Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

For the most part, gambling is illegal in Japan, and the Japanese are wary of it.

It can be addictive and has a whiff of the criminal underworld about it.

But casinos are now legal and the government wants to let the world's biggest casino operators in.

And globalization has ensured that most spirits can be found everywhere, but you won't find Tequila in India.

So one cocktail enthusiast on returning home from America has fired up a still and is making a gava spirit.

Just don't call it Tequila.

But first, today NATO Defence Ministers will conclude their meetings in Brussels,

ahead of a security summit that starts in Munich tomorrow.

The two-day summit comes as the defence alliance is increasingly under the spotlight.

President Donald Trump has long complained that European governments aren't pulling their own weight

when it comes to spending and troop deployments.

They are really sort of letting us down in that one respect, and we don't want people taking advantage of the United States.

He wants NATO to take a more leading role in the Middle East.

In response, ministers have agreed, in principle, to take over some of the training in Iraq that's currently being carried out by a US-led coalition against Islamic State.

It's not clear whether more NATO troops will be deployed or whether more NATO partners will be drafted into a rocket.

What is clear is that the alliance is bending to international pressure.

NATO in the past two or three years has had a pretty difficult time of it, partly because of Donald Trump's pressures on it from the White House.

He's been pushing very hard, harder than perhaps any previous president for NATO members to be spending more money to carry their fair share of the burden as he would put it.

Daniel Franklin is the economist's diplomatic editor.

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