Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is heading into an unusually consequential meeting with Donald Trump. The two are expected to meet in New York on September 22, just two days before Trump is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington.
The timing matters: Tokyo is not merely seeking another reaffirmation of the US-Japan alliance. It is trying to shape the political and economic parameters of the Trump-Xi summit before the two leaders sit down.
The concern in Tokyo is not that Washington and Beijing will negotiate — Japan has little interest in obstructing diplomacy between the world’s two largest economies. The concern is what that diplomacy could produce if transactional logic dominates the summit: a deal in which economic concessions are traded for strategic compromises, leaving allies’ security interests as an afterthought.
That possibility has grown more tangible as Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for the summit. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng have been discussing trade, tariffs, critical minerals and artificial intelligence, as the two sides weigh how to extend their fragile economic truce. For Tokyo, the central question is not whether Trump and Xi can reach an agreement, but whether Japan can make certain strategic issues too costly to trade away.
The first issue is Taiwan. Recent reporting has heightened concern among U.S. allies that Taiwan could become a bargaining chip in that negotiation. Trump has described arms sales to Taiwan as a potential “negotiating chip,” even as Washington and Beijing explore broader economic compromises.
Japan therefore needs to ensure, before the summit, that Taiwan is treated not as an isolated bilateral matter between Washington and Beijing but as part of the wider security architecture of the Indo-Pacific.
Japan’s first objective
For Tokyo, Taiwan is not simply a matter of solidarity with another democracy. Geography makes it inseparable from Japan’s own strategic environment. A crisis in the Taiwan Strait would jeopardize the security of Japan’s southwestern islands, its sea lanes, energy flows and semiconductor supply chains. Any US-China understanding that altered the military balance around Taiwan could therefore carry consequences far beyond Taiwan itself.
That is why Takaichi’s immediate task is to establish a clear strategic boundary with Trump. Japan needs Washington to understand that a Taiwan arrangement negotiated exclusively through US-China bargaining could fundamentally alter its own security environment.
The objective is not to demand a rigid American commitment to every contingency; it is to prevent ambiguity from becoming an invitation to bargain over the regional status quo.
This is especially important because Japan’s own security posture is changing. Tokyo has been strengthening its defense capabilities, expanding its ability to respond to contingencies, and deepening security cooperation with countries beyond the United States. Japan’s Official Security Assistance program, for instance, has expanded rapidly, with its fiscal 2026 budget rising to 18.1 billion yen from 8.1 billion yen the year before.
The program is explicitly designed to strengthen the security and deterrence capabilities of like-minded countries and to prevent unilateral changes to the status quo by force.
But deterrence alone is not enough. Japan also needs to make the alliance economically indispensable to Washington — which explains the second pillar of Tokyo’s strategy: transforming the US-Japan relationship from a traditional security arrangement into an integrated economic, technological and industrial platform.
Central to this effort is Japan’s $550 billion investment commitment in the United States, a framework covering energy, semiconductors, critical minerals and other strategic industries; specific initiatives already include natural-gas generation and small modular nuclear reactors.
The logic is straightforward: if the alliance generates substantial American investment, industrial capacity and jobs, weakening it for a short-term bargain with Beijing becomes far more costly. This is especially true in sectors where Japan retains technological leverage.
Japanese companies hold key positions in semiconductor materials, specialty chemicals and manufacturing equipment; Tokyo Electron and other firms are deeply embedded in global semiconductor production, while Japanese suppliers provide critical materials that are difficult to substitute quickly.
Maintaining coordination between Washington and Tokyo on export controls therefore serves two purposes: it tightens pressure on China while preventing the U.S. technology-control regime from fragmenting in ways that could hurt Japanese industry.
The same principle applies to critical minerals. China’s willingness to restrict exports of strategic materials has already exposed the vulnerability of Japan and other advanced economies. Reuters reported that Chinese exports of heavy rare earths to Japan were sharply curtailed in June amid a diplomatic dispute, laying bare Japanese industry’s dependence on Chinese supplies.
Japan has responded with stockpiling, recycling and diversification toward alternative suppliers.
Institutional commitments
This is where Japan’s strategy grows more sophisticated than simple alliance reassurance.
Tokyo is trying to institutionalize its commitments before they can be reshaped by a Trump-Xi bargain. Personal diplomacy still matters: Takaichi has cultivated a relationship with Trump partly through the political legacy of Shinzo Abe, whose rapport with Trump helped establish a distinctive model of US-Japan diplomacy. But personal chemistry is inherently unstable, while institutional arrangements are harder to reverse.
Japan therefore has an incentive to embed the alliance in economic frameworks, technology agreements, critical-minerals arrangements, coordinated export controls and investment mechanisms. The goal is a network of commitments in which security and economic interests reinforce each other.
Critical minerals offer a useful example: Japan has been pursuing supply diversification while working with the United States on stockpiling and alternative processing capacity. Such arrangements reduce exposure to Chinese economic coercion while increasing the strategic value of cooperation with Washington.
The same logic extends across the wider Indo-Pacific. Japan is deepening security cooperation with Australia, Southeast Asian states and Pacific nations through OSA and other mechanisms.
In fiscal 2025, Japan supported maritime capabilities in Indonesia, including high-speed patrol boats, and has extended similar assistance to other regional partners. These initiatives are modest individually but strategically significant in aggregate, forming a regional network that makes unilateral changes to the status quo more difficult.
Japan’s broader objective, then, is not to stop Trump from negotiating with Xi, nor to push Washington into an unnecessarily confrontational posture toward Beijing. It is to shape the conditions under which US-China diplomacy unfolds.
That requires a delicate balance: Japan must make clear that Taiwan and the regional security order cannot simply become bargaining chips, without framing its position in a way that accelerates Chinese escalation. It must deepen economic integration with the United States without becoming excessively dependent on American policy preferences.
And it must diversify away from China without destroying the commercial ties that remain vital to the Japanese economy. The timing of Takaichi’s meeting with Trump reflects precisely this balancing act.
Tokyo wants to enter the Trump-Xi summit with several facts already established: that Taiwan is inseparable from Japan’s security; that the US-Japan alliance delivers tangible economic benefits to America; that Japan is becoming more capable of carrying its own strategic weight; and that the technological and supply-chain architecture linking the two countries is too integrated to be casually dismantled.
Japan cannot control what Trump and Xi ultimately discuss. It can, however, try to narrow the space in which a grand bargain could be struck at its expense. That is the real purpose of Takaichi’s pre-summit diplomacy: not to prevent a US-China deal, but to ensure that whatever deal emerges does not redraw East Asia’s strategic map over Japan’s head.
Ronny P Sasmita is senior international affairs analyst at Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution, a Jakarta-based think tank. He holds a PhD in international political economy from the University of Tokyo.
