Tea at Trianon: If China Ran the World

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 14, 2022

If China Ran the World

From The Claremont Review of Books:

All the United States military’s war games involving a mainland assault on Taiwan have ended in American defeat. China is building toward 100,000 marines and mechanized infantry poised to invade the island, more than 50 submarines, and a formidable land-to-sea missile capability that could probably destroy most American surface ships operating close to China’s coast. As the editors of the Chinese official English-language newspaper Global Times wrote on July 28, 2021:

The US Navy’s advantage in overwater power will surely persist for some time. China must not only catch up with the US, but also strengthen its land-based missile forces that can strike large US battleships in the South China Sea in a war. We can massively expand this force so that if the US provokes a military confrontation in the South China Sea, all of its large ships there will be targeted by land-based missiles at the same time.

Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense in the Obama Administration, argued in Foreign Affairs last year that deterring China requires the U.S. to possess “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” The clear counterpart to such a force, however, would be China’s credible capability to eliminate U.S. forces in the South China Sea and nearby military facilities even faster, thereby deterring American military initiatives and responses.

It is doubtful that Taiwan could be defended against a Chinese attack by conventional means, and the use of nuclear weapons would put American cities at risk of Chinese retaliation. The non-military risk may be more likely to inhibit China: if annexing Taiwan by force made China a global pariah, the West would absorb the enormous cost of cutting China off from the world economy. China’s economy would collapse and with it the Communist Party’s hold on power. (Read more.)