The United States inches forward daily towards a war with China. Taiwan and the South China sea are the ostensible casus belli. But the genuine reason is that empires fight wars for the sake of power divorced from national security. The armored knight is venerated while the thinker is derided. Remember the lunacy of Napoleon’s march to Moscow in the winter of 1812 or Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
The United States became deranged with hubris and a chosen people zeal with the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991. Our reptilian foreign policy jettisoned peaceful coexistence for truculent domination of the entire planet by the projection of military power beginning with the 1991 war in Kuwait to restore the Al Sabah dynasty and to protect Saudi Arabia’s oil fields from predation by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Then came the unconstitutional presidential wars in Bosnia, Serbia, and Somalia, followed by permanent warfare after 9/11.
To the United States warfare state, all nations that fail to bow to its dictates look like enemies to be strangled or attacked. China is no threat to attack the United States like Pearl Harbor. It lacks the economic sinews to even dent the United States economy. Indeed, China is helping to finance our warfare state through the purchase of nearly $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. President Joe Biden has stupidly and unconstitutionally threatened to attack China militarily if it invades Taiwan.
Taiwan was subject to China’s sovereignty until 1895, when the island was ceded to Japan after defeat in the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War. Taiwan was restored to China by Japan after its defeat at the hands of the United States in 1945. Taiwan’s de facto independence from China is irrelevant to the safety of the United States from foreign aggression.
China’s People’s Liberation Army performed poorly in the abbreviated 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. It is likely to be engulfed in a comparable quagmire if it invades Taiwan, like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or the United States in Vietnam. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would weaken China immensely and strengthen alliances throughout Asia against it as European counties have united against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
But the American Empire like the scores of its predecessors is addicted to fighting over straws for a momentary, juvenile adrenalin high. Daily, the United States gratuitously provokes China with new economic sanctions, arms sales and high-level official visits to Taiwan, training exercises in Australia and the Philippines, and xenophobic prohibitions on purchases of farmland ostensibly to prevent spying and the TikTok app professedly to safeguard national security and privacy.
America’s multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex welcomes a war with China salivating at the potential profits. President Biden and Congress are equally enthusiastic in the expectation victory by God’s chosen people. Citizens will not resist when war breaks out over an inevitable lie, like President Lyndon Johnson’s phantom second North Vietnamese torpedo attack on the USS Maddox to justify the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Nazi Herman Goering was pure evil. But one thing he said before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg captured the depravity of the species and propensity to venerate proficiency in industrial scale exterminations: “Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”