Japan's release of its latest defense white paper is a deliberate bid to heighten security fears and justify moves toward re-militarization, according to an Australian scholar of international affairs.
Japan's Defense Ministry on Tuesday released "Defense of Japan 2026," a white paper that critics say distorts the regional security landscape and plays up so‑called external threats. Framed in the language of "peace" and "defense," the document outlines expanded military capabilities that analysts view as a departure from Japan's long-standing pacifist policy.
By emphasizing an "increasingly severe' environment and a "China threat," the paper is seen by observers as a political tool to heighten security anxieties and justify military build-up.
Speaking to China Global Television Network (CGTN), Warwick Powell, adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, dismissed Japan's framing of military industrialization as economic revitalization, calling it merely an excuse.
"The administration and some of its predecessors have been working assiduously over the course of the last decade and more to loosen those constraints and ultimately shake them off. Now at a formal level, at a legal level, those constraints have not been fully abandoned yet, but you can see the clear trajectory and part of what is happening now is a softening up of the domestic community to manufacture the consent that is needed ultimately for the final coup de grace on the post war settlement. And that is to abandon the restrictions or the constraints on Japan as the military power and to jettison its longstanding commitment to a peaceful and defensive posture within the region. All this talk, of course, about military industrialization as a cornerstone of economic revitalization is an excuse. It speaks, of course, to the limits of Japan's own economic vitality. It's certainly been in the doldrums for a couple of decades or more. And no matter what's been tried in that time, there's been limited success to bring serious life back to the Japanese economy," said Powell.
Powell believes that instead of expanding military capabilities, countries in the region should build collaborative security relationships that take into account each other's security.
"Re-militarization always runs the risk of being viewed in very skeptical terms by a domestic populace, particularly when the economy isn't doing so well and ordinary citizens want the government to focus on their priorities. So how do you justify this re-militarization? Well, the most effective way of doing that is the hype-up fear and paranoia, and that's precisely what has been going on. You could do that or you could actually reach out and find mechanisms by which countries of a region can build collaborative security relationships that actually take into account each other's security. We could reach out to those sorts of ideas and explore how we can build the institutions that will actually make a region safer by enmeshing each other's security with one another," he said.
Japan's defense white paper heightens security fears to justify re-militarization: scholar
