Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government finally unveiled the much-awaited new National Security Strategy (NSS) as well as the National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program. There is nothing in this document that should be termed as a “surprise.”
China, as speculated for quite some time, is listed as “the biggest strategic challenge to Japan's effort toward ensuring peace, safety and stability for itself and international society.” This reflects a major paradigm shift that has gradually seeped into the strategic outlook of the Japanese leadership since December 2013 when Shinzo Abe, then-prime minister, published the first National Security Strategy that labeled North Korea as the key threat while China was bracketed as “an issue of concern to the international community.”
In the last nine years, the global security environment has changed drastically and compelled the Japanese to redefine their strategic intent and stance. Both Russia and China were mentioned as “strategic partners” in the 2013 version of the NSS document and are now being blamed as the main culprits who are behind all the problems and threats to regional security and international order.
There is no doubt that Shinzo Abe, owing to his innate anti-China leanings, was the first prominent Japanese leader who started talking about bringing emphatic changes in the pacifist constitution of Japan to cope with the rising influence of China in the Indo-Pacific. Abe aggressively mobilized public opinion against the China threat as a major political tool to divert attention from the ebbing economic situation of Japan.
Three external factors, other than chronic political instability and disarray in economic policies in the country, played a major role in shaping the Japanese security policy and adding a tinge of belligerency: Rising China-U.S. friction over Taiwan, unabated missile and weapons development by North Korea and the simmering Ukraine war.
Despite being rather insipid compared to most of his recent predecessors, Kishida spearheaded the approval of the most aggressive-ever strategy document in the post-war history of the country. A cursory appraisal of the content of the NSS – and two other associated defense and strategy plans – would reveal three major planks of the emerging strategic thinking in Japan. One, China is now the ultimate challenge for Japan and its allies in the foreseeable future. In fact, the language used by Japan’s NSS and the U.S. National Security Strategy document, which was released just two months back, has similar and identical tones regarding the China chapter. The influence of the Pentagon on Japanese policymakers is quite evident in each sentence and phrase used in Japan’s NSS document.
This was not surprising for the China watchers who were expecting a carbon copy of the American policy on China in this document. Tokyo has effectively validated that it has wholeheartedly bought Washington’s perception of China. By disproportionately inflating the Taiwan issue and the Ukraine war, the Kishida government has certainly maneuvered public opinion to support the transition of Japan from pacifism to gradual bellicosity in its strategic thinking. In the last few months, the Shinzo Abe faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has effectively utilized the heated Sino-U.S. conflict over the Taiwan Strait and Russia’s war with Ukraine as the key arguments to marshal public support for increased defense spending to counter the emerging threats to Japan’s security.
The second important aspect of the NSS is the planned expansion of Japan’s defense budget, which was capped at 1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) until now, to 2% of its GDP by the fiscal year 2027. If implemented, this will make Japan at par with NATO countries’ defense spending targets. This increase in the defense budget is extremely crucial for implementing the third – and perhaps the most aggressive – flump of the NSS: quickly acquiring the “counterstrike” capability.
The counterstrike doctrine has two parts – buying the missiles as well as enhancing the domestic defense production capacity to lessen dependency on the United States. To achieve this counterstrike capability, which almost trespasses the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, Japan is planning to both extend the range of homegrown standoff missiles and develop new hypersonic missiles and buy U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles to counter the Chinese missile power and North Korea’s saber-rattling.
The new security strategy is a leapfrog in Japan’s yearslong intent toward building a more muscular military and eventually lessening its inordinate dependence on the Pentagon. This is a natural phenomenon. Even when Japan opted for self-imposing pacifism after the war, it was not expected to last for more than a few years. The same thing is happening. The rigid post-war pacifism was slowly transformed into its milder form, which was further given a new dimension as “proactive pacifism” by Abe. And now it is passing through another more belligerent phase of evolution due to the swift changes in the geo-political and geo-economic fabric of global politics.
After decades of resistance to the idea, a big chunk of Japanese, as reflected by recent opinion polls, is now convinced that some military buildup is essential to offset China’s growing assertiveness towards Taiwan and Russia’s war in Ukraine. At this time of emerging polarization and zero-sum politicking in the global arena, Japan’s new security policy is likely to further fuel tensions for various reasons.
South Korea has already registered its protest over Japan’s territorial claim over disputed islands – known as “Dokdo” in Korean and “Takeshima” in Japanese – in the national security strategy document. Similarly, after the release of the NSS that mentions the possibility of targeting North Korea in case of hostility, has officially asked Japan to secure its approval before planning an attack on North Korea, as the Constitution defines the North as a part of South Korean territory.
Nonetheless, Japan’s new security strategy is likely to ignite a new arms race in the region and new conflicts may emerge. It paves the way for an aggressive Japan which may slip out of the hands of Washington to reassert its hegemony in the region in the coming days.
