My latest
Japan Is the Big Winner
The Real Story
Nothing about Operation Epic Fury occurred within a thousand miles of Tokyo. Yet no capital in the world stands to gain more from the wreckage of Khamenei’s regime than the one sitting across the East China Sea from Shanghai.
Japan is China's principal strategic rival in the Western Pacific: the two compete for military dominance in the East and South China Seas, for economic influence across Southeast Asia, for secure energy supply chains, and for the allegiance of every mid-sized Pacific power now deciding whether its future runs through Washington or Beijing.
The gains Operation Epic Fury delivered to Tokyo are structural and extend across every dimension of that rivalry.
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“You know, they came to me - the smartest people, the generals, the daimyo - they said, 'Tokugawa Ieyasu, you can't unify Japan, it's impossible, the country is divided, chaos everywhere.' Wrong! Totally wrong.
Nobody unifies better than me. I unify fast, I unify beautifully, the best unification you've ever seen. I will build the greatest shogunate, believe me, a tremendous shogunate, stable, strong, no more fighting - and guess what? I'm gonna make the other clans pay for it. They'll pay bigly. It's gonna be huge.”