historian said:
But we're those attacks successful? I don't think so. I must admit my knowledge of Japanese history is primary focused on modern events from the unification on.
in both Chinese invasion attempts, a typhoon destroyed the fleets before they landed = total loss of invasion force at sea. That prompted the Mongols to leave Japan alone and focus on places they'd had more success.
Mongols also came to grief in Vietnam, for reasons not unlike the events in the modern era = the Vietnamese simply will not submit to foreign control.
History is quite clear that expansionist powers until they are stopped. Look at the size of Russia today. And Russia isn't happy with it. To some degree, this is understandable. Russia does not have defensible borders in the classic sense. They have always dealt with that by expansion, to control all the major invasion routes. At the collapse of the USSR, they lost control of all major invasion routes. ZERO chance an autocratic Russia would be content with that. it would need Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine to control all the invasion routes from the west. That's just geopolitics.....what the map dictates upon the various polities of Eastern Europe writ large.
Of course, all the nations of continental Europe, save Spain and Switzerland, could say the same thing about ease and frequency of invasion. They all have mostly indefensible borders. They all have been invaded from one direction of the other over & over & over just like Russia has. The difference is, European nations, via Nato and EU, have all agreed to abandon all border disputes and enter into collective defense of a free, democratic, capitalist system. They've all promised to trade rather than war with one another Russia, meanwhile, is still an autocracy and is unwilling to make that same commitment. It still wants to be a dominant power at the center of a vast empire, and that requires war.
The advance of Nato/EU is not a threat to a free, democratic, capitalist Russia.
It is only a threat to an autocratic Russia.
Russia of course knows this. it knows full well that Nato could never launch a pre-emptive expansionist war against Russia. Such would require every Nato member to sign on, and that will never happen. But it will still put out propaganda about Nato being an expansionist power which forced Russia to start a war. And some smart people will buy it, mostly because it serves their other agendas.