Trump’s Plan for China: Tariffs Over Tanks, Deals Over Drone Strikes

Flopping Aces ^ | 10-17-24 | Jeff Childers

[Starman417]

by Jeff Childers

We need to check in on developments with China. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “With Jets and Ships, China is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan.” I’m not sure “honing” is the right verb for that mixed metaphor, but we got the idea. China put Taiwan in check yesterday with military chess pieces.

In our intense focus on the upcoming elections, it’s easy to forget how rapidly the rush of events is overtaking the world in other places.

Yesterday, the United States, Japan, South Korea, France and Britain held massive joint military drills near Taiwan. Then, China responded with its own record-setting drills, completely encircling the island nation with China’s Coast Guard, and buzzing it with fighter jets launched from China’s first production aircraft carrier.

One sympathizes with the average Taiwanese citizen who, observing all this military attention, probably feels like it’s been one damn thing after another lately.

Beyond describing the military schlong measuring, the article unintentionally confessed an ugly truth. Neocon China hawks often argue China would be easy to beat since it hasn’t “practiced war” since Vietnam. (You could also say China has remained peaceful for the last 50 years, but nobody wants to hear that.) In making that overly simplistic point, the formerly peace-loving Times grotesquely bragged how the United States has honed its warmaking skills over decades of continuous war:

While continuous war might be great for military-industrial complex shareholders, for everybody else, continuous war is noisy, expensive, and every now and then somebody actually gets killed. Continuous war is kind of exactly what we were hoping to avoid.

That’s why we need President Trump!

Trump’s foreign policy is based on competing with other countries economically rather than kinetically. Trump is confident he can outwit, outmarket, and outsell other countries, without anybody having to die or even get mangled in a drone strike.

This kind of competition is out of the left’s reach. Democrats and generals are cowards; they are scared they can’t compete on a fair economic table, so they wield the bully clubs of American military and economic sanctions trying to tilt the scales in our favor.

[Wuli]

If so Trump is wrong on the CCP. It needs to be slowly pushed out of the west’s economic engagment with it. Anything that helps China’s markets helps the CCP and helps sustain the continued dictatorship running things in China, a dictatorship seeling to expand its influence and its political model.

[Zhang Fei]

[Yesterday, the United States, Japan, South Korea, France and Britain held massive joint military drills near Taiwan. Then, China responded with its own record-setting drills, completely encircling the island nation with China’s Coast Guard, and buzzing it with fighter jets launched from China’s first production aircraft carrier.]

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The hype is evident from the missing numbers. Under 2 dozen PLAN ships. The US drills are similarly small scale, with 2,000 sailors involved. The Eisenhower alone has a crew of 6,000. For perspective, the Normandy landings involved 7,000 naval vessels, 350K men.

[plain talk]

Make a deal deal

[SJSAMPLE]

“Maybe he’s a Republican?”