Last week or so the Failing New York Times had a story trying to determine why the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago. Their conclusion seems correct. All the Smart People sort of talked themselves into it.
Does anyone else have the creepy feeling that both sides are talking us into a war with China?
No. Next question.
No, I think we are very much aware of the threat form both China and Russia. Have been for years. It’s not an either or thing. If China starts being agressive like Russia it will not be sleep walking into a war, it will be a measured response.
Is the Failing New York Times a parody site?
It is a wisecrack. Try not to get off the track.
Not sleepwalking. The US is confronting China in many ways, and attempting to contain its expansion. Historical norms are being tested, such as the degree to which the US will defend Taiwan. It is all very deliberate, in my opinion. EDIT: If you want to be creeped out, see Lindsay Graham (a very powerful Senator) and temporary host Al Franken (a former Senator) discuss how this war in Ukraine will show China what will happen if they act up. On the Daily Show, a program that was once anti war.
The US has seemed very vocal about Chinese spying, usually a subject kept sub rosaa. We only now are talking about Chinese spy balloons, and claiming we never saw them until just now. We are making public declarations about Taiwan. We are selling submarine to the Australians. We are forming alliances specifically to counter the Chinese.
Looking at it from their point of view it is as if we are causing trouble.
No sleepwalking though. The US is becoming very clear on its stances. And its willingness to back up those stances
If you don’t want people to “get off track”, maybe don’t poison the well with a pejorative description.
Addressing the o.p., the current situation with China is nothing like that with Iraq, in no small part because the United States does not actually want and is very much ill prepared for a war with the Peoples Republic of China. Iraq was an almost literal cakewalk, and Saddam Hussein actually made it easier by actually playing the “Do I or Don’t I?” game in response to the manufactured claims that there was an active program to enrich uranium by refusing to allow weapon inspectors into facilities they needed to inspect. China doesn’t have a lot of reach but they can effectively blockade Taiwan (in essence, cutting off access to the high performance microprocessors from TSMC) and can generally make unrestricted commerce impossible in the East and South China Seas, and potentially create trouble across the Bay of Bengal and even potentially impacting movements in the Arabian Sea. China sees itself as the rightly leader of a legitimate hegemony in South Asia, challenging US and ”AUKUS” strategic and commercial interests in the region.
The discussion of spying by the PRC is not a new topic by any means. Certainly the Democratic party didn’t want to talk about it while Bill Clinton and Al Gore literally selling influence to Chinese foreign persons was still in memory, and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld was relatively disinterested on things going on outside of the Middle East and Afghanistan, but the threat of Chinese intelligence gathering including efforts to compromise and recruit people holding US security clearances and engage in corporate espionage has been very much front and center in counterintelligence efforts even before the “War on Terror” was winding down. That it has become a much more widely published issue in the news media of late is just because China has become so bold and forthright about it.
Stranger
No to the OP. Not the tiniest, slightest sliver of a resemblance to Iraq.
The true resemblance is to the 50s and 60s Cold War. Our national leaders lived in a state of quasi-hysteria of nuclear war for three very good reasons. One was an unknown: we did not understand the mindset of the Soviet leaders and so never knew what actions would provoke them. One was a known: the USSR was a brutal regime that crushed countries and internal dissent. One was a theory: the Russians wanted to be thought of as an equal superpower with dominion over half the world and not only didn’t care what tactics it would take to achieve that but were indifferent to the condemnation of other nations.
All these are totally true of China today. The threat is very real. My take on the situation is that we are sitting where we were then: edging toward the line of actual war, with nothing stopping that except the understanding in the minds of enemy leaders of how absolutely disastrous that would be for them as well.
China is a true crisis second only to global climate change on the death list.
This. This is all 20+ year old news to anyone in the military / foreign policy establishment or even anyone who, like me, regularly reads the trade press for those specialties.
What is new is suddenly Joe Average is noticing it. As is Jane Mainsteam Media Anchor.
The usual RW propaganda-o-sphere has been screeching about this whenever they took a breath from screeching about something else for 10-15 years now. And as always, there’s a lot more screech than there is actual information or evidence; mostly just bloviating hyperventilation.
The RW propaganda machine loves two conflicting narratives: The clueless Ds are about to start a war, and The traitorous Ds are about to give away the country to our enemy without a fight. What the RW hotheads can’t seem to decide is which of the two logically conflicting narratives to push on any given day. So they push both.
Iraq was not in any sense a cake-walk, except for the defeat of Saddam’s military. US involvement there had a substantial cost in lives, and led to the evolution of ISIS among other radical groups. Many Americans died there and many more Iraqis died due to that action, with out even mentioning the lives lost when the conflict spread to Syria.
I’m not sure even the Cold War is really a good analogue, at least post-Cuban Missile Crisis. With the Soviet Union, the West was genuinely clueless about the motivations and plans of Soviet leadership and the mostly closed society they ruled, and sometimes unsure who was even in control. We often assumed that they wanted war (even though such a conflict was nearly unthinkable to the leadership in the Stalin and Khrushchev era as they knew that they would be on the losing end of such a war) and were philosophically expansionist even though the real goal of the Warsaw Pact was to create a buffer zone against invasion and ‘client states’ that would buoy the always-on-edge-of-failure Soviet economy. With China, even though it is rules by an authoritarian regime that tries to obscure facts and disseminate false information, we have a pretty good understanding of what they are doing because commercially they are wide open and it is absolutely clear they are both economically and demographically facing enormous problems.
If we end up in a war with China—which is ‘unthinkable’ but all too plausible—it will be because of some act of desperation, either on the side of China needing access resources and labor, or the US coalition not being able to maintain security commitments and doing something foolish as a bluff charge. The real problem is that both parties are facing different and potentially existential crises, and have to burnish their reputations by talking tough. I could see a Cuban Missile Crisis-type of conflict arising over Taiwan, or (less likely) Japan or the Philippines, and there not being a Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson in the room to counsel restraint.
Let me clarify; the US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Hussein-led Ba’athist regime was a cakewalk. Everything that followed that was (quite predictably) a complete shitshow that the poor people of Iraq, the vast majority of whom did not support Hussein (who the US tacitly supported prior to the invasion of Kuwait) have suffered greatly in addition to the loss of lives of American troops and trillions of dollars spent to no fruitful end, all of which created the power vacuum that fomented the rise of ISIS. It is perhaps the most textbook example in a large portfolio of such incidents, of American interventionist policy gone horribly wrong because nobody involved understood the situation or considered the consequences.
Stranger
Or more likely a simple misunderstanding. Maybe some fool will press the wrong button. Maybe some ally will do something foolish. The situation seems quite dangerous and getting worse.
That has always been and continues to be the risk with nuclear arsenals on standby alert. I think a more conventional engagement is less likely to spiral completely out of control just because neither side is (as yet) prepared for it. But I also said Putin wouldn’t actually invade Ukraine because of what a foolishly self-impaling move that would be for Russia, and while I was correct on the consequences I was utterly mistaken in my assumption of rational restraint.
Stranger
According to experts China should have had an entire series of crises over the last decade: labor, environmental, pollution, internal dissent, ghost cities. None ever emerged as a national crisis, an amazing achievement. One result of those serial crises, however, has been a continuing tightening of authoritarian leadership. I won’t speculate about the balance of cause and effect but, normally, increased authoritarian leadership correlates with increased internal disorder.
Authoritarian leaders for life, which Xi effectively is just like Putin, are always more dangerous since they no longer face the opposing internal factors with clout. This is the difference between the China of today and the China of a decade ago. Leaders for life notoriously opt for military solutions to problems, both internal and against outside real or perceived enemies. Therefore a Cuban missile-style incident is a threat, if not directly against Taiwan then against one of the many islands that Taiwan claims but probably cannot protect.
I’m just barely old enough to remember when the outlying Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu, much closer to the Chinese mainland than to Taiwan, were elements in the 1960 election. Quemoy, now called Kinmen, is six miles off the Chinese coast. Kennedy called it indefensible in a debate. It still is.
There are still levels of elevation between where we are today and full on hostilities.
I’m not sweating over it until real trade wars begin.
I’m not talking about wimpy tariffs, more like the days of old with full on embargoes and such. Embargoes are designed to bite hard. Embargoes have started wars.
It was by no means “all” the “Smart People”, even back then. The recovering Iraq War hawks of today (as opposed to all the Iraq War hawks still in denial, of whom there are also plenty) try to shift the blame for their reckless opportunism onto some kind of zeitgeist-hivemind situation that just sort of hypnotized otherwise rational people into unanimous war fever. “Sleepwalking”, if you will.
But the war fever was very far from unanimous, and its chief proponents were not “otherwise rational” in any reliable sense. They were cheerleaders for US imperialism, and they saw what they thought was an irresistible opportunity. They, including the many recovering Iraq War hawks at the New York Times, can’t duck that responsibility now by pretending that golly gee folks, we were all just sort of in a trance. There is plenty of documentation of deep non-unanimity on that issue at the time, including here on these boards.
We ought not to hold the Iraqi’s blameless. They thought claiming they had WMD would somehow protect them. Misunderstandings are easy to make between cultures.
And yet, around half of all Americans, and much higher percentages of the populations in other developed nations, still managed to see through their bullshit and that of our fearmongering, trigger-happy leadership.
Professional politicians and bureaucrats are supposed to be able to tell when their counterparts in hostile nations are lying, based on the elementary fact of international relations that nations lie to one another all the time. Or at the very least, they’re supposed to be able to resist the temptation to swallow the bullshit bait hook, line and sinker before getting factual support for it.
If they’re too stupid and/or reckless and/or opportunistic to manage that, they don’t get to blame everybody else for their bad outcomes.
However, duty compels me to acknowledge that this is getting farther away, except in terms of general diplomatic principles, from the specific topic of your OP in this thread.