The Dormant Power of the UN “Enemy State Clauses”

Germany hides in institutions; Japan stands alone.

Kazuhiro Hayashida discusses Germany’s institutional camouflage and Japan’s structural vulnerability.

The “enemy state clauses” that remain in the United Nations Charter are often described as having already become obsolete. However, this understanding is misleading. Although these provisions are rarely invoked in practice, the legal framework itself remains intact, and the fact that the clauses continue to designate only Japan and Germany as “enemy states” still carries geopolitical significance today.

The reason the enemy state clauses are seldom referenced is simply that they are currently unnecessary, not because they have been rendered invalid. In international politics, unused authority is often the most convenient form of power: easy to store, easy to revive, and easy to weaponize when circumstances permit.

Historically, Italy—despite being a member of the wartime Axis—escaped designation as an enemy state. Germany, by contrast, has successfully utilized supranational frameworks such as the EU and NATO as mechanisms of political camouflage, effectively placing itself outside the formal reach of the clauses. Under the leadership of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU frequently functions as an extension of German strategic interests. As a result, NATO’s zone of influence now closely mirrors the geographic contours of Germany’s wartime sphere, enabling the pursuit of German-aligned policies without acting in the name of the German state itself.

Japan, by contrast, possesses no such mechanisms of institutional self-preservation. It lacks both the capacity to reinterpret international law for its own protection and the political techniques of strategic ambiguity that Europe has systematically developed. As a result, Japan remains fully exposed to the latent force of the enemy state clauses and is structurally vulnerable to scenarios in which external powers may maneuver Japan into inadvertently triggering the very provisions that bind it.

In short, the common belief that the enemy state clauses have “died” obscures the real issue. The clauses persist as dormant legal instruments, while Europe has constructed sophisticated systems to bypass them. Only Japan is left in an unshielded state—without supranational proxies, without political camouflage, and without institutional buffers. Japan’s vulnerability lies less in the clauses themselves and far more in its lack of strategic design and self-protective mechanisms within the current international order.

Very bad. The Japanese have started saying strange things.

The Japanese have begun to mistakenly believe that extreme military buildup is globally acceptable because the enemy state clause has become a dead letter.

(Translated from the Japanese)