Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke at the UN General Assembly, trying to refute charges by his critics that he is re-establishing Japanese militarism in East Asia. He tried to deflect the charges by pointing to the rapid increase in military spending by China. The speech symbolizes the “security dilemma” perfectly. Both Japan and China have a myriad of reasons to cooperate, most importantly in terms of their economic relationship. There are, however, some genuine disagreements between the two countries which tend to overshadow their common interests, and the rapid increase of military spending by both will tend to emphasize those disagreements.
There have been a number of stories about the two commando raids conducted by the US recently, one in Libya and one in Somalia. We still know very little about the raids, but they were touted as indications of American resolve against al-Qaeda. But questions have been raised about their effectiveness, and the Libyan government has protested the US intrusion against Libyan sovereignty. It is often useful to take into account the perceptions of outsiders when assessing the value of such operations.
US Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has made the determination that 400,000 civilian defense workers are “essential” and thereby exempt from the budget constraints of the US government shutdown. That action reduces the number of furloughed workers by half. One should ask the question, however, is how such a determination is made. Do military concerns automatically trump domestic concerns? How does one decide that those who offer food assistance to poor families are less essential than those who are working on a military technology that may be years away from deployment.
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