Foreign Policy Category Archive

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A Blue Dot Barely Visible from New Silk Roads

US-Australia-Japan alternative to Belt and Road helps explain why the US sent a junior delegation to Thailand and why...

Pepe Escobar • November 7, 2019

• 800 Words • 35 Comments • Reply

Chinese President Xi Jinping six years ago launched New Silk Roads, now better known as the Belt and Road Initiative, the largest, most ambitious, pan-Eurasian infrastructure project of the 21st century. Under the Trump administration, Belt and Road has been utterly demonized 24/7: a toxic cocktail of fear and doubt, with Beijing blamed for everything... Read More

Shinzo Abe's Gambit

Eric Striker • September 27, 2019

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The most recurring story Westerners get about Japan is that their society is old and dying. The latest polling data shows that 40% of Japanese Millennials are virgins. Every year fewer couples get married and fewer babies are born than the last year. The country's median age? 46. This sterility is caused by the Allied... Read More

japans_eightfold_fence_-_american_affairs_journal

Japan’s Exclusionary Nationalism: A Striking Essay

John Derbyshire • August 22, 2017

• 1,000 Words • 25 Comments • Reply

There is a striking long essay on Japan in the current (Fall 2017) issue of American Affairs by Asia scholar Michael Auslin. It opens with some lines from an eighth-century Japanese poem: Auslin then proceeds via a historical account of Japan’s sense of nationhood to some remarks comparing present-day Japan’s “exclusionary nationalism” with the rising... Read More

North Korea: Fire, Fury and Fear

Alarm bells ringing as rampant speculation breaks out over Pyongyang's 'possible' miniaturized nuclear warheads

Pepe Escobar • August 9, 2017

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Beware the dogs of war. The same intel “folks” who brought to you babies pulled from incubators by “evil” Iraqis as well as non-existent WMDs are now peddling the notion that North Korea has produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead able to fit its recently tested ICBM. That’s the core of an analysis completed in July... Read More

On Pearl Harbor Day, A Question: Is Today’s Japan Really A Sincere American Friend?

Despite a bloody history, Japan and China are now cooperating in ways that shut out the United States

Eamonn Fingleton • December 7, 2016

• 3,800 Words • 102 Comments • Reply

China is now widely seen as the coming superpower. But few even among the west’s China-watchers understand quite how fast this geopolitical freight train is approaching. Moreover, most western observers assume that China’s ambitions are being opposed by its East Asian rival, Japan. In the words of the Economist, Japan is “standing in the way”... Read More

Nuclear Blackmail and America’s Fantasy War with China

Peter Lee • August 12, 2016

• 900 Words • 9 Comments • Reply

Another day, another piece of US think-tankery poo-pooing the prospects for a nuclear confrontation with the PRC. RAND came up with a new report on the economic costs of war with China,Thinking the Unthinkable. In RAND's view the war won’t escalate beyond a limited conventional war fought in the West Pacific and over Chinese territory,... Read More

Obama in Japan

Israel Shamir • May 30, 2016

• 2,100 Words • 61 Comments • Reply

I came to Japan for the preview of Obama’s visit, when the G7 foreign ministers assembled at Hiroshima, led by the US State Secretary John Kerry. He should apologise, people said. You do not think Kerry apologised for nuking the city, did you? Neither did Obama. The Americans never apologise, banish the thought. Love means... Read More

Will the U.S. Go to Nuclear War Over Kobe or Pusan?

Eric Margolis • April 9, 2016

• 700 Words • 15 Comments • Reply

Should Japan and South Korea be permitted to develop nuclear weapons? That was the very good question posed last week by candidate Donald Trump. Washington’s elite and neocon war party threw up their hands in horror at Trump’s heretical question. The media, heavily influenced by neocons who hate Trump’s call for even-handed US policy in... Read More

Recalculating the North Korea Equation

Peter Lee • October 22, 2015

• 2,100 Words • 10 Comments • Reply

One byproduct of tensions with the People’s Republic of China over the South China Sea (to be followed, shortly, I believe by tensions over the friction between the PRC and Taiwan ruled by the DPP) is the opportunity for the United States to abandon the useful but by now threadbare fiction that the massive U.S.... Read More

Game On! for Abe in Asia

Peter Lee • October 9, 2015

• 1,700 Words • 14 Comments • Reply

On October 6, 2015, the Wall Street Journal carried this headline: Japan Ready to Lead in Asia-Pacific, Abe Says I expect that a few Japan-loving pivot-poobahs inside the Washington beltway had to spit out their breakfast sushi at that one. “But…that wasn’t supposed to happen for decades! Ash Carter promised!” After all, Secretary of Defense... Read More

Rising Sun, Setting Sun

Japan, the United States, and the Security Laws

Peter Lee • September 19, 2015

• 1,000 Words • 52 Comments • Reply

The passage of the collective self defense bills-- enabling Japanese participation in military activities beyond its home territory under restrictions that appear to be rather elastic-- --had a feeling of inevitability to me. They give more freedom of movement to the Japanese government in its security policy, more leverage in its foreign relations, and more... Read More

Japan, Teflon Nation

On Refugees as on Trade, It Excels in Managing Anglophone Opinion

Eamonn Fingleton • September 5, 2015

• 1,100 Words • 104 Comments • Reply

As Third World migration increasingly dominates the headlines in the European Union and the United States, the rich nations of East Asia have been keeping heads their down. With good reason. True to their ultra-strict immigration policies, they have been admitting virtually no refugees. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China are at one... Read More

Why We Spy on the Japanese

NSA spying often occurs because the resources are in place, and have to be used for something

Philip Giraldi • August 20, 2015

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The drama of Edward Snowden’s exposure of wide-ranging National Security Agency (NSA) domestic spying has somewhat overshadowed the steady flow of somewhat lesser revelations derived from the massive cache of documents known as Wikileaks. The most recent news reports based on five Wikileaks documents, plus a list of targeted telephone numbers, detail how Washington spied... Read More

Nikkei's FT Takeover

A $10,000 Invitation to FT Editor-in-chief Lionel Barber

Eamonn Fingleton • July 30, 2015

• 1,900 Words • 64 Comments • Reply

Dear Lionel: I refer to your public assurances that the Financial Times’s independence will not be compromised by the Nikkei takeover. You are misinformed. Frankly, I concur with the BBC’s economics editor Robert Peston who has tweeted that this is a “desperately sad” moment. As you know, I have spent 27 years covering finance and... Read More

After the Financial Times Buyout, Let’s Stop Belittling Japan’s Success

For years, anglophone media ignored the Japanese economy’s strengths. Now it’s time for a rethink

Eamonn Fingleton • July 24, 2015

• 1,200 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

For decades the Financial Times has hardly had a good word to say about the Japanese economy. It is a special irony therefore that the paper’s longtime British owner, the Pearson group, has now agreed to sell it to the Tokyo-based Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) group. How come it is Nikkei that is buying the... Read More

Japan as an American Client State

Karel van Wolferen • September 29, 2014

• 3,600 Words • 24 Comments • Reply

The American-triggered regime change in Ukraine at the Western end of the Eurasian continent has been widely discussed. Less noticed, if at all, has been the American-triggered change of government in Japan four years ago as part of the so-called ‘pivot’ aimed at holding back China on the Eastern end. The two ought to be... Read More

South China Sea: How Many Battalions Does the Passive Voice Have?

And...Island Games: Okinotorishima vs. Johnson South Reef

Peter Lee • May 16, 2014

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My Twitter feed contained the following ringing statement: To paraphrase Napoleon on the Pope, how many battalions does the frickin’ passive voice have? “Must be prevented”. That’s the problem with the pivot. The "pivot to Asia" is an idea. It's not a doctrine, like the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, or the... Read More

American Rooster Prepares to Crow Atop Asian Dunghill

Peter Lee • February 24, 2014

• 2,800 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

[This piece may be reposted if Asia Times Online is credited and a link provided.] In other words, it’s time for the United States to engage in a full-throated celebration of the pivot to Asia with what I think is going to be President Obama’s America F*ck Yeah tour of Asian democracies in April 2014.... Read More

World War III Will be Pre-Fought on Twitter

Peter Lee • February 19, 2014

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I would recommend that readers who have not yet done so create a Twitter account and subscribe to my feed (@chinahand). To my embarrassment and surprise, I’ve churned out over 800 tweets since I started up my feed last November. Some of it is meaningless ephemera, of course. But sometimes the twitter stream carries in... Read More

John Feffer: the Empire's New Asian Clothes

Tom Engelhardt • January 28, 2014

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You want ominous? Then offer a deep bow to conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a maneager to turn the Japanese military into an ever less defensive force, fully breach his country’s “peace constitution,” and assumedly someday end Japan’s “nuclear allergy” when it comes to a future weapons program. In the process, rising tensions with and... Read More

The Pacific Pivot

Why America’s Strategic Rebalance is Really Just Retreat

John Feffer • January 28, 2014

• 3,100 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

In a future update of The Devil's Dictionary, the famed Ambrose Bierce dissection of the linguistic hypocrisies of modern life, a single word will accompany the entry for "Pacific pivot": retreat. It might seem a strange way to characterize the Obama administration's energetic attempt to reorient its foreign and military policy toward Asia. After all,... Read More

Call It "Japanese Military Restoration"

Peter Lee • January 8, 2014

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After several rhetorical fits and starts, I've decided that the best description for the overall process of Japan's recovery of its full security sovereignty (exports of military equipment and technology, alliances, collective self defense, offshore military adventures, etc.) is "military restoration". "Remilitarization" doesn't fit for a country that was already a global top-ten military power.... Read More

Japan Puuuuuuuuuuushes the Envelope on Collective Self Defense

Or, US Pivot Hoisted on Japanese Petard Again

Peter Lee • January 8, 2014

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Via M. Taylor Fravel’s twitter feed I was introduced to this report from Yomiuri Shimbun Dec. 30, 2013. I will quote at length: (Parenthetically, I should point out that the notoriously vulnerable sea lanes of the South China Sea, which Japan is offering to protect, are pretty much vital to nobody but China. Japan ha

Boeing Goes to Pieces

Aerospace execs sell their industry to Japan—one part at a time.

Eamonn Fingleton • The American Conservative • January 8, 2014

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At a welcoming banquet in Japan in the 1980s, Ford Motor chairman Philip Caldwell received a memorably double-edged compliment. “There is no secret about how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell,” said the head of Toyota Motor, Eiji Toyoda. “We learned it at the Rouge.” Toyoda was referring to Ford’s fabled River... Read More

Are the Senkakus Worth a War?

Pat Buchanan • December 13, 2013

• 900 Words • 2 Comments • Reply

"The U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty of 1960 obligates the United States to treat any armed attack against any territories under the administration of Japan as dangerous to [America's] own peace and safety. This would cover such islets as the Senkakus also claimed by Beijing." So this author wrote 15 years ago in "A Republic Not... Read More

Should the US Play Solomon and Split the Senkakus?

Peter Lee • December 9, 2013

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I have grown pretty tired of hearing about the Senkakus. I have a feeling I’m not alone. As far as I can see, Taiwan has the strongest claim to the Senkakus, by geography, geology, history, and propinquity. Japan grabbed the Senkakus in 1895, lost them in World War II, then got them back from the... Read More

More Fun with China’s ADIZ

Peter Lee • December 3, 2013

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I am unwilling to join the rest of China pundits on the fainting couch, overcome with dismay and disapproval at the PRC’s unilateral declaration of an ADIZ. All the big kids have an ADIZ. The PRC has an ADIZ. I don’t think it’s going anywhere and we should get used to it. To me, the... Read More

China ADIZ: You Furnish the Hysterics, We’ll Furnish the Heightened Tensions

Peter Lee • November 25, 2013

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That guidance (to paraphrase Hearst’s famous admonition to Frederic Remington on the occasion of the Spanish-American War, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,”) pretty much sums up the interaction of the government of Japan and the Western media on the matter of the Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone or ADIZ. I’m not going... Read More

South Korea Refuses to Forgive Japan’s Wartime Atrocities

In South Korea a sense of vulnerability bred from past humiliations lies just below the surface

Patrick Cockburn • November 5, 2013

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Old hatreds bred from old atrocities and injustices are slow to disappear. South Korean President Park Geun-hye said at the start of visits to France and Britain this week that she is willing to hold a summit anytime with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whose country intermittently threatens war against South Korea. But she... Read More

Shinzo Abe: “Japan’s Thatcher” or “the Netanyahu of Asia”?

Peter Lee • October 28, 2013

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Update: According to the Japanese Coast Guard via AFP, the PRC did its bit to escalate tensions by dispatching two Coast Guard vessels to loiter in the territorial waters of the Senkakus for two hours. AFP also added this tidbit concerning Abe's defense posture: Global Times weighed in with a ferocious editorial addressing Abe's remarks... Read More

Japan Must Face Up to China

Eric Margolis • July 27, 2013

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World War II has never really ended for Japan. Sixty-eight years after the battleship US “Missouri” sailed into Tokyo Bay to receive the surrender of the Japanese Empire, Japan still behaves like a meek, defeated nation rather than one of the world’s great powers – and great peoples. Economically, Japan is a giant, albeit a... Read More

Is AP and/or the Japanese Government Really Confused About the Difference Between a Fighter Jet and a Surveillance Turboprop?

Peter Lee • July 25, 2013

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After raking the Irish Times over the coals for screwing up the headline it tacked onto the Reuters story about the alleged intrusion of a Chinese military aircraft into Japanese airspace by calling a Y-8 turboprop a “fighter plane”, I was…interested? bemused? incensed? to see AP run its story with the fighter plane characterization in... Read More

Who’s the Biggest Asshole in Asia?

Peter Lee • July 25, 2013

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You are! No, you are! Now that Shinzo Abe’s LDP has rolled to triumph in Japan’s upper house elections, we can return to the pressing matter of Chinese and Japanese fingerpointing over the Senkakus and which nation is the real source of instability in the region—while both sides nervously look over their shoulders to see... Read More

Japanese Bonds and China’s Shrinking Asymmetric Options

Peter Lee • June 3, 2013

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Sinocism kindly posted a link to my piece on China’s Japanese bond holdings, with an admonitory comment questioning my conclusion. The relevant graf (Sinocism comments in bold): I should make it clear that I am not an advocate of the “China debt bomb” theory of US-China relations a.k.a. Chineez ownz r muneez and will rule... Read More

India Places Its Asian Bet on Japan...And Asian Neo-Nationalism?

Peter Lee • May 31, 2013

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[Correction: I incorrectly identified ex-Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi as Shinzo Abe's father-in-law; he was actually Abe's maternal grandfather. Thanks to a knowledgeable and sharp-eyed reader for catching the mistake. PL 6/21/2013] In a dismaying week for the PRC, India turned its back on China...and thereby drifted further away from the narrative of Japanese criminal aggression... Read More

The Tiger and the Fox

Peter Lee • May 15, 2013

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“Irritating Japan” Well On Its Way to Replacing “Rising China” Meme There is a delicious—well, delicious to me, anyway—flavor of Western bewilderment about the neverending parade of Japanese nationalist shenanigans. The most recent entry was Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s endorsement of the World War II Japanese military brothel system a.k.a. “comfort women”: Hashimoto—who seems to... Read More

China's Border Rows Mirror Grim History

Peter Lee • May 11, 2013

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[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on May 3, 2013. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided. I was rather amused to see Paul Eckert of Reuters trolling the comment thread at Asia Times. Not the way to build the Paul Eckert brand, let alone the Reuters brand.]... Read More

A Close Call in the China Sea

Eric Margolis • February 9, 2013

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China Checks the US Picket Line

Peter Lee • December 24, 2012

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[The Asia Times Online yearender, which appeared on Dec. 22, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.] The passing year was the People's Republic of China's (PRC) first opportunity to get up close and personal with the United States' pivot back to Asia, the strategic rebalancing that looks a... Read More

Is China Trying to Implode Japan's Economy?

Peter Lee • December 3, 2012

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[This article originally appeared at Asia Times Online on December 1, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.] Is the People's Republic of China (PRC) trying to implode the Japanese economy? It is starting to look that way. The PRC has counterprogramed the US pivot to Asia -... Read More

Japan Can't Keep Avoiding the Nuclear Threat

Eric Margolis • October 27, 2012

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The noisy Tokyo-Beijing fracas over uninhabited specks of rock in the China Sea are making Japan feel increasingly nervous and vulnerable. Few expect the two nations to stumble into war over the barren Senkaku Islands (Daiou in Chinese) though they are believed to abut important underwater resources. But chances of an accidental clash are rising... Read More

Why Did Japan Risk the Godzilla of Nuclear Power?

Eric Margolis • April 11, 2011

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Japan’s nuclear calamity has shown once again the remarkable courage, patience, and stoicism of that nation’s people. As a visitor to Japan for the past 36 years and former columnist for one of its leading newspapers, Mainichi Daily News, the giant earthquake and ensuing tsunami that savaged northern Japan filled me with anguish and sorrow.... Read More

No Sex Please, We're Japanese

John Derbyshire • March 17, 2011

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Last week was the 70th anniversary of the Café de Paris bombing. This was during the London Blitz of 1940-41. By March of the latter year most Londoners had learned to take shelter underground when the air-raid sirens went off. Among the capital's young moneyed swells and débutantes, however, there was an element who were... Read More

Empire Is Bad Business

The Pentagon sells out American manufacturing for Japanese bases.

Eamonn Fingleton • The American Conservative • January 20, 2011

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TOKYO—When German executives visit Tokyo, they are often treated to a session at Bernd’s Bar, a notably authentic German pub. A bit too authentic, perhaps, given its Axis-era accoutrements. The last time I was there, one of the walls still featured a huge photograph of Willy Messerschmitt in conversation with Charles Lindbergh. It had evidently... Read More

Lower Temperature of Chinese Relations with Japan and the U.S. from "Nippy" to "Chilly"

Peter Lee • October 29, 2010

• 1,200 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

China's Assistant Foreign Minister, Hu Zhengyue--who seems hold the bash-Japan brief--expressed umbrage that some Japanese officials somewhere had made inappropriate statements to the media concerning the Diaoyutai/Senkaku dispute, Apparently there will be no fence-mending meeting between Wen Jiabao and Naoto Kan at the ASEAN get-together in Hanoi What China is probably really angry about is... Read More

Maybe It’s Time to Stop Listening to David Shambaugh on China

Peter Lee • October 28, 2010

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Update: I am willing to grant that China disrupted rare earth shipments to Japan over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku incident. That's a distinction I should have made in the Asia Times article, and I regret not doing so. Given the quota system/smuggling structure of China's rare earth trade, it would be easy to slow or stop exports... Read More

The War on Toyota

It's All Politics

Mike Whitney • February 25, 2010

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Does anyone really believe that Toyota is being pilloried in the media for a few highway fatalities? Nonsense. If Congress is so worried about innocent people getting killed, then why haven't they indicted US commander Stanley McChrystal for blowing up another 27 Afghan civilians on Sunday? But this isn't about bloodshed and it's certainly not... Read More

Circular Gratification: Vice President Cheney’s Most Recent Effort to Contain China

Peter Lee • March 19, 2007

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Vice President Cheney recently visited Asia to lend his prestige and power—two increasingly devalued commodities--to two faithful and embattled allies in his global campaign of confrontation and containment, Japan and Australia. Japan, in particular, needed bucking up, since the Abe regime is reeling from the perfunctory US abandonment of the abductee issue in the rush... Read More

Setting Sun: Shinzo Abe and the Diverging U.S.-Japan Relationship

Peter Lee • February 20, 2007

• 2,700 Words • 1 Comment • Reply

One element that continues to amaze is how cavalierly the United States threw Shinzo Abe under the bus while negotiating the North Korea agreement. The abductee issue—which Abe had ridden to power and which forms the core of his image as Japan’s new generation assertive foreign policy hard case—was dismissively pushed off to the working... Read More

The Not So Great Game: Japan's Hunt for a Security Council Seat

Peter Lee • February 19, 2007

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It must be a great relief to the impoverished nations of Inner Asia and the South Pacific to know that, in addition to the profitable competition between the PRC and Taiwan for diplomatic recognition, there is another cash cow dangling its teat over the region—Japan. Winning one of the non-permanent two-year elected seats on the... Read More

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Category Classics

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

Laurent Guyénot

• 381 Comments • Reply

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up

The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.

Sydney Schanberg

• 148 Comments • Reply

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars