AWC Postdoctoral Fellow Ayumi Teraoka sat down with the Center for Advanced China Research for an interview “about how evolving strategic concerns, legal considerations, and domestic political factors affect Japan’s defense policy and alliance with the United States.”
The interview was originally published on Tuesday, October 4, 2022, and can be read in full here.
The discussion covered a range of important topics relating to the current state of US-Japan relations, including how elections in Japan and the US might affect the strategic relationship, future joint command possibilities, a possible Taiwan contingency, Japanese military development, and current Indo-Pacific security initiatives.
Ayumi maintains that the alliance is thriving; however, it is critically positioned for further growth:
“In my view, this is not the time to be complacent about it; it is actually at a critical stage to take the alliance to the next level. There still needs to be a lot of work before the alliance can turn into something that can be ready for combat. The two countries have obviously fought against each other before, but they have never fought alongside each other in combat. There’s no joint command between the two countries. So when we think about the future, there is still a lot of homework for the two countries.”
Ayumi Teraoka is an America in the World Consortium Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she was also the A.B. Krongard fellow from 2021 to 2022. Her research focuses on coercive diplomacy, alliance politics in the Indo-Pacific, and Japanese foreign policy and national security. Her dissertation, entitled Autonomy Preserved: A Manual for U.S. Alliance Management in the Shadow of U.S.-China Competition, examines the interactive effects of U.S. alliance management efforts and China’s attempts to weaken U.S. alliances from both historical and contemporary perspectives. In 2022, she was a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Previously, Ayumi worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. Her writing has appeared in The Japan Times, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs among others. She holds an M.A. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, an M.A. in Asian Studies from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Law from Keio University.