Posted on 04/28/2015 11:30:59 AM PDT by Zhang Fei
The US commitment to the defense of Japan is "ironclad," top US diplomat John Kerry vowed Monday
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/US_Japan_widen_defense_ties_in_historic_sea_change_999.html
Japan is so screwed.
The US commitment to the defense of Japan is “ironclad,” top US diplomat John Kerry vowed Monday.
That should be enough to alarm them.
Isn’t that what Hussein was saying about Israel when he ran for office?
If I were the Japanese foreign minister and I was hearing that from Kerry during this administration, I’d be very concerned.
“If you like your Japanese islands, you can keep your Japanese islands. Period.”
I’m sure the Japanese feel as comfortable as the American people now.
Ask Ukraine, the American Indians, Iraq, Obamacare patients, the Kurds, Middle East Christians and other groups how that works out.
Just ask Poland. They’ll tell you.
Rough translation : Arm up Japan, you are on your own.
We’ll protect them just like we protect the Marshall Islands...
John Kerry: “We are giving Godzilla some space to express himself by destroying tokyo”...
Perhaps what Kerry means is that US protection will be limited to sending them an old ironclad.
In Jan of 14, I talked with a young Chinese gentleman who worked high in Chinese government housing and when discussing Japan, he stated that ALL ALL Chinese Hate and Despise the Japanese. He said Japan had murdered millions of his people and China was about to retake all lands once owned by China. BeGood.
The Chinese take the long view... but they also do not forget. The Rape of NanJing (Nanking) is just one large example of the atrocities for which they are waiting to exact revenge.
That does about sum it up. The Chinese have long memories and WWII (what the Japanese Imperial Army did in China made the Nazis look like a Salvation Army band) is still fresh in their consciousness. Then again, so are the Opium War and the foreign concessions, so on some level they’re dreaming of payback from a lot of people.
I'd say the Nazis made the Japanese look like a Salvation Army band. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese did not massacre anywhere near 12m people. Most of their atrocities came after significant battles during which they suffered severe losses. Whereas the Germans went in with orders to kill everyone designated as vermin. The Japanese were traditional imperialists - killing in part to vent frustration in the aftermath of the deaths of comrades, in part to deter future resistance, pretty much the reason for war atrocities since time immemorial. Just how bad were the Japanese casualties? They had just come off 3 months of hard campaigning during the Battle of Shanghai, in the course of which they lost 70K dead.
Re the "Opium Wars", the Chinese government burned opium imports, not the domestic variant that had been cultivated for a thousand years. It was a trade war, not a drug war. The Chinese government (on both sides of the Taiwan Straits) leaves out a lot of pertinent facts, including the one that opium was legal worldwide at the time of the wars. The Chinese empire was hemorrhaging silver because of the opium imports, and sought to curb the trade imbalance by confiscating and destroying those imports.
Still, what matters isn’t reality, but perception. The Chinese have a chip on their collective shoulder that may, in the worst case, only be resolved after a massive bloodletting and either total victory or total defeat. A happier resolution would be for them to decide that this is all water under the bridge.
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