The United States seems hell bent on provoking a violent confrontation with China and is doing so without a clear strategic vision. Consider the following
- The General in charge of the U.S. Air Mobility Command sent a letter to his subordinates stating his belief that America will be in a shooting war with China by 2025.
- The United States shot down a Chinese balloon (the Chinese insist it was a weather balloon off course) without making any attempt to communicate with the Government in Beijing prior to destroying the balloon.
- Delegations of bipartisan U.S. legislators (former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was the most prominent) traveled to Taiwan and vowed to defend Taiwan against China.
- Republicans on Congress’ foreign affairs and armed services committees are asking President Joe Biden to propose as much as $2 billion in military aid for Taiwan when he releases his fiscal 2024 budget request, expected next month.
The Pelosi visit to Taiwan last July sparked outrage in Beijing and the Chinese vowed to retaliate. Do you think the Chinese anger has ebbed in light of the three other events listed above?
Biden is going out of his way to provoke the Chinese. In 2021 he sent an unmistakable message to his former benefactors:
President Joe Biden has selected a delegation of five former top Pentagon officials to visit Taiwan on Tuesday as a show of support for the island.
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mike Mullen will lead the delegation, with former deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan along with former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy. Former senior directors for Asia on the National Security Council Mike Green and Evan Medeiros will fill out the rest of the delegation.
Relations with China have entered dangerous waters. Instead of trying to find a diplomatic solution to lessen the heightened tensions, the Biden Administration is doubling down on projecting an aggressive posture:
The Pentagon’s top China official is to visit Taiwan in the coming days, a rare trip to the island by a senior US defence policymaker that comes as relations between Washington and Beijing are mired in crisis over a suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down two weeks ago.
Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, will go to Taiwan in the coming days, according to four people familiar with his trip. He is currently in Mongolia for discussions with the country’s military.
Chase would be the first senior defence official to visit Taiwan since Heino Klinck, deputy assistant secretary for east Asia, went in 2019. At the time, he was the most senior Pentagon official to visit the island in four decades.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese military planners. Do you think they are shrugging all of this off as meaningless posturing by unimportant players in the United States? No. Any intelligence analyst worth their salt will be briefing Xi Jinping that the United States is behaving irrationally and is serious about provoking a confrontation. Accordingly, I am sure the Chinese are preparing for this war.
Here is the problem for the United States — it lacks the military power to defeat China with conventional forces. We failed to learn that lesson in Korea 70 years ago. The situation now is more precarious. America is totally dependent on air craft carrier task forces to project force. China is fully stocked with hyper sonic missiles and the U.S. Navy has no defense against them. Yet the political mood in America, egged on by a corporate media completely clueless about the peril facing U.S. forces if they embark on a war with China, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for Biden to reverse course and seek a peaceful accommodation with Beijing. I fear I am watching a car driven by a drunk that is on a collision course with a steel bridge and there is nothing I can do to prevent the crash.
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