John Ikenberry rightly offers some nuance to the all too fashionable conclusion that Japan is on the decline  But unlike John, I don't see any danger that that "[t]he Washington-Tokyo axis threatens to be replaced with a Washington-Beijing axis as the diplomatic cornerstone of regional stability."

John Ikenberry's post on Japan offers some important qualifications to the current, all too fashionable conclusion that Japan is on the decline and therefore can be comfortably ignored in the grand geopolitical strategy debate. But unlike John, I don't see any danger that that "[t]he Washington-Tokyo axis threatens to be replaced with a Washington-Beijing axis as the diplomatic cornerstone of regional stability." Quite the contrary - we may look back at the last several years as an artificial high water mark in Sino-US relations, as nationalists in China and those who fear China's rise in the United States fuel a spiral of mistrust and hedging that leads to deeper and deeper estrangement between our two countries. This would be welcomed by some nationalist forces in Japan who fear China'rise and Sino-US rapprochement, and hope to reconstitute the Cold War US-Japan alliance as an alliance to contain China. But that result is lose-lose-lose proposition for all three countries, threatening the economic prosperity and relative stability that has characterized East Asia for the past generation. The United States has an enormous stake in trying to tamp down the growing Sino-Japanese antagonism, primarily by making clear that the only solution to regional stability is a trilateral one in which all three countries have a significant voice and that bilateral relations between the United States and Japan are complementary to, rather than a substitute for, the Washington-Beijing "axis" - and vice versa.