The United States is inching toward World War III with China.
All the lights on the dashboard are flashing.
The pivot to Asia proclaimed by past Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Massive arms sales to Taiwan.
The United States Taiwan Defense Command in Taiwan.
The Quad with Japan, Australia, and India to encircle China.
The sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and augmentation of U.S. Marine forces there.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “in-your-face” gratuitous visit to Taiwan.
President Joe Biden’s repeated threats to attack China if it invades Taiwan.
Harsh economic sanctions against China indistinguishable from the United States economic strangulation of Japan before Pearl Harbor.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s summons to deny China access to artificial islands in the South China Sea.
the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, released in October 2022, naming China as the greatest threat to the United States.
Nearly two centuries of humiliation of China by the West, beginning at least with the Opium War of 1842 to make Chinese drug addiction a western profit center. The United States followed with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and a prohibition on the naturalization of Chinese immigrants. The United States betrayed China during the post-World War I Paris Peace talks by surrendering Shandong Province to Japan. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake the hand of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during the Geneva Conference to settle the future of Vietnam and gratuitously sneered that the two would only meet in a car crash.
Taiwan is the same distance from the Chinese mainland as Cuba is to the United States. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, we were willing to initiate war if necessary to compel the Soviet Union to remove tactical nuclear weapons from Cuba, including a blockade. Cuba had requested the missiles to deter a planned second United States invasion on the heels of the Bay of Pigs debacle. The USSR blinked and removed the nuclear weapons in exchange for a sotto voce agreement by the United States to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
Today, the United States is a vastly greater existential threat to China than the Soviet Union’s presence in Cuba was to the United States in 1962. Why does anyone think China would react less strongly than the United States did in the Cuban Missile Crisis to the U.S. arming Taiwan to the teeth, repeatedly threatening war, organizing the Quad, strangling the Chinese economy, and treating the South China Sea as if it were the Gulf of Mexico? Why would the Chinese accept national security risks that the United States has shown it will not?
U.S. relations with China are combustible. Only a spark is necessary to ignite a conflagration that could lead to nuclear exchanges and threaten the species with nuclear winter and extinction.
Something similar happened before with Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. That gave birth to World War I, which witnessed 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. World War III could be precipitated by a shoot-out over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands or the Scarborough Shoal/Huangyan Island.
A war involving the U.S. and China would probably metastasize. According to the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon: “Neither Beijing nor Washington would accept defeat in a limited engagement. Instead, the conflict probably would expand horizontally to other regions and vertically, perhaps even to include nuclear weapons threats—or their actual use. It literally could become the worst catastrophe in the history of warfare.”
In recent years, U.S. wargames have generally shown China defeating the United States. One analysis concluded: “The overarching takeaway from participants in the war game: If China invades Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific region will plunge into a broad, drawn-out war that could include direct attacks on the U.S., including Hawaii and potentially the continental United States.”
If a war with China over Taiwan seems crazy, it’s because it is! We have no defense treaty with Taiwan. We have no diplomatic relations with Taiwan. It has no membership in the United Nations. It is within China’s traditional sphere of influence. It is more than 7,500 miles away from the United States. Its independence is a featherweight to our national security. If China annexed Taiwan, imitating our annexation of Hawaii in 1898, the annexation would not be an existential threat to the United States.
I can already hear the appeasement shouts of “Munich,” “Munich,” “Munich” from the multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex. But China is not the Third Reich, President Xi Jinping is not Adolf Hitler. Taiwan is not Czechoslovakia. And the Domino Theory implicit in the cry of “Munich” was discredited by our defeat by Vietnam. It has become a semi-ally of the United States in opposing China. And Japan and South Korea are fully capable of defending themselves against a Chinese invasion.President George Washington’s time-honored Farewell Address provides the path to extricate ourselves from a war with China over Taiwan: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
Maybe we should all be praying for time. George Michael said it in a song 30 years ago. And now it’s become a reality
China illegal occupation of South China Sea by THE Haque’s international court ruling.in 2016.
I think the US should go to war in the Pacific with Japan, Australia and the USA alone . War!!!!! Block the straits of Malaca and others now and stop China in the world.
Australia wants nothing to do with you.
What they don’t mention is what is a stake in Taiwan…. Everything for the west. The west will come to fight like hell if Taiwan is attacked and that is because the west and allies have large economic ties to Taiwan and interests… Most of all it would be the biggest security threat to the west and its allies as it heavily depends on the world’s most advanced microships that are solely only produced in Taiwan and this gives the world west its cutting technology in its miltary. The west has no choice but to fight against China if China decides to invade Taiwan. The west cannot afford to lose that connection with Taiwan,also Taiwan not welling to create that technology in the US because it gives Taiwan the upper hand to maintain its independence from china. Taiwan expects the west to protect it if China invades, so in exchange Taiwan offers the west the technology it needs for protection from China. The situation is grim. All we need is China to just give up on Taiwan and we can divert world war 3, but if China is stubborn and takes it by force… Ww3 will come. Get ready expected time for this to happen will be between 2025-2027.
its amazing to see the commenters are mostly brainwashed anti china ? but the writer point out the evils of the US against china?
Mr. Williams is COMPLETELY WRONG in regard to his pro-China views. He fails to understand the absolutely DISASTROUS ramifications to the U.S. established World Order if China is allowed replace America as the dominant power in the western Pacific and Indian ocean. Mr. Williams’ “talking points” could have been written in Beijing. NONE have ANY connection with the IMMENSE threat now posed by authoritarianism to the world’s liberal democracies.
Mr. Williams’ “reasoning, ” and his truly incomprehensible lack of understanding (including his absurdly inaccurate comparison of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the OVERWHELMING GEOSTRATEGIC THREAT now posed by a China determined to destroy American world primacy and reduce the United States to a second-class power is completely irresponsible and totally inexcusable, and would be TREASONABLE if Mr. Wiliiams truly understood (which I do not believe he does) the terrible outcome of an America finally forced to kneel to aauthoritarian regime with one single-minded focus – the reduction and final crushing defeat of our great Nation for which so many of our forefathers fought and died.
Finally, Mr. Williams fails to understand that even Nazi Germany did not pose NEARLY the threat to America as now exists regarding the monstrous and IMMEDIATE threat now posed by a determined, powerful, and surging dictatorial Communist China.
I fully agree with the previous comment by “Revelations.”
It is BEYOND obvious that it would be CRIMINALLY STUPID, COWARDLY, UNWORTHY OF THE GREATEST POWER IN THE HISTORY OF THIS PLANET (under whose protection you ALL live), and an absolute CALAMITY for the entire World, if the United States of America simply abandoned, for FEAR of conflict with China, its Indo-Pacific treaty commitments, from Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, Vietnam, Etc., Etc., AND allowed China total control of the SOUTH CHINA SEA!! (Neither of which Mr. Williams or any other essentially “pro-China” COWARD bothers to mention.)
WHY DO YOU ALL THINK CHINA WANTS CONTROL OF TAIWAN (semiconductors), AND CONTROL OF THE ENTIRETY OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA, A CLAIM WHICH THE WORLD COURT AT THE HAGUE RULED TO BE COMPLETELY ILLEGAL (MOST of the World’s trade necessarily passes through these sealanes).
BECAUSE … China now believes it is now at a tipping point where it can bluff and threaten the U.S. to just meekly walk away from its MANY allies in the Indo-Pacific (with the assistance of internal resistance within the US (i.e., like Armstrong Williams) and Europe).
Of course, if this were to occur, American military and economic credibility would IMMEDIATELY COLLAPSE!! And with this complete destruction of America’s worldwide influence, would come the total destruction of the US Dollar’s status as the World’s Sole Reserve Currency (by which Americans enjoy their relatively high standards of living) would soon follow. To then be immediately replaced by the Chinese YUAN.
However, since neither Mr. Armstrong or those who agree with him bother to mention these End-Of-YOUR-World realities, let us slightly alter the title of Mr. Armstrong’s article to the MUCH more accurate, “CHINA NOW MOVING VERY AGGRESSIVELY TOWARD UNNECESSARY CONFRONTATION WITH THE UNITED STATES.”
(To quote another power-mad dictator, Adolf Hitler, “Our enemies are just scared little worms afraid to move against us.”)
SO, TO MY FELLOW AMERICANS: Remember that “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH” resulted in the COMPLETE COLLAPSE of our previous threat (the former USSR), and that, if we remain ABSOLUTELY STRONG AND RESOLUTE, like our forefathers who TOTALLY DESTROYED ALL PREVIOUS ENEMIES, the same will happen to Red China as well!!
And, for Nations as well as individuals, “WEAKNESS IS ONLY FOR LOSERS.”
I wonder if the FINAL Premier of that FORMER Superpower, the U.S.S.R., Mr. Gorbachev, would AT LAST AGREE with that statement??
Let’s just got to war already …with everyone that’s not down with America 100%…im talking South America, Mexico and Africa included. Lets just fight already