Studies On Development And Evolution Of The American East Asia Policy And US-Japan Alliance Relations After The Cold War

The US-Japan Alliance is an important part of the American Asia-Pacific alliance system, an important pillar for the US to support its East Asia Strategy; it also constitutes the basis for Japan to develop its foreign strategies and it exerts huge influences towards both the security situation and regional landscape of the East Asia area. After the Second World War, the US established the US-Japan Alliance in order to fit themselves into the Cold War during which period, the US-Japan Alliance had played important roles as the US’s critical strategic backbone in the Asia-Pasic area; Japan also recovered and rose again under the protection of US’s strategic framework. With wrapping up of the Cold War, the major security issues ever threatening them gradually disappear, the US-Japan re-adjusted their alliance relations after going through a period of low ebb. Since the beginning of the new century, the US-Japan Alliance relations have been re-adjusted and fortified, with their internal power structures and mechanisms going through deeper development.The US-Japan Alliance is not a power-balanced alliance, as the dominant country, the US captures most decisive forces in trending the inter-relations within the alliance, the US-Japan Alliance related strategies are closely related to and deeply influenced by the US’s policy in the East Asia. It’s impossible to make both the US’s and Japan’s strategic benefits exactly agree with each other, foreign policies of Japan in the past were basically in conformance with US’s demands due to Japan’s national power and short-term strategic targets. With strengthening of Japan’s forces, gradual maturity of their alliance relations and regulations of US’s foreign strategies, Japan’s influences and status in the US-Japan Alliance relations have been improved, the US-Japan Alliance strategies under shadow of American East Asia policy cannot completely satisfy the long-term strategic conception of Japan. It has been proved by continuous deepening alliance relations between the US and Japan after the Cold War, that those stable aspects among their alliance relations has overwhelmed those conflicts between them.In this thesis, timescale has been adopted as the mainline, based on evolutions of American East Asia policy and features of US-Japan Alliance in respective historic periods after the Cold War, the correlation between the US-Japan Alliance strategies and US’s strategies will be analyzed, in order to study the status of Japan within those strategies. Through combination of this part of studies, both stable and contradicting aspects among respective US-Japan Alliance relations will be profoundly analyzed, for the purpose of discussing over the causes for evolutions of US-Japan Alliance relations and finding out the critical aspects that exert decisive influences towards stability or instability between US and Japan. Finally, based on the current status of US’s strategic regulations, short-term prediction towards the prospects of US-Japan Alliance will be made.