From the article:
> In truth, it is an argument to retreat from East Asia. That argument can be made, but I would prefer to see it made openly.
I guess the points basically include RoK.
If we (the "west") loses Japan, we've essentially waived our claims to South Korea as well. We'll have lost legitimacy and lost our word to protect (Taiwan) what is a epicenter of global technological development (semiconductors). Japan and South Korea (and to a lesser, but significant extent, AUS&NZ) will look at the west's inability to protect Taiwan, and say "well, looks like we'd better buddy up to China, because they're the big dogs now". And that will be that.
We'd better fucking help Taiwan.
If your hangup is that this is yet another instance of Westerners attempting to decide the fate of a people on the otherside of the planet from them, I think we can grant that there isn't a stellar track record there. Still, ideal scenarios of perfect sovereignty don't exist in the real world and I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect e.g. Japan to ask for continued American involvement.
Those of us who believe in liberal democracy will need to stand up for it. We can no longer take it for granted, even at home.
Many people today seem to feel that Taiwan and Ukraine are interests worth using military force to defend. I do wonder how well that support would hold up if either of those potential wars becomes reality.
Yet here we are....
"Thousands" buried in "Metro":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/10/27/thou...
"A headline in some editions of the Oct. 27 Metro section incorrectly stated that Saturday's antiwar demonstration in the District was the largest since the 1960s. The rally, according to police and estimates of the organizer, was the largest antiwar demonstration in the District since the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975."
< ! >
Honestly, if this demo -- it was huge -- happened in say Cairo, wouldn't it be splashed all over front pages for days?
-- ps --
"Demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tokyo and Mexico City, were held to coincide with the Washington march, and in San Francisco, thousands marched through downtown."
Do they teach this at Columbia's School of Journalism?
- There were demonstrations in lots of major capitals all over the world. Put it in 'international' section?
- Sister cities. Metro.
The protests against the Iraq war were international in scope and generally regarded as the largest political demonstrations in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
While "widespread" might be accurate generally speaking, it is also accurate to say that it was the least popular war in my life time by a giant margin.
The protests were huge. The House vote for Iraq was extremely one-sided politically. Obama ran, and won, on having voted against it. It was really dependent on your political scene whether Iraq II was normalized or not.
Iraq is not really comparable because you can’t separate support for the war there in its early days from 9/11 and the desire to “do something.”
But this is also not a Vietnam situation in which the US is propping up a relatively unpopular government and fighting personally in the conflict at great cost of American lives (maybe Taiwan could go down like that, but I think that makes the prospect of actual conflict unlikely, because neither the US nor China wants to nuke the other).
Ukraine was a bit different because they were not as US-aligned before the conflict. But especially with regards to Taiwan, I’d consider an attack against them the same as an attack against any European or ANZAC ally.
Ukraine has to be won because a Russian victory means they’re emboldened, and the Kremlin preys on weakness. Eventually Poland is hit, Russia will be crushed by NATO, and then the US and Russia exchange nukes. We can’t allow that. Any financial cost and life lost in Ukraine is worth it. We’re not nearly doing enough for Ukraine. It’s vital to world security.
For China, it’s unclear other than nationalism why they want Taiwan. They think they’ll control the world with it, and theoretically that’s true. They just don’t have the expertise to keep TSMC running on their own. And they’re incredibly vulnerable, China is the world’s #1 importer of energy and food. They got excited with all of the foreign investment, but there’s no possible future where China challenges the west. Their peaceful rise and integration was the only way forward, unfortunately, Xi is a madman.
Putin’s war makes at least some sense, on multiple levels. China’s war will be fought as well, but it’s entirely in vain. The CCP will do as much good for Taiwan as Hong Kong.
Both Ukraine and Taiwan represent the life that the Russians and Chinese could have, and ultimately that’s why they’re targets even when it makes little sense otherwise.
NATO and the Quad have no choice but to fight these respective wars. I’m personally willing to fight and die in either conflict because I know what’s at stake.
We all sing to the tune of China, and we fully enabled that. We want cheap garbage without difficult questions about human rights and the environment. This very movement has eroded western society.
The center for technological advancements have already shifted to that region too. The west still holds as a cultural powerhouse but as the technology enables cheap production and distribution of media, that is also bound to vanish.
Overall a fairer world where westerners work as hard as the asians is the most likely scenario IMHO. Flipping burgers in NYC should end up with similar compensation as flipping burgers in Shanghai.
Could be painful but at the end it can be beneficial for the west too. Since a while we live in a world where engineers who deal with atoms are poorly compensated in the west because everything is made in China and our best and brightest spend their lives in the advertisement and gambling business disguised as tech and finance. That part of the world becoming an equal power to the west can be beneficial on the long run.
As long as China is aggressive with its neighbors (e.g. Vietnam), they automatically fall into being friendly with the west and in to the west's sphere of influence. But if Taiwan is conquered by the mainland, all bets are off. There would basically be no counter-balance to China in Asia.
In an ideal world, it would be worth about the same everywhere, but it will take many years until the GDP per capita is uniform everywhere. Especially now that China’s population and its workforce has started to decline.
My concern is that the western burger flippers might have been overcompensated due to artificially inflated productivity in some sectors and once that's over the west might find that they can't match the productivity in China due to destruction of some industries leading undercompensation and as a result, severe lack of talent and know how in those.