The grande fête Washington has laid on all week for Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, is very unusual on the face of it. When a head of state spends this much time in another nation’s capital, you know significant doings are afoot. And they are. In agreements reached as soon as they met Monday, Abe and President Obama have taken defense ties to an intimacy unprecedented in history. As it stands now, this breaches Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, the “no-war” clause barring Japan from military activities other than those in direct defense of its shores.

We witness reordination of a relationship between the U.S. and Japan that should have died a bad death decades ago