As the United States wages war across the Middle East and bends the rules-based international order to its will, Tokyo faces an uncomfortable reckoning — how to preserve its security alliance with Washington without surrendering its identity as a champion of international law.
The image was stark enough to cause visible discomfort in Tokyo's policy circles: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, standing beside U.S. President Donald Trump at a Washington dinner reception on 19 March, offering fulsome praise to a leader who has upended the international order — not once, but repeatedly, and now most dramatically through the ongoing American military campaign against Iran and its regional proxies, a conflict that has reshaped the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East in a matter of weeks.
In a candid editorial published this week by Koji Sonoda, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Political News Section at Japan's leading daily Asahi Shimbun, the discomfort was named plainly: Japan's national leader was seen praising as a peacemaker and prosperity-bringer the very individual who, in the assessment of many international observers, has "brought confusion to the international community through a first strike on another nation."
"Many people may have been shocked to see their national leader praising as the one creating peace and prosperity throughout the world the individual who has brought confusion to the international community through a first strike on another nation. But that is the reality of a world where rule by strength is widespread."
It is a line that captures Japan's profound dilemma — not merely a diplomatic inconvenience, but a structural contradiction at the heart of its postwar identity.
The Venezuelan Precedent and the end of Rules-Based Order
The Asahi editorial arrives against a backdrop of cascading systemic shocks to the liberal international order. The United States' military strike on Venezuela — which preceded the Iranian campaign — was greeted with alarm across the Global South and triggered one of the most significant rhetorical breaks in recent Western political discourse. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking with an unusually blunt tone for a NATO partner, declared that the global order based on rules, long underwritten by Washington, was effectively over.
For Japan, this is not an abstract geopolitical observation. It is an existential recalibration. Tokyo's postwar foreign policy architecture has rested on three pillars: the U.S.-Japan security alliance, adherence to international law and multilateral institutions, and active contribution to a rules-based international order. Two of those pillars are now under strain from the very ally that was supposed to anchor them.
Takaichi in Washington: Necessity, not Enthusiasm
Prime Minister Takaichi's visit to Washington was, at its core, a mission of strategic reassurance. Japan faces an increasingly assertive China across the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and its security dependence on the United States is structurally deeper than that of European allies, who have at least the collective architecture of NATO and the European Union to provide an alternative platform. Tokyo has neither.
The objective was clear: to reconfirm U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific and to preempt the possibility of being sidelined or abandoned by a Trump administration that has demonstrated, in both its first and second terms, a transactional and unpredictable approach to alliance commitments. As Sonoda's editorial acknowledges, "all leaders who meet with Trump do everything they can to pander to him" — a geopolitical reality that transcends ideology or tradition.
"While servility toward Trump may be seen to be sufficient short-term behavior, there are also doubts as to whether such a posture will serve Japan's interests in the mid- to long term."
Japan's calculus is different from, say, Berlin's or Paris's. European leaders can afford — at some political cost — to voice disagreements with Washington, buttressed by the weight of EU institutions, a common market, and an emerging collective defence capacity. Japan cannot. Its only formal military ally is the United States. To antagonise Washington is, from Tokyo's perspective, to leave itself exposed to the very threats it most fears.
The Deeper Stakes: What the Middle East War Reveals
The ongoing U.S.-led conflict — which has engulfed Iran, its proxies across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, and has drawn in Israel as the primary regional partner — has reordered the Middle East's strategic architecture at a speed that has left most capitals scrambling for coherent positions. For Japan, a country with significant energy dependencies on Gulf producers and substantial diplomatic investments in regional stability, the war is not a distant spectacle. It is an accelerant to a broader global disorder that directly affects Tokyo's interests.
The war has also exposed, with brutal clarity, the extent to which the so-called rules-based international order is now a selective framework — invoked by powerful states when convenient, discarded when not. As one U.S. military source cited in the Asahi editorial put it: "Trump only does what he wants and there are no rules pertaining to him." That assessment, frank to the point of being undiplomatic, encapsulates the post-institutional moment in which Japan now finds itself navigating.
Japan’s Unrealised Potential as a Rule-Based Order Champion
It is here that the Asahi editorial's most pointed challenge emerges — and it is directed not at Washington, but at Tokyo. For decades, Japan has positioned itself as one of the strongest advocates for international law, multilateral governance, and peaceful dispute resolution. That identity — painstakingly constructed in the shadow of the Second World War — carries genuine moral capital in the Global South and among mid-sized powers that feel increasingly squeezed by great-power competition.
What the international community is watching for, the editorial argues, is whether Japan will deploy that capital or surrender it in the name of short-term alliance management. The choice is stark: Tokyo can align itself visibly with Trump's America and risk being seen as a passive legitimiser of a world where major powers — including China — dictate the fate of smaller states. Or it can begin, quietly but consistently, to build the foundations of a new global order premised on law rather than strength, coalitions of the willing rather than great-power fiat.
"To remain silent toward such a U.S. administration stance will only contribute to the arrival of a world of the survival of the fittest in which major powers, including China, can determine the fate of small and middle powers."
This is not a call for Japan to abandon its alliance with the United States. The Asahi editorial does not advocate naivety. It is, rather, a call for Japan to exercise its soft power, its diplomatic network, and its historical identity in service of a longer-term architecture — one that may yet prove indispensable when, and if, the current moment of American unilateralism recedes.
The View From the Levant
From the vantage point of the Levant — itself a region where small and mid-sized states are navigating between great-power interests with diminishing room for manoeuvre — Japan's dilemma resonates deeply. Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and the broader Levant are all, in different ways, grappling with the same structural reality: the erosion of the rules-based order leaves smaller actors exposed, dependent, and vulnerable to the whims of patrons who may at any moment redefine the terms of their protection.
Japan's response to this moment — whether it chooses visible deference or principled engagement — will be watched closely not only in Beijing and Washington, but in the chanceries of mid-sized powers from Nicosia to Ankara to Riyadh. The Asahi Shimbun's editorial is a rare act of public candour in Japanese political discourse. Whether it finds an echo in Prime Minister Takaichi's actual policy choices remains to be seen.
What is clear is that the world the Japanese constitution was written to navigate — a world of multilateral institutions, American liberal hegemony, and progressive international law — has been decisively disrupted. The question is not whether Japan must adapt. It is whether it can do so without losing the very thing that makes it valuable to the new order it now needs to help construct.
Photo: Asahi Shimbun