Taiwan’s Foreign Minister said military exercises suggest China is ready to launch a war against Taiwan

Taiwan is not the only country that defends the United States militarily: China’s role in the recent Russian-Israeli war against the Ukraine

As tensions between the US and China have worsened over Taiwan, President Joe Biden has said that the US would defend the island militarily if China were to attack, though administration officials have insisted the US remains committed to its “one China” policy.

Beijing launched the drills on Saturday, a day after Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen returned from a 10-day visit to Central America and the United States where she met US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other US lawmakers.

Asked if the costs of such a visit were too high, Wu told CNN, “China cannot dictate how Taiwan makes friends. China can’t dictate to our friends how they should show support for Taiwan.

Taiwan and China have been separated from each other since the end of their civil war more than seven decades ago. Taiwan, which became a democracy in the 1990s, is one of the freest places in Asia according to Freedom House, a US non-profit organization.

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has grown more powerful and has made clear its intentions to “reunify” with the island.

“We are still trying to figure out what he says and what that means through the French government,” Wu said, though he noted the “French government has been showing support to Taiwan.”

The US, through the Taiwan Relations Act, is legally obligated to provide Taiwan with defensive weaponry, but officials typically remain deliberately vague on whether the US would defend Taiwan in the event of an attempted Chinese attack.

A longstanding concern of the US is that China will support the Kremlin in its war against the Ukrainians.

Many of the documents pertain to the battlefield in Ukraine and the Russian war effort, with some showing the degree to which the United States has penetrated the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Russian mercenary organization Wagner Group.

Many of the documents, which US officials say are authentic, had markings indicating that they had been produced by the Joint Staff’s intelligence arm, known as J2, and appear to be briefing documents.

Beijing is not stopping: a leak of a joint US-US missile plan against Ukraine and a study of its missile defense capabilities in hypersonic glide vehicles

A significant Ukrainian attack that used US or NATO members’ weapons would probably be seen by Beijing as “as indicative that Washington was directly responsible for escalating the conflict” and could possibly be “further justification for China to provide Russia with lethal aid,” the document said.

US officials have repeatedly and publicly warned Beijing against supplying aid to Russia for its war effort – and earlier this year said China was considering providing the Kremlin with lethal aid.

The US was not going to give Ukraine long-range missile systems because of concerns that they might be used to strike inside Russia. The US has promised not to give Ukraine weapons of its own.

Ukraine typically does not comment on questions about its involvement in the limited number of attacks that have taken place inside Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea since the start of the war.

Beijing has yet to comment on the leak of the document but there is some coverage about it in its domestic media, including an article in the People’s Daily.

“In recent years, despite scandals involving the US surveillance of its allies leading to several instances of international public uproar, it seems the US is still ‘not stopping,’” the article said.

One notes a February 25 flight test of a “developmental” DF-27, which it describes as an intermediate range ballistic missile-class multirole hypersonic glide vehicle. The document says that the weapon has a high chance of penetrating the US missile defense.

Missiles with hypersonic glide vehicles are designed to fly more than five times the speed of sound and can maneuver in flight, making them almost impossible to shoot down, according to experts. China is considered to be among the most advanced hypersonic weapon development programs in the world.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/china/china-pentagon-documents-leak-ukraine-intl-hnk-mic/index.html

The Cold War and the United States’ Cold War: Does America Really Need a Nuclear Weapon? The Evidence from a Signal Intelligence Report

The document notes that the Yushen LHA-31 helicopter-carrying assault ship was included in an extended area deployment for the first time.

The National Security Agency states that signals intelligence includes intercepts of communications as it is derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets.

One document attributed to a signals intelligence report said that Jordan’s Foreign Ministry in late February planned to assure Beijing about its interest in a continued economic relationship, after Beijing reportedly complained that Chinese companies were not involved in the country’s 5G network rollout.

The brief also said, without providing a source, that Nicaragua “probably would consider offering Beijing naval access in exchange for economic investment.” It said that China has not stated its intentions to get military access in the country.

The US Department of Defense said in a statement that it was looking into the validity of the documents and assessing their impact on the US and its allies and partners.

In my opinion, the risk of conflict is caused by a number of factors, one of which is the expansion of the nuclear arsenal of Chinese President Hu Jintao and if he supplies Russia with weaponry it will become much worse. America’s domestic politics are steering a collision course, and that may get worse as democrats and republicans compete to condemn China.

From an American vantage point, another cold war may not seem so terrible, since we and the Russians managed to avoid incinerating each other in the last one. Millions of people died in the last cold war. And Russia and the United States avoided nuclear war in part because leaders on each side had memories of World War II that made them cautious; I worry that today, as in 1914, overconfidence and myopic political pressures on each side might drive continuing escalation.

What Do We Want to Know About China? A Tale of Two Infants and Two Babys in Tiananmen Square, China, 1989

I need no reminder of how oppressive China can be: I was on Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and witnessed as the People’s Liberation Army fired on the crowd that I was in. But I also saw China lifting more people out of poverty than any other country in history and vastly improving education and health outcomes. While a baby in Beijing may not be able to look forward to a meaningful vote or free speech but they will still have a life time longer than a baby in Washington, D.C.

When I say we must talk to each other, I am not downplaying American concerns. I’m among those wary of TikTok because of the risk that it might be used for spying. I know that the US has used private businesses to spy on China. When China purchased a new Boeing 767 in 2000 to be the Chinese equivalent of Air Force One, American officials planted at least 27 bugs in it.