Facing the ‘Rogue Elephant’: The Evolution of British Strategy Towards Japan in the 1970s and 1980s

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ABSTRACT By the 1970s, Japan had become a key player in international relations. Less than two decades after the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the formal end of the Second World War and Japanese occupation, the nation now stood as one of Richard Nixon’s ‘three pillars’ of the Western World, with her Gross National Product placed third internationally. Scholarly attention has reflected this inflection point, particularly with regards to the European Community and American relations towards Japan. However, little coverage of how Britain strategized towards Japan has been done for the same period. Utilising recently released archival material, this article identifies core strategic concerns for policymakers when it came to Japan, and how these concerns acted as a framework for a steadily evolving strategy. For Britain, an inherent tension existed between keeping the Japanese ‘bound’ to the Western political system and the domestic political imperative of safeguarding British industry and jobs from a rapidly expanding Japanese export juggernaut. As both Japan’s and Britain’s positions in the world changed, so too would the ways in which British policymakers would envisage methods to balance these strategic ends. This would be marked by an increasing level of centralisation of strategy regarding the Japanese, moving key decision making away from the Foreign Office specialists in the periphery of government towards the Cabinet Committee system. Though the specialists never lost their influence over the direction of strategy, by the late 1980s British policymakers had developed a fully coherent, all-of-Whitehall approach vis-à-vis Japan.