The National Interest was relatively unknown to me until the past month. I have a feeling that was probably the case for most people until Yahoo decided to aggregate their publications on Yahoo news. In my pursuit for dumb news, Yahoo is pretty reliable to deliver at least one story a day, most days multiple. However, they have lately been on a speculative war-mongering tirade that I find baffling.
Japan has never indicated a desire to join the nuclear arms race despite having one of the largest militaries in the world, they also don't really have much interest in provoking China, with whom they have a rather long and checkered past with. There is literally no reason to write this news story, but that seems to be what The National Interest specializes in these days so why not?
Among the reasons that Japan would need nukes (as provided by The National Interest) is "because China and Russia have them," because "they have a compact land mass," and because "they are the 3rd largest economy in the world and can therefore afford them."
The article then goes on to glorify how they wouldn't need to spend as much because their range would only need to be to reach European Russia, China, and the Middle East. huh? Japan has a bad relationship with literally NONE of these countries.
If you ever want to see a collection of speculative and based on nothing at all news articles, I highly suggest running over to The National Interest. It is a treasure-trove of almost entirely OP-ED stories that apparently speak to the war-mongerer in everyone that makes CNN and Fox look like incredibly reliable news sources.
The fact that Yahoo re-posts this stuff says a lot about how dependable their "news" channel actually is.
This is "dumb" in my mind because it is based on a non-existent situation and strategies that have no basis in reality. By the way "The National Interest" is considered a right-leaning publication and I suppose I don't really find that terribly surprising.