“The status of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a nuclear-weapon state has been consolidated irreversibly and permanently.” With these words, spoken by Kim Jong-un at the 9th Congress of the Workers’ Party on 23 February 2026, North Korea cemented the permanence of its nuclear arsenal. By defying every mechanism arising from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Pyongyang is abandoning any further negotiations on denuclearisation.
A clear setback for Sanae Takaichi, the new Japanese Prime Minister elected in October 2025. Her policy speech, delivered three days before the North Korean announcement, had nonetheless given significant weight to the nuclear disarmament of the peninsula. Alongside it figured the usual suspects of Japanese security documents: Russia and its dispute over the Kuril Islands, as well as China, the great regional rival.
While these three threats are nothing new to Japan’s political elites, the 9th Congress of the Workers’ Party reveals the major challenge Sanae Takaichi must meet to ensure national security. North Korea now fully embraces its status as a nuclear power, partly because it no longer faces the same diplomatic constraints once imposed by Russia and China, its two great neighbours, themselves nuclear-armed. The regional balance in East Asia is undergoing a profound reconfiguration, to the detriment of a Japan increasingly encircled by threats that tend to converge into a systemic challenge.
Takaichi’s response nevertheless seems misaligned. It sharpens the break with the Yoshida doctrine, which relied on the American security guarantee and constitutional pacifism, but her securitizing discourse remains marked by a strong China-centrism. Her public affirmation of the link between Japanese security and a Taiwan contingency is proof of this. The supermajority obtained in February 2026 nonetheless gives her the means to act, but against which threats, and within which alliance systems?
This is the question this analysis takes up, by examining to what extent the China-centred securitization pursued by the Takaichi administration, that is, the process by which a social and public issue is transformed within the political space into a security issue justifying exceptional measures, constitutes a coherent response to the regional security challenges Japan faces.
Rethinking regional threats: a new administration.
Successive Japanese administrations have inherited the same regional rivals for several decades. The Russo-Japanese dispute over the Kuril Islands has fuelled tensions since 1945. North Korea’s nuclearisation, for its part, has threatened the peninsula since its first test in 2006. Japan’s main competitor in East Asia nevertheless remains China, the two powers being bound by a centuries-old rivalry. The invasion of Manchuria and the bacteriological experiments conducted there, as well as the Nanjing massacre, have indeed fed anti-Japanese rhetoric, subsequently institutionalised by the Chinese Communist Party. Takaichi inherits these historical tensions: the regional security environment is not in Japan’s favour, as it is on cold terms with three of its main neighbours.
However, while these threats have long been treated as distinct challenges, they are today undergoing a structural recomposition: the growing strategic alignment between Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang. The 2020s have seen a dynamic of convergence flourish between their leaders, brought together by their anti-hegemonic interests. The three powers have multiplied bilateral meetings, culminating in a joint appearance in Beijing in September 2025, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the victory over Japan. On the military side, China reaffirmed its ties with North Korea by renewing in 2021 the mutual defence treaty signed sixty years earlier. The Russian and North Korean governments established a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in 2024, materialised by the dispatch of North Korean troops to the Ukrainian front.
The impact of these developments is not to be overlooked by Japan, a major ally of the West. The irreversibility of North Korea’s nuclear status illustrates this strategic isolation. The front advocating North Korean denuclearisation has crumbled in recent years, starting with Russia, which has abandoned all “denuclearisation rhetoric”. In 2024, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indeed declared that the question of North Korea’s nuclear status is closed. The People’s Republic of China is aligning in a more discreet manner, removing any mention of a possible denuclearisation from its White Paper on arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.
The subject was moreover not mentioned during President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Pyongyang in June 2026. Beijing nevertheless appears to be playing a double game: two weeks before that visit, the Chinese president hosted Donald Trump at a bilateral summit. According to a White House statement, the two leaders reportedly “confirmed their shared goal of the denuclearisation of North Korea”, a claim neither confirmed nor denied by the Chinese government. This silence reveals a deliberate priority. It is the alliance with Pyongyang that constitutes Beijing’s fundamental interest, whereas denuclearisation is merely a rhetorical concession made to Washington. In short, China refuses to officially shift its position on North Korea for fear of alienating this partner, even as Pyongyang is pursuing a significant rapprochement with Moscow. North Korea’s geographical position makes it a space of strategic importance for Beijing: by separating China from South Korea, where American forces are stationed, it acts as a buffer zone. It would be unwelcome to see such a critical point tip into the exclusive orbit of a rival power, and alignment, at least in practice, with Kim Jong-un remains necessary.
The American position is, likewise, shot through with contradictory imperatives. The United States has indeed offered Japan its extended deterrence capabilities since the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty. As the cornerstone of this transpacific relationship, denuclearization must be defended by Washington, whose commitment was reaffirmed last March following a visit by Takaichi to the White House. But Donald Trump has at the same time signalled his openness to a diplomatic rapprochement with Kim Jong-un, even as Pyongyang makes any substantial diplomatic normalisation conditional on recognition of its nuclear status. Japan thus finds itself in a position of asymmetric vulnerability. The parallel agendas of China and the United States erode the credibility of the denuclearization front. These frictions introduce enough uncertainty to complicate Takaichi’s strategic calculations, but nevertheless open up space to undertake a deep recomposition of Japan’s security approach.
Securitizing to act: Takaichi, a discursive turning point?
Whereas Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy adopted a more interconnected reading of regional threats, Takaichi reorients the discourse, refocusing Japanese securitization on its Chinese neighbour. In her addresses to the Diet, the Japanese Prime Minister has indeed emphasized the destabilising role of the People’s Republic of China in the sub-region. She warns against China’s desire “to intensify its unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion”. Japan is bearing the brunt: in 2025, the PRC stepped up maritime harassment operations in the East China Sea. The coast guard presence in the disputed area around the Senkaku Islands was maintained for 357 days. The use of Type-055 destroyers has also intensified in waters neighbouring Japan. Between 25 June and 1 July, Japan’s Ministry of Defense recorded ten movements of Chinese warships through Japanese straits, including the transit of the Type-055 destroyer Nanchang through the Osumi Strait.
This focus on Chinese power is characteristic of the Prime Minister’s rhetoric; she has publicly defended the centrality of the Taiwan issue since 2021, even before her election to the leadership of the LDP. It is not, however, her creation: identifying China as the principal regional competitor and challenger of the international liberal order is in line with her predecessors. The 2022 National Security Strategy of Japan, drafted under Kishida, contributed greatly to making China a central object of contemporary Japanese security concerns. China was identified there as “the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan”.
Sanae Takaichi nonetheless dared to break with Japan’s traditional “strategic ambiguity”. In a statement to the Diet on 7 November 2025, she asserted that a Chinese use of military force against Taiwan would, as it stood, constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for the country. Such a scenario would allow the Japanese authorities to invoke the 2015 legal mechanism authorising military action in the name of the principle of collective self-defence. Standing up to China with a degree of frankness rarely reached, the Takaichi administration continued in this vein by removing from its Diplomatic Bluebook the description of “most important bilateral relationship” previously attached to the People’s Republic of China. Takaichi’s rhetoric thus contrasts with that of her predecessors. She places China back at the centre of Japanese concerns and publicly identifies it as a direct threat to national integrity. But the Prime Minister does not stop there: unlike her predecessors, she now holds the political levers to turn her positions into actionable programmes.
Since the February 2026 elections, the LDP has held a supermajority. With more than two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives, the party can bypass certain blockages in the House of Councillors. This favourable situation comes with a phase of realignment among allies which, once again, suits Takaichi. The Komeito party, which entered a formal coalition with the LDP in 1999, has historically maintained privileged channels of dialogue with Beijing. It had until now acted as a buffer between the two powers and had contributed to improving their bilateral relations. The breakup of this coalition opened the way for the Nippon Ishin no Kai party, more in tune with Sanae Takaichi’s hardened position. She thus has the institutional power to turn the securitization of China into concrete security policy: the new government has already raised the defence budget to 8,800 billion yen for 2026, and announced a revision of the three security documents by December. However, while waiting to be able to carry out these structural reforms, Takaichi is refocusing on the Indo-Pacific, a sphere of Japanese influence she intends to reassert.
Diplomacy and security: Japan’s response in the Indo-Pacific.
True to her former mentor, Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister wishes to bring the slogan “Japan is back” back into fashion. For Sanae Takaichi, diplomacy and regional security form a tandem crucial to preserving Japanese sovereignty. The “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” strategy, an Abe legacy aimed at guaranteeing regional stability, is the main instrument of this. In her speech to the Diet on 20 February 2026, the Prime Minister stated that the FOIP must continue to evolve, with cooperation making the region “stronger and more prosperous”5: it thus regains its function as a geopolitical counterweight to Beijing. To this end, Takaichi wishes to reaffirm the place of the Quad, the quadrilateral coordination forum and pillar of the FOIP, which mobilises three regional powers (India, Australia and Japan) alongside Washington. Its reliability has nonetheless been called into question since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, under which no leaders’ summit has yet taken place. This is one of the weak points of Japan’s alliance architecture in the Indo-Pacific. Although successive governments have worked to diversify their partnerships, they remain too centred on the United States. The “Indo-Pacific triads” – that is, the US-ROK-Japan, US-Japan-Australia and US-Japan-Philippines alliances – all include the superpower, which, given the American president’s erratic foreign policy, is not always able to ensure credible deterrence.
Thus, despite a discourse marked by multilateral engagement, the Takaichi administration must for the time being rely mainly on its bilateral advances. Japan has strengthened its relations with two regional actors: Australia and the Philippines. Australian-Japanese cooperation, already formalized since the 2007 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, continues to deepen under Takaichi. On 18 April 2026, the two powers deepened their military cooperation by signing the Mogami agreement, the first major export contract for lethal arms since the new Japanese administration lifted the ban. This progress continued in May with a summit between Takaichi and Albanese at which two “Joint Statements” were signed organizing bilateral cooperation on security, defence and economic protection. Faced with Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports and refined critical minerals, on which both countries depend, the pair is committed to securing their supply chains. The relationship with the Philippines fits into this China-oriented dynamic. The continuing Scarborough Shoal dispute indeed fuels tensions between the two countries: China still refuses to submit to the 2016 international tribunal’s arbitration ruling in favour of the Philippines. The Philippines strengthened military cooperation with the Takaichi administration by signing the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) on 15 January 2026. It adds to the Reciprocal Access Agreement, an accord promoting military cooperation by facilitating the exchange of military supplies.
While Japan has found in Australia and the Philippines two allies sharing the same view of Chinese activities in the Indo-Pacific, Takaichi must also deal with a more reluctant power. South Korea, however, also faces the existential threat posed by Pyongyang, which moreover regards it as its priority target. North Korean denuclearization was in fact defined as the common agenda of the two leaders at their summit in Nara in January 2026. The urgency of the situation outweighs historical disagreements: Takaichi’s conservative character, notably marked by her visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Class A war criminals, has not prevented cooperation from continuing. It is indeed China that represents the main obstacle to this bilateral understanding. As Seoul’s leading trading partner, Beijing is able to exert considerable economic pressure on Seoul. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung thus follows the Minjoo Party’s cautious line, refusing any openly anti-Chinese position that could prove costly. South Korea indeed paid the price of its dependence in 2017. By accepting the deployment of the American THAAD missile defence system on its soil, Seoul suffered a massive campaign of economic retaliation: tourism boycotts, trade restrictions, and pressure on Korean companies present in Chinese territory. Thus, if Japan’s alliance system is designed to contain Chinese influence, China is also able to limit its reach, or even hamper its functioning. The Japanese Prime Minister is fully aware of this Chinese coercive power, an issue she securitized in her speeches to the Diet.
The limits of Japanese power materialize precisely at this level. Japan cannot create a system hermetically sealed from Chinese authority, nor can it limit the rival system of understandings in the same way. The Japanese Prime Minister does not even contemplate the possibility: the growing rapprochement between Beijing, Pyongyang and Moscow escapes her securitization. This is why Russia does not appear as a point of interest within Indo-Pacific alliances. Its activities there are nonetheless not negligible: between 2019 and 2025, ten joint patrols between Russia and China took place around the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea and the Pacific. Russian activity is admittedly not concentrated in the region, all the more so as the Ukrainian conflict absorbs the vast majority of its resources. However, the real danger Moscow poses to Japan and its Indo-Pacific architecture is not military. Russia is in fact the binder of the progressive rapprochement between China and North Korea; not by design, but as an externality. By intensifying its cooperation with Pyongyang, Moscow fuelled Beijing’s concerns: letting Russia become Kim Jong-un’s privileged interlocutor would amount to ceding a fundamental geostrategic lever. It is this silent competition for diplomatic privilege that has pushed China to redouble its efforts. Xi Jinping now positions himself as the nexus of this triple convergence, as shown by his recent bilateral summits with the Russian and North Korean presidents. Thus, although Japan’s Indo-Pacific diplomatic strategy is not devoid of coherence, Takaichi’s differentiated securitisation does not allow this second-order effect to be perceived. While Russia shows no direct hostile intent towards Japan, it significantly affects the regional balance of power. This shortcoming in Japanese strategy is all the more worrying as it is compounded by a weakening of the American guarantee, in place for decades.
Between dependence and diversification: transpacific alliances.
Since 8 September 1951 and the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the alliance with the United States has been the foundation of Japanese military strategy. This bond endures under Takaichi, who regards it as the “cornerstone of Japan’s foreign and security policy” in her policy speech to the Diet. Its apparent robustness was illustrated at the summits of October 2025 and March 2026, from which emerged a commitment to strengthen diplomatic, defence and economic cooperation. On the military front, the United States has installed a Typhon missile launcher system on the Japanese archipelago, capable of striking targets deep within the region.
Donald Trump’s recent postures nonetheless betray a weakening of this bond in favour of sometimes contrary interests. First, the American president’s desire to secure a favourable trade deal with China leads him to be more cautious in his dealings with the Takaichi administration. He had expressed no support for the Prime Minister following the Chinese pressure caused by the diplomatic crisis of 7 November. Second, the American disengagement, or at least its commitment to other theatres, is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy indeed refocus American attention on the “Western Hemisphere”. China remains a major concern, but its activity in the Indo-Pacific is no longer the central matrix of American strategy. The absence of a Quad leaders’ summit since 2024 and the decline in political momentum within the various trilateral architectures linking Japan and the United States are symptoms of this. The same goes for the transactional American diplomacy of “burden sharing”, which exerts considerable pressure on Japanese finances. The 2025 US-Japan trade agreement provides for a gradual investment of 550 billion dollars in the American economy, even as Japan itself faces significant domestic constraints. The US-Japan relationship is nonetheless not under threat of rupture. Its robustness was illustrated on 31 July 2026, when the American and Japanese Treasuries carried out a joint operation to prop up the yen, an operation welcomed by President Donald Trump, who stated that the United States would “always be there for Japan”.
The weakening, however noticeable, of the US-Japan relationship contributes to the reconfiguration of strategic balances in the Indo-Pacific. In this context, the Takaichi administration, like many Asian partners, must fear being relegated to the status of an adjustment variable in the Sino-American rivalry. This development forces Tokyo into a strategic autonomy of unprecedented scale since the establishment of the Yoshida doctrine. The Prime Minister is aware of this recomposition and is pursuing, accordingly, the diversification of her system of strategic partnerships. Takaichi is turning her gaze across the Pacific Ocean. She has encouraged a deepening of security relations with Canada, framed since the 2010 Joint Declaration on Cooperation in Policy, Peace and Security. Takaichi and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met on 6 March 2026, a summit at the end of which the Japan-Canada Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was established. Its first pillar emphasises strengthening security and defence cooperation, in response to the “growing complexity of security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region”. The two states had already signed, on 27 January 2026, the Defence Equipment and Technology Transfer Agreement (DETA), which establishes a legal framework for the transfer of equipment with a view to joint projects. To this are added the mechanisms provided for in the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, notably an enhanced bilateral dialogue with the Cyber Policy Dialogue and the Economic Security Dialogue, which aim to improve intelligence sharing and make supply networks more resilient in the face of attempts at economic coercion in the region.
The rapprochement with Ottawa cannot, however, offset Washington’s relative disengagement. Canada has neither the power projection capabilities nor the extended deterrence of the United States, and itself remains dependent on the United States for its defence. The Strategic Partnership nonetheless responds to real interests: China and Japan are respectively Canada’s second and fifth largest trading partners, and Asian countries’ demand for critical minerals fuels its exports. Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, focused on promoting peace, resilience and strengthening supply chains, is moreover compatible with the vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific championed by successive Japanese administrations. The motivations differ, but the logic is the same. Both states seek to reduce their dependence on the United States, in security terms for Japan and in economic terms for Canada, which remains overexposed to trade with its neighbour.
The resilience of a network of partners cannot, however, be measured by its diversity alone, but also depends on its coherence and operational capacity. If Takaichi sets out to reposition Japan as a central actor in the Indo-Pacific, the ability of its security architecture to respond to the growing convergence of rival powers remains uncertain. Ultimately, it is probably on the terrain of domestic politics that Japan’s response to the regional recomposition will be decided. The revision of the three documents, scheduled for December 2026, will in this respect be a decisive test for the Takaichi administration. It will make it possible to assess whether pressure from the regional environment is sufficient to strengthen Japan’s military autonomy, despite budgetary constraints and a public opinion still marked by the pacifist legacy of the post-war era. If successful, this revision would pave the way for the amendment of Article 9 of the Constitution, an objective set by Takaichi for spring 2027. The Self-Defence Forces could thus be fully constitutionalized, removing the last legal ambiguities that hold back Japanese military autonomy. The task is nonetheless not without obstacles: Takaichi must still find sufficient support in the upper house and win over a divided public. Domestic politics will now have to turn into capability what securitization has identified and what the regional recomposition has made urgent.
Image Credit: Cabinet Public Affairs Office, via Wikimedia Commons.
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