Noah Smith ønsker godt nytår

"[Xi Jinping] has repeatedly warned Chinese officials that the world is entering an era of upheaval “the likes of which have not been seen for a century.”…

“The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers,” wrote Mr. Zheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”

If you think about this idea from first principles, its fundamental insanity becomes apparent. Spend a few days in Taiwan, and tell me honestly if there is anything wrong with it — some terrible injustice that needs to be corrected with saturation missile strikes and invasion fleets. You cannot. The people here are happy and wealthy and free. The cities are safe and clean. There is no festering racial or religious or cultural conflict, no seething political anger among the citizenry. Everyone here simply wants things to remain the same.

And yet there is a good chance they may not be granted that wish. High explosives may soon rain down on their homes and their families, and an army of stormtroopers may march in and take all of their freedoms from them. And if this happens, it will be because of the will of men far away — an emperor on a throne, generals hungry for glory, bored malcontents behind a computer screen. If these peaceful, unthreatening people suffer and die, it will be because those distant men decreed that they should.

Why would you do this? Why would anyone want to launch wars of conquest? The world has progressed beyond the economic need for warfare — China will not become richer by seizing the fabs of TSMC or the tea plantations of Sun Moon Lake. The mostly stable world created in the aftermath of the Cold War was good not just for Taiwan, but for China as well. Why topple it all chasing a dream of empire?

The only possible answer here is that the world is created anew each generation."

Det hele er i den grad værd at læse. Gør det.

The Players on the Eve of Destruction

The insanity of war has returned to our world.