At least Shinzo Abe was your usual politician with their political forked tongue. I don’t see that with Sanae Takaichi. She is clearly pushing for conflict with China in some form. Most likely going to set the stage to drag Japan into joining the US war against China.
Diplomatic relations with China get under her skin and threats to send Japanese troops to Taiwan. She seems more like those European chihuahuas than a career politician like Shinzo Abe.
Excellent if she does.
Japanese military might, while certainly credible on a global level, is basically an irrelevance in terms of a superpower clash between China and America. Not even the Japanese themselves are delusional enough to think their involvement would magically tip the balance in America’s favour.
The kind of idiotic slave animal mentality needed to proactively push to make your country and collective race essentially grave goods for your foreign overlords funeral is beyond contemptible.
If Japan does stick its nose into a Taiwan conflict, the very best outcome they could realistically hope to expect is to be de-nazified and ruled over by China with a PLA occupation force instead of the American one they will be kicking out.
If China was feeling less charitable and wanted to make it into a teachable moment, they can expect to be stripped back to their core islands (maybe not even that, as the Cuban Guantanamo model will also serve) in terms of territory, be thoroughly deindustrialised via explosive decommissioning of its industry, and hope China is charitable enough to leave enough of its power and transport infrastructure left to allow a semblance of normal life to resume after.
But what is actually more likely is that America will be unsatisfied after China’s lightening takeover of Taiwan and obliteration of its and Japan’s expeditionary forces and instead try to turn Japan into an Eastern Ukraine. They will seek to bolster Japanese homeland defences while simultaneously mounting harassment attacks against Chinese targets from Japanese soil hoping to goad China into a ground invasion of Japan, so they can defeat the PLA in ‘proper’ face to face fighting rather than the ‘weak’ and ‘dishonourable’ Chinese way of obliterating their planes and ships wholesale at extended ranges with swarms of PL15/16/17s and hypersonics.
They might think they are being clever and thinking outside of the box, but a modern Operation Downfall has been a key unspoken objective of the PLAN modernisation for literally decades. What do you think all of the PLAN’s LPDs, LHDs and now LHAs are for? Taiwan? Ha! That would be like buying a top of the line premium motorhome to go camping in your back garden.
Indeed, I would go as far as to say that if it really happened and Japan and America militarily intervened in a Taiwan conflict, the first thing China will do is from a broader geopolitical standpoint is to force South Korea to show its cards immediately.
China will not tolerate a similar situation to Ukraine where ostensibly neutral 3rd parties are actively operating as part of opfor kill chains at extreme close range and immune from retaliation. SK’s choice at that point is to basically kick out the Americans and actively flip to China’s side, or get annihilated by a combined NK and PLA firestorm to pave the way for the full scale invasion of the Japanese home islands.
As strategically speaking, SK is the perfect launchpad for an invasion of the Japanese home islands for China, since PLA air and missile power can make the Sea of Japan a no man’s land for Japanese and American naval and air forces, while the PLAN will own the East China Sea to feed in naval forces for both escorts and the amphibious fleets. Especially after the PLAN has secured key parts of the Ryukyu islands as bulwark against hostile naval incursions into the second island chain. That would basically be the mid-tier acceptable victory conduction for China in a AR scenario involving direct and open combat with American and allied forces.
