Germany and Japan once threatened democracy. Now they’re saving it

It’s one of the most remarkable transformations of our time. Japan and Germany are emerging from three-quarters of a century as pacifist nations to become fully armed and active.

Not that they’ve wanted to. They’ve been enjoying a very comfortable existence to now.

After their WWII fascist regimes failed and fell, they were content to allow the US to provide their defence overwatch while they concentrated on building two of the most prosperous and successful liberal democracies on earth.

Germany today is the world’s third-biggest economy and Japan the fourth. Both are in the exclusive club of countries classified by the Economist Intelligence Unit as “full democracies”.

This club has only 26 members remaining out of 167 countries assessed. It includes Australia. But not the US. Since 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected, America has been listed as a “flawed democracy”.

If history were a Norse deity, it would surely be the god of mischief, Loki. The greatest wartime fascist powers are now bastions of liberty while the chief wartime defender of freedom is now showing autocratic tendencies.

It is America, like Russia and China, that now seeks to destabilise the world. Reluctantly at first, purposefully now, Tokyo and Berlin are beginning to assume responsibility for preserving order.

“Both Germany and Japan appear to have crossed a strategic Rubicon, moving decisively away from the constraints of post-WWII pacifism toward a more assertive and self-reliant security posture,” says Indian analyst Harsh V. Pant of the Observer Research Foundation. Even while they each remain host to big US military bases.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is positioning his country as the central bulwark against Russian invasion of Europe. “We are seeing more and more clearly that Russia’s aggression was, and is, part of a plan targeted against the whole of Europe”. And Europe, he says, is at “five minutes to midnight”. Vladimir Putin, he says, is a “war criminal”.

Yet, at the same time, he sees Germany’s great protector, the US, as completely unreliable: “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

Germany’s defence spending last year grew by a sharp 24 per cent to hit 2 per cent of GDP for the first time since the end of the Cold War; Merz says he will drive it to 5 per cent.

He is pushing a major expansion of German military industry, and he has reinstated national service on a voluntary basis. With Germany currently dependent on Washington for its nuclear shield, he’s now in talks with France and Britain on a joint European nuclear umbrella.

Japan’s prime minister Sanae Takaichi is positioning her country as Asia’s central point of resistance against China’s expansion: “China has intensified its attempts to unilaterally change the status quo through force or coercion in the East China Sea and South China Sea,” she told Japan’s parliament.

If China should attempt to wrest control of Taiwan by force, she said it would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. The legal significance of this classification is that it would allow Japan to deploy its military in defence of Taiwan. If so, it would be the first time Japanese forces had fought any war since 1945.

In response to this plain speaking, a Chinese diplomat called for her to be “decapitated” and Xi Jinping imposed a campaign of intensified coercion on Japan.

Japan’s self-styled “Iron Lady” has refused to buckle. Under Chinese economic sanctions, and with Japan’s air force required to scramble to intercept Chinese air force jets on average one and a half times a day, Takaichi is breaking long-standing taboos.

She has accelerated rising defence spending. A few years ago, her predecessors discarded the self-imposed limit of 1 per cent of GDP; by stepping up spending by 9 per cent, she has now delivered 2 per cent of GDP, and signals further increases.

Her government legislated to allow Japan to sell arms to 17 like-minded countries, including Australia. It’s deploying missiles to Japanese islands close to Taiwan. It’s toughening laws on foreign investment. And, in a country with only the feeblest intelligence capability, the government is creating a national intelligence council chaired by, of course, Takaichi herself.

Now Prime Minister Takaichi is visiting Vietnam and Australia to build a secure supply chain of critical minerals; Beijing’s punitive campaign has cut off the supply to Japan. “A nation that does not take on challenges has no future,” she has said.

And her position on America? One big difference between Germany’s Merz and Japan’s Takaichi is that while Merz has denounced the US president, Takaichi has embraced him.

Notably, in her statement to the media in Canberra on Monday, she spoke of increasing co-operation between Australia and Japan in co-ordination with their “indispensable” ally, America.

When she shared a podium with Trump on the deck of a warship, she bounced and spun, smiling, like an exuberant schoolkid. They’ve exchanged flattery. If she were to antagonise Trump, she calculates, it would only embolden Xi unnecessarily. And that would not help Japan.

Yet, she is busily diversifying Japan’s military and commercial ties. Japan has struck a deal to develop a new fighter jet with Britain and Italy, for example. Relations with Australia are growing intimate.

One of the new agreements Takaichi signed with Anthony Albanese on Monday will allow Japan’s military to train in Australia. And she set out values that Japan and Australia share – “freedom, democracy and the rule of law” – a list that no longer applies in full to the US.

US security assurance for these key traditional allies is withering before our eyes. Trump has shifted US missile defences away from Japan to wage war on Iran, for instance. And Trump is withdrawing troops from US bases in Germany in a petulant response to Merz’s comment that Iran was “humiliating” the US.

Japan and Germany are not only waking from their long strategic hibernation in their separate regions. They’re intensifying relations with each other, too. Tokyo and Berlin are negotiating an agreement to allow each other’s military forces to share facilities. The WWII axis of fascism is reforming but, this time, as an axis of freedom.

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. His international affairs column can be read in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age each Tuesday.

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