Flashback: Jim Webb Stumps George Allen About the Senkaku Islands

I was just reading this article about how “[t]ensions between China and Japan, at their worst in half a century, are making conflict ‘much more likely now than it’s probably been in years,'” and how the focus of that tension is “over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea – the Chinese call them Diaoyu and the Japanese call them Senkaku.” I immediately thought back to the October 2006 debate in Richmond between Jim Webb and George Allen (I was in Webb’s “war room” for that one), in which Webb completely stumped Allen as to what these islands are and why they might matter. Given recent developments between Japan and China, we all know now what Jim Webb knew then (and what George Allen had no clue about, despite the fact that he was in the U.S. Senate at the time).