This commentary originally appeared in Nikkei Asia.

An economic response toward China will be a leading agenda item for the Group of Seven major economies this year, Michael Beeman, who served as assistant U.S. trade representative for Japan, South Korea and APEC affairs until January, told Nikkei.

"It is important to agree on the most pressing issues, which will send a message to the rest of the world," said Beeman, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The U.S. is urging European nations and Japan to align with export restrictions of advanced semiconductors. "The G-7 is the best forum for discussion," said Beeman, who stressed member nations should work together to address export curbs and other measures.

Guam, the small island territory in the Pacific Ocean, plays a unique strategic role in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy. In a new article, part of a Hudson Institute collection of essays on the challenges and motivations of defending Guam, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro analyzes the island’s strategic importance to the United States, China’s threats to U.S. forces on the island, and the pathways to deterrence against Chinese encroachment in the region. 

Mastro enumerates a number of reasons behind Guam’s strategic importance. First, “the Chinese missile threat to U.S. regional bases, especially those located in the first island chain, enhances the operational role of those bases sufficiently distant from China to partially mitigate the threat it poses, yet also close enough to be operationally impactful.” Guam’s geostrategic potential is rooted in its proximity to China, and represents “the westernmost location from which the U.S. can project power, manage logistics, and establish command and control.” 

In a Taiwan contingency, Mastro argues that Guam would play an important role as a logistics hub and jumping-off point for combat forces headed toward the Taiwan Strait, with the caveat that U.S. forces could maintain roughly half the sortie rate from Guam as that from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. Another reason behind Guam’s strategic utility comes from reliable base access, which is more reliable than in other Asian host countries.

Despite the U.S. force posture and the island’s protective distance from China, Guam remains vulnerable to Chinese intermediate-range ballistic missile attack. According to Mastro, the U.S. has systems on the island to protect against missile threats, such as a THAAD battery, but “U.S. military commanders want much more of a guarantee that the U.S. would be able to continue operations out of Guam even under Chinese missile attack.”

Given China’s ability to threaten U.S. bases on the island, Mastro proposes an “unappreciated and underutilized” pathway to deterrence: deterrence by resiliency. Similar to deterrence by punishment, which seeks to prevent adversary attacks by employing the threat of severe penalties should the adversary do so, deterrence by resiliency is based primarily on shaping adversaries’ perceptions of one’s own capabilities. “However, unlike deterrence by punishment, the goal is not to create fear of retaliation but rather to encourage the perception that disruptive events would have little effect on an adversary.” Mastro uses the term resiliency to refer to a state’s ability to both absorb and deflect costs at a given level of violence.

Mastro argues that resilience is about signaling to China that “the benefits it would derive from a particular action would actually be less than it believes them to be. Improving defenses can enhance deterrence through this mechanism, but, given its limitations, other avenues—in particular, pursuing viable alternatives and creating redundancy—should also be pursued to ensure that an attack on Guam would not cripple a U.S. war effort.”

Guam, frequently cited as the U.S.’s viable alternative to bases within the first island chain, represents a critical strategic waypoint, but as long as the U.S. is reliant on the island to fight and win a war, “China will ensure that it can effectively target the island, thus making messaging associated with Guam’s defense key.” Mastro proposes that the language about defending Guam must expand to accomodate resilience contingencies for the island’s planned defenses, which, “once in place and even under attack […] would ensure that the US could continue operations there to the degree necessary to, for example, maintain air superiority over the Taiwan Strait.” 

Whether China would accept deterrence by resilience remains to be seen, but policymakers must employ new thinking about Guam’s defense to meet the new security challenges posed by China.

On March 22, 2022, APARC's Japan Program welcomed a delegation from the Embassy of Japan in the United States and the Consulate-General of Japan in San Francisco, including Ambassador Koji Tomita and Consul-General Hiroshi Kawamura, who met with a joint panel of scholars and administrators from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley for a discussion about fostering a greater understanding of Japan studies in the United States.

APARC Deputy Director and Japan Program Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui presented data on enrollment and employment statistics for Japanese studies in higher education. According to the report, Japanese studies have been in a slow state of decline since the late 1980s, when many in the United States viewed Japan as an economic threat and the country was not as well-understood as it is today. Despite this decline, students today are still very interested in studying Japan and are eager to visit the country.

Naomi Funahashi, Manager of the Reischauer Scholars Program and Teacher Professional Development at the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), presented outcomes from SPICE's outreach efforts and promotion of Japanese studies in the K-14 context. Funahashi indicated strong interest in and engagement with SPICE curricular units focused on Japan and with its local student programs in six regions, one university, and two high schools in Japan.

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Professor Junko Habu, Chair of the Center for Japanese Studies (CJS) and Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, along with Kumi Sawada Hadler, Program Director of CJS, described logistical challenges Japan scholars have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the inability to access the country under lockdown, and indicated that, across the board, universities are not providing as much support for Japanese studies as they used to, especially in terms of endowed faculty positions and departmental "slots" specifically for Japan specialists.

Ambassador Tomita and Consul-General Kawamura agreed that more support was needed to bolster scholarships of Japan. Ambassador Tomita stated that over his long career, he has seen the theoretical focus of Japan studies in the United States shift away from bilateral relations between the two countries toward the region at large. He noted that the public discussion is increasingly directed at Japan as part of a broader complex of nations in East Asia. Consul-General Kawamura indicated that the pandemic has posed a host of challenges for his office but that Japan will continue to open its doors to scholars in the future. 

The meeting concluded with a reaffirmation of the longstanding and crucial relationship between the two nations and of the importance of Japan studies in the United States in fostering fruitful collaboration between the two nations. 

China and the United States are the two biggest carbon-emitting countries in the world. Decarbonization in these two countries will have material impacts on a global scale and is timelier than ever, according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford Center at Peking University, APARC's China Program, and Peking University’s Institute of Energy.

The report is the product of a roundtable series, held in October 2021 that brought together leading American and Chinese current and former officials, and experts in the public and private sectors working on energy, climate, the environment, industry, transportation, and finance. The roundtables promoted discussion around how China and the United States can accelerate decarbonization and cooperate with one another to meet their carbon neutrality goals by mid-century.

The thematic areas of the roundtables included U.S.- China collaboration on climate change, global sustainable finance, corporate climate pledges, and the opportunities and challenges for the acceleration of decarbonization in both countries in general, as well as specifically for the power, transportation, and industry sectors.

The resultant report reviews the key themes and takeaways that emerged from the closed-door discussions. It builds on the “U.S.-China Joint Statement Addressing the Climate Crisis” released by the U.S. Department of State on April 17, 2021 and shares some common themes with the “U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s” released on November 10, 2021. Shiran Victoria Shen of the Hoover Institution authored the report, with contributions by Yi Cui of the Precourt Institute for Energy, Zhijun Jin of the Institute of Energy and Jean Oi, Director of APARC's China Program. 

The report suggests that tensions in U.S.-China relations have hindered the acceleration of decarbonization and that open science in fundamental research areas must be encouraged. Universities can educate future leaders, advance knowledge, and foster U.S.-China collaboration on open-science R&D, regardless of the political environment. The report argues that the most promising strategy to decarbonize energy is to electrify consumption now served by fossil fuels as much as possible while decarbonizing electricity generation. 

The roundtables identified six areas where the U.S. and China could collaborate: global green finance, carbon capture and storage, low-carbon agriculture and food processing, methane leak reduction, grid integration and greater use of intermittent renewables, and governance, including at the subnational level. The report further identifies more concrete and additional promising areas for accelerated decarbonization and bilateral collaboration, as well as the obstacles to be tackled, including institutional, political, and financial constraints.