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With a new US trade deal and prime minister, Japan is now focused on reciprocity.
As President Donald Trump prepares for a visit to Japan later this month, it is worth remarking on the quiet new US defense paradigm that is emerging in East Asia. It is succeeding primarily on the basis of strong and effective relations with Japan, the most dynamic allied power in the region. Encouraged by Washington, Japan is committing new money and military capacity to the administration’s vision for deterrence in Asia. These steps are setting the US-Japan alliance on a path more likely to withstand future challenge from China. The logic, espoused by President Trump, is straightforward: reciprocity over dependency.
President Trump and his team have recognized Japan’s latent economic capacity, and are leveraging it to strategic end. Last month, the United States and Japan finalized a trade deal that included Japan’s pledge to invest $550 billion into the United States. Over a reasonable timeframe, it is realistic to expect Japan to meet this commitment.
These commitments, proffered in the form of equity, loans, and guarantees through Japan’s sophisticated fit-for-purpose overseas lenders, will be aimed squarely at infusing strategic industries in the US that underpin military deterrence—such as shipbuilding, semiconductors, energy export infrastructure, and critical minerals—with new cash. The crucial point is that these investment commitments in key sectors should underwrite a portion of the additional US defense capacity necessary for ensuring the future resilience of the military deterrent in Asia.
While the economic team has been leveraging Japan’s financial capacity to shore up the long-term military deterrent, this administration’s leaders in the Pentagon clearly appreciate Japan’s centrality to today’s East Asia defense architecture. A 2023 CSIS war game simulating Taiwan scenarios found that without access to Japanese operating bases, the United States cannot credibly contest Chinese military power in North and Southeast Asia; with Japanese basing access, US fighters can reach, operate in, and return from Taiwan’s airspace without refueling. As Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated earlier this year, “Japan is our indispensable partner in deterring communist Chinese military aggression.”
The election of Takaichi Sanae as president of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and her consequent elevation to the premiership is evidence that LDP voters do not recoil from the Trump administration’s expectation that Japan grow strong and reciprocal in its dealings with Washington. Takaichi has said a Taiwan contingency would constitute a “Japanese emergency,” given the island’s strategic centrality to Japan’s sea lanes, food and energy security, and technological dynamism.
Having internalized the principle of reciprocity, Takaichi appears amenable to the president and Pentagon’s prudent calls for Japan to spend more on defense, since it aligns with her own goal to deploy more debt capital in favor of Japanese industrial rejuvenation, including in the defense sector. She has firmly stated her ambition to write Japan’s Self-Defense Force (SDF) into the constitution as a military entity, a new step for the modern polity that could broaden the scope of permissible military operations. Meanwhile, in March 2025, the SDF established a permanent Joint Operations Command to coordinate the SDF’s branches for faster crisis response, and, with American urging in June 2025, announced it isimproving its logistics and sustainment capacity with a new Maritime Transport Group designed to move troops and materiel across the Okinawa archipelago.
Elsewhere in East Asia, the Department of War has been succeeding at shoring up military deterrence without surfacing a new crisis in US-China relations. Pacific Air Force Command (PACAF) is rapidly renovating two runways on Tinian, a World War II-era base in the Western Pacific; just this month, PACAF celebrated a milestone in Tinian’s “rehabilitation.” Upgrading Tinian is one part of a shrewd vision by this administration to disperse basing and resupply nodes beyond the first island chain.
It also must be briefly noted that this administration appears to be putting the defense relationship with Taiwan on firmer footing by encouraging the purchase of asymmetric weapons over the slow provision of military aid. Taiwan is, after all, a high-income nation. In Anchorage in August, officials reportedly discussed Taiwan’s multi-billiondollar purchase of drones, antiship missiles, coastal sensors, and other similar items, according to press reports; in September, the administration notified Congress of an upcoming $500 million weapons sale.
In short, 2025 has seen a range of positive changes in the US-Japan military alliance: the concrete commitment of hundreds of billions in Japanese capital to expand American industrial capacity, coupled with the finer tuning of American and Japanese military capabilities in theater. The result is the quiet emergence of a new and more sustainable edifice for defense relations with Japan. “An alliance cannot be ironclad if, in reality or perception, it is seen as one-sided,” Secretary Hegseth noted in May. “That is changing.”
About the Author: Christopher Vassallo
Christopher Vassallo is a PhD Candidate in Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for the National Interest.
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