There's not a day without the omni presence of one Eldridge Colby trying to drum up the China threat and Taiwan invasion 24hrs/day, everyday, 365 days. Here his lates interview with the Unherd interviewed by Freddie about you guess it? China is evil and will invade Taiwan therefore the West lead by America must do X, Y, Z.
But I must admit, reading through the comments I was expecting the usual western narrative and ignorance or omission of truths, twisting of historical facts against China's core interests in Taiwan. And yet I managed to find this particular insightful comment that asks the same questions I myself have pondered and postulated minus the writer's concise but direct to the point strategic questions regarding America's need to defend and fight China for Taiwan.
From @Jasper Sky:
Elbridge Colby: A solid candidate for "most dangerous US foreign policy influencer alive today." Freddie displayed good interview skills here, but not great skills, because he left out several humungous questions and thereby failed to challenge this fanatic's (Colby's) foundational assumptions:
- What if China does become, to an even greater degree, the leading power in eastern Asia (nota bene - surely it already is that, and this fact has not led to disaster in the region's countries - indeed, hasn't it raised general prosperity in the region?) What exactly are the "American interests" that would be so hurt by China being the regional hegemon? Are these "interests" so profound that they're worth risking a regional American military defeat over, or even a full-scale nuclear war? These "interests" never seem to be clearly specified. The assumption seems simply to be that Chinese power is inherently a bad thing - so terribly bad, so profoundly harmful, that it's completely unacceptable to allow China to continue to prosper and to maintain or grow its power. Why?
- Is the future governance of Taiwan - specifically, the question of whether or not Taiwan is re-unified with the mainland in some kind of "two systems, one country" arrangement - a matter of such profound importance that the United States should position itself to go to war against China over it? Why exactly?
- What would be the goals of a war against China that is ostensibly over Taiwan? My guess is that such a war would not really be about Taiwan at all. I think people like Eldridge Colby, as well as "blob" neocons like Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, and Tony Blinken, don't give a rat's ass about Taiwan or its people. A war ostensibly waged to "defend Taiwan" would, in fact, really be about knocking back Chinese power by destroying its navy and air force and imposing an economic blockade, as Eldridge Colby is effectively proposing. Taiwan would be destroyed in the process. Taipei's real interest is to urgently make a deal with Beijing on a "two systems, one country" basis, specifically in order to avoid being used by the US military-industrial-foreign policy establishment as a pretext for war against China and a battlespace over which to fight the PLA (in a similar way as Ukraine is being used by these people as a battlespace and proxy force with which to wage war on Russia). Just as "defending Ukraine's freedom" by sucking the Russians into a war (a war that is indeed evil, as are Putin and his henchmen) has been destroying Ukraine - and turning Ukraine's government into a military autocracy as a semi-inevitable side effect - "defending Taiwan" will lead to the destruction of Taipei and, in due course, Taiwan's occupation by several hundred thousand angry PLA soldiers. A war between the USA and China "over Taiwan" is profoundly not in the interests of Taiwan or its people.
- What would be the economic consequences of a war between the US and China to the United States, to Europe, to eastern Asia, and to developing countries around the world?
- How plausible is it that any war between the US and China would not escalate out of control? Would it turn into a nuclear war? And whether or not it crosses the nuclear threshold, would it draw in Japan, the Koreas, and other countries as well as the US, and leave several countries turned to rubble and smoking ruins? Is reversing Chinese regional and global power so crucially important that this is a price worth paying?
- What if a US administration decided to try to wage peace on China rather than wage war against it, or bully it into submission? What might a policy of waging peace on China look like? In other words, are there decent alternatives to Elbridge Colby's horror-show scenario - in which he proposes to build up US military power in the Pacific "theatre" to an extraordinary extent, guaranteeing that China will further accelerate its own military buildup -- and knowing full well that the Chinese government (backed by the Chinese people) are fully committed to reunification with Taiwan, come what may, i.e. any attempt by the US to use force to prevent this will trigger a huge war? Are there conditions under which Chinese power in the world could be constrained by negotiating mutually beneficial projects and outcomes, e.g. concerted development of Africa's economies using green technologies in joint European, Chinese, and American policies and projects, financially mediated by the regional development banks? Why do people like Mr. Colby - and nearly everyone in Washington DC and in the mainstream media - assume that Chinese power and US power are naturally antagonistic and necessarily a zero-sum game? I see no serious argument why a positive-sum game couldn't be played. In fact, any conflict between these two behemoths - USA and China - won't be a zero-sum game as Mr. Colby implicitly assumes: it would be a radically negative-sum game. Everyone would lose, and lose big. Not least Taiwan, which is destined to be utterly destroyed if a kinetic conflict occurs between the two superpowers "over Taiwan."
- Mr. Colby stated - in passing, as if it were incontestably understood to be fact - that the Chinese Communist Party is "evil". Is it? I'm very much in favour of liberty and democracy - I wish the US itself were more genuinely a democracy, rather than a nation run by two wings of the Money and War Oligarchy Party enabled by a two-party first-past-the-post electoral system gerrymandered to Hell and back and deeply corrupted by campaign cash, faux-news propaganda channels, in which both parties are really just policy corporations run by and for the benefit of rival coalitions of mega-corporations and plutocrats. Yet I don't feel qualified to judge the Chinese political system or to write it off as "evil" - I see it as different than ours, but why call it "evil"?
The current Chinese system is really nothing other than a relabeled version of the same system they've had for thousands of years: there's an Emperor in Beijing (nowadays he's called President and Chairman), and there's a meritocratically structured Mandarinate (nowadays it's called the Communist Party of China cadre system), and there's a Confucian values system underpinning it all. The CPC is Communist in name only. So, is the Chinese system "evil"? It worked reasonably well for long stretches of China's history, and over the past 40 years it lifted several hundred million people out of abject poverty. And in terms of its influence around the world, the Chinese government's main noticeable impact over the past couple of decades has been to build roads and bridges and ports in places like Africa and Pakistan. Is that "evil"? Have the Chinese been sending expeditionary armies to blow up countries halfway around the world, over the past forty years? No -- it's been the US doing that. Are we to assume that the Chinese are going to follow America's example and do this kind of thing in the future? Why? On what basis would anyone make that assumption?
Let's all of us get off our couches and stop maniacs like Elbridge Colby on the Republican Party side and Blinken-Nuland-Sullivan on the Democratic Party side. They're all firmly members of the Party of War. The bipartisan consensus that China is the New Big Enemy That Must Be Crushed is batshit f**king crazy and can only lead to lose-lose outcomes that could make the Second World War look like a teenager's Sweet Sixteen party in comparison.
