Will World War 3 Start in Taiwan?

Politics

The chances of a catastrophic miscalculation between China and the United States are rising by the day

It is a moment of mounting global tension, and international discord, with shifting alliances and difficult new geopolitical realities. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the disintegrating relationship between the United States and China, the most consequential diplomatic relationship in the world, bar none.

It’s an uneasy relationship between an established superpower and an ascendant challenger, between a struggling American democracy and a rising Chinese dictatorship. It is an ideological and economic contest, characterized by mutual mistrust, and rising hostility; it’s a zero-sum game of empire, and power.

Now, relations are threatening to spin utterly out of control around a familiar flashpoint: Taiwan. It’s a perpetual hotspot, and it’s beginning to boil over, once again, due to a proposed visit by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and high stakes brinksmanship on both sides of the divide.

The bilateral relationship between China and the U.S. has had profound challenges recently, amid waves of global instability. First, there’s the Covid-19 pandemic that originated in Wuhan, and the accompanying economic and political fallout, still being felt widely around the world.

There’s stiff economic competition, and bitter trade disagreements.

More critically, a brutal war of conquest is raging in the heart of Europe. It’s the worst conflict since the end of the Second World War, and China and the United States are on opposite sides of the barricades.

The war in Ukraine is a hot proxy battle between the U.S. and Russia; it’s a battle between the forces of revanchist authoritarianism and the forces of freedom and democracy. The war is a microcosm of the larger battle taking place between American-style liberal democracy and Chinese/Russian-style authoritarianism.

In Beijing, Xi Jinping’s government is a firm ideological ally of Vladimir Putin’s regime, even if it’s mostly staying on the sidelines of his brutal campaign in Ukraine, thus far. Still…

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