Unlike the USA, Japan isn’t interested in bankrupting itself for Israel:
Japan has canceled an annual high-level meeting with key ally the United States after the Trump administration demanded it spend more on defense, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had been expected to meet Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya and Defense Minister Gen Nakatani in Washington on July 1 for the yearly 2+2 security talks.But Tokyo scrapped the meeting after the U.S. asked Japan to boost defense spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product, higher than an earlier request of 3%, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported on Saturday that President Donald Trump’s administration was demanding that its Asian allies, including Japan, spend 5% of GDP on defense.
I don’t know when it will happen. But I have absolutely no doubt that Japan is going to flip to an alliance with China sooner or later. And I’m pretty sure that it will happen suddenly, and be presented as a fait accompli that no one could have ever seen coming.
Japan has to be cautious, because it has a giant US military base on Okinawa to consider. But the overall trend appears to be clear, as the US model that so influenced the Japanese since the end of WWII has proven to be an increasingly disastrous one.