why are western politicians and the main stream media misreading the future?.....

Disgraced ex-PM Liz Truss seeks to ruin any hopes for normal UK-China ties
The former premier’s Taiwan trip is nothing but a provocation for Beijing to lash out at London, sinking any constructive dialogue

Liz Truss will always be remembered as a disastrous prime minister who spent only a month in office and was outlasted by a head of lettuce.

By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst

Her disastrous budget plans sent shudders through the UK economy, eliciting criticism from the British people, MPs and foreign leaders alike. Her ideology-driven political decisions found little sympathy with the public, which repaid her with abysmal approval ratings.

You’d think someone like that would have little credibility as a political adviser, but that apparently isn’t the case. Taiwan, which frequently pays washed-up Western right-wing fanatics to come and visit them as a political stunt, invited Liz Truss to Taipei on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Truss then gave a hawkish speech where she called for an end to all cooperation and dialogue with Beijing and the preparation of Russia-style sanctions in the event of a Taiwan conflict. She also repeated her suggestion of an “Economic NATO” – despite a track record that makes her the last person you’d want to listen to for economic advice.

Since her brief stay in Downing Street, she has rebranded herself as a full-time anti-China hawk, and now uses her party position and credentials as a former prime minister to try to undermine her successor’s attempts to carefully edge back towards engagement with China. Truss was always a fantasist, a pro-Brexit zealot who embraced a confrontational stance during her time as foreign secretary.

However, as you can imagine, all you need to do to reinvent yourself these days is to become a China basher. It doesn’t matter how much of a joke you otherwise might be. Hence, the UK media made sure that her stay and words in Taiwan were given widespread coverage without the context of her political failures. The UK government has already distanced itself from her trip – a fact that Beijing should take careful notice of (and no doubt has).

The British Conservative Party has always been rife with that sort of factionalism. While the opposition Labour Party tends to hard-line suppress the more ideological wing of its MPs (hence the purge of the left-wing Corbynite faction), Tory ideologues have long held power as a “disruptive” force on the government itself, undermining its foreign policy. It’s a fracture which emerged during the Margaret Thatcher era, where following the breakdown of the “post-war consensus” of economic pragmatism, ideology gained ascendency in the party and soon manifested into Euroscepticism.

This tug of war lasted 30 years, making it harder for Conservative prime ministers to maintain a working relationship with the EU, and eventually culminating in Brexit itself. Once that was out of the way, these ideologues found a new target: China. While Truss has opportunistically jumped on this bandwagon, former arch-Brexiter Iain Duncan Smith had already made himself the UK’s Sinophobe-in-chief. Their common goal is simply to undermine stable ties with Beijing and provoke conflict by spurring on backbench rebellions, making them a challenge for the government to handle.

Consequently, while Truss may be a national laughingstock thanks to her disastrous tenure as prime minister, this new role she is taking on enables her to cause disruption on this issue. Taiwan, of course, knows this, because its entire foreign policy is premised on trying to undermine the ties of other countries’ relationships with Beijing by spending large amounts of money on inviting figures such as Truss. The timing of the trip was deliberate, coming immediately after the British foreign secretary’s engagement with a senior Chinese official following the coronation of King Charles III.

Taipei hopes that Beijing’s backlash over the Truss visit will target the UK government as a whole and punish the country. China has a record for being abrasive like this, having done so with the Czech Republic in the past and not winning any friends there as a result. If Truss is therefore allowed to dictate the flow of UK-China relations, she wins. Besides her, the UK has never been provocative on Taiwan at a senior level such as with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit last year for the US.

Thus, rather than causing a crisis, China should wait until the upcoming Taiwan elections take place and hope that the more pro-China Kuomintang Party (KMT), which once governed the whole country, will take power and stabilize cross-strait ties again. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) thrives off creating crises, as does the US with its military deployments, and amidst it all there is no intention for cool heads to prevail. While Pelosi was a blatant violation and huge provocation of the One China policy and US commitment to it, the Truss trip is an opportunistic PR stunt by a washed-up has-been who almost ran her country into the ground in a month. Ignore, move on and forget.

https://www.rt.com/news/576452-liz-truss-taiwan-visit/

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By Gus Leonisky at 18 May 2023 - 4:22pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
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idiotic pen-pushers.....

By Richard Llewellyn

Many contributors have exposed the blatant ethical corruption of recent journalism that presages combat with a rampaging China. Just as before, now again, there are ‘interested’ parties more than happy to be the beneficiaries of the click-bait journalism on display. Eisenhower cautioned against complacency towards the military-industrial complex. To this we can nowadays add too much of the mainstream media (‘MSM’) and the advertising industry.

My contribution to this debate derives from many years ago, studying modern (in about 1975) strategic developments (specifically, the submarine element of potential nuclear warfare) plus a continuing interest in developments since then.

An inauspicious background; however, a significant element of that study was provided by Des Ball at the ANU. His appreciation of the world strategic picture was unequalled worldwide. USA President Jimmy Carter publicly credited Des with saving the world from nuclear warfare. The US military regarded him as a dangerous subversive, because his analysis penetrated the curtain of misinformation they used to pursue their objectives.

That was the era of MAD: ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ – the philosophical basis of the USA-Russia nuclear arms race. Des Ball’s analysis proved to the White House that MAD was what the result would be. ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was satire, but so close to the bone that on reflection from our current perspective it is frightening.

Now we substitute submarines for mineshafts. Germane to the current situation was something that Des Ball led me to explore: the emergence of the MIRV technology and deployment. It is well worthwhile to read the history of this development.

MIRV stands for Multiple Independent(ly-targetable) Re-entry Vehicle. In practical terms that means up to 10 precision small kiloton nuclear devices on one Minuteman (or submarine-launched equivalent) missile.

For context: one MIRV swathe could precision-strike selected high-value targets from roughly Brisbane to Wollongong. The USSR responded mainly by adding large (20-megaton) warheads to the SS-9 missile, on the basis that one could more or less vapourise large chunks of, say, Montana…or more specifically, clusters of Minuteman silos. The USA had at one stage 1,000 Minuteman missiles in silos; currently that figure is around 400; how many are armed with which MIRV sets is I think unknown. Potentially, between 1,000 and 4,000 nuclear warheads remain in play.

So how is this relevant to today?

The impetus for the development of MIRV technology came from a ‘wargaming’ exercise held in a US military defence research think tank; from memory, this was under the aegis of the Defence, Research and Engineering division of the US Dept. of Defence.

This was in the era of an unfounded paranoia in the USA about the emergence of a ‘missile gap’ with the USSR – a situation in which the balance of MAD was, theoretically, upset in favour of the USSR by its having more strike missiles. Postulation about the (theoretical and subsequently proven false for the time) possibility of a ring of anti-missile missiles encircling Moscow, thus reducing the effective threat of the USA missile force, was raised and measures to mitigate this eventuality were trialled.

MIRV was seen as the answer: swamp any missile defence system with too many warheads travelling on independent flight paths, delivered by existing missiles from a distance too great for an anti-missile defence launch to be effective.

Sanity would suggest that before rushing off to make this fundamental change to an existing geo-strategic balance, the existence of the potential threat ought to be verified. Sanity stood naked and defenceless against the interests of the military in gaining more power, the arms manufacturers in gaining more profit and the politicians in gaining voter approval of their readiness to ‘defend the nation’.

I cannot now remember the exact figures, but when I was studying this subject, I think nuclear weaponry in the USA was potentially capable of destroying 50% of the population and 75% of the industrial infrastructure of the USSR 4.5 times over in missiles (Minuteman and Polaris/Poseidon) alone; plus 1.2 times in Strategic Air Command bombing from B52’s.

What sort of MADness possess those planning to destroy on such a scale 5 times over? Dead is dead…

Does any of this sound familiar, and contemporary? It damn well should, because that is essentially the same as what is being whipped up here at this time. The New Bosses are the same as the Old Bosses.

Eisenhower cautioned against complacency towards the military-industrial complex. To this we can nowadays add too much of the mainstream media (‘MSM’) and the advertising industry. Plus special interest groups such as ASPI and the IPA and others who in one way or another, snuffle up the crumbs of the armament manufacturers’ investments in positive propaganda. And those crumbs come from pockets of unfathomable depth.

Welcome back, Dr. Strangelove (though you never really went away).

‘Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap’. Sardonic humour, within a wafer-thin distance of ghastly reality.

It would be comical, except that the potential of the push of a Crying Wolf circle-jerk of media stupidity plus the enthusiastic manipulation of the situation by more potent agents could end up in conflict. In which case, life will most assuredly become nasty, brutish and short for all those involved and monumental numbers of innocent bystanders.

We must not allow journalistic stupidity to push us closer to this eventuality.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-dangerous-idiocy-of-current-red-menace-journalism/

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