OSAKA — Three months after the Democratic Party of Japan's landslide general election victory, the new administration's foreign and security policy appears to be increasingly at odds with that of the United States. Indeed, there is growing concern on both sides of the Pacific that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama intends to turn away from the declining U.S. hegemon and reach out to a rising China. Indeed, Hatoyama has announced his rudimentary vision of building an East Asian community that excludes the U.S.
Hatoyama has hastily attempted to fulfill the DPJ's party manifesto and his own public pledges. This includes terminating replenishment support for the U.S.-led interdiction operation in the Indian Ocean, reducing host-nation support to U.S. forces based in Japan, and revising the bilateral status-of-force agreement.
Moreover, Hatoyama is set to expose a secret Cold War nuclear agreement that opened Japanese ports to U.S. naval vessels carrying nuclear weapons in contravention of Japan's Three Nonnuclear Principles, which have guided official policy since the late 1960s. Last but not least, Hatoyama is postponing implementation of a bilateral agreement with the U.S. to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps base on the island of Okinawa, from Futenma to Henoko, thereby causing confusion for America's plan to relocate some of its forces on Okinawa to Guam.