A Line in the Sea - By Michael Auslin

SHANGHAI, China - On Sunday, Japan headed to the polls to return the Liberal Democratic Party to power and select former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo as the man to steer the country out of its nearly quarter-century long financial crisis.

But Abe might face just as serious a challenge dealing with the country's security crisis with China. On Thursday, just three days before the election, the Japanese government responded to a Chinese propeller plane flying over what Japan considers its own airspace by sending eight F-15 fighter planes in response. Ominously, it's the first time a Chinese aircraft has intruded into Japanese airspace. The incident is just the latest in the two countries' ongoing showdown over who owns the Senkakus (the islands over which the Chinese plane was flying, known in China as the Diaoyu) that threatens to destroy their bilateral relationship and possibly even send them to war. Prime Minister-to be Abe shows no sign of backing down over the issue, and reiterated the day after the election that the Senkakus are indisputably Japanese territory.

In Shanghai, China's economic center, discussion about Japan focuses on just how much Tokyo might be willing to risk trade between the two countries over the uninhabited islands. When he takes over next week, Abe needs to understand that China's new leader Xi Jinping has apparently unanimous backing domestically, and can patiently continue to chip away at Japan's administrative control over the Senkakus without fear of having to settle the issue anytime soon. That means Tokyo will have to counter with an equally patient, yet credible strategy.

After a seemingly smooth power transfer in November, Xi leads China's Communist Party and is slated to take over government positions next year. Now the ruler of one of the world's most powerful countries, Xi has unfortunately given little indication of his views on international affairs, other than repeating bromides about China's peaceful rise and asserting that it is "absolutely not a threat" to its neighbors. In a recent meeting with foreign experts, he was quoted as saying that China "will not seek hegemony or expansionism." Yet on specific issues, such as territorial disputes like the Senkakus, Xi has been quiet.

Ties between the two Asian giants remain central to the region's economic prosperity and political stability. In 2011, China and Japan did nearly $340 billion in bilateral trade, largely in electronics, machinery, and foodstuffs, as well as component parts for assembly in China. Millions of Chinese are employed by Japanese firms on the mainland. In June 2012, the two countries introduced a direct yen-yuan exchange mechanism, allowing them to bypass the U.S. dollar and reduce costs of financial transactions.

Yet at the same time, each is also attempting to shore up its own economic position, Japan by flirting with the idea of joining negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade area, and China by exploring ways for the yuan to play a larger global financial role. Politically, each continues to jockey for more international prestige and influence, whether through multilateral organizations or direct ties with other countries.

Politics, however, has put economic ties between the world's second and third largest economies at risk. Major exporters, such as Toyota, have seen sales decline by up to half during the autumn after weeks of demonstrations in China over the Senkakus. Japan's decision this summer to buy several of the privately owned islands may have been a move to forestall Tokyo's then-governor Ishihara Shintaro from doing the same thing, but it ruptured relations with Beijing, unleashed a firestorm of anti-Japanese protests throughout China, and set off an ongoing maritime face-off in the waters around the islands. Chinese generals and commentators have been reported urging the country to prepare for combat, and Western observers, including U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, have raised concerns that conflict could break out between the two historical rivals.

Like Abe, Xi is unlikely to radically alter Beijing's stance on the islands, which is that they have always been China's territory "historically and legally," according to an October press briefing by Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun. Yet he will have to balance a firm diplomatic line with far harsher semi-official stances that serve to inflame Chinese nationalism. For example, Lt. Gen. Ren Haiquan, at meeting of senior military officials from 16 countries in Australia in November, stated that the dispute could cause war with Japan, which he reminded his listeners was once a "fascist" nation that attacked Australia. The hawkish Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan even recommended that rather than negotiating with Japanese, China should send hundreds of maritime vessels to the disputed area to conduct maritime guerrilla warfare. So far, Xi has not specifically repudiated such statements, but neither has he indicated that he intends to reduce the pressure on Japan. Chinese vessels continue regularly to enter the waters around the Senkakus, triggering Japanese Coast Guard responses.

'These Guys Are Thugs' - Interview by David Kenner

CAIRO, Egypt - It's do or die time for Egypt's opposition: They find themselves assailed by a hostile president, threatened by a draft constitution they don't believe protects basic human rights, and at risk of being sidelined from political life if they can't compete at the ballot box.

It's not that Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Egypt's unofficial opposition leader, doesn't know all that. But he believes something else, too -- that he finally has President Mohamed Morsy right where he wants him. In a wide-ranging interview with Foreign Policy at his home outside Cairo, ElBaradei described why the ruling Muslim Brotherhood was on its back foot, and slammed the United States for remaining silent in the face of the Islamist organization's growing autocratic tendencies.

"[Brotherhood officials] are using the same language of Mubarak -- stability. These guys are thugs. It's the same thing," he says. "At least by what you read, some of the [Brotherhood's] militias are killing some of these guys [in street clashes] -- they are using the same tactics. Except they have beards."

The interview came with Egypt in the midst of a referendum on a new draft constitution, which was primarily written by the Muslim Brotherhood and its hard-line allies, the Salafis. ElBaradei, who has tried to rally the "no" vote, says the document "confuses law and morality." Unofficial results from the first round of voting on Dec. 15 showed that 56.5 percent of Egyptians had voted in favor of the constitution -- but ElBaradei denounces those figures as the result of "massive falsification," claiming the "no" vote would have prevailed in a free and fair election.

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, ElBaradei says, has a responsibility to condemn these abuses to avoid being complicit with an autocratic Egyptian regime.

"Particularly in the U.S., frankly, what you see is a very muted reaction," he says. "People here are very disappointed... they want the Americans, and everybody else, to put their money with their mouth is. And that's not happening."

ElBaradei evokes Yogi Berra to describe U.S. policy on Egypt: It reminded him, he said, of "déjà vu, all over again" -- a throwback to when the United States would give the Mubarak regime a free pass on human rights as long as it protected Washington's regional interests. The opposition has compiled evidence that some of the judges overseeing the process were impostors and that Christians were turned away from polling stations. However, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland avoided presenting an opinion on the alleged irregularities at a Dec. 17 press briefing, saying only that the United States is "not going to opine" until the process is concluded.

"Yes, [Morsy] was democratically elected," ElBaradei says. "But does that give him the right to turn himself into a dictator?"

FAIL: North Korean Satellite Losing Steam

The North Korean satellite launched last week to global alarm is already failing and falling from orbit, according to satellite trackers using publicly available military data and software to follow the craft.

The alarm bells sounded in the White House, National Security Council and Pentagon were not so much for Kwangmyongsong 3-2, the satellite, but the massive rocket with two booster stages that threw it into space. That rocket launch, the U.S. fears, lays the groundwork for a potential intercontinental ballistic missile that could someday carry a nuclear warhead, instead of a satellite, all the way to California.

A Pentagon official told the E-Ring the Defense Department would not comment about the status of the satellite, because they do not comment on 'intelligence matters.'

But a U.S. official tells us, 'We haven't completed our final assessment, but it's a good chance whatever they put up there is deaf, blind, and mute.'

North Korea Tech, a website, explains why they know the craft is failing, based on data released by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) here.

You can follow the satellite zooming across the Google map via this website.

Closed Book - By Jina Moore

In law school in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Thomas Alieu was smart, determined, and thwarted. "I wanted to become the first blind lawyer in this country," says Alieu, who was blinded by the measles when he was 5. He'd survived the country's decade-long civil war and thrived at university -- he earned a bachelor's degree in history -- but when he got to law school, he couldn't find recordings of his specialized textbooks, and the classmates who had read aloud to him as an undergraduate were too busy to do the same in law school. "I was forced to be a dropout because the materials were not there."

So Alieu founded the Educational Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Freetown, where he runs Sierra Leone's only Braille printing press, a gift seven years ago from the Dutch. The books are expensive, the copies few, and the heavy paper needed to successfully emboss the raised dots of the Braille alphabet is scarce. The center is a bare-bones library, and even today, nothing here would help a guy like Alieu get through law school.

Theoretically, Alieu could use the same texts specially digitized in the United States, or Braille copies printed here and donated and shipped there; Sierra Leone's students study in English, after all. But sharing Braille books across borders is illegal. At least for the moment.

On Monday, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will decide whether to move forward with a treaty that would finally make it permissible to share accessible texts across borders. The proposed "VIP treaty" (for "visually impaired") would also provide, in effect, the same exception to copyright law that exists in the United States, allowing organizations to copy, in a variety of accessible formats, a copyrighted work without getting permission from or paying a fee to the copyright holder.

That's usually referred to as a copyright "exception," and only a third of all countries have one, according to Dan Pescod, a manager of accessibility campaigns for the Britain's Royal National Institute of the Blind and vice chair of the World Blind Union's Right to Read campaign. The proposed treaty "would get the remaining two-thirds to put into place a national exception, and it would make it legal for us to send accessible books from one country to another."

"Accessible books" includes Braille print copies, but the more important issue is digital files. Specially coded audio books allow the blind to navigate between chapters, bookmark their reading, and otherwise interact with a text as a sighted person might with a print volume. There are also various text-to-speech programs that can adapt a book for a visually impaired reader. All of these are based on digital files that blind resource organizations say would be easy to share with visually impaired readers, if not for the current regulations.

"Let's say the United States produces the book," says Melanie Brunson, executive director of the American Council of the Blind.  "Canada has to produce their own version; England has to produce their own version; Australia has to produce its own version, even though all of them are producing it in English Braille or an English talking book."

That's no small thing. Take Britain's most lately beloved literary export, Harry Potter. It cost the National Braille Press in Boston roughly $80,000 to set and print one volume of the series, though the work had already been done in other countries. Pescod says the resources his Royal National Institute of the Blind used to duplicate a single Harry Potter text could have paid for another four titles in Braille and another seven accessible audiobooks.

Current copyright regulations are contributing to a global "book famine" for blind or visually impaired readers, who number around 285 million, according to the World Blind Union (WBU). The WBU estimates that less than 1 percent of all titles are available in accessible formats in the developing world, and only 7 percent in the developed world. Only 8,517 books are accessible to the blind in Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay combined, according to the WBU, yet Argentina has 63,000 accessible titles and Spain has 102,000. Spanish, of course, is a national language in each of those countries, but current copyright law doesn't permit Spain or Argentina to share its converted texts.

The publishing industry doesn't support the treaty, and so far, the Obama administration appears to be siding with them, if only by omission. "The U.S. has never said no, but they also have never said yes," says Vera Franz, senior at the Open Society Foundation, which supports the treaty.

At previous WIPO meetings, U.S. delegates have pushed for non-binding recommendations, rather than a binding treaty. The European Union long supported that position but reversed itself in November, making the United States a lone but powerful holdout. "If they are not supporting this project, it cannot move forward," Franz says.

This week's conference is the final vote on whether to push ahead with a treaty, which could come to a general vote as early as June. WIPO's consensus-based decision-making means American support would be required to move forward, according to Franz.

The State Department declined to comment on the proposed treaty or Monday's meeting.  Justin Hughes, who heads up the American delegate to the proceedings for the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, withheld specifics about the U.S. position but said in an email that "the U.S. is working with many delegations to ensure that Monday's meeting goes smoothly."

Advocates insist anything less than a treaty won't be smooth at all. "If it's some kind of recommendation, it will be seen as much less serious and less likely to be applied to governments across the world," says Pescod. "We haven't worked for many years on this issue to be fobbed off" with a softer agreement.

Newtown and the Doomsday Preppers - By J.M. Berger

In the wake of a terrible tragedy like Friday's elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, most people immediately begin groping for answers.

On Sunday, a family member claimed that Nancy Lanza, mother of 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza, owned the guns used in the shooting because she was some manner of survivalist. The reasons Adam Lanza did what he did may well be complex. But if the report proves to be true -- and many, many reports about the Lanzas have not -- it may provide context for his actions.

Survivalism, sometimes referred to as "doomsday prepping" or simply "prepping," is a movement based on the fear that society is on the brink of imminent, or at least foreseeable, collapse and that it's sensible to prepare for that possibility.

"Survivalist" is a very broad category, and it includes a strikingly diverse collection of people, many of whom, it should be emphasized, are perfectly nice and have fears that are simply amplified versions of those that keep mainstream Americans awake at night. There are at least tens of thousands of prepper families in the United States, covering a broad range of practices, most of which are not particularly unreasonable.

Someone who closely followed the preparedness guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, or FEMA might find themselves the butt of "survivalist" jokes from their friends and family. But those friends would have been grateful to have a prepper friend if they lived in certain parts of the East Coast when Hurricane Sandy struck.

Preppers go beyond the average household's disaster preparedness regime of having a couple flashlights with batteries in them. Their precautions can include everything from keeping a supply of canned goods to stocking generators and building elaborate bunkers. Many preppers also keep guns and a supply of ammunition in anticipation of the breakdown of law and order, as well as for hunting after the local Whole Foods has been abandoned to looters.

Shortly after press reports about Nancy Lanza's alleged survivalism appeared, the American Preppers Network issued a statement, which said: "Our members, and others around the globe who share our philosophy of being prepared in times of emergency, are sickened by this event. We too are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and to associate APN or any legitimate organization that stresses preparing for emergencies with this barbaric act goes against everything we collectively stand for."

Despite this statement, which is generally correct, prepper subculture can go further than intensive or even excessive preparation. Most survivalism is based around fear of a sometimes ambiguous, sometimes specific disaster that is just around the corner, most commonly referred to by preppers as SHTF, short for "shit hits the fan." Because SHTF can be anything from the collapse of the dollar to an electromagnetic pulse detonation to a race war, survivalist tendencies are sometimes -- but not always -- paired with malignant forms of extremism, such as ideological racism, sovereign citizenship, apocalyptic religion, or anti-government beliefs on both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, for instance, took part in survivalist subculture in addition to their anti-government ideology, and extensive sections of the white nationalist Web forum Stormfront are dedicated to discussions of SHTF. But survivalism tends to be an add-on to such ideologies, not a fundamental cause.

Morning Brief: Japan's Liberal Democratic Party returns to power

Top News

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory in national polls on Sunday, returning to power a party that held a near monopoly on power in Japan's post-war political order until its defeat three years ago. With the LDP's victory, Shinzo Abe, a nationalist and China hawk, is set to become Japan's next prime minister.

Together with its parliamentary ally, New Komeito, the LDP now controls over two-thirds of seats in Japan's lower house, which will allow the two parties to together overrule the upper chamber. Abe has promised to embark on a bold program of economic reform, saying that he will press the Bank of Japan to take steps to increase inflation and end the decades of stagnant growth that have become a hallmark of the Japanese economy. Abe has said that he plans to force the BoJ to raise its inflationary target and push it to engage in "unlimited" quantitative easing, in addition to passing a stimulus bill.

Abe's election has also raised the prospect of increased tensions between China and Japan, which have spent much of the past the year sparring over disputed island claims. Though he declined to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to Japanese soldiers who died in World War II that includes the remains of some executed war criminals, during his previous term as prime minister, Abe said on Monday that he experienced the "deepest anguish" over that decision. Abe, 58, also supports revising Japan's constitution, which renounces war, to allow for a more robust defense.

Egypt: Egyptians took a first step toward approving their country's controversial draft constitution during the first round of voting over the weekend. The Muslim Brotherhood said that about 57 percent of ballots cast Saturday supported ratification of the new constitution, the drafting of which critics say was controlled by Islamists. But turnout was low, and members of the opposition said that voting was marred by widespread irregularities and abuse.

Don't Blame Obama for Syria - By Aaron David Miller

Syria is a tragedy. Too much blood has flowed to imagine a negotiated transition and apparently not enough to warrant an effective intervention by a divided, cautious, and self-interested international community. And it may well be that the real struggle for Syria -- the one that determines its future character -- has yet to begin.

But to lay this bloody mess at President Barack Obama's doorstep, as John Hannah (a guy I respect and admire) does in his recent post for FP, is both wrong and unfair.

I write this not so much in defense of Obama's policies as in recognition of the cruel reality and terrible choices the United States has faced with regards to the Syrian uprising and civil war.

During this entire two-year debate on what Obama should or shouldn't have done on Syria, I have yet to hear a single military strategy that the administration could have adopted that would have been feasible, effective, and consequential in altering the bloody arc of this crisis for the better

Real game-changing moves -- weeks of air and missile strikes on Syrian military assets and leadership targets, a no-fly zone, and a sustained effort to provide the fragmented opposition with lethal weapons -- were rightly deemed too risky, too uncertain, and too open-ended to be viable. At the end of the day, Syria hawks simply could not assure Americans that they wouldn't be stuck with yet another Middle East quagmire.

The less risky steps -- sending in humanitarian assistance and non-lethal aid to the opposition, positioning Patriot missile batteries in Turkey, and launching political efforts to coordinate the opposition -- carried little risk. Admittedly, they have not had much real consequence in altering the course of the conflict. But that doesn't mean that taking more aggressive measures would be good for the United States. And at the end of the day, that's what U.S. foreign policy has to be about.

We will never know about the what-ifs, of course. In the world of counterfactuals, the what-might-have-beens can never be fact checked, let alone held to any kind of empirical standard. And there are risks to everything in life -- action and inaction. Some argue that trying more ambitious policies -- even if they failed -- would have been better than not trying at all. But they haven't persuaded me, or too many others.