We’re getting too old for WW3!
(The Head Groundskeeper careens out of his lane to dabble in international affairs.)
In the last thrilling episode, we gave Vivek Ramawamy the Werkes! The man isn’t scum, as Nikki Haley suggested Wednesday 11-08-23 at the Republican presidential debate. But he IS a jerk, going after Nikki’s daughter. But then, so is Donald Trump, who regularly disparages women’s appearances. Both men deserve a 5-inch heel up the fundament.
Lend me your screens. We come before our platinum subscribers today not to bury Ramma-slamma-ding-dong but to praise him for an attribute as rare and more valuable than yttrium: deviating from the script. VR has that in common with his hero; the insurrectionist in chief wrenched the Republican party out of “forever wars,” threw up trade barriers, and wrested blue collar workers from the party of FDR.
Doesn’t mean we necessarily agree, but let’s hear the argument.
We’re on record saying that Crimea is Russian. Its people speak Russian and worship Russian Orthodox. The Big Three met at one of the Russian czar’s palaces in Yalta during WW2. Nikita Khrushchev mischievously grafted Crimea onto Ukraine in the 1950s to destabilize Ukraine. Soviet leaders injected Russian ethnics into other constituent republics, inducing the Baltic states. Ukraine’s Donbas may be the same story.
We still wish the CIA would sweeten Putin’s tea with a dollop of polonium, but maybe this whole Ukrainian thing is a delayed shake-out from the sudden dissolution of the USSR. Should Poland demand the return of the city of Lviv, stripped from them after WW2 and eventually given to Ukraine?
Taiwan was Chinese
Is it anymore? For millennia, the island nation (once known as Formosa) was Chinese, until Japan took over in 1895; yielding after their defeat in WW2. Became a separate country only after Mao tse Tung won China’s civil war and chased Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland in 1949.
How would we feel? Preoccupied by our own civil war, France invaded Mexico and set up a friendly “emperor,” a Habsburg archduke. When the Confederacy was finally defeated, Mexico invited slavers to set up shop in Mexico. The Monroe Doctrine in his saddle bags, General Grant rattled sabers on the Rio Grande. Napoleon 3 retreated and Maximilian faced a firing squad. Why would China not feel proprietary toward a Chinese-ethnic island 112 miles east of its mainland? Cuba is 103 miles from Ron DeSantis and we remember JFK’s reaction to Russian missiles there.
We get it: Taiwan is a democracy and mainland China is a menacing communist dictatorship. Maybe they don’t stop at Taiwan. Or maybe we care because the island nation makes 90% of the world’s most advanced computer semi-conductors. Which argues for American self-sufficiency, a concept re-introduced by the MAGA Man. Soon, we’ll be spinning our own wool.
The five Republican hopefuls in Miami Wednesday spent an inordinate amount of time guessing the right number of warships the U.S. Navy should float, presumably to protect Taiwan from Chinese TikTokkers. Is it treason to suggest that the U.S. could field a dozen fewer and still deter?
Blaska’s Bottom Line: More important, it seems to us, is something called Resolve. Barack Obama famously drew a line in the sand and dared Syria to cross it, which it promptly did, to no blowback from the U.S. You buzz our ships and we shoot down the intruder.
2 responses to “How bad do we want war with China?”
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We haven’t won a war since the liberation of Kuwait.
Brandon and Barack lost two.
But at least our military is far ahead at wasteful spending and military pronouns.