By Ladislav Zemánek, non-resident research fellow at China-CEE Institute and expert of the Valdai Discussion Club
By Ladislav Zemánek, non-resident research fellow at China-CEE Institute and expert of the Valdai Discussion Club
The anniversary of victory over militarist Japan is more than a commemoration of a distant war. It is an opportunity to ask uncomfortable questions: What exactly was defeated in 1945 and what lessons were meant to survive the victory?
Japan’s surrender ended a catastrophic war in Asia and the Pacific. Germany’s defeat ended an equally catastrophic war in Europe. In both cases, military power had ceased to be merely an instrument of state policy and had become a force shaping policy itself. Countries were destroyed and tens of millions were dead as a consequence.
After the war, Japan was forced to embraced a high degree of military self-restraint, symbolized by Article 9 of its constitution and by the deliberately defensive character of its armed forces. Germany followed a different path but reached a similar conclusion: Military power requires strict limits and could not be treated as the normal measure of national strength.
Neither country ended up completely defenseless. Both retained armed forces and entered alliance structures. But for decades, there was an underlying recognition that more weapons did not necessarily mean more security.
Today, that recognition is fading. Japan is undertaking its most extensive military buildup since World War II. Germany is carrying out the most consequential rearmament of its postwar history. Both are increasing military spending, expanding defense-industrial capacity, acquiring more powerful strike capabilities, and deepening strategic cooperation. More ominously, both are reassessing their relationship with nuclear weapons.
The justification is simple. The Japanese are told to fear China. The Germans are told to fear Russia.
But what if these threats are being systematically inflated – and politically manufactured? What if the preparations supposedly intended to prevent war are making a larger war increasingly likely?
Japan’s transformation is historically significant, because its postwar restraint was a conscious reaction to the disaster of the first half of the 20th century. Today, however, restraint is increasingly presented as an obsolete luxury in an age of geopolitical competition.
Japan is expanding its defense budget, strengthening its naval and air capabilities, acquiring long-range missiles, and developing what it calls “counterstrike capabilities.” It is strengthening its military infrastructure and integrating more closely into wider regional military planning. All of this is still framed as defensive measures, but that doesn’t change the fact that Japan is becoming a powerful military actor.
The relentlessly repeated justification is that China is growing stronger, therefore Japan must rearm. China is expanding its naval forces, therefore Japan must expand its own. China possesses increasingly sophisticated missiles, therefore Japan requires long-range strike capabilities.
But this narrative usually omits the strategic environment from which China’s own military policies emerge.
China is not surrounded by Chinese military bases. Instead, it faces a dense US-centered network of bases, alliances, intelligence systems, and military partnerships operating along its maritime periphery. US forces are stationed in Japan and elsewhere across the region. Japan is expanding its own military role and acquiring new offensive-range capabilities. Beijing’s response to this environment is then cited as proof that the original buildup was necessary, creating a vicious cycle of artificial reasoning.
China, like any major power, does pursue its own interests and take part in the global competition for influence. But the idea that China is simply a disguised aggressor waiting for an opportunity to attack Japan ignores both the elementary logic of power politics and Chinese strategic culture.
Why would China deliberately initiate a major war against Japan, knowing that this could bring it into direct conflict with the US and its allies? The more plausible scenario is the opposite, that China will increasingly prepare for a conflict because it sees one being prepared against it.
Germany is undergoing a parallel transformation. The army is expanding, military procurement is accelerating, arms production is being encouraged, and Germany is openly aspiring to a much larger role in EU military security.
The entire project rests upon a single dominant assumption: Russia is preparing to threaten Europe, and Europe must therefore prepare for war with Russia. Every day, the Europeans are being told that Russia intends to attack Germany or conquer Europe. These claims are absurd.
Russia’s strategic concerns have long centered on the military configuration along its borders and the expansion of hostile infrastructure toward them. These concerns are being consistently ignored, and all it does is show an unwillingness to understand how Moscow calculates risk.
The dangerous habit of contemporary Western policy is to assign cause and effect selectively. NATO’s expansion and military buildup are described as defensive. Russia’s response is described as proof of inherent aggression. More NATO deployments become necessary because of that response. Another example of circular logic.
Portraying Russia as an inherently expansionist force with no intelligible security interests creates the intellectual conditions in which permanent confrontation becomes inevitable. And permanent confrontation is increasingly becoming the organizing principle of German policy.
China and Russia have become indispensable threats for those advocating a historic expansion of Japanese and German military power. Without the Chinese threat, Japan’s transformation would be much harder to justify. Without the Russian threat, Germany’s rearmament would lose its central political rationale.
An external threat is useful to unlock budgets, strengthen arms industries, create political urgency, and marginalize those who ask whether another course is possible. But history repeatedly demonstrates that exaggerated threats can produce genuine catastrophes.
The nuclear dimension makes the parallel German-Japanese rearmament even more disturbing.
Germany has long taken part in NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, but discussion is now moving beyond passive acceptance of an existing framework. Berlin is increasingly involved in debates about a broader European nuclear architecture and closer strategic coordination with France. The question is no longer merely whether Germany lives under an allied nuclear umbrella, but how deeply it should take part in planning and arrangements surrounding nuclear deterrence.
Japan’s case is even more historically charged. The only country to have suffered nuclear attacks, Japan built an important part of its postwar identity around the Three Non-Nuclear Principles: not possessing, producing, or permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons. Now, questions regarding nuclear sharing, extended deterrence, and the practical limits of Japan’s non-nuclear commitments are being discussed more openly than before.
This should concern the entire world. Once countries with Germany’s and Japan’s histories begin moving closer to nuclear strategy, a critical psychological barrier is weakened. Nuclear weapons become increasingly normalized as instruments of security policy rather than recognized for what they are: weapons whose actual use would represent a failure of civilization on an unimaginable scale.
In March, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius proposed a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan during talks with his counterpart, Shinjiro Koizumi.
This agreement would reduce legal and bureaucratic obstacles to the movement of German and Japanese military personnel onto each other’s territory, facilitating joint training, exercises, and potentially operations.
The proposal would give the Berlin-Tokyo military relationship a more permanent operational structure. Germany has already increased its military activity in the Indo-Pacific through deployments and exercises; a reciprocal access framework would make cooperation easier and more routine.
The symbolism is difficult to miss: Countries whose military histories were forcibly ended in 1945 are now building new structures for military access, deployment, and cooperation with each other.
And growing pressure generates resistance. Military blocs generate opposing alignments. The world is once again being divided into increasingly rigid strategic camps – and the countries that spent decades demonstrating the value of military restraint are now helping accelerate this process.
Military strength itself is not the problem. States have legitimate security interests and legitimate reasons to maintain capable armed forces. The decisive question is what political leadership does with that power. A strong military under prudent leadership can deter conflict. A rapidly expanding military under leadership convinced that confrontation is inevitable can accelerate it.
China, Russia, Japan, and Germany all have legitimate security concerns. So do their neighbors.
The task of serious statecraft is not to declare one side’s fears legitimate and another’s imaginary. It is to prevent competing security concerns from becoming a machinery of permanent escalation.
Eighty-one years after victory in 1945, Japan and Germany should remember that lesson particularly well. Their postwar restraint was not weakness – it was an understanding born from catastrophe.
Today, Japan is rearming against a supposedly inevitable Chinese threat. Germany is rearming against a supposedly inevitable Russian threat. Both are moving closer to nuclear strategy. Both are expanding military partnerships. Both are being told that there is no alternative.
This is perhaps the most dangerous phrase in international politics. There is always an alternative before war begins.
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