Japan's foreign policy establishment is openly worrying that Donald Trump's planned May summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping could produce a bilateral bargain that sidelines Tokyo and rewrites the order Washington has built in Asia since 1945. Japanese officials describe the scenario, a revived "G2" that prioritizes US-China ties over traditional alliances, as their nightmare.
The concern was documented in the Financial Times analysis "The country that can't say no to Trump", which "Hvylya" has examined. Almost no US experts believe Trump will replicate Richard Nixon's 1972 "opening of China," but Japanese officials remain nervous that he is chasing a legacy-defining deal with Beijing on terms that would leave Tokyo to absorb the consequences.
Taro Kono, a former foreign and defense minister, said the prospect gives him little comfort. "That is what worries me," he told the Financial Times. Kono added that Japan has limited means to resist such an outcome and argued that "middle powers like Japan" now need to act collectively, perhaps by building "a United Nations 2.0" to avoid being governed by the whim of an unreliable ally. Analyst George Friedman has previously argued that Trump's upcoming meeting with Xi could reshape the global order more profoundly than the entire Iran war.
The fault lines were already visible during Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's late-March visit to the Oval Office. The White House issued a statement stressing the leaders' commitment to "peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait" at what sources familiar with the matter said was Tokyo's urging. Japan itself, however, conspicuously omitted the same phrase from its own readout to avoid angering China at a delicate moment.
Hatsue Shinohara, an expert on US-Japan relations at Waseda University, said the summit had clarified the limits of Japan's options. "With China-Japan relations having declined so much, we need our ally," she said. "We are used to being a subordinate nation." John Roos, the US ambassador to Japan under the Obama administration, credited Takaichi and her predecessor Shinzo Abe for "doing everything they can to keep the alliance intact," but added that "given what is happening, she must be thinking about hedging her bets."
Trump himself offered Tokyo only vague reassurances on the China question at the summit, along with a promise to be "singing Japan's praises" during his meeting with Xi. For Japanese diplomats, that is a thin guarantee ahead of a meeting that could redraw the map of Asian security. "Hvylya" has previously explored the unsettling parallels between the current Trump-Xi standoff and the kind of leadership crisis that preceded the 1914 collapse of the old European order.