An interesting piece on the Milley-Li call.
snip
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The cultural and operational outlook you would hope to see, in a war-games-only military, is caution: We’ve never done this before. We don’t know how much we don’t know. Let’s proceed with care.
Another term for this is, the capacity for tragic imagination. What if things don’t go as we planned? What might we regret? Or wish we’d re-thought?
The reaction I most dread, from the Chinese side, is the opposite. It is the paradoxical (but real) combination of arrogance and insecurity that characterizes many “rising powers” and has marked much of China’s dealings with the world in the Xi Jinping era.
-Arrogance: What could go wrong! Let’s teach a lesson to these paper tigers, with their rotting empires. It’s our turn now.
-Insecurity: We have to be on hair-trigger. The enemy is encircling us and could strike at any time.
The encirclement view is long-standing and powerful among China officials. Recently I mentioned that about a dozen years ago, at the Chinese counterpart of West Point, I heard a detailed lecture on how their country was being surrounded by U.S. forces. The illustration below, from a Western think tank, gives the idea. (Though the maps I saw were more lurid, with big red arrows showing possible attack routes into China, and little American-flag icons marking places where U.S. and allied aircraft, ships, or troops could be based.)
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a tip of the hat to Jim
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