In a tacit admission that US influence in the Islamic world is in freefall, the Biden administration is openly seeking the People’s Republic of China’s help in extricating itself from its self-inflicted fiascos in Gaza and Yemen.
From 1916-1918, General Masatake Terauchi spent a mostly unhappy two years as prime minister of Japan. He successfully carried forward Japan’s involvement in the First World War, but shadows darkened both at home and abroad.
Reform kabuki can never become actual reform until the Liberal Democratic Party is dislodged as Japan’s semi-permanent ruling party.
This month’s column will offer my impressions about how much Japan has changed regarding the issues that have always been on my radar screen—society’s openness to newcomers. On that score, I have some positive developments to report.
The notion that non-Western powers might band together to resist the depredations of Europe and the United States has been around since the late 19th century, but only now has the power balance shifted to a sufficient degree that the era of Western global dominance is actually coming to an end.
From 1914-1916, Shigenobu Okuma made an unlikely return as prime minister, this time establishing a more stable administration in cooperation with the conservative oligarchs. Okuma and his dynamic Foreign Minister Takaaki Kato led the nation into the First World War, which for Japan was a relatively profitable opportunity.
The US Biden administration couldn’t resist the temptation to launch major military strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen. In doing so, it brought renewed attention to the fact that the presidential exercise of war powers has become routinely unconstitutional.
While Japanese leaders continue to focus on possible future threats from external nations like China and Russia, the very immediate threat of climate change is taking hundreds of Japanese lives each year, with an allegedly inadequate response from the authorities.
The mainstream US liberal-left has gone so far down its own ideological rabbit hole in its desperate effort to prevent a second presidential administration of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump that they are openly undermining the democratic system they profess to defend.
Yemen’s Houthi movement has been in the spotlight recently for its military actions in the Red Sea; multiple commercial ships have been targeted in an attempt to warn Western powers, in particular, the United States and the United Kingdom, to end their support for the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.