Japan has announced its most dramatic shift in defense policy since 1945. The country is sharply boosting defense spending and will gain a preemptive counterstrike capability for the first time since the last world war.
The new plans call for Japan to spend $37 billion on weapons including long-range missiles to be deployed as soon as 2026, including powerful Tomahawk cruise missiles used by the U.S. Navy. Overall defense expenditures through 2027 are set to top $300 billion — nearly double current spending rates, as Japan aims to achieve the NATO standard for defense expenditure , a drastic departure from its nearly 50-year-old informal ceiling of 1%.
Speaking to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Tobias Harris, Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund,the boost in Japanese defense spending is"something that the United States government has wanted for the entire existence of the bilateral alliance" — a need he said had all the more urgent given the region's shifting military balance.
Christopher Johnstone, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Japan adopting a counterstrike capability would transform the nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance, demanding a far greater level of integration between the two militaries. "The prospect of a Japan that can strike back in response to an attack, at long range and on its own, would represent a significant new variable for potential adversaries in Pyongyang and Beijing, and one that would help to reinforce deterrence," Johnstone
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