About the South China Sea situation, what needs to be said?
Not about it, but to the Chinese government?
“We’ve said everything we possibly can say,” Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang told Fox Business News, expounding on what he thinks the United States’ next step should be. “We are done talking with you and we’re now going to start to act. And in the South China Sea, unfortunately that means we need to flood the zone with the U.S. Navy and Air Force to show that we will defend our ally the Philippines.”
This is, he explains, “one of those moments like Czechoslovakia in 1938 or Poland in 1939. It’s that serious.”
Serious, indeed: ominous. I think he’s likely correct, but he’s talking about possible escalation to war.
My Trumpian friends will insist upon raising this niggling little thought: the slide into war in the South China Sea “would never have happened under Trump.”
China’s ramped-up belligerence does seem to have spiked with Biden as president, just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have been far less likely under Trump’s leadership.
Gordon Chang is correct that “the Biden” has “been talking to the Chinese intensively throughout the Biden Administration and things have only gotten worse”—but was this the best that could have been done? Has the Biden’s diplomacy been enough talk of the right kind?
Trump scared China.
He also scared our Deep State.
We may have been safer then.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This article originally appeared September 10, 2024 at ThisIsCommonSense.org
