China, Japan and the New US Geostrategy in the Indo-Pacific
Beijing wants to seize new regional opportunities without running afoul of Washington.
By: Kamran Bokhari
As Washington shifts the burden of regional security onto its allies, U.S. adversaries are moving to exploit the resulting power vacuums.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Western Pacific, where China has sharply escalated pressure on Japan to prevent it from emerging as a regional security actor.
Beijing’s strategy is to shape the balance of power on its terms, limiting both Japanese and U.S. maneuverability.
The result is a delicate triangle in which U.S. balancing is complicated by Chinese tactics, even as Washington and Beijing try to reach some kind of accommodation.
On Nov. 10, the United States publicly backed Japan in its dispute with China.
A State Department spokesperson condemned Beijing’s actions as destabilizing and reaffirmed Washington’s unwavering commitment to its ally.
The escalation follows Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s warning to Germany that Japan, as a “defeated nation” in World War II, should exercise greater caution in its military posture.
Relations have been tense since last month, when Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested Tokyo would respond militarily if China attacked Taiwan.
Tensions intensified further after China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier conducted roughly 100 flight operations east of Okinawa, directing radars at Japanese military aircraft.
Bloomberg reported on Dec. 8 that Japan is rapidly fortifying its southwestern island chain – particularly Yonaguni Island, just kilometers from Taiwan – transforming it into a missile archipelago with layered air defenses and electronic warfare capabilities and signaling a decisive shift in Tokyo’s strategic posture toward deterrence.
The clash between China and Japan is ill-timed, coming just as U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are negotiating a tentative accommodation.
Neither side has a strategic incentive for military escalation: Beijing must contend with a severe economic downturn, while Washington is recalibrating its foreign policy under the new National Security Strategy released Dec. 5.
From the U.S. perspective, the emerging understanding with China is predicated on the premise that robust commercial engagement is acceptable so long as Beijing refrains from challenging U.S. military interests.
The back and forth with China, then, doesn’t just complicate a delicate strategic balancing act; it reveals the utter fragility of reconciling economic independence and regional security interests.
The situation typifies a classic contradiction in geopolitics in which objective realities override the subjective preferences of nation-states.
Beijing cannot be expected to do anything that halts its rise as a great power.
It’s already an economic and political power, so, from Beijing’s perspective, it’s only natural that it will enhance its military capabilities.
To sustain a functional working relationship with the U.S., China can dial back its military assertiveness, but it cannot do so indefinitely.
As the world’s second-largest economy with critical dependence on maritime supply lines, Beijing faces a strategic imperative to shape the security of its immediate periphery.
Moreover, China recognizes that the new U.S. geostrategy increasingly relies on allied and partner nations to assume the primary security burden in their respective regions.
Whereas NATO and the European Union provide a mature institutional framework that helps the U.S. reduce its exposure to land-based conflicts, the Indo-Pacific lacks time-tested regional structures.
Washington is therefore trying to construct a security architecture suited to the dynamics of the broader Indo-Pacific basin, but as an oceanic power, it cannot simply leave to its own devices the Western Pacific, which is essential to U.S. global posture.
Neither can it remain the sole net guarantor of regional security – hence why Japan has become strategically indispensable.
China has been projecting power as far as the third island chain, which stretches from the Aleutians to the Solomon Islands, signaling its long-term blue-water ambitions.
Its immediate strategic challenge, however, is securing dominance in the waters closer to home before the emerging U.S.-led security framework is up and running.
Among U.S. allies, Japan is China’s biggest strategic obstacle.
As far as China is concerned, this emerging situation is at once an opportunity and a threat.
Beijing needs to capitalize on the regional security transition, but it cannot allow Japan to stand in the way of its efforts to become the region’s preeminent military force.
Beijing may have reason to avoid conflict with Washington, but it has no such inhibition with Japan.
Japan, for its part, has incentives to become a major military power.
China has already surpassed it economically and technologically and, in doing so, has shifted the regional balance in ways Tokyo can no longer ignore.
While Beijing may not be positioned to challenge Washington globally, it has the military capability to threaten its neighbors and reshape the regional security environment.
Compounding the matter is Tokyo’s growing concern about the shift in U.S. geostrategy, which raises uncomfortable questions about its own security amid threats from China, Russia and North Korea.
As a key U.S. ally with qualitatively superior military capabilities and a long history of power projection, Japan represents a significant threat to China.
Beijing, by contrast, has no modern historical experience conducting wars beyond its borders.
Beijing also knows that Japan’s military power will grow dramatically as a result of the new U.S. geostrategic paradigm.
It thus sees Japan not only as a rising military competitor but also as the pivotal actor capable of undermining its bid for regional primacy.
But China cannot simply confront Japan directly – at least, not without jeopardizing its broader effort to engineer a detente with the U.S., a strategy central to buying time for plans to stabilize its economy.
Any disruption to that process would undermine Beijing’s imperative of managing mounting internal vulnerabilities, such as slowing growth and intensifying pressure on the elite.
This helps to explain Beijing’s unusually sharp and performative bellicosity toward Japan: It’s a calibrated show of strength meant to deter Tokyo without triggering a wider strategic break with Washington.
The U.S.-China-Japan dynamic illustrates the fragile balance between strategic opportunity and risk in the Indo-Pacific.
Washington’s push for allies to assume greater security responsibilities creates openings that Beijing is keen to exploit, so long as it doesn’t run afoul of the U.S.
With its growing military capabilities and historical experience in regional power projection, Japan sits at the center of this emerging tension, serving as both a deterrent and a potential flashpoint.
How Washington, Beijing and Tokyo navigate this delicate interplay will determine not only the stability of the Indo-Pacific but the broader balance of power in the 21st century.
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