The President asks Japan to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz.

The President of the United States, on Friday morning, on the South Lawn of the White House, on his way to Marine One, paused to address reporters and called on the government of Japan to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to assist in reopening the waterway to commercial shipping. He said, in the gaggle, that Japan was a “great country” and that “they should be doing more, frankly, much more.” He named, by way of contrast, the United Kingdom, with which he has been publicly dispiriting allied cooperation for two weeks.

The Constitution of Japan, Article 9, in a clause drafted by officers of the American occupation in 1947 and ratified the same year, reads, in pertinent part, “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”

The article has been the subject of constitutional reinterpretation, in Japan, for sixty years. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces are permitted to operate, but only in defense of Japan or in narrowly defined collective-self-defense scenarios involving an attack on a closely cooperating partner that constitutes a direct threat to Japan’s existence. The deployment of Japanese warships to the Strait of Hormuz, in support of the American campaign against Iran, on the standing legal advice of Japanese government attorneys, would not satisfy any of the existing exceptions. It would be, by Japanese constitutional law, ultra vires.

The Japanese government, on Friday afternoon, through Foreign Ministry spokesman Junichi Kanazawa, declined to comment beyond a measured statement that confirmed Japan’s ongoing close cooperation with the United States and emphasized the importance of stability in the region. The Prime Minister, asked Saturday morning, said the matter would be reviewed by the relevant ministries.

The matter was, in fact, reviewed. The Japanese Cabinet Legal Bureau, in a closed-door meeting on Saturday afternoon, by reporting in the Asahi Shimbun, issued a unanimous advisory opinion that the deployment requested by the American President was not, on the existing constitutional basis, possible. The opinion was transmitted to the Prime Minister’s office. The Prime Minister’s office, on Sunday, communicated to the American Embassy that Japan would not be sending warships to the Strait of Hormuz.

The American President, on Sunday, was not addressed by the Embassy’s response. He was, on Sunday, briefed on it. He returned, in subsequent remarks, to the same request. He named, in subsequent remarks, the same allies. He did not, in subsequent remarks, name Article 9.

It is worth noting the standing of the article. Article 9, in the documentary record, is the most consequential American legal export of the twentieth century. The article was written by Charles L. Kades, a forty-year-old Army colonel, in February 1946, in the working space at the Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Building in Tokyo where General MacArthur’s staff drafted the Japanese Constitution. The article has been a load-bearing piece of the postwar order for eight decades. The American President, on Friday, asked the Japanese government to act in violation of it. The Japanese government, in the formal sense, declined.

A serious country, in a serious moment, would have known the constitutional position of the ally before making the request. A less serious country would do what was done: make the request on the South Lawn, on the way to the helicopter, on Friday morning, and let the embassy work it out.

Calmly documenting the decline.