Move to bring Japan into the Five Eyes community
When it comes to intelligence sharing, one of the most important arrangements in the western world is the Five Eyes community. This is made up of the US; UK; Australia; Canada and New Zealand – or to put it another way, the Anglosphere of military intelligence. It is also an alliance that increasingly cooperates on defence technology and operational matters.
Now the influential Centre for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) has recommended that Japan be made a member of this fairly exclusive and powerful club, making it the Six Eyes agreement. One of the authors is Richard Armitage, the well-respected former Deputy Secretary of State – a Republican but who has excellent connections not only with the Democrats but the entire Washington foreign policy establishment. The other author is Joseph S Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Bill Clinton.
Titled the US-Japan Alliance in 2020 – subtitled An Equal Alliance with a Global Agenda – it makes the case that there is only one country trying to destabilise the existing order in the Asia-Pacific: China. The timing of the release of the study is not coincidental – it is designed to have maximum impact on the incoming Biden administration that will be looking for some positive ways of breaking with the chaos and uncertainty of the Trump years while at the same reassuring traditional friends and allies.
The report points out that another relatively recent alliance – the “Quad” of the US, Japan, India and Australia – already has significant overlap with Five Eyes participants and is also an important framework agreement to push back against Chinese expansion. A manifestation of this was the recently concluded MALABAR naval exercise that brought all four countries together. In addition, the US, Japan and Australia now regularly participate in the tri-nation Cope North series of exercises centred on Guam.
Another beneficiary of the report is Taiwan. It urges both the US and Japan to strengthen links with that country, pointing out that while Washington has given a formal security guarantee, Japan has not – probably because of legal and constitutional issues as well as concerns about provoking Beijing. However, the mood among several countries is hardening – tiptoeing around China’s well-known sensitivities has not lessened that country’s destabilising activities, it has arguably made them worse.
Japan has now increased its defence budget for the fifth year in a row, mainly because of China – though nuclear tipped North Korean missiles are also a worry. If Japan does become the Sixth Eye – and the only non-English speaking, non Anglo-Saxon country to become a member – it will strengthen security arrangements in North Asia. The hope is that eventually the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party will realise the more that they bluster and threaten their neighbours, the stronger the alliances to protect countries from aggression will become. It is almost like one of the laws of physics.
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