Brent Scowcroft Center Nonresident Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security Jamie Metzl writes for Project Syndicate on how ISIS’s brutal murder of two Japanese hostages in January has caused the country to rethink its post-World War II pacifism:

NEW YORK – Soon after the Islamic State’s brutal murder in January of the Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for the country’s “biggest reform” of its military posture since the end of World War II. Abe wants Japan to become a “normal” country again, with the capacity to defend its interests and citizens wherever they are threatened. But how should his government go about it?

Even for a Japanese public that still generally supports their country’s post-war pacifism, the hostage crisis was unsettling, not least because it highlighted Japan’s military impotence. Unlike Jordan, which was able to consider a rescue mission for its own hostage and launch a powerful military response after he was killed, Japan’s constitution left it no options for rescue or retaliation.

Read the full article here.

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