Trump win likely to dampen Ishiba ambitions for U.S. troop pact change

Donald Trump's return to the White House is likely to make Japan reluctant to raise potentially controversial proposals affecting the decades-old bilateral alliance -- including Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's desire to seek a first-ever revision of a pact governing the U.S. military presence.

Ishiba says he wants to beef up the alliance by changing the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement. But experts warn that attempts to amend the pact could backfire with the Republican president-elect critical of allies he says are not paying enough for U.S. security support.

The Japanese government's priority for the time being is also likely to be propping up the economy, especially after the ruling coalition led by Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in the House of Representatives in the Oct 27 election.

Ishiba, a defense policy expert who took office on Oct 1, views the current Japan-U.S. security treaty as "asymmetrical" since while the United States is obliged to defend its Asian ally no corresponding obligation falls on Japan, with Tokyo instead required to provide U.S. forces with military bases.

"The time is ripe to change" the treaty, Ishiba said in a commentary contributed to the U.S. think tank Hudson Institute and released just days before becoming prime minister.

He proposed stationing Japanese Self-Defense Forces members in Guam to strengthen the alliance's deterrence capabilities including through a SOFA revision.

Under the bilateral security treaty, over 50,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, enabling the United States to respond rapidly to emergencies in a region where China has been increasingly assertive and North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. SOFA was signed alongside the 1960 treaty, defining the rights and privileges of American forces in Japan.

But critics and Okinawa Prefecture, which hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan, view the agreement as unfair to Japan, particularly in regard to the legal protection from prosecution afforded to U.S. service members and accident investigations.

When campaigning for his party's leadership race in September and for the general election the following month, Ishiba showed eagerness to amend SOFA, taking a stance more commonly seen from opposition parties rather than the long-governing LDP.

Recalling a U.S. military helicopter crash on an Okinawa university campus that happened in 2004 when Ishiba was defense chief, he said he had wondered whether Japan was "a sovereign state" as U.S. forces sealed off access to the site to retrieve the chopper wreckage with local police unable to conduct their own investigation.

So far the two countries have made operational changes or forged supplementary agreements when high-profile crimes or incidents expose serious problems in the SOFA arrangements.

Ishiba has said operational changes may no longer be enough to address concerns regarding SOFA, but experts are doubtful that Ishiba will be able to bulldoze his way to a revamp.

Ishiba has said the revision is among the issues that should be discussed within his party to establish a consensus.

"It is very likely that his advisors have advised him on how such a policy could cause friction with the United States," said Jeffrey Hornung, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan U.S. research organization.

Hornung, Japan lead for the Rand National Security Research Division, also indicated that the difficulty of altering SOFA rests partly on the fact that the United States has similar agreements with countries around the world, which means changing one of them could trigger calls for revisions of others.

A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official, meanwhile, suggested that a SOFA revision would be a demanding task that would absorb a lot of the government's energies.

Memories of Trump's "America First" policy in his first term in office are also raising concerns, with the approach described by critics as largely viewing allies in terms of dollars and cents rather than as partners to pursue common interests and shared values.

Trump himself has criticized the alliance with Japan as one-sided, saying in 2019 that "if Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III...but if we're attacked, Japan doesn't have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television."

"Mr. Trump could use Mr. Ishiba's argument of the alliance's 'unfairness' against him," said Takuma Nakashima, a professor of Japanese political and diplomatic history at Kyushu University.

U.S. pressure for Japan to pay more of the cost of hosting American troops could be revived under the second Trump administration, even though Japan decided in 2022 to nearly double its annual defense spending to about 2 percent of gross domestic product in five years through fiscal 2027.

But the experts indicated that Ishiba's ambition to revise SOFA should not simply be sidestepped, since efforts to upgrade the partnership with Washington are important to ensure its durability.

Acknowledging that Ishiba's revision proposal still lacks specifics, Hornung said "similar" ideas, such as taking a cue from Singapore's fighter detachments on U.S. territory, may be "worth exploring," given the close ties between the American military and the SDF.

"This doesn't mean stationing the SDF in the U.S.; rather, it means providing them facilities at U.S. bases to train and exercise more, either on their own or with the U.S." he said.

"I think there are a lot of potential benefits that could be gained," he added, although noting that a thorough cost assessment is required.

Nakashima welcomed Ishiba's presentation of a future vision of the Japan-U.S. alliance, saying his proposal indicates the importance of the allies "sharing what they are unsatisfied about with each other in order to regularly review and improve their relationship."

"If he really hopes to push forward a SOFA revision, Mr. Ishiba must tenaciously build trustful ties both with (Japanese) bureaucrats and the U.S. side before broaching the SOFA issue when meeting with Mr. Trump," he said.