Miscellaneous News

Petrolicious88 said:

China is top heavy when it comes to decision making. So it makes sense for the US to focus on influencing Xi and his inner circles, including the use of psychological warfare.

Click to expand...

AndrewS said:

This is one of the biggest analytical flaws.

The Chinese leadership is pretty much immune to foreign influence because their assets and families have been withdrawn inside China.

Plus it lists the following Xi Jinping goals below.
But these all make sense from a national perspective across the Politburo, the broader Communist Party, along with big business in China.
So it doesn't matter who is in charge, because they would all have the same goal of a prosperous hi-tech China, which would be far larger than the USA.

Click to expand...

plawolf said:

Yawn, who cares what someone too cowardly to stand by their own words rants or raves about?

Didn’t bother to read all of it as it just looked like a giant waste of time, but from the bits I did skim, it was pretty clear that the author is living either 30 years in the past, or some parallel universe fantasy land.

The real reason the US has continuously allowed its established positions to be pushed back by China is not due to clever salami slicing trickery by Beijing, but rather as a result of titanic shifts in the real, hard power balance between China and America. Thus America could no longer defend positions it once held as unassailable, so it had no other option but quietly back down when China pressed them on the issue.

In a way, this is actually a sign of past American strategic foresight, that even during the peak of its power, American planners and strategies still had the maturity and presence of mind to build in strategic ambiguity that allows America to back down without appear to be in retrea

Click to expand...

plawolf said:

At the end of the day, nation states should only draw red lines on matters that it is willing and able to go to war over irrespective of the costs. Taiwan is such an issue for China, whereby it is almost impossible to think of any remotely realistic scenario where Taiwan could declare formal independence and not trigger and immediate Chinese invasion.

If you declare a red line over an issue you are manifestly not going to go all in on, then a near-peer adversary with sufficient balls and will can force you to make humiliating climb downs over, as Obama found to his cost with the Russians.

For America to declare any of the red lines as outlined in that report is to invite total disaster, as doing so will hand the strategic initiative entirely to China, whereby China can pick and choose precisely the time and place to fight America to maximise its advantage.

Click to expand...

B.I.B. said:

The writer also suggest that China should be made to attend the SALT talks. What sort of leverage does thewriter think the US has to make China do anything?

Click to expand...

AndrewS said:

That is a very dangerous game to play.

Suppose China were to do the same with the much more open American system, which is wracked with fault lines?

In the next few years, China will have eliminated most of the vulnerabilities that Trump exposed.
So I reckon that it could be in China's interest to support a Trumpian resurgence in Congress and the White House, because there is very little that a future Trump successor could do to China.

Click to expand...

montyp165 said:

The other thing is that everything they accuse China of wanting to do is something that the US itself is doing against anybody and everybody who disagrees with them and yet is supposed to be a good thing for the rest of the world. At the end of the day, regardless of whether it's China, Russia, Iran, EU et al, breaking the American grip on the world becomes a matter of necessity and even survival for everyone.

Click to expand...