The Question: Why Would China Not Invade Taiwan Now?armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Milit… "There is likely to be at least one member of the Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) and the Central Military Commission (CMC) who would make some or all of the following ten points ... "
"I would be surprised if this debate hasn’t already begun within the CMC." —Gen. Martin Dempsey.

"I would ascribe less than a one in four chance that they make a military move in the immediate future, i.e., before U.S. elections." —Adm. James Stavridis
"There probably are some hawks in Beijing arguing for the invasion of Taiwan, confident the U.S. would not respond with military might. They would be wrong. Failure to defend Taiwan is not an option." —Amb. Joseph DeTrani
IOW, the most optimistic member of this discussion sees odds slightly south of 25 percent that China will move before the election.

And Amb. Joseph DeTrani is perfectly correct: Failure to defend Taiwan is not an option.
Do you like those odds? A bit less than one in four that we'll be in a shooting war with China before the election? Frankly, they make me uneasy.
If the odds were "less than one in four" when this was published on June 4, what do you think they are now, when our entire chain of command is in chaos and we're clearly having a complete national nervous breakdown? I think they're a bit higher.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

5 Oct
This and something else: Does anyone have friends or family who basically want Trump to be the great president they hoped he would be and have therefore decided never to read the news? Do you hear phrases like, "For my mental health, I just can't watch it anymore?"
Or, "Who can even figure out what's true anymore?"

@peterpomeranzev has written so well about this--the way autocratic demagogues like Trump ensure the zone is flooded with so much crap that ordinary people give up, cynical, and decide, "To hell with politics,"
or, "They're all just as bad as the others,"
or, "Why bother voting, it's obviously all hopelessly corrupt."

I see the effect it's having on people to whom I'm close, and I have no idea how to counter this effect without pushing them in a way that just gets their dander up.
Read 14 tweets
5 Oct
The Global Peace Index is an effort to define and measure peace around the world according to these specific indicators. This is not necessarily the only way to measure "peace," but this report one of the more respected, and for good reason. Image
Has Trump brought peace to the world? It's a question we can answer, empirically. If he had, we would expect to see an improvement in those indicators. But we don't. You're certainly right to say that peace--according to these indicators--did not increase under Obama. Image
"Global peacefulness has deteriorated over the past year. This is the fourth time in the last five years that the world has seen a fall in peacefulness," they report. "The world is now considerably less peaceful than it was [in 2006.] nd
the US.
Read 8 tweets
4 Oct
Well, we may have lost our dignity, our democracy, our leadership of the free world, our ideals, our moral authority, our innocents, and hundreds of thousands of innocent souls, but man, did we put on a show. The greatest show on earth.
No other country--none--could have produced the Trump Presidency. No other country--none--could have merged the skankiest of low-brow low-production-values entertainment with white-knuckle high-stakes brinksmanship in the nuclear era--
--and turned it into the most compulsively watchable four-year soap opera ever mad.

Only in America. We may no longer command the world's respect. We brought disgrace on every soldier who ever laid down his life in the cause of liberty. We left the next generation poorer,
Read 4 tweets
4 Oct
It's more boosterish than warranted, and glosses too lightly over the cruelty of Europe's refugee policy--although he is also right to say, "Yes, it was cold-hearted, but failing that, Europe ran the danger of fascism."
But he's right that those predicting Europe's demise were wrong--and that includes me, more than a decade ago. (Although I've not thought so at all, recently.) And he's right that the EU is better-run and more effective than the US, Russia, or China. This is a low bar, sadly.
It's easy to make Europe's Covid-19 response look good compared to the US. But by the standards of East Asia, it has been miserable. And you're right to say that the EU's failures on rule of law in member states such as Hungary and Poland is profound.
Read 9 tweets
1 Oct
You know, she could have said, "Competitive debates aren't my style--or my strength. I get nervous. I prefer a relaxed exchange of ideas, when I'm not under pressure to win."

Everyone would have understood. Many would have sympathized.
Or she could have grasped that she had a personal insecurity and a weakness--in debating--and resolved to become better at it.

Instead, she declared that her insecurity and weakness was "a function of imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique"--
--a soppy gumbo of meaningless, passé buzzwords that serve only to make it clear she's entirely incapable of the original thought required of an academic.

At the same time she revealed she had no command--at all--of the basic history of her culture.
Read 5 tweets
30 Sep
This is the most revealing sentence: "Trump treated the debate like he was trying to win an argument between two baby mamas on a trash daytime show."

Part of the problem is that every American understands that sentence. And they shouldn't.
Americans collectively decided, at some point, that it was fine to have "trash daytime shows" featuring "two baby mamas." It primed us for Trump.

Behavior that should have been stigmatized (and situations that were inherently tragic) instead became entertainment.
Well-off people understood perfectly that the screaming women on those shows were objects of derision and mockery.
Read 21 tweets

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