{"id":1548734,"date":"2025-07-24T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1548734"},"modified":"2025-07-24T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T10:00:00","slug":"australia-japan-are-seemingly-having-second-thoughts-about-the-de-facto-asian-nato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/australia-japan-are-seemingly-having-second-thoughts-about-the-de-facto-asian-nato\/1548734\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia & Japan Are Seemingly Having Second Thoughts About The De Facto Asian NATO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia & Japan Are Seemingly Having Second Thoughts About The De Facto Asian NATO<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Playing any role in a Sino-US war over Taiwan, even a logistical one, could provoke Chinese retaliation…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Financial Times<\/a>\u00a0reported that US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby recently asked Australian and Japanese defense officials how their countries would respond to a war over Taiwan. He also asked them to boost defense spending after NATO just agreed to do so during its latest summit. Colby lent credence to this report by\u00a0tweeting<\/a>\u00a0that he\u2019s \u201cfocused on implementing the President\u2019s America First, common sense agenda of restoring deterrence and achieving peace through strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sequence shows that Trump 2.0 is serious about \u201cPivoting (back) to (East) Asia\u201d in order to more robustly contain China.<\/strong> This requires freezing the Ukrainian Conflict and assembling a de facto Asian NATO, however, both of which are uncertain. As regards the first, Trump is being drawn into \u201cmission creep\u201d, while the latter is challenged by\u00a0Australia<\/a>\u2019s and\u00a0Japan<\/a>\u2019s reluctance to step up. To elaborate, they seemingly expected the US to do all the \u201cheavy lifting\u201d, just like NATO expected till recently as well.<\/p>\n

That would explain why they didn\u2019t have a clear answer to Colby\u2019s inquiry about how their countries would respond to a war over Taiwan. Simply put, they likely never planned to do anything at all, thus exposing the shallowness of the de facto Asian NATO that the US has sought to assemble in recent years via the AUKUS+ format. This refers to the\u00a0AUKUS<\/a>\u00a0trilateral of Australia, the UK, and the US alongside what can be described as the honorary members of Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.<\/p>\n

Australia and Japan are correspondingly envisaged as this informal bloc\u2019s Southeast and Northeast Asian anchors, yet they\u2019re evidently unwilling to fulfill the military roles that their US senior partner expects.<\/strong> What it apparently had in mind was them at the very least playing supportive logistical roles in the scenario of a Sino-US war but their representatives reportedly didn\u2019t even suggest as much to Colby. This in turn reveals that they fear retaliation from China even if they don\u2019t participate in combat.<\/p>\n

Japan\u2019s population and resultant economic density make it extremely vulnerable to Chinese missile strikes while unconventional warfare could be waged against Australia through sabotage and the like. Moreover, China is their top trade partner, which opens up additional avenues for retaliation.<\/strong> At the same time, however, neither of them wants China to seize control of Taiwan\u2019s TSMC (if it even survives a speculative conflict) and obtain a monopoly over the global semiconductor industry.<\/p>\n

The US doesn\u2019t want that either, but the problem is that the two envisaged anchors of its de facto Asian NATO aren\u2019t willing to boost defense spending nor seemingly assist America in a war over Taiwan. <\/strong>That\u2019s unacceptable from Trump 2.0\u2019s perspective so tariff and other forms of pressure could be applied for coercing Australia and Japan into at least spending more on their armed forces. The endgame, however, is for them to agree to play some sort of role (whether logistical or ideally combative) in that scenario.<\/p>\n

Seeing as how the US won\u2019t relent on its \u201cPivot (back) to (East) Asia\u201d, it\u2019ll likely coerce the aforesaid concessions from Australia and Japan one way or another. The same goes for the other members of AUKUS+, namely South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, albeit with perhaps a little less defense spending from the last two. All in all, \u201cThe US Is Rounding Up Allies Ahead Of A Possible War With China<\/a>\u201d as was assessed in May 2023, but it\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess whether it actually plans to spark a major conflict.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nThu, 07\/24\/2025 – 02:00<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/geopolitical\/australia-japan-are-seemingly-having-second-thoughts-about-de-facto-asian-nato<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia & Japan Are Seemingly Having Second Thoughts About The De Facto Asian NATO Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack, Playing any role in a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1548735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1548734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1548734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1548735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1548734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1548734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1548734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}