most important ingredient in any relationship, whether between individuals or nations, and Trump’s willingness to disregard past commitments highlights the risks of assuming that the future will resemble the past. (The current tariff talks, from Tokyo’s perspective, can be seen as a reversal or renegotiation of an earlier 2019 US-Japan trade agreement, agreed to by Trump 1.0 and which had been viewed as an end to US punitive trade diplomacy, particularly as it related to Japanese auto exports). Japanese negotiators from the Abe era might legitimately have believed that their success in building a working relationship with the first Trump presidency would put Japan in a privileged position when negotiating with Trump 2.0. So far, this seems an overoptimistic assumption.

Seasoned Japanese diplomats and diplomatic historians recall the traumatic experience of US-Japan relations in 1971 when the Nixon administration stunned Japan’s Sato government by announcing, with barely any prior notice that the US was planning to tear up decades of containment of communist China by having the US president signal his intention to visit Beijing for face to face talks with Mao Zedong. To officials in Tokyo, most notably to former Japanese ambassador to the United States, Koichi Asakai, this was a ‘recurring nightmare’ that underscored the periodic unreliability of the United States. Japan’s leaders had been left out of any formal consultation with the US, despite having a huge stake in relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and, as a consequence, were exposed to public accusations of ‘excessive subservience to US interests.’ Now, more than 50 years later, the Ishiba administration similarly finds itself criticised for adopting ‘tributary diplomacy’ with the US. This time, however, the divergence between Tokyo and Washington is more deep-seated, notwithstanding some of the more positive rhetoric between officials of the two countries.

Trump’s radical departure from the norms of the Cold War and post-Cold War era, his embrace of a far more authoritarian model of politics at home, and his support for illiberal regimes abroad, as well as his willingness to alienate long-standing allies whether in Europe, North America, Europe or indeed in Asia is a warning sign that the old rules of the diplomatic game no longer apply. Moreover, in the past, when there were tensions between the US and Japan, there was typically an active cohort of seasoned Japan hands in the United States who could intervene to offset momentary tensions between Tokyo and Washington. The recent death on 13 April of Richard Armitage, a key architect of a closer security partnership between the US and Japan in the 1990s, is a poignant reminder of the relative absence of knowledgeable and experienced Japan experts in positions of influence in the current Trump Administration.

Armitage stressed the importance of treating Japan like an equal partner within the alliance, a line of thinking that can be traced back to similar US advocates of close ties with Japan, including Mike Mansfield in the 1970s and 1980s, ambassador Edwin Reischauer in the 1960s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower in the 1950s, and  George Kennan, onetime head of the Policy Planning Staff (PPS) in the 1940s. These officials – whether out of pragmatism, psychological insight or longstanding engagement with and affection for Japan – helped forge a longstanding community of common purpose with their Japanese counterparts. Radical change in Washington-Tokyo ties will not happen overnight. However, the worry is that Japan’s civil servants and especially its politicians, irritated by and unused to being treated as a dependent subordinate, will, out of necessity, slowly but deliberately look for new partners in Asia and Europe and in the process the US-Japan alliance, which has been the linchpin for regional security in the Indopacific, will become frayed and increasingly less reliable and effective. Trust is a precious commodity and once lost may prove very difficult, if not impossible, to restore.