President Joe Biden recently welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide to the White House where both leaders expressed their commitment to defending and advancing shared values, including human rights and the rule of law.
The U.S.-Japan alliance remains ironclad, said President Biden:
“We are committed to working together to take on the challenges from China and on issues like the East China Sea, the South China Sea, as well as North Korea, to ensure a future of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Both nations agreed to a series of practical commitments to further strengthen the alliance through the U.S.-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership. A key area of cooperation will be in competitiveness and innovation, focusing on scientific and technological advances, said President Biden:
“That includes making sure we invest in and protect technologies that will maintain and sharpen our competitive edge. . . .So, we’re going to work together across a range of fields — from promoting secure and reliable 5G networks; to increasing our cooperation on supply chains for critical sectors like semiconductors; to driving joint research in areas like artificial intelligence, genomics, quantum computing, and much more.”
With regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. and Japan pledged to cooperate on global COVID-19 vaccine supply and manufacturing needs toward ending the pandemic, and also build longer-term global health security to help prevent the next pandemic.
The United States and Japan are also committed to taking aggressive action to meet the threats posed by the climate crisis. Indeed, both nations agreed to take decisive action by 2030 to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and launched the U.S.-Japan Climate Partnership.
The final component of the new partnership will be to foster people-to-people ties through extensive international exchange programs and joint projects and research.
President Biden affirmed that “Japan and the United States are two strong democracies,” and the U.S.-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership will prove that “democracies can still compete and win in the twenty-first century.”
