Donald Rumsfeld, whom we lost last week, warned us 15 years ago that “Weakness is provocative,” words that have ominous meaning as the Biden administration degrades military morale, cohesiveness, and readiness with exercises that prioritize racial strife, homosexuality, and transgenderism in place of patriotic unity. Xi Jinping is not likely to fear American security guarantees for Taiwan or anywhere else in the face of America’s highly visible retreat from the trappings of power. And the billion dollars sent to the son of the President of the United States to “manage” surely bought something more than mediocre investment returns.
That is why alarm bells are being rung over the possibility of China launching armed conflict, to take advantage of American weakness, and the leadership vacuum under a senescent President Biden. As many observers have noted, China faces a serious demographic crisis owing to the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy a decades-long foolishness that dooms it to a top-heavy population distribution, declining absolute population, and a severe shortage of females, owing to selective abortion practices when couples could have only one child. In other words, China’s relative power over the United States may be higher now than in the future.
Japan’s government officials usually are given more to circumspection than bluntness, which is why this warning from Japan’s State Defense Minister (the deputy to the Defense Minister) is so shocking:
On Wednesday, Japan’s number two defense official said China and Russia are showing increased signs of military cooperation and their activities in the Pacific could show signs they plan to launch a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the U.S., similitar to how Japan did on Dec. 7, 1941, propelling the U.S. into World War II.
Speaking at a Hudson Institute event, Japanese State Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama said, “Seventy years ago, we attacked Pearl Harbor, but now the U.S. and Japan [are] very good allies, one of the best allies all over the world.” Nakayama went on to say now Russian naval forces “are really exercising just right in front of the western part of Honolulu, and so I don’t want to remind the 70 years ago, but we have to be careful of the exercising of the Russians.”
Nakayama used alarming language:
“If some country shoot’s [a nuclear weapon] from their continent towards Honolulu, that missile’s . . . the warheads compared to Hiroshima, it’s 200 times more than Hiroshima,” Nakayama said. “So I’ve been to Hiroshima before and I went to the museum before, from that experience and the perspective, if 200 times more strong atomic bombs or torpedoes or missiles, warheads towards Honolulu, I think Honolulu will be erased from the map. So we have to think before using those powers, we have to think how to stop it.”
Nakayama also described the growing threat of invasion China poses against Taiwan and how Japan and the U.S. must cooperate to keep Chinese actions in check.
“What we can do is show the deterrence and also [that an attack] or happening towards Taiwan, it’s straight to relate to not just Japan, but also the U.S.-Japan alliance even,” he said.
This was before the highly nationalistic speech commemorating the CCP’s hundredth anniversary given by dictator-for-life Xi Jinping in front of a crowd of 70,000 in Tien An Men Square.
Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun found an alarming similarity of Xi’s rhetoric with that of Hitler prior to World War Two in an unfortunately paywalled article:
The world must not ignore this: Last week’s big anniversary speech by China’s dictator sounded very much like Hitler’s.
So don’t be surprised when the shooting starts.
Xi gave his speech in Beijing on the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, at a ceremony featuring soldiers goosestepping, Nazi style.
It was frightening enough that Xi threatened “foreign forces” he’d “crack their heads and spill blood”.
Worse, was that in paragraph after key paragraph he pushed the same buttons Hitler pushed in his speech in 1937 on the fourth anniversary of his Nazi dictatorship.
All the same evils are there. The appeals to race. The paranoia. The inflammatory poking of a mortified national pride. The fake appeals for peace, and gory threats of blood. That sound of a whiner, grown big and now scary-daring himself to fight.
Reading them side-by-side, how can anyone think we’re safe?
Hat tip: John McMahon
You can watch a simultaneously translated version of Xi’s hour-plus speech here.
Also worrisome is the possibility that Xi may need to fan the flames of war owing to the weakness of the CCP’s hold on power. Melissa Chen writes in The Spectator:
Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms and China ascended to the WTO in 2001 after the West had spent decades trying to get the CCP to play by the rules of the international world order. The opposite happened — the CCP eroded the world order from inside. China could have taken advantage of Western gullibility for longer, coasting for a few more decades as it played the long and quiet game, enriching itself at the expense of the West while keeping its ambitions for global domination shrouded in secrecy.
But the party’s increasing insecurity about its grip on power led China to turn inward and ultimately, with the rise of Xi Jinping who purged corruption in the politburo to preserve loyalists and removed presidential term limits, it fell back to a personality cult not seen since Mao. Steadily in the last few years and particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, China has turned the world against it by proving itself to be an irresponsible world actor. For starters, after mismanaging the pandemic in its early days and shutting down domestic travel while broadcasting how banning international travel was racist, China continued to hamper independent investigations into the origins of the virus. It retaliated strongly against countries like Australia who demanded a full inquiry by slapping huge tariffs on Australian imports and then absurdly claiming that the virus came from frozen Australian meat. Aggressive vaccine diplomacy involving the questionable efficacy of Sinovac, military excursions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits and belligerent wolf-diplomacy all signal China’s deep insecurities and fragility.
Right now, China holds some serious means to cripple us, even without military action. We depend on them for pharmaceuticals, microchips, rare earths, and other essentials, whose production we could not quickly replace should they be cut off by China. China also has much of corporate America in its back pocket, members of our own oligarchy who respect and obey China’s desires over those of the American people.
These are very dangerous times indeed.
Photo credit: YouTube screengrab
