'Will Biden Stumble into a New World War?
The behavior of policy-makers in D.C. today is eerily similar to that of British leaders at the onset of the First World War.
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When it comes to defense and foreign policy, there are very few stone-cold realists in Washington’s policy-making circles. Since 1945, with a few notable exceptions, most American presidents have tended to put short-term political celebrity or ephemeral liberal causes ahead of tangible, concrete national interests in America’s relations with other nation-states. Biden is no exception to the rule.
Guided more by impulse and emotion than reason or knowledge of the facts, President Biden, like most of Washington’s ruling political class, may be privately pleased with Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taipei. When Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is viewed in the context of Biden's self-evidently thoughtless remark, however, it is clear that the combination is having a negative impact across Asia.
Japan's top government spokesman, Hiroakazu Matsono, expressed a view that is widely shared across Asia when he said, “Peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is important not only for the security of Japan but also the world.”
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Beijing expects that the immediate threat to China will come from the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet and America’s Air Force. Consequently, Beijing invested heavily over the last two decades in the combination of layered air defenses and a vast arsenal of ground-based tactical and intermediate range surface-to-surface precision-guided missiles, rockets, and loitering munitions linked to persistent space and terrestrial-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR-Strike) platforms.
In a confrontation over Taiwan, the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet would have to operate far from China’s coastline to avoid the PLA’s missile strikes, severely limiting the surface fleet’s ability to influence events ashore inside China. Washington could still blockade China’s Pacific Coast, but to do so, it would have to rely primarily on its nuclear-powered attack submarines in deep water.
But a blockade would not nullify China’s principal strategic advantage. The depth of its continental position with a friendly, resource-rich Russia to the north suggests that a blockade is unlikely to succeed. Based on the expenditure rates oft munitions and precision-guided weapon systems of all kinds in Ukraine, current U.S. inventories of precision-guided missiles and munitions would be exhausted quickly. Unrealistic thinking about the demands of modern warfare combined with a false sense of moral superiority irreparably harmed the British Empire, and eventually reduced Great Britain to the status of a second-rate power. The question for Americans is whether the leadership in Washington, D.C. is not unlike a brontosaurus with a body that’s 50 yards long and a brain the size of a pin. With each passing day, it becomes more critical for Americans with common sense to replace the pin-brains running the show inside the beltway before they march Americans down the ruinous path the British took in 1914.'
-Douglas Macgregor
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/will-biden-stumble-into-a-new-world-war/
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Sicklyboy:
