[JasonC]

He is already doing the latter. There is money from him and from Lulu in Brazil and from the Chinese, all of it washing over all of south America spreading the anti-American gringo go home version of communism. Which is simply China running its ongoing grand strategy of asymmetric warfare against the US. When we are done with the middle east they'll have all the terrorists and nuke proliferation threats we could ask for stoked up and ready to go in our hemisphere.

Wear us out in the periphery. When we get tired of it and get an isolationist streak, go home and won't listen to pols telling us to go do yet another one, then they take Taiwan.

[gondramB]

>>Wear us out in the periphery. When we get tired of it and get an isolationist streak, go home and won't listen to pols telling us to go do yet another one, then they take Taiwan.<<

Don't forget where are their biggest customer and buy lots more from them than they buy from us - that's works against taking Taiwan.

On the other hand, their domestic consumption is going way up cutting their total dependence on exports... so longer term maybe they think they will be able to take Taiwan.