Adam Tooze wrote a book The Wages of Destruction: the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. He outlines a now or never perspective among German industrial leaders who saw a closing window of opportunity to defeat Germany's European rivals to become a continental power like the US. The means to foreclose the possibility of slipping into second rate status as a world power was to be achieved by military conquest. Currently, the Russia-China partnership and the belt and road initiative present the MacKinder nightmare of "barbarian uncivilized peoples" controlling the so called "world island." In the Anglo-American geo-political perspective rooted in 19th and 20th Century notions of racial, ethnic and ideological superiority this cannot happen.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4306367
The 2016 Rand study on the challenge posed to the US by the growth in Chinese power posits a window of US military superiority ending in 2025.* A few respected US analysts of China's military power consider this discussion dangerously mistaken. The Chinese already have conventional military superiority in their littoral seas and on the mainland. Nevertheless, the Rand discussion represents a similar now or never perspective in the US which is widely accepted: namely, act now, while the US has the advantage. In the first half of the 20th Century, Japan suffered from a similar syndrome as Nazi Germany and miscalculated the outcomes possible in the Pacific War.
*War with China, Thinking Through the Unthinkable, Rand Corporation, Gombert et al, 2016; https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf
The right in Japan currently and the US are in a negative feedback loop overestimating how they can make China submit to the US/UK/Japan imperial redefinition of geopolitical reality in Asia. Similar US miscalculations preceded the disastrous Korean and Vietnam wars, in which millions were killed. The ongoing current delusion shared by the prior early 20th Century allies, who carved up Asia and the western Pacific before their falling out during WW II, represents a revival of obsolescent geopolitical views. The US unfortunately appears ideologically and culturally incapable of engaging in any kind of geopolitical ceasefire with China as some critics of US foreign policy have sensibly recommended.
The US will be encouraged to engage in further abandonment of the "three communiques" concerning the one China policy by the UK and Japan. Provocations in this regard will continue with respect to Taiwan. Exaggerated and false claims concerning Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet and the South China Sea repeated in Enlish language media daily are accepted uncritically by insular domestic audiences who literally know nothing about East Asia. Already the anti-Beijing Olympics strategy is being rolled out for propaganda purposes. Anyone who studies the so called human rights campaigns sponsored by the US against various Asian states, knows that they signal the end rather than the beginning of negotiations, because they are an in essence interference in the internal affairs of those states and represent regime change efforts. It goes without saying that no objective analyst could take western claims of genocide in Xinjiang seriously. The domestic racism and xenophobia against China and its nationals in the US has been whipped up to a frenzy for political purposes and now really can't be contained. Anyone proposing diplomatic solutions will be ridiculed, accused of disloyalty or worse as 1950s era McCarthyism reemerges.
No comments:
Post a Comment