The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Japan Sees the Writing on the Wall || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party just won a two-thirds majority in the lower house. This gives Prime Minister Takaichi a rare personal mandate and practically total control of the government for the next few years.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3O0pf7c

Hey all, Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. It is February somehow, 60 degrees. Anyway, today we're talking about the recent elections over the weekend in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the largest party by far in the country. Got a two-thirds majority in the lower house of the diet, meaning that Prime Minister Takaichi has basically everything she needs to run the government however she wants for at least the next couple of years. Politics in Japan aren't really policy or party-based, the more personality-based, and the first hurdle that any new leader has to achieve is a personal

mandate, and she has now done that in spades. This doesn't happen very often in Japan, usually. We have seen a series of successive weak governments that are never able to get that mandate. The last leader of the LDP, the last prime minister, who was able to secure that sort of personal mandate was a guy by the name of Shenzhou Abe, who ruled for about a decade, and he was Takai Chi's mentor. So she's learned from the best. The question, of course, is what she will do with it. Japan today, Japan 10 years ago, Japan 20 years ago, Japan 30 years ago, has always had the same two big problems. The first is demographics and the debt that comes from that. The country basically saw its birth rate collapsed before World War II and has been the oldest demographic-speaking

country in the world for several decades. They've managed to slow that decline, so about another a dozen countries are now aging faster than them, but they are still aging and they are still the oldest. And that means consumption in this country is really not possible in any meaningful way because there just aren't enough young people to do it. That leaves them dependent upon exports, but after the 80s and the 90s in a series of trade conflicts with the rest of the world, most notably with the United States, they've basically redomiciled their economy. So if you're going to exports something from Japan, you actually take your industrial plant to the country you want to export to, build it there, operate it there, employ people there, sell to people there.

And the connections between Japan proper and the rest of the world economically are actually just limited to energy pretty much these days. It actually, as a percent of GDP, trades less than the rest of the world than the United States does even. That doesn't mean that all is good. It means that you've got a Japan that really can't grow. They can still advance. They can still update, and they still have influence.

But there are never going to be the economic weight that they used to be. and that limits some of their options. The second problem, of course, is relations with the United States. Japan throughout the Cold War into the post-Cold War era has maintained the second most powerful expeditionary Navy in the world, second only to the United States. And it's been the American-Japanese alliance that has been the cornerstone of not just the American position in the Pacific, but of Japan's existence as a major power. The question that the Japanese are starting to ask in the age of Trump, too, is whether that

has legs. under shinsu a trade deal with a security add-on was negotiated in which the Japanese basically gave in on every irritant in the bilateral relationship. And Trump too comes in and says that that deal was stupid. And he actually specifically said it was a Biden deal, which was hilarious. Anyway, the Japanese are thinking that, you know, if we give the Americans everything that they want and they're still not satisfied, should we give the Americans anything that they want? We're not to the point that the alliance is in formal danger. We're not to the point where that is part of the debate in Japan. But when the Japanese see what the Trump administration has done to even

firmer allies, countries like Denmark, they have to be wondering how long this can last. It doesn't mean a war is imminent, much less inevitable. But Japan is starting to lay the groundwork for going its own way, whatever that happens to mean. And without the American partnership with Tokyo, the American, position in the Pacific goes from unassailable to something significantly less robust. The process for that happening would require probably a constitutional change because the alliance with the Americans and not having an independent military structure, that's hard-coded into the

constitution that the Americans wrote for the Japanese after the last time we had a tussle at the end of World War II. Now, the new government can start that process. They now have a two-thousand- majority in the lower house of the diet, which is where a constitutional amendment start. But then it has to pass through the upper house. And the upper house is a little bit like the U.S. Senate. Half of it is reselected every three years. And unlike the lower house where the prime minister can declare fresh elections whenever he or she wants, can't do that for the upper house. It's only on the schedule. And we just had elections in the upper house in 2025. So you have to wait until 2008. So barring a really significant change in the political environment and relations with

the Americans, it's difficult to imagine the upper house just amending the Constitution in the direction of Japan being a more independent power without something dramatic happening, and that is at the moment not in the cards. Granted, two months ago, I would have said that the Americans willing to walk away from the entire Western alliance in order to grab a chunk of ice cap wasn't in the cards either, so the Trump administration is perfectly reserves its right to throw all of this to the shitter at the first opportunity. How the Japanese respond to that, of course, is going to be the issue. And at least for the prime minister, she now faces no meaningful opposition in making day-to-day

policy. So the Japanese response to whatever happens can actually be pretty quick.