Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged that he will bring back a strong Japan while visiting the United States last week.

This has raised eyebrows, to say the least, in a region that vividly remembers his country's brutal rampage across Asia 70 years ago.

Abe desperately wants Japan to stand tall, yet the case he is trying to make is legally and morally flawed. Abe reiterated his determination to revise Japan's war-renouncing constitution to establish a "national defense force" and asserted Japan's right to collective self-defense, which is prohibited under the Japanese government's current interpretation of the charter.