Japan bought itself a front-row seat in the coming world order, and it did so with open eyes. They understood one thing very clearly: being on the wrong side of America is a luxury for countries with youth, resources, and strategic depth. Japan has none of those. What many people lazily attribute to Trump—the American retreat from global housekeeping—started long before him. Obama was less globalist than Bush. Bush was less interested in global management than Clinton. And Clinton, in turn, was already a step down from the last true internationalist occupant of the White House: Bush senior.
The direction of travel has been obvious for decades. Anyone who failed to see it simply wasn’t paying attention.
Now imagine you are Japan. An island nation with brutal demographics, an aging and shrinking population, and no realistic prospect of restarting the growth Ponzi that keeps modern welfare states solvent. You don’t get second chances. You don’t get to experiment. You don’t get to posture. You want the strongest ally on the planet breathing down the necks of anyone who might be tempted to test you. And yes, that protection comes at a price. It always has. It always will.
What says a lot is not that Japan aligned harder with the United States—but how.
LNG supply diversification was the wrong horse from the beginning. Japan’s geology simply does not allow for large-scale gas storage. No salt caverns, no geological freebies. That means Japan needs LNG exactly when Japan needs LNG. Not later. Not “eventually.” Right now. That reality alone makes long, fragile supply chains a strategic liability.
Tankers crossing the Pacific are far harder to interfere with than those coming from the Middle East. Middle Eastern routes pass far too close to China for comfort. Imagine Beijing deciding to “manage risk” by declaring a conveniently vague maritime exclusion zone. Or imagine an outright conflict. Japan does not want to discover, mid-crisis, that its energy lifeline runs through waters someone else controls.
So Japan did the rational thing. Lock in U.S. LNG. Double down on nuclear. Shorten supply chains. Reduce chokepoints. Accept the cost.
That combination—American LNG and new nukes—is not ideology. It’s survival planning. And unlike much of the world, Japan still remembers what happens when survival planning is outsourced to hope.
