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Trump shock spurs Japan to think about the unthinkable: nuclear arms
In Japan and South Korea there is deepening concern over the reliability of long-time American security guarantees – whether the U.S. will come to their aid in the event of a war. This has been turbo-charged by Trump’s tough treatment of traditional U.S. allies, which has some in Tokyo and Seoul...
www.reuters.com
It was at an 18th century Georgian manor house outside London that Japanese lawmaker Rui Matsukawa began to have serious doubts about America’s commitment to defending her country.
Matsukawa, a former deputy defense minister, traveled in March to historic Fordham Abbey for a top-level bilateral conference. At the estate, now home to a Japanese-owned sake brewery, she said she learned from British lawmakers, diplomats and business leaders that a tectonic shift in their thinking was underway.
U.S. President Donald Trump was openly berating America’s European allies and tilting toward Russia. And Europe had “awakened,” she said, to the fact it could no longer rely so heavily on America and must take more responsibility for its security.
This was also true for Japan, currently the home to the largest overseas contingent of U.S. troops globally, she realized. “You can’t really take the U.S. presence for granted,” said Matsukawa, a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) influential national security policy council.
Matsukawa is part of a contingent of senior Japanese lawmakers who are beginning to think the unthinkable in the only nation to have suffered an atomic bomb attack: Surrounded by nuclear-armed neighbours China, North Korea and Russia, Japan too might have to deploy those weapons of mass destruction....
The Trump shock is also reverberating in neighbouring South Korea, currently protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella like Japan. Up to 75% of the South Korean public is in favor of the country building its own nuclear weapons, polling shows. The election of left-center President Lee Jae Myung in June has dampened some of the more overt talk of nuclear weapons in Seoul. But even some in his Democratic Party are increasingly recognizing the need, should U.S. security commitments falter, to achieve “nuclear latency” – possessing the means to quickly build a usable atomic arsenal....
