Slouching Toward War?

Foreign or domestic.

I saw this from InstaPundit reader Bart Hall and it got me thinking:

I notice interesting military trends which more than hint at a pattern, at least from an historical perspective.

Taiwan, Japan, and Australia are seriously arming up. South Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam ... less so, but significantly.

India are close to a largely indigenous nuclear "triad" [ICBMs, bombers, and submarines] and are pushing hard to field a powerful Indo-Pacific blue-water navy.

Britain and France are harmonising their nuclear "deterrent" systems, navies, air forces, and (France) land armies. Poland is massively buttressing its military, as are (smaller) Sweden and Finland. Turkey and its Kurdish rebels are working on an enduring end to the PKK guerrilla war ... to "focus on larger issues".

The US is onshoring everything possible, as fast as possible and pushing defence production on steroids, as well we should IMO.

The scenes are being built. The actors are moving into place during rehearsals. It will focus on Taiwan, and that it will probably [be what it takes] to rid the world of communism-- at least outside of university faculty lounges.

China is definitely being surrounded, and that’s its own fault. In it’s pre-Xi mercantile days, people weren’t particularly scared. The Chinese have alarmed their neighbors into, effectively, hemming them in. China could probably beat any of these neighbors (well, maybe not Japan or Korea, possibly not India, though terrain makes a full-blown land war with India difficult to even start) but it can’t beat all of them, and the costs of going to war with any of them are substantial, especially given China’s economic and political fragility. (And the fragility of the Three Gorges Dam, rumored to be Taiwan’s chief target in a war, which would drown huge numbers of people and even huger proportions of China’s productive capacity.)

But yeah, there are signs of something brewing. Just as in 1939-1941, the United States is (late as always) beginning to look at its Navy and Merchant Marine capacity, beginning to update its army and get serious about recruiting, etc. Perhaps these preparations will have a deterrent effect. Perhaps China will be preoccupied with internal struggles soon. (But perhaps China will turn to war as a distraction from those internal struggles). But if history doesn’t repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.

Meanwhile, there are parallels in the United States to the runup to a different kind of war: An increasing division between North and South, Democratic “fire eaters” calling for violence — and sometimes even secession — and an increased amount of left-wing violence from groups like Antifa and various militias.

I’ve read Kurt Schlichter’s The Attack, a novel about a 10/7 style attack on the United States, and I’m currently reading his American Apocalypse, a (fictional, so far) oral history of a second American Civil War. Somehow both of those struck me when I was at The Breakers in Florida last week. We’ve gone there on and off for 20 years, for conventions (the Southeastern Association of Law Schools has met there a lot) and for family trips. What we noticed this year was a drastic increase in security.

They always had an entrance with a guardhouse where they checked your ID as you arrived, and there was always an off-duty Palm Beach cop hanging out in the lobby. But there are a lot more security people (both visible and less-so) nowadays. It’s now multiple Palm Beach cops, with more stationed by the entrance to the pool area (now gated), which used to just have a Breakers flunky sitting at a desk.

Room keys now only take your elevator to your floor; you can’t go anywhere else except the public lobby and mezzanine levels. And most strikingly to me, the vehicle gates, which used to be the usual token wooden barriers that are designed to break off if someone drives into them, there are now heavy duty military style steel-beam gates that slot into big metal brackets at both ends. They look like they’d stop a truck. You don’t normally see them at pleasure resorts, at least not in this country.

The beachside daiquiris, I’m happy to say, remain unchanged.

I suspect that this is in part due to Trump’s presence just down the road at Mar-a-Lago. Not only does that have the potential for attracting crazed lefties and terrorists, but many visiting foreign leaders apparently stay at The Breakers instead of Mar-a-Lago for reasons of independence, or simply space.

And, of course, The Breakers was recently the scene of an arriving boatload of immigrants from places as diverse as Romania, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. Palm Beach police and ICE rounded them up quickly and hauled them away. One Breakers guest commented: “They’re rounding them up. I think it’s excellent.” I can hardly think of a worse place to land your migrant-smuggling boat.

I’m all for solid security — I seldom visit a place without thinking about how it could be safer, and I used to make a game out of penetrating allegedly secure places without showing ID, etc. (Once a friend was surprised when I turned up at the door of his apartment in an allegedly super secure building favored by diplomats; I had just struck up a conversation with the family entering ahead of me and followed them in.) But if you assume, as I tend to, that security is usually less than it really needs to be (except after something happens, when it’s usually more, or more likely just more theatrical) then the boost is a bit worrisome.

I’m pretty optimistic about the way the country is going, but I fear there may be some bumpiness along the way.

And to tie these two things together, I have a suspicion that much of the lefty activism in the United States is pushed by China. And I also suspect that the Pakistani invasion of the UK has been pushed by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which of course often works with China. Softening up the social fabric, while putting sleeper agents in place? Pretty sure I know what Kurt Schlichter would think.