The Escalation to China War By James Reed

I have been writing about the coming war of the West with China for some time, and this is important, as Australia is going to be the meat in the proverbial sandwich here, with a likely nuclear attack upon Pine Gap in the early stages of a US-China war. There are vital political and social issues that are not being discussed by our immigration-insane elites, including the matter of unknown numbers of local CCP and PLA members, who will fight for the mother country if an all-out war occurs. This issue is discussed by some members of the US Congress and Senate, in the context of the US border invasion, where thousands of military age male Chinese are pouring into the country, then disappearing into the ethnic woodwork. These possible CCP and PLA members, flooding in through replacement level migration, are in positions where crucial infrastructure could be sabotaged easily, such as bringing down the grid. This issue was a problem in World War II, leading to internment camps, and will be many times greater now because of the Great Replacement, in World War III. Unless of course, our Australian political "leaders" have already decided to surrender to mother China, which given the dominance of the communist loving Left in this country would not surprise me.

Foreign Policy.com has a piece which details that war with China is more likely than not, and all the indicators, such as China's massive, military build up, and the Taiwan trigger point, are present. What is not mentioned though is that war with Russia and Iran could evolve to embrace China as well, or China invades Taiwan at the most opportunistic moment. It is not a good bet to wager on peace in the world today. But Australians seem to be sleepwalking while this is happening, and the federal Labor government seems to have become part of the CCP.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/04/china-war-military-taiwan-us-asia-xi-escalation-crisis/

"How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia's key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II.

How worried should we be?

Notwithstanding the recent flurry of high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, the warning signs are certainly there. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades. Notwithstanding some recent efforts to lure back skittish foreign investment, China is stockpiling fuel and food and trying to reduce the vulnerability of its economy to sanctions—steps one might take as conflict nears. Xi has said China must prepare for "worst-case and extreme scenarios" and be ready to withstand "high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms." All of this comes as Beijing has become increasingly coercive (and occasionally violent) in dealings with its neighbors, including the Philippines, Japan, and India—and as it periodically advertises its ability to batter,

blockade, and perhaps invade Taiwan.

Many U.S. officials believe the risk of war is rising. CIA Director William Burns has said Xi seeks the capability to take Taiwan by 2027. And as China's economy struggles, some observers—including, reportedly, U.S. intelligence analysts—are looking for signs that a peaking China might turn aggressive in order to distract attention from internal problems or to lock in gains while it still can.

Other analysts think the risk of Chinese aggression is overblown. Some scholars say the danger likely can be managed provided Washington doesn't provoke Beijing—an echo of a longer-standing argument that China won't upend a status quo that has served it well. Others point out that China has not started a war since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Still others dismiss the prospect that China might fight in response to a slowing economy and other domestic problems, claiming that the country has no history of diversionary war. What links these arguments is a belief in the basic continuity of Chinese conduct: the idea that a country that hasn't launched a disastrous war in more than four decades is unlikely to do so now.

We believe this confidence is dangerously misplaced. A country's behavior is profoundly shaped by its circumstances, no less than its strategic tradition, and China's circumstances are changing in explosive ways. Political scientists and historians have identified a range of factors that make great powers more or less inclined to fight. When one considers four such factors, it becomes clear that many of the conditions that once enabled a peaceful rise may now be encouraging a violent descent.

First, the territorial disputes and other issues China is contesting are becoming less susceptible to compromise or peaceful resolution than they once were, making foreign policy a zero-sum game. Second, the military balance in Asia is shifting in ways that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. Third, as China's short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening—a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past. Fourth, Xi has turned China into a personalist dictatorship of the sort especially

prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.

This isn't to say China will invade Taiwan in a particular week, month, or year. It is impossible to predict when, exactly, a conflict might occur because the trigger is often an unforeseen crisis. We now know that Europe was primed for war in 1914, but World War I would likely not have happened then had the driver of the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand not taken one of history's most fateful wrong turns. Wars are more like earthquakes: We can't know precisely when they will happen, but we can recognize factors that lead to higher or lower degrees of risk. Today, China's risk indicators are blinking red.

The possibility of a U.S.-China war might seem remote at first glance. Beijing has not fought a major war in 44 years, and its military hasn't killed large numbers of foreigners since 1988, when Chinese frigates machine-gunned 64 Vietnamese sailors in a skirmish over the Spratly Islands. The so-called Asian peace—the lack of interstate wars in East Asia since 1979—has rested on a Chinese peace.

The absence of war has hardly meant the absence of aggression: Beijing has used military and paramilitary capabilities to enlarge its writ in the South and East China seas. In recent years, China has also engaged in bloody scraps with India. Nonetheless, the fact that Beijing has abstained from major wars—while the United States has fought several of them—has allowed Chinese officials to claim that their country is following a uniquely peaceful path to global power. And it compels those who worry about war to explain why China, which has experienced record-breaking growth enabled by two generations of peace, would change course so dramatically.

It wouldn't be the first time a seemingly peaceful rising power broke bad. Prior to 1914, Germany hadn't fought a major war for more than 40 years. In the 1920s, Japan looked to many foreign observers like a responsible stakeholder as it signed treaties pledging to limit its navy, share power in Asia, and respect China's territorial integrity. In the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin mused about joining NATO and linking Russia closer to the West. That each of these nations nonetheless launched barbaric wars of conquest underscores a basic truth: Things change. The same country can behave differently, perhaps radically so, depending on the circumstances.

One such circumstance involves territorial disputes. Most wars are fights about who owns what strip of the Earth; roughly 85 percent of international conflicts waged since 1945 have revolved around territorial claims. Territory is hard to share because it often has symbolic or strategic significance. Even when nations agree to divide an area, they often end up fighting over the most valuable parts, such as cities, oil reserves, holy sites, waterways, or strategic high ground. In addition, securing territory requires physical presence in the form of fences, soldiers, or settlers. Thus, when nations claim the same turf, they come into frequent and unwelcome contact. Territorial disputes are especially likely to escalate when one side fears its claims are eroding precipitously. The belief that hallowed ground is slipping away or that the nation could be dismembered by its enemies can trigger aggression that a country more secure in its borders would avoid.

A second cause of war is a shifting military balance. Wars are waged over various issues but all share a fundamental cause: false optimism. They happen when both sides believe they can use force to achieve objectives—in other words, when both sides think they can win. Of course, few wars are truly win-win affairs, meaning at least one side—and very often both sides—disastrously underestimated the enemy's strength. In short, competitive or ambiguous military balances cause wars; therefore, anything that makes a given balance more competitive or ambiguous, such as the introduction of new technologies or a massive military buildup by the weaker side, increases the risk of war.

Third, great powers become belligerent when they fear future decline. Geopolitical competition is fierce and unforgiving, so nations nervously guard their relative wealth and power. Even the mightiest countries can spiral into violent insecurity when beset by economic stagnation, strategic encirclement, or other protracted trends that threaten their international position and expose them to predation by their foes. Heavily armed but increasingly anxious, a great power on the precipice of decline will be eager, even desperate, to beat back unfavorable trends by any means necessary. For imperial Germany, imperial Japan, and Putin's Russia, that ultimately meant war.

Finally, a country's conduct is shaped by its regime. Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands. Dictators initiate more wars because they are less exposed to the costs of conflict: Over the past 100 years, dictators who lost wars fell from power only 30 percent of the time, whereas other types of leaders who lost wars were voted out or otherwise removed from office nearly 100 percent of the time. Dictators veer into extremism because they are surrounded by sycophants who go all out to meet the dear leader's demands. Dictators also cultivate real and imagined enemies abroad because blood-and-

soil nationalism helps them justify oppressive rule at home. So whereas leaders of limited governments typically rule modestly and fade into obscurity, dictators—including Germany's Adolf Hitler, Italy's Benito Mussolini, the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, China's Mao Zedong, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and Russia's Putin—often butcher their way into the history books.

These four factors—insecure borders, a competitive military balance, negative expectations, and dictatorship—help explain China's historical use of force, and they have ominous implications today."