August 9 marks the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing – the event that preceded Japan’s surrender in the Second World War and its postwar commitment to peace. Eighty-one years on, that commitment is fraying. Japan is pursuing full-scale defense modernization, from expanded intelligence capabilities to a normalization of military themes in popular culture, and in doing so is testing the very postwar order it once helped uphold.
The friction with Beijing is sharpening. Tokyo’s 2026 defense white paper, approved on August 4, again describes China as “unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge” and devotes a chapter to a potential Taiwan contingency. Beijing lodged formal representations, accusing Japan of abandoning its exclusively defensive posture and pursuing remilitarization. Days earlier, the Maritime Self-Defense Force conducted its first live-fire test of a Tomahawk cruise missile from the destroyer JS Chokai – part of a 400-missile acquisition that gives Japan long-range strike reach it has not possessed since 1945. Japan’s defense establishment justifies the counterstrike capability by invoking the most severe security environment since the war’s end.
Most telling was what was not said. Japan, the only nation to have suffered atomic bombardment, has long anchored its identity in the Three Non-Nuclear Principles: no possession, no production, no introduction of nuclear weapons. Yet at Hiroshima’s 81st-anniversary ceremony, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi confined herself to describing the present policy – “Japan is upholding the Three Non-Nuclear Principles” – while, unlike her predecessors, declining to pledge their continuation. Pressed afterward on whether the principles would survive this year’s revision of Japan’s security documents, she refused to prejudge the outcome. In that setting, on that date, the omission carried weight.
Why is Washington tolerating – indeed enabling – this drift? The reading offered here is that Japan has become America’s tactical card. Beijing does not believe Washington misunderstands China’s intention: reunification with Taiwan without military confrontation, save perhaps a blockade. If that path cannot be blocked directly, the remaining option, on this interpretation, is to engineer a regional conflict on the Ukraine model – with Japan cast in the role of proxy. The logic is straightforward. A China bogged down in prolonged confrontation with Japan, as Russia has been with Ukraine, would leave the United States free to repatriate manufacturing capacity targeted from both Europe and Asia. If, by contrast, Beijing can manage Tokyo’s assertiveness, the conversation about Taiwan can begin.
How should Beijing escape this trap? History offers a template: the late 1970s. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues engineered a favorable geopolitical environment for reform and opening up with remarkable strategic wisdom. First, they aligned with America’s overriding imperative – preserving the dollar’s postwar hegemony. Second, undeterred by a million Soviet troops on the northern border, they demonstrated resolve at enormous human cost in the 1979 war against Vietnam, then the self-styled third-strongest military power. Third, by supporting the Western coalition’s campaign in Afghanistan, they helped precipitate the internal collapse of the Warsaw Pact – the demise of China’s most formidable historical adversary. The returns were immense: Western capital, technology, and markets for China’s modernization; the opening of Western universities to a generation of Chinese students; and, in time, the recovery of Hong Kong.
The deeper lesson of that grand strategy is this: Taiwan’s return, like Hong Kong’s, should arrive as the natural consequence of normalized US-China relations – not as the prize of a zero-sum contest. The normalization of diplomatic ties on January 1, 1979, created the stable environment in which, among much else, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry could later flourish. Deeper normalization today should likewise expand the interests of all parties rather than threaten them. Harmonious reunification across the Strait need not come at America’s expense; that this is common sense should itself become the shared premise of any conversation between Beijing and Washington.
Nor should Beijing underestimate its counterpart. Two presidents of the Roosevelt family bookended peacefully America’s assumption of Britain’s global burden, demonstrating that American power is capable of extending its reach across generations through patient widom and needed perseverance. American statecraft at its most effective has combined moral grandiloquence with ruthless flexibility: conjuring tactical leverage from nothing, capitalizing strategically on circumstance, pursuing advantage while managing risk – and, when the spoils warranted, entering two world wars, disregarding international law, and accepting untold civilian suffering as the price.
The second US-China leaders’ summit of 2026 is scheduled for September in Washington, following the May meeting in Beijing. The obstacle is structural. China’s export capacity in Western markets is unprecedented – far exceeding the scale of Western demand that absorbed Chinese goods in the early reform era. The United States and the European Union, gripped by a sense of crisis, are layering sanctions on Chinese products. The wars in Iran and Ukraine have become Washington’s and Brussels’ urgent priority, with escalation toward tactical nuclear use no longer unthinkable. The risks today exceed those once posed by the Soviet bloc, whose global posturing outran its actual capabilities.
Beijing, on this reading, has seen through to the underlying reality: beyond the escalating trade war, the US-led West faces a debt crisis without precedent – federal debt approaching $40 trillion and growing daily – that threatens the foundations of dollar hegemony and the economic stability of the G7. It is in this context that Washington has given Tokyo its head, signaling that Japan is the crucial tactical card. The implicit test is stark. If Beijing can bring Japan’s militarist right to heel – peacefully or, failing that, by force – the two powers could jointly capitalize on the Japanese and South Korean economies, showcased by Taiwan once, above all their AI-relevant chip industries, and negotiate an understanding on Taiwan going forard. If Beijing cannot manage even Japan, then no power can credibly challenge the United States, and the world must continue to accept its unchecked primacy.