Dilemmas of a Trading Nation ─ Japan and the United States in the Evolving Asia-Pacific Order

Japan is at a critical moment in determining its trade policy as it strives for renewed economic growth.

Its economy still struggling after two decades of low growth, Japan now faces a difficult moment as it confronts this ongoing challenge to economic renewal. Tokyo could deploy a proactive trade policy to help it rise again as one of the world's greatest trading nations. It could also, at the same time, attack the structural problems that have hindered its economic competitiveness and kept it from becoming a leading voice in the drafting of rules for this century's global economy. Or, it could do nothing and remain shackled to the domestic political constraints that have kept it from playing a central role in international trade negotiations.

In Dilemmas of a Trading Nation, Mireya Solís describes how Japan's economic choices are important for the United States, as well. The two nations are the most important members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade agreement concluded in 2015 intended to spur trade in the world's fastest-growing economic region.

The arrest of Japan’s economic decline, the credibility of America’s resolve to remain a Pacific power, and the deepening of the bilateral alliance are all influenced significantly by the outcome of the TPP agreement. But the domestic politics of trade policy have never been as unwieldy as policymakers across the Pacific aim to negotiate ever more ambitious trade and to marshal domestic support for them. Dilemmas of a Trading Nation describes how, for both Japan and the United States, the stakes involved in addressing the tradeoffs of trade policy design could not be higher.

Mireya Solís is the Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies and Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, where she specializes in Japan’s political economy, foreign policy, and Asia-Pacific trade integration. Her previous books include Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries, Competitive Regionalism: FTA Diffusion in the Pacific Rim (co-edited), and Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Permeated Regionalism in East Asia (co-edited).