I admit that I find it hard to believe that China would think that even a lame duck Trump would order an attack on China.
Trump is a bully, and like the bully he is, Trump generally avoids picking fights with anyone who actually is able to fight back. That is why Trump backed away from war on Iran, and China is certainly able to do much more than Iran as far as fighting back goes.
I doubt most of East Asia will be willing to back the US if push comes to shove with China. This is just another instance of the US picking a fight it cannot win…but that enriches a select few.
I am not a fan of Elbridge Colby or his mindset. Look at the website of his organization, the Marathon Project. It's named after a "great" battle of Greek antiquity. It's logo is a Spartan helmet. The message he's sending is "I watched the Zac Snyder movie 300 and it made me feel strong" despite the fact that the United States has no intelligible relationship to Ancient Greece.
The basic mindset of Colby is "we need to have great wars against great adversaries in order to be part of history, just like the heroes of ancient Greece." This is an idiotic mindset that sees war as an end in and of itself. Then again, we are living in a country that has been aggressive and expansionist like no other polity in world history. Colby should remember that Hitler had a fetish for the Spartans too.
Larison's former publisher put out an article recently about how the United States needed to "reclaim its Spartan heritage" or somesuch idiocy.
While it was news to me that the United States was modeled on Ancient Sparta or that we had any "Spartan heritage" to reclaim, I posed the question whether that meant the general anti-intellectualism of Sparta, or did he just want us to reclaim the gay sex, the slavery of the helots, or the exposure of infants? Or did the author just find the dudes with swords and tunics and aggressive bullying to be stimulating?
Ha! My guess is the latter, and not so much the 80% of society being slaves or the infanticide.
Honestly I think it's even a big stretch for anyone to even claim that the US has "Anglo-Protestant" heritage at this point. That was the case when my six-times-great Grandfather fought in the Revolution (though he was Dutch rather than Anglo, and fought against the most Anglo-Protestant of Anglo-Protestant nations while getting military aid from Franco-Catholic France) but it hasn't been for a long, long time.
The desire to invoke patrimonial heritage (real or imagined) plus their valor in war is a very unhealthy combo. We're Americans. We're very unlike other societies. We don't share common ancestry and we don't have a state religion. And I hope we don't need any of that stuff. I'll take the U.S. Constitution over Roman law any day of the week.
I think the mindset of the typical TAC reader at this point is equivalent to the average person who reads stuff from the Claremont institute. "Ah, I see they are making allusions to stuff about Rome and have pictures of marble statues and stuff in their banners, and also they say that Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with my political views. That stuff is stuff that smart people know about, so I am smart for reading it."
As far as China is concerned, Taiwan is a province with a high degree of autonomy. How would independence benefit Taiwan? For the US to start selling arms to Taiwan would only be interpreted as meddling in internal affairs, which China would never accept it. Selling arms to Taiwan is not defending Taiwan.
Imagine if a foreign great power like Britain or France had sold arms to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. How would Lincoln have reacted? He would have gone ballistic.
That's how China views Taiwan. Taiwan is only de facto independent today because Chiang Kai Shek and his army of conscripts fled mainland China after losing the Chinese Civil War on the mainland to Mao and his army of peasants. In June of 1950, Harry Truman decided to intervene in the Chinese Civil War by sailing the Seventh Fleet into the Strait of Taiwan, thus preventing the Maoists from launching an amphibious assault on Taiwan to recapture it. The US then spent decades claiming that the Guomindang in Taiwan was the legitimate government of all of China, and the Guomindang held China's seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Taiwanese regime continued to claim that it was the rightful regime of all of China (not just Taiwan) until the 2000s.
Of course, this history and other details that every Chinese person is aware of are details which Americans don't know about. Learning the political/geopolitical history of non-Western European countries makes most peoples' brains hurt. They want simple narratives with a white hat and a black hat. They want cowboy movies rather than history.
I admit that I find it hard to believe that China would think that even a lame duck Trump would order an attack on China.
Trump is a bully, and like the bully he is, Trump generally avoids picking fights with anyone who actually is able to fight back. That is why Trump backed away from war on Iran, and China is certainly able to do much more than Iran as far as fighting back goes.
I think the key issue is this: Trump would be more than willing to let *other people* die on his behalf. That sounds pretty plausible to me.
Great point. Despite the incoherent mouth noises or Twitter spewings of Trump, he was probably a pretty easy-read for foreign adversaries.
I doubt most of East Asia will be willing to back the US if push comes to shove with China. This is just another instance of the US picking a fight it cannot win…but that enriches a select few.
I am not a fan of Elbridge Colby or his mindset. Look at the website of his organization, the Marathon Project. It's named after a "great" battle of Greek antiquity. It's logo is a Spartan helmet. The message he's sending is "I watched the Zac Snyder movie 300 and it made me feel strong" despite the fact that the United States has no intelligible relationship to Ancient Greece.
The basic mindset of Colby is "we need to have great wars against great adversaries in order to be part of history, just like the heroes of ancient Greece." This is an idiotic mindset that sees war as an end in and of itself. Then again, we are living in a country that has been aggressive and expansionist like no other polity in world history. Colby should remember that Hitler had a fetish for the Spartans too.
Larison's former publisher put out an article recently about how the United States needed to "reclaim its Spartan heritage" or somesuch idiocy.
While it was news to me that the United States was modeled on Ancient Sparta or that we had any "Spartan heritage" to reclaim, I posed the question whether that meant the general anti-intellectualism of Sparta, or did he just want us to reclaim the gay sex, the slavery of the helots, or the exposure of infants? Or did the author just find the dudes with swords and tunics and aggressive bullying to be stimulating?
Ha! My guess is the latter, and not so much the 80% of society being slaves or the infanticide.
Honestly I think it's even a big stretch for anyone to even claim that the US has "Anglo-Protestant" heritage at this point. That was the case when my six-times-great Grandfather fought in the Revolution (though he was Dutch rather than Anglo, and fought against the most Anglo-Protestant of Anglo-Protestant nations while getting military aid from Franco-Catholic France) but it hasn't been for a long, long time.
The desire to invoke patrimonial heritage (real or imagined) plus their valor in war is a very unhealthy combo. We're Americans. We're very unlike other societies. We don't share common ancestry and we don't have a state religion. And I hope we don't need any of that stuff. I'll take the U.S. Constitution over Roman law any day of the week.
TAC writes a lot of stupid crap these days, the midwit equivalent of clickbait.
I think the mindset of the typical TAC reader at this point is equivalent to the average person who reads stuff from the Claremont institute. "Ah, I see they are making allusions to stuff about Rome and have pictures of marble statues and stuff in their banners, and also they say that Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with my political views. That stuff is stuff that smart people know about, so I am smart for reading it."
TAC is still a intervention-skeptical rag despite the toga fetish. That's a rarity that's still worth something.
At least TAC is not a kneejerk interventionist rag.
As far as China is concerned, Taiwan is a province with a high degree of autonomy. How would independence benefit Taiwan? For the US to start selling arms to Taiwan would only be interpreted as meddling in internal affairs, which China would never accept it. Selling arms to Taiwan is not defending Taiwan.
Imagine if a foreign great power like Britain or France had sold arms to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. How would Lincoln have reacted? He would have gone ballistic.
That's how China views Taiwan. Taiwan is only de facto independent today because Chiang Kai Shek and his army of conscripts fled mainland China after losing the Chinese Civil War on the mainland to Mao and his army of peasants. In June of 1950, Harry Truman decided to intervene in the Chinese Civil War by sailing the Seventh Fleet into the Strait of Taiwan, thus preventing the Maoists from launching an amphibious assault on Taiwan to recapture it. The US then spent decades claiming that the Guomindang in Taiwan was the legitimate government of all of China, and the Guomindang held China's seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Taiwanese regime continued to claim that it was the rightful regime of all of China (not just Taiwan) until the 2000s.
Of course, this history and other details that every Chinese person is aware of are details which Americans don't know about. Learning the political/geopolitical history of non-Western European countries makes most peoples' brains hurt. They want simple narratives with a white hat and a black hat. They want cowboy movies rather than history.