India has an aircraft carrier. It just finished its maiden voyage in China’s backyard. Those shipping lanes—one third of ocean-faring trade traffic—which China wants to claim by planting islands next to—most of them pass India. If any of them have traffic trouble, India will have reason to sail to the South Sea and clear up the cause of traffic congestion—or what some might call trade blocking.
India isn’t the only nation with a navy on the rise. Britain has its new aircraft carrier in the area. Germany wants to join the party. South Korea will join a scheduled US Navy exercise. And, the Japanese want to hire the British carrier builders to make their helicopter carriers F-35-ready. India’s carrier was built by a collection of 500 companies. If anything went nuts in the Taiwan Strait or the South Sea or the Sea of Japan, moving over to the Indian Ocean wouldn’t be a wonderful option since India already has its patrol.
Navies are snowballing in the East. If there’s money to be made in a Pacific scuffle, the convenient logistics of already having so many at the party could push the timing. Those islands-nations are in tumultuous waters.
China faces a three-pronged attack in the realm of public opinion. The Olympics converge with COVID; the third is three levelings up in Chinese military aggression.
COVID is seen in the public eye as having mainly originated from China. Even with conspiracy theories surrounding Faucci and Gates, no explanation lets China off the hook. That actually works to argue against the conspiracy theories—if they were true, they would seem to give China an alibi, but they don’t. Every noteworthy theory on the COVID origin points to China.
Now, COVID is crashing the Olympics in Japan.
This makes an additional bad connotation against China and the Olympics. So, with China wanting to host the 2022 Olympics, boycotts against China can be expected even from the Japanese. Then, other countries will feel comfortable joining the anti-China Olympic boycott. Such boycotts from across the globe will achieve two things: fueling popular hatred against China and inflaming China’s emotional-shame reaction. The Chinese government will dig in its heels and the world will want the Chinese dead where they stand.
But, adding to both sentiments are China’s military saber rattling. Surprise military drills within 300 miles of Taiwan, a step up in Chinese vessels observing a US-Australia navy drill, threats to nuke Japan if Japan honors a treaty to defend Taiwan from invasion—these also enrage the non-Chinese public against China. China has the control to stop global anti-China sentiment: stop giving excuses. But, that is a course of action that emotionally-driven shame doesn’t understand. And, no one expects this response better than the masterminds of the West.
China’s getting more flack from more sides—Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines. Vietnamese are furious with H&M for depicting maps with Vietnam-claimed islands as part of China, even though H&M did that because the Chinese told them to. The noose of perceived nuisance tightens.
China won’t back off on military drills and presence. The greatest beneficiaries are Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. They have every reason to hope China continues military drills. A Chinese aircraft recently radioed reference to airspace as “Chinese”, which Taiwan also claims. Weapons dealers are probably clanging champagne glasses over that.
Military activity in the Southeast Asia is on the uptick. No one plans to back down. The question is over which side is reacting how the other side expected. The accurate expector will likely win the next scuffle.
If one were to guess what was going on between Trump and Kim, internal politics of North Korea would explain it all. Korea is no exception to East Asia’s history of ongoing domination quarreling. Kim is not universally loved within his own government. The military is constantly at his back door and he must squash mutinies constantly. Pomp and acting like he’s the “military man” makes it hard for his enemies within to rally ill will against him.
Also, Trump has commented that many things are going on with North Korea behind the scenes—things which remain beyond the paparazzi watch of the Western presses. When Trump indicates no objection to the non-nuclear missile launches in North Korea, it almost seems as if Trump knows Kim is doing something the rest of the West doesn’t know about. For all we know, the number and frequency of non-nuclear missile tests could be a kind of Morse code only known to Trump and Kim. Given what has been publicly told, that would not be impossible. This only leads us to conclude that we can’t conclude anything about what’s happening in North Korea so far; there have just been too many jokers added to the deck.
Then, there’s China, China, and also China.
When it comes to raising public support for Western action against China, China is its own worst PR enemy.
China keeps doing the same thing. Beijing’s solution to rejection is to incite more rejection. Beijing’s solution to resistance is to give excuse for more resistance. It’s in a self-destructing insanity tailspin—paranoid of invisible enemies, justifying interfering in Hong Kong under the auspices that Hong Kong was already interfered in by the West.
That’s what this is all about, by the way. The whole reason Beijing accuses Taiwan and the US of causing the Hong Kong riots is to build the case that “Hong Kong was already interfered with”, and therefore sending in China’s military to stop the protests would not violate the Basic Law. The problem is that the Basic Law does not grant China permission to use military force against unarmed Hong Kong citizens on the basis of “Western interference”. But, the Chinese don’t understand the concept of “lawfulness” anyway. They just come up with whatever excuse sounds sophisticated enough to seem smarter than everyone else and thereby hypnotize the public into compliance.
China wants to blame the US and Trump won’t give China one single excuse to be twisted into so-called proof. Trump treads cautiously, but he is neither callous nor oblivious. His silence should be a warning to China that he is no fool. Sadly, China will take his silence to mean that he has caved into Beijing’s aggression and the Chinese military will only grow more overconfident than it already is. But, choices of the past four decades suggest that may have been the plan all along.
The tipping point is upon us. If China’s warship crashed into a Taiwan freighter on accident, then there would be no reason to fear or respect China’s Navy because their crew can’t steer. The alternative is to interpret it as an act of war. China doesn’t consider either because an angry bully in blamer-mode doesn’t consider others, not even how others can or will respond.
President Trump’s response to Kim Jong-Un’s recent missile party neither shows lack of a plan nor lack of respect for Japan; it show patience and insight. Gaining and maintaining trust and respect in difficult situations requires sureness in action and slowness in harsh words. Talk is cheap. These are politics, after all.
Trump has taken no action nor signed any orders giving Kim more permission. Many pundits and opinion commentators have speculated that Trump will have difficulty with Abe because of his patient words for Kim, but all of this speculation is speculation only. They are presenting a model to analyze Trump’s decisions, but that model is devoid of a grid of using “kind words” in the face of betrayal. Kim’s strategy has not deviated: provoke a US response. Trump’s words “defuse” that strategy, so to speak. Trump is no pretentious fool, more of a patient father.
The situation in China, however is heating up, obviously for the same reasons. Trump and Xi exchange similar words as Trump gives in response to Kim’s actions. They promise to prepare for talks while rallying their own citizens against each other. Rumors of peace are the surest sign that there is none just as provocation indicates a peace not easily broken.
Taiwan is gearing up for war, its war machine in full motion. Taiwan is beginning mass production of strategic strike responses. Taiwan is renaming one of its offices to include both “US” and “Taiwan” in the name, which is a first. These are not actions that have any intention of appeasing Beijing.
Then, there’s Hong Kong. Responses from the American government would view the SAR as no longer capable of diplomatic ties if the extradition law on the table is passed. This extradition law would likely isolate Hong Kong from North America and Europe. We know war is close, but “how close” will be known by whether Beijing allows “Asia’s World City” to internationally isolate itself.
Those promised and prepared talks between Beijing and Washington will only serve as size-ups, if they even happen.
The PDT Symphony Asian Mad Scientist Theorem is hard at work—that history unfolds as if a mythical mad scientist has finished societal experimentation on North Korea and has now decided to implement the same principles in China, this time with a seemingly faster canter toward communist calamity. Rather than nukes, China makes noises of sinking US aircraft carriers and invading Taiwan.
The theorem is not truth, but it helps to accurately anticipate how history will unfold, and anticipate it has. It foretold that the mythical “miracle of China” would be exposed for the myth it always was.
The so-called “China miracle” seduced too many. There was no miracle happening inside China. There was no invention, no innovation, no new ideas. Even China’s socioeconomic framework was reverse-engineered from Russian Marxism. Now, government requires itself to be the head of even religion; an Atheist government wants to define the truth for a religion that believes in a God that the government does not. How can that not be a course for calamity?
China gained its money, not from its own human ingenuity—since the Confucian education culture purges all ingenuity inclinations. No, the money came from Americans who would drive half a dollar’s distance in gasoline to save a nickel—thinking that this made sense. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t save cents, but it did make dollars for China. But, now, those dollars are all gone—the dollars China believed in, and the dollars that made Western saps believe in China. The “miracle” was never from China, but from the United States’ innovative, free-thinking, God-fearing economy.
China continues to grab for power—not because it feels powerful. While its economy and international respect have taken a nosedive, China is all the more adamant about “reclaiming” what is China’s ostensibly by rite. The looming invasion of Taiwan won’t happen because China believes it is economically strong enough to win, but that reclaiming Taiwan would solve all other problems to make China economically strong again. China believes China is a poor nation only because it hasn’t yet “retaken” more control of more lands, such as Taiwan—an island that the Communist Party never once controlled.
Even King Belshazzar feared the writing on the wall without understanding it. But, Western saps didn’t fear the writing written in their own economic language. Now, three Canadians are shocked and caught off guard. They should have known better than to put themselves in such peril during our dangerous times. So should the coupon clippers in America’s consumer base have known better. So should the American companies about to watch their investments get “appropriated” have known better.
And, China should have known such a trade war was coming. Lack of reciprocity started the Opium Wars. China should have researched America’s history books for the phrase “Indian giver”, which often described America’s government much more than it described America’s Natives. China should have known that American consumers would respond in wrath when their jobs had been exported from their homes and imported into a country that prohibits free speech and religion. China should have known that a trade war was in the making from the first day that American manufacturers outsourced their labor to the Chinese.
But, the Americans never told China because the Americans were too consumed with their own consumerism.
The obvious has been ignored. Now, the inevitable results are playing out. Whatever course history takes, the results must run their course, but we know it won’t be pretty, not for a while anyway. But, of all the things it never was, it was always foreseeable to those who wanted to look at what was right in front of them.
It takes two to start a war, so everyone should have known the war that was starting because everyone was starting it long, long ago.
