With daily news about Russian attacks on Ukraine and the building threat of similar strikes by communist China on Taiwan—any of which could escalate to conventional, tactical nuclear, or strategic nuclear war with the United States—more folks are starting to worry.
The columnist fears “blundering” into a conventional war with China that could escalate to tactical nuclear strikes in Asia or the destruction of U.S. and Chinese cities.
The Post columnist, Max Boot, wrote that “there is scant evidence that it [the Chinese Communist Party] is conspiring to export its system of oppression globally.”
Boot smears the views of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who leads the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, as “an update of the old Cold War paranoia about a supposed Soviet plot to take over the world, which missed the fact that Soviet leaders were driven primarily by defensive concerns about their own security.”
“Primarily” does the heavy lifting in that sentence. If the Soviets could have taken over the world, they would have. And it repeats CCP talking points, for example, that Beijing only stole islands from the Philippines and Vietnam, including murdering their soldiers for “defensive” purposes. Please.
Moscow and Beijing want the world’s democracies to ponder and fear their threats—to varying degrees implied, signaled, and in some cases explicit—in the hope that we appease their regimes by giving up Taiwan and Ukraine, much as the West surrendered Crimea to Vladimir Putin, and the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler. That appeasement whetted the appetite of these dictators, who widened their wars in the hopes of taking yet more.
Hyping the threat of China’s nuclear weapons, as the Post has done, stokes public fear and plays to Beijing’s hand. Despite the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) rapid increase in its nuclear weapons and sophistication of its delivery vehicles, the United States still has a more-than-credible deterrent, most (and least) obviously, in its deadly quiet ballistic missile submarines.
The public in democracies, however, is easily swayed by slick-but-misguided columnists in The Washington Post. Unlike dictators, our democratic leaders are beholden to the public, while dictatorships are not.
Democrats and libertarians are more likely to fearmonger about nuclear war than Republicans because fearmongering encourages isolationism, and isolationism saves money, at least in the short term. In the long term, isolationists give away the farm because the threats they ignore will eventually come to get them here in the Lower 48.
Democrats want that money for extravagant social service spending that undermines the U.S. economy, and libertarians want to “spend it” on tax cuts. At least the latter are pro-growth.
However, fearmongering is double-edged for even these political persuasions, as it might lead to greater spending on much-needed improvements in missile defense to defeat the latest hypersonic missiles of both Moscow and Beijing.
Beijing is also playing with fire, as democracies are slow to anger but, once roused, are ruthless in their own defense. Consider the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It took years for the United States to enter World War II, but there was hell to pay once we did. Beijing currently courts that hell by threatening our friends and allies in Asia.
The difference today is that democracies’ adversaries are nuclear-armed, so it would obviously be harder and riskier for Washington to fight Russia or China directly. The more likely scenario is a proxy war where we supply Taiwan with the necessary weapons to defend itself, up to and including nuclear weapons, without putting U.S. boots on the ground or sinking PLA Navy ships directly. If Taiwan started losing, the U.S. military could provide a backstop.
Only the foolish claim to predict the full course of a war, but it is usually a safe bet to assume it will be hell for all involved, especially our enemies. That doesn’t mean we should hype that hell to the point of scaring our democracies into not defending themselves by standing for what is right.
