[scottLobster]

Chinese incursions into Taiwanese airspace have increased in the past few months. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/26/taiwan-reports...

It's speculation, but China appears to be building up normalcy bias in Taiwanese defenses, get them used to seeing Chinese aircraft and making them more complacent.

Add the fact that China's national victim mentality is driving it to restore itself to it's perceived state before the "west" messed it up (includes regaining Taiwan), and that objective being one of the socio-political foundations of the CCP's power, and the CCP being well aware that China will start running out of young people in next decade due to one child policy (makes military adventures harder for both manpower and economic reasons), and Xi consolidating more power under himself and his cult of personality than any Chinese ruler since Mao...

Yeah if I was Taiwan I'd be subtly building some extra "tourism infrastructure" on the beaches and quietly stepping up training requirements for reserves; and give the US whatever it wants in exchange for a couple of carrier battle groups if needed.

[randomopining]

CCP is highly pragmatic, they're just using everything as a nationalistic smoke screen to get what they want - control of Asia and probably the world.

It's funny because anybody with a brain could look at China in 1970 and look at it now, while asking themselves: "Hmmm, how did China do with that opening up to the US/West?"

It's laughable, but anti-US will say "buh buh buh... IRAQ!" as some sort of blanket example that the US has to stand aside now and let anybody do anything they want.

[typon]

> US has to stand aside now and let anybody do anything they want.

Reducing three countries to rubble (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) in just the past 20 years means exactly that the US has no place in international politics and should be treated as an extremely dangerous country, sanctioned by the United Nations for warcrimes, made to pay trillions in damages and slowly be re-introduced into the global village once they are demilitarized.

[randomopining]

Laughable.

Iraq - I didn't agree with it. But look at the country now versus 20 years ago... it's a democracy in much better shape.

Afghanistan - we needed to take out al-Qaeda after the attacks. The country is broken, and outside actors help the Taliban continue their terrorism. You support the Taliban? Popular opinion supports the democratic government.

Libya - Russia and Turkey are the big players there now, continuing the civil war. I guess it's not as simple as you make it out to be, huh?

And yet you gloss over the countries like Japan, South Korea, Phillipines, Colombia, Eastern Europe and Western, that have all entered our sphere after war and have done amazingly economically while retaining high quality democracies.

Without the US, the world would quickly devolve back to fighting warlord/autocratic ethnostates. Or an autocratic CCP-controlled world.