Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced a joint resolution on Thursday aimed at ending the unauthorized U.S. military role in the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen.
The move comes amid President Biden’s unpopularvisit to the region, where he will visit with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the coming days. In an op-ed explaining the reasoning behind the trip, Biden touted an ongoing truce in Yemen, but didn’t say whether he would press for an end to the war.
The House introduced a similar bill last month led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). The senate companion will be considered “privileged,” meaning it can be voted on 10 calendar days after it is introduced.
“We must put an end to the unauthorized and unconstitutional involvement of U.S. Armed Forces in the catastrophic Saudi-led war in Yemen and Congress must take back its authority over war,” Sanders said in a press release. “More than 85,000 children in Yemen have already starved and millions more are facing imminent famine and death.”
Sen. Warren noted that “The American people, through their elected representatives in Congress, never authorized U.S. involvement in the war,” adding that “Congress abdicated its constitutional powers and failed to prevent our country from involving itself in this crisis.”
“The U.S. must immediately end its support for Saudi-led coalition in Yemen unless explicitly authorized by Congress,” she said.
Ben Armbruster is the Managing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He has more than a decade of experience working at the intersection of politics, foreign policy, and media. Ben previously held senior editorial and management positions at Media Matters, ThinkProgress, ReThink Media, and Win Without War.
Photos: Rob Crandall, Trevor Collens, and Rich Koele via shutterstock.com
Top photo credit: A man, wearing shirt in the colours of the U.S. flag, and a woman, wearing an Israeli flag across her shoulders, celebrate after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas agreed on the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire, at the "Hostages square", in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 9, 2025. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Reports today indicate that both the Israelis and Hamas have agreed on a deal that would call for an immediate cessation of fighting and return of hostages and prisoners on both sides in a first phase.
Both parties are expected to sign the agreement and the Israeli cabinet will vote to approve it afterwards. The deal would supposedly see a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from the ground in order for the hostage-prisoner swaps to proceed, but the thornier issues of Hamas disarmament, governance, full Israeli withdrawal and a complete end to the war have been left to hammer out in later phases.
It remains to be seen if this is fully implemented and successful, but if it will secure an ultimate end of the genocide and the release of the hostages, then that is a crucial achievement.
There is a risk that the deal repeats Trump's previous phased agreement that ended up only becoming a prisoner exchange rather than an end to the slaughter. At the time, in March 2025, Israel had already killed some 48,000 Palestinians in Gaza; today, 67,000 and likely many more are dead.
Israel decided to break that first agreement and resumed the war, and as a result, Phase II of the previous agreement was never reached.
Some commentators in Israel are already declaring that there is no intent on the Israeli side to reach Phase II and end the genocide. Rather, this is just a “hostage deal, and a ceasefire while talks continue in good faith.” That is, a tactical pause before Israel restarts the slaughter.
On the positive side, the fact that Trump is making this such a personal success for himself may imply that he will be far less forgiving if Israel sabotages the deal once again. This, it seems, is what the Palestinians and the Arab states are counting on.
Bottom line is that Trump must retain pressure on all parties — particularly Israel — to ensure that the prisoner exchange is followed up with a full end to the war.
The fact that Trump and his team could step in aggressively to get a deal done this week shows that the war could have ended much earlier had the U.S. pressured the Netanyahu government appropriately earlier. The key reason Trump moved forward with pressure on Israel at this point is because of Israel's overreach by bombing Qatar in September.
It made the White House recognize that Israel's recklessness was increasingly becoming an American problem.
Add to this another key factor: Israel was increasingly becoming a political burden for Trump. Israel’s popularity has been tanking among Trump’s America First constituency. The sheer amount of Trump’s time Israel was demanding - from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran - was seen as undermining Trump’s domestic political priorities while dragging the US once again into unnecessary Middle East conflicts.
Trump has himself pointed to this, saying that his voters have turned against Israel. “My people are starting to hate Israel,” Trump told a donor already in July. Major voices in MAGA, such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, and, privately before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk, view blind support for Israel as incompatible with the America First approach.
Israel‘s international isolation also imposed a cost on the US since it is Washington that is constantly tasked to defend Israel and insulate it from international pressure. Trump reportedly told Netanyahu that Israel cannot fight the entire world. The implicit message was that the US can no longer spend its political capital defending a reckless and recalcitrant Israel.
Trump, of course, is eyeing a Nobel Peace Prize. But ceasefires do not warrant such prizes. Much more must be achieved. If Trump keeps up the pressure on Israel, peace can be secured. And so can the coveted peace prize.
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A building destroyed by fighting near the al-Madina Souq in Aleppo, Syria. (Connor Echols/Responsible Statecraft)
DAMASCUS, SYRIA — The Old City of Damascus is teeming with life. On any given night, one can find thousands of Syrians strolling through streets lined with endless shops. People stream in and out of restaurants situated in ornate Ottoman-era courtyards, where diners hang out around elegant, black-and-white stone fountains until the early hours of the morning.
But a short walk east reveals a ghost town. The neighborhood of Jobar, a former rebel stronghold with a prewar population of 300,000, has been reduced to a maze of crumbling apartment buildings and mangled cars. “When I was [in Syria] in January, I was shocked at the level of destruction,” said Robert Ford, who served as U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014 and has visited the country several times in recent years. “It looked like films I'd seen of cities in World War Two.”
Streets full of destroyed buildings, believed to be littered with unexploded ordnance, stretch for miles in the Jobar neighborhood of Damascus. (Connor Echols/Responsible Statecraft)
<p>In places like Jobar, the task facing Syria’s new government stands in stark relief, written on the destroyed remnants of once bustling streets. And these visible scars are just one indication of the profound damage that years of war and sanctions have wrought on Syria’s economy.</p><p>Rolling blackouts attest to the sorry state of the country’s electrical grid. Syrian banks, after years of toiling in isolation, are now struggling to return their practices to international standards in order to plug themselves into the global financial system. With gas stations in disrepair, most drivers now rely on roadside stops where workers dispense fuel from thin plastic water jugs. Supply chains for most industries will have to be rebuilt from scratch.</p><p>Nine months after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria is working hard to overcome these challenges. Syrians of all stripes have thrown their support behind the effort to reconstruct cities ravaged by war and natural disasters, with some <a href="https://x.com/QalaatAlMudiq/status/1971694920558944447" target="_blank"><u>contributing</u></a> millions of dollars and others chipping in with sweat and tears. Many of the 14 million people who <a href="https://www.unrefugees.org/news/syria-refugee-crisis-explained/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>fled</u></a> during the conflict have returned to visit, and some have even made the decision to move back home for good.</p><p>But looming over all of this enthusiasm is the threat of a new economic disaster — one driven not by local dynamics but by Western sanctions. President Donald Trump, despite having waived or suspended many U.S. sanctions on Syria, has so far failed to persuade Congress to permanently remove crippling measures first put in place to pressure the Assad regime. Lawmakers, particularly in the House, have instead pushed to add new conditions for the removal of sanctions, sowing doubt about the Syrian economy’s future and slowing the flow of the estimated $400 billion in investment needed to rebuild a country in which 90% of people now <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/impact-conflict-syria-devastated-economy-pervasive-poverty-and-challenging-road-ahead-social-and-economic-recovery-enar" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>live</u></a> in poverty.</p><p>To better understand the impact of sanctions — and assess the possibility of removing them — RS visited a range of cities in Syria and spoke with people on the ground there, in addition to experts on sanctions and congressional staffers. The picture that emerged is bleak.</p><p>Sanctions represent a key barrier to the program of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has focused on technocratic policies following the fall of the Assad regime. “He is genuine when he says the priority has to be reconstruction,” said Ford, who has spoken with Sharaa several times since he took power. Back in 2023, when Ford first met Sharaa, the future president was particularly concerned about job creation in Idlib, the city that his militant group had held since 2017.</p><p>Sharaa’s logic was that, “if young people don't have jobs, they migrate towards the most extreme Islamist movements,” Ford recalled.</p><p>Experts on Syria’s economy share Sharaa’s concerns. As Syria continues its fragile transition to a post-Assad system, they argue that the continued imposition of sanctions will threaten more than just Syrians’ pocketbooks. “If the country remains economically isolated, institutionally hollow, and unable to meet humanitarian needs, it risks descending into state failure and triggering new migration waves, drug trafficking, terrorism, and chaos that various regional and domestic actors could quickly exploit,” a recent report from Karam Shaar Advisory, a consulting firm focused on Syria, <a href="https://www.kas.de/documents/284382/284431/Implications+and+Policy+Responses+for+Banking+Sector+Sanctions+on+Syria.pdf/7c3d81bc-ffad-13d4-3443-6a272921e6b1?version=1.0&t=1752055230631" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>said</u></a>.</p><p>One Syrian man put it more bluntly. “The sanctions aren’t against the government,” he said. “They’re against the people.”</p>
The long arm of sanctions
Syria is no stranger to sanctions. Back in 1979, the U.S. designated the Syrian government as a state sponsor of terrorism, largely as a result of its support for Palestinian armed groups. U.S.-Syrian relations experienced a series of ebbs and flows in the ensuing decades, but the designation stuck.
President Clinton met multiple times with President Hafez al-Assad in the 1990s as the U.S. sought normalization between Syria and Israel. In the early days of the war on terror, Syria even lent the U.S. a hand by alerting Washington of a planned al-Qaeda attack on an American base in Bahrain. But that cooperation unraveled following Syria’s opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, which led the U.S. to impose new sanctions on the Assad regime.
Eight years later, the government’s brutal crackdown on Arab Spring protestors erased any possibility for a cooling of tensions between the U.S. and Syria.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations used executive orders to impose additional sanctions on Syria as the country descended into a brutal civil war. Then, in 2019, Congress made the fateful decision to impose a package of restrictions known as the Caesar sanctions in response to atrocities committed by the Assad regime. These unusually harsh measures, which included secondary sanctions against foreign entities doing business in most sectors of the Syrian economy, left the country in near complete economic isolation.
“Sanctions were having an impact on a 360 degree level,” recalled Vittorio Maresca di Serracapriola, an expert in sanctions on Syria and an economic analyst at Karam Shaar Advisory.
Once a luxury resort, the Safir hotel in Maaloula, Syria, was all but destroyed in fighting during the civil war. The property's Kuwaiti owners have yet to begin reconstruction. (Connor Echols/Responsible Statecraft)
<p>When President Bashar al-Assad finally fled in December 2024, many hoped that the sanctions would go with him. President Trump fed these hopes in May when he <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/5/16/trumps-decision-to-lift-syria-sanctions-fuels-dreams-of-economic-revival" target="_blank"><u>promised</u></a> an end to the measures, which he followed up in June with a sweeping executive order that <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/providing-for-the-revocation-of-syria-sanctions/" target="_blank"><u>suspended</u></a> or waived the vast majority of sanctions.</p><p>But Congress has had other plans. In the House, some lawmakers have <a href="https://joewilson.house.gov/media/press-releases/wilson-introduces-bipartisan-bill-repeal-syria-caesar-civilian-protection-act" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>pushed</u></a> for the full elimination of the Caesar sanctions, but others have advocated instead for imposing additional conditions. The pro-sanctions camp remains skeptical of Sharaa, a one-time al-Qaeda fighter who claims to have moderated his views. And so far, these skeptics are winning. A <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4427/text" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>bill</u></a> that would maintain the Caesar sanctions for at least two more years, sponsored by Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), advanced out of the House Financial Services Committee in July.</p><p>Efforts to secure a clean repeal, meanwhile, have yet to even get a committee markup.</p><p>Debate in the Senate has been more complex. Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), have argued in favor of a straight repeal. “The financial services industry has made clear that, absent a clean repeal, it is very unlikely that they will be able to extend financing to any kind of major projects in Syria,” a Democratic congressional aide told RS, adding that this would kill any hopes for a full reconstruction.</p><p>Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for his part, initially pushed to maintain the sanctions with strict conditions for their removal. But, after negotiations with Democrats including Shaheen and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Graham signed onto a compromise <a href="https://www.congress.gov/amendment/119th-congress/senate-amendment/3889/text" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>proposal</u></a>. The new version would provide immediate sanctions relief and simply require the president to regularly update Congress on Syria’s compliance with various requirements related to fighting terrorism and ensuring accountability for atrocities. This proposal is likely to be included in a “manager’s package” of amendments to the annual defense policy bill, meaning that its chances of passing the Senate are high, according to the Democratic staffer.</p><p>Van Hollen praised the compromise proposal in a statement to RS. “Failure to lift the sanctions would be a big missed opportunity and would hamstring vital reconstruction efforts,” he said. “That being said, given the past history of members of this interim government, it’s critical that we also have an insurance policy to safeguard our interests.”</p><p>It remains unclear whether this compromise will be enough to persuade Western banks to take the risk of investing in a new Syria. After all, even with a clean withdrawal of sanctions, Syria’s problems go far deeper than kitchen table issues. Clashes continue between the central government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and soldiers affiliated with Sharaa’s government have been accused of committing massacres against both Alawite and Druze Syrians in recent months.</p><p>Meanwhile, efforts to secure some form of transitional justice and move toward a more democratic system of government have been halting at best, and terror groups like ISIS have tried to take advantage of the transition to reconstitute their forces. But Sharaa’s bet is that these problems can only be dealt with properly if the country’s economy is placed on a clear path to recovery.</p>
Palmyra, which once had a population of at least 70,000 people, is among the most destroyed cities in Syria. A small portion of the pre-war population has begun to return. (Connor Echols/Responsible Statecraft)
<p>In September, Sharaa brought this argument to the United Nations, where he became the first Syrian president to address the General Assembly in more than 50 years. “Syria is reclaiming its rightful place among the nations of the world,” he <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/24/in-his-first-un-speech-syrias-al-sharaa-urges-end-to-all-sanctions" target="_blank"><u>said</u></a>. “We call now for the complete lifting of sanctions, so that they no longer shackle the Syrian people.”</p><p>Trump appears to agree with Sharaa about the need for sanctions relief, which, as Ford noted, will be necessary in order to secure any form of long-term investment. But without support from Congress, the administration can only do so much to calm the nerves of investors. So it is that the Caesar sanctions, first designed to bring the Assad regime to heel, are now poised to cripple its successor.</p><p>“We could do everything possible to help the Syrians and it could still not work out,” the Democratic aide said. “But I think if we don't do everything possible, like removing these shackles off the economy, that it definitely won't work out.”</p>
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Top photo credit: Japan’s LDP leader Sanae Takaichi (Govt. of Japan) Chinese President Xi Jinping Alan Santos/PR/Roman Kubanskiy (Wikimedia Commons)
On October 4, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan chose Sanae Takaichi — who is expected to reflect a more determined stand in defense of Taiwan — as its president, and the Diet is expected to elect her as prime minister next Wednesday.
(Editor's note, 10/10: The Kōmeitō’s departure from its 26-year coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) reported today has complicated Takaichi’s path to the prime ministership and delayed the Diet vote on who will lead Japan.)
During her successful campaign for the leadership, Takaichi repeated her long-held positions regarding security policy: the need for Japan to assume greater responsibility for its own security by building up its defense capabilities; continued strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance; deepening U.S.-Japan-South Korea and U.S.-Japan-Philippines trilateral relations as well as the Quad (U.S.-Japan-Australia-India cooperation) to counter China; and realization of the late Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific.”
But what about her views regarding Taiwan?
In her recent contribution to the Hudson Institute’s discussion on the future of Japanese foreign policy, Takaichi largely reflected Japanese mainstream thinking. She emphasized that “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait” are of “the utmost importance to the international community, including Japan,” “unilateral changes to the status quo through force or coercion must never occur,” and “Taiwan is an extremely important partner and a valued friend for Japan, sharing fundamental values and maintaining close economic ties and people-to-people exchanges.”
She also insisted that “issues concerning Taiwan should be resolved peacefully through dialogue,” affirmed the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, and expressed her wish “to engage in solid and candid dialogue with Chinese leaders.”
But in other statements, Takaichi has been much more forward-leaning regarding Japan’s involvement in the defense of Taiwan. For example, when she first ran for the LDP presidency in September 2021, Takaichi stated that a Taiwan crisis would be a threat to Japan and that the possibility that Japan’s Self-Defense Force would be deployed is high.
She also declared that Japan and the U.S. would need to closely coordinate their response, including exercising the right of collective self-defense. During her second run for the LDP’s top post in September 2024, Takaichi suggested that a scenario in which China imposed a maritime blockade on Taiwan could qualify as a “crisis that threatens the nation’s existence.” Under such a scenario, according to legislation passed in 2015, Tokyo could use force even before a direct military attack on Japanese territory.
In a speech in Taiwan itself just last April, Takaichi noted the importance of both Japan and Taiwan strengthening their respective defense capabilities but added that neither can defend itself alone. Therefore, she stressed the need to deepen mutual cooperation among the United States, Taiwan, and Japan, and potentially the Philippines, Australia, and EU nations.
In two policy briefs recently published by the Quincy Institute, Michael Swaine articulates a view that runs counter to Takaichi’s and the perspectives of much of the mainstream Japanese foreign and security policy community. Swaine argued that Taiwan is not a vital U.S. security interest and that Washington should therefore avoid a catastrophic war with China over the Taiwan issue.
To promote peace and stability in the Taiwan strait, he argues, the U.S. should move to a policy of strategic clarity whereby Washington would declare that it would not directly fight China to defend Taiwan but rather simply work to strengthen Taiwan’s own military capabilities and take other political, economic, and diplomatic measures to deter China without direct U.S. military intervention.
Although such a policy shift, if implemented prudently as outlined by Swaine, would ultimately serve Japan’s national interest, Japan under Takaichi’s leadership is likely to oppose this change.
Japanese misgivings about Swaine’s proposal will center around two points. First, Japanese policymakers will insist that Taiwan is indeed a critical interest because if China were to unify Taiwan with the mainland through military force, it would be able to use the island as a strategic asset to threaten Japanese sea lanes and even Japanese territory, especially Okinawa.
Second, they will argue that the adoption of such a policy would weaken deterrence and dramatically increase the possibility that China will resort to force to unify Taiwan with the mainland. Indeed, concerns about the weakening of deterrence prompted Shinzō Abe after his retirement as prime minister to ask Washington to adopt a policy of strategic clarity in the opposite direction; namely, that the U.S. should clearly state that it would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan.
Although these two objections may seem compelling at first glance, they are ultimately unpersuasive.
First, the argument that Beijing’s control over Taiwan poses a critical threat to Japan’s security and national survival inflates the Chinese threat. Although Beijing has long held that the recovery of Taiwan, which China lost after its defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war, is a core interest of China, it does not necessarily follow that Beijing will use Taiwan as a stepping stone to seize Japanese territory such as Okinawa.
Anti-China hawks in Japan emphasize how some Chinese commentators have highlighted the Ryūkyū Kingdom’s status as a tributary state during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Ryūkyū Kingdom was indeed a political entity with close trade and political relations with China before Japan dismantled the kingdom and incorporated its territory into Japan as Okinawa Prefecture, but it is farfetched to claim that China therefore has the strategic intention to seize the Okinawan islands after unifying Taiwan with mainland China. Chinese officials have never suggested they had such a goal.
China’s strategic interest in Okinawa stems not from a desire to take that territory, but rather its concern that Okinawa has become an important base for U.S. military operations to intervene in a Taiwan conflict. If Taiwan became a less contentious military issue between China and the United States, the Chinese military threat to Japanese territory would abate.
One exception might be Japanese fears of Chinese claims over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. But compared to Taiwan, China’s irredentist claims over these small uninhabited islands is much weaker. Rather than seizing these islands by force, China’s intentions are focused on getting Japan to recognize the existence of a territorial dispute.
Given that China’s interest in these maritime features pales in comparison to its commitment to China-Taiwan unification, it is far from clear that China intends to risk a military conflict with Japan (and possibly the United States) to seize the islands by force.
As a consequence, Japanese defense capabilities should be more than sufficient to deter China. To be sure, if Taiwan came under Chinese control, the Chinese navy could more easily access the Pacific Ocean because it would not confront the choke points along the Ryūkyū Island chain. But given China’s interest in international trade, it is hard to imagine Beijing threatening Japan’s sea lanes beyond its claims to Taiwan. Although such a Chinese action might occur under conditions of war, it is very hard to conceive of what would generate such a war, other than the Taiwan issue.
Second, the argument that Washington moving away from directly defending Taiwan would invite a Chinese attack on Taiwan reflects an incomplete understanding of how deterrence works and can fail.
Certainly, if the U.S. had both the will and military capability to inflict unacceptable punishment on China or to deny its ability to seize or compel Taiwan by military force or coercion, then China might be deterred from attacking Taiwan. But given China’s commitment to unifying Taiwan with the mainland, Beijing will inevitably respond to U.S. upgrades in military deterrence by strengthening its own capabilities to increase the costs and risks of American military intervention.
In an arms race between China and the United States, Beijing has the advantage of geographic proximity, a primary focus on the Taiwan issue, and few political constraints on the allocation of resources to pursue its irredentist aims regarding Taiwan. Although the United States will certainly need the support of allies like Japan to balance against the buildup of Chinese military capabilities, even under Takaichi’s hawkish leadership, Japan is unlikely to have the political will and the economic capacity to make up for the long-term disadvantages that Washington faces in its military competition with Beijing in the regional theater relevant in a Taiwan conflict.
With the ongoing military competition and the increase in military exercises in the region, the danger of some kind of military accident that could escalate into an actual conflict neither side wants is rising.
In short, an overemphasis on military deterrence could ignite an inadvertent war. For deterrence to be effective, it is important to reassure the target country — China — that its vital interests are not being threatened. China has repeatedly stated that the eventual “reunification” of China and Taiwan, as well as the prevention of Taiwan’s independence, are core interests.
From China’s perspective, Washington and its allies, including Japan, are encouraging pro-independence forces in Taiwan and undermining the understandings that formed the basis of normalization between China and both Japan and the U.S.
In 1972, Japan declared that it “fully understands and respects” the People’s Republic of China’s stance that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” In 1979, the United States acknowledged “the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” If Takaichi were to enhance Tokyo’s security engagement with Taiwan, as well as encourage Washington to buttress military deterrence and bolster its defense ties with Taiwan, Beijing is likely to escalate its coercive actions around Taiwan as well as accelerate its military buildup.
This negative action-reaction spiral could eventually drive the Chinese leadership into a corner and lead them to conclude that the possibility of peaceful unification has disappeared and that the use of military force is the only viable option.
Even under President Xi Jinping, China prefers peaceful unification; but it has long reserved the option of military force to prevent Taiwan from moving toward formal independence. A certain level of deterrence is indeed necessary to persuade China not to use force against Taiwan. Swaine has argued that a strengthening of Taiwan’s own defense capabilities and the negative impact a Taiwan war would have on the Chinese economy (and China’s overall reputation if it were to attack Taiwan) would contribute to deterrence by making the military option unattractive to China.
But for deterrence to work without the negative risks outlined above, China must be convinced to be patient about unification. Essential to nurturing such patience is the promotion of cross-strait dialogue, the stabilization and improvement of U.S.-China and Japan-China relations, and U.S. and Japanese restraint regarding security ties with Taiwan.
Swaine’s proposal would be in Japan’s national interest because such a policy shift, if properly handled, has the potential to reduce the danger of war while preserving Taiwan’s security. Moreover, if Washington were to intervene in such a conflict by using its military assets in Japan against Chinese forces or the Chinese homeland, Beijing is likely to use its formidable missile capabilities to strike U.S. military bases throughout the Japanese archipelago, not just those located in Okinawa, and perhaps even Self-Defense Force bases that could support U.S. military intervention.
The conflict could rapidly escalate and endanger the lives and livelihood of Japanese civilians.
In proclaiming that “Japan is back,” Sanae Takaichi seeks to revive her nation’s economy, improve the livelihood of all Japanese, promote Japan’s security, and enhance its diplomatic influence. The best way for her to achieve these aspirations is to work with the United States in pursuing a strategy of peace along the lines recommended by Swaine, and not by aggravating the Taiwan issue and escalating tensions with China.
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