U.S. President Joe Biden received Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House on Friday with a message of «strong support» for the new and strengthened military policy announced late last year by the Japanese government, designed to counter China’s expanding influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
«I want to make one thing very clear: the United States is completely, totally and absolutely committed to its alliance with Japan,» said Biden in his first appearance with the Prime Minister, who arrived accompanied by a delegation composed, among others, of his National Security Advisor, Takeo Akiba.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris also applauded Japan’s new military strategy during a breakfast meeting with Kishida upon landing his flight from Japan.
Kishida unveiled in mid-December what is seen as the most ambitious strategic security review since World War II, one that could herald a radical shift away from a historic policy of limited national «self-defense» and one that would see Japanese forces eventually able to launch counterattacks outside their borders.
This new initiative, which could require an increase of up to one hundred percent in Japan’s annual defense budget, comes at a time when Japan is threatened by the growing military influence of China – which has already repudiated this document – in regional waters and North Korea’s constant ballistic tests.
President Biden, also radically opposed to China’s expansionist interests, has assured that the meeting with Kishida comes at a «remarkable moment» in relations between the two countries. «I don’t think there’s ever been a time before when we were closer to each other,» he said in comments released by the team of international correspondents and envoys in Washington D.C.
Kishida, for his part, explained that his decision to increase defense spending was prompted «by the complex and challenging security environment» his country is currently facing in the region, between China’s ambitions and Pyongyang’s latest ballistic tests.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
