Beltane Emergence Moon
Over breakfast this morning we got into an interesting conversation, first about climate change, then about China. Climate change sentiments varied around this table of guys who mostly agree with each other.
China raised the most controversy. Mark Odegard feels a war with China, a world war, is inevitable. I don’t. I feel China is not historically expansionist and very far behind us in military spending, military preparedness and military competence. Doing much harm to the U.S. would also hurt the Chinese investments in our economy. I forgot to mention this morning that since both China and the U.S. have nuclear weapons the likelihood of a full-fledged war is much less.
Mark sees the region as rent by old wounds, like the Japanese invasion and rape of Nanjing, the occupation of Tibet and, he didn’t mention, but could have the Islamist Uighur’s in the West. He also sees Japan and North Korea, especially the latter, as prone to irrational decisions and likely to precipitate a full-scale war through some hot-headed action.
Certainly history is on the side of the one who foresees military action. As a species, we are violence prone and given the anarchic nature of politics at the nation-state level that tendency has often led to military rather than diplomatic solutions. There are, too, no end of possible trigger points, the major among them being China and Japan’s insatiable appetite for oil, which must come from largely from the Middle East. That makes the South China Sea a potential flash point and China has repeatedly engaged in provocative actions there.
It is my sense though that Chinese development benefits much, much more from peace and diplomacy than it would from a war fought across the vastness of the Pacific and especially against an enemy like the U.S. which already has significant military presence in its near ocean. A war would present the U.S. with major supply chain issues, of course, but we have shown ourselves willing to overcome that distance once and I imagine we could again, certainly much faster than China could project naval and armed forces power in the other direction.
History is the judge in this debate and we may not live long enough to see the question answered definitively.
