Seems the Japanese are absolutely itching to put China back in their place and plan to use the ‘big brother’ foil as a means by which to accomplish this. China have been bullying all and sundry around these now well known disputed zones in that region of the world and perhaps Japan backing up the minnow nations could bring back some balance to the Force…? Or will it just make things worse?
What say you: Is an unbridled, resource rapacious, nationalism fermenting China running amok better or is a militarised, historically antagonistic Japan a better outcome for this Asian powder keg?
Seems to me you have a double standard. If China’s trying to bully neighbouring countries (which it is) then China is the aggressor. If Japan is just resisting this Chinese aggression that doesn’t make Japan an aggressor.
And I really don’t see any Big Brother in this scenario. Even if Japan was acting aggressively towards China, it’s hard to picture China - which is ten times bigger than Japan - in the role of Winston Smith.
I do agree with the first paragraph, but I think that their using “Big Brother” is a reference to the paternalistic order Japan sought with its neighbors before/during WWII, and not Orwell. I’m not saying Japan currently has this goal as a people. There are almost certainly politicians who have that view, but I doubt they’ll be able to bring their ideas to reality.
However, I have been wrong about both interpreting a poster’s intent and international relations before.
Ah, very shrewd move by the US government. Lacking the funds and political willpower to fully engage in an Asian arms race with China, the Empire seeks to rearm its most powerful (and historically belligerent) satellite nation in the region. This way when nationalists in Japan and/or China spark a regional war, the US citizenry will be bombarded with “We must protect our allies!” until the elite get their war and subsequently, their oil fields.
I take it you pay little attention to foreign affairs, Asia, China, Japan, the size of the US DoD budget or the location of oil fields. The US is currently spending at least 3 times as much on its military budget as China, Japan isn’t a satellite state of the US, there isn’t much danger of Japan and China getting into a regional war and if they do it won’t be over oil fields, and you seem to have missed out on the last seven decades if you think Japan is “seeking” to rearm (or cough the Empire is seeking to rearm Japan). Japan has the 7th or 8th largest yearly military budget in the world. In 2012 it spent just shy of $60 billion on defense.
Nonsense. China has nuclear weapons, therefore we aren’t going to go to war with them, short of a nuclear exchange. And we wouldn’t have any use for oil fields halfway across the world if our society collapsed after much of its population was killed in a nuclear war.
First google “Japan China oil”. There your ignorance of Chinese-Japan oil feuds will be abated.
The rest of your post is spent being coy or naive about the nature of the relationship between Japan and the US, and fighting a bizarre straw man in which I supposedly claimed the US was not spending much on defense. You also miss the point of the OP which states there is movement afoot to turn the Japanese military into an offensive force, a movement backed by the US government.
It’s the conspiracy point of view we have problems with. Instead of just acknowledging the obvious - Japan is increasing its military to counter an increasing threat from China - you claim it’s a secret plot by the American government to foment a war so the United States can seize Asian oil fields.
I think you’re eliding the growing evidence of the U.S. ‘outsourcing’ its military expeditions via arming up its allies with compatible equipment (see: JSF, a.k.a. ‘Junk Scrap Flotsam’ program) and using them as, indeed, ‘satellite’ military arms.
It makes perfect sense that Japan are goaded to once again become powerful (actually, they are powerful, despite the misleading appellation of their military – analysts estimate 1-2 months before they could become nuclear capable) and therefore share the burden of corralling the rogue Chinese PLA. It’s definitely a better solution than to have the 7th Fleet floating about over there risking a third world war if some errant ordnance lobs their way; either from China or everybody’s favourite fatty, Kimmy-Jong. With Japan (and others) acting as a sanitary glove for the U.S., even live fire exchanges can be dismissed and placated through rhetoric by Washington without losing face or venturing down a politically unsavoury path of direct involvement.
Moot – ‘MAD’.
The N.S.A. tapping your every communication was a conspiracy too, before Snowden became a celebrity. “WMD’s” as a false flag war with Iraq to settle a family feud was a conspiracy until 100,000 Iraqis were immolated and none of these mythical weapons were found. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was another false flag conspiracy until McNamara all but confirmed it was…
I have no problem believing in evil conspiracies. But this is a stupid conspiracy. History has shown that there are evil people like Hitler and Stalin and Johnson and Nixon. But this is the kind of nonsense we’d get from the Joker and he’s fictional.
The NSA is spying on people? Okay, that didn’t surprise anyone with half a brain. The American government lying to start a war? It’s happened.
If the United States wanted to steal some oil fields, we’d instigate a revolution in Venezuela and then invade. It’s a simple plan, it would work, and we get a lot of oil from there already. It’s an evil plan but not a stupid plan.
But building up Japan so it starts a war with China and then loses the war with China and then we join in on the war and then we beat China and then we take all of China’s oil? That’s a stupid plan. The only people who’d believe in a conspiracy like this are people who can’t face reality and need to have a conspiracy to believe in.
I’ve never even heard of such a hair-brained, Wile E. Coyote scheme let alone suggested it was fact.
What I do believe is that the U.S. have had enough of China cheating its way into prosperity and global superpowerdom and is eager to do something about it. And given air craft carriers aren’t the power projecting deterrent they used to be (even China has one now, and will have more soon), what better way to push China back into its overpopulated, polluted hole than to use its neighbours as Israel-esque deputy sheriffs?
No, you’re eliding the fact that Japan has had one of the world’s top 10 military budgets for many decades despite keeping the military budget to 1% of its GDP. Japan has been buying compatible equipment with what is state of the art hardware for the US military for decades as well. Japan was buying F-15s at the same time that the USAF was buying them, and before that F-4 Phantoms. They were outfitting all of their destroyers with two quad Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers in the 1980s at the same time that the USN was. Japan was the first foreign nation to use the Aegis missile system. Japan is not “rearming”; they have been quite well armed with state of the art weapons for many decades.
Oh, and the name of the logical fallacy you are using is the excluded middle.
Ah, the google vomit defense. Quite a good start.
You don’t seem to pay any attention to what you write or don’t understand what the word straw man means. How else to explain this bolded nonsense you wrote?
Again, there is no rearming going on. Japan has had one of the worlds largest defense budgets for a very long time, and rearmed seven decades ago.
No, you missed that there is no point to the OP. All militaries are by their very nature offensive forces. There is no such thing as a military that is only capable of being defensive in nature. The CNN article conveniently only quotes half of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. The full text in official English translation reads:
The bolded part is left out of the CNN article; the Self-Defense Forces clearly violate paragraph 2 as they are land, sea, and air forces as well as other war potential and have been since the creation of the SDF in 1954 out of the National Police Reserve which was itself an army of 75,000 despite its name, organized and equipped to maintain order and repel invasion - that is, to engage in war which article 9 said the Japanese people forever renounced as a sovereign right of the nation. The tanks the National Police Reserve had couldn’t of course actually be called tanks; they were “special vehicles”. The constitutional dodge around this that has again been going on for seven decades is that the SDF are by law an extension of the police forces.