Thirty years ago the postwar relationship between the United States and Japan—loosely called an alliance, though technically nothing of the sort—became fixed in the mold set by the MacArthur shogunate, the Japanese Constitution of 1946, and the Mutual Security Treaty of 1952. Since that time, Japan has emerged as the third industrial nation of the world and the dominant economic force in Asia. Japan also fulfills a vital military role for the United States, as potential staging area, repair base, unsinkable aircraft carrier, and gatekeeper to the maritime exit routes of Siberia. Yet by no stretch of the imagination can Japan be considered to be an independent ally with a national security policy of its own. Except at the routine level of ordinary diplomatic intercourse, it cannot even be said to have its own foreign policy.

The fall of the Ohira government, and the devolution of power to a transitional ministry headed by Zenko Suzuki, makes a reassessment of Japanese foreign policy by the Liberal Democratic leadership virtually inevitable. The central question of that reassessment is bound to be Japan's relationship with the United States, for in its foreign relations Japan is in many respects an American dependency. Despite the fact that the scope of the Mutual Security Treaty covers a relatively narrow range of eventualities, and is to all intents and purposes confined to the Western Pacific, it has increasingly been invoked by the United States to cover situations for which it was never intended. Whenever this has failed, the nuclear umbrella has been brought into play to justify U.S. "leadership" in crises that often have little to do with Japan.