‘Pearl Harbor without Bombs’: A Critical Geopolitics of the US—Japan ‘FSX’ Debate

In the spring of 1989 a proposed fighter-aircraft codevelopment and coproduction deal between General Dynamics and Mitsubishi Heavy Industry presented the Bush administration with its first foreign policy crisis. The deal to construct a modified version of General Dynamic's F-16 called the FSX (fighter support experimental) for the Japanese government with use of US technology was first approved by the Reagan administration and subsequently revised and supported by the Bush administration. The submission of the deal to Congress for approval by the Bush administration on 1 May 1989 provided the occasion for a sustained and wide-ranging debate within the US political system over the role of the USA in a changing world order. For many the question of the FSX fighter was symbolic of a series of larger issues which confronted the USA. Could the USA continue to conceptualize national security in geopolitical terms when its leading ally was also its leading competitor in world markets? Was the most significant threat to the USA from an East-West struggle with the Soviet Union, or with Japan? This paper is a critical geopolitics of the FSX debate in which the conflicting geographical scripts of Japan as both ally and threat are investigated. The debate provides a window into a larger struggle within the USA between an emergent geo-economic definition of national security and an increasingly materially unsustainable geopolitical vision of the US role in the world.