The U.S. Must Allow Japanese Independence

Washington has no greater friend in the world than Japan—or so the political establishments in both the United States and Tokyo would like to believe. Not everyone is playing along, though. Kan Ito, a graduate of the University of Tokyo and a well-known public intellectual in Japan, has been the bête noire of America’s Japan-hands—the imperial factotums who keep Japan subservient to Washington’s strategic interests. Ito’s articulate, pungent criticism of American foreign policy often exposes inconvenient truths about U.S.-Japan relations, truths based on Ito’s more than 30 years in America.

Ito has worked mostly in Washington D.C. as a foreign policy analyst and critic and has published five books in Japanese on international politics. His foreign policy view is defensive realism. He admires George Kennan, Kenneth Waltz, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. His philosophical views are Platonist and Kantian, and he deeply respects conservative American thinkers like Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, and Reinhold Niebuhr. None of this endears him to the Washington-worshiping foreign policy inner circles in his home country.

Ito also has inconvenient truths to share with Americans. He thinks that the United States has been disintegrating due to moral degradation since the 1960s. He also finds that post-Cold War unipolar hegemonism—which masquerades, in his opinion, as “idealistic liberal internationalism” and “democracy promotion”—have been ruinous for the American character. In this interview with The American Conservative, Ito explains why he thinks American hegemonism, the very bedrock of Japan’s postwar political order, has been unwise and misguided, and why Japan needs to pursue its own independent foreign and defense policies.

TAC: How do you see the American presidential election and U.S. politics?

Ito: I often wonder whether American civilization has entered a period of unproductive strife and long-term disintegration. American people do not seem to share common values or standards any more. Can a people without a common culture and common values function steadily and purposefully? I doubt it. Today’s America often looks like a perennially bickering dysfunctional family. The moral foundation that Americans once held in common has gone. In its place is postmodernism, heedlessly imported during the past half century. But postmodernism has degraded the intellectual life of America.

There are no more religious or philosophical standards in the U.S. upon which to build steady, stable value judgments. Instead, we now have strident hyper-liberalism, wokeism, petulant feminism and LGBTQ-ism, the squelching of dissent, and deformity of the intellect. Gender studies, ethnic studies, history, psychology, education, sociology, and other such fields in American universities have been completely politicized. These academic fields are not intellectually productive anymore. We have lost classical humanity and erudite culture in the higher educational institutions. I think it will be very difficult to restore thoughtfulness and sanity in the U.S. media and politics.

TAC: The United States remains strong geopolitically, though, especially in East Asia.

Ito: Oh yes, indeed. The U.S. does have an imposing, intimidating military establishment, and it can always “win” various wars as long as those last for short durations. The U.S. can even “govern and enlighten” defeated countries for a year or two. But after the initial short period of showy successes, the U.S. military and diplomats almost always fail to win the hearts and minds of the conquered people. For the past 70 years, American military interventions have been mostly failures. U.S.-engineered coups d’etat in various democratic countries have simply produced embittered local populations. Moreover, after the end of the Cold War, the frequency of American military interventions has jumped. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American foreign policy establishment—especially its bellicose neocons and powerful Israel lobby—became giddy with their imperial power. They have shown remarkable hubris, amorality, and short-sightedness. Has that behavior made the U.S. a more trustworthy ally for Japan and Europe? I doubt it.

What is needed in the current world is the restoration of a stable balance of power. We don’t need American unipolar hegemonism. For the past 500 years, we usually had five or six great powers in the world system. Wise, judicious balance-of-power policies could keep these great powers in check. But today, we have a very unstable balance of power structure. China and the U.S. have been acting as offensive hegemons, while the restored, post-Soviet Russia has been a defensive hegemon. (The ongoing Russian invasion of the eastern part of Ukraine is a defensive reaction to the threatening, intimidating NATO expansion scheme of the Bush/Obama/Biden administrations. Wise, thoughtful Americans like Kennan, Waltz, and Huntington opposed the NATO expansion scheme.) The current U.S. foreign policy is not judicious balance-of-power politics. It has destabilizing effects on the world, and it may instigate a tragic world war. We need a more stable, less confrontational multipolar world system which will restrain offensive hegemons like the U.S. and China.

The Chinese and Russians believe that America is in decline. With the growing interest payment on the U.S. national debt—a yearly bill which is already bigger than the U.S. military expenditure—and the massive growth of mandatory non-discretionary spending, the U.S. is unable to increase its defense spending as rapidly as China. Calculated in purchasing power parity, the Chinese will surely attain the largest military expenditure in the world within several years. Therefore, all Beijing has to do is to wait while American hegemony gets weaker and weaker, more and more unstable, and more irritable and fractious. China is on pace to become, by 2035, the world’s biggest exporter of high-tech goods, and by mid-century, or perhaps earlier, China will have the most powerful military in the world. The Chinese believe that the Americans will give up on the intensifying geopolitical competition and simply retreat from various geopolitical theaters one by one. I expect that the U.S. will be gone from East Asia by the early or mid-2040s. At that point, I guess, Japan will go from being a timorous, obedient vassal state of America to one of China.

In order to avoid such a tragic fate, I think Japan needs to construct its own nuclear deterrence. Of course, the U.S. government—which nuked hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese women and children not just once, but twice—is eager to prevent the emergence of an independent Japan with its own nuclear deterrence capabilities. Aha, such is the “benevolent” behavior of hypocritical U.S. hegemony. No wonder so many Global South nations nowadays chuckle at the hypocrisy of “American idealism” and “American human-rights diplomacy.”

TAC: You have spoken highly of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. What is about him that you find compelling?

Ito: Vance seems to have real Christian values. I think his Catholic faith can help restore some moral fiber to America. I don’t think Vance is a shallow, simplistic, sanctimonious Christian like Mike Pence and Mike Johnson. I myself do not subscribe to any particular religion, but I am sympathetic to Catholic teaching.

The United States was (at least nominally) a Christian country until the 1950s, but various Supreme Court decisions expelled Christianity from public life and schools. That was a big mistake. It weakened the moral consciousness of America. I do believe that every child in the US (and Japan) should be taught the basic tenets of Christianity, Buddhism, and classical Greek and Latin humanism. Even if most children would not believe any of it, it is still very useful to acquire basic knowledge of classical religions and philosophy, because fashionable pop psychology and political ideologies do not nurture in people a deep moral sensibility.

In general, Christianity and Buddhism take a dim view of human beings in the sense that everyone is presumed to be a sinner and born with original sin (or with amoral, untamed desires and libidos). The humanism of Rousseau and the progressivism and pragmatism of the 19th and 20th centuries were, by contrast, optimistic about human nature. I think we need to recognize human beings’ innate limitations, self-deceptions, cognitive dissonance, self-righteous hypocrisy, and hubris. Why have we so casually discarded the noble teachings of Buddha, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus? That was suicidal stupidity!

If J.D. Vance and Catholic thinkers around him are plotting to restore religious (or classical) teaching in America, I welcome it wholeheartedly. Postmodernism, wokeism, materialism, hedonism, neocon jingoism, and many other ills have poisoned America. Let’s restore some sanity to our society and politics.

TAC: You have often said that Japan is a vassal state of Washington. Can the U.S.-Japan alliance continue into the foreseeable future?

Ito: The U.S.-Japan alliance is not a normal alliance. It has never been a real, genuine, honest alliance. It is a “Double Containment Alliance” to control and utilize defeated Japan as an American vassal. The U.S. has absolutely no intention to make Japan a normal, secure, independent country. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Americans like John Foster Dulles openly talked about this double containment policy. “Keep Germans down, Americans in, and Russians out” was their German policy, and “Keep Japanese down, Americans in, and Russians (or Chinese) out” was their Japan policy. The U.S. wanted to use a “contained Japan” for its policy of “Soviet containment.” Therefore, it was called a double containment alliance. The US government had no intention to make Japan a real sovereign country. (President Eisenhower, however, was an exception; he didn’t like self-righteous, overbearing American hegemonism. But he was a rather isolated figure among the haughty, domineering military–industrial complex, against which he warned.)

Even after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government insisted on keeping this double containment policy. If you google “1992 Defense Planning Guidance,” you will find hundreds of thousands of hits about this post-Cold War American hegemonist grand strategy. This classified document (which was leaked to the U.S. media in March 1992) clearly stated that the U.S. would prevent Japan and Germany from regaining real independence after the demise of the Soviet Union. Since then, the hegemony-obsessed U.S. government has been repeating its counterproductive military interventions all around the world, causing millions of unnecessary deaths among innocent civilians. Therefore, the majority of the nations in the world nowadays dislike and distrust American foreign policy.

Currently, three hostile countries surrounding Japan—China, North Korea, and Russia—are rapidly strengthening their nuclear-war fighting capability. But the U.S. government, which wants to maintain its selfish double containment policy against Japan, has been adamant to prevent Japan’s own nuclear deterrence, even though the U.S. knows that its extended nuclear deterrence (the so-called nuclear umbrella) will not function in the event of an East Asian nuclear-war crisis. The U.S. government has absolutely no intention to engage in nuclear wars with the three nuclear powers of Russia, North Korea, or China in order to protect a dependent, subservient vassal state like Japan.

This immoral, unjust American policy toward Japan must end. It is unfair and evil that the U.S., which has already committed two nuclear war crimes (nuclear genocide) against innocent women and children, thinks it is acceptable to keep Japan deliberately vulnerable to the nuclear threats of Russia, China, and North Korea. By deliberately keeping the Japanese people vulnerable, the U.S. government has shown its true colors: the purveyors of a selfish, hypocritical, mean-spirited hegemonism.

Fortunately for Japan, Donald Trump does not subscribe to this immoral double containment policy. He repeatedly stated that Japan should become an independent country, with its own nuclear deterrence if necessary. (As president, Trump several times urged the late prime minister Shinzo Abe to make Japan a sovereign, independent country.) Unlike the hypocritical American foreign policy establishment, Trump has no interest in sustaining America’s unipolar hegemonism. In spite of his big mouth and habitual boastfulness, he is actually neither warlike nor imperialistic. A strange fellow, Mr. Trump.

In 1967, Eisenhower advised then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon that Japan should be made independent with its own nuclear deterrence. Nixon accepted this advice. Unfortunately, Japan’s then-prime minister, Eisaku Sato, a small-minded, timorous, obtuse nincompoop, could not understand why Eisenhower and Nixon advised Japan to regain its independence. The second Trump presidency will be perhaps the last chance for Japan to regain its independence. The Japanese people must not fail to take it.

For ordinary Americans, a nuclear-armed Japan—which will counterbalance nuclear-armed China, Russia, and North Korea—will be clearly beneficial. The American deep state wants to keep Japan insecure and vulnerable, but such an immoral, evil policy is not in the interests of ordinary Americans. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to get involved in foreign wars, especially nuclear wars, for the sake of a slavishly dependent vassal like Japan. It is time for the spineless Japanese politicians and bureaucrats to show real resolve and maturity, and to regain their independence and integrity. Otherwise, Japan will be absorbed into the Chinese Imperium—which would be the end of Japan as a nation.

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