The debates unfolding today in Japan and Germany are impossible to understand without returning to the moment that shaped both nations more powerfully than any decade since: the aftermath of the Second World War. The war did not simply defeat two regimes - it carved deep legal, psychological and strategic constraints that froze both societies into a posture of military self-restraint while exporting responsibility for their security to the United States. For nearly eighty years, this arrangement functioned because Washington had both the will and the geopolitical ambition to act as the global guarantor. Today, the cracks in that system are so wide that neither Tokyo nor Berlin can pretend the postwar settlement still protects them.
Japan’s new tax package - corporate surcharges, higher tobacco duty, a one-percent income tax rise - is officially sold as necessary to fund “defense.” In reality, it marks the slow death of the post-1945 identity that banned Japan from projecting force beyond its shores. The country that once constitutionally renounced war is now financing long-range counter-strike systems. Germany’s position is no different in spirit: a “Sondervermögen” masquerading as a one-time correction to decades of underfunding, even though the Bundeswehr remains incapable of defending the country for more than a symbolic window. These are not isolated policy steps. They are signals that the old model - moral restraint outsourced to American firepower - has collapsed.
Both countries carry the trauma of their own militaristic pasts and that trauma was institutionalised into their constitutions, political cultures and entire national identities. Japan wrapped its Self-Defense Forces in legal ambiguity; Germany built a military designed to be psychologically allergic to power. But the world around them did not freeze. As the US gradually recalibrates its commitments, both nations are being forced into roles they were never allowed to grow into and for which their societies are not mentally prepared.
The irony is brutal: the United States shaped the postwar restrictions that turned Japan and Germany into economic giants but military dependents and now Washington increasingly signals that it cannot or will not carry the same burden. Whether through strategic overstretch, domestic political polarization or shifting priorities toward the Pacific, the US is no longer the unquestioned backstop that defined the second half of the twentieth century. And as Washington steps back, the unresolved contradictions of the postwar settlement step forward.
This is where tax debates become geopolitical existentialism. Japan’s 1.2 trillion yen target buys fifty F-35s - the kind of aircraft that only make sense if a nation is prepared to strike quickly and far. Germany’s two-percent discussions hide the same evolution. Long-range artillery, air-defense systems, cyber capabilities: these are not instruments of passive defense. They are the infrastructure of a country that may need to act before being hit. And yet both societies are still chained to the post-1945 narrative that anything resembling pre-emption is aggression and aggression is forbidden by history.
That psychological dissonance is amplified by demographic decline and fiscal exhaustion. Both Japan and Germany built welfare states assuming a permanent peace dividend: low defense budgets, high economic output, generous social programs and the comforting illusion that soft power could replace hard power forever. Now, with shrinking workforces and rising strategic threats, the cost of rearmament does not simply compete with domestic priorities - it threatens to rewrite the social contract entirely.
This is the context in which provocative ideas emerge. The suggestion that Japan could legalize and heavily tax its vast grey-zone sex industry is not about morality. It is a symptom of a political class that knows the old revenue base cannot sustain the new strategic reality. Germany operates its own grey zones - shadow labor markets, under-taxed real estate structures, politically tolerated loopholes in low-wage sectors - that serve as pressure valves for an economy afraid of structural reforms. Both countries avoided confrontation for decades and that habit of avoidance is precisely what now collides with the hard logic of geopolitics.
The deeper truth is that Japan and Germany are not choosing rearmament. They are being pushed into it by the unraveling of the very order the United States created for them after 1945. And Washington, which once imposed military restraint and then guaranteed protection, now expects its former wards to build capabilities that approach the threshold of pre-emptive action - while offering no guarantee that support will arrive if deterrence fails. The old protector has become an increasingly conditional partner and the two countries that were once constrained by American power now face the consequences of American inconsistency.
Japan and Germany therefore stand in a historical paradox: defined by WWII, limited by its aftermath and now forced into a strategic adulthood they were never allowed to learn. Their challenge is not whether to increase defense spending. It is whether they can psychologically and politically transition from nations designed to avoid military power into nations that must wield it responsibly - without repeating the mistakes that made the postwar restrictions necessary in the first place.
The question is not whether they can pay for F-35s, counter-strike systems and armored brigades. The real question is whether their societies are ready for the end of the postwar world - a world in which the United States is no longer the ultimate guarantor and where Japan and Germany must resolve a contradiction that has defined them for eighty years: how to act like sovereign powers in a world that never fully trusted them to be sovereign at all.