The Crisis Of Liberal Internationalism Japan And The World Order Yoichi Funabashi Editor by Yoichi Funabashi (editor), G. John Ikenberry (editor) 9780815737674, 081573767X instant download after payment.

Japan’s challenges and opportunities in a new era of uncertainty

Henry Kissinger wrote a few years ago that Japan has been for seven decades an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity. However, Japan has only played this anchoring role within an American-led liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II. Now that order itself is under siege, not just from illiberal forces such as China and Russia but from its very core, the United States under Donald Trump. The already evident damage to that order, and even its possible collapse, pose particular challenges for Japan, as explored in this book.

Noted experts survey the difficult position that Japan finds itself in, both abroad and at home. The weakening of the rules-based order threatens the very basis of Japan’s trade-based prosperity, with the unreliability of U.S. protection leaving Japan vulnerable to an economic and technological superpower in China and at heightened risk from a nuclear North Korea. Japan’s response to such challenges are complicated by controversies over constitutional revision and the dark aspects of its history that remain a source of tension with its neighbors.

The absence of virulent strains of populism have helped to provide Japan with a stable platform from which to pursue its international agenda. Yet with a rapidly aging population, widening intergenerational inequality, and high levels of public debt, the sources of Japan’s stability its welfare state and immigration policies are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.