The election marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. 

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

Japan’s Feb. 8 election was not merely an electoral landslide. It was a geopolitical turning point.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thirds supermajority — an outcome that finally gives Tokyo something it has lacked for decades: a political mandate to redefine its postwar identity and act as a proactive security power.

For Washington, this is both a gift and a challenge. The U.S. can now deepen collaboration with its most important and capable ally in Asia. Japan hosts the largest concentration of U.S. forces anywhere in the world. Its geographic position is uniquely strategic, and its naval and air capabilities are the most sophisticated among U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, with interoperability unmatched by any regional partner.

But the election also signals Japan’s strategic reawakening. It marks the arrival of a Japan that will be more assertive, more strategically self-confident and less inclined to subordinate its interests to shifting currents of U.S. policy. Tokyo is no longer content to be a U.S.-protected power. It intends to be a shaping power.

For almost eight decades, Japan operated within self-imposed limits — constitutional pacifism, restrained defense budgets and a preference for economic statecraft over hard power. Takaichi’s mandate alters that trajectory. With a supermajority, she can pursue constitutional revision, formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and accelerate defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product.

Japan is set to shift from merely reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing costs for it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the southwestern island chain stretching toward Taiwan. Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning and ensure that no “fait accompli” seizure of territory or coercive maritime gambit goes unanswered.

For American strategists concerned about U.S. overreach, this is a structural upgrade to the regional balance. A Japan capable of defending its southwestern approaches will reduce the burden on U.S. forces while disrupting Chinese war-planning.

Beijing’s pressure campaign was meant to deter Japan’s rightward drift. Instead, it helped bring about Takaichi’s landslide. Chinese economic restrictions, maritime incursions and thinly veiled threats did not fracture Japanese politics; they consolidated it. Voters concluded that dependence invites coercion and that resilience requires strength.

Japan’s push to rewire supply chains toward India, Southeast Asia and trusted partners is not just industrial policy — it is counter-coercion doctrine.

Takaichi has described a Taiwan contingency as an “existential threat” to Japan. That language would once have been politically radioactive. Now it carries electoral legitimacy and, if sustained, will alter the military geometry of the Taiwan Strait. In a crisis, Japanese bases, surveillance networks and maritime forces would become integral to a U.S. response.

For the U.S., this reinforces a broader trend: Chinese pressure is accelerating, not halting, the formation of balancing coalitions. A stronger Japan becomes the anchor of that process in East Asia.

Takaichi’s strategy also involves alliance diversification. She is building stronger economic and defense links with Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and especially India, alongside the U.S. treaty alliance — insurance against volatility in American politics.

Japanese policymakers have drawn a sober conclusion: that resilience requires options. Fluctuating U.S. trade policy, tariff threats, periodic talk of retrenchment and transactional approaches to alliances have convinced many in Tokyo that Japan must insure itself against strategic volatility in Washington.

For the U.S., this is not a loss of influence but a redistribution of responsibility. A Japan that leads within the Quad, shapes regional trade architecture and invests in defense industrial cooperation strengthens a stable Indo-Pacific order — provided Washington treats Tokyo as a strategic partner rather than a junior ally.

Takaichi’s economic program — “Sanaenomics” — fuses industrial policy with national defense. Supply-chain resilience, semiconductor co-development, critical-mineral stockpiles and shipyard revitalization are designed to reduce Japan’s vulnerability to “weaponized interdependence.”

This aligns with Washington’s emphasis on economic security but also introduces potential friction. A more nationalist “Japan First” posture could collide with U.S. tariff policies or technology controls if not coordinated. The opportunity lies in building a shared defense-industrial ecosystem.

For years, American policymakers urged Japan to do more for its own defense. Takaichi’s victory answers that call.

But greater capability brings greater autonomy. Tokyo will expect a more important voice in alliance strategy — from Taiwan contingencies to regional trade architecture — and will not accept policies that expose it to coercion without consultation.

Alliances endure not because one side dominates, but because both sides see them as vehicles for advancing national strategy. A stronger Japan will strengthen the alliance if Washington treats Tokyo as a co-architect rather than a subordinate.

The most consequential implication of Japan’s election is regional. Across the Indo-Pacific, middle powers increasingly see a stronger Japan as a stabilizing “strategic ballast” amid uncertainty about both China’s trajectory and America’s staying power. Japan is reentering history as a security actor, not merely an economic one.

Washington should recognize what just happened. Japan did not simply elect a new government. It chose strategic normalization — deterrence over hesitation — and signaled that the era of passive alliance management is over.

For Washington, the message is clear: The most important geopolitical shift in Asia is not China’s rise alone, but Japan’s return. The alliance must evolve accordingly.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

For over two decades, the United States has regarded India as a “natural partner” – a rising power whose geography, military capabilities, and democratic credentials made it indispensable to America’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Five successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, invested heavily in strengthening that partnership, treating India not just as a market, but as a long-term strategic bet.

But the goodwill that the US built up with India over that period has been rapidly eroded since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency last year. Trump’s second presidency has brought repeated public insults and a bruising trade war, with the US using tariffs as tools of geopolitical coercion. The interim trade deal announced on February 2 may have halted the economic confrontation, but trust – the essential currency of any strategic partnership – is unlikely to be restored any time soon.

By reducing the effective US tariff burden on Indian goods from 50% to 18%, the newly announced deal will deliver short-term relief for India. But it comes with plenty of strings attached, including the requirement that India move toward near-zero tariffs on US industrial products and a wide range of agricultural goods. India’s decision to open its sensitive agricultural sector – the country’s largest employer – to a flood of imports from the US is already sparking a domestic backlash.

But that is not all. India has also agreed to purchase a whopping $500 billion worth of American goods over the next five years, and to replace discounted Russian oil with US energy at market prices, which also implies additional transport costs. Meanwhile, the US offered no binding commitments to India. This lopsided bargain looks nothing like a stable, reciprocal, rules-based trade partnership, and underscores how far US trade policy has drifted from World Trade Organization norms. It is probably best understood as a tactical de-escalation, not a strategic reconciliation.

The way the deal was announced reinforces this interpretation. Typically, bilateral agreements or joint statements are announced simultaneously in both capitals to signal equal partnership. The free-trade agreement India recently concluded with the European Union, which created a trade corridor encompassing roughly 25% of global GDP and one-third of world trade, was touted by both sides as the “mother of all deals.”

The US-India agreement, by contrast, was announced first by Trump, who portrayed it on his social-media platform as a favor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose “request” for an agreement Trump had granted “out of friendship and respect.” Days later, the White House released a “joint statement” outlining the terms of the agreement at 5:00 a.m. Indian Standard Time.

The Trump administration then added injury to insult, announcing a presidential executive order authorizing reimposition of punitive tariffs if the US deems India to have violated its commitment to halt all direct and indirect imports of Russian oil. By framing Indian energy imports as a US national-security issue, the administration has turned economic engagement into a compliance test. The message to India is unmistakable: autonomy will be tolerated only within US-approved limits.

India’s leaders have framed the agreement as a win, noting that India now faces lower tariffs than China or Vietnam. But this is a low bar for a relationship that successive US administrations described as “defining.” And they are probably well aware that Trump could still pull the rug out from under them. The arrangement’s details have not yet been finalized, and Trump has a long history of changing his mind, scrapping deals, and layering on new demands.

Whatever happens next, India will not quickly forget Trump’s past betrayals. Nor will it overlook his slights, such as branding India, whose GDP growth outpaces all other major economies, as a “dead economy” last July.

In a sense, Trump might have done India a favor. By exposing the raw transactionalism at the core of his foreign policy, he has left no doubt that, under his leadership, the US is not a reliable strategic partner. As a result, India’s government is committed to diversifying India’s economic relationships away from the US, as underscored by its FTAs with the EU and the United Kingdom – an effort that will likely continue, regardless of the new trade agreement with the US.

Markets, too, are unlikely to put too much faith in the US. News of the trade deal did trigger a stock-market rally in India, but the gains are likely to be short-lived.

Strategic partnerships are sustained not by tariffs and threats, but by predictability, mutual respect, and restraint – qualities that have been conspicuously absent from Trump’s presidency. The US should beware. Whatever short-term concessions Trump secures through bullying and coercion will be dwarfed by the long-term costs of destabilizing a partnership that, as previous administrations recognized, is vital to American interests in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2026.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The “rules-based international order” was never a set of neutral rules. It was a story the U.S. told — about itself, its power and its right to bend norms when convenient.

In January, that story finally collapsed when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called that order what many governments have long known it to be: a useful “fiction,” sustained less by universal law than by American power and selective enforcement.

For decades, when U.S. officials invoked a “rules-based international order,” they were not describing universal principles, but defending a flexible set of rules largely devised in Washington and adjusted whenever American interests required it. Now, as President Trump openly revives territorial expansion and economic coercion as tools of U.S. statecraft, that phrase no longer commands belief, even among America’s closest allies.

Carney, speaking in Davos, did what no major Western leader had previously dared to do: He called the bluff. The “rules-based order,” Carney said, was a convenient illusion — one the West itself knew was only partially true, tolerated for as long as U.S. hegemony delivered enough public goods to make the hypocrisy worthwhile. That bargain, he concluded, no longer works.

Carney’s candor marks a watershed. By naming the fiction out loud, he validated a critique long voiced by the Global South and quietly acknowledged across Western capitals. More importantly, he signaled that the era of polite silence surrounding American exceptionalism has ended.

Any international order must, by definition, rest on rules. Modern global life — trade, finance, aviation, maritime navigation — cannot function without shared norms and procedures. The real question has never been whether rules matter, but which rules matter most, and to whom they apply.

For many Western governments, the core norm underpinning the international order is the prohibition on territorial conquest. That is why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was framed as a civilizational rupture. As then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, the war challenged the principle that borders cannot be changed by force.

International law is indeed clear on this point: the U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of states, and the Geneva Conventions forbid the demographic transformation of occupied territories.

Yet the selective invocation of this norm has gradually eroded its credibility. The U.S. has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of other states — not by annexing land, but by overthrowing governments and installing new ones that remain formally sovereign while substantively dependent on Washington. This maneuver allows Washington to deny conquest while achieving many of its effects.

Nor is Ukraine’s defense best understood as a pure defense of the norm against conquest. Great powers rarely act primarily to uphold norms. They intervene to prevent adverse shifts in the balance of power. The rallying of NATO behind Ukraine may have aligned with international law, but it was driven at least as much by strategic calculation as by legal fidelity.

The fiction of moral clarity was further strained by the rhetoric that cast the conflict as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has lurched toward authoritarianism. As in past U.S. interventions, “fighting for freedom” has remained a narrative convenience rather than a consistent standard.

If the Biden administration strained the fiction, Trump has shattered it. Trump has openly re-embraced territorial expansion as a legitimate tool of statecraft. His second term has featured military intervention in Venezuela, renewed demands for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and an unapologetic revival of “Manifest Destiny.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not bother cloaking ambition in the language of universalism. He says the quiet part out loud.

Trump is not unique in expanding American power; because of his predecessors’ global expansion, there are about 750 U.S. military bases today in at least 80 countries. What is new is the abandonment of euphemism. By openly praising 19th-century imperial precedents and refusing to rule out coercion even against allies, Trump has made it impossible to pretend that the U.S. is merely the custodian of a rules-based order.

Norms survive not on consistency alone but on credibility. When enforcement is asymmetric, rules become tools rather than constraints. The same applies to the norm of non-interference, which has never prevented cyber operations, sanctions, covert actions or targeted killings. No major power — whether the U.S., Russia or China — fully abides by it. What differs is how honestly that reality is acknowledged.

Carney’s comments matter precisely because they strip away the last vestiges of moral theater. By admitting that Western allies knowingly participated in a ritualized fiction, he reframed the present moment not as a transition, but as a “rupture.” The old bargain — accept U.S. primacy in exchange for stability and public goods — is unraveling. What replaces it will be messier and more transactional.

The “rules-based order” endured not because it was universally respected, but because it was useful — and because American power made it impolite to ask questions. With that politeness gone, what remains is not the collapse of order, but the collapse of pretense. This may allow for a more honest reckoning with power, interest and responsibility.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”