Asia loses if language of 'security' used to cover military expansion

Japan has dispatched 420 Ground Self-Defense Force personnel to the Philippines to participate in the United States-Philippines Salaknib 2026 military exercise, which opened at Fort Ramon Magsaysay on Monday last week, finishing on Friday.

Couched in the familiar language of contemporary security cooperation — readiness, interoperability, coordination — this is the first time since World War II that Japanese ground troops have taken part in military drills on Philippine soil, a fact that gives such deployment a meaning that administrative language cannot erase.

Nor is this an isolated development. The Japan-Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement came into force on Sept 11, 2025, giving the two sides a firmer legislative and logistical basis for closer defense cooperation. What is taking shape, therefore, is not a one-off adjustment to a changing security environment.

For decades after World War II, regional expectations were clear enough: Japan would not assume a military role that appeared too forward and reminiscent of its wartime atrocities. But that expectation is now changing through Tokyo's plans to revise its pacifist Constitution, institutional adjustments and repeated participation in external security activities.

This matters, especially in the Philippines where Japanese forces committed horrific wartime atrocities during their occupation of the country, including the Battle of Manila in 1945 when they massacred over 100,000 Philippine civilians. The brutality of that period left deep scars there and remains among the darkest chapters in Asia's modern history.

The current development must also be placed in a wider strategic context. From Washington's perspective, minilateral arrangements are attractive precisely because they are faster, narrower and more strategically controllable than broader regional platforms. They allow the US to tighten security coordination among selected partners without having to work through the slower and more inclusive logic of regional multilateralism.

US military statements present Salaknib as part of an effort to deepen readiness and interoperability in support of a "free and open Indo-Pacific". A Japan willing to play a more visible and active role fits neatly into that design.

But what serves US strategic convenience does not serve Asian stability.

For many years, Asia remained manageable not only because of deterrence, but because its diplomacy retained a degree of elasticity. That is one reason the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations matters. It is not a decorative phrase. At its best, it has helped preserve room for inclusiveness, dialogue and balance in a region long wary of bloc rivalry and external domination.

That tension is particularly visible in 2026 because the Philippines is serving as ASEAN chair. In principle, the ASEAN chair is expected to help preserve a regional order that leaves room for dialogue, flexibility and inclusive coordination. Yet Manila is at the same time moving more deeply into security arrangements with Washington and Tokyo that point in a more exclusive direction. The contradiction is not merely diplomatic. It risks weakening the very regional balance that the chair is expected to uphold.

Japan's place in this trend deserves special mention. Its military history is inseparable from some of the region's deepest historical trauma. That is why each outward extension of Japanese military activity carries a political weight far greater than the technical terms used to describe it. Interoperability may explain the mechanism. It does not settle the meaning. Legal agreements may facilitate military access. They do not dissolve historical memory, nor do they automatically create regional acceptance.

A durable regional order cannot be built on the steady normalization of bloc rivalry, forward military positioning and selective historical amnesia. If Asia is to remain governable, it needs a security framework that still leaves room for restraint, dialogue and political accommodation, rather than one that assumes the language of "security" can move ahead of history.