So the Chinese ambassador to Australia is saying that heightened military activities including the firing of missiles over Taiwan etc. was caused by the Pelosi visit to Taiwan, so she is directly responsible for those acts of aggression.
Hmm. It seems to me that if we go down that route of who did what to whom then the argument dissolves into meaningless diversions and deflections that cannot be refuted by evidence. Can’t we just say that whoever fired the first shot or committed the first act of aggression, is the so called ‘warmonger’ (protesters called Pelosi am ‘onger warm’ in a nice display of illiteracy).
On a personal level this doesn’t work because you can put someone in fear for their lives without physically harming them first.
But at a state level, surely we can say that the state committing the first act of violent aggression against another state or its allies is the instigator of the war? Not someone who just went on a stopover visit. Can’t we make that a universally understood rule?
You mentioned “act of aggression” as one option to decide who started a war. The PRC government considers Ms Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan an act of aggression, specifically one of interference with China’s internal affairs.
Alright, so can’t we immediately discount their opinion of what an act of aggression is? Visiting one of their cousins for a friendly visit is not an act of aggression, and only a crazy hillbilly would take it as one. So, discounted. War is war. Visits are visits. Learn the distinction. This is important.
Usually one could discount that, but it’s kind of hard to do that when they’ve managed to get agreement from the US to support the “one China” policy and yet we still provide arms to an area the PRC considers to be a renegade province.
Personally, I think the people starting a war are the ones who fire the first shots. Nothing else should matter. As you said, what constitutes any other act of aggression is a matter of opinion.
I also think the US made a big mistake in deciding to recognize the PRC government, thereby shafting the ROC government. But that’s just me, I guess.
Who is “we”, how should they “make”, and what is “universal”?
Politics in the best-run democratic countries is at least partly the art of BS. In badly run or dictatorial countries politics is substantially 100% BS.
The entire world could agree that “starting a war” means only and exclusively launching military violence at scale against another country or region of your own country. And meanwhile if the e.g., Chinese government chooses to ignore that definition and substitute their own of “Anyone except us started it”, the only force on Earth that can change their mind is regime change. Theirs.
I think that if you could somehow magically get the leadership of all the other countries of the world to speak frankly and factually, rather than angling for their own perceived benefit, they’d almost universally say Pelosi’s visit didn’t start a war, and neither, so far, has China’s missiles shot into the sea. And once real shooting does start then whoever did that started it.
The hard part is coming up with the magic to have them speak frankly and factually while their own mission as leader (fair or foul) of their country is to advance its international military and commercial interests over all others, not to advance the interests of Truth for its own sake.
Even by the standards of international conflicts, the Taiwan-China confrontation is a tricky one, I mean its basically an continuation of the Chinese Civil War in the early 20th Century (which was itself an spectacularly complex and drawn out affair). I mean not only does China fail to recognize Taiwan and consider it part of Chine, but Taiwan fails to recognize China, and considers Taiwan to be the “real China” which has sovereignty over all the mainland (Which the US went along with until Nixon normalized relations with China)
Compared to that the current escalation over the Pelosi trip is drop in the bucket.
I was not aware that the war had already started, but if this is the case, the only way to determine who started the war is to win it. Then the loser will be the one which started the war.
As long as the war is not finished each side will claim whatever suits them. So if you really believe the war has already begun you better do your damnest to end it, and end it favourably with a resounding win.
Otherwise I would recommend you try to avoid the war breaking out.
Can’t we agree on who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?
Surely we can make a universally understood rule.
Individuals and states can say anything and provide what they think are proofs. Reasonable and rational people and countries will abide by those.
Many are neither reasonable nor rational. Additionally, vast numbers of cultures and beliefs exist in the world, with different definitions of basic terms. How does one convince them? By firing the first shot? Now we’re back at the beginning. It’s a hopeless loop.
I’m fine with this definition, as are most people.
Warmongers and their apologists are a different story, as we’ve seen in recent comments on the Dope in regards to who’s to blame for starting WWI and the Russia-Ukraine war.
To this day, we can’t be sure who fired the first shot at Lexington in 1775. Does that mean we don’t know who the aggressor was in the American Revolution?
One recommendation is to use the laws of the land.
Imagine, for example, that two children have become betrothed to one another in their youth. However, they end up never getting married - largely because the woman decides that she does not like the man. He, however, is still set on claiming her and completing the union.
A warrior in town is concerned about the man’s intentions and begins to teach her martial arts and show her how to use a sword - to defend herself in case the man ever comes to take her.
The man is aware of this but does nothing, so long as the warrior is chaste towards the woman and accepts that she is sworn to be the man’s bride.
The town begins to suspect that the man intends to force himself on the woman and impregnate her so that she will be forced to marry. They don’t know that this is true - it might not be - they merely suspect.
The man begins to worry that the warrior and his family are planning to spirit the girl away to another town where she will be forever beyond his reach. They have sent a messenger to the girl’s house, to hold secret conversations.
Now if all of this happened in modern day China, what would Chinese law say if the man attacked the woman because of the visit by the messenger? Who, in the trial, would be declared the aggressor? What is the standard for Chinese society - the standards set and imposed by the leaders of the nation, on the basis of what seemed to them to be the most just?
Is incursion by military airplanes, without a shot being fired, an act of aggression ? Spy planes, fighters, bombers, take your pick.
If it is, is the country whose borders are being violated allowed to shoot down the intruding airplanes ? Who fired the first shot then ?
Whose radar printouts will serve as proof that the incursion occurred ? If the plane manages to cross back home before crashing, or disappears at sea, whose testimony or whose pictures will prove that the plane was hit by a missile and didn’t just have a wing fall off at random ? Who will prove that the missile itself wasn’t a false flag by the plane’s own country, as a pretext to war – especially if it’s a model of missile that both countries possess ?
Supposing the United Nations has the ability to determine all this, what happens if one of the two countries isn’t even a member of the U.N. ? Or if one country denies that the other is a country at all, and claims that it’s a troubled province, and thus that the planes never had borders to violate, and the entire invasion is just internal policing, or at worst a civil war that doesn’t concern any other country ? And what can the U.N. really do if one of the countries has a veto in the Security Council – because the U.N. decided decades ago to strip one of warring countries from its U.N. seat and to give it to the other ?
When the two countries disagree on where their territory, territorial waters, or airspace beings and ends, who defines when an incursion has occurred? Even worse, what if their definitions overlap such that there is territory, waters, or airspace that both claim as their own?
As to shots fired, every major country always has various spies and special forces types out doing Sneaky Pete stuff. Some of which occasionally, but inevitably, leads to dead bystanders and/or dead operators on your or the other side. It’s a slow, steady, and very sub rosa dripfeed of bloodshed.
Generally every country has a desire to keep this reality out of the headlines, but any such event can be exploited publicly as thecasus belli even if it’s merely the latest in a long albeit thin string of violent violations of the other’s sovereignty & territory in either direction.
We’ve made stupid arguments look foolish before and I trust we can do it again. Women once couldn’t drive because of stupid arguments - and we made those arguments look foolish and hardly anyone makes them today (a few do of course, but we laugh at them).
And if the Chinese do indeed start a shooting war over Taiwan, history should (normative judgment call here) judge them harshly.
But if so that doesn’t alter the fact there will have been a war, destruction, casualties, disease, pestilence, and all the rest. And that in the lead-up, during the war, and even afterwards if China succeeds, there will be toady countries loudly agreeing with whatever China says was the truth because they judged it to their own advantage at that point to do so.
Truth & Right are honored much more in the breech or decades later than actually in the here-and-now. That’s fully applicable to the historical examples you cite and it will be fully applicable to the future of the Taiwan / China situation whenever it comes to an “end”. Whatever “end” even means in the context of nation / state interactions. c.f. “frozen conflict”.
Yes, you are right. I’m not talking about preventing a war - we have no power to do that. But we do have power as an information sharing community to assign blame for the start of conflict. And more than that, to discount arguments that try to re-assign blame to events that were non- violent.