"The US-Japan Alliance under Trump 2.0: Still ‘Indispensable’ for America" - by CWP alum Adam Liff

Driven by the urgent need to strengthen regional deterrence and secure increasingly vulnerable supply chains, Japan is now widely seen in Washington as America’s most important partner in Asia, if not the world. Indeed, over the past decade, the view that Tokyo is America’s “indispensable ally” has become firmly entrenched in US foreign policy circles. 

Even President Donald Trump, the world’s most famous alliance-skeptic American, has over the past 18 months repeatedly joined Japan’s prime ministers – first Shigeru Ishiba and now Sanae Takaichi – in calling for a “new Golden Age” of the US-Japan alliance.

To be sure, smile-filled summitry and abstract calls for an alliance “golden age” mask significant anxieties in Japan (as well as among many Americans) about the direction of US foreign policy, as well as sub-surface frictions in bilateral relations. Even so, relative to many other major democratic US treaty allies, Japan has – at least so far – weathered “Trump 2.0” remarkably well.

9 Jul 2026 - ISPI (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale) - https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/the-us-japan-alliance-under-trump-2-0-still-indispensable-for-america-241316

Adam P. Liff (アダム・リッフ) is professor of East Asian international relations at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as founding director of its 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI). He is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, as well as a faculty associate and an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, respectively. From 2023 to 2024 he served as the Visiting Chair of Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Dr. Liff holds a PhD and MA in politics from Princeton University, a postgraduate research certificate from the University of Tokyo, and a BA from Stanford University.

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