Introduction: The Post-unipolar Triangle

As the Biden presidency approached denouement, the contrast between US relations with China and Japan, respectively, could not be starker. The chapter examines Japan’s transformation from a pacifist, defensive, and economy-focused actor into a rapidly re-arming, even militarizing, and proactive power with deepened ties to the USA, expanding security links to US-led coalition-partners, and overtly challenging China’s ‘core interests’ vis-à-vis Taiwan, the East and South China Seas, and farther afield. It analyzes Washington’s refinement of Biden’s policy inheritance, bisecting strategic-diplomatic, commercial-economic, and military-technological alliance-based approaches to China and Japan; and their responses. As the US-Chinese ‘central’ rivalry hardened, Japan’s assertion of its own interests, in direct opposition to China’s, rendered Japan a ‘frontline-state’ within the multipolarizing system, a status Japan had abjured since 1945.