Will The U.S. Go To War With China?

DC China Hawks Will Virtue Signal This Country into Poverty

BP

Bipartisanship is foolishly celebrated. It often comes in the form of banal red tape, expansion of the sacred welfare state, but worst of all is good old-fashioned war. Warfare makes the job of a politician easy: pious speeches, self-affirming pats on the back, and vague saber-rattling without repercussions. DC lawmakers get to masquerade as freedom-fighting patriots while enticing our country’s largest lender and supplier of goods into a Cold War. Bipartisanship is dangerous.

What’s concerning is that leaders are coalescing into the same sort of thinking that started the Ukraine war.

On Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on China during which Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) said “if there is anything that we should learn from the Russian invasion,” it’s that the US should have been more aggressive in “deterrence” and retaliated more swiftly:

Having recently moved to DC for my job, I attended an event on Thursday at the Hudson Institute (one of several hawkish think tanks). After the event, I overheard the guest speaker — US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific  Security Affairs Dr. Ely Ratner — say something rather revealing about the underlying attitude of the US security state:

“It’s the same as it’s always been. They’ll push it up to the line and back off as soon the heat turns on.”

It’s all posturing. A game of chicken.

So what happens if China does bite the bullet and invade? Well… in the name of “deterrence,” we’ve made all sorts of commitments that range from starting WWIII to self-impoverishment via sanctions.

Biden has promised that US troops will defend Taiwan against an invasion. “U.S. men and women — would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” asked CBS host Scott Pelley in a “60 Minutes” interview last September. “Yes,” Biden replied.

So we are committed to a hot war with China if they invade Taiwan? Once that starts, where does it end? We both have nuclear bombs. Is the assumption that both sides will stick to conventional World War II-style combat? And, after some number of casualties, one side will throw up its hands and say “oh well, that’s enough”?

But even if two nuclear powers somehow refrained from pushing the button. China has more bodies to throw at this conflict, views Taiwan as Chinese soil, and would decisively win a conventional conflict according to US Air Force’s own simulations. More optimistic were the simulations by the Lockheed Martin-funded CSIS, which found that “Taiwan remained an autonomous democracy, albeit as a ravaged island without basic services like electricity.” In other words, they’ll be blown back to the Stone Age but at least they’ll retain the right to vote!

Let’s assume the Biden admin is not suicidal enough to start a hot war over Taiwan. Even still, Congress is working to hinge our standard of living to the fate of the island.

Another bill the House Financial Services Committee put forward on Tuesday would enact sanctions against top CCP officials and their family members, “including Xi Jinping himself,” according to the bill’s sponsor Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.). As a reminder:

• China controls 97% of manganese steel processing (essential for cement, railroads, tractors, and mining).
• They produce a “substantial portion” of our antibiotics.
• China and Taiwan combined account for 70% of global semiconductor production (this would likely halt during an invasion or if China blockaded).
• US imports nearly four times the number of goods from the Chinese that it exports to them.

Are we going to start a sanction war from this position? It would be worse than inflationary. This would be empty shelves and riots.

Will we honor these commitments and face the destruction of our own country in order to protect the sovereignty of another (or more likely turn it into a ruinous crater like Ukraine)? Or does the deep state understand these risks? Will they find some way to save face while breaking our foolish promises?

I pray it’s the latter, but I doubt it. I think they believe their BS. But even if they do, our options are not great. We either: fold and admit we were bluffing the whole time or we double down and face ruin.

Just like in Ukraine, we NEED to be brokering for peace.

If — in the future — we want any sort of leverage over China, we need to be self-sufficient. This will not be attained by giving tens of billions to subpar American semiconductor manufacturers. Bailouts do not make firms more competitive. The opposite is true.

Shrink government. Deregulate. Lower taxes. Abolish all these that we’ve created to police every industry under the Sun — FDA, FCC, FAA, USDA… Then, once we’ve grown more prosperous, and we are exporting more than dollars to China, maybe we will have the leverage to stand up for other countries.