By Li Haichuan
Akio Fujii, Executive Chairman of the Editorial Board of Nikkei, addressed another open letter to the US President. In it, he writes that the US is "losing the world's trust" and its soft power "appears to be in decline", while concluding with the hope that the US can regain the strength to unite the world before a Third World War breaks out.
What makes this letter intriguing is not merely the anxiety of Japan’s strategic elite over US disorder, but rather the exposure of Japan’s own strategic predicament. Strategic elites like Fujii are neither blind to the erosion of US credibility nor insensitive to the destabilization of the international order; paradoxically, the more they perceive these risks, the more they hope for a swift return to form by the US. They remain neither willing nor able to transcend the confines of the "US-centric order."
More dangerous still is that the hardline conservative course represented by Sanae Takaichi is pushing this anxiety in an even more reckless direction. While it may appear to elevate Japan's status, it is, in reality, deepening Japan's dependence on the US through an even more confrontational posturing while exporting new security risks to Asia.
From a historical perspective, Japan may now be experiencing a "second Nixon Shock" of sorts. In 1971, the Nixon administration bypassed Japan to establish secret contact with China and abruptly announced President Nixon's forthcoming visit to the country. Tokyo, having received virtually no advance notice, was caught completely off guard by the shift in US strategy toward Asia. More than half a century later, a similar structural predicament has resurfaced.
Today, from hyping up the so-called "Taiwan contingency" and strengthening its "counterstrike capabilities", to increasing defense spending, relaxing restrictions on arms exports, and promoting the Japan-Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA), Japanese hardliners are once again staking their strategy on the assumption that the US will remain locked in long-term strategic confrontation with China.
However, US strategy has never been tailored to Japan. Just as the US bypassed Japan to break the ice with China in the past, it may today seek to manage its differences with China and reset its priorities in line with its own interests. This "Nixon Shock" style of predicament encapsulates Japan's strategic dilemma: the more it stakes its security on the US, the harder it becomes to avoid being swept along by shifts in US strategy; and the more it seeks to elevate its status through the alliance, the more likely it is to find itself on the receiving end of Washington's strategic reshuffling.
The first miscalculation of the Takaichi policy is mistaking military normalization for national normalization. Whether a country is "normal" depends not on the strength of its military, but on whether it exercises its power responsibly. The danger of the Takaichi policy lies in treating the very foundations on which post-war Japan regained international trust as shackles, portraying the historical responsibilities it should shoulder as a national burden, and packaging military expansion as a return to a so-called normal state.
The second miscalculation is mistaking dependence on an alliance for strategic autonomy. True strategic autonomy begins with the ability to clearly distinguish a country's own security interests from the global strategic priorities of its allies, while preserving independent judgment and strategic flexibility amid great-power competition. The Takaichi policy does precisely the opposite: it binds Japan's security even more tightly to US global strategy, making it increasingly difficult for Japan to break free from the strategic pace set by Washington.
The third miscalculation is mistaking the spillover of security issues for regional stability. Japan-Philippines security cooperation has intensified rapidly in recent years. The real danger of their growing alignment lies in the way it links maritime delimitation, security cooperation, the US alliance network, Japan's military normalization process, and the so-called "First Island Chain" narrative into a single strategic framework, making localized disputes more likely to escalate into systemic confrontation.
Together, these three miscalculations constitute the most dangerous underlying logic of Japan's current security policy: military expansion is portrayed as national normalization, dependence on the US is presented as strategic autonomy, and the spillover of security tensions is packaged as regional stability. Consequently, Japan's pursuit of security is becoming a new source of instability in Asia's security environment; its pursuit of autonomy is deepening its dependence on the US-led system; and its pursuit of normal-state status is eroding the very foundation of trust that Asia has placed in Japan.
Fujii's open letter serves as a reminder that growing disorder in the US is fueling anxiety among its allies. For Japan, the deeper question is not how long it should wait for the US to "unite the world" again, but how to prevent Takaichi-style political adventurism from turning Japan's anxiety into a new source of regional risk.
(The author is a current affairs commentator on Asia-Pacific issues)
Editor's note: Originally published on huanqiu.com, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.