Mutually Assured Destruction....M.A.D....had been part of our defense policy since the Kennedy administration in 1962. Essentially it was that if both sides knew that a nuclear war might destroy the other side....but it would also destroy themselves....saner heads would prevail. There was no world war. We today live in a world of communist dictatorships with nuclear weapons and radical terrorist states that have the capability to start a world war.....thus our number one goal continued to be to avoid world war. Communist states and rogue terrorist states can cause smaller wars and great and significant problems for the West and for America....but hopefully not a world war.
Trump had always been a tariff person....because that meant prosperity and for people in his money bracket....but there was no ideological concerns at all on China. He was loving Xi Jinping in 2018...."He's now president for life, president for life. And that's great....maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday." John Bolton wrote that in 2019 at a summit dinner that Trump told Xi Jinping that China's economic capabilities to purchase agricultural products could aid his 2020 election effort.. Bolton said that he could give the exact words words that Trump used but the government edited them out for security reasons. Bolton also reported on Trump's encouragement on China's building camps for Uighur Muslims....but alas.....we on our side do not read books like Bolton's do we? So what went wrong with the great relationship of Trump and Xi Jinping? One speculative view is that China's great rejuvenation plans....and Trump's MAGA....clashed. Trump next turned to his other advisers and the tariff war was on. It was essentially a new cold war....that has already reaped severe consequences. The main goal of avoiding world war....(and war with China would most likely be a world war)....is no longer our focus. We gave communist China every break in the book in the last fifty years....because as we thought that a strong China economy would boost all of us....and possibly help avoid war....but when China became a monster....we found ourselves in a compromising situation. Our answer recently has evolved.....for economic reasons....to 'going for the win'....no longer 'going for the peace.' The following post is from March of last year:
What Did We Expect
The plane that I was on left Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon on the same day that Air Force One landed in Beijing....February 21, 1972. This was President Nixon's attempt to make war with China less likely....or so he explained it as such. Four months previous....mainland China was admitted to the United Nations as Taiwan was expelled. Four months after President Nixon's arrival in China....burglers were caught at the Watergate Hotel. On April 30, 1975 the Chinese variation of the Soviet T-54 tank rolled onto Tan Son Nhut. China was admitted to the World Trade Organization on December 11, 2011....three months to the day after 9/11.
Today our relationship with China is like a clematis plant that has climbed in and out of the wires of a trellis. As a matter of fact the whole world is the trellis as China's economy weaves its way up and around and through.
China persecutes many of its people....and steals intellectual property....and its influence around the world has been spreading as an invasive plant. What did we expect? Its economy is said to need an annual 6% growth to sustain itself. We not only allowed this economic powerhouse to come about....we wanted it to grow....and we continued to feed it.
If China's economy were to totally collapse....what would happen? Economists attempt an answer on the economic side....but its our intelligence agencies that attempt to answer the sociopolitical concerns....but what good would that be anyway....for President Trump doesn't believe them. Well he may now with his own appointees in there.
It would have been one thing if our economy had been suffering and people were out of work in great numbers.....but that wasn't the case as we were constantly told that we were the greatest economy in the history of the world. So why did we pursue a risky tariff war? Was it on principle? Does Donald Trump seem to you to be a man who acts on principle?
China was being pressured big time. Their communist leadership was moving back to a cold war stance.....and then the virus hit....and if it subsides China will then be taken to task. The Pentagon announced just today that the Marines are changing their training and equipment to focus on a more likely 21st Century war with China.
If one is building a giant skyscraper hotel....one might be able to go back and forth on almost a daily basis....'OK we'll do it this way" and then "No we'll do it that way". If you make a mistake....worst case scenario you're out a few million bucks...but in world affairs as serious as potential major wars we need consistency. We don't need a novice stomping around saying that he's the smartest man in the room. Do we want China to at least survive....or do we want it to collapse? Let's look to both the immediate and long-term repercussions before answering that.
What has been getting in the way of common sense is the greed of profiteering....which is short-sightedness. The tariff war was ill-advised. The dispersions cast upon NATO were ill-advised....as were purging of experienced intelligence people because they were not a rubber stamp....and as was the arm-twisting of the Fed....as was a number of other decisions made only to increase profits that were supposedly through the roof already. Whatever decisions will be made on China have to take into consideration what the communist leadership might do if their backs are absolutely up against the wall.
