My latest… an analysis of both change and continuity in Japan’s defense policy under the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe… has been published in The Washington Quarterly. In it, I aim to inject some sober-minded analysis into a domestic and international discourse on Japan’s security policy trajectory that typically generates more heat than light, and which is generally biased by a one-sided–and often misguided–focus on change. I argue that although practically significant in a Japanese context recent developments under Abe are at most radically moderate, and continue decades-old trends toward “reactive realism within strict normative bounds.” Recent reforms have stretched, but not removed, Japan’s core principles of self-restraint.

• Liff, Adam P. “Japan’s Defense Policy: Abe the Evolutionary.” The Washington Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2015).