In merely the last month …
Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash.
And a war.
Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”
Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.
“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-armed, billion-plus-people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*
The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.
In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”
Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting … resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”
Illustration created with Midjourney
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
6 replies on “Playing With Fire?”
Other issue is that Manchurian in the White House.
Having spent 30-years in the defense industry with the last 10 managing a wargaming simulation group, I can tell you that ALL models and simulations can be abd often are wrong. You just can’t model the fog of war. Our models consistently showed that the US Navy would get their heads handed to them by China…then again, the models also showed that Russia should have easily overcome Ukraine. As George Box said: All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Agreed. That is why I took only “a smidgen of comfort.”
“The good news? … Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles ‘capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.’ ”
Yes, because a militarized Japan has certainly never turned out to be a very bad thing before.
I’d ask my grandfather, who was on board a ship off the Japanese coast in August of 1945, about that if he was still alive.
It isn’t 1945 anymore and my desire is for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc., to remain (relatively) free and not under the threat or thumb of a genocidal totalitarian China. That requires having the military might to withstand an attack by the world’s largest navy. I see Japan re-militarizing the same way I view a 70-year-old woman, who lives in a dangerous neighborhood, buying a gun — that is, a defensive action and not an offensive one.
20 Indians died and only four Chinese? Those Indians better learn to speak Chinese or get better in hand-to-hand combat.