Japanese ministers say they are not pursuing PM’s ‘Asian Nato’ proposal

TOKYO – Japan’s foreign and defence ministers said on Oct 2 that they are not working on a proposal by the new prime minister to establish an “Asian Nato”, as the US and India had rejected the idea.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba made the proposal ahead of

his victory in the ruling party leadership election

on Sept 27, arguing that it would bolster security in Asia.

But on Oct 1, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar expressed scepticism, saying

New Delhi did not share Mr Ishiba’s vision

. In September, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, Mr Daniel Kritenbrink, said it was too early to discuss such a proposal.

“I think it’s one idea for the future. It’s difficult to immediately set up a mechanism that would impose mutual defence obligations in Asia,” Japan’s Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya told a news conference in Tokyo.

Such a framework would not be aimed at any specific country, Mr Iwaya added, when asked whether it was targeting China.

“In his instructions yesterday, the Prime Minister did not mention anything about considering something like an Asian version of Nato,” Defence Minister Gen Nakatani said in his first press conference after being appointed by Mr Ishiba.

In a paper to the Hudson Institute think-tank in September, Mr Ishiba argued that locking Washington and other friendly nations into an “Asian Nato” would deter China from using military force in Asia.

The organisation, he said, could encompass separate groups and alliances such as the Quad group of India and the US, Japan and Australia and the trilateral security partnership between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. REUTERS