Japan’s Quiet Leadership: Reshaping the Indo-Pacific
Mireya Solís. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. 260 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander J. Scott Shaffer, U.S. Navy Reserve
In the 2022 National Security Strategy, President Joseph Biden outlines the importance of promoting peace in the Pacific by maintaining a close relationship with regional partners and treaty allies, including with the U.S. commitment to the defense of Japan. However, the actions of the Japanese government over the past 20 years highlight Japan’s skepticism of U.S. dedication in the face of growing Chinese aggression. These measures include implementing a new strategic framework focusing on Japan’s national interest and resulting in its status as a leader in the region. Such initiatives stand in contrast to Japanese security policy during the Cold War and throughout the 1990s, when Japan relied on the United States.
The strategic shift did not go unnoticed and generated a number of books analyzing Japan’s role in regional security. Mireya Solís’s Japan’s Quiet Leadership: Reshaping the Indo-Pacific offers the most recent assessment. Consistent with other evaluations, her work emphasizes Japan’s success in promoting free trade, leading and developing the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), increasing its defensive capabilities, and promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific. These efforts illustrate Japan’s initiative and independence over the past two decades, with the author offering her analysis of their success.
Solis defines the security, political, and economic conditions that drove Japan’s self-determination in prioritizing regional security. The U.S. entanglement in the Middle East and withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership forced Japanese leaders to reevaluate the bilateral relationship. Further, Japan faced domestic political instability resulting in six new prime ministers in six years, along with a number of economic challenges. These circumstances provided the platform for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to announce his strategy to grow the country’s security posture—thus, paving the way for Japan’s new leadership role in the region.
As evidence to Abe’s success, Solis cites the 21 free trade agreements secured, along with Japan’s promotion of the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Further, Japan increased the number of security agreements with regional powers (including and in addition to the Quad) and made changes to Article 9 of its constitution ensuring collective self-defense with U.S. forces. Solis argued that four factors enabled these achievements: the lack of a populist political wave against free trade (such as those seen in Europe and the United States), effective government decision-making, a multinational diplomatic networking strategy, and the emphasis by Japanese leaders on supporting the rules-based international order. These four elements fueled Japan’s thrust into leadership in the Pacific.
U.S. military leaders with the privilege of working with the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) understand its level of commitment, professionalism, and dedication to preserving a peaceful Indo-Pacific. However, the U.S. military can have a tendency to frame bilateral operations and exercises as a lead-and-lag relationship, with the United States in the lead role. Japan’s Quiet Leadership: Reshaping the Indo-Pacific reinforces Japan’s contributions to shaping the security environment. The region remains a focal point for U.S. strategic leaders, but competing priorities across the globe continue to challenge the U.S. focus. Japan showed it can fill the gap quietly, or, in other words, without U.S. direction. The question remains, will it do so in the future? For the U.S. Navy, it should take every bilateral opportunity to grow and foster this defense relationship.
Lieutenant Command Shaffer is the commanding officer of Naval Reserve Expeditionary Warfare Training Group Pacific. His previous experience includes service on board the USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG-54) during Operation Tomodachi and as a specialist to the Indo-Pacific Operational Information Sharing Working Group.
The Neptune Factor: Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Concept of Sea Power
Nicholas A. Lambert. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2024. 448 pp. $35.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Kyle Cregge, U.S. Navy
“It’s a lot of reading … if you do it,” or so was I told by many fellow junior officers who had completed their joint professional military education (JPME). A rite of passage for lieutenants, we are formally introduced to works in the military canon. Names become singular and ideas are simplified: Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Sir Julian Corbett, and, most certainly, the United States’ own Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 serves as a central text and vignette for analysis, and junior officers walk away from JPME with this tenet to remember: Mahan wrote on the importance of big sea battles to achieve command of the sea.
Such is the problem with readings of Mahan—not solely of JPME instruction. Mahan has become a prophet more quoted than read, and as Nicholas Lambert argues, the misapplication of a portion of Influence has had “a deleterious effect on the U.S. Navy, whose persistent misreading of Mahan has handicapped its own strategic thinking to the present time.” Revisionist and radical though it may seem, Lambert’s work is surely one of the best books ever published by the Naval Institute Press. The Neptune Factor: Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Concept of Sea Power is a deeply researched, clearly argued, and thought-provoking history of Mahan and his writings. The book and its nearly 1,200 footnotes are reinforced by what Mahan read and his correspondence with leading experts of the day, along with Lambert’s comprehensive critiques of prior Mahan interpretations, which have led the Navy to see its preeminent theorist as primarily focused on combat.
Lambert demonstrates that at the heart of Mahan’s later writings and his concept of sea power is not combat, but economics. Among these tenets are the idea of the sea as “the single greatest driver of national wealth” and a “separate and equal domain,” rather than an extension of the land. Naval combat was an entering precondition to ensure one’s own or deny adversary access to that trade. As his interpersonal correspondence with leading economists makes clear, Mahan was constantly seeking to better understand what would now be called the first era of globalization. Furthermore, access to maritime trade was intimately connected with domestic political stability, whether in Mahan’s contemporary articles or his less-remembered but better-written monograph (in the eyes of Lambert), The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793---–1812. The “noiseless pressure” the Royal Navy applied on Napoleon’s Continental System (and the subsequent French regime’s domestic overreach it caused) provided the evidence for a navy’s role in economic derangement having equivalent war termination power as an army’s occupation of foreign soil.
Indeed, while Neptune Factor stands on its own, readers who enjoy it may best consider it a prequel to Lambert’s prior work: Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Harvard University Press, 2012) provides an even deeper revision to the historical understanding of Royal Navy plans to derange the German economy leading up to what would become World War I. That Mahan was in regular correspondence with Admiral Sir Jacky Fisher, First Sea Lord and the chief sponsor of the prewar British plans for economic warfare, seems like more than coincidence.
Whether as applicable history or a detailed revision of prior interpretations, Neptune Factor succeeds. One cannot help but see pulled quotes and bureaucratic or political dynamics that have their analogy today. By no means is Lambert seeking to degrade the U.S. Navy’s self-conception as a warfighting organization. Rather, he seeks to restore and reinvigorate the peacetime and economic purpose of the service, in much the same way Congressman Mike Gallagher did by way of the 2023 modification of the Navy’s Title 10 mission. There appears no better contemporary evidence of the Navy’s utility and Mahan’s arguments than the Navy’s continued battles against Houthi militants, who seek political ends through attacks against the international economic system of maritime trade.
To appreciate Mahan and his theory of sea power in its fullest form is to read all he wrote, what he wrote to those with whom he corresponded, and what he read throughout his life’s work. It is a lot of reading, and Nicholas Lambert did it. Now, we must too. Go read Neptune Factor.
Lieutenant Cregge is a surface warfare officer. He is the operations officer for the USS Pinckey (DDG-91).
