日本加速与东南亚结盟：战略转向与地缘逻辑

On Thursday, the penultimate day of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s visit to Tokyo, Japan and the Philippines announced that they had agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the second highest tier of relations in Japan's diplomatic nomenclature, below only a formal military alliance. This was pretty big news in and of itself, but also means that in barely the past few years, Japan now has comprehensive strategic partnerships with most of Southeast Asia.

Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Cambodia signed theirs in late 2023, with Laos signing on in early 2025. At the same time, Japan has also signed a number of security agreements with its neighbors. Earlier this month, Japan and Indonesia signed a new defense cooperation agreement, and late last year, Japan and the Philippines signed what's known as a reciprocal access agreement, or RAA, which effectively allows each country's military forces to enter the other's territory for joint exercises, training, and disaster relief.

Japan only has RAAs with two other countries, Australia and the UK, and they're essentially a step up from your bog-standard defense cooperation agreements, which is why they're sometimes described as quasi-alliances. To top it all off, this week, Japan and the Philippines also agreed to begin negotiations on an intelligence-sharing agreement, much like the one that Japan currently has with South Korea. So, in this video, we're going to take a look at Japan's expanding alliance network in the region, and try to figure out its underlying strategic logic.

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So, let's get straight into it. The policy underlying the recent expansion of Japan's alliance network is sometimes called the free and open Indo-Pacific framework, sometimes uncomfortably abbreviated to FOIP. The term was first coined back in 2016 by Japan's then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who basically popularized the term Indo-Pacific. Before Abe, foreign policy wonks generally saw the Pacific and Asia as two separate strategic regions.

Abe wanted policy makers, especially in the US, to instead see these two zones and oceans as essentially interconnected and to therefore focus more on their confluence, basically the South China Sea. Abe's argument was that this area had become increasingly important to the global economy. Something like 30% of the world's total trade passes through the South China Sea every year, but it was also increasingly contested, in large part because China was trying to press its expansionist territorial claims.

Abe apparently believed that policy makers outside of Southeast Asia weren't paying enough attention to the region because it sort of fell in between the Pacific and Indian oceans and was thus considered essentially a regional dispute, despite its centrality to the global economy. This is why he kept pushing the term Indo-Pacific. He wanted policy makers to see the Indian and Pacific oceans as essentially one big lucrative sea lane, with the implication being that it was everyone's responsibility, not just that of Southeast Asia, to keep it free and open.

More cynically, Abe saw this reframing as a way to get the US, Japan's long-time ally, more involved in the region and in the escalating geopolitical contest with China. Abe was remarkably successful in this respect. While Abe had been making this argument in vague terms since probably 2007, when he gave a speech in India talking about the confluence of the two seas, he first explicitly coined the term free and open Indo-Pacific during a visit to Kenya in August 2016, when he argued that the prosperity of both Africa and Asia depended on a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Thanks to Abe's famously chummy relationship with Donald Trump, this phrase quickly caught on. In 2017, during a speech at CSIS, Trump's first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, explicitly used the phrase free and open Indo-Pacific for the first time. And a month later, Trump used the term himself, saying it was his quote honor to share a vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific. The same year, the US National Security Strategy switched out the term Asia-Pacific for Indo-Pacific.

And in 2018, the United States Pacific Command was renamed to the United States Indo-Pacific Command. The first Trump administration matched this rhetoric with action. Especially in the last two years of his term, Trump took a remarkably firm stance against China's claims in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, carrying out a record number of so-called freedom of navigation operations, which is basically when the US Navy deliberately sails through waters where another country has made an illegitimate maritime claim in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

In the years since, the term Indo-Pacific has entered common parlance in foreign policy circles. And it's become essentially good form to have some sort of Indo-Pacific strategy. Anyway, Japan's current Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, a well-known Abe protege and China hawk herself, is somewhat unsurprisingly a big fan of the FOIP. Earlier this month, Takaichi gave a speech in Vietnam, where she essentially outlined her updated version of the policy.

In that speech, Takaichi argued that the FOIP policy aligned directly with the strategic interests of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which has historically preferred to talk about a quote inclusive Indo-Pacific. In other words, one that includes China. Takaichi also announced an expansion of Japan's Official Security Assistance, or OSA, and official development assistance or ODA programs, with the vast majority of these funds going to Southeast Asian countries.

This, plus the recent deepening of Japan's regional alliances, all suggest that Japan is essentially trying to get its Southeast Asian neighbors to take more responsibility for guaranteeing a free and open Indo-Pacific, and in practice, to take a stronger stance against China. This presumably reflects the fact that Japan knows it can no longer count on the US to take the lead in the Indo-Pacific, both because the second Trump administration seems far more dovish on China than the first, and because the US is just, well, too busy with all its other wars.

This might also partly explain why Japan lifted its long-standing ban on the export of lethal arms, meaning Japan is now permitted to sell to countries with which it has defense cooperation agreements, like its regional neighbors. This will help Japan take the lead on regional security matters, and make Japan a more attractive security partner to these countries, especially if they were previously reliant on US military tech.

So, will this work? Well, there are some familiar obstacles. China is pretty intransigent with its territorial claims, and has an ever larger military to back them up. There's also a fair bit of intra-ASEAN disagreement. The current Japanese government, for instance, is pretty anti-China, while Vietnam is on the other end of the spectrum, and maintains cozy relations with Beijing, despite having a defense cooperation agreement with Japan and a relatively expansive security agreement with the US.

Nonetheless, somewhat paradoxically, one of the main obstacles to regional cooperation was America's hitherto expanding presence in the Indo-Pacific, which reframed regional disputes into the wider US-China geopolitical contest, and made Beijing less willing to make concessions. While it definitely hasn't happened yet, as evidenced by the dire state of Sino-Japanese relations, it's at least possible that America's de fac

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