Since it regained its independence in 1952, Japan has only had one formal ally: The United States. The Security Treaty between the United States and Japan, signed in 1951 following the San Francisco peace conference, and amended in 1960, has been the cornerstone of Japanese national security policy for three quarters of a century.

However, in recent years, Japan has developed defense partnerships with other countries, both in East Asia and beyond. This trend has accelerated since 2020, and those partnerships are now an element of Japanese defense and diplomacy that cannot be ignored. 

Speaker:
Benoit Hardy-Chartrand is a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at Temple University Japan, in Tokyo, where he teaches courses on international politics. He has been conducting research on Indo-Pacific geopolitics in academic institutions and think tanks for close to 15 years. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies in Montreal. His work has been featured in numerous publications, and he has appeared more than 600 times in media outlets around the world.

Before relocating to Tokyo in 2017, he was a Senior Research at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (2014-2017) a Lecturer at the University of Montreal (2015-2017), a Junior Fellow at United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo (2012), and a visiting researcher and lecturer at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) in China (2009).  

Moderator: 
Kyle Cleveland | ICAS Co-director, Temple University, Japan Campus