 Good afternoon everyone and welcome. My name is Bill Burns and I'm the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Today's event coming on the heels of Secretary Mattis' trip to Asia and Prime Minister Abe's visit to the United States is very well timed. The question I think on everyone's mind is how President Trump, who pledged during the campaign to dramatically re-cast America's role in the world, might reorient U.S. foreign policy and the partnerships and alliances that are so critical to it. Inevitably, analysts and commentators are looking for clues in the President's early engagements, including with Japan, but there's much more at stake than mere political scorekeeping. Indeed, as the international landscape evolves, America's role and America's web of alliances and partnerships must evolve as well. That's true in our own hemisphere, just as it's true in Europe and in Asia, and it's true when it comes to our critically important alliance with Japan. As we think about its long-term evolution, we could not ask for a better guide than Jim Shroff's new report on Common Alliance for the Common Good, the United States and Japan after the Cold War. For clues about the future of the alliance, Jim looks to its past. He offers a comprehensive portrait of a relationship that has only gotten stronger, broader, and more resilient over the past quarter century, and he outlines a compelling and affirmative case for how to reorient the partnership on a global scale to keep pace with a rapidly changing international landscape. Jim's analysis and prescription rests on extraordinary experience and expertise. His career has tracked the evolution of the U.S.-Japan alliance since the end of the Cold War. He was at school in Tokyo when Reagan met with Gorbachev and Reykjavik, and back again after college at the very moment when the Soviet Union collapsed and with it, the alliance's original purpose. Since those turbulent years, Jim's career has touched on many aspects of the relationship, from education and journalism to business and defense, including most recently as a senior advisor for East Asia policy at the Pentagon. He has profound and wide-ranging insight into the relationship and what it can contribute to global peace and prosperity, and he has dedicated his career to doing his part to realize its potential. Jim, you should be very proud of this report. I know I'm very proud to be your colleague, and I'm very pleased that Tanaka Masayoshi, NHK's Washington bureau chief, was kind enough to join us to moderate today's conversation. Tanaka-san is one of Japan's veteran foreign correspondents. He's been on assignment in nearly every corner of the globe, including from Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. So with that brief introduction, please join me in welcoming Jim and Tanaka-san to the stage. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Bill. I am honored by your introduction today, and I'm sincerely grateful for the leadership that you provide here at Carnegie and the support you provide to the Japan program. It means a lot, and I want to thank everyone here for coming to join me and us to talk about what I think is a really critical part of American foreign policy. The research for the report that we're unveiling today was prompted in part by my time in government, but also throughout my career from the late 1980s, based on the idea that we should be able to get more strategic benefit from the investments we make in the Alliance as it has become increasingly capable and more diverse. So the report is constructed in two parts. The first part is a post Cold War history of the US Japan Alliance, and I'm hoping that that has some good shelf life is something that's useful for universities, professors, students, media, and the general public. And then the second part is a little bit more of a traditional think tank analysis of the current security situation and weighing of different policy options that our two governments have. Now, starting with the first part, you know, the end of the Cold War, I believe was a major turning point for the US Japan Alliance no longer rooted in containing the Soviet Union and coming at a time of particularly intense US Japan trade and economic friction. Our two governments really had to decide what was the purpose going forward and the orienting principle for for the Alliance, and that was not an obvious conclusion that strengthening strengthening the Alliance would be the result. The Alliance has changed as a result of policies both of us have adopted and compromises along the way as well as changes in the global arena. But we're at a new turning point now, both in terms of where our countries are at and what's going on in the world. And that's part of what I want to talk about today as well. We had a pre Cold War during the Cold War era. We had a very stable but relatively inactive Alliance. And after the end of the Cold War ended, we produced a much more capable Alliance, but in many ways, I believe it is more fragile. Now, at the end of the Cold War, somewhat ironically, when the United States was in its military primacy moment, its unipolar moment, security Alliance strengthening became the overarching theme and activity within Alliance management. In the beginning, forward here. In the beginning, it was a bit of an insurance policy to some extent, but then because of North Korea's nuclear development and beginning to develop more and more capable missiles, that security dynamic or imperative became more concrete. And then certainly as China's defense budgets increased its military modernization program and its economic strength grew in the 2000s, that became ever more concrete, as well as American intervention overseas addressing fragile states, sources of terrorism and ethnic conflict that developed around the world at the time. Now the security Alliance strengthening within the Alliance is something that happened very incrementally and relatively slowly. This is what I call essentially a staircase of Japanese domestic legal and policy changes throughout starting with the PKO law at the bottom in 1992 and ending at the top in 2015 with the security legislation most recently passed. The vision of a more stronger U.S.-Japan Alliance began in the Clinton administration with the Joint Declaration in 1996. It began to crystallize during the Bush administration and the Defense Policy Review Initiative, but it really took all the way until the Obama administration for it to come to fruition and be attained with the U.S.-Japan defense guidelines in 2015 together with this new security legislation. Now the other interesting part about this idea of a staircase is where are we on the staircase? Are there more stairs above where we are now yet to climb within the Alliance or are we essentially at a landing or at a plateau? Now I would argue in the report that we are probably more likely at a plateau or a landing than we are in the middle of a staircase barring some kind of significant or severe security change in the region. And that has implications for where we want to make our Alliance investments going forward. In addition to security strengthening in the Alliance, we also laid out and experimented with a broader rationale and role for the U.S.-Japan Alliance. A global partnership or common agenda as it came to be known, taking advantage of Japan's economic growth, its strength, its diplomatic and technological strength as well as its large overseas aid budget to work together internationally addressing common interests around the world in the area of environmental protection, global health, and political and economic development in developing countries. And in the book I differentiate between downstream cooperation, which is more traditional military defense cooperation within the Alliance, primarily there to help deal with problems after they have manifest themselves. This could also be dealing with financial crises or disaster relief, but it's primarily in a military security context. And then versus upstream cooperation, which is more of this area of global cooperation in environment, health, governance, economic development, trying to stem problems before they flow downstream. And this is ultimately a more efficient investment, but one that is incredibly difficult to see concrete success and also to coordinate internationally. Now this is hard to see here, but this is a static shot of an interactive infographic that we developed and is on our Carnegie website, on the Japan program website. And what it shows at the top layer is time is 1990 and flowing down to the bottom to 2015. It tracks the development of a variety of different U.S.-Japan bilateral initiatives over the post-Cold War period across different categories. Development, the economy, foreign policy, science and technology and security. And these kind of upstream cooperative initiatives were generally overshadowed by the economic trade tensions of the 1990s and the security focus in 2000s. They're valuable and have produced some good benefits, particularly in the area of combating AIDS and polio in Asia, helping Cambodia get back on its feet in the 1990s. But they are tactical cooperative initiatives that are generally handled and managed at the working level. Still though, you see at the top about seven or so different initiatives going on at the same time. The Trump administration is inheriting about 20, at least 20 right now, including space dialogues, cyber dialogues, dialogues on the internet economy and the like. Now this kind of upstream cooperation came into sharper strategic focus during the Afghan wars, the U.S. war in Iraq. But that was embedded primarily within a multilateral framework. And it had limited sustainability from a Japanese point of view because the strategic priority was simply not as high for Tokyo than it was for the United States. The nice thing is we've developed this wider range of cooperation and you can also see the colors, the bars become more multicolored at the bottom because of the interagency dynamic developing. The space dialogue involves economic technology and defense participants now much more than it used to. So we've gotten better at it and we have a much greater capacity to leverage these different types of tools within the alliance. Now, in addition to the changes in the alliance, our countries have changed, our economic relationship has changed, and the world has changed to some extent. We have a much closer U.S.-Japan economic relationship, a more global Japan, and a much more influential and capable neighbor in China. So in this list, we've looked at where we were in 1990 and compared to where we were in 2015 in terms of Japan's share of the U.S. trade deficit. It was 40 percent then, it's about 9 percent now. U.S. trade complaints are way down from where they were at the end of the Cold War. Japanese foreign direct investment has increased at least by six times, employing well over a million Americans. And Japan is the largest foreign employer in the manufacturing sector in the United States. At the same time, Japan is investing all around the world in other supply chain networks and the ratio of foreign assets held by Japanese companies to their overall assets rose from about 3 percent to well over 12 percent and by some measures closer to 20. At the same time, foreign ownership of Japanese stock market and foreign involvement in Japan's economy is growing. Now at about 30 percent in the Tokyo Stock Exchange, foreign ownership compared to 5 percent back then. And China has become a much bigger player and a much more important trading partner for Japan. Now, I did some research in the area of corporate strategic alliances because I was curious about how alliances, why alliances are formed and how they either succeed or suffer or fail. And in the corporate world, if you review business case analysis, they fail quite a lot. And sometimes it's due to poor leadership, sometimes it's due to poor coordination. But an overarching reason is a failure to grasp and articulate the strategic intent of the alliance. Or it's the lack of recognition of the close interplay between the overall strategy of the company and the role that the alliance plays in that strategy. So it's not just about, well, they have different business cultures or their competitors in other areas. Those can be managed if the reason why the alliance is created in the first place is well understood and well articulated. Now today I would say that some elements of our old grand bargain with Japan are still in place, subsidized U.S. military presence in Japan, in Asia, for regional stability, defense of Japan and open markets. But the business environment has changed over time. We now have greater diplomatic and economic cooperation on global challenges, which are becoming more directly linked to our own national security than ever before. We've seen the political impact of displaced persons within countries suffering civil war, refugee crisis having not only an economic impact but also a political impact. Terrorism and terrorists able to recruit followers virtually without crossing borders. The environmental impact on climate, the suffering from overfishing and damage to marine resource environments spill over into identity politics and essentially a backlash against the globalization and the movement toward more openness and stability that we were seeing internationally is now more directly linked to many of these upstream challenges that we were trying to address in the past. Now we have some, our leaders have tried and we saw most recently by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe 2014-2015 issue a vision for U.S.-Japan alliance cooperation that combines on the one hand strengthening and modernizing our security alliance and on the other promoting peace, stability and economic growth throughout the world. We have a pretty good roadmap for that first component, which is the defense guidelines of 2015. We do not have a good roadmap for the second component. We have no global cooperation guidelines. The alliance has developed common strategic objectives in the past, but these are a wide ranging list of common interests everywhere from specific policy initiatives, but also including resolving the Northern Territories dispute or peaceful resolution of tensions between China and Taiwan. That's not a good roadmap for alliance cooperation in service of some of these upstream requirements that we face. Now how do we conceptualize, how would we put together a roadmap or a set of global cooperation guidelines? What purpose would that serve beyond this vague idea of promoting peace, stability and economic growth around the world? And in the book I talk about essentially something that we hear touched on constantly, the rules-based liberal international order. In the book I call it an open stable system. It's not necessarily a new entity. It's something we've been working on ever since the end of World War II with the GATT and cooperation in the G7, but also in other areas accelerating our efforts to support this open stable system in harmonizing finance rules, trade liberalization, creation of the WTO, cheering on the European Union, APEC, East Asia Summit, international organizations and the like. This system is under pressure and it has a competing vision from China, which prefers a less open, less democratic, more state-centric approach to this concept of an open stable system. It likes the open stable system to some extent, but there is a competition particularly intense in Southeast Asia, I believe, over the normative foundation of international relations and geopolitics in Asia. And you see it playing out in many of the ASEAN meetings and hassle, struggles over how to come up with a consensus among the countries there on certain key issues. So the challenge going forward, if we look at overlapping alliance strategic priorities, I tried to portray the balance between the United States and Japan. The overlapping priorities certainly take up a larger, the U.S. touches on a larger portion of those in Japan, but it's pretty significant for the United States as well. And in the report, I make a realist argument for a two-pronged alliance approach to leverage U.S.-Japan relations for greater strategic benefit. The downside or hard security imperative remains, and in some ways it's even a larger share of that overlapping priority, particularly with North Korean nuclear development and China's continued expansion. But we have the defense guidelines to help guide us on that front. The challenge is to think in terms of where do our overlapping strategic priorities rest in the upstream side. Our cooperation with Myanmar and Southeast Asia is a pretty good example of this, bringing together both diplomatic tools, finance, sanction, political and economic private sector investment all coming together overseas aid and coordinating other policies vis-a-vis Myanmar and the region. Can we sustain that? And can we agree on a small set of key priorities going forward that will attract more sustained support over the long term between the United States and Japan that support their strategic interests? And here I have my own views and I talk about them in the report. The United States, the U.S. and Japanese governments would have to actually come together to decide what those priorities are. But I borrowed a concept by Nicholas Spikeman, this idea of the Mediterranean. Asia's Mediterranean is a little hard to see here, but if you tilt the South China Sea on its axis, you see quite an interesting parallel to the Mediterranean Sea itself. And this periphery of China, I think, is the battle space essentially for upstream cooperation, for shaping the future of the open stable system in the region, whether it's going to be more democratic, more rules-based, less might-makes-right. And rather than attempting to influence this in an approach that is more militaristic or confrontational, in the report I offer and emphasize a more indirect approach or a bank shot essentially that would focus on regional commons issues in the South China Sea, primarily in the fisheries area, which does not have a regional fisheries management organization. The United States and Japan can bring complementary networks in this region and complementary strengths, which include money, which include membership in international organizations, their own experiences in other similar environmental and resource management organizations, convening power, technology, and of course kind of that military diplomatic strength to back it up. Now we need a consultation mechanism within the Alliance to figure out and agree exactly on what these cooperative, upstream cooperative priorities would be. I lay out a five-step process of Alliance strategy consultation that is both bottom-up and top-down. The leadership does and the direction does have to come from the executives in both sides, the NSCs in both sides, but it would involve contributions from throughout the government. And in addition to, well, the key priorities in this conversation ultimately are China policy and I believe Southeast Asia as well, North Korea of course is certainly there and science and technology cooperation particularly in artificial intelligence is one of the case studies that I talk about in the book because of the potential for disruption and also productive contributions to our economies in the future. Not necessarily in a technology development area, but in future policy development for how AI will evolve is something that I think beyond the cancer moonshot. We've done it before in the genome mapping program. There are resources we have to leverage in this regard. Now let me end just quickly here with, of course you have to have a list of policy recommendations at the end of any new administration book here in Washington. And it begins with this idea of Alliance consultations, the agenda that I talk about, but kind of added this one on the global economy and trying to minimize protectionism and promote tech policy as I mentioned. I think the new U.S. Japan bilateral framework that has been proposed in the first summit meeting between Abbey and Trump, led by Vice President Pence and Deputy Prime Minister Asso nominally. We have to see how this comes together, but that could be a way to put together some of these consultation priorities. It's also going to be a way I think for Japan to try to better understand what direction Washington intends to go or the Trump administration intends to go on trade and economic policy and try to have some input on that front. I've added defense guideline implementation, of course, extremely important. I also added here continuing to reduce the U.S. footprint in Okinawa. I mentioned that I think we ought to go forward with the Henoko relocation because it is the fastest way to reduce Marines return land and improve safety in Okinawa, but we cannot just leave it there. Looking around the world and seeing the role that identity politics plays and the trends that are going on, if we don't act proactively to continue to try to find ways to reduce the impact on the local population there, I think we will be playing a dangerous game of ketchup and heaven forbid there's not another accident there in the meantime. And then finally, there are some technical adjustments or bureaucratic adjustments I recommend for being better able to leverage some of this upstream cooperation. More involvement of Meti and the Commerce Department, which I think we'll see now in this new organization and new framework, and also more involvement of the Under Secretary of State for civilian security, democracy and human rights and some of the offices there. So some different alliances on that front. I don't want to go on any longer because I want to give a chance to hear what Masa Tanaka has for me in the way of questions and also give you all a sense, a chance to ask some questions as well. But I hope we've picked your interest in this broad capacity within the alliance to address what are both in the downstream and upstream side. I think very tangible strategic priorities for both of our countries. The key is identifying those priorities and then bridging the gap between a vision for what we want to do as an alliance and all the tactical initiatives that we have on the ground. It's that middle piece and the link between those two that I think we need to apply our focus. So please let me invite Masa Tanaka up here. I'm so glad he was willing to join us today. I really respect his journalism and if you haven't seen it, he had a very interesting interview with President Obama last year, I believe, or 2015. So I'm honored that you came to join us today. So we will have a little chat for a few minutes here and then we'll carry it on to the rest of the audience. Good afternoon, Jim, and thank you for a kind of presentation and the wonderful presentation of your book. And I was so impressed by your book, the newly published congratulations and which is very impressive and according to your long experience of U.S.-Japan relationship, especially security field. So first of all, my question is your book title, Uncommon Alliance for the Common Girls. Why you choose this title? Well, you have to have something catchy as a title and I thought that that might fit the bill. It was actually very difficult to translate into Japanese and we have a summary in Japanese of the book available on our website. But it spoke to a couple of key themes in my mind. One is that the United States and Japan are not natural partners in many ways. The way we came together, the way we built our alliance was a marriage of necessity at the time. Culturally we're very different. I do believe many of America's strengths are in some ways Japan's weaknesses, but the opposite is true. Many of America's weaknesses are strengths in Japan. So we fit well together, but we're very different. We're very far away. And it was not a preordained outcome that when the initial raison d'etre for the alliance and containing the Soviet Union disappeared, that we would come together and have such a strong and in many ways stronger, more diverse alliance of stakeholders, economic, civil society, education, now sports and culture. So I talk about the Uncommon Alliance in the book and how we've changed in the post-Cold War era to be closer. And then the common good in my mind often gets talked about in an altruistic way or, gee, wouldn't it be great if we help address this disease or improve the ability to deal with pandemic diseases in the region or help a country improve its election monitoring system, etc. But I've tried to make a very realist argument for the strategic benefit that that can give both of our countries and our mutual interests and our common interests have only become stronger over time. And so that kind of fit in that way. Thank you, Jim. You proposed the Five Steps Alliance Strategy Consultation, and you just explained it for us. And would you like to elaborate a little bit more about this, your proposal of Five Steps Alliance Strategy Consultation? Sure, sure. I mean, we released this book online a couple of weeks ago and just barely made it ahead of the Abe Trump Summit. And we'll see whether or not this kind of an idea gets adopted. For me, it begins with this idea of collection and discussion. And collection happens in both countries independently with some consultation, which is why the flags are separate from each other. But it's really trying to get a full stock taking of the bilateral activity that's going on. And my experience in government is that in many ways, in many cases, one office or one department doesn't necessarily fully understand how all the other offices or departments are currently involved in cooperating. I want to mention in-country cooperation between our embassies in places in Southeast Asia, for example. There's a lot of that kind of cooperation. So there's a collection and a discussion process internally in each country to help identify this area, this then diagram. And then there is this direction piece in the middle, which probably takes several months. And it could fit within this idea of a pence, also a bilateral framework that would sort through some of this and connect it, link it back to each country's national strategy so that we bridge that gap, and then provide more specific direction, essentially the certain key guidelines for this idea of global cooperation. Some will be downstream, some will be upstream. And then the remainder part is kind of an ongoing setup of monitoring and adjustment going forward, not creating a whole separate entity to follow it, but better linking within the interagency on how these goals and guidelines are being met. Now we'll see. My instinct or my gut tells me when I look at the rhetoric around the idea of a new bilateral framework is that it will not necessarily get to this point. The Trump administration, from my first look, does not appear to be as interested in this aspect of the open stable system, upholding the rules based liberal international order. That's actually a big fear in Tokyo because of how important it is to Japan. But we'll see whether or not some of that could come in there. My gut tells me that the bilateral framework is mostly going to be about managing the economic and trade pressures coming out of some of those in Trump's White House. And as well as trying to have some bilateral collaboration to deal with various crises that may emerge going forward. But we'll see if they can get something that's more farther looking. Jim, you mentioned about China. China is a very important country. And at the same time, China is a big challenge for both the United States and Japan as well. And you mentioned about we have to have a constructive cooperation with China trying to get better relations. And what you proposed is U.S.-Japan cooperation in Southeast Asia. Why is that? Well, to have sustained cooperation, in my mind it has to be something that both countries identify as a high strategic priority. We cooperated in Afghanistan and Iraq. That was a much higher priority for us than it was for Japan. We cooperate on some areas of defense at the Senkaku Islands, for example, in the East China Sea. That's a much higher priority for Japan than it is for the United States. And Central Asia, other parts of China's periphery, don't stick out to me as much of a priority for both countries as Southeast Asia does. And when you look at what's going on in Thailand or what's going on in the Philippines or other countries there, U.S. treaty allies. Southeast Asia is at a real turning point at a time when it could go in a wonderfully productive, more democratic, more cohesive kind of regional cooperative framework to deal with some of the challenges that they face. I mean, half of, this is a small environmental issue, but half of the waste plastic that ends up in the oceans today comes from five countries that surround the South China Sea. The fisheries resource in the South China Sea is incredibly important, not only for all those economies. You think of how many millions, hundreds of millions of people live around the South China Sea. But that resource is being significantly depleted and it's not being managed the same time you're having all these fights over territorial issues in the region. So it struck me that if we want to try to, and we've been trying this for a long time now, how do you draw China in, enmesh China into the current system as we've kind of constructed it? One way to do that is to bring along a region and address regional commons issues that get beyond which rock belongs to who, which boat is allowed to go to which place, and try to deal with, and not just individual countries or human rights issues or democracy issues within individual countries, try to tie it together in a more of a regional cooperative framework. And that's why I turned towards Southeast Asia. Thank you. So let me go to US, Japan's summit last week, Trump Ave summit in Washington DC and West Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago. And in Japan, before the summit, lots of concerns, maybe President Trump might touch on the subject of Toyota or currency issues, lots of concerns. So how do you assess the summit between President Trump and Prime Minister Abe? What's your sense, Ben? Yeah, no, and I'm fascinated that you've got a chance to go down there and see that firsthand. I think overall, my reaction is so far so good. We did not have any major faux pas. We did not have any kind of tone of confrontation. I mean, the Trump's bear hug at the very beginning with Abe and we've all seen the extended handshake on the internet. I think they've gotten off to a good start. Abe is trying to portray Japan as a country that is contributing to America's economic growth, that American prosperity is directly linked to Japan's prosperity. The idea that Japan can be a partner with the United States to help Trump understand that Japan is an asset, not a liability for the United States. And they've agreed to set up this bilateral framework, which I think strategically Tokyo is trying to avoid getting too amashed in the White House with the uncertainties there and see if they can deal more with Vice President Pence, former governor of a state that has a lot of Japanese manufacturing investments. So if they can get this framework set up and have the adults in the room to work on these issues, I think that was a good start. But we'll have to see. I do expect some of these, whether it's border tax, adjustment tax issues, tinkering with NAFTA, which was a big reason why a lot of Japanese investment came in the first place, messing up global supply chains, putting sanctions on China where a lot of Japanese exports come into the United States from China. So there are a lot of moving parts and I think Japan's going to be playing a little bit of defense on the trade front going forward. So the Gulf meeting in Florida and what was astonishing was the participation of Annie Ells, the PGA professional golf player from South Africa. But just after the Gulf meeting in Florida, North Korea launched Bostick Missile. So what do you think is significant? What is the message that you think North Korea has launched at this time, at this moment? Well, in some ways it was fortunate for the Alliance to demonstrate that element of solidarity there in Florida. I think the Trump administration demonstrated some lack of experience in terms of how they managed that whole thing, not a whole lot of substance coming out of on the Trump side in terms of what the United States thinks about it or wants to do about it. But it's still early and Abe has many years on these issues, so he was able to demonstrate some of that experience there. But I think this underscores and this is still the importance of the downstream side of the Alliance. I don't want to minimize that and the defense guidelines and the new legislation is really critical because of the nuclear and missile threat that North Korea is in the process of perfecting. And the launch recently we've seen a shift to solid fuel capability, much harder to target missiles down the line quicker to fire. So I really think a military solution to the North Korean problem is not workable unless we're forced into it. And we are in a process of containment. We're not going to be able to provide inducements to North Korea to get them to give it away. We're going to be in a nuclear standoff that is more uncomfortable for Japan than the one during the Cold War was. Because the potential for North Korea to believe in a use it or lose it situation that they need to strike at U.S. targets in Japan or other targets in Japan is something we can't rule out. It's increasingly concrete. So deterrence and this kind of defense cooperation that we're building through the defense guidelines is increasingly important. And I think Secretary Mattis understands that and I think we're off to a good start, at least in the Abe-Trump relationship. And that's going to be important. How did you see the joint statement by Prime Minister Abe and President Trump at Mar-a-Lago? A very, very brief statement. But it's only a couple of weeks after the inauguration. I mean, this quick, I remember when Obama first came in and Prime Minister Asso rushed over to develop the new relationship. It was a very brief meeting he flew in. They had a meeting in the Oval Office and he turned around and flew away. And then Asso was gone within a couple of months of that. But here we had Kishida and Asso and Abe all here multiple days. So I think the statement said all the right things in terms of the security threats that they face. There was a little bit of finger pointing at China in there, which was maybe a little more direct than we've seen in the past. There was a commitment to free and fair trade and we'll have to see how where the fair part comes into it, but not getting into too many specifics. No mention of host nation support payments and the idea of this bilateral framework and reiterating the U.S. commitment that Article 5 of the Security Treaty applies to the Senkakus. So all the boxes were checked at the start and now Japan has lost one of its main contacts in the NSC with the departure of the National Security Advisor Flynn. He was a key contact together with Ken Juster on the on the economic side. So Juster becomes increasingly important and then Japan will have to start again with a relationship with a new National Security Advisor as soon as possible. Do you know who would be a new national security? You see on Twitter a different name, but it does appear to be, I think it's Admiral Hayward, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce his name, but a fellow SENTCOM companion of Secretary Mattis from the past and someone who seems to be highly professional. I think we're up for an upgrade in that position either way. Thank you for the latest information and let me get back to the question of North Korea. So people see that and the new administration, the U.S. policy toward North Korea would be strengthened. Do you think U.S. administration will give up so-called strategic patience? So how do you foresee the new administration's policy toward North Korea, sanction-wise and military-wise? Well, they're still in a policy review right now and everybody talks about how strategic patience has failed, but so has everything else we've tried. We may be coming to a realization that there's just only so much we can control in North Korea. And maybe we've missed some opportunities in the past, but at this point I don't see any prospect of a bargain with Kim Jong-un possible to get them to denuclearize. At the same time, I don't think there's a military solution to it. And I think they'll realize that. That doesn't mean we can't have some kind of engagement with North Korea. And we will probably have a more liberal government in South Korea later this year, possibly, which could begin to reach out to re-establish links and redevelop K-Song industrial complex or other shifts. If that happens, that could also influence U.S. policy, but I expect us to press sanctions. We could see further pressing on China. The whole U.S.-China relationship to me is the big wild card and both for the alliance. If we really start pressing on both the trade front and the sanctions front, kind of secondary sanctions on China, and end up into a more direct overt confrontation with China, that changes the atmosphere in the region significantly. If we nibble more on the edges and don't do that quite as much, then I think we're just sanctions, containment, building up defense and deterrence, maybe some engagement economically or confidence-building measures with the North Koreans in collaboration with the South. But I expect if the choices are dramatic change in North Korean policy by the United States and not so dramatic change, I think it's going to be more not so dramatic change. Seems that my question time is up, but let me ask a final question. Okay. Yeah, and then we'll turn. Yeah. So the world is watching the North Korea, the Kim Jong-un brother was murdered in Kuala Lumpur. I don't know it is a half brother. It's assassination or not. So how do you see this incident? Well, I don't know a whole lot of details right now, but my assumption is that the reports are accurate that he was assassinated at the direction of the North Korean leadership. You know, to me, this raises a question mark about the narrative that Kim Jong-un has really solidified his political base and he has managed to actually begin to deliver on this Jung Jin policy of nuclear development and economic development where there's been some economic improvement in the lives of North Koreans, modest, but an improvement nonetheless. And that idea of a very stable North Korea, you're going to have to deal with us for a long time. The other narrative has been the defection from by the number two at the North Korean embassy in the UK and and other high level defections that suggest there might be something beneath the surface that that and this suggests that Kim Jong-un is concerned about that Kim Jong-un was always a candidate to be a puppet plant by a Chinese orchestrated coup of some kind. And that just reiterates there's both the downstream side we need to be prepared for in the context of conflict in the Korean Peninsula or a collapse in Korea. But this upstream side of collaboration within the UN within with regional countries dealing with refugees dealing with rebuilding a country. If it comes to that, you know, it brings that importance or that component back to my mind. But but I'm glad I focused more on Japan in my career than North Korea. It's been a much more productive time. Thank you, Jen. So now is a question and answer time. I would try to open the floor to guests. Please wait for microphone and the state your name and the gentleman. Yes, Dave. It's your retired Foreign Service question, perhaps more for Tanaka. Feel free. We got him here. I was just wondering about the Abe Trump summit. There was a lot of talk just before the summit that there was going to be negotiations on the Saturday at the Mar-a-Lago. And I don't see that there was any actual negotiation time that went on there. You were a lot closer to it. Saturday media cycles here don't give you much information on substantive elements. But I didn't get a sense that there was any real substantive negotiations of any kind going on other than the golf game and arbiter on that kind of stuff. But talk on Friday here in Washington, but rest of it just at the dinner tables. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your questions. Actually, the Prime Minister spent a lot of time with the President Trump. And the Prime Minister went back to Japan and Tokyo as soon as he arrived in Tokyo, he came to NHK studio in Tokyo and he explained what he did talk with the President. And what he said, what he talked was very private. And they are talking about foreign leaders and my colleague made a question, who's a foreign leader? I cannot say about that. But maybe about China or Russia. So they talked about President Putin, his character and maybe Chinese President Xi Jinping. How is he looked like? And it was a private conversation, he said. There was no statement, read out. So it was very unofficial conversation. But I imagine that they exchanged their views about, it wasn't negotiation actually. And I think I imagine Prime Minister Abe, he has a long and lots of experience about diplomacy and he met a lot of foreign leaders. So I imagine he gave some of the ideas about foreign leaders like the President Trump is going to meet. And that really played. No, I mean, Tillerson wasn't there. There were some people from MOFA as part of the entourage, but it was a very thin U.S. entourage. My understanding was actually there was some fairly poor coordination that went on with state. State was asking White House in the last minute, aren't this person, this person, this person going? And they were told, why would they need to go? They still got a ways to go before they get that. So I don't think there was a whole lot of substance. But the discussion of world leaders is right up Abe's alley. He's met them all and he could take a different hole and say, let's talk about this person you're going to meet. And so 27 holes, 27 leaders. And yeah, we haven't dived in. They even pulled back the whole idea of a detailed proposal of a Japanese investment in infrastructure and creating jobs in the United States. They kind of ended up tamping that down to a level of abstractness so they could flesh that out going forward. Thank you. Thank you for this great panel. So questions on China. During the press conference, President Trump also sent a very positive message to China and he changed his before private to the summit. He also changed his stance on one China policy. Which kind of message did this send to Japan and U.S.-Japan alliance? And also talking about the Gulf diplomacy. Do you think Japan and the United States government set this bar too high to have this kind of intimate and long-hour engagement for the two leaders? Do you expect in the future the Chinese government is also going to require this same format and intimate long-hour summit in the future? Thank you. Well, I had some questions about this when they jumped into a whole weekend or maybe even 27 holes of Gulf together and State Department friends of mine said, what talking points am I going to write for this kind of a meeting and what are they going to talk about? But I think it has more to do with Trump himself. I think he's somewhat lonely already in this job. He doesn't have a lot of fun with it. And the idea, he seemed to kind of hit it off with Abe. Abe is all in on building this relationship and is able, I think, to take a more low-key approach, not make it all so serious. And so Trump was like, come on down to the club. You meet the members and I think that's a lot of what drove it and it worked. That doesn't mean it's going to work with a lot of other people. And I would not expect that to happen unless Xi Jinping is a great golfer or wants to buy ex-memberships in the club. The first question, I've also heard some discussion about whether or not this phone call with Xi was timed related to the Abe visit or such. But I actually don't think they were necessarily strategically linked. Pressure had been mounting for some time to deal with some of the key questions of China policy to get to a level where they could have a phone call with Xi Jinping. I think that was working on its own track. And in some ways, as he was getting ready to go away for the weekend and a whole bunch of other things coming down the pike, they wanted to get that out of the way and they made a decision to kind of put the one China policy in a place where it would be seemingly comfortable for a while. And in many ways, I think it's good for Japan. Japan wants a tougher U.S. stance vis-a-vis China, at least in the sense that they don't do a deal with China and carve up the world without Japan or they don't just completely abandon the region, but they don't want a serious conflict between the United States and China, either in a military sense, a trade sense, or otherwise. So I think this was viewed as actually a positive thing from Tokyo's perspective. A ping-pong meeting? Yeah, there's Trump-like ping-pong that I'm on. And Dylan Ciencia Press. With the rise, very recent rise of a more sober tone in American foreign policy, do you think that that might open the door gradually to a resumption of the TPP? Well, the TPP, talk about upstream cooperation. The TPP would have been a great mechanism for supporting the open-stable system, the rules-based order in Asia. And its loss, for now, is a great loss from Japan's national strategy perspective. I don't expect Trump to reverse himself on TPP, per se. I also think it's very hard for the other TPP countries to quickly adjust that equation and that formula that came together with the United States to take the U.S. out and make it all work is actually going to take some serious time. We may see opportunities to, under the surface, take components of TPP and try to address them, put them into NAFTA negotiations, for example, both. In theory, all three countries have signed the TPP, Mexico, Canada and the United States. There are elements related to internet economy, digital trade, intellectual property protection, some environmental and labor rules that all have agreed to. So maybe that would be a way to jumpstart some NAFTA discussions and essentially begin to get some of the TPP components into place while other piecemeal conversations are going on in Asia. But I'm hopeful. I think as a package it was very compelling and Vietnam's participation and others was really groundbreaking in some ways. So I'm hopeful that if it's not in this Trump administration, maybe the next administration, it will still be kind of kept warm enough that they can go back to that. It's passing quite fast. So we'll take a couple more questions. I'm Jasmine. I'm from Georgetown University. So my question is how do you think of Trump's presidency on the open stable system? Will it challenge the system or can the system still exist and re-warm up after Trump's presidency? Yeah, no, that's a key question. I don't think the Trump administration is so hostile to the system necessarily. Certainly we'll do what it can to expand incentives for companies and countries who want to sell things to Americans to make those things in the United States. And we will see rule changes probably to that effect, which will have an impact on the whole global supply chain network that has evolved to date. And that's how significant of a change I expect for all the cheering on Wall Street right now for what the Trump administration is going to do on deregulation and perhaps infrastructure investment banking reform. There is also wariness on some of these issues. Some of the vested interests and stakeholders in the current system will probably be influential enough. There's not a lot of broad based objection to the open stable system within the US government and the bureaucracies that are involved. There's a portion of the American electorate that is very concerned about it and feels directly undermined by it. And we see it in other parts of the world as well. And that's a real challenge. I don't think it's just about us convincing them that they're wrong and this is all good for you. It's about recognizing that we have work to do to essentially make the impacts of globalization more fair or more democratic in terms of how these things are managed. More flexibility may need to be injected in what is was always moving toward a more market based solution. So we're taking a little detour from where we were. All of us proponents of globalization and international harmony were steaming straight ahead. This is all going to be great. And we have reduced poverty in the world and we have reduced state to state conflict and we have increased per capita income in the United States and all these different measures. But income inequality is great and we have a lot of other challenges. So domestically and internationally that's a conversation we're going to have with the Europeans and throughout Asia. My problem is I'm not confident that the G 20 the EU framework are well equipped to manage this kind of tension and dissonance on where we go next. So it's it's not it's going to be a bumpy ride. But I'm not predicting the downfall of the system right away. And I'll stay around afterwards for people who have some additional questions and one more question. So many expected that Trump and our base would talk about will have some kind of post TPP talks either bilateral or multilateral trade negotiations but that didn't happen. Why. And another question is so how do you think the Obama's Asia pivot policy will evolve under the Trump administration taken together all a lot that you just discussed. Thank you. Well the you know that that kind of trade negotiation or discussion didn't happen I think primarily because it's still so early. And we don't have a US trade representative we don't have a Secretary of Commerce in yet. Those positions have not been been formed. And I expect certainly Tokyo would like to steer those conversations into this new bilateral framework where they can get different stakeholders around the table. And as I said deal more with someone like Pence as opposed to it being headed up by someone like Navarro or or or other hawks on on this issue. I am not optimistic for bilateral US Japan free trade talks or trade talks is where I think Japan's got to be a little bit on the defensive. We came up with an agreement in TPP because we could get other things that made the deal attractive. It wasn't just we were satisfied with the level of access to Japan's agricultural market or Japan was just satisfied with our reduction of like truck tariffs and the phase out period. We had a lot of tough negotiations on that in a straight one to one bilateral negotiation. There's not a whole lot of room for more compromise and if the US wants to throw currency into the mix and and make other demands. Japan's going to be very wary of that. So we're back into kind of the 1990s of semiconductor talks and some other things where there'll be some things Japan can do. But they'll draw the line at well we're not going to do this and they want to manage that as much behind the scenes as possible and and also try to provide information to US negotiators. Negotiators on how certain NAFTA changes would affect them how certain trade talks with China would affect them. And I think that's what they want this framework to to allow them to plug into this debate within the United States so that they can it can be as informed a debate as possible. On the the rebalance I think we're a lot of individual people are still committed to it and I think Secretary Mattis believes in it and Tillerson probably does to some extent on Capitol Hill as well. But I don't necessarily see that coming out as a strategy of the United States or at least articulated in that way. And we see a lot of people's experience in the White House now is more aimed at the Middle East than than anywhere else. Last question. Last one. Anna Schwartz with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. I was wondering that given President Trump's past statements about the cost of protecting countries like Japan under the US nuclear umbrella. Are Japanese strategists questioning the credibility of the US extended deterrence. Well I think so far no. And if anything the White House commitment to increase defense spending and talk of further investment in the US nuclear enterprise is heartening on that front. So in terms of capability the extended deterrence commitment I think will stay pretty robust. The key question is going to be will you know because the deterrence is both the capability together with the will. And so far you know Trump just getting up there and saying I'm behind Japan 100 percent. It's pretty straightforward and and and I think so far that's that's reassuring for now and certainly in other parts of the government Mattis's trip. We see reassurance taking place. But Secretary Mattis also made a comment I think today vis-a-vis NATO that NATO needs to spend more or else the US might moderate its commitment to NATO. I'm sure that was not his own talking point. I'm sure that is something that is he's being told that he has to address. So will he as time goes on be instructed to demand more from Japan in terms of defense spending or host nation support. That could very well be. Now I think it's reasonable for Japan to increase slightly its defense spending doesn't mean it needs to double it or greatly increase it. But given what's going on in the region Japan can find area ways to spend some more money on maritime security and on missile defense and surveillance and reconnaissance etc. And they could tout that and say because of Donald Trump's wonderful negotiating skills we've decided to increase our defense spending difficult politically at home. So certainly it's I'm not expecting any great increases but you know we could end up breaking the 1% kind of theoretical threshold in Japan 1% of GDP. And that would be a big deal in Japan and I think would would be enough to swage critics here. So I'm cautiously optimistic that that's not going to be a big deal down the road because of North Korea and because of what many in the Trump administration perceive as a real growing concern in terms of China's military capability. We have a many things to talk about. Thank you very much Jim and congratulations on your book launch. Well thank you Masa. Thank you everybody. Really wonderful for you to be here. Thank you.