The ruling party of Japan has made an unprecedented electoral commitment, namely the intention to double military spending as written on the political manifesto presented a few days ago in view of this weekend’s political elections.
What emerges is the urgency for a nationwide rearmament project (ranging from missiles to stealth fighters to drones) with the aim of deterring further provocations by the Chinese army in the disputed East China Sea.
The LDP said the aforementioned plan is a direct response to increased Chinese military activity around the Taiwan Strait and those uninhabited but strategic islets in the Western Pacific controlled by Japan but also claimed by the Asian giant.
For the first time in its political platform ahead of this month’s national elections, the Liberal Democratic Party has announced its goal of spending 2% of GDP – 80 billion euros – to strengthen and modernize the military.
The defense budget target of 2% of GDP is a psychological limit of great impact given that so far the country’s defense spending has stabilized at around 1% of GDP in recent decades.
Writing in black and white in the party’s political manifesto a doubling of military build-up is an official declaration of the need to form a broader consensus for the major changes that are looming over the future of defense policy.
However, it must be said that in the above manifesto there is no deadline to carry out the theoretical doubling of spending, so much so that experts do not expect the new Prime Minister Kishida to be able to implement the plan in a short time, also given the enormous debt. history of the country and an economy still stalled due to the effects of the pandemic.
However, it is a clear sign that the ‘genetically’ pacifist nation – even within the ganglia of its Constitution – could in a relatively short period of time abandon that commitment to maintain a low military profile (represented until now symbolically by that military budget set within 1 percent of GDP) and give new impetus to that militarist approach already cradled in the past decades by the ill-concealed revanchist desires of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
In Japanese there is a saying “chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru”, or by dint of accumulating dust you get a mountain, and thus pursuing a patient policy of small progressions, Abe has managed to enact crucial laws that allow Japanese troops to engaging in battle on foreign soil, has put an end to the ban on military exports and has reinterpreted the country’s constitution where in the discussed Article 9 war is renounced in order to allow missile attacks on enemy territory.
Kishida himself, never completely aligned with the party hawks in the past, has instead immediately embraced the new agenda on the issue of national security.
Furthermore, the United States pressures its key ally in the Pacific towards a strengthening of defense spending and the contemplated increase to 2% of GDP would, among other things, make Japan an equal partner with the commitments of the various members. of NATO (whose guideline foresees a defense expenditure equal to 2%).
Plans for rearmament could not come at a “better” time from the point of view of a popular mood that views the threat to Taiwan with concern.
In a survey conducted by the Nikkei business newspaper as many as 86% of respondents said that China poses a threat in the South Pacific, while ‘only’ 82% expressed concern about a potentially nuclear version of North Korea.
Japan’s military strategy has always been aimed at defending the territory starting from the border of the East China Sea where there is a dispute with Beijing on a group of uninhabited islands, the Senkaku, which border the main shipping routes. , are extremely rich in fisheries and hide a potential for crude oil in the subsoil.
The chain of Okinawa, Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands themselves form what experts call a natural barrier to containment of Chinese operations in the Western Pacific.
The People’s Republic argues that there is sufficient documentary evidence to establish Chinese possession of these islands prior to the First Sino-Japanese War and that they should consequently be returned as was the case for the rest of the Japanese colonial conquests ceded in 1945.
The islands are, however, included in the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, which means that any armed dispute over the islets would require the United States to intervene in aid of the ally.
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