A New Government in a Shaky Part of the World: Thinking About Ishiba Shigeru’s “Asian NATO” Concept

An Unpopular Idea from a Shaky Administration

One of the ideas floated by Ishiba Shigeru as he ran for the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party in September 2024 was the creation of an “Asian NATO.” This proposal proved unpopular—foreign policy and security specialists in Japan and the United States, as well as elsewhere in Asia, turned their noses up at it, and on October 1, the day Ishiba became prime minister, India’s minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, noted his nation’s lack of interest in a speech in Washington: “We have never been a treaty ally of any country. We don’t have that kind of strategic architecture in mind.”

The popularity of Ishiba’s plan may be a moot point. In the October 27 House of Representatives election he called soon after taking office, his LDP and its junior coalition partner Kōmeitō lost their majority in the chamber. In the extraordinary Diet session in early November Ishiba was selected to continue serving as prime minister, but as head of a minority government on shaky footing. The upshot may be that his grand plan of Japanese leadership in an Asian equivalent to NATO will come to nothing.

Still more uncertainty was introduced to the international scene on November 5, when Donald Trump won another term as president of the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris had promised to largely keep the policies of President Joe Biden in place, but under President Trump, who has even made noise about pulling the United States out of NATO itself, all bets are off.

For a highly transactional president like Trump, even the US alliances with its partners in Northeast Asia, Japan and South Korea, may be on uncertain ground as he focuses more on what America gets out of the deal. Several influential English-language publications have opined that if the Trump White House fails to show sincerity in upholding the US side of the alliance and defending these countries, Seoul and Tokyo may well pursue nuclear arms of their own to replace the US umbrella. In South Korea in particular, up through 2016 or so there was a strong taboo against considering a domestic nuclear capability, but today more than 60% of Korean opinion poll respondents are in favor of their country possessing these weapons.

Trump comes across as an outlandish presence on the US political scene, but in truth American reticence toward overseas military involvement has been on the rise since well before his emergence, and it is difficult to see a reversal in this trend with him in the White House once again. I believe this means it may be time to discuss the potential for a multilateral security framework in East Asia, and from that perspective, there is reason to pay attention to Ishiba’s proposal.

Considering Ishiba’s Actual Aims

One key sticking point, though, is that it is hard to see precisely what Ishiba hopes to accomplish with his Asian NATO plan. His proposal made an international splash when he contributed a piece to the US Hudson Institute prior to his election as LDP president. In it he stated that “Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow,” arguing for the need to develop greater deterrence against China in preparation for a potential crisis in Taiwan.

However, Ishiba’s book Hoshu seijika (A Conservative Politician), published in August 2024 based on interviews and writing by former Mainichi Shimbun journalist Kurashige Atsurō, tells a somewhat different story. In it he states, “These days we hear more and more arguments along the lines of ‘today’s Ukraine is tomorrow’s Japan’ or ‘a Taiwan crisis could take place at any time.’ But if these things are actually the case, there is more reason than ever to work at keeping diplomatic channels open with Russia and China. This is something that we need to stress.” There is no mention here of the concept of an Asian version of NATO to stand against these adversaries.

In the same book he goes on to make what I feel is a highly cogent point: “If views of China as a threat are given free rein in Japan, I fear that we will lose our ability to carry out balanced discussions of that nation as a whole.” Building on this, he laments the narrow views increasingly taking hold in Japanese society: “In the past a number of eminent members of the LDP played valuable roles as liaisons between Japan and China. Today, though, people are apt to view anyone seeking to advance Sino-Japanese ties as ‘kowtowing to Beijing,’ often going so far as to attack them for their efforts to take the relationship in a positive direction.”

It may well be the case that Ishiba is sincere in both his proposal to launch an Asian NATO with China deterrence as one of its primary goals and his desire to curb views of China as a threat. Place them side by side, though, and they appear to be the products of entirely different speakers.

At the same time, it is somewhat worrisome that Ishiba’s criticism of excessive anti-Chinese stances comes across as a negative take on his predecessors in the prime minister’s office, including Abe Shinzō and Kishida Fumio. Ishiba has long enjoyed support from the public for serving as sort of an opposition force within the ruling LDP. Now that he himself stands atop the party and serves as prime minister, he can no longer take the stance of a gadfly sniping at the current premier and party president. People will be watching to see whether, as the nation’s leader, he takes responsibility for the various views he has expressed to date.

The Shock of the 1994 Higuchi Report

The negative reception of Ishiba’s Asian NATO concept brings to mind a development from three decades ago—the release of the so-called Higuchi Report, The Modality of Security and Defense Capability of Japan: The Outlook for the Twenty-First Century. This report was issued in 1994 by the Advisory Group on Defense Issues, an expert group headed by leading businessman Higuchi Hirotarō, under the administration of Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro, whose term in office had marked the end to the “1955 setup” of unbroken LDP rule. The document’s focus was on ways for Japan to cope with the new international environment emerging in the wake of the end of the Cold War.

The Higuchi Report made waves in particular for its positioning of two main pillars of Japan’s post–Cold War security strategy, namely (1) multilateral security efforts and (2) the Japan-US alliance. The fact that multilateral outreach appeared first in this list, ahead of the alliance with America, was a shock to many, including those in the Japanese and US security polity communities, who felt that Japan was showing scant regard for the alliance and signaling its intent to move out of the American orbit.

Professor Watanabe Akio of Aoyama Gakuin University (he later went on to become professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo), who helped write the report, has stressed that these two items were mutually reinforcing, and had no relative value ascribed to them. At the same time, he also notes that the pressure from the Japanese establishment to list the alliance with the United States first was considerable. In choosing to leave the order as it stood in the final form of the report, though, the compilers were seeking to poke holes in the stultifying idea that the Japan-US alliance always needed to come first in Japan’s foreign policy considerations.

In the early 1990s, just after the end of the Cold War between the US and Soviet sides, many nations were of the mind that America was likely to draw down its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. To head off these concerns, in 1995 the US Department of Defense published the “Nye Report,” the US Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region. This document reaffirmed the American “commitment to maintain a stable forward presence in the region, at the existing level of about 100,000 troops, for the foreseeable future.”

Needless to say, the international landscape in the 1990s was not what we face today, and statements then about a continued American presence in the region (or its lack) carry an entirely different significance from what such statements have today. But both the 1995 Higuchi Report and the 2024 Asian NATO concept rest on similar bedrock: the idea that we ought to be concerned about a relative decline in US involvement in the East Asian region and willing to consider replacing it with multilateral frameworks. We are also seeing similar reactions in the present era to those seen three decades ago, with worries that the bilateral Japan-US relationship is being devalued or ascribed a lower relative significance. (In the case of the Asian NATO idea being floated today, a key criticism is the fact that the Asian players who would be a part of such a framework lack a commonly held take on the threats facing them and the region.)

Can Multilateralism Take Hold in Asia?

Ishiba’s ideas on security and foreign policy have naturally come to attract much more attention as he has risen to the top of his party and the office of prime minister of Japan. It is also worth noting, though, that prior to the LDP presidential contest in September, junior coalition partner Kōmeitō also tabled the idea of creating an Asian version of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE, originally launched in 1975 as the CSCE, or Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, brings together Russia and the Western states to discuss matters like confidence-building and disarmament by both the Western and Eastern sides. The Kōmeitō concept of an Asian version of this framework proposed bringing Japan, China, and South Korea together with players including North Korea, the United States, and Russia, with a secretariat headquartered in Japan to foster dialogue among all the region’s nations.

On the opposition side of the aisle, meanwhile, the Japanese Communist Party is focusing its attention on ASEAN. Shii Kazuo, the longtime head of the party who stepped down from that post in January 2024, gave a speech in April before a group of officials from foreign countries’ embassies in Tokyo at which he stressed ASEAN’s emphasis on dialogue in Southeast Asia, a region that previously saw nearly ceaseless conflict. He had high praise for the role played by the organization in stabilizing the regional order, urging the players in Northeast Asia, a hotbed of rivalries and divisive actions, to follow the ASEAN lead in forging treaties of friendship and cooperation.

In truth, there have been times when multilateral approaches have held sway in East Asia and been expected to make further strides. One of these was the six-party talks on North Korean denuclearization, which lasted until 2009, when Pyongyang walked out of the negotiations. Since then, the North Korean nuclear program has become an established fact, and the Taiwan issue has risen to prominence as the main security concern in the region—but this time, China, which was counted on to be a driving force in the six-party framework, is a primary instigator of the ongoing situation, removing it from consideration as a potential coordinator of constructive talks on Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, if we see an increasingly murky situation when it comes to US involvement in East Asia, the regional order could crumble into instability in short order. To avoid the outcomes of such a development, including the possible scenarios of nuclear-armed Korean and Japanese forces, we cannot rely solely on efforts to keep the United States engaged. We must think more broadly now, and one part of these considerations certainly worth our time will be the concept of an Asian NATO.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, second from left, meets with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, at far right, on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington DC on July 11, 2024. © STT-Lehtikuva/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect.)