As Japan and the UK face serious challenges at home and in their respective regions, this report makes the case that a stronger relationship could advance each country’s ability to address shared global concerns.
A Japanese translation of the report is also available as a PDF via this link.
Since Donald Trump became US president in 2017, a number of foreign policy experts have commented on the decline of the liberal international order as a stabilizing force in global politics.160 John Ikenberry, a professor of international politics at Princeton University and a leading theorist of the liberal international order, wrote that:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s every instinct runs counter to the ideas that have underpinned the post-war international system. Trade, alliances, international law, multilateralism, environmental protection, torture, and human rights – on all of these core issues, Trump has made assertions that, if acted on, would bring to an end the United States’ role as guarantor of the liberal world order.161
The international system today differs significantly from the 19th-century classical order in the sense that it incorporates several important norms and values that restrain the behaviour of great powers. It has become more institutionalized and more rules-based. Against this backdrop, states can collaborate more effectively and more predictably with other like-minded powers. Ikenberry stated that ‘over the last two hundred years, Western democratic states have made repeated attempts to build international order around open and rules-based relations among states – that is, they have engaged in liberal order building’.162 However, current political leaders who do not respect these rules and norms are now damaging this liberal international order.
Ikenberry underlined the importance of the US’s leading role in establishing the liberal international order:
In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. The result was a particular type of liberal international order – a liberal hegemonic order. The United States took on the duties of building and running an international order, organizing it around multilateral institutions, alliances, special relationships, and client states. It was a hierarchical political order with liberal characteristics.163
However, it is often argued that the term ‘liberal international order’, or ‘liberal internationalism’, is vague in definition, and scholars use it inconsistently.164 Tim Dunne, Trine Flockhart and Marjo Koivisto argue that the type of liberalism that has been successful possesses the following characteristics: (1) it has a history; (2) it embodies contradictions; and (3) it takes into account both politics and economics.165 Scholars tend to avoid defining the term ‘US-led liberal international order’ but they would agree that Western democracies have repeatedly tried to build an international order based on rules and open relations between states. As the US’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, respectively, both the UK and Japan have enjoyed peace and prosperity in the rules-based order for decades. Through their alliances, they have been collaborating with the US on ways to sustain and enhance the current system. However, with Trump’s unwillingness to operate in the system created by the US and his lack of commitment to the norms, values and institutions that underpin liberal order, the UK and Japan now face a serious question: namely, whether or not to continue to base their security strategies on their close alliances with the US. If the US government is capable of radically changing its relationships with its own allies, then the UK and Japan may need to rethink how they themselves prioritize the US alliance.
If the US government is capable of radically changing its relationships with its own allies, then the UK and Japan may need to rethink how they themselves prioritize the US alliance
If the US loses interest in maintaining the liberal international order, this would undoubtedly affect its allies and partners. Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, stated that ‘the U.S. commitment to global leadership, which until now has sustained the order through good times and bad, looks weaker than at any point since World War II’.166 It is natural to doubt the continuation of the rules-based order as we know it, not only because of Trump’s actions since he began his term, but also from his campaign. Niblett lists Trump’s ‘explicitly “America First” platform’, his pleas to renegotiate US trade deals, his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his questioning of US commitments to NATO.167 If existing rules and norms are at odds with the US national interest, Trump is more willing to undermine them than any previous president in order to promote his ‘America First’ policy.
Elements of this policy are already coming through in practice. In his foreword to a new US National Security Strategy document published in December 2017, Trump wrote: ‘In pursuit of that future, we will look at the world with clear eyes and fresh thinking. We will promote a balance of power that favors the United States, our allies, and our partners.’168 While he underlined the importance of ‘a balance of power that favors the United States’, Trump did not mention the importance of the rules-based international order. This indication of greater dependence on US military power rather than on the norms and institutions that form the basis of the post-war liberal international order has provoked widespread anxiety over the future of that order.
The UK and Japan are two leading powers with a strong interest in defending the current system. Compared with the US and China, both are more prepared to commit to non-proliferation, a sign that they are more willing to enhance the rules-based order. However, as two of the US’s major allies, they need to coordinate more frequently in the policy space than before in an effort to preserve the liberal international order. This chapter will examine their individual approaches to maintaining that order, and countering its decline.
The rules-based international order should be the foundation of the broader and more value-embedded ‘liberal’ international order. A significant current problem with the latter is that several leading powers are now essentially reluctant to respect those liberal values, but do agree on the importance of defending international rules that benefit their own national interests. In general, international rules are more easily respected by authoritarian regimes than liberal values such as democracy, human rights and international institutions. In this sense, in order to secure broader support, both the UK and Japan tend to prefer the term ‘rules-based international order’ to ‘liberal international order’. As such, defending the former should be the focus of their strategy for creating a more stable and more predictable international order.
Ikenberry is not alone in presenting his concerns over the decline of the liberal international order. Even before Trump’s election, many foreign policy experts had already expressed anxieties over the future of the system. For example, a World Economic Forum White Paper entitled ‘Strengthening the Liberal World Order’ argued that the:
… liberal order is being challenged by a variety of forces – by powerful authoritarian governments and anti-liberal fundamentalist movements, as well as by long-term shifts in the global economy and changes in the physical environment.169
This sense of pessimism was shared by several leading scholars, including Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of international politics, who wrote that ‘the heady optimism of the 1990s has given way to a growing sense of pessimism – even alarm – about the existing liberal order’.170 Just four days after Trump took office, Robert Kagan, a leading Republican foreign policy expert, wrote likewise that ‘the liberal world order established in the aftermath of World War II may be coming to an end, challenged by forces both without and within’.171 A few months later, Foreign Affairs magazine asked experts whether they agreed or disagreed with the argument that ‘the postwar liberal international order is in grave danger’. No respondents answered ‘Strongly Disagree’, while 11 experts answered ‘Strongly Agree’ and 14 ‘Agree’. Four were ‘Neutral’ and only three responded ‘Disagree’.172
On the other hand, Michael Anton, US deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications at the National Security Council, has tried to dispel criticisms that Trump threatened the liberal international order. While attacking some aspects of the US-led order, Anton argued that ‘America’s national interests are to pursue and promote prosperity, prestige and peace’.173 In part, this highlighted the fact that the Trump administration does not share its predecessors’ commitment to defend that order.174 Anton concluded that:
the uncertainty of the present moment does not derive from President Trump’s supposed disregard for the fundamentals of the liberal international order. On the contrary, the uncertainty arises from a growing awareness of the disconnect between the instrumental policies of that order and its overriding purpose.175
By this, he meant that Trump’s administration does not care much about whether the US defends the liberal international order, as long as the US government can protect its own ‘prosperity, prestige and peace’ by other means.
Anton asked: ‘Why is it that no one quite got around to saying what, exactly, the “liberal international order” is?’176 Other commentators and practitioners share his criticism of the vagueness of the definition. In particular, a number of Republican foreign policy experts are opposed to using the term ‘liberal’ in describing their ideas, as ‘liberal international order’ is generally regarded as an order with liberal norms and values.
‘Rules-based international order’ is a more appropriate and much clearer description of the post-war rules, norms and institutions that govern relations between countries than ‘liberal international order’. Although it was created chiefly by the US and the UK through several bilateral meetings including the Atlantic Summit of 1941 and the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944, other, illiberal powers such as the Soviet Union and the Kuomintang government of China were also present on some of these occasions.177 They agreed on the fundamental rules of the post-war international order, but not all of them agreed on liberal norms such as democracy, human rights and market capitalism. Thus liberal international order is a more contested concept given that some major powers (both now and in the past, including even certain US allies) do not share the values that underpin it.
In recent years, both Japanese and UK governments have used the term ‘rules-based international order’ more frequently than before in official documents. This is partly due to the fear that authoritarian states and terrorist groups are now seriously challenging this order on many fronts. Additionally, neither Japan nor the UK has economic or military power to equal that of the US and China. It is understandable, therefore, that they must both rely more on these rules than the two leading powers.
While the UK is facing the challenge of Russia’s assertive and unlawful activities in Ukraine as well as in the UK, Japan is being challenged by Chinese maritime activities in the South and East China seas
Prime ministers Shinzo Abe and Theresa May have been particularly keen to defend the rules-based international order. While the UK is facing the challenge of Russia’s assertive and unlawful activities in Ukraine as well as in the UK, Japan is being challenged by Chinese maritime activities in the South and East China seas. US goodwill alone is not capable of resolving every difficult problem in international security. It is therefore in the best interests of the UK and Japan to defend and advance the rules-based order that both Russia and China should abide by.
When May visited Japan at the end of August 2017, she agreed with Abe on the importance of enhancing the rules-based order. The ‘Japan–UK Joint Vision Statement’, signed on 31 August, began by declaring that ‘Japan and the UK are global strategic partners, sharing common interests as outward-looking and free-trading island nations with a global reach, committed to the rules-based international system’.178 In this context, the two governments reaffirmed the value of enhancing the bilateral partnership, and the phrase ‘the rules-based system’ was repeated several times.
Furthermore, in the ‘Japan–UK Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation’, issued on the same date, the two leaders declared their commitment ‘to exercising their leadership to maintain the rules-based international system as the closest security partners [of the US] respectively in Asia and Europe’.179 The UK and Japan are ‘the closest security partners’ because they share the same vision in defending the rules-based international order. It is not always easy for the US’s two closest allies to include phrases relating to liberal norms and the importance of international rules and agreements in their joint documents with the US government, as Trump often openly attacks liberal values and multilateral institutions.
Both the UK and Japan, individually and jointly, have been enhancing the rules-based international order in a variety of ways. Together with a few European powers, they have underlined the importance of defending it; for example, they took the initiative in drafting the Charlevoix G7 Summit Communiqué, which starts:
We, the Leaders of the G7, have come together in Charlevoix, Quebec, Canada on June 8–9, 2018, guided by our shared values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and our commitment to promote a rules-based international order.180
This statement is particularly important in demonstrating the G7’s commitment to promoting this order, since Trump disagreed with his European counterparts on several key agenda items, including trade, and reportedly repudiated the communiqué, causing huge concern among the G7 leaders.
The UK has had a proud history of helping to establish, protect and enhance the rules-based order for more than a century. The UK government upholds this diplomatic tradition, and this is reflected in many major documents relating to it. Without a continuing and active UK contribution to this tradition, the rules-based international order as we know it cannot be maintained.
In the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 (NSS/SDSR 2015), one of the three priorities in Britain’s security strategy for the next five years is to ‘help strengthen the rules-based international order and its institutions, encouraging reform to enable further participation of growing powers’. Furthermore, the UK will work with its ‘partners to reduce conflict, and to promote stability, good governance and human rights’.181 Japan can be defined as one of the major ‘partners’ with which the UK can collaborate on these goals, as outlined in the Japan–UK Joint Vision Statement.
The NSS/SDSR 2015 states that:
[The UK’s] long-term security and prosperity also depend on a stable international system that reflects our core British values … Democracy, the rule of law, open, accountable governments and institutions, human rights, freedom of speech, property rights and equality of opportunity, including the empowerment of women and girls, are the building blocks of successful societies.182
At a time when the US president is disregarding several important liberal values including civil liberties, human rights, gender equality and environmental protection, and the UK is distancing itself from the EU through its Brexit decision, Japan is now regarded as the UK’s main partner in promoting the rules-based international order. Thus the UK government has been taking the lead in seeking to strengthen its bilateral security cooperation with Japan.
The UK government is proud of being ‘at the heart of the rules-based international order’, according to NSS/SDSR 2015, which notes that the UK is the only nation that is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and is in NATO, the EU, the Commonwealth, the G7 and G20, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.183
Regarding the UK’s exceptional international position, the NSS/SDSR 2015 notes:
We use our membership of these organizations as an instrument to amplify our nation’s power and prosperity … In all of these organizations, we play a central role in strengthening international norms and promoting our values.184
This suggests that the UK’s leadership in promoting the rules-based international order has become a major component of its identity within the international community.
In NSS/SDSR 2015, a specific section is devoted to explaining the details and the reality of the rules-based international order, which it says is:
… founded on relationships between states and through international institutions, with shared rules and agreements on behaviour. It has done much to encourage predictable behaviour by states and the non-violent management of disputes, and has led states to develop political and economic arrangements at home which favour open markets, the rule of law, participation and accountability. The UK has consistently championed this framework.185
There are of course some states that do not share these values. Russia and Syria, among others, do not welcome the UK’s leading role in criticizing their violations of international laws and agreements. This has caused some serious provocation and antagonism. The NSS/SDSR 2015 asserts:
The rules-based international order also relies on enforcement of standards and laws covering a wide range of activities and behaviours, from the Geneva Conventions to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. There have been successes, in particular the work of the E3+3 (the UK, France, Germany, the US, China and Russia) and the EU to conclude the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran so that it meets its obligations to ensure its nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful. Some powerful state and non-state actors, however, are increasingly ignoring international norms that they believe run contrary to their interests, or favour the West. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and the challenges around non-state actors’ compliance with international humanitarian law are examples of this.186
In May 2016, the Multilateral Policy Directorate within the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) launched a new aid strategy entitled the RBIS (rules-based international system) Fund. The FCO identified five specific priority areas in relation to enhancing this system:
Although the concept remains relatively vague and underdeveloped, the FCO has started to implement this approach in enhancing the rules-based international order, particularly in the field of official development assistance (ODA). The RBIS Fund will allow the FCO to extend its multilateral programme work into new areas in a way that complements both FCO diplomacy and existing cross-Whitehall programme activity.188
The UK needs to find partners with the same interest to collaborate in protecting the rules-based international order
However, the UK lacks the economic resources and faces the challenge of securing public support as it seeks to take the lead in defending the rules-based international order. This comes at a time when new difficulties are emerging and as leading military powers such as China and Russia are critical of liberal democracy and supportive of authoritarian political regimes. Now that fewer powers are interested in defending the well-established liberal system, the UK needs to find partners with the same interest to collaborate in protecting the rules-based international order.
In December 2013, Abe’s cabinet adopted a National Security Strategy that clearly outlined Japan’s long-term, strategic purposes, goals and visions – its first opportunity to do so. One of the document’s main features is its focus on the importance of the rule of law in the international community. It states that ‘Japan will continue to faithfully comply with international law as a guardian of the rule of law.’ It adds that, to ‘establish the rule of law in the international community, Japan will participate proactively in international rule-making from the planning stage, so that Japan’s principles and positions based on fairness, transparency and reciprocity are duly reflected.’189
Japan’s approach to the rules-based international order is best exemplified by its assistance to countries developing their own legal systems. The strategy therefore mentions that Japan will ‘actively engage’ in this area.190 In particular, Japan has been working hard to promote an ‘Open and Stable Seas’ policy based on the rule of law. Its Diplomatic Bluebook 2017 states that:
Japan is strengthening its cooperation with various countries by actively participating in initiatives to ensure the security of sea lanes of communication through anti-piracy measures off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden as well as Asia, international rule-making to strengthen the rule of law in outer space and cyberspace, as well as the efforts of the international community regarding the Arctic.191
One of the reasons underpinning Japan’s respect for the rule of law in the international community relates to its historical path in the 20th century. At the 70th anniversary commemoration of the end of the Second World War, Abe declared: ‘With deep repentance for the war, Japan made that pledge … Upon it, we have created a free and democratic country, abided by the rule of law, and consistently upheld that pledge never to wage a war again.’192 His statement went on to highlight Japan’s commitment to the rules-based liberal international order, reflecting on the circumstances leading up to the Second World War in Asia:
Japan attempted to break its deadlock with force … Upon this reflection, Japan will continue to firmly uphold the principle that any disputes must be settled peacefully and diplomatically based on the respect for the rule of law and not through the use of force, and to reach out to other countries in the world to do the same.193
At the end of the Second World War, Japan chose to become a peace-loving nation with a limited military force. Largely owing to Article 9 of the Constitution, Japan has refrained from relying on its military power to resolve international disputes. Under the banner of ‘proactive contributor to peace based on international cooperation’, Abe has placed Japan’s policy for consolidating the rules-based international order at the core of the country’s own diplomatic strategy.194 The White Paper on Development Cooperation 2017 focuses on Japan’s efforts in ‘maintaining free and open international order based on the rule of law’.195 Japan’s current ODA policy broadens these goals to include the maintenance and enhancement of the rules-based international order, and both the UK and Japan use their development assistance policy to defend it.
With both Russia and China challenging previous international rules and agreements, respectively, in Ukraine and the South China Sea, the UK and Japan have begun to collaborate with other like-minded countries. However, several difficulties have emerged.
The UK currently faces challenges from Russia in Europe, while Japan is confronted by challenges from China in Asia. In some areas Russia and China are hostile to existing international agreements and rules, but they also seek to create new rules and agreements that are based on, and more suited to, their own visions for regional order.196 Former Chinese Ambassador to the UK Fu Ying has argued that the ‘existing world order is built and led by the US, which is also known as “Pax Americana”.’197 She complained that ‘China has long been alienated politically by the Western world’ and the ‘US-led military alliance puts their interests above others’, and pays little attention to China’s security concerns.198
G7 summits have become important gatherings where leaders from seven liberal democracies agree to enhance the rules-based international order. In 2016, the G7 Ise-Shima Leaders’ Declaration reaffirmed the ‘serious threats’ that violent extremism, terrorist attacks and other challenges pose ‘to the existing rules-based international order, as well as to common values and principles for all humanity’.199 Abe hosted this summit and led the process of drafting its joint declaration, which stated: ‘We remain bound together as a group guided by our common values and principles, including freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights’.200 This position was reaffirmed at the Third Japan–UK Foreign and Defence Ministerial Meeting on 14 December 2017, when the two governments expressed their commitment to maintaining the rules-based international system, described as ‘the foundation of global security and prosperity, including through harnessing the UK’s vision of “Global Britain” and Japan’s vision of “Proactive Contribution to Peace” based on the principle of international cooperation’.201
In recent years, both the UK and Japanese governments have had to address new security challenges. Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, researchers at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), warned in their report that:
the regimes in Moscow and Beijing are essentially exploiting the opportunities of globalization while rejecting its underlying principle of free and open exchange … This basic hostility to universal liberal norms is most clear in their propaganda narratives, which typically frame democratic values as ‘Western values’ that have no place in other parts of the world. As an alternative, the two governments promote nationalist, ‘traditional’ cultural constructs and revisionist histories that seem to justify authoritarian rule and the violation of basic human rights.202
Walker and Ludwig labelled authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China as ‘sharp powers’.203 The activities of these ‘sharp powers’ have become the source of new challenges to the rules-based international order.
North Korean nuclear proliferation is another serious challenge, which the UK and Japan agreed to address on the basis of previous international rules and agreements. In a joint statement on 14 December 2017, both countries affirmed that they would:
apply maximum pressure upon North Korea to urge it to take concrete actions towards abandoning its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, thus realizing denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.204
The question is whether or not the UK and Japan are capable of resolving these difficult problems. North Korean denuclearization is discussed and negotiated mainly by the US, North Korea and South Korea. Given that the UK and Japan have clear limitations in their efforts to settle difficult international conflicts and disputes, they must still rely on the rules-based international order.
The UK and Japan currently face serious challenges to the liberal international order that they have defended for decades. Meanwhile, Russia and China are frustrated with the existing framework, which they do not consider sufficiently serves their own interests or represents their values. However, at the same time, these authoritarian regimes can agree to observe certain rules as long as these benefit their own national interests. Although the liberal international order is in decline, the UK and Japan should take a more proactive lead in defending it.
For example, freedom of navigation is one of the most important foundations of the liberal international order. The UK and Japan are now more willing than before to defend it in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Both India and Australia can join them to enhance this commitment. Simultaneously, the UK and Japanese prime ministers are arguing more boldly about the importance of preserving multilateral institutions such as the UN and the WTO, at a time when the US president is harshly criticizing and undermining the same institutions.
The UK and Japan are not alone in undertaking this task. The leading member states of the EU are also committed to defending the rules-based international order, as stated in several published joint statements and declarations. Even Russia and China are willing to support it in some areas. The EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement and Strategic Partnership Agreement can further support their efforts to defend this order, from which all can benefit.
The international community continues to face challenges and risks to the world order. The UK–Japan partnership must therefore continue to be at the heart of a liberal international order based on the rule of law. With an enhanced rules-based international order, the international community is more likely to embrace some of the liberal norms that will serve to strengthen global stability and prosperity.
