Defense Without U.S. Help Is a Live Topic for Canada, Japan and Australia
The leaders of Japan and Canada are making a unified front on defense cooperation as President Trump raises the pressure over military spending.
By Ian Austen
Reporting from Tokyo, the final stop on Mark Carney’s trip to India, Australia and Japan
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Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada landed in Japan on Friday as part of a 10-day tour that also included Australia. All three countries share at least one major concern: how to adapt now that President Trump has made it clear that they will need to look after their own security.
After Mr. Carney met with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan, the two leaders provided something of an answer — try to do more together.
“First, most importantly and fundamentally, we are enhancing our security and defense cooperation,” Mr. Carney said after a brief signing ceremony.
Ms. Takaichi said the agreements “will contribute greatly toward building a resilient Indo-Pacific.”
The agreements were vague, some had been previously announced and they were all nonbinding. Nevertheless, they clearly emphasize greater defense cooperation. They include expanding joint exercises and operations, a joint cybercrime effort and marine law enforcement.
The passenger list on Mr. Carney’s Royal Canadian Air Force Airbus underscored the importance of security issues. It left Ottawa last week to visit India first, with four cabinet ministers. By the time it landed in Tokyo, only the minister of defense represented the cabinet.
Canada, Japan and Australia are all in the midst of major buildups in military spending, with Canada planning to divert billions of dollars it long paid to U.S. defense companies and direct it instead to domestic manufacturers. Its effort followed Mr. Trump’s criticisms of allies’ military efforts and his repeated talk about making Canada the 51st state. Currently, about 70 percent of Canada’s military spending is on American goods.
“It’s certainly the case, to different degrees for Australia, Japan and Canada, that there is an ongoing dependency on the United States,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario. He added that the countries “have come to realize that degree of dependency in the past is not sustainable in the future and is actually harmful to the conduct of sovereign defense and foreign policy.”
Canada was planning to buy 88 F-35 jets, but Mr. Carney has put that project under review as the country ponders shifting to less costly planes made by the Swedish company Saab, which is promising to eventually build them in Canada.
Both Canada and Australia, which has committed to buying a fleet of nuclear submarines, were already concerned over a decision by the United States to deny them access to core software and other technologies for the planes and submarines.
Mr. Carney has called on the world’s “middle powers” to band together and resist Mr. Trump, largely because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on key Canadian industries like steel, aluminum and auto making. In addition to more security cooperation, his tour has been focused on a host of economic and trade issues.
As was the case in Australia and India, Japan said that it would work with Canada on “critical minerals” like uranium, lithium and nickel, which it has in abundance. Japan is also interested in Canada’s relatively new business in liquefied natural gas. Fears about Japan’s energy supply have risen in recent days amid the turmoil in Iran and the ensuing disruption to trade routes. Japan is heavily dependent on oil imports from the Middle East and hopes to diversify its energy supply.
Mr. Carney will meet with Japanese auto industry executives on Saturday. Toyota and Honda produce about 70 percent of all cars built in Canada. A vast majority of those vehicles are sent to the United States.
A Japanese official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak about the meetings, said beforehand that the carmakers would emphasize the importance to the Canadian plants of renewing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade. It is up for review this year.
A Japanese armed-forces band and an honor guard greeted Mr. Carney as he arrived for dinner with Ms. Takaichi at her office. He became the first foreign leader to visit Ms. Takaichi, who rose to power in October, since her landslide win of a snap election last month.
The two leaders have notably different backgrounds. Ms. Takaichi is a longtime politician who was a heavy-metal drummer in her youth and remains an unabashed admirer of Margaret Thatcher, the former Conservative prime minister of Britain. Mr. Carney, a Liberal, was a hockey goalie while studying at Oxford, worked in investment banking and was the central banker for both Canada and England. He entered politics just over a year ago.
Early in his career, Mr. Carney worked in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs. On Friday he made a valiant, if stumbling, attempt to deliver part of his speech in Japanese.
Mr. Wark said that while some people in all three countries hope that they can just ride out the Trump storm, doing so would be a mistake.
“The days in which all of these states regarded their dependency on the United States as an immovable, immutable fact are over,” he said.
Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at aus...@nytimes.com.
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