Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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That's the thing - the US had done so much to show to everybody we do NOT mean business - up to US military leader openly proclaiming in public he would warn the Chinese if US government were about to do anything against them - that one can get the impression we genuinely do not mean business. Prior to Trump - given how the matters in Afghanistan were handled, given how the matters in Russia are being handled, given how the matters on the American continent are handled - which part would convince China we actually mean business? And are ready to go if they start any shit, and aren't going to just fold like a wet paper bag, after declaring fighting China is racist anyway? The Chinese are not stupid, and they have full access to all the information about the US. Maybe they are culturally biased, as every person is, but in 2025, and if we had President Harris now, I do not see how observing what is happening in the US, they could have made the conclusion that we mean business. Now, this conclusion - at least until Trump is gone - is much more supported by the facts.
Neither President Harris nor President Trump means business. President Obama, who deployed THAAD in South Korea in 2016; President Bush, who sent planes to crash with a Chinese jet in the South China Sea in 2001; and President Clinton, who sent the seventh fleet to Taiwan during the third Taiwan strait crisis and bombed Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, they mean business.
You're too consumed by the American culture war to realize the Chinese leadership doesn't care much about what Milley said. No one in Beijing expects Americans to be soft-hearted regardless of what you say. It matters what you do. And of course removing assets from East Asia to supply the Iran missions (especially considering how little damage Iranian missiles have made) means less business than the other way around. And of course appointing DEI hires or reverse DEI hires in the military means less business too.
Chinese leadership may be not concerned by what he said - they unlikely to rely in their plans on woke generals actually warning them. But they surely must notice what kinds of people are floating to the top, and what it says about the state of the system. And I think they may make a conclusion that Americans are now too obsessed with wokeness to be a serious adversary, if shit is going to really go down. After all, such a conclusion about Europe is entirely warranted, and if Trump didn't win, it likely would have been true about the US too quite soon. The fact that we dodged the bullet this time doesn't mean we're far from it.
It matters what you do, but also it matters what you are prepared to do. If your opponents are convinced your army is mostly Potemkin villages and your leadership is more concerned about not looking racist than about defending the interests of your nation, they would surely adopt a more aggressive stance than otherwise. If you have a asset stockpile that the enemy is sure you'd never use, they wouldn't be deterred much by it.
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