COLUMNIST WARNS TAIWAN CRISIS TO END AMERICAN EMPIRE

Bloomberg News columnist Niall Ferguson has warned that the Taiwan crisis sparked by China’s invasion may well be the last nail on the coffin of the American empire, likening it to the collapse of the British empire when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and London could do nothing about it.

Ferguson, the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and Oxford, said in a column that the US is like a fox in dealing with the Taiwan issue as it is concerned with a raft of issues while China is like the hedgehog who thinks only of Taiwan, Taiwan and Taiwan, an island that Beijing never really administered.

The US abrogated its 1954 mutual defense treaty with Taiwan as it recognized China but a pro-Taiwan lobby in Congress was able to throw Taipei a lifeline in 1979, the Taiwan Relations Act, which enraged China.

The act states that the US will consider “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.”

It also commits the US government to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and … services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capacity,” as well as to “maintain the capacity of the US to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”

Ferguson said that for the Chinese hedgehog, this ambiguity — whereby the US does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state but at the same time underwrites its security and de facto autonomy — remains an intolerable state of affairs.

Thus, China has embarked on full-scale military modernization, building up its naval forces to counter the US and hastening economic development to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy. Thus, the talk about 2025, 2027 and 2034 as possible years for the Beijing invasion based on the overweening belief that the largely untested People’s Liberation Army Navy, Air Force and the PLA itself could be honed into a disciplined fighting force with an advanced weapons system.

The PLA sustained heavy casualties in Vietnam, which Deng Xiaoping wanted to school on the /art of war, as its forces withdrew.

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