The United States should silently cheer over Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a Chinese invasion of Taiwan
They promise self-ruination to both countries while making the United States safer
Every orthodoxy about war and international relations is wrong. The insatiable hormonal craving for power deranges the mind into believing stupidities in plain view.
Napoleon marched on Moscow in winter and decimated his Grande Armee. Hitler commenced Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union beginning the Nazi downfall soon thereafter in the Battle of Stalingrad. The Maginot Line was obsolete the day it was built. The French colonial misadventure in Indochina ended in disaster at Dien Bien Phu.
The Russian conquest of Central Asia created a Muslim economic albatross and Fifth columnists eager for sabotage and espionage. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. The Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War strengthened the security of Western Europe and the United States by diverting huge Soviet military and economic resources to putting down chronic insurrections or revolts and and subsidizing deadweights. The Warsaw Pact was a paper tiger that weakened the military sinews of the Soviet Union.
Twin prevailing doltish orthodoxies are that a Russian conquest of Ukraine and a Chinese conquest of Taiwan would create a clear and present danger to the security of the United States by weakening its ability to deter or defend itself from attack by either aggressor. In fact, the security of the United States would be fortified by either or both eventualities.
Suppose Russia conquers Ukraine. It would immediately confront chronic revolts. Remember the Soviet Union and East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981, and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Further, tens of billions of rubles would be necessary to prop up the devastated Ukraine economy, just as Russia is hemorrhaging economically to subsize Crimea, Chechnya, and Dagestan. It would be only a matter of time until Russia decamped because the conquest game is never worth the candle. It offers only Pyrrhic victories.
Suppose China conquers Taiwan. It would confront the same headaches Russia would face in Ukraine. Constant revolts or insurrections expensive to suppress. A huge brain drain of Taiwanese to the United States, Western Europe, Japan, or Australia. The diminishment of Taiwan’s economy from a locomotive to caboose. Sending balloons to spy on the United States would plunge to the bottom of China’s urgencies.
No colonial conquest pays its own way. The United States would have been better off by refraining from sovereignty over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam in the Spanish-American War. The Philippines was a migraine until independence was granted in 1946. No one doubts that America would be stronger by restoring sovereignty to Puerto Rico featuring a decrepit government and economy by any measure. Guam is irrelevant to the Constitution’s foreign policy of invincible self-defense but not one cent for racing abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Mankind, however, is too intoxicated with raw power to heed the wisdom of “Be careful what you wish for in colonial conquests. You might get it.” Henry Kissinger, former national security advisor and secretary of state complicit in the Vietnam War debacle confessed, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”