Commentary
Since the National Security treaty was signed in 1951, Japan has depended on the United States for its national security, but that has been changing over the last 12 years, and that change accelerated on February 8, 2026, when voters went to the polls in a snap election called by Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. Long story short, the snap election delivered a historic landslide, giving her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) its strongest majority in more than seventy years. This was no accident. After the decades-long LDP-Komeito partnership collapsed in late 2025, she cobbled together a more ideologically aligned alliance with Japan’s Innovation Party.
