Together, Japan and the US can check China.

Improving China-Japan relations pave the way for improving China-US relations.

Following the opening salvos of U.S. tariffs on solar panels and washing machines, the Trump administration may now also push for a more muscular China policy, to the benefit of Japan’s dealing with China. Make no mistake: while Japan and China relations show signs of a minor détente in the making, this year will witness continued strategic rivalry and the fleshing out of opposing visions of regional, if not global, order.

China led the way on innovative cooperation at the APEC summit, as the U.S. and Japan faltered.

Shinzo Abe’s reelection as prime minister provides a favorable climate for both Donald Trump’s first presidential visit to Japan and an improvement of Chinese-Japanese-U.S. relations.

Japan’s APA boss Toshio Motoya provoked criticisms from China by placing his revisionist history book in APA guest rooms. In this book, he claimed the Nanking Massacre was faked. This represents part of a perceptible shift in Japan toward conservatism, and it implies some deeper and larger change in the country’s overall mindset on war history. While self-deprecation has long overstayed its time in Japan, and self-respect is something better and urgently needed, at the same time it would be in Japan’s very interests not to be embarking on the road of self-aggrandizement.

The U.S. push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership undercut the potential for closer China-Japan ties that might have unbalanced trilateral relations. Policy moves in China or Japan will affect ties among all three countries, which must approach their relationships in a balanced manner for regional and global stability and development.

With Japan’s pride and nationalist impulse to play a bigger international role now rising, its domestic debate on national-security and constitutional reform is set to intensify. Although rising powers tend to be revisionist powers, a politically resurgent Japan, strikingly, is seeking to uphold the present Asian political and maritime order.

Japan’s Abe government is appealing to the nationalistic Japan Restoration Party to revise the constitution to permit the assembly of an army. Lyle J. Goldstein’s book, Meeting China Halfway—How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry has important suggestions for avoiding a Japan-China military conflict.

Interactions among China, Japan and the United States have gone far beyond the constraints of political stereotypes. The flow of capital, material, technology and people has brought the countries ever closer together. Embracing common interests, not “balancing power”, is the key to peace and prosperity for all three.