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<p>This article reconceives Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy as managed balancing: a middle-power approach combining normative entrepreneurship, selective institutionalization, and strategic restraint to sustain a rules-based order without the alliance polarization of hard balancing. Tracing FOIP from Abe’s security-inflected FOIP 1.0 (2016) and inclusivity-oriented FOIP 2.0 (2018), through Kishida’s reinvigorated FOIP 3.0 (2023), to an emergent recalibration under Prime Minister Takaichi driven by expanding Official Security Assistance and bilateral defense cooperation, the article argues that FOIP’s oscillation between confrontational clarity and diplomatic ambiguity reflects managed balancing rather than incoherence. The Quad appears not as an embryonic alliance but as Japan’s principal minilateral instrument for operationalizing this strategy, increasingly embedded within bilateral and trilateral arrangements that now carry much of its intended operational weight. Structurally heterogeneous and non-binding, the Quad remains resilient at the working level, though the absence of a 2025 summit exposes limits to that resilience. Using the South China Sea as a stress test, the article traces how capacity-building, Coast Guard practice transfer, and maritime domain-awareness tools generate cumulative deterrence through partner empowerment. It thereby advances managed balancing as a conceptual contribution and reframes the Quad as a norm-operationalizing platform.</p>

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From Strategic Vision to Institutionalized Order: Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific and the Role of the Quad

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月1日

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摘要

This article reconceives Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy as managed balancing: a middle-power approach combining normative entrepreneurship, selective institutionalization, and strategic restraint to sustain a rules-based order without the alliance polarization of hard balancing. Tracing FOIP from Abe’s security-inflected FOIP 1.0 (2016) and inclusivity-oriented FOIP 2.0 (2018), through Kishida’s reinvigorated FOIP 3.0 (2023), to an emergent recalibration under Prime Minister Takaichi driven by expanding Official Security Assistance and bilateral defense cooperation, the article argues that FOIP’s oscillation between confrontational clarity and diplomatic ambiguity reflects managed balancing rather than incoherence. The Quad appears not as an embryonic alliance but as Japan’s principal minilateral instrument for operationalizing this strategy, increasingly embedded within bilateral and trilateral arrangements that now carry much of its intended operational weight. Structurally heterogeneous and non-binding, the Quad remains resilient at the working level, though the absence of a 2025 summit exposes limits to that resilience. Using the South China Sea as a stress test, the article traces how capacity-building, Coast Guard practice transfer, and maritime domain-awareness tools generate cumulative deterrence through partner empowerment. It thereby advances managed balancing as a conceptual contribution and reframes the Quad as a norm-operationalizing platform.