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.
The limited impact of economic sanctions on Russia represents an additional data point proving that the West, even when relatively united, no longer rules the world. Indeed, its losing streak in major 21st century military conflicts continues unbroken, and it serially overestimates its ability to shape global affairs.
The US government stands alone among the world’s major nations in supporting the continuing massacre of the civilian population of Gaza.
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has adopted “moral clarity” as one of her leading slogans in her quest to gain the Republican nomination for president. This is a key intellectual concept behind the neoconservative movement which reached a peak under the presidency of George W. Bush; it is effectively a coded call to embrace a forever war in pursuit of US global primacy.
As they have repeatedly done in the past, Washington and Tokyo have conspired to ensure that, should a military conflict break out with mainland China, thousands of Okinawans will be among the first to be killed.
Across the ideological spectrum, a consensus is emerging: Fumio Kishida is unlikely to last another year as prime minister, and even now, he is only lingering on because no credible and attractive alternative has appeared.
US President Joe Biden celebrated an economic agreement last week among fourteen Asia-Pacific countries, including Japan, which implicitly aims to counter China’s regional economic influence.
Somalia’s internationally-recognized government has once again appealed for the removal of the UN weapons embargo, citing the urgent need for weaponry and supplies to counter the Al-Shabab insurgency.
Authoritarians are once again trying to racialize citizenship. In Asia, that’s quite normal. The problem is that conservative movements worldwide are similarly trying to shore up their dwindling popularity by undemocratically disenfranchising the very immigrants they had once invited over.
