A SHINING CITY ON A HILL (ABLE TO PROTECT ITSELF):

Defending Japan (National Post, 11/12/02)

Do you remember when Ottawa and Europe were warning of the parade of horribles that would follow if the United States scuttled the obsolete 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty? At the time, back in pre-9/11 days, missile opponents pointed to various heavyweights -- Russia, China, Japan -- that were anxious about the U.S. plan. The belief was that an ambitious anti-missile scheme would jump-start a new arms race, and thus destabilize the planet.

But when the Americans did withdraw from the ABM, nothing happened. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who'd been looking for a way to trim his military budget, was more than happy to accept his American counterpart's offer to cut the number of nuclear warheads. China had more reason to fear -- because its tiny fleet of 1950s- and 1960s-vintage missiles might be completely neutralized by even a modest anti-missile program. But Beijing was not a signatory to the ABM in the first place. And Sino-U.S. relations have actually become stronger in the past year as the two nations collaborate in the fight against terrorists.

Japan is now coming around too. "We should exert efforts to get the program to leave the research phase as soon as possible," Shigeru Ishiba, head of Japan's Defence Agency, told a parliamentary committee this week. The president of the National Defence Academy, Masashi Nishihara, feels Tokyo must "move forward to develop
missile defence, and to eventually deploy it."

Here, as elsewhere, one man saw further than the rest. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2002 7:44 PM