Asia's Dangerous History Wars

Asia's Dangerous History Wars

Recent scholarship on World War I, most recently Christopher Clark’s masterful account, has challenged the many Manichean interpretations of the war that assign all, or most, of the blame to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. But Abe was not delivering a paper at a convention of the American Historical Association. His aim was political: to sound the tocsin so as to draw attention to the displays of Chinese power in East Asia, above all Beijing’s peremptory proclamation of an Air Defense Identification Zone that intrudes into Japanese and South Korean airspace, but also to Beijing’s shows of force aimed at underpinning its claims to assorted island groupings in the East and South China Seas. In Abe’s mind, these actions amount to an ominous bellwether—not merely for Japan, but for East Asia more generally.

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