Special to WorldTribune.com Geostrategy-Direct.com With tensions between China and Japan rising rapidly, Japan’s new cabinet under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has decided to augment its armed forces known collectively as the Japan Self-Defense Forces by as many as 18,000 troops. This was a direct reversal to the previous cabinet’s 2010 defense guideline which proposed to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com MANILA — Japan is probing the possibilities of a most improbable alliance in a corner of Southeast Asia that once lay at the heart of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” The term “co-prosperity” was a euphemism for Imperial Japan’s policy of prospering off impoverished people from Burma […]
John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — The impending launch of a North Korean ballistic missile has as much to do with the propaganda goal of putting a satellite into orbit as to serve as a less than subtle bullying to neighboring states all undergoing a period of political transition. Though Pyongyang has forewarned regional governments […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The spectacle of the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh did more to lay bare the problems, conflicts and paradoxes of relations among the region’s wildly different and widely scattered nations than to resolve them. The fact that at least three of the leaders at this year’s ASEAN summit […]
Special to WorldTribune.com East-Asia-Intel.com Washington and Tokyo have decided to cancel a large joint amphibious exercise scheduled for Nov. 5, one day before the U.S. presidential election and three days before China’s 18th Communist Party Congress, in which a major shuffling of government leadership will occur. The exercise was scheduled long before Beijing announced the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Brian M Downing, FreePressers.com The dispute between China and Japan over the Senkakus group of uninhabited islands and barren rocks jutting up from the East China Sea has intensified in recent days. China has sent armed vessels to the island and anti-Japanese demonstrations have broken out in Chinese cities. Japan has […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The North Koreans have got to love this one. The ruckus over disputed islands gets so much play in Korea and Japan that Koreans and Japanese tend to forget they’ve got a real enemy lurking somewhere over the 38th parallel. That would be North Korea, whose strategists may […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Even as the world awaits new foreign-policy initiatives expected after leadership changes at the 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress this fall, Beijing has significantly fine-tuned its policy toward the Asia-Pacific arena. A leitmotif of the far more aggressive foreign and military policies crafted by President and military […]
Sol W. Sanders Paying a visit to my phlegmatic Punjabi physician in New Delhi in the early 1960s, I found him uncharacteristically upset. Amniocentesis had come to India and some of his patients were asking him to abort fetuses if they were female. Out of moral scruple, he was refusing, losing patients — and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Since territorial disputes erupted between China and Japan in the early 1970s over the Diaoyu islets (called the Senkakus in Japan), Beijing has stuck to late patriarch Deng Xiaoping’s famous dictum: “Leave the question of sovereignty for the next generation; let’s put the emphasis on joint [economic] development.” […]