"belong to the first generation of leaders governing their countries without any personal memory of war, occupation or postwar reconstruction" [first generation]
The article explicitly identifies this generational break as potentially 'more consequential than it first appears,' directly linking the absence of lived war memory to the political feasibility of current rearmament drives.
Reasoning from this article
The article treats the Merz-Ishiba generation as a structural inflection point, not a coincidence. When leaders who inherited rather than experienced the lessons of catastrophic war take power, the visceral political cost of militarization declines. This dynamic is not unique to Germany and Japan—it applies to any post-conflict state where constitutional or normative restraints on military power were anchored in living memory rather than institutional design alone. As that generation exits governance globally, similar constraint erosion should be expected elsewhere.