TaiShang
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Yep. There's a serious deficit in the quality of strategic thinking between the adversaries.
China strategy is derived from Weiqi. Everything China does has a strategic purpose. Maritime Silk Road, AIIB, island reclamation - these all translate into tangible gains for China, increase China's influence, bind trade partners close to China, and create new facts on the grounds. Every turn, China places a new stone on the board.
The Americans think they are playing chess. In chess, it's important to move your pieces into position for checkmate. So superficially, the USA's military posturing, escalations and constant shuffling around of military assets would appear to be strategically sound. The problem is however is that the objective of chess is to deliver checkmate, but the US is neither willing nor capable of delivering checkmate. And if they can't deliver checkmate, then there's the added cost of overextending themselves.
What they want to intimidate China through their bluffs (they call it 'shock and awe') into stopping island reclamation, and more generally, to submit to US hegemony in Asia. That is actually a poker strategy, and they combining poker strategy with chess tactics, which makes for an incoherent approach.
All China has to do is ignore the bluffs, and keep putting more stone on the board, and if the US can't respond, they lose.
Very well said.
What is important for China at this stage is capacity building. Every move you mentioned above seems to be directed at increasing China's capabilities, which is, by default, not directly aggressive to any outside actors. So long as the US moves (bluffs, high-level speeches, "indispensable nation," "we write the rules" rhetoric, empty new alliances that pop up every day with no real content and implications) fail to prevent China from capacity building, then, there is nothing that really bothers China.
As another member (@Genesis , I guess) said on another thread, the US can pump its face into China's window, at the end of the day, all it can do is watching. Why should China care if the US watches 12 miles off instead of 12.000 miles off? I guess the US has capability to monitor even without having to coming so close.
China is literally putting pieces across the board, from Central Asia to Latin America and Africa. I wonder how the US is planning to confront China in the midst of so many moves. China's proactive but non-aggressive moves leave the US incapacitated because without military , their diplomacy appears utterly clueless.
I am, nonetheless, glad that they belittle China and still fail to see the long term importance of China's strategic moves, the Belt and Road Project and the accompanying international cooperation scheme being one of them.
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