On this day in 1941, the Japanese attacked the US Naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and forced us into joining World War II, first against the Japanese and shortly after, against the Germans in defense of England.
84 years have now passed and now it isn’t China we’re defending against Japan, it’s Japan we’re defending against China. No bullets are flying or bombs dropping , not yet anyway, and while alliances have changed and enemies and friends have swapped sides, the world is still behaving just as childishly as before. Only this time with even bigger, badder, more dangerous weapons.
The idea is to maintain a permanent arms race. This forces opposing nations to keep buying the latest weaponry to keep up with each other’s threat level. They don’t have peace between them because those who profit from the arms industries make sure it’s them who run the governments, and maintaining unrest keeps the people working to pay the taxes that buy the guns.
I look at Trump stopping all those small nations wars, and mostly internal wars between factions, and see no threat to the bomb makers profits because these are mostly small, poor countries that can’t afford the jet fighters and high-tech rocketry, they fight with machetes and torches. But getting them to make peace makes the US, and Trump of course, look good, even as the true arms race between the US and China continues to surge and the profits flow unabated.
And so I wonder when the test will come, and where. Will China take the big step and assault Taiwan? The US, Japan and possibly other Asian nations will come to Taiwan’s aid, this is pretty certain. The Chinese might want to test just how certain it is.
Maybe they’ll go after the Senkaku Islands held by Japan that China’s wanted for a long time and keeps threatening, or possibly commit to an all-out takeover of the Philippine fishing grounds, to test the commitment of the US to our allies. I think they’ll make some sort of actual military attack soon because between the US and China, it’s China that keeps threatening the US, not the other way around, while it’s the US that’s actually committing to military force with the new administration. First Iran and now Venezuela and this makes the US look stronger than China. All China keeps doing is threatening and while they’re working like mad to build up their military strength, their threats are empty.
This is a bad look for the Xi regime, and Xi is aging. Old Chinese leaders never have good endings and he wants to stay in power. Starting a war somewhere is a good way to do that, and why December 7 is a real good reminder of that fact.