The Pitfalls of a Trilateral Anti-China Pact

The measures that hawks believe will intimidate other states often goad them into taking more aggressive actions.

Hal Brands proposes getting U.S. allies to commit to fighting a war they don’t want to fight:

What Washington can do is exploit the blowback Chinese coercion is already causing to secure an explicit agreement that three crucial regional powers — Australia, Japan and the US — will all be in it together if war comes.

It is doubtful that Japan or Australia would want to agree to this. As I just showed in my column this week, the Japanese government is reluctant to make any commitments about what it would do in the event of a war over Taiwan, and one of the big reasons for this is that most people in Japan don’t want their armed forces to be in the fight. Only 11% of respondents say that they think Japan’s Self-Defense Forces should join a fight over Taiwan. That would make any explicit commitment connected to this issue very controversial and politically dangerous for any government that agreed to it.