Wednesday 15 July 2026
(hosted by Japan Institute for International Affairs)
(video: TGD7 Session1 Strategic Choices for an Uncertain Era)
Ambassador Sasae, thank you for the invitation. I'd also like to acknowledge Ambassador Nogami. This is not my first JIIA rodeo, and it's very good to be back. It's also a great honor to be part of such a distinguished panel. A couple of old friends here. Very good to see them. And I've been sitting here listening, and I have to say, quite enjoying the different presentations, not withstanding the somewhat grim subject matter, because I think the Time of Monsters label has some relevance to this conversation.
I might start by making the observation that there are some very significant systemic drivers of our changing international context, and they haven't really been touched on, but I think we need to pay attention to demographic change. I think we need to pay attention to some of the deep economic rebalancing that's happening globally, partly as a result of that demographic change. I think we have to pay attention to the changing climate system and the energy transition as well. And of course, these major drivers are all interconnected in very complex ways. But the question asked me to narrow in on one most significant driver of the deteriorating regional strategic environment. And here I might slightly differ with my old friend Raja.
I'm not a declinist when it comes to the United States. I think the arguments you make about the US economy are very powerful, Raja, and I agree with them. I also think Secretary Wilkie's comments about America eventually getting it right are also apt. But I do think that the biggest change we are grappling with is the rapid and adverse shift in the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific when it comes to military power.
And if you like, paramilitary and dual-use power, I think that's relevant and especially the technological contest, because I think that's where the struggle for primacy between the United States and China is at its sharpest. And if we look at the region today, I think we're seeing increasingly concerted efforts to unpick the regional order, to strip away its more liberal characteristics and over time unpick the US alliance system, which I would argue has been at the core of that system for decades, and over time replace it with a more illiberal, more hierarchical and inherently more coercive order that manifests in lots of different ways.
Many of these sit in the gray zone, I'm thinking here of cyber operations, disinformation operations, various forms of elite capture which are manifesting in our region. I think about maritime militia activities. I think about economic coercion as well in this regard. And I think about paramilitary coercive pressure, whether it's exercised through those maritime militias or Coast Guard forces. And I think that's a very difficult problem for us to respond to as Western liberal democracies.
We are building new capability. We are relearning some old muscle memory that perhaps we lost since the Cold War, and we're building new partnerships to deal with many of these challenges. But it's a difficult problem. And I think if you're objective, you would say we are sort of gradually losing some of that contest, even though we are working hard to offset that.
We're also, of course, seeing the increasingly overt use of both conventional and, in a coercive sense, nuclear capability in the region. And of course, the most recent obvious example of that is the unprecedented launch of a intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine deep into the Pacific Ocean, a development that the Prime Minister of Australia described as destabilizing and provocative, and which has created almost universal concern among Pacific island countries and their leaders.
But that's part of a broader pattern, of course, of increasing PLA power projection deep into the Indian Ocean. And I think together, these developments really are driving much of the uncertainty and the friction and the increased miscalculation risk that we're experiencing at the moment. Of course, it's driving a set of responses. Unsurprisingly, as a strategic analyst, all of us up here would expect to see many of these responses.
Countries - including all of them, many of them represented on this panel are looking to build up their own national capabilities, the resilience of their national systems and their economies and their political systems, the forging of new partnerships. They include, obviously, groupings like the QUAD, also the AUKUS grouping. And there are others emerging in this sort of architecture of overlapping security alliances and networks across the region.
And again, many of the countries represented on this panel are involved in those developments. Here in Japan, that includes a calibrated, measured and appropriate reinvestment in defense capabilities and a more resilient defense posture, including stronger counterstrike capabilities. And it also includes Japanese efforts to continue to strengthen its alliance with the United States and to build strategic partnerships.
As we heard from Vice Minister Lim, with countries like the ROK and Australia and India, and also important partnerships with European countries, we're seeing that as part of the mix. If we look at the broader picture; continuing conflict in Ukraine; the prospect perhaps, according to some reports, of a more desperate President Putin contemplating military action against countries in Europe other than Ukraine in the future, perhaps in the next several years, as he's built this war economy and may look for some other way to find victory (or at least something he can claim to be a success).
The very unstable situation, obviously, in the Middle East today, the depletion of US magazines, whether it comes to strike weapons or interceptors for defensive purposes, all of these things, I think, cause grave concern for us in this region. We have to worry about the aggregate impact of these other theaters on deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, because these theaters are deeply interconnected.
And I think we also have to pay attention to the bandwidth of our systems and the domestic pressures that all of our countries are facing, including in terms of debt, which was touched on again, and other domestic pressures, including aging societies and so forth. So when I net all of that out, my conclusion is a mix of optimism, cautious optimism, because I do believe that some of these counterbalancing impulses going to build more deterrence, but also a time of intense risk over the next 5 to 10 years. Because despite talk of strategic stability between the first and second most powerful countries in the world, I do not see a genuine move towards creating the sort of strategic stability that was in place for much of the Cold War.
And also, I think, concerningly the threshold for conflict has come down in recent years, and that is something that should worry us all. I'll leave it there.