Japan's new defense vision is halfhearted
Tokyo should be upfront with public and neighbors about strategic shift
Masahiro Matsumura is professor of international politics and national security at the faculty of law of St. Andrew's University in Osaka.
The new National Security Strategy that the Japanese government unveiled last month, along with two accompanying policy papers, envisions a drastic arms buildup to enable the country to defend itself and to fight side by side with the U.S. if need be.
From the U.S. perspective, the new approach is a much-needed development that will complement its own military power which faces serious decline in relation to that of China. Its emergence makes sense in the context of the summit meetings between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. President Joe Biden held last May and earlier this month.
Yet Tokyo has a serious accountability deficit. It has not publicly acknowledged that the new approach moves Japan from its post-World War II status as a pacifist state toward becoming a normal state.
The rich catalog of planned new weapons systems will enhance Japan's military capabilities considerably but has been presented without a well-defined purpose. Worse, the government has not elaborated on the risks involved with its new approach to either the Japanese public or regional neighbors.
The regional military balance, a key underlying element of the three new defense documents, remains precarious. As Washington made clear in its own National Security Strategy update last October, the U.S. is no longer able to counter China alone and needs its allies to supplement its capabilities.
Tokyo has responded in a bold way. It will double overall defense spending over the next decade, abandoning the long-standing position that a lightly armed Japan is a necessary condition for peace and security in Asia.
The previous exclusively defensive defense policy will switch to one of active defense. Once the new plan is fully implemented, Tokyo will be the world's third or fourth-largest military power in terms of defense spending, making it one of the most powerful non-nuclear military powers around.
But Tokyo's failure to explain its intentions in pursuing such power and status is problematic. The government instead pretends that it will basically continue its longtime defense policy line so as to avoid having to answer questions over whether Japan is overstepping the boundaries set by its pacifist constitution.
This self-deception will impede necessary preparations to adapt to the dangerous realities in which Japan finds itself. To cope with the unprecedented security challenge posed by China, Tokyo needs to take a whole-of-government approach covering areas ranging from defense and diplomacy to economics.
In failing to put forward a new state identity as a responsible military power on which it is constructing a fresh grand strategy and in pretending that its new approach is but an extension of previous policies, Tokyo assumes it will be able to continue to rely on the U.S. as the sole guarantor of its security.
In this way, Tokyo fails to recognize the reality that U.S. hegemony is in decline while continuing to talk about the dream of liberalism.
There is also the question of whether the strategy reforms, as good as they may look on paper, can actually be carried through.
In an age of declining births, Japan does not have a sufficient pool of youngsters to tap to join its Self-Defense Forces. To secure the necessary personnel to handle new weapon systems and prepare for potential air and sea battles in the Western Pacific, Japan will inevitably have to drastically downsize the scale of its ground forces.
This will require its Ground Self-Defense Force to give up substantial numbers of tanks, artillery, helicopters and infantry. The GSDF is a heavy army designed to fend off an invasion by the Soviet Army from the north. Is it ready to overcome its own bureaucratic interests?
Tokyo also fails to hedge against the ever-intensifying U.S.-China rivalry. Given various geopolitical and geoeconomic vulnerabilities, Japan's national security can never be perfected solely with strong military instruments.
Instead, Japan needs a comprehensive strategy that integrates military, diplomatic, economic and other instruments of national power. This is especially true now that the U.S. is no longer the world's sole hegemon.
Tokyo has to both check and balance against China, Russia, North Korea and other security challenges while retaining a strong alliance with the U.S.
It needs to conduct an independent macro geopolitical risk assessment on the challenges and opportunities it faces. The new NSS and related documents are light in this area, compared to their eloquence explaining planned weapons programs and deterrence approaches.
By becoming a military power, Japan will make itself a front-line state in a U.S.-China war if deterrence fails. Perhaps Tokyo can muddle forward based on the new NSS for several years, but then cracks will begin to appear.