The United States has never been a “normal country” – although it is difficult to find or define what that actually means – and has always, since its founding, been proud of its “exceptionalism.” The righteousness that has been one of the driving motivators of the republic has led it to take a moral stance on issues that are not directly related to its own material needs and to fight for values and principles rather than focusing purely on the defense of the homeland. However, if this way of behavioral instincts were to face a reckoning, the year 1991 provided the right opportunity to change course.

The Soviet Union, once an “evil empire,” and by then far less menacing, was gone, ending a half-century standoff between the two superpowers that had faced each other at the brink of nuclear Armageddon. The successful campaign and diplomatic coordination that defeated Iraqi aggression against Kuwait revived hopes for international governance and for multilateralism as a means of maintaining peace. The U.S. role of global policeman – a role Washington had concluded it needed to fill after Pearl Harbor in order to deter threats before they reached its shores – now seemed unnecessary, with the monsters abroad gone.

While triumphalism had taken hold in the United States, and Europe was still buoyed by German unification and held high hopes for the regional integration that proceeded during the decade, for Japan the 1990s were a different story. Many Americans saw Japan as the real victor of the Cold War and a graver threat than the Soviets had ever been. Among Japanese, there was dread, disappointment, and disbelief that the country’s cherished pacifism went unrecognized – and so did its contribution to the Gulf War. 

Japan had sent no troops but had given billions of dollars, including funds for humanitarian purposes. Yet many dismissed Japan’s contributions entirely – including the Kuwaiti government, which omitted Japan from a newspaper advertisement thanking the countries that had sent troops to liberate it. Economic prowess was one of Japan’s proudest post-war achievements, and the rejection of that power’s use deepened Japan’s disillusionment with its own altruism.

The experience of 1991 was vastly different for the United States and Japan. However, at the same time calls for normalcy in both countries began to gain momentum. In the United States, both mainstream and marginal figures began calling for the U.S. to become a “normal” country – one that does not feel required to right every international problem, regardless of the distance and resources at its disposal. 

The previous year, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, an archetype of Cold War foreign policy thinking, published an essay titled “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” in which she urged the governing elites to adopt a foreign policy more attuned to domestic needs, with the end of the Cold War in sight.

“The time when Americans should bear such unusual burdens is past,” she wrote. “With a return to ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation – and take care of pressing problems of education, family, industry, and technology. We can be an independent nation in a world of independent nations.”

On the other side of the spectrum, Pat Buchanan, who declared his bid to challenge the sitting president in December 1991, called for a reversal of the post-Cold War consensus, advocating trade protectionism and immigration restriction under the slogan “America First.”

However, for the vast majority of mainstream policy elites, a new world order was in sight, and the “unipolar moment” had arrived for the United States. In the following decades, U.S. foreign policy was guided by missionary zeal for exporting democracy and liberalized markets, ultimately leading to nation-building projects. Yet these prolonged, ambitious undertakings abroad gradually eroded the popular support that had initially sustained them, and the resulting frustration culminated in the rise of the anti-elite populist Donald Trump.

In contrast, while a debate over “normalcy” was ignited in Japan, 1991 turned out to be the moment when the country realized that it was not truly “normal” after all. The debate over troop deployment during the Gulf War highlighted the domestic nature of Japan’s definition of pacifism, as well as the lack of international understanding of how it put pacifism into practice. 

In 1993, Ozawa Ichiro, then a rising star in the Liberal Democratic Party, laid out the case for “normalcy” in his best-selling book “Nihon Kaizō Keikaku,” later translated into English as “Blueprint for a New Japan.” For Ozawa, being a “normal country” meant doing what is taken for granted in the international community, and cooperating to the fullest extent with “countries striving to build prosperous and stable lives for their citizens” and on the common challenges facing humanity. 

He also challenged what he saw as a “misunderstanding” of the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, a grand strategy, coined by scholars, that praised the genius of former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s decision to put the economy first and outsource the main burden of deterrence to the United States, which laid the foundation for postwar development. In Ozawa’s view, Yoshida’s decision was only tentative. In his book, he quoted at length from the former prime minister’s own 1963 writing, in which Yoshida argued that Japan should reduce its security dependence on the United States and instead bear responsibility for contributing to world peace.

Ozawa left the LDP shortly after the book’s publication, as it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. He remained an influential power broker in opposition politics for the rest of his career, with little direct influence on foreign policy. Nevertheless, his foreign policy vision largely defined the course the Japanese government charted over the following three decades. 

In 1992, Japan dispatched Self-Defense Forces personnel to Cambodia for a peacekeeping operation, the first such overseas deployment since the SDF’s founding. The SDF went on to participate in missions in other regions across the globe. In the following decades, Japan became an advocate for global issues such as “human security” and environmental action. In terms of international security, Japan has used its alliance with the United States as a platform for contributing to global security. Japan’s championing of free trade agreements that span the globe is also compatible with Ozawa’s vision of the dual pursuit of national and international interests.

At the present, Japan and the United States seem to hold different notions of what a “normalized” foreign policy entails. For the United States under Trump, it rests on the idea, similar to Kirkpatrick’s, that the national interest, narrowly and unambiguously defined, should be the guiding principle, and that the United States should not lecture other powers or dictate how they govern themselves, so long as they do not interfere with U.S. interests. For Japan, becoming a “normal country” means shouldering a greater burden for regional and international security and committing itself to being a facilitator of international cooperation. This resembles the “exceptional” path the United States took after 1991, albeit in a quieter and more modest fashion.

However, the two “normalcies” are converging. The United States is pursuing an offshore balancing approach that delegates primary responsibility for defense to allies, while Japan shows greater willingness to shoulder the burden, driven by an independent-minded prime minister, a public concerned about regional stability, and a coalition partner that wants to truly normalize the Japan-U.S. alliance by revising it into a mutual defense pact. 

The roots of this ongoing trend lie in the 1991 moment and the lessons both countries drew from it. These different but aligning conceptions of “normalcy” are likely to reinforce the Japan-U.S. alliance going forward, as the roles within it need to be redefined and reconstructed.