In pondering Washington’s new toy, a cold war against China, one sees a pattern. China’s approach to influence and prosperity is commercial and longsighted. This does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy, only intelligent. They advance their interests while turning a profit, which wars don’t. China invests heavily in the infrastructure, both physical and educational, that makes for current and future competitiveness. They are fast, agile, innovative, and imperfectly scrupulous. They seek trade agreements: The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with Europe, The RCEP, Regional comprehensive Economic Partnership, the CPEC, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the huge Iran deal, the development with Russia of the NSR, the Northern Sea Route. They seem good at it, China now being the largest trading partner of something like 165 countries.

Washington’s approach is military, coercive, shortsighted, and commercially dimwitted. It forms military alliances: the Quad in the Indian Ocean, with Japan against China, puts missiles in South Korea, pushes Europe to buy more American weaponry, sends naval forces to the Indian Ocean, Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf to intimidate, without much success, China, Russia, and Iran. It wants to get the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO to threaten Russia. It makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake.

China’s major capital expenditures, as gleaned as best I can from pubs covering these: highways, dams, bridges, very-high-voltage power lines, airports, rail, new high-tech 360 mph rail, five-g implementation, reactors, and semiconductor catchup.

America’s major capital expenditures: the B-21, F-35, Virginia-class subs, , Ford-class aircraft carriers, SSN (x) attack submarine. Biden says he will build infrastructure but, if history is a guide, he will pander to the woke, fight systemic racism, promote LBGQXYZ, become mired in congressional infighting, and the whole thing will devolve into pork. Want to bet?

What are these weapons for? The B-21 is an intercontinental nuclear bomber. What does one do with intercontinental nuclear bombers? Engage in intercontinental nuclear war. Are we sure this is a good idea? There will be no such war unless America starts it. China isn’t going to since (a) its approach to power and influence is commercial, which is working well, and (b) America has so many, many nuclear weapons of all sorts that China would be obliterated. If the US launched a first strike, the bombers would get there hours after the war was over. What would be the point?

The point is to funnel vast amounts of money into a bloated, running-on-autopilot military business so large that it can’t be reduced or controlled. All of this send-money PR assumes that China thinks it needs a nuclear holocaust. Who can doubt it?

It is impossible even to leave the military budget as it is, much less reduce it.

• Congress Moves to Increase Pentagon Budget, Defying Biden

Military industry is so pervasive, providing so many jobs in so many states with so many lobbyists, that the President and his party cannot control it

• China-Africa trade hits record high of \$139.1 billion from January to July: MOFCOM

America sends troops (Africom, Africa Command) and builds drone bases. China builds rail lines and buys up resources. Did we say something about a pattern?

What is a Ford-class carrier good for? The Fords are versatile ships, having a three-fold purpose: Funneling lots of money into military industry, killing defenseless peasants, and sticking the Pentagon’s tongue out at China. Killing peasants and soldiers in third-rate armies of bedraggled third-world countries is what the American military does. Think Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia. Getting into big wars with real countries is no longer practical despite the opportunities for profits because big countries depend on each other too much commercially. Even killing peasants begins to lose cache, as witness the comic opera defeat in Afghanistan..

• Congress Pushes for Weapons the Pentagon Doesn’t want

A list of examples from Ohio. When military industry wants to produce a new weapon, it makes sure that components are produced in as many states as possible. But some things should be obvious. A big-ticket carrier creates a huge number of jobs for years at Newport News as well as jobs all over America for parts. When the carrier is completed and sails off to kill its peasants, the town goes into depression and stockholders lose dividends. The Pentagon then discovers an urgent need for another carrier. Congress shares this sense of urgency. Surprise, surprise.

What do I mean in saying that America is “short-sighted”? Try this:

• Oregon Governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that removed the requirement for graduating high school children in the state to be proficient in reading, writing, and math, in an effort to aid “students of color.”

Wowee, that must terrify them over in China’s engineering departments, where students are years ahead of American in mathematics. This sort of thing goes on across America.

Number of Chinese overseas military bases: 1 (Djibouti) American: Hundreds. Number of Chinese military conflicts: One, a minor border clash with India. American: You know the list as well as I do, with Iran perhaps being groomed for the next war. Which country spends more on the foregoing? What has America gained?

• ORAN an Also Ran to Huawei Five-G

This is long and kind of techy but makes the point that China is leaving the US far behind in five-g. While many think of Five-G as being for use in smart phones, this is actually of negligible importance. Where it counts is in industry, robotics, smart cities, mining with nobody underground, on and on. The United States, unable to compete with Huawei, consigned itself to primitivism by excluding the Chinese. Then it failed in its attempt to prevent China from rolling out five-g within its own borders. So much for bringing manufacturing back to America.

• China Overtakes US in AI Research

And whose fault is this?

• China Passes US in Output of Influential Science Papers

Here is a point worth noting. The Chinese have the engineers, the numbers and the focus to do pretty much anything. They do not always have the machinery. AI takes more brains than machinery.

• CATL goes all in on next-gen sodium-ion EV batteries

CATL Goes All in on Sodium Ion Batteries

Not a game-changer, and other countries look at the same thing but, as so often, China is right up there with the other big boys.

• “Last month, during high-level talks in Honolulu, the US Indo-Pacific Command and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) agreed to build a new base in the island nation.” To contain China.

A few weeks back I wrote a column suggesting that Jews have become successful because they are smart. I confess that I did it in the spirit of a small boy poking a wasps’ nest and running like hell. I am a bad person, but it is more interesting than accountancy. The Devil makes me do it.

I predicted–it didn’t take much predicting—that there would follow great fury and anguish and thundering that Jews aren’t really that smart, indeed really not more than anyone else, that they weren’t really inventive, had actually produced little or nothing, This led to the interesting conclusion that a tiny group, not very bright, not inventive and unproductive, “totally control everything.” This further led me, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to conclude that success must be proportional to the lack of any qualities likely to produce it and that if Jews were even less intelligent and imaginative, they would not only control everything but also everything else. This is getting confusing.

There is in the horror of Jews an opposing strand, a pop-evo assertion that, well, yes, Jews are smart and they got that way because in the Shetls bright boys became rabbis and were respected so married the best prospects and had lots of children, concentrating genes for brains. Kevin McDonald is the guru of this line of thought. Like most, or all, ex post facto metaphysical Sunday-supplement evolutionism, this relies on genes assumed but undetected, acted upon by selective pressures imagined but neither quantifiable nor instrumentally detectable, producing results assumed to be consequent to but not correlatable with the assumed pressures. Apart from these quibbles the theory seems firm.

But if those doing the resentful hissing and snarling really believe that every aspect of our lives is run by Jews, perhaps from a control room deep beneath Manhattan, does this not imply we, the controlled, must be weak, feckless, dim, easily led and, well, contemptible? Are the rest of us really as helpless and docile as the hissers hold us to be? I mean, honest, I can actually dress myself.

For the record, I have found Jews other than some Israelis to be pretty good people, though there have been exceptions, certainly less tedious than their detractors, certainly more intelligent, and on occasions living up to their high moral impression of themselves. That is policy in this column. Deal with it.

Most of the squalling and fulmination aforementioned supports my not very astonishing assertion that Jews get ahead for the obvious reasons that explain the advance of any brighter group operating among the less bright: Indians and Chinese in Africa, Chinese in Indonesia, Australians and abos in Australia, and so on. The success and subsequent influence certainly exist, as easily shown by counting those in high governmental office, entrepreneurs, the sciences, arts, high-tech, academia, and the like.

What explains the seething resentment, other than a sense of inferiority? There is a close affinity between Jew worriers and anti-vaccers, and with conspiracy theorists in general. I have not actually heard anyone saying that Jews contain microchips or nanoparticles to alter our DNA, but I expect this any day now. There is the same sense of some unseen evil, a foul miasma, like swamp gas, palpable, almost visible but just out of the range of vision. behind everything. The (Jews, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Davos crowd, the UN, World Government, the Democrats).

For example, CTs believe not only in black helicopters, FEMA camps into which conservatives will be stuffed come the Reset, and a half-dozen (at least) conspiracies involving the virus, but also that Jews destroyed the Twin towers and killed JFK. I sleep with a loaded pistol.

The conspiracy game would fascinate psychiatrists if they weren’t already crazier than their patients. On the same page of the Vacca whacsites you can find articles arguing on powerful authority that the virus doesn’t exist, and that it is a conspiracy to depopulate the earth, that the needles contain microchips to track us and nanoparticles to reprogram our DNA for some reason probably not desirable. This is not parody. I know people who believe all of these things. But wouldn’t the nanoparticles jam up the needles? And if the earth were depopulated, who would the microchips track? These are deep waters.

Then, always, there is white Christian civilization, which Jews are said to be destroying. If so, they are not very good at it, since the said civilization has proved the most successful to date, but we will not worry about this. Does not one have in logic if any to believe either A, that Jesus is the Son of God and Jews His chosen people, in which case one might expect them to have a leg up in life, or B, that Christianity is a fraud, arguably perpetrated by Jews, and that the faith has no more truth in it than an elaborated Cargo Cult? And if Jews are good enough for God, shouldn’t they be good enough for us’

Of course one could posit that Christianity isn’t true but that it contains all sorts of desirable values and thus is a fitting timon for humanity, but then it still comes—shriek !—from those pesky Jews.

The perennial insistence that Jews are out to destroy white Christian civilization runs into the awkward facts that Jews are usually white and that Christianity is their invention. Uberpatriots make invidious comparisons between Christian virtues and the dark morals and failings of other races and tribes, but…wait…didn’t Jews write the Bible?

Jews of course tend to be politically liberal and so regarded as enemies by the anti-Jewish folk, mostly conservative. Note that liberals are highly inclusive in outlook, regardless of whether it makes sense in a given case, while conservatives are by nature hostile to outgroups, whether it makes sense in a given case or not. Another common thread is that liberals, sort of half of America, are dupes led by the nose by Jewish intellectuals whereas conservatives, the other half, see things with lone crystalline clarity

The connection of conservatism with nuttiness is in fact fairly rare, but it’s a doozy when it happens. Mainline conservatives believe in small government, lower taxes, states’ rights, individual liberty, traditional morality, and such. While some may disagree with aspects of these, none is loony. But then you come to the CT enthusiasts who fall off the Right Wing out where the feathers run out and giddy space begins. It seems not to occur to them that highly intelligent, educated, and decent liberals often come to their positions all by themselves. You don’t have to be a robot of the Jews to favor universal health care. When a society faces multiple grave problems with no solution, people of good intention will plunk for programs likely to produce miserable results over those plunked for by the other side, which also will produce miserable results.

I will now go into hiding.

Forty-six years ago in a previous comedy I was in Saigon, recently having been evacuated from Phnom Penh in an Air America—CIA—Caribou carrying, in addition to me, several ARVN junior officers and perhaps a dozen BUFEs (Big Ugly Fucking Elephants, the ceramic pachyderms much beloved of GIs). America had already embarked on its currently standard policy of forcing small countries into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. In Cambodia this led to the reign of Pol Pot, the ghastly torture operation at Toul Sleng, and a million or so dead. In the unending fight for democracy, casualties are inevitable.

At the time Saigon was tense because Ban Me Thuot had fallen and the NVA roared down Route One toward Saigon. To anyone with the brains of a doorknob, the American adventure in Vietnam was coming to an end, but the embassy was studiedly unconcerned. Embassies do not have the brains of a doorknob, but are keenly aware of public relations. Acknowledging the inescapable is not their way. As usual, Washington would rather lie than breathe, and did. As in Cambodia, so in Nam, and so later in Afghanistan.

Apparently a genius at State realized that a lot of gringo expats lived in Nam—the number six thousand comes to mind, but may be wrong—and that six thousand hostages taken when Saigon fell would be bad PR. So the embassy in Kabul—Saigon, I meant to say, Saigon—quietly announced that expats could fly out on military aircraft from Ton Son Nhut. They didn’t, or at least many didn’t. The NVA continued its rush toward Saigon.

The expats didn’t fly out because they had Vietnamese wives and families and were not going to leave them, period. These wives may not have had the trappings of pieces of paper and stamps and maybe snippets of ribbon. These things do not seem important in Asian war zones. But the expats regarded them as wives. Period. The family went, or nobody did. Period.

The embassy didn’t understand this because embassies are staffed by people from Princeton with names like Derek who wear pink shirts and don’t know where they are. The ambassador is usually a political appointee being rewarded for campaign contributions and probably doesn’t speak the language as few gringos spikka da Pushto or Vietnamese or Farsi or Khmer. For example, nobody at all in the embassy in Cambodia spoke Khmer. The rank and file of State are better suited to a high-end Rotarian barbecue than a Third World city teeming with strange people in funny clothes eating God knows what horrible things in winding frightening alleys. And so the State people could not understand why an American would marry one “of them,” as in the embassy I once heard a gringa put it. It was a good question. Why would a man marry a pretty, sleek, smart, self-reliant woman who wanted family and children? It was a great mystery.

The Taliban—NVA, I mean–NVA kept coming closer. A PR disaster loomed.

Meanwhile the PR apparatus insisted that the sky wasn’t really falling even as it did and no, no, no the US had not gotten its sit-down royally kicked by a ratpack of rice-propelled paddy maggots, as GIs described the opposition. Many in government seemed to believe this. This was an early instance, to be repeated in another part of Asia, of inventing a fairyland world and then trying to move into it.

Finally State faced reality, a novel concept. It allowed quietly that expats and their families could fly out, military. It was getting late, but better than nothing.

The comedic value of this goat rope grew, becoming more amusing by the hour. I was trying to get a young Vietnamese woman out as she had worked for the embassy and we suspected things might not go well with her under the NVA. Call her Linda. Linda and I took the bus to Tan Son Nhut. The Viet gate guards gave her a hard time, envying her for getting out while they could not, but we got in. I was going to tell the State people that we were married but that while I was in Can Tho, by then in VC hands, see, the marriage papers had slipped from my carrying case. This was obvious bullshit, but I guessed that if I made a huge issue of it they would bend rather than get in a megillah with a reporter, no matter how unimportant.

We found ourselves in a long line of expats with their families leading to the door of a Quonset hut, inside of which a State official was checking papers. Some of the expats had around them what appeared to be small villages of in-laws, brothers of wives, sisters, everything but the family dog. An official with a bull horn told us to write down all their names and the relationships on clipboards being passed around. Tran Thi Tuyet Lan, sister, for example.

Then a genius at the embassy or Foggy Bottom realized that something resembling a third of Viet Nam was about to come out, listed as in-laws. Policy changed, at least in Washington which was as usual blankly ignorant of reality on the ground. At Tan Son Nhut this meant telling men that they had to leave parts of their families behind, which they weren’t going to do. This would not look good above the fold in the Washington Post. Dozens of Americans taken captive because the State Department would not let their families out.” All was confusion because the US had spent years telling itself that the disaster couldn’t happen. What to do?

American ingenuity kicked in. At the Quonset hut the guy with the bullhorn announced, “From now on, all mothers-in-law are mothers, all brothers-in-law are brothers. Change your forms.” All along the line, magic markers went through “in-law.” This meant that some women had two mothers, but this under the circumstances seemed a minor biological quibble. The guy with the bull horn was at most three feet from the guy in the Quonset hut who was certifying papers as valid. He solemnly looked at the papers with their strike-through’s, , certified them as correct, and that was that. A field expedient.

Hours and hours went by. Night came. Tempers frayed. Nobody seemed to have planned how actually to get these people out. Nobody seemed to have planned anything. Finally a 130 howled in. This was the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a four-engine turboprop cargo bird and a magnificent plane. It taxied over. The engines did not shut down. The prop wash was strong and hot. The tail ramp dropped. The waiting mob were rushed aboard without ceremony. There were no seats in the dark cavern of the fuselage. That would have required planning, which no one in Washington had thought of. The air reeked of burned aviation kerosene. We squatted on the cargo deck while an Air Force guy with a bullhorn warned, “Keep the kids’ hands out of the expansion slots, you’ll lose them.”

The real-world Air Force didn’t have people named Derek in pink shirts and if you told it all rules off, get the job done, it did. Ramp up, fast taxi, takeoff run, tight corkscrewing climb with the engines running at power I didn’t know they had. The NVA and VC were now very close due to incompetent planning (have I mentioned incompetent planning?) and might have SAM-7s so it wasn’t a good idea to fly over territory they now controlled. Cutting and running from a stupid war run by generals as clueless as they were careerist, with Saigon spinning below, seen through open doors amid tightly packed peasants going they had little idea where. Days later when we got to San Fran on a chartered airliner, hundreds of refugees were dumped into the main concourse, no immigrations, customs, or paperwork.

A staple of the columnist’s life is mail embodying a weird obsession with Jews. It is a versatile obsession, suitable for any occasion. If I were to write a column on the economics of watermelon farming in rural Kansas for a conservative site, a high proportion of the comments would consist of angry denunciations of Jews, the Ziomedia, the ZOG, Jew bankers, Marx, the pernicious effects of Jews on watermelons, and the commie plot to destroy Western civilization, as if it were not competent to do it unaided. Given that Jews tend to prosper mightily in Western civilization, it is not clear why they should want to destroy it, but these are deep waters I will not endeavor to plumb. Further, it was not clear how a tiny group, most of whom seemed to be dentists, could destroy civilizations. Unless they were way smarter than the civilizations.

The hostility to Jews is grinding, bitter, and implacable, coming chiefly from conservatives, who by nature are tribal and tend to see existence in terms of threats and conflict. And often have a tendency to see everything whatever as consequent to Jewish plots. Why the rancor and, in particular, why the belief in the unlimited power of Jews?

At first I assumed that the daughters of the complainers must have been sold into Arab slavery by Jewish flesh merchants. Nothing else could explain it. Yet this turned out not to be true, at least in those cases I could investigate. (Two) The daughters were in place. The commenters never mentioned anything that Jews had actually done to them—poisoned their dogs, swindled them out of their inheritance. Most (though here I speculate) seemed not to know any Jews. So why this tedious fury?

The bitterness, I noted, resemble the hostility of many blacks toward whites. Blacks, at the bottom of society, apparently need someone to blame. Similarly the commenters appeared to resent the Jews for being much more successful that house-and-garden-variety whites (Hagvacas). Might the causes be the same: a resentment of a superior people accompanied by an unwillingness to admit the superiority? The infuriated seemed willing, indeed eager, to point to the inferiority of blacks to themselves but, mysteriously, not their own inferiority to Jews. An oversight, no doubt.

I offer three helpful rules of racial resentment in gratitude for which an astounded world will doubtless send me their children’s college funds:

• First, prosperity tends to be proportional to intelligence over statistically meaningful populations.
• Second, resentment is proportional to IQ difference.
• Third, equal differences of IQ produce equal differences of outcome.

These rules do not apply exclusively to Jews. South African whites, and in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Chinese (who have a large IQ advantage over the natives) are detested for owning things and having money. In Indonesia they have been attacked by mobs and killed. In general, a rich, powerful, and distinguishable group will draw hostility.

Psychometrists, who study intelligence, almost universally rank the races in order of intelligence as Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, Whites, Latinos, and blacks. (Note that income, educational level, and academic performance closely track this ordering.) The psychometrists are mostly white men so are unlikely to be cooking the numbers against themselves.

Among IQists, it is doctrine that blacks have a mean IQ of 85, fifteen points below the Hagvaca average of 100, and this is held to account for the lack of success of blacks. Searching the literature reveals authorities asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of 115, as far above ordinary or Hagvaca whites as whites are above blacks. Eureka, and all. Equal differences of input produce equal differences of outcome. N’est-ce pas?.

Hagvacas don’t want, and Jews know better than, to emphasize this. Yet there it is.

One finds such as this, “Ashkenazi Jews, who make up 80 percent of the Jews in the world today, have, on average, the highest IQs of any ethnic group in the world. While Asians are often touted as the smartest people in the world, Ashkenazi Jews as a group average 115 on an IQ test—eight points higher than Asians and dramatically higher than the world average of 79.1. Ashkenazim skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding—the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population.”

Among IQ buffs, IQs tend to vary depending on polemic intent, and there will be much squawking to the effect that it isn’t, isn’t, iSN’T true, but observation suggests that it is. The foregoing plaudit tracks well with observable result. This sort of thing arouses shrieks of anguish amongst the Antis who grind their hair and pull their teeth, or maybe it’s the other way around. I can never remember. This engenders assertions that the IQ tests are biased, that Jewish success arises from collusion, that it’s culture, that it’s dishonesty and lack of principle—all of which closely parallel the assertions of blacks against whites.

After reading a great deal of this I began imagining Jews sitting among sacks of gold in darkened counting rooms, rubbing their hands together and saying, “Heh-heh-heh.”

Yet the disproportion in achievement is there. Neither Jews (wisely) nor Hagvacas want to recognize the fairly obvious reason.

The IQ difference if you do the numbers means that one Hagvaca in six is as smart as the average Jew, just as one black in six is as smart as the average white. It also means that if two percent of whites are at IQ 130, the cutoff for Mensa, then two percent of Jews have IQs of 145 or higher (which, according to some estimates is entry level for Wall Street, which is where money is. The nature of a bell-shaped distribution is such that at progressively higher IQs, the numerical advantage grows.

For centuries Jews have been charged with greed, deviousness, arrogance, clannishness, selfishness, generic horribleness, and sacrificing Christian children. In my experience Jews have been no more devious and horrible than everyone else, though admittedly this leaves much room for deviousness and horribleness. The only people who want to sacrifice Christian children are, occasionally, Christian parents. Yet character defects alone, if any, cannot produce overwhelming influence in intellectual endeavor. People who sleep in bus stations have character defects, but do not run publishing houses.

Are Jews obsessed by money? Or just better at making it?. Dentists, cardiac surgeons, IT managers, semiconductor designers and hedge-fund maestros s make more than taxi drivers, midlevel bureaucrats, and people who sell fan belts at the NAPA outlet.

I will now explain war, or some of it. If you wonder how some mutt in Mexico with a computer thinks he knows about strategy, well, look at what we have in Washington. How could I be worse?

In geopolitical circles, blather swirls over whether the United States can defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion in a regional war. Sez I, it doesn’t matter whether it can if it won’t, and China will likely get the island without invading. The key is to think about how things look from Taiwan.

Washington is vague about whether it would militarily defend Taiwan. Taiwan presumably has noticed. Further, America does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country. More waffling. The implication is that Washington might, or might not, do something, or something else, depending on unspecified things, probably or at least possibly.

This sounds like hedging, a disguised American recognition that this isn’t 1955, and China is no longer a bamboo republic that makes pencils and cheap plastic buckets for Walmart. As China’s military power grows, and thus the cost of a war, America’s equivocation will likely become more equivocal. Throw in that America does \$550 billion in commerce annually with the Middle Kingdom, including countless things America doesn’t make but can’t do without, and war with China doesn’t look real feasible. This too has probably occurred to Taipei.

The fashion in naval circles is to talk about the First Island Chain, which is a sort of barrier along the coast of China, the Kuriles, Japan, Okinawa in the Ryukyus, Taiwan, the Philippines, and even Borneo. The idea, apart from some fairly silly notions about “containing China,” is that these islands will want to join with Washington, which is somewhere else, to fight China, which is right there, to defend Taiwan, which also is right there.

Now, who would actually defend Taiwan—that is, go to war with China? Japan? Note that Japan is within missile range of China, and probably does not want missiles of large warhead raining down on Tokyo. Japan gets ninety percent of its petroleum from the Persian Gulf and, If Tokyo’s reserves of oil run out, Japan stops. All of it. China has pretty good submarines these days. The beltway Hawklets might say, “Don’t worry. We have magic anti-submarine stuff, no prob.” Given America’s military record, would you buy a used car from these people?

Do you suppose the Japanese have thought of this?

Washington might say, not to worry, we have antimissile gadgets, THAAD, and Patriot, and Aegis, and we can escort your tankers. But none of these weapons has much of a track record, and neither does America.

Further energizing Japan’s likely unenthusiasm for fighting Washington’s wars is that trade with China is crucial to the Japanese economy, and that Taiwan isn’t all that valuable to Tokyo. Today Japan trades with Taiwan, and with China. If Taiwan became part of China, this trade would probably continue with nothing changing but the letterhead.

Lastly, Japan may have noticed America’s propensity for getting its vassals (or allies, clients, or poodles, take your choice) into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. Think Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan and, soon, Syria and Iraq. This would leave Japan in a shooting war with China, all by itself. If the gringos lose a war, they can just go home. Japan is not mobile.

The Japanese might whisper into American ears, “All cool, Round Eye. But it’s just your empire on the line. It’s our ass. we’ll sit this one out.”

South Korea might think similar thoughts regarding use of its air bases, especially given that the Korean peninsula has a land border with China. Washington doesn’t. Seoul needs a war with the Middle Kingdom like it needs smallpox. “Tell you what, Round Eye, bugger off….”

Taiwan would get wind of this through back channels if not by sheer deduction.

How would a regional war over the Taiwan Strait look to an adult commander of an aircraft carrier? He might think, “Hmmm. Squinty-eyed rascals good engineers. Make’m Mars probe, worke’m. Train go three hundred sixty miles hour. Work’em. Maybe make’m missiles work’em good too. Hmmmm. Bad juju.”

The Navy’s PR operation will say that Chinese missiles don’t really amount to anything, this to protect the budget for its favorite bathtub toys and the only surface ship that justifies the existence of the Navy. But of course China can build swarms of missiles to arrive simultaneously.

Further, realists in Washington might ask themselves what would happen if the war didn’t go as planned, as wars usually don’t, and a carrier and three destroyers became marine barbecues before sinking. War games and Pentagon studies suggest that this is quite likely. To save face, the hawks would have to turn a regional war into a world war, which America would win. “Win.” Millions would die and the world economy stop. Never underestimate the influence of vanity in world affairs.

Taiwan could divine all of this. It could also divine that the Navy had divined it.

In recent years China has shown itself to be very good at engineering all manner of things, and has emphasized antiship missiles, including but not limited to terminally guided ballistic missiles of range far greater than that of carrier aviation. Do they work as advertised? We don’t know. A carrier captain would probably want someone else to find out.

Despite growly aphasic pronunciamientos from the White House, and chirpy assurance from Navy PR, grownups in the Pentagon might think, “You know…maybe a war with China isn’t a great idea. How about lunch instead at a really good rib joint on the Hill?”

Taiwan would know of these doubts. This would further undermine hope of American defense.

Now, suppose that China keeps on doing what to all appearances it is doing: increasing its amphibious- assault assets, improving and enlarging its already highly non-negligible air force, building missiles and increasing its number of marines. Meanwhile the Chinese navy grows like kudzu on a Georgia road cut. China can increase its forces across the Strait virtually without limit. The US cannot. At some point, past or future, Taiwan will face assault forces it has no chance whatever of repelling by itself. Taipei would notice this.

Further suppose that China keeps doing what else it has been doing for some time: practicing amphibious assaults that could at any moment become real assaults. Thus no one—read, America—would know whether the attack would come in two months, five years, or never. This would require keeping defensive forces, such as carriers, on station constantly and at a high state of readiness. Militaries do not do this well, and it is expensive. Moreover, after long periods of peace militaries do not mobilize quickly as it is discovered that there aren’t many of things there ought to be lots of because of some budget cut, or something, and the whole enterprise turns into a gargantuan goat-rope.