Opinion of Japanese Foreign Policy under PM Shinzo Abe

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Obviously dreadful, Abe needs to be stopped. Does Japan really want to more itself in the sick world of arms exporting and militarism?

Of course Japan as a whole doesn't.

Anyway,

Beyond horrible.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nice to see a solid majority thinks favorably of naked saber-rattling motivated by delusional historical revisionism. The issue isn't that Abe is incidentally more forthright than his predecessors about advancing his country's position in the context of East Asian geopolitics. The issue is that this is somebody who does not understand World War II (seventy years ago or otherwise) as having represented any sort of significant moral failing on Japan's part, that this is somebody who consequently has an intensely personal (and admitted!) desire to do what is essentially just 'showing' (as in 'I'll show them!') the rest of the world, and that because of this the implications and end goals of his policy go far beyond anything that could reasonably be construed as merely defending Japan's legitimate interests. It needs to be remembered that Abe is acting within and from the perspective of an ideology that is not really limited in its scope in any meaningful way, that is not particularly characterized by regard for human rights or the 'Western values' or whatever of which some of us seem to want to see him as an instrument, and that fundamentally is barely even democratic.

I don't think that transforming Japan into a more active arm of the American military alliance system is even in a vacuum necessarily the right thing to do in terms of Abe's responsibilities to his own people, so I'm unmoved by that argument.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does anyone else realize that "we" (USA) can use Japan as a counter-weight to China in the region?

Apparently at least fifteen other people realize this.

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I actually completely agree that it's good for Japan to assume more responsibility for its own obligations to itself, but it's naive to think that Abe's public statements about his motivations accurately represent the full extent of what he really wants to do here. The Japanese opposition realizes this, as does a very large chunk of the Japanese body politic, who have dealt with Abe as a public figure for a long time now and know how he operates and what he believes.

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I'm actually willing to accept this criticism, with the understanding that you and I have very different value systems in this respect.

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This is a really buzzword-y sentence, but again, I'm actually willing to et cetera.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The thing is that defending Japan's existing interests when they're threatened is already perfectly allowed within the scope of Article 9. Stuff like limiting the defense budget to one per cent of the total was just convention. But it's clear that that's not what Abe truly wants. If it was, he wouldn't be forcing through laws that are unconstitutional, he wouldn't want to change the constitution to legitimate that post facto, and he certainly wouldn't have any interest in, as CrabCake points out, turning his country into an arms dealer.