The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. On Dec. 9, while the West was still shell shocked from the fall of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria the day before, the Japanese prime minister was busy with the celebration of the empress’ birthday and parliamentary deliberations on the supplementary budget.
For sure, there was some discussion in Tokyo about humanitarian and reconstruction assistance following the upheaval in Syria. The collapse of the Syrian regime is truly a major event that could lead to a tectonic shift across the Middle East if handled poorly. And yet, unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), the reaction of the Japanese government and the media was slow and tone-deaf.
The Assad regime was virtually the last of the old “Arab socialist” states in the Middle East. Now, many of the key players in the region — such as Hamas, Hezbollah and countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel — have mostly become political forces influenced by strong religious ideologies.
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