I always found the though process behind stationing missiles on island close to Taiwan fascinating...
1 - If it's for defence against Chinese first strike, then that location will be taken out instantly without the ability to contribute.
2 - If it's for attack, then it can only get one shot off (and probably intercepted) before getting taken out and said island permanently added to Chinese territory.
3 - If it's for deterrence, see #1
So the only logic pathway to arriving at the conclusion that its a good idea to station missiles at place subjected to overwhelming threat and power mismatch is: they really do believe AR will consist of and only consist of fishing boats trying to storm beaches.
It’s part posturing, part deliberate provocation, but mostly down to a comically idiotic strategic assessment that AR will be just like the Ukraine war, only in the east this time.
Placing assets there only makes sense if they honestly think China will be as easily cowed as the Russians are, and will not dare to engage American and Japanese assets working as part of Taiwan’s kill chain against Chinese forces.
So their delusional thinking is that by parking long range sensors so close to Taiwan, they can basically become Taiwan’s untouchable early warning and off-board targeting platform able to actively scan PLA assets at point blank range to datalink targeting solutions to missile launchers in Taiwan and that China will be too scared to do anything about it.
If you stop thinking about it rationally and logically and actually approach it from the prospective of a moron who drinks western msm propaganda wholesale and actually believes that shit, then this looks like a real baller move. Way to stick it to Beijing!
Remember, Japan is a thoroughly compromised and mentally castrated nation who genuinely believes white is best and wishes with their whole Asian hearts to be white. To them, if white Europeans are reduced to slogging it out like it’s 1912 all over again, it’s inconceivable that any ‘genetically inferior yellow Asians’ can do any better. And what worked against the White Russians must by definition work 10 times better against the Chinese.
This, in addition to their deep unquenchable lust for Chinese lands and resources and their deep sense of injustice that the ‘inferior’ Chinese are so blessed with natural bounty while they are so starved of it, makes them feel that Chinese people don’t deserve China and somehow stole their rightful birthright to all the lands and riches of China (which also applies to all the rest of Asia). If that bullshit sounds familiar, it should, because it was this same perverted sense of cheated entitlement that fuelled their cruelty and savagery when they unleashed their unrepentant fascist hatred on their fellow Asians during WWII.
With that emotional baggage, if China was weak today, don’t any of you doubt for a second they would happily turn all of China into one giant Gaza if they could.
China invoking the enemy states clause isn’t China rules lawyering with some dusty old relic clauses. The Japanese themselves have kept those clauses alive and relevant all these years because they themselves have refused to own up to their crimes in WWII and would do it all again if given the chance.
That’s why the PLA modernisation for the last generation has really been about given China the tools and power to finally finish what the Americans abandoned in 1945 because it was more interested in using the Japanese to fight the Soviets instead of actually properly rehabilitating Japanese society. It’s exactly the same mentality at play when America released all those Uighur fighters from Guantanamo that were captured fighting for Bin Ladin in Afghanistan. America was satisfied that they presented no terrorist threats to American interests. They were still terrorists, but that was just fine and dandy if their terrorist targets were America’s enemies. America has never had any problems getting in bed with the worst monsters the world has ever seen just so long as those monsters were only interested in killing their enemies. This lack of moral fibre is why America itself is falling to fascism so easily today.