(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said the post-World War II agreement with Japan to provide defense assistance if that country is ever attacked is a lopsided pact that needs to be changed.
“If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III, we will go in and we will protect them and we will fight with our lives and our treasure. We will fight at all costs,” Trump said Wednesday during an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo. “But if we're attacked, Japan doesn't have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.”
Trump regards the accord as too one-sided because it promises U.S. aid if Japan is ever attacked, but doesn't oblige Japan's military to come to America's defense, three people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The treaty, signed more than 60 years ago after the U.S. defeated Japan in World War II, forms the foundation of the alliance between the countries that emerged after the conflict.
Read more: Trump muses privately about ending Japan pact
Abandoning the pact would jeopardize a postwar alliance that has helped guarantee security in the Asia Pacific, laying the foundation for the region's economic rise. Under the terms of its surrender in World War II, Japan agreed to a pacifist constitution in which it renounced the right to wage war.
To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Washington at tdopp@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kasia Klimasinska at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Wendy Benjaminson
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