Marines assigned to Camp Blaz hike to Tarague Beach on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Jan. 9, 2026. (Afton Smiley/U.S. Marine Corps)
A new report from a U.S. foreign policy think tank is urging Washington to renegotiate a decades-old agreement with Japan to reduce the Marine Corps presence on Okinawa, arguing that the deal should instead be reversed to strengthen deterrence against China.
The report, released Feb. 3 by the Atlantic Council, recommends keeping about 5,000 Marines on Okinawa rather than relocating them to Guam and retaining the Corps’ airfield in densely populated central Okinawa along with a replacement runaway under construction farther north.
The authors call for reversing the Defense Policy Review Initiative, or DPRI, a 20-year-old U.S.-Japan agreement aimed at reducing the U.S. military footprint on Okinawa by moving thousands of Marines to Guam.
The report was written by Lt. Col. Caleb Eames, a senior Marine Corps fellow at the council, and Amy Cowley, assistant director for the Forward Defense program at the council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. They argue the initiative weakens U.S. deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
The plan “would give Chinese military planners exactly what they want — a removal of U.S. forces from the locations where they would be most essential in a First Island Chain conflict,” the authors write.
Eames and Cowley recommend retaining Marine Corps Air Station Futenma while completing the replacement facility under construction at Camp Schwab. They also propose temporary Marine deployments to Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost inhabited island, about 70 miles from Taiwan.
The recommendations are “sound and necessary,” said retired Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo.
“China (and North Korea and Russia) are far more of a threat than they were 20 years ago when the deal was negotiated,” he wrote Monday in an email to Stars and Stripes.
As part of the initiative, about 100 logistics support troops from III Marine Expeditionary Force moved from Okinawa to Guam last year. The 210-square-mile U.S. territory is projected to grow from about 17,000 service members to roughly 24,000 by fiscal year 2033.
The authors also argue that crime concerns often cited to justify reducing the Marine presence have diminished, noting that “U.S. military crime rates on Okinawa are now far lower than in decades past.”
They cite an October 2024 Stars and Stripes report that found six felony cases linked to the U.S. military community on Okinawa that year — the highest tally in 16 years — but noted the figure ran counter to a broader, decades-long decline in crime on the island.
The cases included four sexual assaults — three indictments and two convictions — that sparked public outrage and prompted U.S. Forces Japan to tighten liberty restrictions, including a ban on service members drinking off base between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.
As incentives for renegotiation, Eames and Cowley suggest exempting Okinawa from U.S. tariffs and repurposing Marine facilities built on Guam for Army use.
Any change would require senior officials in President Donald Trump’s administration to “recognize the dangers of continuing” with the current plan, Newsham said. He added that “strong vested interests” — including Japanese companies and politicians benefiting from construction projects tied to the relocation — support keeping the agreement intact.
