About the South China Sea situation, what needs to be said?
Not about it, but to the Chinese government.
“We’ve said everything we possibly can say,” Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang told Fox Business News, expounding on what he thinks the United States’ next step should be. “We are done talking with you and we’re now going to start to act. And in the South China Sea, unfortunately that means we need to flood the zone with the U.S. Navy and Air Force to show that we will defend our ally the Philippines.”
This is, he explains, “one of those moments like Czechoslovakia in 1938 or Poland in 1939. It’s that serious.”
Serious, indeed: ominous. I think he’s likely correct, but he’s talking about possible escalation to war.
My Trumpian friends will insist upon raising this niggling little thought: the slide into war in the South China Sea “would never have happened under Trump.”
China’s ramped-up belligerence does seem to have spiked with Biden as president, just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have been far less likely under Trump’s leadership.
Gordon Chang is correct that “the Biden” has “been talking to the Chinese intensively throughout the Biden Administration and things have only gotten worse” — but was this the best that could have been done? Has the Biden’s diplomacy been enough talk of the right kind?
Trump scared China.
He also scared our Deep State.
We may have been safer then.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “So It’s War, Then?”
While I am sure that the Chinese state (which is not China) has felt freer to be belligerent during the Biden Administration than that state would have felt under Trump, I don’t at all know that the Russian state (which is not Russia) would have felt more worried about invading Ukraine — on the assumption that the US had made the same efforts to draw Ukraine away from Russia.
Trump didn’t seem keen to be as entangled with Europe as we were, which attitude not only makes that assumption a pretty big one, but calls into question Trump’s general willingness to engage in a proxy war against the Russian state.
I don’t think that the Russian state would have resorted to invasion had Trump been reëlected; but, had that state done so, then Trump would likely have noted that Ukraine were not a member of NATO, as if such membership were the only reason to act against the invasion. (Mind you that the US has a treaty obligation to the Ukrainian state, independent of NATO membership, which obligation was exchanged for the surrender of nuclear weapons by the Ukrainian state.)
“Trump scared China.”
Yes, so much so that the Chinese regime deployed its Coast Guard to escort fishing boats in waters also claimed by Indonesia and “expelled” the USS John McCain from waters it claimed around the Spratly Islands.
Destruction is the plan.
https://x.com/SULLY10X/status/1833288823071027441
I absolutely agree that there would have been no war in Ukraine on Trump’s watch. Ukraine would simply not exist! Don gad already told Vlad that “He could do as he pleased” in that region. So the Ukrainians would have had nothing with which to defend their homeland, much as Poland had to fight the Germans when they invaded before WW2.
I guess that Don knows that Vlad will not behave like the German leader of the last century. Surely Vlad will not move further than Kiev, perhaps to Warsaw? Would he? Don doesn’t think so but neither did a British Prime Minister think Adolph would. Ah well, we all know history never repeats itself, does it?