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SECURING JAPAN: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, Richard J. Samuels, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2007, 277 pages, $49.95.
Both within the country and without, Japan is often portrayed as a country bereft of grand strategy; considered, indeed, by some, to possess a "strategic allergy" that borders on the irrational. Others who concede Japan does do strategy claim that strategy is unduly idealistic and pacifistic. To the contrary, in his book Securing Japan: Tokyo 's Grand Strategy and the Future of Asia, author Richard J. Samuels convincingly argues that over the past 150 years, Japan has been both realist and rational in creating three grand strategies, and is in the midst of building a consensus for a fourth. In cogent detail, he outlines the rationales and the constraints, both...