US-Japan building castles in the air

Some media in the United States and Japan have been promoting the view that there is an increasingly heavy smell of gunpowder emanating from China's "rhetoric" in its recent disputes with other regional countries.

They have argued that because of this, the US and Japan should adapt to a changing situation in the Asia-Pacific region and establish a "Washington-Tokyo-plus-one" strategy to weave a "network of containment" against China.

The so-called US-Japan-plus-one strategy refers to the establishment of a kind of alliance or cooperation between Washington and Tokyo with a strategic and military arc of countries, including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and the Republic of Korea, in a bid to build a network that can keep China bottled up in the Asia-Pacific region.