The US-Japan alliance has played a positive role in facilitating Japan's economic recovery immediately after World War II, but it now serves only to make Japan a proxy for the United States in its bid to contain China.
Japan is doing a disservice to the economic integration of East Asia and the stability of the region by getting involved as actively as possible in the US's moves to encircle China or create various barriers for the smooth development of its neighbor. Japan is reinforcing its loss of autonomy as a protectorate of the US, because it is unconditionally submitting to whatever the US dictates.
Japan is pushing aside almost all the factors that make it a major country in East Asia such as its long-term economic cooperation with China, which has facilitated its economic stability, and its role as a key player in the economic integration of the region, and the contribution it has made to the building of political trust among countries in the region.
Japan's defense strategy emphasizes the importance of maintaining stability across the Taiwan Straits and Japan's Parliament in 2021, pointing out the serious human rights situation in China. An accusing finger at the Chinese government's policies in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region highlights how willing Japan is to jump on the US anti-China bandwagon.
With its increasingly active role in various US-led cliques such as the Quad, Japan has become a factor of instability in East Asia. The Japanese prime minister is expected to attend the NATO summit later this month, which is viewed as a move intended to facilitate NATO's expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.
By following such a path, Japan is estrangling itself from its neighbors, complicating the security situation in East Asia and jeopardizing the integration of the regional economy. This will only gain it the mistrust of other countries in the region.
With the atrocities of Japanese invading forces committed during Japan's aggression against its neighboring countries before and during World War II still being raw wounds, Japan's neighbors don't have any reason to believe that Japan acting as the minion of a self-obsessed and imperious US will do any good to the peace and development of the region.
It is shame that Japanese politicians have become so obsessed with Japan's junior partner role in the alliance that they are willing to stoop so low to cater to whatever Washington dictates at the cost of regional peace and even Japan's own development.