Wake-up call for security architecture

Japan's newly released 2026 defense white paper reads less like a sober assessment of regional realities and more like a carefully crafted narrative designed to manufacture domestic consent for accelerated militarization. It portrays China as an "unprecedented strategic challenge" that must be met with "overall national strength" and deeper alignment with allies. Almost simultaneously, Tokyo has moved to create a centralized intelligence agency — the first of its kind since the end of World War II — overturning eight decades of postwar decentralization. These steps, taken in the shadow of the 80th anniversary of the Tokyo Trials, and against the enduring refusal to fully confront wartime atrocities, including the biological barbarism of Unit 731, generate understandable unease across the region.

Layered onto this is an even more sobering development. Reports indicate that the Pentagon is drafting a classified nuclear strategy that places greater emphasis on the potential use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in a regional conflict involving China or Russia. The combination of Japanese remilitarization, historical amnesia and US nuclear signalling creates a dangerous escalatory environment. It is a wake-up call that the old architecture of exclusive blocs and forward military presence is not merely fraying; it is actively raising the risks of catastrophic miscalculation.

The material foundations underpinning US regional primacy have already eroded. Depleted interceptor inventories, multiyear production timelines and structural industrial constraints mean that Washington cannot sustain the forward posture it once took for granted. Rhetoric about deterrence cannot substitute for magazine depth and replenishment capacity. Into this vacuum, exclusive minilaterals and intensified alliance structures offer no sustainable answer. They narrow options, heighten threat perceptions and lock the region into a competitive logic that serves neither stability nor prosperity.

What is urgently required is a different pathway — an Asian Way grounded in historical memory and imaginative statecraft.

This pathway must move away from the logic of blocs and toward inclusive security. The intellectual and political resources for such an architecture already exist. The Bandung Conference of 1955 articulated principles of sovereign equality, mutual respect and peaceful coexistence that later helped inspire the Non-Aligned Movement and remain profoundly relevant. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence continue to offer a practical foundation for managing differences without resort to force or exclusive alliances. Together they point toward institutions built on indivisible security: the understanding that the security of one state cannot be purchased at the expense of another.

An inclusive Asian security architecture would stand in deliberate contrast to the closed groupings favoured by the US strategic axis. It would not be limited to any single subregion or set of members. It would be open to all states prepared to accept the core norms of nonaggression, noninterference and mutual restraint. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is well positioned to act as convener and curator of such a process. Its patient consensus-building, demonstrated in the negotiation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, shows that the region already possesses the diplomatic capacity to work across diverse interests and produce durable multilateral outcomes. The same method can be applied to security.

Strategic thinkers across Asia must now think historically and imaginatively. History teaches that militarization pursued without genuine reckoning with the past carries profound risks. The failure to fully confront the crimes adjudicated at the Tokyo Trials, and the darker chapters of Unit 731, continues to cast a shadow over regional trust. At the same time, imaginative diplomacy is required to construct institutions that can absorb and transcend the pressures of great-power competition. Exclusive alliances amplify those pressures. Inclusive arrangements can dampen them.

Economic resilience forms a necessary complement. The coercive leverage of the US has long rested on energy and financial channels. Pathways toward greater autonomy — through accelerated electrification and the development of parallel payment systems — are already emerging. These practical measures reduce vulnerability and expand the space for independent regional agency.

The present moment is one of genuine fluidity. Japanese domestic mobilization, US nuclear signalling and the structural decline of forward conventional capacity have created openings that can either harden into dangerous confrontation or be filled by a more stable regional order. The choice is not between Chinese dominance and US hegemony. It is between a future organized around exclusive blocs and one organized around inclusive security.

An Asian security architecture rooted in the Bandung principles of peaceful coexistence and indivisible security is no longer a distant aspiration. It is the most realistic means of stepping out of the shadows of great-power rivalry and preventing the region from becoming the theatre of a conflict none of its peoples can afford. The wake-up call has been issued. The responsibility now rests with the strategic communities of Asia to answer it with clarity and resolve.

The author is an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and former policy adviser to former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.