Ben Sando
In November 2024, Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya stopped in Kyiv for a surprise meeting with his counterpart, Andrii Sybiha. Iwaya’s priority was to discuss the some 12,000 North Korean soldiers battling Ukrainian forces in the Kursk border region of Russia.
This burgeoning military alliance between Pyongyang and Moscow threatens to upset the security balance in Northeast Asia and may force Tokyo to scale back its engagement with maritime issues in East Asia.
For the past two decades, a new generation of political leadership in Tokyo has encouraged a pivot away from Japan’s insular, restrained defence posture towards greater engagement in defence multilateralism, led by the United States. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe signalled his resolve in 2014 by reinterpreting Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow greater leeway for the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to come to the aid of an ally under attack, an act Japan’s armed forces were previously unable to perform.
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