Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo, recently unveiled a new political party which, he says, will help build a “stronger and tougher Japan”. This is the same Shintaro Ishihara who recently provoked an increasingly bitter row with China over control of a string of islands in the East China Sea. As Mr Ishihara and other leading Japanese politicians strike a more strident foreign policy tone and a more aggressive attitude toward China, they should consider the recent history of a quite different country in a quite different region.
When Mikheil Saakashvili rode Georgia’s Rose Revolution to power in 2004, the international community lauded the small nation’s transition to democracy. Mr Saakashvili quickly reached out to Washington and the Bush administration, eager to build a new strategic friendship in the region, reached back. But US officials worried aloud that Mr Saakashvili, convinced that US support offered him a shield, might stumble into conflict with Russia, Georgia’s hostile neighbour to the north. Four years later, exactly what happened.
Georgia’s young president, eager to score patriotic political points by standing up to the superpower bully next door, sent tanks into the breakaway region of South Ossetia, giving Moscow the opening it needed to push the Georgians almost all the way back to Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The US remained on the sidelines, reminding Georgia’s president that it had warned him about poking the bear. As then Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned him, the United States would not go to war with Russia over a breakaway province in the southern Caucasus.