BY MICHAEL AUSLIN
For an alliance that is more that half a century old, the U.S.-Japan relationship has had a surprising amount of ups and downs. Tokyo and Washington have at times praised each other, lashed out at each other, ignored each other, or, in their current phase, simply dismissed each other.
The cycle began in the early 1970s with the "Nixon shocks" that opened the United States to China and took the dollar off the gold standard, leaving Japan politically insecure and economically weakened. Trade tensions heated up in the 1980s and early 1990s, with threats of trade wars, sanctions and protectionism ...