Ask yourself an open, fair and honest question - Do you believe you actually understand the mechanics of warfare?
No, I don't. As a matter of fact, I am not a foreign policy expert in the least. But I think you have my motive for why I started this thread confused with another motive. My motive is not to show how much of an expert in foreign policy I am, nor is it to posit anything but baseline stuff. The baseline: Democracies ought to get busy defending the righteousness of the democratic project.
These are dark days. I am simply saying that democracies need to be fundamentally assured of their justice and goodness as entities. They need to re-arm themselves, to militarize. They can no longer be beholden to past injustices and fallen empires and the sting of genocidal endeavors. They must be convinced of their own righteousness in order to defend their own houses.
Iran will defend its own conception of the good, no matter how evil it is. Russian will defend its own kleptocrats. China will defend its own communist/autocrats. It is up for the people of the world to see this, to ally, and to unite for the defense of our way of life.
That is what this thread is about. Democracy ascendant.
But I take issue with one assertion of yours, your main one:
I do not think your doom and gloom scenario of war with China will happen.
The U.S. does not start wars. We are a democratic people beholden to democratic impulses, and those impulses tend toward the preservation of life at all costs these days. We have no stomach for an extended, traditional war like you describe with the sinking of boats and the release of weapons and civilian deaths as a tertiary result of those weapons. Nor does the Chinese people. Neither populace will stand for it.
You give short shrift to the mob. And by that I mean the essential base of all governments. The security of one's self, of life, of having given yourself over to organizations that we oversee our own protection with. The State of Nature guys that believed solitary life in pre-societal being was nasty, brutish, and short (Locke and Hobbes) had the first impulse correct. We organize to stop the killing. That is the great motivating factor behind starting political organizations. Security. Survival. Life.
While it may seem ironic that the reaches of organized killing has reached a zenith with the onset of nuclear and chemical weapons when we have organized for precisely the opposite reason is not lost of me. But you underestimate the power emanating from the people. They will not tolerate large losses like you endeavor to portend and claim will happen. There will be revolt and governments will be torn asunder before war is declared by any major power against another. Mutually assured destruction is still a heavy deterrent in the halls of foreign policy.
The question, then, becomes who will follow through on destruction if assured? The Democrats seem to offer little in that regard. Not the modern Democrats anyway, scared of their societies, debating whether their own society is just and good.
No, nor the Republicans to be trusted, having squandered away so much Cold War capital on foreign adventurism in the Middle East.
Nor are the latter two assertions what the thread is urging.
Democracies, unite! You have nothing to lose but your world!
So true.
