President Joe Biden hosts Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio for a state visit Wednesday, including a crucial Oval Office meeting, reinforcing his commitment to bolstering vital partnerships in the Indo-Pacific amid a militarily and economically resurgent China.
Over 70 items covering a wide array of critical sectors are expected to be announced as part of the bilateral meeting between Biden and Kishida, according to senior administration officials.
These include a commitment to changing the US force structure in Japan to improve how Japanese and US forces are integrated, establish a “military industrial council” to evaluate where the two countries can co-produce defense weapons to improve cooperation, and items related to integrating anti-missile defense between the US, Australia and Japan, according to the officials.
The announcements are all part of a major update to the nations’ military alliance but elements of them will take some time to implement – including the change to US force structure, which will take several months for both countries to work through, one senior official noted.
The leaders are also expected to detail space collaboration at a time when Japan has signaled interest in landing its first astronaut on the Moon and to lay out ways to increase people-to-people ties amid lagging student exchanges between the two countries in recent years.
Some of these include a joint artificial intelligence research initiative between Carnegie Mellon University and Keio University in Tokyo, as well as another AI-related exchange between the University of Washington and Washington State and Tsukuba University in Japan, according to the officials. This will also include creating a scholarship to fund high school students from the US to travel to Japan to study and vice versa.
…
Read the full article here
