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When arsonists like Blinken are threatening to torch a house, which is Taiwan, to save it, it's no wonder the whole neighbourhood is alarmed. It doesn't help when top US military men just keep on predicting a war with China, any time now, and up to 2027 at the latest.
It also doesn't help when the United States keeps selling more weapons to the island, and is now increasing its military presence with actual boots on Taiwanese ground. If that's not provocation, I don't know what is.
There is an easier and sensible way to ease tensions with China, and that's by trying to reach an understanding with Beijing over the island, as both the US and the mainland have managed to do in the past 40 years, until now.
But then the US decides it must openly confront and contain a rising China. And what's more convenient than playing the Taiwan card, Asia's peace and security be damned? After all, if the whole region goes up in smoke, that's someone else's neighbourhood, not America's. It's déjà vu. How many times have we seen this film before? Why talk when you can just pull out a gun?
That's America's style. It's apparently even written into its constitution.
Washington plans to significantly increase its presence of troops on Taiwan, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, by quadrupling the number to 200 military personnel in the coming months. Meanwhile, separate reports also say Taiwanese troops will be sent to the US for combat training.
Until recently, there were not supposed to be any US troops on Taiwan; and even up to the start of 2021, no more than two dozen were reported. The military exchange will be a real escalation.
Such moves are usually between the militaries of two sovereign countries. It's clear while the Joe Biden White House claims to uphold the one-China principle, its actions say otherwise.
For a while, President Tsai Ing-wen tried to put a lid on the rising US presence of troops, but now she doesn't even bother. Washington keeps arguing for increasingly assertive and overt support, especially with frequent US naval operations across the strait. It's the only way to help deter "Chinese aggression". That's a matter of perspective.
For Beijing, it just looks like deliberate provocation.
Since Taiwan independence or secession is the only issue on which China will go to war, the US is risking the future of the entire region for its own China containment policy, by playing the Taiwan card to the max. This game becomes more dangerous with each new provocation, such as an expected visit by Republican House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy, following in the footsteps of his Democrat predecessor Nancy Pelosi.
The increasing number of US troops on the island is not occurring in isolation, but part of the US militarisation of the region, with bases reopening in the Philippines, and as it steps up the so-called chip war with the help of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
When you pick on every move China makes or could make in the imagination of US generals and hawkish politicians, there will come a point of no return when Beijing says enough is enough. When a stray Chinese balloon is deliberately turned into an international incident, it shows US policymakers have lost all sense of proportion and cannot be trusted to act rationally with China.
All the nations in the Asia-Pacific region must realise America's unreliability, irresponsibility and propensity for war - in their neighbourhood. Preserving peace, security and prosperity in the region depends on delicately balancing between the US and China.
Siding with one and ganging up on the other is a recipe for disaster.
Reader Comments
When arsonists like Blinken are threatening to torch a house, which is Taiwan, to save it, it's no wonder the whole neighbourhood is alarmed. It doesn't help when top US military men just keep on predicting a war with China, any time now, and up to 2027 at the latest.’
Kissinger/Brzezinski doctrine of constant tension between the three superstates exactly as Orwell’s 1984 told us.
The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed , as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc . And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour- plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
its own citizens must rise up, make jan 6 look like a kindy play scene..
go for the throats of these mad rabid dogs in congress and the WH, , or we all shall perish in flames.
musso stlye them all asap!