South China Sea and China (2011-2017)

[carl]

Surely you appreciate the irony implicit in an American fretting over anyone else's accumulation of subs, aircraft carriers, ships, missiles, etc. Of course it's quite ok if we accumulate those things because we never ever throw our weight around and attack people... oh, wait.

What is it, exactly that you fear they will do?

That is the predictable PC answer. "Oh yeah! Well what about us?" But our navel levels generally go up and down in relation to some threat or other. It went up a lot after Dec 1941 and went down hugely after 1945 and then has been up and down since. We have used it to throw our weight around as you say, most spectacularly in waters right close to where you are. The thing we use those naval forces for more than any other is keeping the seas open for free trade and we tend to build up when states whose free trade has not been threatened, say Red China, start to build up navies for purposes that aren't defensive, since there is no extant threat. Makes us a bit suspicious. We don't always do that. Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking nothing serious is happening, like now.

And as I already mentioned above, it isn't just the accumulation of more fighting ships; it is the accumulation of more fighting ships combined with all the other things I mentioned above.

I fear they will take over the South China Sea, effectively turning it into Chinese territorial waters, thence cowing Vietnam, the PI, Malaysia, Thailand etc into becoming tropical Finlands. After that I fear the consequences, since the killer elites that run China don't impress me as being primarily motivated by the golden rule.

Our ancestors didn't do so badly either. If the propensity for large scale violence is an inherited trait, the human race is in deep $#!t.

Oh no Sir. You are very wrong. When it comes to mass murder and infliction of human suffering on a massive scale, the only people and political culture that come close to Mao and Chicoms are Stalin and the Russian communists.

Your quote is another variation of the "Oh yeah!" argument.