AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
I remember when APEC first started, the American negotiator, C. Fred Bergsten, would talk about how Asian countries avoided anything that would provoke China. Which meant if the US wanted to contain China, they would get no support from China's neighbors. But the key word is "provoke." If China was the one provoking, that would get China's neighbors to support the US. Hence why in order to get support for the Pivot to Asia from China's neighbors, Obama gave Exxon, operated then by Rex Tillerson, the present Secretary of State, permission to co-explore disputed waters in the South China Sea defacto declaring those waters belonged to Vietnam. Obama knew China would have to react and thus spin it to be Chinese aggression and that's what plunged the Far East into the worst tensions since the darkest days of the Cold War. You think Obama, who encouraged Syrian rebels to fight promising them with his redline threat to Assad and then to die by backing out when the redline was crossed, would care about starting a war in Asia? Just as long as American lives, aka American voters, weren't at risk, there was nothing that would be seen as crossing the line. But then Asia was expecting the US to do all the work against China that Obama was expecting them to do thus why the Pivot to Asia is in disarray today.
We always hear about American omnipotence but there's a glaring weakness. Americans can't take casualties. Mao said, "One life lost is a great tragedy. A thousand lives lost are only a statistic." If you look at the casualties during the Iraq wars... even though it was slow, even though there were few, Americans will turn on a war when families who lost people start mourning alone and become only a statistic especially since every life lost in the beginning was lionized individually by the media.
If China wants to win a war, don't be the one that starts it and no adversary will ever win against China. They're the ones that wants to change China. They already put themselves in a position where if they don't get what they want or expect, they're the ones that will get angry and try to do something about it. If they start the war, they're already on the losing side no matter how much they can kill and destroy because in the end China will outlast them.
We always hear about American omnipotence but there's a glaring weakness. Americans can't take casualties. Mao said, "One life lost is a great tragedy. A thousand lives lost are only a statistic." If you look at the casualties during the Iraq wars... even though it was slow, even though there were few, Americans will turn on a war when families who lost people start mourning alone and become only a statistic especially since every life lost in the beginning was lionized individually by the media.
If China wants to win a war, don't be the one that starts it and no adversary will ever win against China. They're the ones that wants to change China. They already put themselves in a position where if they don't get what they want or expect, they're the ones that will get angry and try to do something about it. If they start the war, they're already on the losing side no matter how much they can kill and destroy because in the end China will outlast them.
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