Later this month Japan will announce new national security and defense strategies that will shatter policy norms in place for much of the period since World War II. Tokyo is poised to unveil plans to nearly double defense spending over the next five years, discarding the informal 1 percent of GDP cap that has been in place since 1976. It will set out plans to acquire long-range precision-strike cruise missiles, capable of hitting targets well inside North Korean or Chinese territory, loosening the postwar constraint on military power projection. And it may signal intent to remove much of the remaining limits on defense equipment exports, first adopted in 1967 and loosened in 2014, but to little effect. This package, if implemented, will break with a tradition of incremental change in Japanese defense policies that is rooted in Article 9 of the constitution—and ultimately transform Japan’s defense posture and the U.S.-Japan alliance.
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