Kolkata's The Telegraph announces "a rupture with the principle of post-War pacifism: that Japan and Germany had adhered to for decades". The West Bengal-based newspaper was founded in 1982 by Aveek Sarkar, a former protégé of Harold Evans at The Sunday Times in London. The editorial highlights certain aspects worth noting.
First and foremost, there is a psychological dimension to the crises in the world order. The ideologies of the post-war order, imposed on the defeated bourgeoisies of Germany and Japan for decades, have permeated the whole of society to the point of becoming second nature that shape the German and Japanese ruling classes themselves. But today, a re-evaluation of these ideologies is in turn being imposed by an uneven development that, over the long term, has been economic, political, and military. This is a Zeitenwende, a change of era, which, through accelerated rearmament, is shaking up political cultures that have long been restrained on matters of war and military violence.
In Tokyo, Sanae Takaichi's government has undertaken a review of Japan's security apparatus and traditional defence policies, with the aim of increasing spending and revising its highly sensitive nuclear stance. In Berlin, a roadmap for rearmament has been adopted for the first time since the Second World War, with the aim of transforming the Bundeswehr into Europe's most powerful conventional military force by 2035. In both cases, the burden of the pacifist tradition is being reconfigured and transformed, but this is also a "signal" to all the major powers that is also being felt in India. Tokyo and Berlin's emergence from the status of strategic inferiority in which the Second World War had relegated them right up to the imperialist convention of the 1980s and 1990s — is an indicator of the intensity of the crises in the world order.
For Kunihiko Miyake, former adviser to Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Fumio Kishida, Japan would be moving ever closer again to the status of a "normal country". In Berlin, there is clear concern about the unprecedented repercussions that German rearmament may have on the European balance of power.
Liana Fix is a senior fellow for Europe at the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Chancellor Friedrich Merz sought a private meeting with her during his recent visit to Washington to discuss her views on the return of German military power to the heart of Europe. In Foreign Affairs, the German researcher writes that Germany should reassure its European partners by accepting a substantial share of Eurobonds as a quid pro quo for German rearmament. Similarly, "to reunify with East Germany, Helmut Kohl swapped the deutschmark for the euro, relinquishing Berlin's monetary sovereignty". In the new dynamics of the German question, Fix claims Germany should not underestimate the divisive effects of an "unbridled hegemony" inherent in the pace and unprecedented scale of rearmament — a prospect that Merz sought to dispel in his meeting with the author.
For Fix, the paradox is that Germany is the only European power with the budgetary capacity to fund the continent's rearmament, "but Berlin must recognise the risks that accompany its strengths and restrain German power by embedding its defensive might in more deeply integrated European military structures". For decades, US military presence in Europe had mitigated the German dilemma, but this is now being called into question by the White House; nor does it help that Berlin appears to favour its national defence industries, thereby hindering greater Europeanisation of military spending. Fix fears regarding Germany's military and industrial dominance are deeply rooted: "Paris does not like the idea of Germany becoming Europe's military powerhouse because it believes that is France's role". "Some Polish officials fear that a militarily powerful Germany might one day feel free to restore amicable relations with Russia". It would, however, be in Washington's interest — and this is perhaps the real conclusion, aimed at the American public — to avoid a fragmentation of Europe, which would ultimately divert the US from the Asian challenge. But this is at odds with the erratic threat of disengagement issued by the Trump administration and, above all, with the support for European sovereignist parties endorsed in the American National Security Strategy. Yet, it has provoked remarkably little reaction among Atlanticist circles.
The weight of the crises of American credibility is the second aspect highlighted by The Telegraph in the acceleration of European and Asian rearmament. Tokyo has reason to be concerned about China, Russia, and North Korea, all nuclear powers; Germany is on alert due to Russia's war in Ukraine. But "the very reason" is the pervasive shift in the United States' position. An isolationist, transactional, and unpredictable US president has made it difficult for Tokyo to believe that Washington will honour all the commitments of the US-Japan Security Treaty. Similarly, Berlin has had reason to be alarmed by Donald Trump's hostile attitude towards NATO; the conditional withdrawal of the United States from the Alliance's commitments is no longer inconceivable. "Tokyo and Berlin's new positions on defence are thus pragmatic. But they also signify the global disenchantment with rules and moral imperatives".
At stake, more than morality, is the credibility of the American nuclear umbrella and the repudiation — whether intended or not — of the strategic rationale underlying the alliances built around it: namely, preventing Europe and Japan from developing strategic and nuclear autonomy.
The self-inflicted crisis of the extended deterrence guaranteed by the US thus helps to explain the allies' nuclear rearmament, combined with three specific features of the process in Germany and Japan: the non-linear nature of conventional precision guided missiles; the German and Japanese nuclear threshold conditions; and France, Germany's specific European threshold condition, owing to its potential to proceed swiftly towards a European deterrence alongside France and the UK once a political decision has been taken. This is what we have summarised as the new features of the crisis in the nuclear order: namely, the unprecedented shift in the balance of power is translated into the realm of deterrence.
In this respect, the two dynamics — European and Japanese rearmament — illuminate one another. In other pages of this newspaper, we report on the review of Japan's National Security Strategy. Tomotaka Shoji, who is a researcher at the Center for Disarmament, Science, and Technology at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA); he is active in the NSS review panel, but writes about French deterrence — a way of discussing Japanese deterrence through a typically Japanese game of screens.
Emmanuel Macron's speech on March 2nd at the Île Longue naval base, home to nuclear submarines, is regarded as "the most significant doctrinal shift in French nuclear deterrence since the end of the Cold War", with substantial implications for European security and for "the global nuclear order". Among the factors driving this change, China's nuclear rearmament is mentioned. With the end of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM), Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF), and New START treaties, the potential resumption of nuclear testing, and China's refusal to enter into any kind of negotiation, it is the "unreliability" of the US commitment to Europe and the erosion of the arms control architecture which has Macron to the stark conclusion that "The field of rules has turned into a field of ruins". This forces France to adopt a firmer stance regarding its doctrine and its nuclear arsenal. In short, "an ambitious recalibration of France's deterrence for a more unstable era".
Macron reaffirms certain key principles of nuclear doctrine, starting with a firm stance on the use of nuclear weapons if necessary, but he underlines this credibility by highlighting their destructive power in unusually concrete terms: "Just one of our submarines, like the one behind me, carries firepower equivalent to the sum of all bombs that fell on Europe during the Second World War. That's close to a thousand times the power of the first nuclear bomb!". According to Shoji, this vivid image of absolute destruction serve to move beyond abstract references to "unacceptable damage" — traditionally established by French nuclear doctrine against adversaries who struck France's vital interests — replacing them with the more vague and menacing formulation of "damage that [France's adversaries] could not recover from". Perhaps, we might add, there is also an allusion to MAD, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, suggesting the capacity to guarantee deterrence even without the United States.
The nation implies a strengthening of the logic of sufficient defence, the ability to "tear off an arm" from any potential aggressor, according to the French expression, making the cost of an attack disproportionate to any possible benefit. The new wording would suggest the capability for a second strike closer to "irreversible destruction", or in any case having consequences beyond the hypothetical adversary's arm. This has global implications: both for the reference to the French model by any new power aspiring to acquire the bomb, and for the comparison with China's nuclear rearmament, accused of abandoning sufficiency in its rush to match the vast Russian and American arsenals. The adjustment of French deterrence to the level of the imperialist contention is significant, both in terms of raising the threshold for nuclear confrontation between the powers and in terms of the underlying link to the rise of the Asian giants in the era of continental powers. On the other hand, an examination of China's rearmament suggests caution, since Beijing does not intend to abandon sufficiency, but rather to guarantee itself assured retaliation, and in any case to rise to the horror of sufficiency to the strategic commitments of its imperialist projection.
Macron too has declared the "indispensable strengthening of the French arsenal", according to Shoji, thereby moving away from the principle of "strict sufficiency". This is partly justified by the concept of "forward deterrence", based on the "European dimension" of France's vital interests. This concept is developed through the proposal to deploy the Forces de frappe in Europe and the call for conventional "spontaneous" for France from other European powers in the areas of early warning, air defence, and deep precision missile strikes. Thus, we note that the expansion of the French arsenal suggests a Europeanisation of the arsenal, and, if anything, this signals the beginnings of a European sufficiency.
In Tokyo, however, observers note that Macron's emphasis on conventional capabilities as an integral component of deterrence — combined with "deep strike capabilities to respond to acts of aggression" — is very pronounced and unprecedented. Japan is equipping itself with similar missile capabilities, and it is the nuclear debate in Germany that, in this regard, sheds light on their strategic implications.
The discussion was sparked by Trump's decision to cancel the deployment of American medium-range missiles allocated by Joe Biden to Germany. According to the Financial Times, this laid bare a vulnerability in European deterrence, and revealed the new nature of conventional deep precision strike capabilities that Europe had neglected while relying on American supplies. It is said that, through their development, these systems have become part of nuclear deterrence, providing "pre-strategic" escalation options in the event of large-scale conflict, and taking on a deterrent dimension through the possible use of "counter-force" — i.e., attacks on enemy launch bases.
The German debate has used the term conventional deterrence, and the Japanese one strategic conventional, to describe the grey area within which so-called long-range "counter-strike capabilities" operate. In Berlin, as mentioned above, this also retains a further degree of ambivalence, due to possible combination with the deterrence of Paris and London, and to Germany's threshold condition — a condition which, incidentally, also applies in Tokyo.
It should be added that Europe's vulnerability has been exacerbated by the US's 2019 withdrawal from the INF Treaty, which prohibited the possession and production of ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.
Jana Puglierin of the ECFR notes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Russian Iskander missiles have been deployed in Kaliningrad since 2018, joined in 2023 by fighter jets equipped with hypersonic missiles with a range of 2,000 km. In 2024, Biden agreed with Berlin on the deployment of Tomahawks, SM-6s, and Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles from 2026 onwards; as part of five Multi-Domain Task Forces conceived following withdrawal from the INF Treaty. These were originally to be stationed in the US, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific; in the latter region, they would be directed against China, with Typhoon systems temporarily deployed in the Philippines and Japan. Meanwhile, in Europe, the ELSA project — the European Long-Range Strike Approach — was launched, aimed at producing European precision-guided missiles from 2030. Under German plans, American Euro-missiles were supposed to cover the window of vulnerability during that five-year period. Trump's withdrawal, as retaliation for Europe's lack of support for the Gulf War, had not been foreseen. However, the US cannot operate effectively in the Middle East without European bases, and Europe cannot deter Russia without American missiles. These are the new linkages for the crisis in the world order.
The Old Continent is seeking stopgap solutions. Die Welt speculates on joint ventures with American manufacturers, and FAZ on ventures with new Ukrainian firms, not ruling out collaboration with Japan. Other solutions would be purchasing from the US or converting French and British naval missiles. An emerging feature of the rearmament cycle is industrial convergence between Europe and Japan, a verifiable channel of European political and military influence in the East. Finally, whether the acceleration of European rearmament will prove to be a further consequence of the American realignment remains to be seen.
The roadmap for German rearmament points to the multi-faceted dimensions that the power struggle may take on as military deployments progress. The rearmament plans envisage that the Bundeswehr will be capable of deterring Russia by 2029, that it will acquire adequate numerical strength by 2035 — one might assume that the relationship between voluntary and compulsory military service will have been resolved by then — and that it will be technologically superior by 2030; this vague formula is reminiscent of China's goal of a world-class force by 2035. One might speculate that there is a link with the date of Euro-Russian tensions, severed by the war in Ukraine, and with US disengagement, an issue which, according to Die Zeit, is addressed in the classified section of the plan. On the other hand, it goes without saying that the prospect of European-missile rearmament would cover a crucial window for negotiation with Moscow, starting with the respective alignments, every rearmament is, in essence, either a vector of negotiation or a demand for negotiation.
This was the premise of the Macron anti-force, where the goal of European autonomy in missile and nuclear matters suggested an analogy with the Euro-missile issue of the 1980s. At that time, Helmut Schmidt supported European deployment of American-made missiles as part of the negotiations between the US and the USSR for the zero option — i.e., for the withdrawal of Russian systems in exchange for the cancellation of Western deployment, and thus the removal of the two superpowers' medium-range missiles from the European theatre.
The key difference would be the deployment of European not American Euro-missiles, intended to open an unprecedented strategic dialogue between Europe and Russia. The American reaction to such an autonomous consequence of Trumpism would then need to be gauged. This is the third point highlighted by The Telegraph editorial: the repercussions of the fluctuations and contradictions of American decline are spreading in every direction.
The decision to withdraw 5,000 troops and refuse to deploy missiles in Germany coincides with the ongoing military review in Tokyo and reverberates in Kolkata and New Delhi, where a reassessment is an underway of the American role in India's multi-alignment policy, deemed "too intermittent and unreliable".
For at least 30 years, since the 1991 Gulf War, the US has worked to remain at the centre of all power relations. Today that central role is challenged by China, the rising Middle Kingdom, which is eroding the old system of relations and presenting itself as an indispensable actor in the troubled recomposition or in crises and wars. The Sino-American summit in mid-May also bears this out.
Trump arrived in Beijing with two unfinished wars: the trade war against China and the conflict in the Persian Gulf against Iran. Dr Canrong, a leading figure at Renmin University's School of International Studies, believes that the difficulties encountered by the United States in the Strait of Hormuz hang over the Forbidden City like a stone weight. Washington's likely to be more cautious with Beijing, having demonstrated the limits of its military power in the Gulf. Furthermore, the conflict has revealed that China is less constrained by the "Malacca dilemma" — its dependence on energy routes — thanks to its oil reserves, domestic production, overland pipelines, and new energy sources. Russia's comments also reveal careful energy planning, an indication that Beijing "is preparing for a serious political-military crisis in the coming decade".
Xi Jinping has reiterated his call to "transcend the so-called 'Thucydides Trap'" and forge "a new paradigm for major power relations". He draws on the now fashionable image from the American debate of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, where the challenger and the dominant power are destined for war. According to the Financial Times, China is seeking to present itself as a world order in waiting, calm and soft as silk, as implied, contrast to the turbulent American president. The key to Thucydides' theory is the time factor, which Beijing believes works in its favour. However, even The Wall Street Journal, on the opposite side, believes that a debate with China would be acceptable if intended to "buy time" for American rearmament and re-industrialisation — i.e., the hypothesis that deregulation, energy advantages, and the development of artificial intelligence will help counter the decline. Among other Chinese commentators, this is what Zhao Maoruo saw in the American NSS: the US as a wounded superpower attempting to follow a strategy of "hiding strength and biding its time" — an approach designed to regain its power. A strand of Chinese analysis therefore views American appeasement with suspicion, regarding it as tactical.
On the other hand, the analogy with Athens and Sparta suggests parity between the two powers, or at least a challenge between powers operating at the same level of strength. Xi's formulations evoke the "new type of great-power relations", a status that Barack Obama had ultimately refused to grant to China. For Shen Yi, an outspoken voice at Fudan University in Shanghai, "the approach only became acceptable once the power relations had been consolidated". Even Zheng Yongnian, an advocate of inclusive multilateralism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen, recognises stabilisation as a Chinese achievement: "Relationships built on a foundation of strength are the most reliable". But for Zheng, the summit could mark the start of a "completely new phase", once "the objective reality that China and the United States have formed a de facto G2" is accepted as a de facto condition rather than a political choice. Once the quantitative relationship has been defined, the question is which policy will define the qualitative relations: for Zheng believes that stability is merely the prerequisite for building a "new international order" in the future.
Beijing makes a claim to building "constructive strategic stability" with Washington, presenting itself as a stabilising power against the acceleration imposed by the US on the crisis in the world order. For Li Haidong, of the China University of Foreign Affairs, the stability of relations is a "global public good" that Beijing offers, demonstrating its ability to reform the imperialist American system. In Chinese commentary, however, the G2 formula is received with ambivalence: on the one hand, it is an opportunity to influence the US; on the other, it is a burdensome commitment that may also constrain China in its relations with other powers. After all, the confrontation between the US and China cannot be a two-way street, just as the one between Britain and its challengers in the two world wars was not. Rearmament in Europe and Asia serves to disprove any claim of a bipolar world.
Wu Xinbo is dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, and for many years headed its Centre for American Studies; furthermore, as a regular at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was present at the gala dinner hosted by Xi for Trump. Having long been following the evolution of his posture of "strategic composure", he is grappling with his work China and the Asian Crisis in the Asia-Pacific [2014], a response to Zbigniew Brzezinski's Strategic Vision. For Wu, "unable to maintain its original international position, the United States is opting for more pragmatic strategic choices". Trump achieved he could force China to make concessions, but the trade war has resulted in a "soft landing": if strategic stability holds for the next three years, this will prolong the window of opportunity and "give time and space" for China's development.
Wu warns against the logic of the G2. The agreement may be a delaying tactic, but also a strangling path: Washington appears to see it as "hegemonic co-management aimed at limiting China", in contrast to the Chinese position of "equality but not co-dominance"; the "Global South" would view it as an illegitimate monopoly by the great powers; finally, China would risk alienating key balancing partners such as Europe, India, and Brazil.
For Jia Qingguo, too, American engagement is tactical and serves the US to "buy time to reorganise". On closer inspection, it was Washington that launched the strategic offensive, partially triggering the "Iliades trap" in the commercial sphere. For Jia, China's firm stance has produced a "strategic stalemate" that is now pushing the US to accept the concept of the G2, giving an impression of co-governance that misses competition for resources in Latin America and the Gulf, for control of the Strait and export markets, right through to support for Asian rearmament to contain China in the Philippines and Japan.
There is a clear dialectic between Liang Canrong from Beijing and Zheng Yongnian from Guangzhou. For Jia, "humanity is entering a global version of the Spring and Autumn Period [722-481 BC] and the Warring States Period [475-221 BC]". For Zheng, in his latest book Change and Resilience, "the modern world is entering an era of great change, comparable to the European period between 1848 and 1945". Zheng suggests that China must demonstrate strategic composure, as external peace and internal development relative to one another, but Jia objects that "continuing to prioritise trade over security issues undermines China's relations with middle powers vulnerable to American coercion". Even the Chinese Dragon, we note, must contend with ideologies that have become real forces. "Against the trend towards spheres of influence", says Zheng, "China remains reluctant and opts to 'adhere' to Western global order, supporting trade and globalisation". "While avoiding open alliances", writes Jia, "a tactical pivot is needed from moderate pragmatism to the more active role of 'benevolent hegemon'".
Deng Xiaoping's low profile had proved a strategic cover for the internal compromise that allowed the South to exclaim "Get rich!", the abandonment of the low profile is the expression of an objective projection of power. There is, however, a plurality of lines within the key Chinese areas, the "five lakes and four seas" in Deng Xiaoping's formulation. In his book, Zheng sees the risk of an unprecedented war in Asia, and Jia's articles document China's preparations for war. No claim to archilision can escape two simple truths of the crisis in the world order: rearmament affects all military currents of the bourgeoisie, and internationalism cannot maintain world order.