Takaichi's Costly Blunder

It doesn’t take a master strategist to anticipate that a hardline Japanese nationalist leader talking about intervening in a Taiwan conflict would set off an intense Chinese nationalist reaction.

Japan’s hardline prime minister has already made a costly blunder in managing the relationship with China:

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is facing her first major diplomatic test less than a month into office, after angering China with remarks about Tokyo’s position on the red line issue of Taiwan.

Takaichi this month became the first sitting Japanese leader in decades to publicly link a Taiwan Strait crisis with the possible deployment of Japanese troops, prompting Beijing to unleash a flurry of economic reprisals and threats of more retribution.

Hardline nationalists tend to make serious foreign policy mistakes because they can’t or won’t understand the position of other nations. Takaichi may have thought that her remarks would not cause such a major backlash, but she was wrong. It doesn’t take a master strategist to anticipate that a hardline Japanese nationalist leader talking about possibly intervening in a Taiwan conflict would set off an intense Chinese nationalist reaction.