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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   906 thread views

Transnational Thursday for April 2, 2026

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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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.

You're too consumed by the American culture war to realize the Chinese leadership doesn't care much about what Milley said

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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