NATO and Japan: A strategic convergence? Post cold-war geopolitics: Russia, China, anti-piracy and anti-terrorism

Abstract

In this article, I argue that NATO and Japan, from a parallel anti-Soviet Cold War position through common links with the United States, have directly moved towards each other since the 1990s. Each of them has gone more global. NATO’s ‘out of area’ operations have taken NATO eastwards from its previous focus on Europe and the Mediterranean, while Japan’s gradual multilateral activism have taken it westwards from its previous focus on East Asia. This has created geopolitical overlap between these two actors, most notably in Afghanistan but also elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Common advocacy of liberal democracy, and overt concerns over jihadist and piracy destabilisation have brought these two actors together. NATO’s post-Cold War search for relevance meets Japan’s wider external security sensitivity, especially with regard to China’s rise. However, while NATO has adopted a flexible range of ‘Partnership’ frameworks, there have been long-running constitutional impediments to Japan deploying military forces outside its own immediate territory. It is precisely this impediment to further NATO-Japan interaction that the Japanese government has been removing during 2015.