The U.S. assassination Friday of a top Iranian military commander and key player in the country’s proxy conflicts in the Middle East will have grave implications for Japan ahead of a planned dispatch of Self-Defense Forces personnel to the region, according to analysts.
The targeted killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who headed Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, is expected to trigger an intense backlash by Tehran against American interests in the region — including, perhaps inadvertently, against U.S. ally Japan.
"The strike on Soleimani adds significant risk to Japan's plans for an SDF deployment in the region, and likely will need to be re-analyzed in the coming weeks as tensions between Tehran and Washington play out," said J. Berkshire Miller, a senior fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo.