Reassessing the U.S.-Japan Security Relationship in the Post-Cold War Context

摘要

Change is spawning doubts about NATO and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Sceptics say the old alliances will fall into disuse. A reassessment of alliances is necessary, but it should focus on action to transform them into instruments for post-Cold War cooperation. The alliances are broad frameworks for cooperation across a gamut of concerns: environment and energy, third world development, democracy, refugees and disasters, rules of the road for managing simultaneous technological competition and cooperation. Certainly alliances can no longer be conducted in the traditional manner. A new political economy is at work. Linkages between politics and economics are evident everywhere but hard to define. As a result, a new terminology is in fact gaining ground - the language of mutual recrimination, more pronounced with respect to Japan but present in the European relationship as well.