Japan: an ally with no voice and no choice

Caught between China’s rise and America’s decline, Tokyo is losing its strategic autonomy.

A crushing dependence

The regional dynamics are stark and undeniable.
In thirty years, Japan’s share of global GDP has fallen from 14% to 4%.
During that same period, China rose from 2% to 18% of world GDP, becoming today Japan’s leading trading partner and accounting for more than 20% of its exports.

Despite a spectacular increase in its military budget, Japan’s armed forces are still designed not to ensure the country’s independence, but to operate in coordination with the United States. In fact, Japan’s energy dependence on the U.S. is vital: 45% of its imported oil travels through maritime routes secured by the U.S. Navy.
In other words, Japan’s strategic architecture remains that of a country that has never fully regained its autonomy.

The impossible choice

The country, and its leaders, have recognized the inevitable: China’s ascent is structural, just as America’s decline is.
Japan’s geopolitical dilemma is easy to state: the decline of its protector is far more dangerous than the rise of its rival.
Yet Japan clings to an illusory hope: that its protection will be guaranteed by Washington as long as it obeys and firmly resists Beijing.

But the American withdrawal from Afghanistan offered definitive proof that cost alone now determines U.S. engagement—regardless of administration. Washington withdraws, whatever the profile or loyalty of its allies.

A silenced voice

Here lies the tragedy: a country that has never been allowed to recover its own voice after 1945, not because of China, but because of the same country that now treats it as a bargaining chip.

For Washington, Japan is less a goal than a strategic instrument.
When America’s priorities are China, technological competitiveness, and reducing foreign commitments, Tokyo’s are stability, diplomatic survival, and room for autonomy.

This is why Japan is left wondering whether it can still survive between these two giants—one of which, America, sees it not as an end but as a means, a card on the negotiating table.

The fatal denial

Today the country lives in a form of denial that helps it avoid confronting its existential fear: that the United States cannot protect it indefinitely, and that China’s rise is irreversible.

Its tragedy is not so much Chinese power as the arrival of a world in which neither the United States nor Japan is the center of gravity in Asia anymore.
It fears not so much China’s strength as the prospect of a region that will soon revolve more around Beijing than around Tokyo or Washington.

The strategic void

But what would remain of Japan without American power?

A country without a true army.
A constitution written by foreign victors.
An economy pulled between the tectonic plates of Washington and Beijing.
A diplomacy without an independent axis.

Turned into a strategic outpost, Japan has seen several generations grow up learning to survive through obedience, rather than through sovereignty.

Since 1945, it has never truly had the chance to choose its own path or make its own voice heard.
Not because China prevented it, but because a superpower now hesitates to see it as anything more than a bargaining chip.

The warning for Europe

Francis Fukuyama was right: “Sovereignty is measured not only by military capability, but by the ability to define one’s own choices.”

In this sense, Japan’s example should be a wake-up call for Europe.
Not to advocate any dogmatic break with the United States, but because loyalty, today, is no longer a guarantee—it is a cost to be weighed.

Europe must regard its sovereignty as an active lever of power, one that can neither be bought nor begged for, but built.
May the Japanese case finally pull it out of its naivety—or its torpor.

May it finally rewrite its own narrative, equal to the challenges of the 21st century.