No War With China
February 6, 2023
You might think that provoking nuclear war with Russia would be enough for brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers. But it isn’t. They want nuclear war with China too. The Chinese government regards Taiwan as part of China, but it hasn’t tried to take it over militarily. Biden decided this isn’t good enough. He warned the Chinese that if they use force against Taiwan, the US will use force against them. This risks nuclear war.
Michael D. Swaine, an authority of Chinese-American relations who has advised the State Department, explains what is going on in an article that was published in The Diplomat, January 23: “The past year has seen a significant escalation in tension between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, with many strategists warning that China seems poised to invade the island. In order to preserve U.S. interests, they argue, Washington must rely primarily, if not entirely, on military deterrence.
But this strategy would almost certainly backfire. Rather than preventing a war with China over Taiwan, a policy centered on military deterrence could spark one.
Those who advocate an approach based almost exclusively on deterrence believe China aspires to replace the United States as the dominant regional power in Asia through largely military means. Seizing Taiwan by force or intimidation, they say, is a necessary first step toward subjugating other Asian nations, including U.S. allies like Japan. They believe that once it has gained broader military access to the Pacific by controlling Taiwan and dominating other nearby powers, China could then go on to threaten Hawaii and the continental United States.
According to this analysis, the only option for the United States is to double down on its military presence in the region, push its allies to greatly increase their defense spending and support for the U.S. stance, and move closer to Taiwan both politically and militarily, making it a de facto security ally in Asia. The clear implication is that Taiwan, as a critical strategic location, must never be unified with China.
But this approach to the Taiwan situation is based on a very dubious analysis of both Taiwan’s purported strategic value and China’s regional intentions.
In fact, despite the views of some American and Chinese defense analysts today, historically, neither Washington nor Beijing have ever regarded Taiwan as a key strategic linchpin in the region. For China, reunification with Taiwan is above all else an issue of territorial integrity and national pride; as such, it is critical to the legitimacy of the Communist Party regime in the eyes of its people. For the United States, Taiwan is linked to Washington’s credibility as a loyal supporter of a democratic friend and an ally to others such as Japan and South Korea.
From a purely military perspective, it is highly problematic to assert that control over Taiwan would give Beijing decisive leverage over Japan, South Korea, or other Asian countries, much less the United States. And there is no clear evidence to show that China believes its security depends on militarily defeating or intimidating its Asian neighbors.
Moreover, while some Asian countries are certainly hedging against China’s growing military power and the danger of a Sino-American conflict by increasing their defense spending, the region as a whole is more worried about economic issues such as recovering from the pandemic, overcoming recession, and promoting sustainable growth through continued close economic ties with both the United States and China.
For the United States, a deterrence policy predicated on keeping Taiwan separate from China for strategic reasons is totally incompatible with its one China policy, whereby Washington opposes any unilateral move toward Taiwan independence, maintains strategic ambiguity regarding its defense of Taiwan, and remains open to the possibility of peaceful, uncoerced unification. This position remains the core of the understanding reached in 1972, which formed the basis of the normalization of Sino-American relations, in which the U.S. acknowledged the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China while Beijing stressed that peaceful unification would be a top priority of its cross-strait policy.
If the United States were to abrogate that critical understanding by, for example, extending diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, or making the island into a full–fledged security ally (as the deterrence-only approach advocates), China would without doubt respond by dropping its part of the understanding and proceed to reverse any such U.S. actions by all means necessary, including military force. The PRC government’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens would simply not survive if Beijing failed to respond to such a basic challenge to its nationalist credentials.
Equally significant, China’s leaders would almost certainly resort to force even if the U.S. enjoyed superior military deterrence capabilities, a point that is apparently not fully grasped by proponents of the deterrence-only approach. Given the incredibly high political stakes involved, even a failed effort to forcibly prevent the loss of Taiwan would be viewed in Beijing as favorable to doing nothing. The latter would almost certainly result in a severe domestic crisis, putting at risk not only the personal positions of China’s leaders but the stability of the entire PRC regime.
The Biden administration seems to be inviting such desperate Chinese calculations with its erosion of the one China policy and its growing reliance on aspects of the deterrence-only approach to Taiwan.
President Joe Biden has said repeatedly that the United States will intervene militarily if China attacks Taiwan, thereby treating the island as a sovereign security ally. He has also asserted that Taiwan alone must decide whether it should be independent, which denies the long-standing U.S. stance of opposition to any unilateral move toward Taiwan independence.
The government has also designated Taiwan as a non-NATO U.S. ally, giving it a status similar to sovereign nations with which it has formal security ties. It has sent senior U.S. officials to Taiwan under quasi-official conditions and sought to pressure countries against shifting their diplomatic representation from Taiwan to China, despite Washington having taken exactly the same action in 1979. And one senior U.S. defense official recently indicated in congressional testimony that Taiwan is indeed a critical U.S. strategic node central to its entire defense position in the Western Pacific, implying that the United States would be opposed to Taiwan uniting with China under any circumstances.”
It does not help matters that a U.S. General predicted on January 27 that war with China was likely by 2025: “A U.S. general said in a memo on Friday that he believes the country will be at war with China by 2025, according to several outlets that obtained a copy of the communication.
‘I hope I am wrong,’ Gen. Mike Minihan, a four-star Air Force general who leads the Air Mobility Command (AMC), said in the memo to troops under his command, which was first reported by NBC News.
However, he added: ‘My gut tells me we will fight in 2025. [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.’
Minihan told AMC personnel to accept some increased risk in training as they prepare for the ‘China fight’ and sometime in February to ‘fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most. Aim for the head.’”
You might ask, how can brain-dead Biden be so stupid that he provokes war with both China and Russia? But that is just the point. Biden wants to block any challenge to American global hegemony. As the Strategic Culture Foundation noted nearly two years ago, “Similar to the Ukraine, the Biden administration’s rhetoric and conduct is serving to fuel an ever-more provocative stance by the Taiwanese leaders. This week, a senior official warned that the island’s forces would shoot down Chinese aircraft that approach the territory. This is nothing but a flagrant challenge to China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. As in the case of the Ukraine and Russia, it is Washington’s words and actions that are inflaming the tensions between Taiwan and China. Yet the Americans accuse others of ‘aggression’ and claim to be providing ‘defense’.
The bigger picture for all of this is, of course, the geopolitical great game which Washington sees as a zero-sum challenge. Strategists in Washington have made it abundantly clear that the American imperative for pursuing its ambitions for global power and dominance is to prevent the rise of Russia and China and a multipolar world order. . . It is therefore logical, if not execrable, that Washington appears to be accelerating on a collision course against Russia and China. The speed and recklessness is correlated with the growing sense that the American Empire is in terminal demise. The Ukraine and Taiwan are providing the U.S. with a two-prong attack against Russia and China and what Washington views as its last chance to grasp on to a world that is disappearing before its eyes. America’s reckless and delusional gambling is placing the world in an extremely dangerous situation. Its rulers and their political flunkies are flicking matches at a powder-keg.”
But if the US abandons its aggressive anti-China policy, doesn’t this also mean abandoning Taiwan? Pat Buchanan has the answer to this, in a column last September: “One wonders: If China invades and seizes Taiwanese-claimed and -occupied islands within sight of the Chinese coast, and Taiwan resists, what would Biden do?
In the Nixon-Kennedy campaign of 1960, JFK called it ‘unwise’ to take a risk of being dragged into war, which could lead to a world war, over islands like Quemoy and Matsu that were not strategically defensible.
If Beijing invaded and occupied islands a few miles right off its coast, and Taiwan resisted, would Biden send the Seventh Fleet to war with China?
The basic question raised by these Biden commitments to go to war with a China with a huge army and fleet, and in its own home region, is — why?
No U.S. president after Richard Nixon has challenged China’s claim that there is but ‘one China’ and Taiwan ‘is a part of China.’
How many battle deaths, how many war dead, are we willing to sacrifice to prevent Beijing taking political control of an island of 23 million Taiwanese 6,000 miles away from the United States?
We
did not fight to prevent China from imposing its control on 7 million
people of Hong Kong. Why then does the independence of 23 million
Taiwanese justify a U.S. war with the world’s most populous nation?
And if we fought a war with China over Taiwan, what would be our long-term strategic goal?
Independence for Taiwan?
But did we not cede that in the 1970s with Nixon’s trip to China, his Shanghai Communique and Carter’s severing of relations with the Republic of China?”
We must do all we can to fight against brain-dead Biden’s efforts to start nuclear wars with Russia and China.
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