{"id":34187,"date":"2018-05-12T06:22:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-12T11:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34187"},"modified":"2018-05-12T06:22:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-12T11:22:49","slug":"dont-poke-the-dragon-war-with-china-would-be-an-unnecessary-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34187","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Poke the Dragon: War with China Would Be an Unnecessary Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/danny_sjursen\/2018\/05\/07\/dont-poke-the-dragon-war-with-china-would-be-an-unnecessary-disaster\/\">Don\u2019t Poke the Dragon: War with China Would Be an Unnecessary Disaster<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<footer class=\"entry-footer\">\n<p class=\"pagesub\"><strong>The Non-Options: 4 Wars the Military Prepares for But Shouldn\u2019t Fight: Volume II<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/footer>\n<div class=\"entry-content\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2012331833\" src=\"https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3.jpg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 85vw, 200px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3.jpg 200w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-32x32.jpg 32w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-50x50.jpg 50w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-64x64.jpg 64w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-96x96.jpg 96w, https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Sjursen3-128x128.jpg 128w\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"199\" \/>There\u2019s nothing military men like more than obsessively training for wars they will never have to fight. The trick is not to stumble into a conflict that no one will win.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s everyone take a breath. Yes, China presents a potential threat to American interests in the economic, cyber, and naval realms. The U.S. must maintain a credible defensive and expeditionary posture and be prepared for a worst case scenario. What we <i>don\u2019t need<\/i> is to blunder into a regional, or, worse still, all-out war with the Chinese dragon. Not now, probably not ever.<\/p>\n<p>And yet, in Washington today, and within the Trump administration in particular, alarmism seems the name of the game. This is risky, and, ultimately, dangerous. In his 2018 National Defense <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/checkpoint\/wp\/2018\/01\/19\/mattis-calls-for-urgent-change-to-counter-russia-and-china-in-new-pentagon-strategy\/?utm_term=.9ea0d1234419\">Strategy<\/a>, Secretary of Defense Mattis, a known hawk, refers to Russia and China as &#8220;revisionist powers,&#8221; and announces that the US military must now pivot to &#8220;great power&#8221; competition. Look, I\u2019m all for extricating our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/were-killing-these-kids-were-breaking-the-army\/\">overstretched<\/a> armed forces from the Middle East and de-escalating the never-ending, counterproductive &#8220;war on terror.&#8221; What doesn\u2019t make sense, is the reflexive assumption that (maybe) dialing down one war, must translate into ramping up for other, more perilous, wars with nuclear-armed powerhouses like Russia or China.<\/p>\n<p>The usual laundry list of Chinese threats is well-known: China is (how dare they!) building a sizable blue-water navy and (gasp!) patrolling around sandy islands in the South China Sea. They conduct cyber-attacks (so do we) and steal intellectual property. They are planning a new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2018\/01\/08\/a-new-silk-road\">\u201cSilk Road\u201d<\/a> to integrate much of Eurasia into a China-centric trade and transportation system. No doubt, some of those items may be cause for measured concern, but none of the listed &#8220;infractions&#8221; warrants war!<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don\u2019t Poke the Dragon: War with China Would Be an Unnecessary Disaster The Non-Options: 4 Wars the Military Prepares for But Shouldn\u2019t Fight: Volume II There\u2019s nothing military men like more than obsessively training for wars they will never have to fight. The trick is not to stumble into a conflict that no one will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6400,130,19532,827,862],"class_list":["post-34187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-antiwar-com","tag-china","tag-maj-danny-sjursen","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34188,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34187\/revisions\/34188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}