U.S.–Japan Alliance Conference

Since late 2017, the United States and Japan, together with Australia and India, have resumed meeting in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The forum is designed to enable the four countries—prospectively with other future partners to join later—to explore opportunities for security and defense dialogue and cooperation. Around the same time, Japan's vision of a "free and open Indo-Pacific" (FOIP) regional order was embraced by the Trump administration, which began articulating a FOIP strategy as the successor to the Obama administration's "pivot" or "rebalance" to the Asia-Pacific.

Given the importance of these broad foreign and defense policy initiatives, on March 5, 2019, the RAND Corporation convened a public conference at its office in Santa Monica, California, that brought together leading experts on American, Australian, Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese foreign policies to explore the issues raised by these developments. Speakers included former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines, Naoko Funatsu of the Japan Institute for International Affairs, Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution, and Natalie Sambhi of the Perth USAsia Centre and Verve Research.