Biden and Japan’s Kishida bolster defense ties to counter China
The United States and Japan are dramatically beefing up their military cooperation and intelligence sharing, President Joe Biden said Wednesday, in an announcement widely seen as an effort to check an increasingly aggressive China.
Standing beside Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in a Rose Garden ceremony, President Biden heralded the move as the “most significant upgrade” of the alliance in more than half a century.
Until recently, the military relationship between Washington and Tokyo has been “just about the defense of Japan,” as one senior Biden administration official put it earlier in the week during a background briefing.
Today, that relationship is undergoing a “major shift,” the official added, from “alliance protection to alliance projection” designed to disabuse Beijing of
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