This June I was honored to address CULCON at a roundtable organized by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I discussed “The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy,” noting that depending on who won the election in November, we would see a very different future indeed: one committed to maintaining the current US-led order in Asia (and the US-Japan alliance), or one without that commitment, whose intentions will be hard to predict.

I had previously written about CULCON as an important bilateral initiative that grew out of ideas discussed by President Kennedy and Prime Minister Ikeda in 1962.  After the controversy and acrimony of the 1950s, American and Japanese leaders realized they needed to do more to deepen and broaden support for the US-Japan alliance within their societies, and CULCON was one of the initiatives the two countries aimed at this goal. A half-century later, the institution continues to bridge our two countries.