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Monday November 23, 2009

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Event Summary

For the past sixty years, most analysts have assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however.

Event Information

When

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM

Where

Somers Room
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies

E-mail: cnaps@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6055

In this presentation, Dr. Richard Samuels argues that North Korea's renewed nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in both Tokyo and Washington, and while Japan is becoming more muscular, it is also clinging to the alliance.

Transcript

DICK SAMUELS: What I'm going to do today is going to be familiar to some of you because I know some of you have read Securing Japan. My presentation will have three unequal parts. I want to talk very briefly about the past, then I'm going to talk about the present, and then spend most of the time speculating with you about where things are headed.

At the end of World War II Japan found itself with four unequally endowed groups of strategic thinkers and activists. Each of these groups was connected to a prewar perspective that I explore in the book in detail. The first group, the pacifists, got an outsized dollop of credit for having shaped postwar Japanese security policy. They certainly deserve some, because only because the pragmatic conservatives, the fourth group down there, worked with them to elevate their concerns about the revision of the constitution, the protection, I should say, of the constitution.

Participants

Speaker

Dr. Richard Samuels

Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology