Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba wants to separate negotiations on tough U.S. tariffs from security-related discussions — but disentangling the two will prove a challenge as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to voice long-held complaints about the alliance’s fairness.
Ishiba has repeatedly said over the last week that the two issues must be dealt with separately, following Trump’s latest gripes that the 65-year-old security alliance is “one-sided.”
“Tariff negotiations are tariff negotiations. National security discussions are national security discussions,” Ishiba told lawmakers on Monday. “If we don’t keep them separate, I believe we risk distorting the essence of each issue.”
The prime minister and his team have worked assiduously to convey to Trump that Japan not only delivers a massive amount of investment into the United States, but has also ramped up its own defense budget and boosted its financial contributions to the alliance.
This, however, has done little to tamp down the U.S. president’s criticisms — or persuade him to grant Japan tariff exemptions.
Trump has hit the U.S. ally with a 25% levy on cars, steel and aluminum despite Tokyo’s push for the measure’s removal. His administration has also slapped Japan with a 24% across-the-board tariff, though this was pared back to 10% for 90 days from earlier this month.
Instead of divorcing tariffs from security, though, Trump may decide to double-down on his grievances and instead use them as leverage in the trade negotiations.
Indeed, his claims thus far, which are reminiscent of those he leveled at Tokyo during his first White House stint, convey the larger view he has of U.S. alliances — that they are “taking advantage” of the United States, said Sheila Smith, an expert on U.S.-Japan ties at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Ishiba will want to separate the economic from the nuts and bolts of alliance management,” Smith said. “Trump will want a deal sooner rather than later to demonstrate the success of his approach. What contours of a deal give each a political win without economic distress? Therein lies the challenge.”
Japan’s response
Japanese officials have been unusually quick — and vociferous — in responding to Trump’s linkage of the issues, with Defense Minister Gen Nakatani saying Friday that there is “no reason” to renegotiate a cost-sharing agreement for hosting U.S. troops in Japan before its expiration in 2027.
On Tuesday, following Ishiba’s weekend remarks, Nakatani emphasized that he believes security issues would not play an outsize role in the ongoing tariff negotiations.
“I understand that the Japan-U.S. consultations on tariff measures will focus mainly on economic measures,” Nakatani told a news conference when asked about the issue and how security discussions should proceed.
Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya, meanwhile, was even clearer, laying out a possible timeline from the Japanese side for tackling the cost-sharing issue ahead of the expiration of a five-year cost-sharing deal reached in 2022, known as a Special Measures Agreement (SMA).
“The agreement is set to expire in two years, so we intend to continue discussions on an appropriate track starting next year regarding the appropriate burden-sharing arrangements for Japan,” he told a separate news conference Tuesday.
Contrary to Trump’s claims that the U.S. doles out “hundreds of billions of dollars” to defend Japan while Tokyo pays nothing, the latest SMA shows that Japan will spend around ¥227 billion ($1.69 billion) this year on expenses such as utilities, facility maintenance and wages for Japanese staff at U.S. military bases in the country.
In addition to the SMA, Japan says it pours even more cash into hosting U.S. troops — about ¥456 billion this year alone on rents for U.S. exclusive-use land, construction of facilities for Marines being moved from Okinawa to Guam, as well as “burden-reduction” measures, among other things.
Much will hinge on whether Japanese negotiators can successfully communicate this to the notoriously impatient Trump — though experts say such a scenario is unlikely.
“Trump is guided more by feeling and his long-held beliefs rather than facts when he complains about the so-called one-sided defense relationship,” said James Schoff, a Japan expert at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in Washington.
Leverage for Trump?
In less than two months, Trump has already linked trade to national security issues as he clamors for leverage in the tariff talks.
In March, he railed against Japan, inaccurately claiming it makes “a fortune with us economically” without having to protect the U.S. Then, during a Cabinet meeting this month, as Trump was riffing about his global tariff push and what he said is the inequity of the global trading system, he suddenly shifted gears to lament the alliance, falsely claiming that the U.S. pays “hundreds of billions of dollars to defend them” while the Japanese “don’t pay anything.”
The moves have signaled that the U.S. president’s current approach to negotiations with Japan has much in common with the strategy he employed during his first White House stint.
In July 2019, Trump demanded that Japan pay $8 billion per year for costs associated with hosting American troops — more than four times the amount Tokyo shouldered at the time — or risk their withdrawal, according to John Bolton, one of his former national security advisers.
Months later, Trump sealed a limited bilateral trade agreement that observers said gave him most of what he wanted, while then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe got little.
While it remains unclear if the threat to withdraw troops had played any direct role in pushing the trade deal across the finish line, officials in Tokyo at the time voiced deep concern that the cost-sharing issue could throw the alliance into disarray.
This time may be different, in that Trump may be more inclined to seal a quick deal that separates the two issues amid his growing anxiety over the tariffs’ negative impact on the U.S. economy.
Japan could capitalize on this, said Schoff, by focusing on the technical complexities involved in calculating cost-sharing “as a way to dissuade U.S. negotiators from going down that path because it will bog down what they hope will be a relatively quick negotiation.”
But if Trump presses forward with linking the issues, Tokyo could also “give” Trump things that Japan already does “and let him claim it as a win,” Schoff suggested.
This could include crediting him for Japan’s boosted defense budgets and for promoting the so-called one-theater concept that the allies are believed to currently be examining, Schoff added.
The concept would consider the East China Sea, South China Sea, Korean Peninsula and surrounding areas as a single “theater,” a term for an area where wartime operations are conducted. Such a move would substantially expand the geographical area where the Self-Defense Forces may be deployed to counter potential threats from China — a key focus of the Trump administration.
“Ishiba is right to want to separate the trade and tariff talks from alliance discussions about defense budgets and host nation support, but if Trump wants some kind of defense ‘win’ as part of this negotiation, then I don’t see a way to avoid it,” said Schoff. “That doesn’t mean simply giving Trump what he wants, but I think it would sour the whole negotiation if Japan flatly refused to discuss defense-related issues.”
Ultimately, though, any potential close linkage between trade and security risks obfuscating Washington’s broader goals and interests with Japan and the region at large.
“The bigger question here is what is U.S. strategy?” the Council on Foreign Relations' Smith asked. “Is Trump looking for allies to take up more of the slack on capabilities as the U.S. retrenches? Or, is he going to fundamentally retreat from U.S. strategic commitments to allies? Can Ishiba gauge what is a tactical bargaining strategy and what may be the beginnings of a major strategic adjustment?”
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