Is Japan Really Going To Do This? by Michael Billington May 21 (EIRNS)-New initiatives emerged in East Asia this month, largely through the efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with consequences that have greatly damaged the ongoing Anglo-American war drive, while opening up the potential for the integration of all East Asia into a "zone of peace," defined by the economic development perspective of the New Silk Road and China's "One Road, One Belt" policy. On May 6, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held an extremely successful summit with Putin in Sochi on the Black Sea, despite intense pressure from the Obama White House to cancel the visit. Sources close to the negotiations have informed EIR that Abe and Putin agreed on a path towards solving the territorial dispute that has prevented the signing of a peace treaty to end World War II between Russia and Japan. The two leaders also discussed a wide range of potential Japanese investments, mostly in the Russian Far East, in oil and gas production, energy generation, medical facilities, transportation, ports, and more. The launching of such extensive joint development will also have significant implications for the Korean Peninsula, because the potential for joint China-Japan-South Korea-Russia projects in the Russian Far East, involving skilled North Korean labor, is a necessary basis for resolving the other crisis spot left over from World War II. Then, on May 19-20, President Putin hosted the summit of Russia and the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), also in Sochi. The title of the summit, "Towards Strategic Partnership for the Sake of the Common Good," is, in and of itself, a strategic statement of the utmost importance, and it makes clear that Russia's intention is not to turn ASEAN against the United States, but against geopolitics itself. Before the summit, the government leaders of nearly all of the ASEAN nations issued strong endorsements of Russia's crucial role in Asia, calling for expanding Russia's relatively low level of trade and investment in the region. U.S. President Barack Obama will be in Asia from May 21 to 28, visiting Vietnam and Japan. As a result of Putin's initiatives, this trip will now take place in an environment in which his carefully nurtured anti-China alliance is beginning to fracture and collapse. It was in October 2011 that his anti-China policy, which Obama dubbed his Pivot to Asia, was first announced by his sister-in-war Hillary Clinton, in an article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), entitled, "America's Pacific Century." Obama's approach is that of the British Empire-imperial geopolitics- based on the notion that nations function in the same manner as the Hobbesian view of individual men and women: bellum omnium contra omnes, "the war of all against all," or each against all. This bestial view of man is the bedrock of the imperial strategy of divide and conquer. As a result of Vladimir Putin's flanking initiatives, Obama's intentions have been dealt a huge blow over these recent days. Russia, in conjunction with China's leaders, has moved decisively to defeat not only Obama's war plans, but geopolitics itself. The ability to manipulate nations against each other depends on convincing those nations that the degraded imperial view of man and nations is true, that a nation's self-interest requires the forming of military and economic blocs to protect against stronger neighbors, that there is no such thing as the common aims of mankind.