Hey guys, Scott here.
I've got some speeches and events and things to tell you guys about.
First of all, on the evening of February the 7th, I'm hosting another Renegade University at ThaddeusRussell.com.
On February the 24th, I'm giving a talk here in Austin at Austin Anarchy in Action.
On March 2nd, I'll be in D.C. tabling, selling books, hopefully, at the Israel Lobby Conference.
But then on March 3rd, I'm flying up to Philadelphia to give a speech to the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party at their convention.
But then I'll be back in D.C. on March the 4th to give two speeches, one at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs bookstore and another at Tenleytown Library.
So that's the weekend of March 2nd through 4th there.
On March 20th, I'll be giving a speech at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.
On March 24th, I'll be speaking at the New Jersey Libertarian Party Convention in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
On April 28th, I'll be up in Fort Worth giving a talk to the local Libertarian Party group there.
And in the first week of May, I'm not exactly sure, it's I think the 3rd through the 6th, one of those days, I will be in San Diego giving a speech for Libertopia.
Then on June 21st, the Michigan Midwest Peace and Liberty Fest is going on.
I'll be giving a talk there.
And October the 6th, planning a little bit ahead now, on October the 6th, I'll be giving a talk at Liberty Fest, again in New York City.
Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, introducing Peter Lee.
He's known as Chinahand on Twitter, and he has the blog Chinamatters.blogspot.com, and also works with NewsBud, and he put together this great documentary.
You guys are really going to love it.
General Douglas MacArthur's Conspiracy to Start a War with China.
You thought you already knew this story.
I thought I did, but yeah, no, I didn't.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
I'm doing great.
Great to be here.
Yeah, so something something MacArthur, he was a little too big for his britches, and Truman had to put him in check, but I think you're going to have to get detailed for us.
Yeah, well, of course, for your younger viewers, they might be asking, who is Douglas MacArthur?
But he was pretty much in line to be President of the United States if Dwight Eisenhower hadn't gotten in the way.
He ran the U.S. war in the Pacific during World War II, and he was head of the occupation in Japan, and then he was called upon to run the Korean War on behalf of the United States and the U.N., and he was, to put it mildly, an independent-minded general.
His nickname was American Caesar, and he got dissatisfied with the Korean War because he felt that his hands were tied by President Truman, and the story that made it into the history books is that Truman just got frustrated with MacArthur mouthing off continually and criticizing him privately and semi-publicly.
But the story that I came up with after talking to some servicemen from the Korean War was that MacArthur went the extra mile, and he actually sent a 14-ship flotilla, armada I guess you could call it, down to the Taiwan Strait with the intention of provoking a incident with China that he could use to expand the war from the Korean Peninsula to the entire Chinese coast.
And this mission was so risky and so dangerous that Truman removed him immediately.
In fact, in the middle of the operation, Truman hurriedly announced MacArthur's relief, and one of the sailors I was talking to was making the joke.
He says, hey, we started the operation under MacArthur that day, and we finished up under Ridgway because Matthew Ridgway took over as the supreme commander of U.N. forces in Korea.
Wow.
All right.
So now previously, if I have the history right, MacArthur's mandate was to keep the North Koreans out of the South, but then he decided to invade the North and not just in—and I could have that wrong.
Maybe this was decided in D.C.
I really have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.
But then they pushed all the way, not just into the North, but all the way to the Chinese border almost, to the Yalu River.
And only then did the Chinese quote volunteers because it was supposed to be a deniable mission, that it wasn't exactly a war between China and America at this point.
Somehow local militiamen was the story as they had run across the border, I don't know how many of them, and pushed the Americans back.
And then MacArthur had come in with the big landing at Incheon to split the difference and this and that.
I don't know.
So he had already made major blunders in the war up until that point, right?
And got us into—really almost got us into a war with China at that point.
Yeah, exactly.
He had told Truman that there was no way that the Chinese were going to intervene, and when the Chinese intervened, that was a major black eye for MacArthur.
And instead of accepting the reality or fact that the Chinese were a factor in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, he decided he wanted to run the table, take care of the North Koreans, take care of the Chinese, and take care of business, and show that he was still the number one commander in the history of the United States.
All right, now, so the thing is, I actually learned this story when I was a kid, I'm not sure why, it was just on TV or whatever, something.
But the whole deal was, though, that if we had a war with China, that might have meant nuclear war with Russia.
And in fact, that was very likely, that it would have meant nuclear war with Russia, and that was what everyone else seemed to consider except him.
Is that right?
Well, MacArthur was famous for considering the atomic bomb just another weapon.
And particularly when you were mixing it up with an adversary, he was willing to go all the way.
But the risk in Asia was that at the time, there was a very close alliance between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, and there was a real possibility that if the United States actually attacked the rear bases, which was actually of the North Koreans, which was China's provinces in Manchuria, which was north of Korea, then the Soviet Union might step up and help out the Chinese by bombing the rear areas of the UN-US effort, which was Japan.
And at the time, Japan was not considered to be a wonderful pillar of democracy.
It was these guys who had just lost the war, and so it was sort of like a tit-for-tat thing.
If the US moved against Manchuria, then it was feared that the Russians would have no qualms about bombing Japan, either with conventional or perhaps nuclear weapons.
And then, does it not go without saying, or does it go without saying, that that would have meant, or maybe it's not until the Eisenhower years, that that would have definitely meant a full-scale exchange of nuclear bombs between the US and the USSR at that point?
I don't know, because the funny thing was that a lot of the hesitance about mixing it up with the Chinese and indirectly the Russians in Korea was the idea that the United States military was not in particularly great shape, and we did not have a lot of atomic bombs, and it was considered that we had to keep our powder dry for Europe.
And so, I guess you could game out all these scenarios and risks, but it would have been possible that we would have bombed Manchuria, and the Russians might have bombed some ports in Japan, and that would have been the end of it.
But the real anxiety of Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British was that there was not a lot of conventional and atomic forces to hold back the Russians, and they had to concentrate on NATO and Europe.
Well, and then you say that in the movie, I think you say that this was MacArthur's frustration, is that they were just much less concerned about the Pacific overall, and didn't want him jeopardizing that, and that was why he thought he had to go to such lengths as to provoke a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident here.
Exactly.
All right, so tell us all about the Gulf of Tonkin-type incident he tried to provoke, because, you know, I just thought, in fact, there's a really great essay called Why Truman Really Fired MacArthur, all about how, if I remember right, it's the guy that wrote the book on the Korean War.
Yeah, H.W. Brands.
No, somebody else, somebody else.
Anyway, but it was about how it was the cobalt, he wanted to drop all these, you know, extra dirty nuclear bombs all across the North Korean and Chinese border laced with cobalt that would render the place uninhabitable for X many years, you know, probably much less than in reality, and that that was what, that was the final straw for Truman.
But then you're saying, man, it was, he really almost provoked a full-scale war with China here.
Yeah, the, it's slowly come out, because, you know, the whole operation was classified, and it also was extremely embarrassing, you know, to the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because, you know, basically what MacArthur did was first he sabotaged the peace negotiations, or I should say the armistice negotiations that Truman was trying to orchestrate with the Chinese, and then- How did he do that?
Well, he, Truman had sent him a message saying, we're going to, you know, don't destabilize the situation on the peninsula, we're working towards an armistice, because it's a UN thing, we have to announce the negotiations after we've, you know, got all our ducks in a row with the UN.
And so MacArthur preempted that by going out there and saying, you have been stopped in Korea, you know, do not attempt anything more, come talk to MacArthur, or much worse, we'll befall you.
And so the idea was that with this combination of threat and bluster, you know, that the Chinese would get their backs up and not come to the peace table.
And to make sure that didn't happen, then MacArthur got the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send a task force of 14 ships down the Taiwan Strait for the purpose of trying to create a provocation with the People's Republic of China.
And he, the key element of it was that he took this one ship destroyer called the John A. Bole, and he parked it three miles off of the Chinese coast, and basically taunted the Chinese in the hope that they would send out their naval militia and there'd be an incident.
MacArthur had already arranged with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he had the right of, you know, to take military, defensive military operations in response to a Chinese outrage anywhere along the Chinese coast.
And so he had two aircraft carriers and I think it was 13 destroyers and a cruiser out there.
So if the John A. Bole was attacked by the Chinese, then, you know, he could unleash hell against the South Chinese ports in retaliation.
And I believe his ambition was to create a wider war with China that would at least start with a blockade of the entire Chinese coast.
All right, and then, so Truman fired him right in the middle of this.
Exactly, yeah.
So how did he find out?
Because wouldn't MacArthur wanted to try to keep it secret?
Yeah, well, you know, it's a funny thing about MacArthur.
He kept his secret from Truman, but he actually announced to the, he was chummy.
MacArthur and his Chief of Staff, Charles Willoughby, were very chummy with fascists.
And so he actually confided in the ambassadors from Spain and Portugal, which were at the time both run by fascists, Franco and Salazar.
He told them, I'm going to widen the war into China.
But he didn't tell Truman.
And what happened was that the U.S. was intercepting this traffic and it was encrypted traffic, but they decoded it and it made its way to the White House.
And so actually, you know, the White House and presumably Truman knew that MacArthur had these ambitions of a wider war with China.
And then I guess at that point he followed up and learned that, hey, we have boats off of the Chinese coast right now attempting to provoke an incident.
Do you have that communication at all?
The funny thing was that the British somehow got wind of the operation.
It's possible that they were invited to send a ship to make it a truly U.N. experience.
But they sent a desperate telegram to their embassy in London asking them to talk to the State Department and actually persuade Truman to issue secret orders to MacArthur not to widen the war.
And so on the one hand, you know, the White House was looking at these intercepts with MacArthur saying he wanted to widen the war.
On the other hand, they had these secret communications from Great Britain, which is very, very concerned.
They said this was basically widening the war was unacceptable.
And, you know, they know about this task force that's supposed to be going in the Taiwan Strait is what they called a coat trailing operation, which meant a provocation.
And the British were desperately afraid that the People's Republic of China might seize Hong Kong in retaliation.
And so they got on the horn to the State Department and the State Department found out that not only did MacArthur have these ambitions, MacArthur also had this actual project there.
And so that's the context, I think, for the sudden, extremely sudden relief of MacArthur right in the middle of this operation.
Man, isn't that something?
And, you know, yeah.
And for all I've heard about the risk of war with the Soviet Union in the event of this war with China at that point, I guess I never heard it mentioned.
And I'm not creative enough to have thought of it about the British losing Hong Kong at that point and the threat of that.
Because, well, what was holding the Maoists from taking Hong Kong in the first place?
Well, because they didn't want to.
You know, the Chinese, the Chinese communists have from the beginning understood the importance of retaining engagement with the West.
And Hong Kong was their window for that.
And also they felt that way.
They had Great Britain on the hook.
You know, they could use it as a bargaining chip and hostage for their dealing.
So, you know, the Hong Kong gets all of its potable water from the mainland, you know, from the Chinese side of the border.
And so they didn't even have to invade.
They could have just cut the water line to Hong Kong.
So that was always understood that, you know, behind all this thing, there was always this little tango where the British and were trying to appease the Chinese and, you know, do what they and not confront them.
So that's why they didn't take Hong Kong.
And and of course, you know, it's possible that the Chinese, you know, issued a threat.
You know, one of the things I talk about in the DVD is that apparently thanks to the Cambridge spies, the the Russian, the Soviet and the Chinese governments actually knew about this operation from the British foreign office.
And they actually that actually conditioned their response.
They didn't attack the destroyer that was moored off of Shantou or Swatow, as it's called.
And they probably passed a threat to the British government that if this if this kind of hijinks went on, it was quite possible that the Chinese would occupy Hong Kong.
Hey, guys, here's how to support this show.
First of all, buy my book, Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
Everybody likes it.
And check out the YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Sign up there.
The great Eric Schuller has figured it out and is finally putting all four thousand five hundred something interviews up on YouTube.
So check that out.
Sign up for the feeds at Scott Horton dot org and donate at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
Anybody who donates 20 bucks now gets the audio book first.
And you better hurry because it's done.
It's just the files are screwed up.
But anyway, you get the audio book first.
If you donate twenty dollars at Scott Horton dot org slash donate for fifty dollars, you get a signed book.
A hundred dollars.
You get a QR code commodity disc.
Scan it.
Get the instant spot price.
And for a two hundred dollar donation to the show, you get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books.
And yes, I take all different kinds of digital currencies as well.
That's all at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And by the way, you can sign up for monthly donations by way of PayPal.
And those are really great.
Those really help out.
And thank you very much everyone who signed up for those monthly subscriptions.
Also, Patreon dot com slash Scott Horton show.
If you want to incentivize me to do more interviews, you can donate per interview at Patreon dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Anybody signs up for a dollar more per interview there gets two free audio books from listen and think.
You can find out all about that stuff at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And there's an Amazon link.
If you want to shop Amazon by way of my link, give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher or Amazon dot com.
If you've read the book and liked it.
And then, of course, always share the show on social media.
Tell your friends.
You can invite me to give speeches, too.
I'm at Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
All right.
So another part of what's big news here, I guess, really, is that you're breaking this story.
Right.
It's been so well covered up this entire time and nobody knew until now or when.
Well, the the operation was classified.
And, you know, it's funny.
Navy types, even today, still don't like to talk about it too much because they felt that they were sworn to secrecy.
And it was a matter of, you know, their you know, their obligations to the service.
But there are a lot of people on the John A.
Bull, the destroyer that was sent there to sit in just outside Chinese waters for six hours, surrounded by motorized junks with guns and, you know, threatened with attack or, you know, or boarding, you know, that didn't sit too well with the people on the bull.
And one of the officers who was on there actually started to declassify the information concerning the incident in the 1990s.
And he wrote a fictionalized book about it.
And but, you know, not naming his ship and sort of using a, you know, a sort of a composite, you know, to tell the story of what it was like to be on a destroyer.
But anyway, that's interesting.
Yeah.
You know, it's a nice book by James Alexander from Inchon to Wonsan.
And and so he he passed away.
But then another guy who's in my DVD is Tracy Wilson, who was the chief propulsion officer in charge of the engine room on the bull.
He started pursuing it.
And I got in touch with him and I was able to interview him for the show and also interview the guy who was in the command center running the surface radar to make sure that the ship didn't sail inside the three mile limit of China, which would have been an active war.
So that the the story has been slowly and grudgingly declassified.
It used to be, well, we were just sailing down the Taiwan Strait.
Then it's like, you know, we were sailing down the Taiwan Strait and also we were flying planes over over China for photo reconnaissance.
And then, yeah, we were going really close to China.
But the the actual story that the the John A.
Bull was sent there as a provocation.
That story is not part of the official history.
And you'll only get it from the sailors of the John Bull and my DVD.
Man, that's something.
And again, it's called because I have it right here.
General Douglas MacArthur's conspiracy to start a war with China.
So, geez, what am I forgetting to ask you here now?
Well, actually, the thing was, is that, you know, I'm seriously talking to the people about repackaging it, because nowadays in the military and security establishment, it's considered that we should have let MacArthur go in there and zots the Chinese in 1951 because now they're so big and so scary.
It's going to be extremely hard.
I'll say.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
We've been paying attention to the national security strategy and the national defense strategy documents that were just issued in the last three weeks.
Yeah.
But they explicitly designate China as a strategic competitor.
And therefore, you know, we're supposed to be rolling back Chinese influence and Chinese power by any means necessary.
And there's going to be a lot of ugly stuff coming down the pipe.
Well, I guess then that was Nixon's greatest failure, not his greatest accomplishment.
Kissinger should have never gone to China.
They should have helped the Maoists assassinate Deng Xiaoping and keep China a communist country of starving dead bodies and cannibalism and the worst nightmare in the history of humanity.
Yeah, we're saying why didn't we?
Because that would have been good for us.
Exactly.
And, you know, the Soviets were asked the United States if they could nuke China back in the 60s.
And we said no.
And now we're saying, gosh, maybe we should have done that.
But anyway.
So, yeah.
So that's the that's the one thing is that, you know, the you know, from my perspective, it's man, you know, this this jerk almost started a war down there.
But, you know, from from the but from the current perspective, that is a crisis.
I think it's called a crisis initiation action, which you need to start a war at a time when it is beneficial to you.
And so MacArthur understood that.
And now, you know, we have a crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
We got Taiwan heating up and we got the South China Sea.
And we're just looking to recreate those conditions today under much less favorable circumstances so that we can have a confrontation with China while China is still in a position of relative weakness.
Well, I'm going to ask you again about that time Russia wanted to nuke China in a second.
But, yeah, we're just talking about that with Andrew Bacevich here a minute ago.
Well, we meaning I and the conversation was about how.
Yeah, well, look, it's a military strategy.
It's written by Mattis.
And so, of course, his entire point of view about the question is a military point of view.
When the relationship between America and China is certainly a lot bigger and better than any kind of military lens could even be able to perceive, much less properly assess and come up with a strategy.
You know, these these strategies, I think, are supposed to be.
And, you know, this can be dangerous, too, but drawn up by by civilians and then the military guys obey because all they know is how to carry out the strategies and the tactics, not how to come up with them.
Yeah.
Well, I watched some of Mattis's speech at Johns Hopkins when he was rolling out the strategy.
And it was actually, to me, kind of sad.
It was one of those things where you're watching a Roman consul in the last days of the empire.
And he says, well, you know, what we really got to do is we got to we got to work with these goths to keep the other goths at bay.
And it's yeah, he there's definitely this sort of scary tunnel vision.
And from what I can tell is that, you know, the uniform military is is basically Trump's primary institutional base inside Washington.
And they're basically getting what they want.
And what they want is a foreign policy that is based upon the idea of sustaining American military hegemony.
They can't the military can't consider it's a I called it a manhood measuring contest.
The military, I think, can't consider a situation where there's a military power that they cannot, you know, claim to be able to confront and defeat under any circumstances.
All right, you guys, this show is sponsored by Zen Cash.
It's a new digital currency, has all kinds of different features.
You can send documents and messages and all kinds of other things with it, too.
It's great.
It's called Zen Cash.
Look it up at ZenSystem.io, ZenSystem.io.
Read my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and also The War State by the great Michael Swanson.
This is such a great and important book.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years.
It goes to show what those three presidents did to build it up and also try to fight to limit its power as well.
Very interesting book, The War State.
Now, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
Let me tell you, these guys have been around as long as I have, since the mid to late 70s.
They do an incredible job.
They charge the slightest of premiums to broker your exchanges in gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and there's no charge at all if you use Bitcoin.
That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc., rrbi.co, rrbi.co.
LibertyStickers.com.
We're working on a brand new site, brand new art, and all kinds of stuff.
It's not up there yet, but soon LibertyStickers.com is going to be rocking.
Of course, if you want a 2018 model website, then you need to go to expanddesigns.com and get a brand new website from them.
If you go to expanddesigns.com.scot, you'll save $500.
Look, man, I got such an ideological bent against the American empire and against confrontation.
I'm just so used to blaming America at this point because it's America's fault so much of the time.
It's kind of my job.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and maybe China really is a big military threat.
My understanding, I guess, was that after Iraq War I and then after Bill Clinton sailed the Navy through the Taiwan Straits back in 1996 or whichever it was, that these two events were pretty big for China's military establishment, and they decided to build up their coastal force from nothing to a little bit of something.
But they do have what level of blue water Navy?
They aspire to, you know, there's all this talk about all their challenge to all the neighboring countries about the islands in the South China Sea and all this kind of thing.
So just how aggressive are they?
You know, Bacevich was talking about China is rising one way or the other.
How we deal with it, you know, is still an open question, but it is something.
Like most good things, we can blame Dick Cheney for this.
The core of U.S. geopolitical strategy for China since the 1990s has been to threaten, you know, China's a net oil importer, right?
And so the whole geopolitical strategy was to have control over China's oil resources, and that was supposed to be able to bring them to heel.
And in fact, part of the philosophy of clean breaking into Iraq and hopefully Iran was that then we would control those oil supplies and the Chinese would be begging us for oil.
So then when that didn't work, actually China is the largest purchaser of Iraqi oil right now.
When that didn't work, then the focus switched to the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea as a way to interdict Chinese oil imports.
I am a bit of a bear on this thing because the South China Sea is strategically important only to China, and mainly because it carries most of China's oil imports.
And then when the Chinese made moves to neutralize that, we've shifted to what's called the Indo-Pacific.
The big news in China policy is the frantic recruitment of India as a quasi-ally because India can control the Indian Ocean, and that's where those tankers have to sail through.
And China is not standing idly by.
They're building aircraft carriers, they're building ports, they're putting military installations in Djibouti and maybe Pakistan.
So they're interested in power projection for energy security and for national security.
So yeah, they're getting aggressive, particularly in Southeast Asia with the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and also Korea.
Korea is basically inching towards Finlandization in terms of becoming an economic partner of China.
So yeah, they're doing lots of stuff there.
I don't think of them as trying to rule the world, but I think they want to rule their backyard, and the United States just can't deal with that.
Yeah, well, and it sounds like you're saying it's really in response to not— I had my two major provocations from back in the 90s about their military doctrine or whatever, but then you just went down the list of America basically poking them in the chest and putting them in the position where they go, okay, well, if you're going to be in Djibouti, then we're going to be in Djibouti or whatever it is, right?
What the hell?
Yeah, well, the United States has had a covertly hostile policy towards China in terms of energy, finance, military, what have you, since the 1990s, but China has done a pretty good job of countering it, and so now we have to escalate.
That's the thing.
So now I'd say our policy is we're moving into trade war with China.
We got the national security thing, and we have the campaign against Chinese influence at places like the University of Texas at Austin, and so I'd say now our policy is like 60% hostile and 40% engagement, and the military wants to tilt it even more in the confrontation zone because they feel that unless they escalate, they're not going to win.
The status quo is favorable to China because, among other things, China is in Asia, and we're just visitors over there.
Yeah.
Man, I need to see some pie charts or something about some kind of line graphs.
I'm not sure how to graphically represent it, but somebody needs to take the data about how much of the American economy is really tied directly to these military and defense firms, but what about everybody else?
They're our second biggest trading partner, I think, after Canada, right?
I don't know.
What the hell do I know about China?
Not very much at all, but sorry for the audience to repeat from earlier in the Bacevich interview, but we have no choice but to be friends and partners with them because they're a significant portion of humanity, and nobody wants an H-bomb war, and the future is going to continue on unless we do have an H-bomb war, so what kind of accommodation can we come to?
Why isn't that the only question?
What are we supposed to do, contain China?
We can't bring Mao back.
That's the only way to contain the Chinese, right, is to take all their property away and make them starve to death.
Well, hope springs eternal in the Pentagon breast.
Right now, the ideas we're supposed to multiply are cloud through the democracy quadrilateral of India, Japan, Australia, and the United States.
Those are the only reliably anti-Chinese forces out Asia way, but the key danger that I see is that the U.S. military's attitude towards China is predicated upon the idea that China is a paper tiger.
To be perfectly frank, I don't think the Chinese have won a war since 1949.
You might correct me there, but they haven't performed particularly spectacularly since then.
Of course, we haven't won that many wars either, but the U.S. military sees it as win-win.
Either the Chinese is a paper tiger and it backs down, or it tries to push back and we kick its ass.
So that, I think, is going to be driving a lot of the confrontation.
The idea is that it's being sold to the civilian leadership.
It's win-win.
Either China bends the knee or they get whipped.
So Admiral Harry Harris of PACOM, Pacific Command, which is the most important military operation in the world, in my opinion, was recently in India saying, this is going to be the year for courageous doings to get things done.
I think that the military has the upper hand in policy and it's looking for that provocation.
Maybe they're encouraging Taiwan to move more towards independence because I think that'll bring the Chinese out of their hole and force them into a confrontation.
They're trying stuff in the South China Sea.
The Indians are doing border provocations down at the Sino-Indian border.
So there's a certain amount of recklessness, I think, and the danger is I think the Chinese feel that they have to shed this paper tiger tag and so somebody's going to have to get their hair must.
I have a feeling it might be the Indians down at the Sino-Indian border.
Man, well, yeah, and again, H-bombs, though, because hair must, or a conflict between, or I don't know exactly how they war game these things out, but it seems like if the American and Chinese militaries start shooting at each other that it's more likely than not that things will escalate to the point of ICBMs rather than, in other words, kick their ass doesn't mean anything when you lose L.A.
Well, let me tell you, the U.S. war gaming on China, the official doctrine is, if you look at the stuff that Brookings writes, it is actually pathologically geared to the assumption that the conflict can be prevented from escalating to a nuclear exchange.
So again, there's this whole thing.
I don't believe it either.
I was talking to Lawrence Wilkerson, and he said that every scenario he actually war gamed when he was doing that thing at the Pentagon, any war with China ended up escalating to a nuclear exchange.
But that's not the official story, because the whole thing is that the Pentagon is selling a half a trillion dollar a year presence in Asia on the idea that we can fight a limited conventional regional war out there, and the homeland is not going to get zotzed.
You know, this is Gareth Porter's whole thing, the perils of dominance, where these guys know that they have more planes and missiles and subs and carriers and battleships and guns of every description, satellites and networks and every other thing.
But they think that that means that they can do whatever they want.
But no, that's not true.
In fact, you know, you can kill three million Vietnamese, and they still won't give up.
That's right.
Three million.
And they'll say, actually, no, we have our red line, and we're not backing down.
Sorry.
But then we think we can push around the Chinese.
Doug Bandow says this.
They really, in D.C., they act as though they cannot fathom that any other country would react the same way we would react, that you cannot tell us what to do.
And we will, at some point, we will rather fight and even die in large numbers than be dominated by a foreign power.
Well, I guess, you know, resistance is a feature, not a bug, when it comes to asking for more budget, you know, more mission, that sort of stuff.
Mutually assured destruction, save me.
You know, I don't know.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming on the show.
I really hope everyone will look at this.
This is such an important piece of history.
You know, I bet you can teach some experts that you know a new thing.
Show them General Douglas MacArthur's Conspiracy to Start a War with China by Peter Lee, and they can get this at newsbud.com?
That's right.
All right, and then also everybody follow Peter on Twitter.
He's the SpaghettiOs guy on there, China hand.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys, and you know me.
I'm scotthorton.org for the shows, foolsaron.us for my book, Fools Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute for what I want you to read, and follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
