By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 23, 2025
The words “nuclear proliferation” fill many people with
dread and anxiety, and for good reason. But just as there are states with very
different characters within the current nuclear club—the United States and
France are not very much like China and Russia—there are big differences among
the countries that could become nuclear powers. A nuclear Iran is a prospect to
be feared—and prevented, work which probably is not yet entirely finished.
But what about a nuclear Japan?
The consensus among the publicly available assessments of
the world’s intelligence agencies is that Japan does not, at the moment, have a
nuclear weapons program per se. As the only people on Earth against whom
nuclear weapons have been deployed, the Japanese are understandably sensitive
about the issue.
But many experts in the field consider Japan a de
facto nuclear state. The current prime minister at
one point suggested that Japan could possibly host U.S,-controlled nuclear
weapons or build an arsenal of its own, though he has been somewhat
equivocal on the matter.
Japan has long experience with using nuclear power to
generate electricity—and, in spite of a decline in nuclear investment after the
2011 Fukushima
episode, Japanese authorities have wisely decided to press for an expansion
of the country’s nuclear-power capacity, because nuclear power is an excellent
source of clean, reliable, safe power that produces no greenhouse gases at the
point of generation and relatively little up the supply chain. Japan has both
experience and expertise in acquiring, processing, and handling nuclear
materials.
Japan is home to many of the world’s premier
manufacturers, with enormously sophisticated technological and design
capabilities embedded in its domestic industries. Japan also has plenty of
investment capital at its disposal, including a sovereign wealth fund that
operates a venture capital firm and one of the largest private equity
businesses in the world—one that lately has been showing a great deal of
interest in the chip-and-semiconductor business. Even with Japan’s deep
economic challenges and its political dysfunction, it could probably produce a
nuclear weapon—and a credible nuclear arsenal—in very short order, about a year
in
the estimate of some experts. If Japan’s manufacturing past is prologue,
count on the Japanese to produce a highly efficient and reliable nuclear weapon
at a better price than its American or European peers—if it should come to
that.
Should it come to that?
The government of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, a member
of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has just
canceled a planned high-level meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Marco
Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and their Japanese counterparts after
being berated by the undiplomatic diplomats of the Trump administration over
its defense spending, lately at a high of 3 percent of GDP but less than the
3.5 percent now demanded by Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for
policy. Colby, one of those gold-plated populists (Groton, Harvard, Yale Law)
who orbit Trump, possibly ought to have known better: He spent part of his
childhood in Japan while his father, an investment banker, ran First Boston’s
operations in Tokyo. (These people really are the bane of elitists and globalists,
are they not?) Japan’s LDP is going into a tough legislative election and
presumably did not want to appear to be running the kind of government that
enjoys being slapped around by American bullies.
And so the “2+2 Ministerial Dialogue,” as the
U.S.-Japan-India-Russia meeting is known, will be “2+2-1.”
It is remarkable that the supposed “realists” of the
Trump administration look at Japan as a problem for Washington when
Japan is—plainly and obviously, and irrespective of whether it wants to be—a solution.
Or at least a big part of a solution.
Washington’s problem in Asia is not Japan—it is China.
Donald Trump, who is in many ways stuck in the ’80s—not a
zombie Reaganite but a zombie Perotista—still speaks about Japan from time to
time with the outmoded tropes of the Asian economic superman—as though a
country that has seen average
real GDP growth damned close to 0.00 percent in recent years is somehow
eating our lunch. There was a great deal of angst about Japanese automakers a
generation ago, but ready labor, cheap capital, and proximity to the world’s
most lucrative consumer-goods market have (much more than any protectionist
policy, though there have been some of those, too) over the decades encouraged
Japanese firms to invest in U.S.-based manufacturing, and today an American
autoworker is about as likely to be employed by a Japanese firm as by Ford. Every business
interest group exaggerates its economic impact, particularly when it comes to
jobs, but a reasonable estimate would put the number of American workers who
owe their jobs directly or indirectly to Japanese automobile manufacturing at more
than 1 million. U.S. GDP per capita currently is more than 2.5 times that
of Japan and very well may end up being three times Japan’s—but, somehow, Trump
and the ignoramuses around him believe the United States is being economically
victimized by trade–even as they now agree to a Japanese firm’s acquisition of
U.S. Steel, a merger Trump once denounced in the bitterest of terms.
The argument that countries such as Japan and the more
expansive welfare states of Europe are subsidized by superabundant American
investment in military capacity is, and always has been, a canard. It is not
the case that Japan and the advanced economies of Europe can afford larger
welfare states because they shift their defense burdens onto the United States:
The United States has a gigantic military because the United States wants one
and is willing to pay for it; Europe and Japan have larger welfare states
because they want them and are willing to pay for them. The difference is that
the United States is, for all of its fiscal problems, still better able to
afford its war machine than Japan and the European countries are able to afford
their welfare states, which are paid for with high taxes and—much more
consequentially—indirectly with reduced economic dynamism. Don’t take it from
me—ask The Economist, which put it plainly: “The
American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.”
The Trumpist rationale is wrong, as it almost always is.
But the push toward a more capable Europe and Japan goes in the right
direction: The Europeans, of course, know that they need to do more to be able
to see to their own defense interests, which is what all that talk of
“strategic autonomy” has been about. Japan, which has been hearing the kind of
nationalistic rumblings that are associated with a nation in decline, knows
that it should be doing more, too. But neither the Europeans nor the Japanese
have shown much appetite for doing as much as they need to—much less for doing
as much as the United States would, in the course of seeing to its own
interests, prefer to see them do.
A more “normal” Japan, one relieved of the suffocating
pacificism of its postwar constitution, one possessing a more capable military
and a more assertive foreign policy to go with it—and, possibly, possessing a
nuclear arsenal—would be for Washington the easiest, least expensive, and
arguably least dangerous way of shifting power in the Asia-Pacific in a way
amenable to U.S. interests. We need not resort to crude zero-sum thinking to
understand that a more powerful Japan would present a real loss—and a challenge,
and a problem—for the elderly autocrats in Beijing.
A resurgent Japan would present a challenge to China in
its own right and on its own terms, and it would also be (we need not emphasize
the fact in public) a stronger, more assertive, better-armed U.S. ally in a
place where we very much need one. It is not as though the United States is
overwhelmed with suitable partners in Asia: Even if we assume the rosiest
scenario for India’s economic and military development and for Indo-U.S.
cooperation, it would be a very long time before India would be able to provide
the kind of counterbalance that would serve U.S. interests. Who else? The
Republic of Korea? A dynamic economy and an important ally, to be sure, but one
with fewer people than Italy and an economy about
the size of Florida’s (around $1.7 trillion). Singapore? Mongolia?
All of the caveats about Japan should of course be given
their proper weight. Japan is in demographic collapse. Its economy is stagnant.
Its politics seems incapable of breaking through the web of interlocking elite
interests to produce deep reform or new and innovative ideas. About these, it
is difficult to gin up much optimism. But it also is difficult to think of
anything that might help to mitigate these problems as much as a renewed sense
of national purpose. There might, after all, be more to Japan than a
comfortable national decline in the featherbed of Toyota’s profits.
A newly assertive Japan arming up and flexing its still
considerable national muscle would be good for the United States and would give
Beijing fits—it would be a hell of a lot more significant than some tariffs on
Baowu Steel or China Minmetals.
But it will take smarter people than those employed in
the Trump administration to get it done, and more patience and bipartisan
continuity than Washington has exhibited in recent years.
Words About Words
“No problem.”
I have all but given up on that one. You know how it
goes: You order your cup of coffee, the guy at Starbucks gives you your cup of
coffee, you say, “Thank you,” and he says:
“No problem.”
And you don’t—you try not to!—say:
“Well, of course it’s no problem, you nincompoop. I paid
you for a cup of coffee. You gave me a cup of coffee. I said, ‘Thank you.’ I am
a pretty creative guy, but I cannot think of a plausible scenario in which it
would be a problem for you to give me the cup of coffee I just bought,
and your formulation suggests that there is such an imaginable scenario or,
even worse, contains within it the unspoken assertion that you are doing me
some kind of favor by giving me the cup of coffee I just bought. The words you
are seeking in vain are, ‘You’re welcome.’ You might even stick a ‘sir’ in
there, somewhere, if it comes up.”
We have too much democracy.
By democracy I don’t mean merely the procedural
thing of voting for candidates or having representatives vote in an assembly on
this or that piece of legislation. I mean the underlying cult—the real and true
–ocracy, there—that sanctifies majorities, or large groups, or the
common, the capital-P “We the People.”
The cult of the People is very useful to a certain kind
of lazy and craven pundit. (Not that I know any of those!) In the same way that
Jon Stewart used to toggle between “Clown Nose On” and “Clown Nose Off,” the
lazy pundit can switch, whenever it is convenient, between high-minded idealism
and cold-eyed political “realism,” which generally isn’t all that realistic,
but never mind that, for now.
You know how it goes: “Republicans should get more
serious about fiscal stability. And that means either cutting spending on
programs people like, such as Social Security and Medicare, or raising taxes,
or, probably, both.” The weaselly pundit looks around, nervously. What can he
do? He is a Republican-affiliated television mouthhole, and so he cannot
come out in favor of: 1) spending cuts opposed by Donald Trump and other
Republicans; 2) higher taxes; 3) running up the debt until there is a fiscal
crisis. All are anathema. And, so:
“Well, good luck winning an election running on high
taxes or cutting Social Security!”
When Bill Clinton got into trouble for his relationship
with the head intern, Democrats scoffed: “The American People don’t care about
this!” Or, “This is a distraction from the People’s business!” As anybody who
paid attention to television news ratings or newspaper sales in the era knew
perfectly well (to say nothing of the honest kind of pollster), the general
public did care a great deal about Clinton’s adultery and perjury. But We the
People can be recruited to any cause, especially if it is only a defensive
maneuver.
On the other hand, point out (e.g.) that the Democrats keep
running into a series of political buzz saws by taking the radical side of
losing issues, and you’ll be met by indignant moralizing.
The problem with sanctifying “50 percent +1”
majoritarianism is that it boils down to a might-makes-right argument, and all
of us—all of us functional mentally normal adults paying attention, anyway—know
that majorities get it wrong all the time, probably more often than they get it
right. As the economist Bryan
Caplan has observed, we have nice things such as freedom of speech not
because We the People demand such liberality but because moneyed elites have
disproportionate influence over our politics and are able to frustrate the
popular will from time to time, or at least mitigate its worst excesses.
Everybody knows that the People get it wrong a lot, that
the usual stampeding herd of independent thinkers will run right off a cliff
like those mythical lemmings we all used to learn about. (I’m not much for
tales of corporate evil, but I do enjoy the juxtaposition of “Walt
Disney” with “staged lemming suicides.”) What you need to painlessly
resolve the cognitive dissonance that comes from both valuing democracy and
knowing people is either a more capacious and subtle metaphysics (which,
ho! ho! ho!) or some simplistic and half-articulated horsepucky (there it is!)
about how “everybody’s opinion matters,” which, I am here to tell you, it
don’t.
I’m getting back to the barista. Just give me a sec.
A few years ago, I was in Norway, and one of our guides
was going on and on in a particularly smugly unbearable Scandinavian fashion
about how egalitarian Norwegians are. He informed us, in his smugly unbearably
Norwegianly particular way, that it is not unusual for college students to call
professors by their first names. “No titles,” he said.
“And your king—what does your king think
about all that? What says His Majesty, King Harald V of the House of
Glücksburg, about titles?” I didn’t say it that smoothly, but, approximately,
that.
He wasn’t wrong, of course. One of the useful things
about largely ceremonial constitutional monarchies is that they provide a kind
of hierarchy theater by means of which whatever pent-up social-hierarchy energy
a society contains may be relieved by catharsis. In many societies that have a
genuinely democratic sensibility, you’ll see habits and institutions in tension
with that sensibility: In Germany, they sometimes practice a very formal kind
of etiquette; in Norway, they have a monarchy; in England, there is a monarchy
and a surviving class system and titles and an aristocracy. (My friend Dan
Hannan, who possesses the better kind of democratic
sensibility in a very high degree, serves in the House of Lords and marvels
that the world’s least democratic legislative chamber is in many ways its most
responsible.) But each of those societies has its own kind of genuine
egalitarianism, one that is much less pronounced in a number of societies that
supposed put equality first, such as India, the constitution of which proclaims
it a “socialist secular democratic republic,” each of those three adjective and
one noun being true at times but seldom all the way and all at once.
In the United States, we do not have a class system—we
just have money. We do not have a monarchy, as much as we have tried to make
the presidency into the office of a god-emperor. We also have a great deal of
social mobility, which matters: If you live in a college town and enjoy an
above-median income and have some education, then surely it will occur to you
that the young woman taking your order at Outback Steakhouse may very well be
more highly educated than you are, or on her way to it, and possibly only a
couple of years away from out-earning you. There is a hierarchy to the
server-client relationship, but, in the United States, such hierarchies are not
necessarily permanent.
We sometimes try to compensate with status goods, but
that is a dead end: You cannot buy an aristocratic family history, but Hermes
will sell a tie or a handbag to anybody. It may be because we have so
few reliable status markers that Americans are so status-conscious and so
anxious about it. One of the consequences of this is an utterly phony and
affected sense of familiarity and intimacy that we insist on in public as a
kind of shorthand for our more general commitment to the egalitarian principle,
which is excessive in its most genuine form and often exaggerated to
grotesquery.
“You’re welcome” is formal. “No problem” is casual, part
of a pretense that we are all friends here and what’s happening is only
incidentally commercial in character. I never much cared about honorifics and
that sort of thing, and I always felt a little weird when students called me
“Professor Williamson,” an awfully elevated title for a man without so much as
a humble B.A. But when American Airlines wants to call me “Kevin” like we’re
buddies when they’re leaving me stranded overnight in Bangor on a rainy evening—then,
I want to be “Mr. Williamson.”
All of this is compounded by the American habit of
insisting that restaurant servers and others in similar jobs speak to their
customers as though their customers were 3 years old.
“Are we ready to order?”
“We? Are we … plural?”
Or:
“Did we save room for dessert?”
The we there makes the infantile save room that
much worse.
Eventually, people will start talking that way in dive
bars:
“Did we save room for more Jack Daniels?”
Another one that brings out my inner strangler is when a
server replies to my order with the word, “Perfect!” as though I had made a
really excellent and non-obvious choice from a 20-page wine list (and, even
then, do I really need or crave the waiter’s approval?) rather than ordering my
standard venti (because we all speak Italian at Starbucks) iced coffee.
“Perfect? Not 97 percent? Not A-plus but perfect?”
“Can I get a name for the order?”
“Professor Williamson.”
But that won’t do, either: Mr. Williamson was my father,
and Prof. Williamson is my wife.
Like Tammy Faye-level makeup on an old woman or oversized
shoulderpads on a fat man’s suit, trying to plaster over the facts with
paint and powder often only serves to highlight the underlying facts of the
case we are all pretending to ignore.
Here’s a useful metaphor, I think: I surely am not the
only person on Earth who thinks that the kind of improvised “dancing” young
people (and less-than-young people) are expected to do at nightclubs or wedding
receptions or whatever is awkward and ungraceful and not very much fun, whereas
more formal and structured kinds of dancing not only are more enjoyable but
also, in a sense, more accessible in that there are steps and rules that can be
learned by anybody who wants to learn them, no special talent or grace or
musicality needed. In a similar way, formal etiquette (like formal language!)
can be socially liberating: One learns a few basic rules and principles, and
holding to these with some reasonable amount of care will get one through most
uncertain social situations without very much anxiety or self-consciousness. If
you want people to have good manners, then you have to teach them what good
manners are, which means that somebody has to decide—however undemocratically
or arbitrarily!—what good manners are. That includes how we speak to one
another in social or commercial situations. There isn’t anything to be
embarrassed about in being on either side of the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts, but
pretending that we’re all old friends just spending the morning together is
weird and awkward and fundamentally dishonest.
And what’s so hard about this?
“Good morning.”
“Good morning. I’d like a large black coffee to go,
please.”
“Yes, sir. That will be $3.09.”
[Taps the American Express card. Leaves a medium-sized
tip in spite of the fact that this is patently ridiculous in the context of
counter service on the Pareto-ish theory that $1 tips cumulatively mean a lot
more to the young man working at Dunkin’ than it does to me and most of the
other customers, a perfectly fine principle when you don’t try to enforce it at
gunpoint.]
“Here’s your coffee.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
And, then . . . nothing.
[Exit, pursued by a bear.]
In Closing
Tomorrow is the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, one of
my favorite New Testament figures. I admire his asceticism and his humility
(virtues I have not yet mastered and may never), and he seems to have a sense
of humor, which is admirable even as one gets a sense of his personal
fanaticism, as well. Saints, it seems, rarely were easy to get along with or to
live with—a problem John solved by separating himself from the community and
dwelling out there in the desert with the locusts and the wild honey.
The voice of him that crieth in
the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a
highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made
straight, and the rough places plain:
And the glory of the Lord shall
be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord
hath spoken it.
The voice said, Cry. And he said,
What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the
flower of the field:
The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is
grass.
The grass withereth, the flower
fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
John was beheaded for speaking out against the personal
immorality of a powerful political figure. I wonder where we ever got the idea
that Christianity was supposed to be comforting?
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