Japan no longer needs U.S. bases for its own defense

Evidence

Most U.S. and conservative Japanese officials would say that Japan has simply been paying the United States to provide security. While this argument may have been plausible during the Cold War, it seems harder to sustain today. Although there is real public fear of China, especially over tensions in the East China Sea, China’s military power still does not rival that of the United States. Japan’s so-called Self-Defense Forces are also one of the world’s most powerful militaries, even though Japan’s U.S.-drafted constitution renounces war and insists that armed forces “will never be maintained.” The country regularly ranks among the world’s top military spenders (fifth in 2012, eighth in 2013). Since 2001, Japan has provided both financial contributions and “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Japan apparently feels secure enough in its self-defense to have a foreign military base of its own in Djibouti, the country’s first since World War II. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 879

Categorization

• XREF: Cuts against the standard security-guarantee justification for forward basing, central to this whole book’s thesis.