I have had a 40-year relationship with friends in and around the Japanese State Department (Gaimusho). An Israeli friend wrote asking me about a YouTube by SSanbeer on Biden’s deteriorating U.S. relations with Japan. I sent it along to a close friend in Japan, a foreign policy professor. She sent two articles she had written on the subject, one is a long pdf here.
She sees a confused and reluctant Japanese political establishment with all the other East Asian participants heavily influenced by 20th century military history and occupation. America remains the unpredictable overlord.
One problem people around the world have in observing the U.S. is a false global media picture painted by The New York Times. It is largely a Francophone effigy. Few people have access to any reliable depiction of America. All the global media start with the nonsensical European image of Left and Right. In America, the Right is not and has never been totalitarian or belligerent in over 200 years. The ‘White Supremacists’ are a strawman, an insignificant, trivial population.
The crucial world affairs focus, these days, concerns China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea (both North and South.) China is a rising economic power with a huge but irrelevant army and a growing navy with no historic fighting experience.
The Cold War is over, with it’s attendant battles on the periphery. The current international war is a cyber war with minor human casualties. Diplomacy is not effective.
The role of the U.S. as the global suzerain is waning. The Trump doctrine of abandoning peripheral wars is becoming the established American rule based on his successful Middle Eastern example.
Now the battle for the future of American global foreign policy is being fought on American soil. The Democrats versus the Trumpians. The Democrats control a vast sweep of academia, the tech world, Wall Street and nearly all the media. There is no mechanism for the world to see and understand the Trumpian side of the battle. Trumpians are about 60-40 in terms of political power (Trump 60%.) Like the picadors in a bullfight the bull is being provoked by the Democrats who are senescent. There is no Democrat matador, just antediluvian bureaucrats.
This will be a long domestic war. Combat zones will be poorly defined. The battle is religious at its core. The Democrats guzzle the Enviro Religion. They are on the side that is apocalyptic, anti-commerce, largely Luddite (anti-nuclear, vegetarian, pro organic, anti-GMO) and the Trumpian opposition is eclectic.
Religious wars are multi-generational. The world can just watch in dread.