I think Japan will find it considerably harder to take China if there is a round two:
The Middle East has been a tinderbox for decades. But there’s a problem with our intervention in Afghanistan in particular, and that is the fact that both Pakistan and India, not far away, have nuclear weapons. India is reasonably stable but Pakistan is another matter entirely, and the last thing we need is for a conflict to spread into that country.
The worst of the unrest, however, isn’t there and isn’t being widely-reported. It’s in China.
China and Japan have had a long-running territorial dispute over some a handful of islands. Over the weekend what had been a simmering issue turned into a real problem with Chinese rising up and doing something extraordinary: They are demanding WAR with Japan.
These are not just people waving signs either. They are burning Japanese-linked stores and factories, from sushi places to car dealers. Automobile owners are being ejected from their vehicles on a forcible basis and their cars destroyed. And while I’m sure some official agitation is involved this appears to have caught a number of people by surprise, including officials from Japan and the United States.
It is really remarkable how clearly socionomics predicts these things. Not the specifics, but the generalities. I mean, who would have ever imagined that war between China and Japan could be a genuine possibility in the next ten years? The drums of war are beating and one can hear them nearly everywhere. We’ve all forgotten the Japanese occupation of the 1930s, but it is very clear that the Chinese haven’t.