Negroponte: Japan-U.S. Trade Talks Tend to Work Out; Former U.S. Official Warns of N-War Risk Over Taiwan

The Yomiuri Shimbun

6:00 JST, May 9, 2025

WASHINGTON — John Negroponte, 85, who served as the first U.S. director of national intelligence in the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, said in an interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun that Japan-U.S. trade talks will result in some solutions thanks to the two nations’ alliance.

The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for flow and clarity.

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The Yomiuri Shimbun: How do you view the current approach of the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to other countries, especially allies in Europe and Asia, using tariffs as a tool to maximize U.S. interests?

John Negroponte: Trump is a very transactional president. I think Japan knows that from past experience, and we’ve seen how he behaved in his first administration.

I do think he’s very tactical. He does seek to negotiate for, I wouldn’t say economic advantage so much as economic fairness.

Over here in the United States, we import a lot of things, but over time, I think we’ve always worked things out, especially with Japan. I remember back in the 1970s and ’80s, when I was in the East Asia bureau, and my colleague right next to me was Mr. [Michael] Armacost, who later became the ambassador [to Japan].

I was handling Southeast Asia, and he was handling Northeast Asia, and we were talking about how to deal with the large amount of Japanese cars that we were importing. And I think that time is when we began to encourage Japanese investment and manufacturing some of their cars here in the United States. And that has proven to be, over time, a very successful policy. So, I think the fact that we have an alliance is important.

Yomiuri: How do you define these trade issues from a national security perspective?

Negroponte: International trade is important in its own right for our country, for yours, for every country. I think that the international security aspect is that sometimes trade and foreign policy get intermixed. For example, trade with an adversary like mainland China, where the relationship has become more antagonistic in recent years. I was involved in the opening to China back in the 1970s. I think our relationship was on a friendlier basis. And now I think there is some antagonism and some concern that China takes advantage of some aspects of our trading relationship to gain national security benefits, state secrets, the way we make certain kinds of products or materials, the way they sometimes borrow, if you want to use a polite word, intellectual property.

Yomiuri: U.S. allies and partners are confused because the current U.S. administration seems to put everything into the tariff and national security box. Do you think that is the right approach?

Negroponte: When we were about to sign the U.S.-Canada trade agreement in January 1988, I was the deputy national security [officer]. Gen. Colin Powell, who was the national security advisor, and I went in to see President Ronald Reagan the morning that he was going to sign the agreement. He was going to do it by video conference. And Gen. Powell said: “John Negroponte will brief you on this Canada free trade agreement that you will sign this afternoon, Mr. President.” The president interrupted and said, “You don’t have to brief me about free trade; I remember the Smoot-Hawley tariff.” That was the tariff in 1930 that exacerbated a global recession and depression. And Reagan was old enough back in the 1930s to know about the tariff, and he was taught in school and elsewhere that that was not a good thing. So, you know, different presidents have different views.

The customs department was one of the biggest sources of revenue, the taxes and tariffs that we put on goods imported from abroad, which was early in our history. And then we moved to a national budget based more on personal income taxes and less on customs receipts. That was a big change about 100 years ago.

Trump seems to be interested in going back to that old model. He has it in his mind that if we could do that, we would be able to reduce income taxes. And of course, he also has in mind reducing income taxes on rich people.

Yomiuri: Trump uses what almost looks like a decoupling policy with China. Do you think that will be beneficial for the United States?

Negroponte: I sometimes get the impression that there are some around President Trump, some of his advisors, who may wish to completely decouple the two economies. I think there are those, and maybe this is more the mainstream, who think we have to keep trading, because they’re a huge economy, and we don’t want to ignore a global market, but we should stop doing things that might hurt our national security or might cause us some loss of competitiveness in the technological area, and we better be careful about protecting our technology and developing it in our own country or with allied countries, and not give China too much opportunity to imitate our technology, or benefit from working with us on high technology issues.

I think there is a real concern in that, and you’ve seen it with some of the reductions in access on the part of China. You also see it sometimes with us scrutinizing which Chinese students are trying to come to the United States. If they want to study in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) category, we sometimes get concerned, but it’s not easy to manage, and I think that’s one of the challenges.

Yomiuri: Do you think that the United Sates and China are actually in a cold war? If so, how is it different from or the same as the actual Cold War?

Negroponte: There are elements of the Cold War in the current relationship. First of all, let’s not forget China is still one of the few remaining communist regimes in the world.

So, there’s an ideological aspect to this, not so much as there was during the Cold War, but I do think there are two very serious hot spots. First, the South China Sea and the disputes that exist over maritime boundaries and maritime territory. And the other may be more serious, Taiwan, and the fact that it appears that Mr. [Chinese President] Xi Jinping has adopted a harder line.

Yomiuri: Do you think the Taiwan issue is an existential threat for the United States?

Negroponte: I do think there’s a threat of a serious conflict between mainland China and the United States if Taiwan is attacked. So that is sort of existential, right there. I mean, there’d be the risk of a nuclear exchange. I’m not saying that would happen, but there would be that risk, yes, a greater risk than we’ve seen up until now.

It’s a far away place, but it would seriously affect our posture in the Asia-Pacific region, and I think it would diminish the United States’ role and standing in that part of the world. We hope that doesn’t happen. I do notice that Japan has adopted a policy of being supportive of what we’re doing.

We’ve seen a very interesting evolution of Japanese policy towards security in East Asia, and a much more, I would say, proactive role on the part of Japan, which I think has been quite a positive development.

Prime Minister Abe was a big factor in this shift. It’s a shift. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but a shift in Japanese policy towards more proactive military role. And I think it was positive.

— This interview was conducted by Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent Yuko Mukai.

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John Negroponte

Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to Honduras and the Philippines. Immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, he became the ambassador to the United Nations. After serving as the U.S ambassador to Iraq, he was appointed the first U.S. director of national intelligence in 2005. He also served as deputy secretary of state. Negroponte is one of the former high-ranking Republican officials who have publicly said he does not support U.S. President Donald Trump.

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