The Sideshow to End All Sideshows
Triumph will allow allies to focus on what matters
(Tokyo) An oddity of being abroad while the United States is at war is detachment from the political logrolling in Washington and fact-free emoting that dominate the anti-American media.
Most notably, at least here in Japan, is the relative absence of people who have been turned deranged and hysterical by President Donald Trump and who are rooting for the United States to lose to Iran’s terrorist-run government because of their self-hating and wrong politics. I speak of course of the Democrats and their elite soulmates in Europe, Canada, and Australia.
That is not to say that the Japanese public supports the Iran war. Japanese and their government have the characteristic of putting their country first—a concept still shocking to America’s elite. Japan imports 97.9% of its crude oil and 99.7% of its natural gas. Some 90% of that oil comes from the Middle East and is immediately vulnerable to supply disruption and price hikes that arise from the Strait of Hormuz near Iran (and the Strait of Malacca near Singapore).
This supply chain risk will ring a bell to history buffs of the Pacific War just a few days after Trump got through nearly all of his joint appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi without humorously bringing up Pearl Harbor. Energy shortages or even just prolonged high prices can lead to political crisis here, undermining pro-U.S. politicians.
Yet, despite these risks, just as Takaichi and Japan’s central bank tame other inflation, the Japanese don’t seem to be wailing about “illegal war” and the end of days. Nor is there alarm as the U.S.-led coalition ponders returning Iran to the Stone Age if necessary.
And it is a coalition, despite media efforts to deprecate it as a scheme limited to Israel and the United States. The U.S. military is operating short-range Apache helicopters and A-10 attack jets, which obviously are operating from Gulf states. Yousef Otaiba, the ambassador from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, wrote yesterday:
The past 3½ weeks of war have confirmed what we have known for nearly 50 years—Iran’s revolution is a threat to global security and economic stability. We can’t let Iran hold the U.S., the United Arab Emirates and the global economy hostage. A simple cease-fire isn’t enough. We need a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran’s full range of threats: nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, terror proxies and blockades of international sea lanes.
Trump has assembled a formidable political and military coalition of the countries that matter—a reality not lost on our friends and foes in Asia, even if it is lost on lefty politicians and the media.
Beyond energy prices, Japanese officials do worry that America will be distracted by prolonged Middle East conflict. Such a situation previously contributed to China’s military and economic rise from the 2003 invasion of Iraq through the 2016 election after which Trump reversed globalism and the misguided accommodation of China.
Japan has effectively completed a process begun in 2022 of doubling its defense budget, broadly defined, and is considering further increases. A decade ago, it expanded the definition of “self-defense” in its pacifist postwar constitution to include “collective self-defense”—a euphemism for fighting with America in a critical struggle against China. Now Takaichi, fresh from the most resounding electoral victory in Japanese history, is pursuing further reform that would normalize Japan’s ability to fight with America and other key allies like the Philippines if China seeks war in the Western Pacific.
Japan has finally acquired conventional missiles from the United States and developed missiles of its own with the range to hit China—critical for deterrence. It is about to deploy its Hyper Velocity Gliding Projectile, which, at a speed of Mach five, is faster and more survivable than U.S. cruise missiles and ahead of comparable U.S. hypersonic systems under development. (Russia got ahead of everyone when dotard Joe Biden’s staff prioritized DEI and losing.)
Japan has spent the last fifteen years—the blink of an eye for a peacetime army—reorienting its ground forces from those poised to repel a Soviet invasion to forces more expeditionary and relevant to a fight with China.
But the bigger questions regarding whether Japan will help America deter China pertain to Japan’s economic and cultural health. Will it remain rich enough to field the hella expensive networked military needed to prevail today? And will it fight?
Takaichi’s mentor, the assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pursued three “arrows” of reform, the last of which was supposed to be economic liberalization to spur a stagnant economy. It never quite materialized. Japan has long been pro-business and capitalist but also stuck on government-centric Keynesian spending that racks up debt and crowds out innovation. Keynesianism is based on the wrong assumption that government whiz kids allocate capital more efficiently than private investors and individual consumers—which is why the elitists at the Federal Reserve and among the Davos crowd love it.
Japanese culture and politics preclude the type of radical shift toward full economic liberalization carried out by Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but Takaichi has the mandate to attempt a Japanese version. Her plan is to browbeat industry into higher-growth sectors like technology, push corporations to spend stockpiles of cash on research, development, and labor, and reduce disincentives for wives to work while also undertaking other workforce liberalizations.
Takaichi is unabashedly pro-nuclear energy and realizes this is Japan’s best path to cheaper electricity—which means cheaper everything—and less foreign vulnerability. Even advocating cheap and abundant electricity rather than scarcity is a big step for a country that hosted the signing of the disastrous, prosperity-killing Kyoto Protocol in 1997—a sort of Council of Nicaea for the elite’s pagan religion of climate change alarmism.
While this program may not sound radical, it just might mark a turning point. Any move away from Japan’s high-tax and heavy-spending state would be welcome. Only time will tell. Early indications of success will be hysterical opposition from the financial elite and media, which is already underway. Both hoped in vain that Takaichi would face the same fate as Liz Truss, who was ousted as prime minister of Britain after just 49 days for attempting economic reform. Instead, Takaichi has prevailed. (English-language commentary and Japanese-dubbed appearances by American “experts” in Japanese media invariably are biased toward left-wing, establishment voices.)
The second big unknown is culture. The Japanese population is shrinking. People not having kids can be an economic and cultural vote of no confidence in a nation’s future. Japan has a population of 123 million, which decreases by about 600,000 annually. However, Japan is hardly alone in Northeast Asia in contending with population decline. Furthermore, the nativism that helped drive Takaichi’s victory is an indication of Japanese confidence in their own culture and a rejection of the woke self-hatred that prevails in the English-speaking world aside from the Trump-run United States. Will Japan fight if necessary to prevent Chinese domination of Asia and the Western Pacific despite the pacifism that has been driven into their culture since 1945?
I’ll bet they would.
Which brings us back to patience with the Iran war and what Trump is seeking to bring about despite the risks of near-term economic disruption and distraction from the China threat.
The Europeans are busy doing what they do best: attending pointless conferences, saying pointless things, and accomplishing nothing. Recently the president of Germany—of all places—remarked that “this war is contrary to international law,” and “a dangerous mistake.”
Apparently, the German president doesn’t lose much sleep over the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran recreating the Holocaust in the twinkling of an eye, but gets worked up over violations of make-believe law.
Non-American members of NATO—ludicrously billed as “the most successful alliance in history,” and “the most important alliance in history,” are completely irrelevant to the current struggle. It is simply impossible to call its members “allies” of the United States using any definition of that word that most normal people would understand. Today with Iran, tomorrow with China, when the crisis comes, they are worse than irrelevant: they are intentionally unhelpful.
Which is just another reason why the crucial operation against Iran—the feared sideshow “war of choice”—must for a little while longer be the main show that produces a safer world and an ability to focus on what matters.
When it ends, the Middle East will be much more secure and poised for its next stage of evolution as an economic and cultural center. Iran may end up as a secular democracy, but a kleptocracy or a failed state will do just as well. The key is that the malignant role it has played throughout the Middle East since 1979 will be curtailed. America will hope that Israel and Arab states mow the lawn as necessary to prevent regional threats, but can return in force at any time if necessary.
NATO and the broader European project will continue to exist in name only. There is no special relationship with Britain. NATO is a paper tiger. Europe is for vacations and second-rate wine. Its economy is as stagnant as its culture and the AI revolution will only leave it farther behind.
Armed with this realization, and with the Iran sideshow finally controlled, America can turn its military deterrence more fully toward China, while benefiting economically from a Middle East that is an asset, not a liability.
Trump is set to have two summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this year, the first of which is scheduled for May. Some fear that Trump will be too accommodating of Xi in his quest for good relations. But having knocked off Chinese friends in Iran and Venezuela and restored America’s cultural and economic might as China falters, this outcome seems unlikely.
More than any recent president, Trump will arrive in Beijing prepared for peace.
I imagine if Krakatoa had launched a better future into the atmosphere, that would be Trump. Incredible changes are happening.