United States sides with longtime ally over competing superpower.

Long story short, none of the countries involved in this dispute are stupid enough to start a war over it. We can all look forward to this being a years, possibly decades long stalemate and a constant diplomatic thorn in the sides of everyone involved, including the United States.

Thank you very much for clearing that up for me. These 5 stars are for YOU!

If we go to war over it, it's because we are already at war. There has been a currency war going on between the US and China (and Russia) for years now.

China basically wants to push around smaller countries around it, especially Vietnam and the Philippines by pushing into their waters and taking whatever they want. Even Vietnam, which has a communist government, is getting really nervous.

But yeah, apart from belligerent grandstanding and nationalism, nothing will come of this. Unless we go to war. But don't fool yourselves, they could solve all this with diplomacy if they really want. If they want a war they will find an excuse.

I am hoping this is just meant as a "fuck you" to China and nothing more.

it's the 'abortion rights' of that area...no side will actually do anything about it, but it makes great political theater to boost your standings.

if either side were serious about its conquest it would have been sending jews to cheap housing projects there for years. err, wait. wrong annexation.

China's always been beating up on Vietnam; China even invaded the poor country not long after our own Vietnamese War ended. While Vietnam was Communist, they were the wrong KIND of Communist; they were backed by the Soviet Union, and Eastasia can't just let Eurasia fuck around in Indochina, or else there might be a domino effect or something.

Anyway, I'm glad our Warmonger in Chief is finally getting in shape for the big match. He's still no Putin, either in the ring or cutting promos, but he's learning! What I'd like to know is, will there be a push to remilitarize Japan? As Yukio Mishima said, Japan would have been and should have been a bulwark against Communism. Add to that the historical truth that Japan would have conquered China by the mid 1940s had it not been for the interfering gaijin and their last-ditch attempts to salvage their colonial empires, and I think we have a good case for giving Japan back it's bloated military-industrial complex.

Japan is re-militarizing with US support as we speak, it might take a little while, but with China next door, it shouldn't be hard for their leadership and ours to stroke enough fear. They're obviously our strongest ally in the "East", besides the Philippines (they let us have military bases there again recently) and Australia, and our gov is working on India. It's smart from a geopolitical point of view; we need a cheaper way to contain China and bulwark against the Russians, what better way than to defer more responsibility to Japan?

It's going to be way more interesting to see how China deals with their environmental issues.

I look forward to the re-militarization of a country where the government and the textbooks still deny their World War II atrocities.

To be fair, I find that, despite a lot of continued political tarring by Korea and China, Japan has been by and large a responsible global citizen. I'm not trying to deny that they did some horrendous stuff during WWII. However, there is a lot more grey to the issue than is let on. The occupation of most of Southeast Asia was brutal as hell but East Asia, in particularly Korea, is a bit more grey than most wish to admit.

I find that Korea and Japan's relationship after the annexation is akin to that of France and Vietnam. It was exploitative and largely focused on further disenfranchising the less privileged in society, no doubt. However, what is missed is that many people did indeed buy into their rulers and adopted foreign practices in the interest in being "on the winning team." Vietnam more or less quietly owns up to this fact whereas Korea, perhaps as a backlash, completely disowned the notion that anything good could have come from Japan. Ironically, North Korea's worship of Kim Il-Sung is a basic carbon copy of Imperial Japan's Emperor worship and wartime paranoia and the South Korean miracle seems hell-bent on imitating Japan's as hard as it possibly can.

In contrast, note how Taiwan looks rather favorably upon Japan even to this day despite being subject to a similarly repressive colonization. Granted, this is due to post-war mismanaging by the nationalist government leading to nostalgia of the relatively organized Japanese, but this all a digression.

Basically, everyone beats the country over the head with it's WWII history but they were far from alone in the atrocity department. In any case, I'd imagine that any attempt to re-create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would lead to a tremendous political backlash and Korea and China suddenly realizing they're really good buddies.

Long story short. Germany is European, gets to have a military and is allowed to build up into the dominant player in Europe. Japan is Asian, gets to have a "self defense force" and 50 years later needs to ask permission to defend thier interests.