Germany and Japan: “Reluctant warriors” no more?

Abstract

Signifying the return of great power revisionism by all means, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has had a dramatic impact on the security and defense postures of Germany and Japan, two key US allies with strong anti-military foreign policy traditions based on peace constitutions. In analyzing the two countries’ far-reaching adjustments between 2022 and 2024, this article reflects on four major factors to explain the respective trajectories: threat perceptions, domestic political processes and settings, international institutional settings and alliance structures, and the influence of anti-militarist political cultures. While we identify a reorientation of Germany and Japan towards greater efforts for individual and collective self-defense due to increased threat perceptions, the residual influence of their anti-militarist cultures continues to restrain defense policy changes and their implementation. Interwoven into both countries’ domestic politics, those cultures have pervaded the material and institutional foundations of their security and defense policies in sustained ways.

Introduction

As the post-Cold War order splinters in the face of the challenge posed by the revisionist powers led by Russia and China, the United States has been looking towards allies—and in particular to Germany and Japan—to protect what remains of the liberal international order. ¹ As the fourth and fifth largest economies (in 2022, calculated in terms of purchasing power (CIA, 2024)) and long-standing close allies, the two provide critically important economic, military, and political support to America's role in the world and underpin the US-led regional security orders in Europe and East Asia.

In the struggle over the future shape of the international order, the Russian war on Ukraine ushered in a new phase not only in Europe but also in East Asia. In response, Germany and Japan announced far-reaching changes in their security and defense postures. For both countries, this represented a fundamental departure from their traditional foreign policy orientations. Since the end of the Second World War, the two countries have prioritized economic and diplomatic tools of statecraft over military means in their foreign and defense policy postures, cultivating an international profile that has been described as “civilian powers” (Maull, 1990). Both Germany and Japan have put their faith first and foremost in the civilizing force of economic interdependence. Germany hoped to transform post-Cold War Russia into a liberal and democratic partner; Japan entertained similar expectations about China and East Asia in general. And both Tokyo and Berlin massively supported their prospective partners financially, economically, and politically, failing to perceive the internal developments in Russia and China that would lead them to challenge the international status quo. ²

After the end of the Cold War, Germany and Japan made significant adjustments to their earlier security policy posture. For the first time, their forces were sent on overseas military missions, providing peacekeepers and logistical support to multilateral missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, and elsewhere. Yet, public and elite resistance to such an expanded military role proved strong in both countries. While Germany and Japan moved closer to becoming “normal nations” with respect to the use of force, they remained very much “reluctant warriors” (Sakaki et al., 2020).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and heightened tensions surrounding Taiwan have brought the threat of war and aggression by revisionist great powers back to Europe, East Asia, and the world. Making matters worse, the polarization of US politics, brought into high relief following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, has raised fears over the reliability of the United States. Germany and Japan therefore felt compelled to fundamentally re-adjust their foreign and defense policy postures, strengthening their alliances, bolstering their armed forces, and promising to boost their defense spending.

Have Germany and Japan thus turned away from their previous “civilian power” behavior? Are they “reluctant warriors” no more (Sakaki et al., 2020)? We recognize the fundamental nature of the changes postulated by their respective new foreign, security, and defense policy postures, but we remain skeptical about their ability to implement those changes swiftly and comprehensively. Although it is too early to say how the two countries’ policies will evolve, constraints stemming from their cultures of anti-militarism will complicate actual policy adjustments. In our view, Germany and Japan will remain “reluctant warriors,” but now warriors that are reluctant rather than “reluctants” that disdain to be warriors—an important shift in emphasis, rather than a reversal, of traditional policies. Our analysis suggests that the two countries will remain opposed to any independent projection of military force and continue to exhibit a strong preference for using “civilian” tools—diplomacy, economic engagement, but also sanctions and other tools of economic statecraft—to mitigate the sharper edges of the military competition with China, Russia, and other potential adversaries. Expectations that either country will develop more expansive security roles along the lines of other great powers such as Britain or France are likely to be disappointed. ³

Our article first provides a brief overview of Germany's and Japan's post-1945 security policy trajectories, highlighting how the two have developed political cultures as “reluctant warriors.” This section also introduces our conceptual framework that draws on four factors to explain both countries’ policy evolutions. The next section outlines the changes in both countries’ external environment that triggered the far-reaching policy changes between 2022 and 2024. The remainder of the article provides analysis of the four factors specified in our conceptual framework, comparing how each dimension impacted the two countries’ responses.

The molding of “reluctant warriors”

In our previous analysis of Germany’s and Japan’s security policies (Sakaki et al., 2020), we pointed out that after the Second World War the two countries had developed peculiar political (or strategic) cultures that were shaped by the collective trauma of the war. ⁴ The combination of destruction and defeat de-legitimated their respective pre-1945 strategic cultures that had emphasized the use of force to achieve national objectives. When subsequently rearming in the context of the Cold War, they integrated their military forces within US-led alliance structures, relying on US nuclear deterrence while pursuing economic development. Over time, the two nations made a virtue of necessity, embracing a national self-image that emphasized anti-militarist values and policies that relied heavily on non-military tools such as trade and diplomacy to shape their strategic environments. In the case of Japan, there was a deliberate effort to avoid becoming involved in security beyond its own defense, thus limiting Tokyo's strategic engagement with other US regional allies and partners. In the case of West Germany, a powerful preference for multilateralism emerged as a means to anchor it in the framework of European integration and the transatlantic security alliance. Both countries only reluctantly rearmed amid Cold War tensions and under allied pressure, with policies reflecting their continued distrust of the military as an institution and their reluctance to use force as a means to protect their national interests.

The post-Cold War security environments for both Germany and Japan initially appeared to improve. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the formerly divided European continent seemed on a path towards reconciliation, peace, and democratic transformation. In East Asia, North Korea was weakened by the loss of Soviet support, and China by the fall-out from the Tiananmen massacre. Moreover, China had embraced the East Asian model of export-led development, integrating with the international economy. However, a plethora of new security concerns also emerged, including wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1995–1996, and North Korea's advancing nuclear and missile programs since the 1990s. The changes in their security environment prompted Germany and Japan to make some important but limited adjustments to their security policies to preserve the security alliances on which they had come to depend. Indicating the influence of their entrenched strategic cultures, the two countries defied predictions by realist scholars like Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer, who foresaw both pursuing international great power roles through a significant expansion of military capabilities, including nuclear weapons (Mearsheimer, 1990; Waltz, 1993).

Overall, the international security environment after 1990 was dominated by concerns beyond traditional territorial defense, with a new focus on containing instability in the global South and threats from Islamist terrorism. Multilateral peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions sought to cope with those security challenges, while national and collective self-defense, which had dominated German and Japanese security postures during the Cold War, receded into the background. Consequently, both countries stepped up their participation in UN (and for Germany, also in NATO and EU) peace keeping or peace enforcement missions. Germany advanced further than Japan in accepting the use of force, participating in coercive military interventions, notably the NATO interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, as well as in Africa. In contrast, Japan—due to domestic opposition—confined itself to peace keeping missions and providing rear-area logistical support, for example for the US-led operations in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, even German military missions remained contested domestically and numerous restrictions applied for the participating Bundeswehr contingents.

In our previous analysis, we argued that Germany's and Japan's anti-militarist cultures have decisively shaped the two countries’ defense and security postures. Our approach is informed by a dynamic understanding of political culture. From this perspective, cultures can be viewed as evolving frameworks of ideas and narratives that are rooted in a society and—by extension—the state that governs a society. These profoundly shape how a country perceives its identity, the world around it, and the goals it should pursue. The policies that states follow are not merely the product of the international environment in which they find themselves—the type of geostrategic threats and opportunities that they face (as emphasized by Realists) or the incentives and disincentives to cooperate (as stressed by Liberals)—but also by their norms and values (as pointed out by Constructivists (Wendt, 1992)).

This is not to say that factors such as external threats or economic needs do not influence state behavior. However, these factors are filtered through the lenses of a state's strategic culture. What a society sees as its interests and what it views as the best way of pursuing those interests is very much shaped by its culture. ⁵ At the same time, however, cultures evolve over time as they are evoked but also routinely subtly reinterpreted by “norm entrepreneurs” in response to changes in international environment and domestic politics. External and internal shifts may thus lead to a gradual reconstruction of the embedded norms, ideas, and narratives that constitute foreign policy cultures.

It thus becomes the task of the analyst who uses the concept of strategic culture to identify the salient elements that are shaping the policy outcomes that they are trying to explain, while remaining sensitive to how these factors—including culture—change. Our previous analysis identified four key factors that have interacted to affect the respective trajectories of German and Japan policies post-1990: (1) threat perceptions, (2) domestic political settings and processes—including party politics, bureaucratic dynamics, and political leadership, (3) the international institutional settings and alliance structures, and (4) the pervasive influence of anti-militarist political cultures. ⁶ This article applies this conceptual framework, which we developed at greater length previously (Sakaki et al., 2020), to update our assessment of the evolution of German and Japanese security and defense policies in the time period from 2022 to 2024.

Catalysts of change: War in Ukraine and tensions over Taiwan

Russia's massive attack on Ukraine represents a major turning point in the international relations of the 21st century. The responses by Germany and Japan to the Russian invasion were dramatic and far-reaching, and they went in a similar direction: both chose to oppose Russia's attack on the fundamental principles and rules of the post-1945 international order, to support the defense of Ukraine, and to strengthen the Western alliance of liberal democracies.

Germany’s response

For Germany, the war represented a rude awakening from widely shared delusions about the character of Russia's regime. Only three days after Russia's attack, on February 27, in a dramatic speech to the Bundestag, Chancellor Scholz (2022a, 2022b) declared it a “Zeitenwende” or “epochal tectonic shift.” He outlined how Germany would respond to this shock along five axes. First, provide (military) support for Ukraine; second, impose sanctions against Russia; third, enhance German contributions to the NATO defense of Eastern European countries; fourth, strengthen Germany's military capabilities; and fifth, pursue German energy security. He also pledged to bring annual defense spending “year by year” to “more than two percent of GDP” and announced an extra €100 billion Special Fund (Sondervermögen) to help close material gaps in Germany's military capabilities and preparedness. Economic sanctions played a key role in this German response, and in the overall Western strategy. Yet, while Berlin finally withdrew its support for the infamous Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, it hesitated to sanction other Russian natural gas exports, due to concerns about the impact on the German economy.

Supporting Ukraine

Already on February 26, the day before the Zeitenwende speech, Germany announced that it would supply Ukraine with anti-tank weapons and Stinger surface-to-air missiles, a major departure from its traditional policy of not supplying weapons to conflict areas (Herszenhorn et al., 2022). Arms supplies eventually came to include self-propelled artillery and main battle tanks, including—after much hesitation and a vociferous public debate—the highly capable Leopard tank. As of the end of June 2024, the value of Germany's support commitments for Ukraine in terms of armaments and military equipment (US$20.02 billion) was second only to that of the United States (US$69.8 billion), and almost twice that of the UK (Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2024). Yet considerable hesitation and ambivalence characterized the implementation of Germany’s military support for Ukraine. Time and again, the government categorically opposed the transfer of certain types of heavy weapons systems, be it howitzers, tanks, or missiles, only to transgress its own red lines later on. Germany's ultimately extensive supply of military arms and equipment was thus at times overshadowed by the perception of ambivalence and hesitation, damaging its standing among allies.

Other material, financial, and humanitarian support for Ukraine was also provided on a major scale, both bilaterally and through the European Union (EU). Bilaterally, Germany had committed US$4.8 billion in humanitarian and financial support by June 2024 (Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2024). Germany also took in around 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees, topping even Poland (Statista Research Department, 2024). Overall, by June 2024 the EU and its member states collectively had contributed US$151.7 billion, as compared to the United States with US$98.6 billion, to the support of Ukraine (Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2024).

Strengthening collective defense and deterrence in Eastern Europe

Germany had responded to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea with Bundeswehr deployments in Lithuania to strengthen NATO's deterrence in Eastern Europe. In his 2022 speech, Scholz announced a further provision of Bundeswehr air defense units to Slovakia. A German PATRIOT air defense battery was also deployed to Poland in January 2023. In June 2023, the Federal Republic announced plans for permanently stationing an additional 4000 troops in Lithuania (Frankfurter Allgemeine, 2023). Moreover, in July 2024 the German government agreed to host US long-range missiles from 2026 onwards to increase NATO deterrence in Europe (White House, 2024).

Enhancing national defense

Germany's military support for Ukraine was impeded not only by political hesitation but also by the sorry state of Germany's military: the Bundeswehr itself turned out to be short of almost everything Ukraine required. To address those glaring deficiencies, the government announced a major procurement deal for 35 US-supplied F-35 fighter aircraft, capable of delivering nuclear weapons and thus ensuring German participation in NATO's nuclear deterrence. The government also approved the purchase of 140 armed drones from Israel—a deal that before had been held up by vociferous opposition from within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2023: 200). Yet while the Chancellor had committed the government to raise defense spending to two percent of GDP “immediately, year by year,” actual defense expenditure in 2022 and 2023 fell short of this target. The budget of the Ministry of Defense, which spent €41.2 billion in 2021 and €44.3 billion in 2022, was expected to decline slightly in 2023 and then to essentially remain at this level to 2027 without any significant increase (Deutscher Bundestag, 2023: 20). To make matters worse, as the Bundeswehr supplied equipment to Ukraine, its own stocks were depleted even further. As a result, one year after Scholz's historical Zeitenwende speech, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius confessed that the German army would be incapable of repelling a brutal assault like that on Ukraine (Carstens, 2023). By 2024, German defense expenditures for the first time met the two percent NATO target, but thanks only to the additional money made available through the Special Fund. Without the infusion of additional funds, it was clear that Germany would no longer meet the 2 percent target by 2026. Although demands for additional funds to secure adequate defense expenditure continued, not least from the Bundeswehr’s own ombudsperson Eva Högl and Defense Minister Boris Pistorious (Gebauer, 2024), the SPD and Chancellor Scholz failed to back their Social Democratic colleagues. Confronting acute fiscal stringency, the coalition government refused to accommodate those demands (Gebauer, 2024). By late 2024, the financial foundations for turning the German armed forces into the “powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr” that the Chancellor had promised in his Zeitenwende speech still appeared shaky at best (Scholz, 2022a).

Japan’s response

The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not as directly impact Japan as it did Germany. Kyiv is far closer to Berlin than it is to Tokyo, and the Russian attack posed a far more immediate threat to Germany's national interests. Nonetheless, Japan quickly decided to join the United States and NATO in imposing far-reaching sanctions on Russia and providing aid to Ukraine (Prime Minister's Office, 2023). While some in Japan saw in Russia a potential ally against China, or at least wanted to separate China and Russia, mainstream opinion concluded that the Russian invasion represented a challenge to the existing international order and, if unchecked, could encourage Chinese aggression in Asia, especially vis-a-vis Taiwan (Brown, 2023).

Supporting Ukraine

Japan, which has long pursued a highly restrictive arms export policy, decided against sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. Instead, it provided non-lethal equipment such as bulletproof vests, helmets, small drones, and food rations, while also contributing funds to the United Nations Development Program to clear landmines (Prime Minister's Office, 2023). In May 2023, Tokyo went a step further by announcing the supply to Ukraine of 100 armored vehicles (Prime Minister's Office, 2023). Furthermore, Japan relaxed its arms export principles in December 2023, enabling the provision of ‘indirect military aid’ to Ukraine by supplying surface-to-air missiles to the United States. This allowed the United States to supply Ukraine with missiles without depleting its own stockpiles (Japan News / Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024b). Although Japan's military support lags behind that of Western nations, it nevertheless marks the first time in its postwar history that it is assisting a non-allied country in an armed conflict.

More important, however, was Japan’s considerable financial and humanitarian support to Ukraine. As of June 2024, Japan had committed US$11.1 billion in financial and US$2.2 billion in humanitarian aid, making it the third largest bilateral contributor in those two categories after the EU and the United States (Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 2024). In terms of total bilateral commitments, Japan was the fifth largest donor of aid to Ukraine, after the United States, the EU, Germany, and the UK, and it also provided support to various neighboring countries of Ukraine and to international organizations such as UN agencies for their respective efforts in the context of the war. In terms of humanitarian support, Japan agreed to offer medical treatment for injured Ukrainian soldiers. Despite a history of accepting almost no refugees, Japan also took in about 2300 Ukrainians in 2022 (Takahara, 2023).

Strengthening collective defense

The war in Ukraine gave a major push to Japan’s efforts to strengthen collective deterrence efforts and security cooperation in East Asia. Over the past decade, Japan has pursued steps to enhance military cooperation and integration with US forces, while also going beyond its traditionally exclusive focus on that bilateral security relationship in what Christopher Hughes (2022) has called “bilateralism plus.” Among its new regional partners were Australia and India and cooperation in the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) as well as several Southeast Asian countries.

By deepening ties with other US partners and like-minded countries, Japan hopes to foster a “networked regional security architecture” that can contribute to sustaining the rules-based liberal international order (Tokuchi, 2023). Since 2023, it has played a central role in advancing US-centered mini-lateral cooperation, such as the US-Japan-South Korea and the US-Japan-Philippines trilateral frameworks (Nagy, 2024). At the same time, Japan has also pursued closer ties with NATO. Its cooperation with other countries includes defense equipment: in April 2023, Tokyo announced a new program called Official Security Assistance to strengthen the militaries of like-minded countries. The Philippines, Bangladesh, Fiji, and Malaysia have been selected as the first recipients (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2023). In December 2022, Japan also revealed plans to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet together with the UK and Italy, its first major arms procurement project with partners other than the United States.

Enhancing national defense

Like Germany, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine Japan promised to raise its security-related spending up to two percent of GDP. To get there, the government has pledged to raise the defense budget by 65 percent from 5.4 trillion Yen (corresponding to around US$35 billion as of July 2024) in the fiscal year 2022 to 8.9 trillion Yen (US$57 billion) in the fiscal year 2027. In 2024, Japan spent around 1.4 percent of its 2022 GDP on defense, or around 1.6 percent of GDP if security-related expenditures like the Coast Guard are included. ⁷ As with Germany, however, fiscal constraints may prevent Japan from reaching the 2 percent target: a publicly controversial decision to raise taxes to finance the defense budget increases has repeatedly been postponed (Nikkei Asia, 2023). Moreover, the historically weak Yen also poses problems for Japan's defense buildup, as international procurements have become significantly more expensive (Akira und Ueno, 2024).

In December 2022, Japan decided to develop counterstrike capabilities against North Korea and China, beginning with the acquisition of 400 Tomahawk missiles from the United States. At the same time, Tokyo signed contracts with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in April 2023 to develop indigenous missiles with ranges of at least 1000 kilometers, which would be relevant in any Taiwan contingency (Reuters, 2023). Overall, Japan's response thus reflects resolve for enhancing national defense capabilities, but budgetary issues remain a potential stumbling block going forward.

Explaining changes and continuities

To explain and contextualize the German and Japanese security policy described above, we return to the four-part analytical scheme that we introduced earlier and examine how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected German and Japanese threat perceptions, domestic politics, the institutional settings in which foreign policy is made, and finally their strategic cultures of anti-militarism.

Threat perceptions

In our conceptualization, threat perceptions are based on threat assessments by mainstream indigenous expert analysts of the respective international security environment. Those assessments provide the basis for collective threat perceptions by the foreign policy and defense establishments and the attentive publics. Threat perceptions will be possibly distorted and emotionally and politically charged by various factors, including the strategic culture as well as the history and geography of the nation.

Over the last roughly one and a half decades, the German and Japanese experts have assessed the security environments to be gradually but steadily deteriorating to an alarming level. In Germany's case, the government and public were slow to recognize the signs of this deterioration, even as security experts signaled growing concern. Until February 2022, the broader political and public debate did not recognize any major direct threats to national security beyond those represented by international terrorism. The Bundeswehr was focused on multilateral peace missions within Europe (the Balkans) and beyond (notably in Afghanistan and West Africa). Even Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea in 2014 did not change this rosy public view. Since February 2022 and the public discourses about Zeitenwende, however, the sense of threat has increased dramatically, while previous beliefs about relations with Russia have been discarded, including the expectation that economic cooperation would lead to a democratic transformation in Russia and that ensuring European security requires working with rather than against Moscow. Russia now is seen as an urgent threat to European security, both in the foreign policy establishment and by the German public. A poll in mid-2022 found that the percentage of Germans seeing Russia as a threat to German security stood at 65 percent, a radical shift from the previous year when only 35 percent of respondents shared this perception (Graf, 2022).

However, Ukrainians’ fierce resistance and Russia's initial military setbacks muted Germany’s initial sense of anxiety, and some of its old ambiguities regarding security and defense policy resurfaced. This helped encourage the tacit withdrawal of the Chancellor's promise to raise German defense spending to “more than two percent” of GDP (Bundesregierung, 2022), described above.

Threat perceptions of Russia also showed a considerable erosion. Whereas Russia was seen as Germany’s most serious threat in early 2023, one year later it had fallen back to seventh place, with the two top concerns being mass migration and Islamic radicalism (Graf, 2022; Munich Security Conference, 2024) even though the German security expert community continued to warn that Russia posed the far greater danger to German interests.

Whereas German threat perceptions have changed significantly since 2022, the same cannot be said of Japan. To be sure, Russia's invasion of Ukraine served as a powerful catalyst in Japanese security and defense thinking and provided a framing for the government's announcement in late 2022 of a new National Security Strategy. An opinion poll conducted in early 2024 found that 84 percent of respondents felt that Japan's security was threatened (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024). Nevertheless, even prior to 2022, security concerns had been high among Japanese experts, policymakers, and the public. For example, a public opinion poll conducted in 2019 found that recognition of a military threat to Japan among respondents reached close to 75 percent, with North Korea (85 percent), China (58 percent), and Russia (36 percent) identified as the key concerns (Genron NPO, 2019: 19).

For Japan, the war in Ukraine thus aggravated an already grim assessment of the state of international politics. In Japan's assessment, China has been pursuing unilateral changes through territorial and maritime disputes in Asia for more than a decade, relying on hybrid tactics that combined both military and non-military tools. In the South China Sea, China has aggressively asserted its sovereignty over the area, building up military bases on dredged-up islands and harassing local shipping and air traffic, all in blatant disregard of international law. Even more worrisome for Japan is its own decades-old territorial dispute with Beijing over the Senkaku (Diaoyu in Chinese) islands in the East China Sea, where since 2012 China has regularly challenged Japanese control by provocative deployments of vessels into the surrounding waters.

In recent years, Tokyo has also become increasingly concerned about the future of Taiwan. Tensions over the island escalated when US Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022. China reacted with air and sea exercises on an unprecedented scale around the island, some of which took place only 60 kilometers from nearby Japanese islands. These developments reinforced the perception that a military contingency around Taiwan cannot be ruled out. In a Yomiuri-Gallup public opinion poll in late 2022, 61 percent of Japanese respondents said they thought China would launch a military invasion of Taiwan in the future, while only 31 percent believed this would not happen (Japan News / Yomiuri Shimbun, 2022). Japanese military experts have warned that in such an event, it would be impossible for Japan to stay out of a conflict if the United States requested support. Even if Japanese forces remained disengaged—at the risk of a permanent rupture to its security relationship with Washington—China is likely to launch attacks on US bases in Japan that would be at the core of the US military response (Watanabe et al., 2020).

Japan’s concerns about the threat posed by North Korea go back even further. North Korea's launch of a missile crossing over Japan's archipelago in 1998 served as an early wake-up call. Since Kim Jong-Un assumed power in late 2011, the regime has tested long-range missiles that are increasingly difficult to intercept. In 2018, the Japanese government concluded that Pyongyang possesses miniaturized nuclear warheads that could be mounted on its missiles (Cabinet Secretariat, 2018: 6). The North's capabilities have prompted Japanese concerns about ‘alliance decoupling,’ or the fear of weakening US willingness to defend allies if faced with possible nuclear strikes on American soil. The year 2022 saw a further upsurge in North Korean missile tests, setting a new record of 69 missile launches (Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2023). The recent increase in North Korean-Russian cooperation on defense matters, in which Moscow provides North Korea with military technology—including nuclear weapons technology—in return for North Korean munitions for the war in Ukraine has further triggered alarm bells (Kiuchi, 2024).

Overall, developments since 2022 have combined to accelerate change in Japan's security policy. Japan's Defense Strategy in late 2022 notes that Ukraine's defense capability had been “insufficient, thus failing to discourage and deter Russian aggression,” and calls on Japan to “fundamentally reinforce defense capabilities” (Ministry of Defense Japan, 2022).

Domestic politics: The case of Germany

In December 2021, a new, three-party government took power in Berlin. Such a broad-based, heterogeneous coalition was a novelty in German politics: it brought together the Social Democrats, the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP), and the Greens (SPD et al., 2021) under their coalition agreement's banner of “dare (to make) more progress.” Both the SPD and the Greens were parties with strong anti-militarist traditions. In their coalition agreement, the three parties confirmed Germany’s commitment to NATO as the “indispensable foundation” of German security but remained vague on the NATO defense expenditure goals. The new government also underlined Germany’s traditional commitment to a restrictive arms export policy (SPD et al., 2021: 143–146).

The war in Ukraine created a new situation, prompting the Zeitenwende speech by the Chancellor. Yet the announced re-direction of Germany’s foreign, security, and defense policies unfolded slowly, hesitantly, and, to many observers within Germany and abroad, confusingly. Germany’s initial offer of 5000 helmets as its contribution to Ukraine’s resistance against the aggression invited incredulity and derision (Schuetze, 2022). Even after Berlin agreed to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons, Germany time and again hesitated to provide certain categories of weapons, such as the Leopard tank, to Ukraine.

What explains this gap between a strong initial response and tardy implementation of Germany’s commitments? We see it as the result of three domestic political forces: intra-party and intra-coalition politics; bureaucratic politics; and a dearth of political leadership, all greatly exacerbated by the persistence of anti-military attitudes in Germany's strategic culture.

Intra-party and coalition politics

Within the SPD, relations with Russia had long enjoyed a privileged status due to a sense of responsibility and shame stemming from Nazi Germany’s devastating war against the Soviet Union, the legacy of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, and the influence of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Many Social Democrats cultivated the hope that Russia could be transformed into a democratic entity through a “modernization partnership.” ⁸ When he became chancellor, Gerhard Schröder quickly succumbed to efforts by Vladimir Putin to cultivate a personal friendship (Bingener and Wehner, 2023). Russia also built up influence within Germany using media such as the television station Russia Today and social media outlets, and also by offering lucrative commercial opportunities. This approach resonated with the Russian and Russian-speaking population in Germany, but also with many in the Eastern parts of the country that had constituted the Communist German Democratic Republic during the Cold War.

The Free Democrats, while not particularly pro-Russia, are close to the German business community and thus traditionally reluctant to impose economic sanctions. Given Russia's aggression against Ukraine, however, they did fall in line with government policy. The Greens, while fiercely critical of Russia’s leadership on human rights and democracy grounds, were the traditional home of anti-militarist and pacifist forces that opposed any German military efforts and arms exports ( Deutschlandfunk, 2021 ). Among the opposition parties, the conservative CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union) supported the new defense posture and support for Ukraine, even if this was complicated by commercial interests and sympathies for Russia among East Germans. Russia enjoyed a considerable following within both Die Linke, the left-wing successor party of the former East German Communist party, and the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Not coincidentally, both parties depended heavily on the Eastern parts of the country for electoral support.

Coalition politics also contributed to the mismatch between declared policies and their implementation. State elections in 2022 saw rather mixed results for the coalition parties; the Free Democrats, in particular, fared badly. Electoral dissatisfaction with the performance of the coalition government was further highlighted by the European parliamentary elections in June 2024 as well as by elections in the three Eastern states of Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony in September 2024. In order to mobilize their support bases, all three parties have emphasized their respective core party issues (e.g. Greens on climate, FDP on taxes, the SPD on spending for welfare), causing tensions within the government. While individual politicians and the leadership of the mainstream parties offer at least strong rhetorical support for increased military spending, within the major parties there is no strong constituency for defense. As a result, in the fierce intra-coalition fight over budget priorities, boosting the armed forces’ budget ends up being neglected.

Bureaucratic politics

The workings of Germany’s executive branch are guided by three somewhat contradictory principles. First, the Ressortprinzip stipulates that each minister decides in his or her field of ministerial responsibilities. Since different ministries are often led by ministers belonging to different coalition parties, bureaucratic politics reflect inter-party rivalries. At the same time, ministries serve as conduits for the expertise and lobbying of vested interests and may to some extent even be “captured” by them. Second, the Kabinettsprinzip demands that certain government decisions, notably the initiation of legislation, are taken collectively by the cabinet, in which all ministries are represented. Finally, there is the Kanzlerprinzip, which elevates the position of the chancellor by granting him or her the right to define broad policy guidelines (Richtlinienkompetenz). As with many other aspects of the German polity, the complicated interplay of intra-coalition and bureaucratic politics favors incrementalism. The most glaring example of such incrementalism has been the evolution of defense expenditure after the Zeitenwende and the enormous difficulties that Germany faces in meeting its military spending goals.

Bureaucratic politics also played a role in Germany’s hesitation to supply the Ukraine with arms. Especially in the initial phase of war, the Bundeswehr appeared reluctant to part with weapons that were in short supply, thus providing yet another rationale for procrastination (Der Spiegel, 2022a). While understandable given depleted stocks, arguably this was shortsighted, in light of possible consequences the war may have for the future of the Russian military threat to NATO, and to Germany itself.

Leadership

Contributing to the gap between rhetoric and performance in German security and defense policies was a lack of leadership by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Scholz repeatedly defined red lines for his government (such as rejecting the supply of main battle tanks), only to cross them later on. He appeared concerned by the risk of escalation, seeking to have the US government go along with Germany's military provisions. His insistence on risk sharing eventually succeeded to get the Biden Administration to agree to deliver Abrams Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) to Ukraine as a quid pro quo to facilitate German deliveries of Leopard 2 MBTs, which were much more germane to Ukraine’s war efforts than the overly large and difficult to maintain US Abrams (Hofmann, 2023; Rinaldi, 2023).

The Chancellor's communicative deficiencies were not helped by his Minister of Defense Christine Lambrecht, who seemed to be out of her depth in responding to the war, leading to her resignation in January 2023. She was replaced by Boris Pistorius, another Social Democrat who quickly emerged as one of Germany’s most popular political leaders and thus a potential challenger to Chancellor Olaf Scholz within his own party. While Pistorius forcefully pushed for greater financial efforts and a new look at forms of conscription to rebuild the Bundeswehr, without strong support from the Chancellor he found himself constrained by the stringent financial situation and the bureaucratic and intra-coalitional dynamics described above (Gebauer, 2024).

Domestic politics: The case of Japan

In Japan, the Kishida government moved forward with security policy changes at a brisk pace from 2022 onwards. In this regard, Kishida surprised many observers (Asahi Gakujo Nabi, 2021; Nilsson-Wright, 2021): given that he hails from the Hiroshima constituency and has long been a proponent of nuclear disarmament and of non-proliferation, many expected he would be dovish on defense. ⁹ Instead, he successfully worked to strengthen Japan's defenses more than any other prime minister save the late Shinzo Abe, who had pushed key security policy reforms during his two times in office. Yet Kishida, too, has found his options constrained by opposition party alignments and public opinion.

Coalition and party politics

The shock of Russia's invasion of Ukraine amplified concerns about regional security developments surrounding China and North Korea among both the Japanese political establishment and the wider public. In the October 2021 Lower House election, Kishida's LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) had run on a platform calling for increasing defense spending to two percent of GDP (Asahi Shimbun, 2021b). At that time, however, it was unclear whether the party's leadership would muster the political will to push this goal and to gain support from the smaller coalition party, the Clean Government Party (CGP), which was known for its long-standing anti-militarist leanings (Asahi Shimbun, 2021a).

Yet Russia's invasion galvanized broad political backing for the Kishida government’s moves. Major opposition parties, including the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDPJ), and the Democratic Party for the People (DPPJ), voiced support for increased defense spending. The LDP's coalition partner CGP also took a more cooperative stance on Kishida's defense spending plan, acknowledging the need to “respond to the concerns of the people in an increasingly tough security environment,” as CGP leader Yamaguchi Natsuo observed (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2022). In explaining the party's acquiescence to acquiring counterstrike capabilities, CGP's Deputy Secretary-General Sato Shigeki acknowledged the need to address “insufficiencies in deterrence” (Sankei News, 2022). Party members emphasized that the CGP nevertheless continued to serve as a “break” (hadome) on the government's defense policy, for example by insisting on a clear distinction between counter-attack and preemptive attack (Sankei News, 2022).

Kishida's plan to finance about a quarter of the increase through tax hikes was met with resistance from the main opposition party, the CDPJ, along with other leftist parties, and even parts of Kishida's own LDP. Majorities of the public have consistently opposed the plan (FNN Prime, 2022). An opinion poll conducted in early 2024 for example showed almost 70 percent of respondents opposing tax increases to fund additional defense spending (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024).

While the Defense Finance Law (bōei zaigen-hō) of June 2023 established a fund using non-tax revenue to help cover increased spending (e.g. from selling government assets), it failed to resolve the controversial question of tax hikes (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2023a). The law's passage followed the typical pattern of defense bills since the 1990s. The LDP convinced its smaller coalition partner, the CGP, to go along with it by watering down its initial proposal. In this way, Japan has over time implemented significant incremental changes in its security policy, hedged by limitations—which in turn both reassure the Japanese public and provide escape clauses that can give Tokyo's policymakers plausible excuses for rejecting US requests.

This somewhat ritualized defense policy procedure is grounded in a co-dependent relationship that revolves around the idea that “you can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need” (to quote the Rolling Stones). The conservatives in the LDP do not get the major dramatic changes, including revision of Article 9 of the Constitution, which is their fondest wish, but they are satisfied with moving Japan towards becoming a “normal nation” in terms of security. The liberal-left and the CGP, on the other hand, do not prevent change but keep Article 9 intact and restrain the conservatives’ greater ambitions.

Short of a dramatic shift in the Japanese party landscape, this pattern of defense policymaking may increasingly involve the LDP seeking support from conservative opposition parties for their proposals, thereby putting pressure on the CGP to go along with it. Parties will nevertheless also have to consider the still-widespread concerns in the Japanese public about the risks of being drawn into war, especially over Taiwan (Teramoto, 2023). Moreover, there is continuing uncertainty about the Japanese government's plan to increase taxes to finance the defense budget, especially following a series of fraud-related scandals within the LDP and within the Defense Ministry in 2023, and Kishida's subsequent announcement that he will not run for reelection in the LDP's leadership election in September 2024 (Japan News / Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024a; Kyodo News, 2023).

Executive leadership and bureaucratic politics

Kishida’s determined and resolute response was facilitated by a number of government reforms that have significantly strengthened the policymaking powers of the prime minister and his cabinet. Traditionally, the ability of Japan's core executive to influence policy was undercut by informal power structures involving the ruling party and the bureaucracy. Japanese prime ministers were forced to manage intra-party factional competition, while also contending with a powerful bureaucracy that has frequently taken the lead in policy formulation. Reforms that gradually expanded the powers of the core executive include electoral reforms in 1993–1994, administrative reforms around the turn of the century, and the establishment of a National Security Council along with a Secretariat in 2013. A shift in powers in 2014 furthermore enabled the core executive to exercise greater control over bureaucratic appointments (Krauss and Pekkanen, 2011; Shinoda, 2023).

The growing empowerment of prime ministers had already been showcased by Abe Shinzo, who had vigorously pursued security and defense policy reforms. This included new security legislations in 2015, reinterpreting the constitutional constraints regarding the exercise of collective self-defense: if Japan's survival was seen as threatened by the government, it now was considered permissible to come to the support of allies with military means, albeit only under certain vague conditions (Green, 2022). This means that in the event of a regional military contingency—say, over Taiwan or in the South China Sea—a future Japanese prime minister could commit Japanese forces to support the United States. The Kishida government's response to Russia's war on Ukraine extended and built on many of the security policy changes that Abe had realized.

International institutional settings and alliance structures

The sudden perceived threat to its own national security led to a pronounced German pivot towards NATO. Berlin moved closer to Washington, carefully keeping its military support for Ukraine in lockstep with US provisions. For economic support to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, however, Germany relied extensively on the EU. In both multilateral contexts, Berlin acted more as a follower than a leader (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2023). Its repeated hesitancy to provide specific types of military support caused considerable irritation within the EU and NATO, despite Germany's bolstering of its military presence within the NATO framework in the Baltic States, Romania, and Poland (Economist, 2023; International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2023). Germany’s perceived procrastination exacerbated preexisting tensions in the EU between its Eastern and Western half and weakened its position within the EU (Zamość and Pitel, 2023). Disarray in the Franco-German tandem did not help, either (Foy et al., 2023).

Germany’s pivot to NATO reflected its re-emergence as the core security arrangement for the transatlantic region and beyond, as NATO intensified its outreach to US allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Yet the Ukraine war also served as a catalyst for expanding the EU’s role as a security actor. In March 2022, the Union formally approved an ambitious plan (Strategic Compass) to strengthen the EU’s security and resilience and “to make the EU a stronger and more capable security provider” (Council of the European Union, 2022). To this end, the EU committed to upgrade its Common Security and Defense Policy capabilities, enhance its resilience, notably in the realm of cyber warfare, and strengthen the European defense industrial and technological base through joint procurement programs, all supported with EU funds. The EU also assumed a major role in providing humanitarian and financial support for Ukraine, including support for arms purchases (European Council, 2024).

Berlin resolutely clung to its traditional commitment to NATO and Europe as its principal multilateral frameworks of operation, as had been re-emphasized in the Coalition Agreement (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2023: 205). Yet this averral of European and transatlantic unity sounded somewhat hollow to many observers against the backdrop of Germany's past self-interested policies towards Russia. Nor did it help that Berlin failed to show strong leadership in response to the war. Although parts of the coalition government (the Greens) pushed for stronger responses, the Chancellor seemed content to shadow US policies. Overall, German diplomacy within Europe suffered considerable reputational damage and lost much of the trust that it had carefully accumulated over decades (Fix, 2022).

Given the lack of viable multilateral security arrangements in Asia, Japan made the alliance relationship with the United States a central pillar of its postwar security policy, and the alliance has in turn shaped Japan's evolving approach. The Kishida government's planned defense buildup remains firmly grounded within the context of the alliance. From Tokyo's perspective, the military imbalance vis-a-vis China is far too great for Japan to contemplate a more autonomous security policy.

In the past, Japan often felt acutely the twin alliance dilemmas of abandonment (if the United States failed to honor its security guarantees), or entrapment (if Japan were to be dragged into a conflict through its alliance relationship). Fears of abandonment were triggered during Donald Trump's first presidential turn, in which he questioned the value of alliance relationships. Since then, however, the two allies during the administration of President Biden increasingly aligned their strategic assessment, with China standing out as the most serious long-term threat. Following the publication of Japan's National Security Strategy, Tokyo and Washington revealed several initiatives, including closer cyber security cooperation, the expansion of joint use of key infrastructure like bases, airports, and seaports or ammunition storage in Japan, and the creation of a more integrated command-and-control relationship that would allow the US and Japanese armed forces to respond more quickly and effectively in the event of a military contingency. In particular, Japan's acquisition of counterstrike capabilities will force both allies to strengthen bilateral consultations, planning, and decision-making mechanisms.

Closer Japanese cooperation with South Korea, the United States’ other key ally in East Asia, has the potential to significantly buttress US deterrence capability. Since coming to office in 2022, South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol has taken strong initiatives to repair the bilateral relationship with Japan, which has long been fraught with tensions related to Japan's past colonial rule in Korea. In August 2023, the United States, Japan, and South Korea met for their first ever stand-alone trilateral summit, in which the three sides sought to establish more institutionalized and resilient forms of cooperation, for example by introducing a number of annual trilateral meetings (White House, 2023).

As a supplement to its alliance with the United States, Japan has in recent years also pursued deeper relations with other like-minded countries through bilateral and mini-lateral engagements. Tokyo has placed particular importance on close ties to Australia—another US ally in the region—while it has also pursued cooperation with Southeast Asian countries, India, and European states. According to Japan's 2022 National Security Strategy, Tokyo will continue along this path, seeking to build a multilayered network of partnerships, although these remain more supplements to its central relationship with Washington.

Culture of anti-militarism

Although the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022 produced strong shifts in public opinion in favor of security and defense, the culture of anti-militarism that has developed in Germany over decades continued to linger and mingle with other aspects of Germany’s political culture to constrain policy revisions. Those other aspects included the bifurcation of public attitudes between the Eastern and Western parts of Germany and persistent anti-Americanism, both on the Left and on the Right. Russian disinformation campaigns built on those and fed them further (Graf, 2022: 28; Schinkels, 2024).

Overall, the impact of Germany’s lingering culture of anti-militarism was to produce uncertainties, hesitation, and delays in the implementation of security and defense policy revisions after February 2022. It also constrained those policy shifts through path dependencies, resulting from the decades-long neglect of the Bundeswehr.

Despite the massive shift in public perceptions about Russia, horizontal divisions persisted both within the elite and in the public, with enduring sympathies for Russia and the desire to see the war end held by significant minorities, notably in the East. Politically, both the far-left Linke and the far-right AfD tried to channel pro-Russian attitudes, although this was not uncontested in either party. In 2024, a group of dissidents of the Linke, led by Sahra Wagenknecht, founded a new party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Its program combined broadly anti-capitalist and redistributionist policy proposals with a restrictive approach to immigration and pro-Russian and anti-American positions on foreign policy. This mixture of populist and progressive elements, combined with the charismatic qualities of Wagenknecht herself, proved very successful—as reflected in the election results for the European Parliament in June 2024 and regional elections in Eastern Germany in September 2024. Remarkably, the success of BSW did not significantly reduce the electoral support for the AfD; rather, it further weakened the non-populist, traditional parties.

Public support for increasing German defense expenditure rose from 19 percent in 2013 (before the annexation of Crimea) and 41 percent in 2021 to 57 percent in 2023 (Graf, 2024: 21). The same survey also shows a similar trend in public support for increasing Bundeswehr personnel. At the same time, public support for the use of force to uphold the international order—which has long been weak, with only 46 percent accepting it as sometimes necessary in 2010—remained fragile. Remarkably, Germany was the only one of 10 countries with a majority opposed; even in Japan, 56 percent supported the use of force under such circumstances (Statista Research Department, 2010).

Public backing for German NATO membership—long solid—strengthened further after February 2022. While there has long been a large gap between support for German NATO membership and the willingness to defend allies and contribute to deterrence, this gap has narrowed significantly since 2022, with 47 percent of respondents in 2023 in favor of military assistance to the Baltic states to help them defend themselves (Graf, 2024: 25). Forty-eight percent of those polled also supported NATO’s posture of nuclear deterrence, while 26 percent opposed it. Only a minority of 34 percent (with 37 percent opposed) upheld the stationing of US nuclear weapons in Germany to underpin nuclear deterrence, however. Opposition to an EU nuclear deterrent force was even more pronounced: only a minority of 30 percent favored this idea, while 47 percent were opposed to it (Graf, 2024: 87–88). The traditional opposition to arms exports to friendly countries went into reverse: in 2023, 44 percent supported such exports, while only 28 percent opposed them (Graf, 2024: 79).

The public mood in Japan also has shifted in favor of greater defense efforts, with most polls since 2022 showing slight majorities supporting increased spending. For example, a Yomiuri Shimbun poll conducted in early 2024 shows 53 percent of respondents approving an increase and 42 percent opposed to it (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024). By comparison, an earlier poll in March 2018 by the Asahi Shimbun (2018) found only 19 percent of respondents in favor of increased defense expenditure, while a large majority of 58 percent favored maintaining the present level. ¹⁰ This shift is reflected in decreased policy contestation. The Kishida government's changes announced in 2022 are a case in point, with hardly any public demonstrations against the plan to strengthen military capabilities. This contrasts sharply with previous decades, when defense policy was highly divisive, with policy changes sometimes triggering mass protests. When the Diet under the Abe government in 2015 passed security laws allowing the exercise of collective self-defense, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in opposition (Oda and Fifield, 2015).

While public attitudes to defense have changed significantly, recent polls still indicate substantial opposition to increased spending. The Japanese public has also shown its enduring attachment to the “Peace Constitution” and an exclusively defense-oriented policy as well as a restrictive arms-export policy. A Nikkei public opinion poll in February 2023 found a large majority of 76 percent of respondents opposing weapons exports to Ukraine, although the poll also found a majority in favor of greater assistance to the country in general (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2023b).

Against that background, it is notable that the Japanese government's decision to acquire counterstrike capabilities—missiles with medium ranges of around 1000 kilometers or more and thus cable of reaching neighboring countries—has found the support of a slight majority in the Japanese public. For example, in a December 2022 Asahi poll, 56 percent supported the acquisition, with only 38 percent opposed to it (Osaki, 2022). The Japanese government has argued that such counterstrike capabilities are constitutional, provided their use is limited to the minimum necessary in cases where Japan has been attacked. Complementing Japan's existing missile defense capabilities, the new types of missiles are envisioned to enable the country to “mount effective counterstrikes against the opponent to prevent further attacks” (Cabinet Secretariat December, 2022). As in the past, the Japanese public is comfortable with defending Japan but cautious about going too far beyond that.

In sum, in response to the war, both Germany and Japan have doubled down on their security relationships with the United States—the transatlantic NATO alliance for Germany and the bilateral Security Treaty system in the case of Japan. While both countries have simultaneously sought to also strengthen and diversify their security ties with other nations—in part to hedge against the growing risk of a return to isolationism in the United States—Washington has remained central to their military security efforts. Their alliances have provided political leaders in Berlin and Tokyo with political cover for increasing defense spending. Nevertheless, the alliances have simultaneously created contradictory incentives to free ride on the United States.

In both Germany and Japan, the public generally supports the incremental shifts in policy that have been made so far. However, the cultures of anti-militarism are still alive in both Germany and Japan: while in neither country has there emerged a highly visible peace movement, at the same time there is little evidence of any support for the development of a more independent defense posture (as in France) or the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Neither Germany nor Japan have been willing (or indeed able) to provide for their own national security on their own, or together with like-minded neighbors in their respective regions. They thus continue to be existentially dependent on security guarantees provided by the United States.

Conclusion

The world has entered an era of growing great power competition and the re-emergence of the threat and use of force. The war in Ukraine has served as a grim confirmation of this trend. As a result, the international security agenda has refocused on individual and collective self-defense in national and regional security, shifting from the earlier focus on collective security concerns such as international terrorism and multilateral stability missions in fragile states.

Germany and Japan have responded with significant modifications in the period from 2022 to 2024: both have supported Ukraine in its war against Russia with financial and humanitarian assistance and with the supply of military equipment (though only Germany has provided lethal equipment). Both have pledged major increases in defense spending, while also seeking to strengthen their respective alliances with the United States and deepening security cooperation with other partners.

Yet changing threat perceptions have been only one among several factors shaping the policy responses of Germany and Japan. Although Germany and Japan will reorient their security and defense postures towards greater contributions to their respective alliances and a more robust military stance, they will do so in their own, measured ways. They are likely to remain strongly embedded within those alliances as long as these provide credible security assurances. They therefore continue to be confronted with the alliance dilemmas of abandonment by their principal ally, the United States, and entanglement in wider regional security conflicts, for example in the Taiwan Strait (a concern in both Japan and Germany). The changes in Germany's and Japan's security and defense postures will also likely be less decisive and more tortuous than their allies—and many members of their own governments—might wish.

Overall, the anti-militarist cultures in both countries may be fading, but their residual influence will continue to moderate policy changes and cause frictions in policy implementation. Those cultures, which have dominated security and defense policies and postures in both countries for many decades, are interwoven into the two countries’ domestic politics, thus inhibiting and complicating responses. They have impacted the material and institutional foundations of security and defense policies in myriad ways. They have shaped attitudes and policies towards the armed forces, the export of arms, and the use of military force, but also towards defense industries, academic research and development, and many other aspects of their societies.