“Japan and the United States are currently facing the most challenging and complex security environment in recent history,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a news conference with President Biden in Washington in January.

The United States was debating how to respond to the massive Russian “SolarWinds” hack, which was uncovered during the Trump administration and had sowed malicious code and enabled cyberspies to steal information from several major U.S. government agencies.

“The government of Japan intends to strengthen its cybersecurity response capabilities to be equal to or surpass the level of leading Western countries,” Noriyuki Shikata, Kishida’s cabinet press secretary, said in an interview.

“Both within and beyond Asia, Japan faces more diverse threats and more complex international responsibilities, which call for intelligence that provides a better understanding of its national security needs,” stated the report, written by a bipartisan study group including foreign policy experts Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye.

Sensitive commercial and classified material has been stolen, the NSA’s own top-secret hacking tools have been released into the wild, Hollywood studios have been coerced and embarrassed, and the United States’ democracy has been assaulted.