Japan's foreign minister stated that the country plans to open a liaison office for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which would be the first of its kind in Asia.
“Tokyo is working towards opening a NATO liaison office, with Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi justifying the move by the swirling Russo-Ukrainian conflict and growing instability across the world. What's really behind the development?
‘The whole reason to put a NATO office in Japan is to create destabilization against Russia and China and to confirm South Korea's and Japan's total vassal role that they play with the United States using them like puppets to counter the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), Russia and China’, Jeff J. Brown, author of The China Trilogy, editor at China Rising Radio Sinoland and co-founder and curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, told Sputnik.
‘So the whole idea about doing this is just one more factor to destabilize Asia. For the United States, they get to destabilize three hated enemies. And those three hated enemies are China, Russia and the DPRK’.
On May 10th, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told CNN that Tokyo is in talks to open a NATO liaison which would be the first of its kind in Asia. ‘We are already in discussions, but no details (have been) finalized yet’, the Japanese official said.
Earlier this week, Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. Koji Tomita told reporters that the country was ‘working’ towards opening such an office but provided no details.
Tokyo has recently bolstered its partnership with NATO, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida becoming the first Japanese leader to attend a NATO summit in June of 2022. From April 24th to 26th, 2023, a military delegation from NATO’s Cooperative Security Division (CS), led by Lieutenant General Francesco Diella, traveled to Japan to meet the nation's senior military representatives and discuss the ongoing cooperation and opportunities to strengthen military ties.
‘These are our first military staff talks in Japan after the pandemic and I have seen firsthand that what happens in Europe matters to you, just as what happens in the Indo-Pacific region matters to NATO’, Diella told her Japanese hosts, led by Major General Minamikawa Nobutaka. ‘Your support to Ukraine has been significant, demonstrating your engagement as a security provider on a global scale’.
It's no coincidence that Tokyo and Washington have repeated over and over that their increasing military cooperation is caused by Ukrainian affairs even though it has nothing to do with the Asia-Pacific region, according to Brown.
‘Ukraine affects directly the situation here in the Pacific' is kind of an ironic Freudian slip because obviously the NATO plan in Ukraine to try to destroy Russia is being directly projected onto Taiwan and using Japan and South Korea as members of NATO’, Brown said.
‘So in the West, you have NATO and you have Ukraine, you have Russia, Ukraine is the proxy, and the United States is using Europe as a vassal, basically a vassal or a slave to help the United States. Western imperial global capitalism tried to destroy Russia. They are now going to try to do the exact same thing in Asia’.
By linking the Pacific and the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, the Japanese officials are basically confirming that ‘NATO will use Taiwan as a proxy against China, Russia and the DPRK, and that Japan and South Korea will play the role of Western Europe as vassals to attack the DPRK, China and Russia in Asia’, suggested Brown. ‘So it's the same playbook. It's just a different region of the world’, he stressed.
‘It has nothing to do with Ukraine and everything to do with the rise of China, which the U.S. opposes’, Dr. Scott Burchill, honorary fellow in international relations at Deakin University and author of The National Interest in International Relations Theory and Misunderstanding International Relations, told Sputnik, echoing Brown. ‘It is designed to antagonize Beijing and I suspect it will. Its purpose is to ensure Washington’s control over the military strategies of its friends and allies in the region’.
In December of 2022, the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government approved three policy documents – the National Security Strategy (NSS), the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program – which envisaged doubling the nation’s defense expenditures within the next five years. The new funding, amounting to roughly $320 billion, is set to ensure Japan's largest military build-up since the Second World War.
Even though Tokyo's post-WW2 security policy was regarded as largely pacifist, the Japanese government has decided to revise it citing changes in international and regional security environment and referring to its long-standing ally, the U.S., who expects that Tokyo would use its ‘national strength’ to protect the ‘post-war international order’.
According to Sputnik's interlocutors, it's the U.S.-led NATO bloc that is behind Japan's recent militarization”. -Ekaterina Blinova, Sputnik News
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has similar liaison offices in other parts of the world, including Vienna and Kiev.
Although there has yet to be an Asian country to join NATO, some Asia-Pacific nations have worked with the alliance, particularly Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea.
Eventually, Japan will have to determine its willingness to fight a proxy war against the Chinese on behalf of the West and run the risk of turning itself into the Ukraine of East Asia if it follows NATO's strategic line.