After five years, Japan’s National Security Council has established institutional weight in determining the country’s security priorities.
Author: Adam P Liff, Indiana University
On 4 December 2018, Japan’s National Security Council (NSC) marks its fifth anniversary. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration established the NSC after a decades-long reform movement aimed at strengthening the prime minister’s office and addressing perceived weaknesses of previous national security institutions. Its creation was, and remains, a big deal. Leading experts on Japan’s foreign policy have deemed it ‘the most ambitious reorganization of Japan’s foreign and security policy apparatus since the end of World War II’.
Over the past half-decade, the NSC has come to play a central role in shaping Japan’s strategic trajectory that has attracted so much global attention in the Abe era. Though its existence and structure hardly make for eye-grabbing headlines, appreciating the NSC’s behind-the-scenes role is crucial to understanding some of Japan’s major policy decisions in the past five years, as well as how the country plans to cope with current and future challenges.
The NSC facilitates top-down decision making on national security issues, deeper integration and inter-agency coordination for strategic planning and crisis management, and a more robust, political demand-driven intelligence cycle. It is designed to be a Cabinet-based ‘control tower’ for national security decision making. The council also serves longer-term efforts by Japan’s leaders to expand and strengthen the ‘ prime ministerial executive ’ at the expense of its historically powerful bureaucracy.
Though established under Abe, the NSC was the culmination of longer-term trends. Critics had recognised institutional deficiencies for decades. The NSC’s immediate predecessor, the Security Council, was judged to be insufficient to handle increasingly severe and diverse security challenges requiring more effective ‘whole-of-government’ decision making, planning, intelligence gathering and assessment.
