On the agenda of the G7 leaders who met in France this week was reportedly a proposal straight out of a geopolitical conjurer's playbook: Japan's participation in the Eurodrone project.

On paper, this is a straightforward case of industrial synergy. Europe wants to reduce its reliance on US and Chinese supply chains; Japan, with its precision manufacturing, needs new partners to ease the strain on an overstretched US defense industry. It sounds like a pragmatic "alignment" of interests.

But to see this as merely a tech-transfer or investment deal is to miss the strategic bamboozling at its heart. This is the latest, and perhaps most brazen, act in a well-rehearsed Japanese trick: the art of "security" packaging. Tokyo has become a master of cloaking military ambition in the drab language of economic and technological cooperation.

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The Eurodrone initiative seems to be the perfect vehicle. It allows Japan to deepen its military ties with key European countries, gain access to sensitive drone technology for its own "counterstrike" capabilities, and embed itself further into Europe's military-industrial base — all under the guise of supply-chain "diversification".

The G7, already grappling with its existential anxieties, is susceptible to being hoodwinked in this way, as Europe's post-Ukraine security jitters mean it is predisposed to Japan selling itself as an indispensable "natural partner". By exploiting the European need to reduce dependency on the US for military supplies, Tokyo hopes to weave Japan's "remilitarization" into the fabric of collective Western security. As Tokyo sees it, if it can get a G7 stamp of approval for a project like Eurodrone, it gains a powerful imprimatur for its broader "remilitarization".

Gaining international "legitimacy" for its military expansion is not an afterthought, but the core objective of the move.

The Sanae Takaichi government has labeled China as Japan's "unprecedented strategic challenge"; Japan has doubled its military budget in a mere four years, with spending set to hit a staggering 9 trillion yen ($56.15 billion) this year; and it is actively developing offensive weapons that effectively shatter its postwar "exclusively defense-oriented" principle.

And this brings us to the uncomfortable historical parallels that polite diplomatic discourse tends to forget. The very same zaibatsu industrial conglomerates that will be at the heart of any Japan-Europe defense project were the indispensable gears of Japan's wartime military machine. This structural continuity, combined with the right-wing forces that continue to whitewash its wartime history, should set alarm bells ringing.

The proposal by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to increase military spending to 3 percent to 3.5 percent of Japan's GDP, and to build "sustained combat capability" for a prolonged "emergency", demonstrates the direction of the dangerous journey the Takaichi government is leading Japan on at present.

It is a trajectory of a state methodically, and seemingly with "great courtesy", dismantling its constitutional shackles. Japan has not yet formally revised Article 9, but with its "helicopter destroyers" that are effectively aircraft carriers and its latent capability to produce nuclear weapons, the infrastructure for a potent military force is already in place. All that remains is the final push.

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Therefore the query posed by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian warrants serious global attention. Highlighting Japan's history of militarism and foreign aggression, Lin asked some pointed and timely questions: Is Japan's militarist past returning? Is Japan speeding down the path of "remilitarization"? Could Japan once again become the bane of East Asia?

As the G7 leaders consider Japan's proposal, they should ask themselves whether they are engaging with a peaceful partner, or are they providing, through their own anxieties, a multilateral seal of approval for Japan's strategic revisionism? The European G7 members risk becoming enablers of aggression. They should not be fooled by the language of "partnership". This is about more than drones; it's about setting a dangerous precedent.