On September 25, 2024, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Forces destroyer JS Sazanami transited the Strait of Taiwan, together with naval vessels from New Zealand and Australia. These kinds of freedom-of-navigation operations (FONOPS) are common for the United States and its allies, but the September, 2024 transit was a first for postwar Japan. Japan has no particular need to transit the Taiwan Strait. The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa is to the northeast of Taiwan, not to its west, and there is at any rate no indication that the Taiwan Strait is to be closed to commercial navigation or that there is any other similar threat to Japan’s sovereignty, security, or economy. The sheer gratuity of the move, from Japan’s perspective, reflected the Japanese government’s full integration into Washington’s globalist “security” apparatus. Japan, Washington’s “global partner” (in the words of former prime minister Kishida Fumio), is now all-in on the ancient Anglo-Saxon game of hiding imperial domination under “international law.”
The proximate cover for FONOPS is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which took its basic form, minus subsequent additions, in 1982. The convention stipulates that the oceans extending twelve nautical miles and further from a country’s shoreline are international waters, meaning that any vessel is free to move through those waters (given certain conditions). “International” is part of the ruse. FONOPS are very often explained away by Anglo-Saxons and their lackeys, such as the government of Japan, as exercises in upholding international law or protecting the “rules-based international order.” Those who question the legality or the wisdom of FONOPS, especially when FONOPS are clearly meant to be provocations to a nuclear superpower, are often portrayed as hooligan challengers to the order the Anglo-Saxons provide. “All we are doing,” the FONOPS side argues, “is keeping the rules-based international order going. If you don’t like FONOPS, then you must not like freedom of navigation or international law.”
But let us go back and imagine the JS Sazanami transiting the Strait of Taiwan that September day about a year ago. As the ship steamed south through the straits, I wonder if any of the crew members were able to see the island of Taiwan off the port side of the vessel. If so, did any of them recall, from their high school history textbooks perhaps, that Taiwan was once a part of Japan, annexed into the Japanese Empire in 1895 and firmly in place there until dislodged by the marauding Americans five decades later? Did any of the Sazanami sailors think about the elderly people on Taiwan, only a few in number now, who can still speak Japanese, or who think of themselves as (abandoned) citizens of Japan? Did anyone on board the Sazanami, or anyone in political office in Tokyo, pause to reflect on the strangeness of history, the irony of having once ruled mainly benevolently over an island only to have it wrested away, and then put to work using that same island, for the sake of the same people that took it, as a pawn in a new imperial venture? And then, to add comedy to irony, to call this arrangement “international law,” “the rules-based international order,” and “freedom of navigation”?
To put it another way, there was never any trouble over Taiwan until the Americans got involved. Now, the endless standoff between Taiwan and the mainland is a feature of East Asian geopolitics. One could be forgiven for believing that the Americans keep things that way to justify the presence of their military bases throughout the region. But this the Americans, and their allies–including Taiwan’s erstwhile custodians, the Japanese–glibly refer to as “order.” Some especially enthusiastic flatterers in Japan even thank Washington for providing a “Pax Americana.” Others insist that any incident breaking out around Taiwan will directly affect Japan’s security. The latter is obvious, but also deceptive. What pro-Washington toadies in Japan mean by this is that they want to use Taiwan as a lever to move themselves even closer to Washington and its imperial designs. Japan once developed Taiwan as part of a way to raise Asia up in defiance of Western imperialism. Today, Japan keeps Taiwan down, locked in the Washington chaos economy, and calls all of this peace, order, and rule of law.
But not everyone is deceived. Perhaps only Washington and Tokyo, alone in the world, cannot see the foolishness of their solemn-sounding homage to freedom of navigation. What FONOPS and the so-called “rules-based order” in which they are embedded attempt to conceal is the lawlessness of the American hegemon, and the terror and racism America has used to reach the imperial domination that is now quickly slipping out of its hands. The United States’ control of the Pacific Ocean is portrayed today, by the propagandists and court historians who are paid to write patriotic lies about the American past, as an inevitable working out of freedom and democracy, the foreordained blessing of liberty brought to a third of the planet in the hulls of American ships patrolling the high seas. But the Pacific is an American lake only because the Americans engaged in unprecedented violence to take it. And the brunt of that violence was borne by the very country that now declares itself America’s most faithful servant: Japan.
The Americans act today, as they did in 1941, as if Japan decided one morning, on a whim, to attack American bases on Oahu. The Americans leave out the part of wresting control of Spanish imperial holdings in the Pacific, namely the Philippines, all while pretending to be the sole non-imperial expansionist power in Asia and the Pacific. What was at stake in the clash between Japan and America was always about much, much more than some battleships at anchor off of Ford Island. If the Americans wanted an answer to Pearl Harbor, and that alone, then they had it at Midway, when Japan’s aircraft carriers were sent to the bottom of the sea and the ability of the Japanese Empire to threaten American-held territory was essentially brought to an end. That could, and should, have been the end of the fracas in the north central Pacific. If the Americans had no imperial ambitions, then they should have been grateful to Japan for liberating the Philippines, and driving the British out of Hong Kong and Singapore, the French out of Indochina, and the Dutch out of the East Indies. But the Americans demanded more and more blood, pretending the price being extracted was revenge for Pearl Harbor and not down-payment on an Asian-Pacific American empire, until unconditional surrender became the overarching strategy and Japan was subjected to violence such as the world had never seen. The preeminence of the American navy in the Pacific, the necessary condition for the Taiwan Strait transiting in which the Japanese non-military non-navy now takes part (America castrated Japan at the end of the war and keeps its lapdog emasculated today), was bought with American and Japanese blood and the ashes of Japanese cities, as well as the re-establishment, at war’s end, of the white man’s Asian outposts. Those outposts eventually tasted liberation thanks to the efforts of Asian freedom fighters, but Japan, in another historical irony, is America’s colony today.
Japan turned turtle in 1945, and was brought into the American imperial shell game. This is the most basic fact of the fake country that we continue to call “Japan” today. The land of the samurai is now ruled by geldings, non-men who serve Washington and no other. Abe Shinzo, slain in Nara three years ago, was the postwar prime minister who arguably did more to make Japan the fifty-first state than any of his slavish predecessors did (and that’s saying something–Nakasone Yasuhiro was to Ronald Reagan what Donald Trump today is to Benjamin Netanyahu). Abe was the strategist behind the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, FOIP, which pro-Washington conservatives in Japan continue to hail as a masterstroke of geopolitical maneuvering. Perhaps it was, but in the long run it seems that Abe’s vision for a new Asia ended up playing into Washington’s hands, making the Asia-Pacific even more of a plaything for Anglo-Saxon neocons.
Abe, too, is still hailed in Japan as a “conservative,” and in many ways that’s true. Abe conserved the postwar American regime, the Vichy Japon he inherited from the senior lickspittles in his Liberal Democratic Party, better than any politician of any postwar generation. His Free and Open Indo-Pacific may perhaps be read as a grand gambit to reach beyond the scope of the US-Japan alliance, encircling the alliance parameters, as it were, and thereby allowing Japan room to maneuver free of the clutches of Washington. But Abe is dead now (whether Washington killed him is anybody’s guess, but not a bad guess all in all), and his beloved FOIP is part of the FONOPS rigamarole, embroidered into the net keeping Japan lashed to America and America’s imperial ambitions. In the shadow of the US-Japan alliance, in the wake of the Japanese destroyers (which destroy nothing but the remnants of Japan’s sovereignty), is a lost drive for freedom, a lost Asia, a lost Japan that once stood up to America but now rolls over for her.
There is something curious about American imperial ambition, too. Just as the dereliction of the Anglo-Saxons, their centuries of pirating and plundering on the high seas, is cloaked now in fine-sounding phrases like “freedom of navigation” and “law of the sea” (much as the earlier Anglo-Saxon pirates, the British, controlled the oceans and called it “free trade” and “liberal economic policy”), violence disappearing into a contentless order in which all are purported to be free to partake, so, too, does the American Empire have no deeper substance beyond violence and control. It is a recruit-oriented deception, in that it draws others in as it plays out–perhaps necessarily, as the “freedom of navigation” rhetoric implies and as the appeal to “universal values” connotes. But what the American empire brings to Japan, or Asia, or anywhere else, besides death and misery, is the emptiness of its own grandeur. The American empire is nothing, a “base network” having no purpose beyond restriction, and enriching those in the Washington center who provide goods and services so that the empire can continue. The American empire has no substance at all, is as wispy as a ghost, as weightless as a forgotten dream.
This negative empire, the empire of concealment and misdirection, of violence disguised as moral imperative, is at bottom an empire of restraint, of binding other states to prevent them from challenging the hegemon’s primacy. The American empire’s only purpose, beyond fattening those who feed at its trough, is keeping other empires from rising. What is most remarkable about the American empire is that it attempts to do this by either incorporating states into the sham “rule-of-law” and “international rules-based order” arrangement Washington concocted and continues to hold forth as a legitimate basis for world peace (ignoring the violence on which the “order” is based and by which it was won, and ignoring also the violence to which Washington appeals without hesitation when that “order” is threatened), or else by accusing recalcitrant states of threatening that “order,” and therefore of being a menace to peace.
This is precisely what Washington does with Japan and the People’s Republic of China. Japan’s role in Washington’s game, besides undertaking FONOPS in the FOIP and other such stage play, is to “restrain” China, to keep China from challenging Washington’s supremacy. The Americans and their Japanese tools seek no territory in China, or elsewhere. They seek only to keep real countries, countries that have real histories and not webs of pro-Washington deceit dressed up as accurate records of the past, from telling the Americans and their sidekicks to go home, to stop interfering in the affairs of the world. Washington’s goal is enforced and total silence. It doesn’t want to steal land, as its forerunner Anglo-Saxon marauders did. It just wants to go on occupying the peak of power. Its only objective is the non-existence of rivals.
This is not to say that Washington is paranoid. It really does have enemies (and rightly so). It is true, of course, that China is an expansive state. But its expansion is radically different from Washington’s imperial modus operandi. China’s expansion is constructive and largely continental, or continental-littoral. Its Belt and Road initiative runs through states and territorial waters for the most part, so the role played by the Chinese government and Chinese firms is transactional, without a grand ideological architecture to defend.
There are worries over debt and resource extraction, to be sure. The Belt and Road initiative is not a charity project. But it differs completely from the Anglo-Saxon model in that it is not one thing masquerading as another. It is not violence pretending to be freedom of navigation, not five hundred years of human trafficking, exploitation, and genocide pretending to be the keystone of peace for mankind. America’s negative empire, the empire of deception and restraint, and China’s positive empire, the empire of building and dealmaking, are said to be in competition. But I think they cannot be, for they are two utterly different kinds of things.
America’s negative empire is also self-defeating, and will fall prey to its own heinous mythology, that of the “open society” and the social order of ideological idolatry. It is extraordinary to hear people in the American government complain about interference from Karl Popper disciple George Soros, because no entity has done more to Popperize the planet than Washington, DC. “Freedom of navigation” is the same as the old Open Door policy in China. Borders are meaningless to the negative empire. Washington wants only, nothing. It wants to keep this nothing in place forever. It is a very strange empire, this negative dominion America imposes. It denies all things to all peoples, and then says that this state of paralysis is the pinnacle of human achievement, the very end of history.
And now Japan has been enlisted in the farce, blind to its own history, and even blinder to the designs of the Anglo-Saxon devil who has hypnotized her. Enlisted both ways, in fact. In June, 2025, it came to light that the Japanese city of Nagoya has become a hub for processing and trans-shipping fentanyl from China to the United States and elsewhere in North and South America. What the Anglo-Saxon empire conceals, China remembers, and Japan forgets. The Opium War may be ancient history in the West, but these kinds of depravities have long shelf lives in places where the victims once lived. One would have thought that Japan would have a long memory, too. But its amnesia is its curse and its shame. Japan, financier to the American empire and provider of technology, land, and markets for the violence-providers who back up the empire with force, is now also a conduit for revenge for the imperial drug trade from two centuries prior. In this way, in many ways, states are revealed more in their shadows than in the cultivated images they present to the world.
There is one shadow that is thicker and bigger than any other: BRICS. This coalition in which former colonies of Western powers are heavily represented, as are governments of states whose peoples were kidnapped by the millions to build the infrastructure and wealth of the American empire, is a reminder that, no matter what the Anglo-Saxons and their lackeys say, history does not end until the last score is settled. After the most recent BRICS meeting, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, BRICS delegates released a lengthy statement addressing many of the problems created by Western empires that plague the world today. To my mind, the most arresting passage from the Rio de Janeiro Declaration was paragraph 104. It reads, in part, as follows.
We welcome the proclamation of a Second International Decade for People of African Descent (2025 – 2034), by the UN General Assembly. We welcome of the decision of the African Union to designate 2025 as the year for “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations” and recognize the efforts of the African Union to tackle the destructive legacy of colonialism and the slave trade.
Anglo-Saxons are notorious for pillaging others’ countries and then, when later asked to make restitution for the murder and robbery they have committed, appealing to universal principles and invented paradigms–rule of law, “diversity”–to explain why restitution is impossible and why, furthermore, those asking for it are threats to the “international rules-based order.” The Americans refuse to pay reparations to Africa or to Africans because of rules, of legal principles, of racial harmony, of freedom and democracy. The real reason is much easier to understand. If America ever paid for its crimes, or apologized for them (including, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it would be the end of Washington planetary rule. Returning stolen money, paying reparations for centuries of kidnapping, rape, and enslavement, apologizing for incinerating cities, would imply that the very mechanism of the American empire had unwound, and would never be put in motion again. BRICS is insisting that Washington turn around and acknowledge its own shadow. If this were to happen, and God willing it will, then Washington would become its shadow, and those who have lived in it, like Japan, would be forced to face history and the present once again. One senses that this time is drawing nigh, whether Washington and Tokyo like it or not.
For now, though, Tokyo is content to go on serving its imperial master. Perhaps there will be another transit of the Taiwan Strait by a Japanese vessel this year. All in the name of the “rules-based international order,” of course. Never mind that the Americans never joined the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The rules don’t apply to Anglo-Saxons. They are its guarantors, they claim. Their navy, free from legal constraint, is the muscle that keeps the system moving. Anglo-Saxon lawlessness is, even today, what we keep calling the rule of law.
