Japan News & Analysis

Thousands of kilometers from the drone strikes and naval blockades of the Middle East, a quiet deployment of a 352-meter floating barrier in the South China Sea offers a stark illustration of gaps in strategic focus and planning horizon between Beijing and Washington.

Reforms advancing through the Diet signal that the political consensus treating centralized intelligence as incompatible with Japanese democracy has been retired, opening up new avenues for intelligence cooperation with the West.

In an era of precision saturation attacks and resource restraint, missile defense will be defined less by the number of interceptors than by the coherence of the regional architecture behind them.

This week we examine warning signs that EU critical minerals policy is falling short in its diversification efforts, ISIS-linked attacks in Nigeria and how they reflect a widening band of Sahel instability, the assassination of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in Libya, winners and losers in a potential US withdrawal from Syria, and an emphatic election win for Sanae Takaichi’s LDP in Japan.

The recent Japan–Philippines pact is not simply about defense. It is about determining whether the most stabilizing elements of the old order can be salvaged via minilateralism and conventional deterrence. Failure means fragmentation, and ‘might’ eclipsing ‘right’ in the Indo-Pacific.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi heads into upcoming snap elections in a position of strength. However, good politics don’t always make for good economic policy, and Japan’s massive debt allows precious little room for error.

This week we examine a conspicuously warm visit by President Putin to New Delhi, Washington’s new and impractically hard line on European operations under NATO, a setback for a Trump-endorsed peace plan in Eastern DRC, and warning signs in Japanese bond markets that could spill over into global financial flows.

This week we cover missile deployments near Taiwan, a brewing water crisis in Europe along with a far more advanced one in Iran, and President Trump’s latest posturing over Venezuela.

A secure Taiwan will be built quietly and deliberately, through fuel reserves, civil defense training, and conscription reform - long before any foreign voice promises safety.

This week we cover escalating tensions between Japan and China, a timely intervention by President Trump to rescue the Thai-Cambodia peace process, Prime Minister Carney’s latest recommendations for Canada’s major projects drive, and the latest signs of a state capitalist renaissance in the West.

A speech from new Japan Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi helps fill in the blanks on what the next era of Japanese foreign policy will look like in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Japan’s longstanding ban on arms exports has been slowly dismantled since the Shinzo Abe era, with the conspicuous exception of small arms exports. That may be about to change.

This week we cover a shocking plan to move Iran’s capital due to water scarcity, a new right-wing prime minister taking over in Japan, further warming in US-Pakistan relations, and new efforts by the Pentagon to shore up US missile stockpiles.

The gross miscommunication after a reasonably successful 9th TICAD is a major mistake, but it can also serve as a lesson in how far Japan must go to adapt to a rapidly changing society.

The Falklands War was a reminder that alliances succeed or fail on the basis of political imagination and practical enablers, not just treaty text, and military planners must bear these lessons in mind when preparing for a Taiwan-Korea dual contingency in East Asia.