Future Research
The direction of my research will admittedly depend on what my next job is. However, broadly speaking, I am interested in researching the future of Japan-Europe relations and how U.S. allies will respond to the second Trump administration.
There are several broad questions I could explore. Specifically:
- How will Japan and European democracies respond to the shift from U.S. liberal hegemony to illiberal hegemony?
- How will Japan and European democracies respond to the transactionalist turn in U.S. foreign policy?
- How will Japan and other U.S. allies respond to (limited) U.S. retrenchment?
- How will Japan and other U.S. allies respond to the return of multipolarity?
- Will Japan be more effective in achieving its foreign policy objectives and security if it approaches European democracies as an independent actor or as a U.S. proxy?
- What are future areas of Japan-Europe security cooperation?
- How are security challenges in the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic linked? What can be done by Japan to help address security challenges in the Euro-Atlantic and by European democracies to address security challenges in the Indo-Pacific?
I have several research tools that I can use to start answering parts of these questions, including:
- Interviews: directly ask those involved in policymaking today about their efforts and objectives, how they think about what they are doing.
- Wargames: draw on the experience of policymakers and knowledge of experts to simulate how countries will react in situations that they have not encountered yet.
- Historical research: draw on primary and secondary sources to analyze how countries have reacted to similar situations in the past (with careful consideration of how the future is different from the past).
- Surveys and survey experiments: directly ask the public how their policy preferences are evolving in response to current developments and manipulate the information they are presented with to understand how their policy preferences might evolve in a possible future.
Again, at this point, the direction of my future research is likely to be driven by my next job, and I am open-minded to other lines of Japan- and/or international security-related work.