This may set a new world record for Blob stupidity. From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:
They’re functioning as tripwires for curtailing China’s freedom of military action in any forthcoming cross-strait crisis and directly involving the US if that fails.
The Taiwanese “Defense Minister” confirmed on Thursday in response to media reports that US Army Special Forces are training his polity’s troops on the island of Kinmen just six miles from Mainland China. It was already provocative enough that former “President” Tsai Ing-wen revealed in October 2021 that American boots were within her self-proclaimed jurisdiction in a training capacity, but few could have imagined that they’d reach as far as Taiwan’s outermost island.
Back then, ties between the US and China were much more strained, but tensions began to abate somewhat since their leaders met on the sidelines of November’s APEC Summit in San Francisco last November. The intervening two years saw them work out a “new normal” in their relations, which was partially aimed at stabilizing the global economy after it risked being disrupted yet again by the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine that followed shortly after the pandemic finally ended.
All the while, China continued expanding its economic influence across the Global South in parallel with the US rounding up regional allies, particularly the AUKUS+ countries of Japan and the Philippines. Each knows that their “cold peace” might not last as long as they’d like, which is a credible concern considering the latest tensions between Beijing and Manila over the South China Sea. It’s therefore possible that a major crisis could explode by miscalculation and take both of them off guard.
