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Japan has just chosen Sanae Takaichi as its new prime minister, a hardline conservative who now carries the burden of steering the world’s fourth-largest economy out of a long-standing slump. Her election — historic as Japan’s first female prime minister — is a welcome corrective to technocratic stagnation and shows that voters still value strong, results-driven leadership.
From the first speeches, Takaichi has made clear she will not be a timid steward of Japan’s future: she’s accelerating defence spending and pushing a “proactive” fiscal agenda that puts growth and national security at the forefront. That means bringing forward the target to raise military spending to 2 percent of GDP and deploying large-scale stimulus tied to strategic investments — moves that finally acknowledge that strength abroad and prosperity at home go hand in hand.
Conservatives should cheer her willingness to break with the tired orthodoxy of austerity-for-its-own-sake and to embrace what she calls bold “crisis management” investment in robotics, semiconductors, AI and energy. Those are the industries that will secure Japan’s competitiveness and protect the supply chains North America relies on, but they must be paired with market-based reforms — lower taxes, less red tape, and real privatization where state overreach chokes innovation.
Noted market voices like Steve Forbes have even praised Takaichi’s Thatcher-like instincts, seeing in her a leader who understands that bold reform can restore national dynamism — yet Forbes and others also warn she is flirting with the same old spending-heavy playbook that risks long-term instability. That contradiction is the central test: can she use spending strategically to create growth, or will she simply pile on debt and paper over structural rot?
It is not just a Japanese problem. Economists and market-watchers are already voicing concerns that an unfocused mix of heavy fiscal expansion and central-bank accommodation could leave Japan vulnerable to a fiscal reckoning that spreads through global markets and hurts American exporters and investors. The stakes are high because Japan’s economic health matters to U.S. manufacturing, technology supply chains, and the security architecture in Asia.
Patriotic conservatives in both Tokyo and Washington should demand that Takaichi turn good intentions into real pro-growth reforms: cut corporate and personal tax burdens, dismantle anti-competitive regulations, fire the bureaucrats who protect entrenched losers, and tether fiscal stimulus to clear return-on-investment metrics. Growth without discipline is a sugar high that ends in a crash; disciplined growth rooted in free markets is the only path to durable prosperity for Japanese and American workers alike.
America should welcome a stronger, freer Japan that shares our values and shores up the alliance against coercive powers, but that welcome must come with clarity — trade that rewards American workers, investments that boost mutual supply-chain resilience, and insistence that Tokyo avoid policies that export inflation or instability to our shores. The Trump administration’s high-level engagement proves how strategically important a revitalized Japan can be for U.S. economic and security interests.
This moment demands tough-minded realism from conservatives: celebrate Takaichi’s resolve and her break with timid politics, but hold her accountable to actual liberalizing reforms rather than a return to big-government cronyism. If she chooses the former, she can revive Japan and reinforce the American century; if she falls back into the latter, we’ll all feel the pain — and hardworking Americans should be ready to call it out.
