by Erik Stryker, The Unz Review:
This week, the People’s Liberation Army conducted aggressive military exercises in the South China sea. This act was a forceful response to the Taiwanese President’s meeting with Kevin McCarthy, where the two figures reaffirmed a mutual interest in “defending democracy.”
The display is unusual for two reasons. The first, is that the Chinese generally shy from gratuitous displays of force, so this should be taken seriously. The military drills were strikingly reminiscent to ones conducted by Russia on the eve of the Ukraine war.
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The second, is the ludicrous fact that Washington does not even recognize Taiwan as a nation.
The US government gave up claims to the territory it controlled as a semi-colony when negotiating Chinese support for a common front against the Soviet Union. Chinese ownership of Taiwan was officially acknowledged in the 1972 Shanghai Communique authored by Henry Kissinger and presented by Richard Nixon. The 1955 Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which compels the US military to defend Taiwan in the case of a mainland invasion, was officially terminated in 1980 when Washington formally established diplomatic ties with China.
With the Soviet Union gone and China beginning to forge its identity as a world power, the self-selected judge, jury and executioner of the “rules based international order” has decided these agreements are no longer convenient and have, over the decades, used legalisms to establish the rat-like policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the matter of Taiwan.
But things are no longer so ambiguous. Following the Ukraine script, the Pentagon and State Department are now moving forward on furnishing Taiwan with billions of dollars worth of arms on top of the steady trickle of weapons the Biden Administration has already been sending. The US has a backlog of over $12 billion dollars worth of weaponry earmarked to “Ukrainize” Taiwan combined with an anti-China disinformation campaign seeking to stoke jingoism. This is a brazen provocation. Prior to this foreign interloping, China was on track for peaceful reunification, now in the blink of an eye, we have Lindsay Graham stating he would support sending US troops to fight them over the island.
In the post-Iraq era, nobody believes the saccharine self-righteous lectures about Truth, Justice and the American Way unless they’re paid to pretend to. Geopolitical analysts across the ideological spectrum have correctly identified the imperial economics behind the US government’s bellicose finger in China’s eye: Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors, which are requisite parts of virtually all advanced electronic innovations from smartphones to modern automobiles. Possession of a monopoly on the production of this specialized technology, observers say, would allow China unprecedented global influence.
The Pentagon’s newspeak about Taiwanese sovereignty becomes increasingly preposterous when listening to some of the spastic outbursts emanating from our unelected national security hierarchs. At a March Global Security Forum in Qatar, former White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien stated that the United States was planning to blow up all of Taiwan’s semiconductor factories in the event of a Chinese military intervention. Such a brash action could instantly wipe trillions from the world economy and plunge the world into a depression. Some would argue that O’Brien may have been blowing hot air, but his words follow a pattern of incompetence and reckless disregard by Washington’s gay Jewish fanatics, who The Times has reported actually instructed Ukrainian forces to use HIMARs artillery to attack Europe’s largest power plant in Zaporizhzhia!
The semiconductor industry certainly plays an important role in the Sino-American stand-off, but economics alone are not the primary motive for Washington’s over-the-top aggression, which is so unhinged that it is even scaring some of its most loyal subjects.
The real dilemma for globalists is not that a non-Western state will control chip manufacturing, as some have theorized. US companies leaving China are moving chip manufacturing to nearby India and Vietnam. The real source of their protestation is that China’s influence could enable countries to have more say over their own affairs!
