The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Japanese Weapons Are Open for Export || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Japan has lifted its long-standing restriction on exporting weapons. This will bring some fresh dynamism to the global defense industry, specifically in naval manufacturing and drones. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter:

Hey, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Nashville. Today we're going to talk about something actually happened about a week ago. The Japanese changed their illegal structures so they can now, for the first time since World War II, export weapons. So the question is, how big of an impact that this have in what sectors over what sort of time.

Japan has the world's second largest navy, but they have always, by design, not had a particularly large military because of the whole World War II thing, And in all operational terms, the United States more or less operates their military on a tactical level whenever we decide we want to. So that has encouraged the Japanese to not do a whole lot. And so in terms of percent of GDP, which is a threshold that most people use for defense spending, the Japanese have actually dipped down to as low as about 1% as of 10 years ago. Now, as China has become more of a threat that has risen, and they're now spending just under 2%, and, you know, if you double the size of your defense budget, you would think that your military

industrial complex would expand, and it has, but not by as much as you might think. The Japanese are working from the theory that before we get all the hardware, we should make sure that we have the right people in the training regimen works, hard to argue, and that means that the defense expansion hasn't really kept up. So a sudden change and the ability to export weapons doesn't immediately translate into those weapons being available. But this is still Japan, one of the most technologically advanced cultures with the fastest rate of change in technology and manufacturing in human history. And now that they can access the market, they're going to. So kind of phase one is there are 20 countries that they consider allies,

which concludes most of NATO, where weapons are now legal to sell to. And the question is, what are they going to do? The obvious one is ships, especially small ships, and they've already cut a number of deals, including with, say, Australia, to turn more ships out of their shipyards and get them out there. And since the Japanese Navy is one of the three most powerful on the planet at the moment, the Brits, the Japanese, and the Americans, I don't doubt that they can do that in number in a relatively short period of time. But it's the second phase that I'm really interested in. Japan is a partially robotic society. This is a country that has been aging very, very quickly and as the world's oldest average population. And so 15, 20 years ago, they established a

national robot strategy to basically automate and robotize whatever part of their economy that they could because they knew they weren't going to have the people and they knew that the people were going to need the obsicitance. You mate that with what is going on in this second phase of the revolution in military affairs. And all of a sudden some really interesting things can come out of the drone world because when it comes to actuators and things like that, the Japanese have been doing it for decades. So we now have a deal in place already between the Japanese and the Ukrainians to bring Japanese production capacity to Ukrainian drone tech. You put those two things together, a fast-adapting automated workforce with a very quick turnaround on things like prototyping. And you're talking about

Japan becoming a massive drone power in probably less than two years. years. And now they have export capacity. So I don't know what they're going to look like, but we're going to have Japanese built drones produced in mass and exported in mass in the not too distant future. And we're only at the very beginning of understanding what drone warfare means in general. We are utterly unprepared for what it means when the Japanese take lead in that sector.