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These are times in which the citizenry assumes peace. There is a difference. The EMH does not apply to military spending or popular sentiment.
Or to put it another way: when Xi Jinping told the PLA to prepare the capability to invade Taiwan in 2027 (he said this multiple years ago), do you think that he wasn't being serious?
I'm not saying we're definitely going to have a nuclear war next year. He might call no-go. The West might eat Beijing's cock. Or we might have a conventional war that doesn't go nuclear (this last one is very unlikely, though). But it's a live option. And, obviously, "decent chance of WWIII" is pretty serious. But we are not serious people.
Nobody takes great-power war into account, 'tis true. Nobody does cybersecurity as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (we mandate smart cars, because we're too used to the only hacker threat being organised crime who have nothing to gain by killing 50,000 people in rush hour). Nobody does reliance on space as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (the moment there's a great-power war, lol ASAT and LEO is destroyed by Kessler syndrome). Nobody does urban planning as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (YIMBY). I don't think that this is because WWIII's impossible. I think that this is because it's been 73 years since a great-power war and 81 years since a total war, most of the Western population is less than 78 years old, and the various other pressures on Western attention and business practices have had their way - after all, the IQ 100 way of learning to take something seriously is generally to get burned by it.
(There was a whole pile of commercial integration between the great powers in 1914, too. WWI happened anyway.)
Let me ask you this. How much time do you spend listening to Xi Jinping speeches? Are you fluent in Chinese? Do you keep up with all of his internal briefings and read all of his essays?
I'm going to guess the answer is no. Me neither. It's impossible to keep up with everything like that unless its your professional job. So I rely on trusting those professionals, instead of trying to figure it all out myself. But that means we can't take one statement out of context from a foreign leader and take it literally- let the professionals who analyze this stuff figure out what it means. If they're not worried, I'm not either.
Politicians love to talk, it's what they do. Most of it is aimed at whatever audiencee they're talking to at the time, not for foreign nations. So it sounds to me like he made some rah-rah patriotic "make the PLA great again!" speech to encourage the troops, which then got picked up by foreign media, and they've been scaremongering us for years. Because that's what media does.
Notice Xi Jinping hasn't done. He hasn't loudly repeated the threat over and over again, like real warmongers do. He's never said anything to Taiwan at all. He hasn't significantly increased military spending, or built any amphibious invasion craft, or worked the general public up into a militaristic frenzy like the leaders did before WW1. There's just no parallel at all in modern times to the massive nationalistic arms race that preceded WW1.
Your info may be out of date.
Ok, find and replace "any" with "a significant amount of." Five barges is not the sort of invasion force that threatens WW3.
If those were their only assets and if they needed to threaten a larger nation than Taiwan (say, Japan or Philippines), I would agree with you.
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