While it’s likely that Rome’s relative strength vis-a-vis the rest of the classical world declined during that period, it was already so far beyond them in strength that it didn’t matter. Instead, the internal institutional decay of that period eroded the internal checks that had limited Rome from fully using her strength for self-aggrandizement.

‘Now if the Pentagon manual says that having access to any part of the globe under any circumstance is an unnegotiable national interest of the US, well of course nothing short of utterly crashing any country functional enough to rival the US military is going to work.

That’s pretty much what it says. It’s in chapter 3, ‘Top Priority Nonnegotiable Imperatives of Global Military Domination’ Chapter 1 is ‘Really Important and Useful Stuff’ with a blurb about ‘Global Domination’ which points you to Chapter 3 with a reminder that it excludes non-allied powers with thermonuclear ICBMs, which is considered in Chapter 4.

The PLA has the same chapter in their own manual. Except there’s a little asterisk that sends them to an appendix, “How to get to Chapter 3 if you don’t presently have enough power” It’s currently in revision. Or it should be.

I’m not talking about my personal preferences. As it happens I live in the only country to which China is a real threat, and which has all the incentives to screw with China for good. I also have grown to dislike Chinese society, so I don’t fancy Chinese rule at all, unlike our gracious host here.

But I do think that the USG has no real interest in the area, besides keeping open sea lanes it doesn’t use itself.
Now if the Pentagon manual says that having access to any part of the globe under any circumstance is an unnegotiable national interest of the US, well of course nothing short of utterly crashing any country functional enough to rival the US military is going to work.

Given US decline, if, say, achieving 40% of US power is the threshold for the Pentagon rushing to annihilation, the US will have to annihilate every country on earth eventually. Unless they decline at the same rate. Maybe that’s the rationale behind pushing immigration to all functional countries?

The actual point is that if the Chinese government wants to eat up its neighbors it should be better at anticipating the reactions to its actions, and thus be more clever and subtle, and less aggressive and provocative, in its methods of achieving that goal. It has behaved incompetently.

What nations, China, the US, or whatever, ‘ought’ to be doing, or what their ‘proper’ business ought to be, is a nice game of theoretical morality. Real world strategy is about getting what you want as efficiently as possible by correctly understanding how your counterparties actually perceive their interests and how they will actually react to what you do. Does the USG perceive its interests in at least a partially asinine way? Certainly! But that’s no reason to excuse the CCP’s failure to account for it.

If you want stern and intelligent Chinese rule over as much as the world’s surface as possible and see it as a kind of unalloyed good – analogous to Victorian British rule I suppose but with an HBD rationale – and if you also want to see the US pushed out, as a kind of corrupting influence, then nothing anyone says is going to convince you that anyone has any right or interest, ‘properly conceived’, at standing in the way of such ‘progress’. The things the USG wants – like to preserve the option value of free navigability of the Sea LOCs as insurance against being excluded from the region in the event of a crisis – can never be seen as ‘legitimate’ or ‘justifiable’ from such a perspective. Nothing can be.

The point is that’s nobody’s business really. Stopping China from eating up its neighbours is like decolonizing Africa and hand it over to black rule.

We The People have no compelling interest in war with China to protect …anyone. Perhaps Australia. The CommonWealth could defend Australia [remember England has nukes], it has aggregate ships and planes to do so. I also think attacking Australia would bring us in, and it should. Same for New Zealand.

I think this is extremely unlikely, the Chinese have no designs on either.

Japan could defend itself.

The analogy for the US and especially the hegemony is probably the Sea Version of Austro-Hungary.

Thunder at Twilight was a most excellent book.

The NSA’s actions also make me wonder if the NSA has not become actually a fourth player in this… some of their actions make me wonder if they haven’t been hedging their position between Pentagon and State…

Also, it seems like Russia may prove resistant to the liberal virus that has made Western nations so dependent on volatile levels of foreign person importations.

Does China sense, the way that Germany sensed, that Russia will eventually ripen as the new Hegemon unless they are sufficiently aggressive, to the point of actually risking a better future position? Are they trading a shoo-in for VP for a chance at the Presidency?

I wonder what the adjudge the odds to be, and moreover, I think it would be poor to suppose they don’t have some concept of damage control if this aggressive strategy doesn’t give them what they need to overpower/outmaneuver Russia….