Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz appeared on The Rick Amato Show Thursday to discuss the escalating tensions between Japan and China and the declining foreign policy of the Obama administration.
"China is preparing for a war with Japan," he said. "This is something that's been building up, it's clear, going back to November, when the Chinese declared this air defense zone over the East China Sea, which covers the Senkaku Islands. They're in this dispute over these islands, have large gas and oil reserves underneath, and the Chinese are really ratcheting it up."
The Japanese are heavily reliant on the U.S. due to having no effective military, but Gertz said the Obama administration has sent Japan mixed messages.
"On one hand, the Obama administration has said we are neutral in territorial and maritime disputes," he said. "On the other hand, it's kind of given its quiet support for Japan, with whom the United States has a defense alliance. In other words, if Japan is attacked over these islands, the U.S. is obligated to defend Japan. And yet, the Chinese are conducting outside of the military threats a very sophisticated influence operation to try to divide Japan from the United States."
Amato asked Gertz to elaborate on what these developments mean for the prestige of the U.S. around the world, leading Gertz to compare Obama unfavorably to former Democratic president Jimmy Carter.
"A lot of wrong-headed policies on the part of the Obama administration," Gertz said. "I've seen this movie before, back in the '70s when Jimmy Carter was president. He welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a dissident democratizer for Iran. Look at how that's turned out. Now we see a similar kind of thing with the Obama administration. Conciliatory policies that project weakness, and I agree with the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. who said weakness is provocative. It provokes other powers into taking mistaken actions that can lead to war."