Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria, who early this year was elevated within the House Armed Services Committee, wants Congress to pre-authorize President Biden to take military action to defend Taiwan against China.

“The president has no legal authority to react in the time necessary to repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and deter an all-out war,” Luria, a 20-year Navy veteran, wrote in an op-ed published by the Washington Post this week. “If the president’s hands remain legally tied in preventing Chinese military action against Taiwan, then an even larger conflict with China is most certainly assured.”

As Luria notes in her article, Republican lawmakers agree with her that Congress, which has the power to authorize war by the U.S. Constitution, should cede its war powers on this matter to the president. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) have introduced a bill called the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act that would authorize the president “to use the Armed Forces of the United States and take such other measures as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to secure and protect Taiwan” against China. The measure had 18 House Republican co-sponsors in the previous Congress.

At the Quincy Institute’s website Responsible Statecraft, attorney Elizabeth Beavers wrote that Luria’s proposal “rests on a fantasy of American exceptionalism in which the United States can and must lead Taiwan to a military victory against Chinese invasion.

“It also defies logic to suggest that such an authorization would deter or prevent large-scale conflict, as it would surely be seen as a provocation by China. By establishing an overly-available military option, Congress would be setting in motion a chain of events that could hamper diplomatic possibilities and make war between two nuclear powers all the more likely.”

Luria has been in Congress since 2019 and she is rapidly gaining foreign policy influence in the Democratic caucus. She was seated this session on the Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee and the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over acquisition and procurement of items like military ships and submarine-launched weapons. She was also elected in February as the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, a committee leadership position that suggests she has the confidence of the chairman, hawkish Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.).

Defense contractors’ PACs donated $42,750 to Luria’s campaigns from January 2019 to June 30, 2021. When she was first a candidate for Congress during the 2018 cycle, Luria promised voters in her district that she would not take donations from corporate PACs, taking a pledge organized by End Citizens United, but she quietly backed out of the pledge in late 2020, when she took funds from the PACs of defense contractors including BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Rolls-Royce North America, which she kept for herself as payback for money she had loaned her campaign.

Luria’s office defended the decision to withdraw from the “No Corporate PAC Money” pledge by saying to the Virginian-Pilot of the corporate PACs she is now taking money from that “all these PAC funds come from individual small dollar contributions from employees.” But a review of campaign finance data from Code for Democracy reveals that since 2019, the PACs of the top five defense companies, all of which have donated to Luria besides Northrop Grumman’s, have received donations of at least $1,000 from 332 senior executives and that the average amount that these executive-donors have given to them is $2,113. Forty defense executives, who told the FEC their titles included president, CEO, chairman, or director, have given their employers’ PACs more than $10,000 since 2019.
https://truthout.org/articles/ascendant ... ith-china/

She is bought and paid for by the Military Industrial Complex, that has never found a war they didn't like.

Gen. Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, American Commander of the China Burma India Theater during WWII made a statement after the war. He warned to never get involved in a land war in Asia, because you can't win a war there. This was before the Korean War, Vietnam and Afghanistan. He was correct as a prophet.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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There are no "pure" politicians in Washington, they all have to be responsive to their constituents like Schumer and Gillibrand serve Wall Street, Manchin serves the coal industry and Cornyn and Cruz serve the oil and gas industries, Feinstein and Padilla support Hollywood, Silicone Valley and CA social media companies.

China is saber rattling, they can't scoop up Taiwan like Russia scooped up Crimea.
The 25 Chinese fighter jets, bombers and other warplanes flew in menacing formations off the southern end of Taiwan, a show of military might on China’s National Day, Oct. 1. The incursions, dozens upon dozens, continued into the night and the days that followed and surged to the highest numbers ever on Monday, when 56 warplanes tested Taiwan’s beleaguered air defenses.

Taiwan’s jets scrambled to keep up, while the United States warned China that its “provocative military activity” undermined “regional peace and stability.” China did not cower. When a Taiwanese combat air traffic controller radioed one Chinese aircraft, the pilot dismissed the challenge with an obscenity involving the officer’s mother.

As such confrontations intensify, the balance of power around Taiwan is fundamentally shifting, pushing a decades-long impasse over its future into a dangerous new phase.

After holding out against unification demands from China’s communist rulers for more than 70 years, Taiwan is now at the heart of the deepening discord between China and the United States. The island’s fate has the potential to reshape the regional order and even to ignite a military conflagration — intentional or not.
China’s military might has, for the first time, made a conquest of Taiwan conceivable, perhaps even tempting. The United States wants to thwart any invasion but has watched its military dominance in Asia steadily erode. Taiwan’s own military preparedness has withered, even as its people become increasingly resistant to unification.
China’s ambitious leader, Xi Jinping, now presides over what is arguably the country’s most potent military in history. Some argue that Mr. Xi, who has set the stage to rule for a third term starting in 2022, could feel compelled to conquer Taiwan to crown his era in power.

Mr. Xi said Saturday in Beijing that Taiwan independence “was a grave lurking threat to national rejuvenation.” China wanted peaceful unification, he said, but added: “Nobody should underestimate the staunch determination, firm will and powerful ability of the Chinese people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Few believe a war is imminent or foreordained, in part because the economic and diplomatic aftershocks would be staggering for China. Yet even if the recent flights into Taiwan’s self-declared air identification zone are intended merely as political pressure, not a prelude to war, China’s financial, political and military ascendancy has made preserving the island’s security a gravely complex endeavor.

Until recently, the United States believed it could hold Chinese territorial ambitions in check, but the military superiority it long held may not be enough. When the Pentagon organized a war game in October 2020, an American “blue team” struggled against new Chinese weaponry in a simulated battle over Taiwan.

China now acts with increasing confidence, in part because many officials, including Mr. Xi, hold the view that American power has faltered. The United States’ failures with the Covid-19 pandemic and its political upheavals have reinforced such views.

Some advisers and former officers in China argue that the United States no longer has the will to send forces if a war were to break out over Taiwan. Under the right conditions, others suggest, the People’s Liberation Army could prevail if it did.

In Taiwan, China’s military provocations have bolstered political support for the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who has sought to forge ties with countries increasingly wary of China. The Biden administration is trying to bolster Taiwan’s defense capabilities and international standing, hoping to delay or prevent the need for American military intervention.

“The three sides have seen their interactions caught in a vicious spiral,” Jia Qingguo, a professor of international relations at Peking University who advises the Chinese government, recently wrote. “The process of vicious interactions between Taipei, Beijing, and Washington resembles the forming of a perfect storm.”
Two days after the fall of Kabul in August, as the Biden administration scrambled to evacuate thousands stranded by the American withdrawal, China staged military exercises explicitly designed to show off its prowess.

Chinese warships fired missiles into the sea south of Taiwan, while amphibious landing vehicles swept ashore a beach in China. It was one of the largest exercises ever to simulate an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.

In previous drills, the People’s Liberation Army maintained a gauze of deniability about its imagined adversary, but this time it left no doubt. One officer on Chinese television warned the United States and Taiwan “not to play with fire on the Taiwan issue and immolate themselves.”

The question is whether Mr. Xi intends to act.

He has vowed to lead the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” including bringing Taiwan under Chinese control. Some interpret that to mean within a decade, if not sooner. His hard-line policies have made it less likely that Taiwan could ever willingly agree to China’s terms, especially after Mr. Xi throttled political freedoms in Hong Kong.
China’s leaders began the long, politically fraught process of overhauling the People’s Liberation Army after watching the United States put its military power on display in the Persian Gulf war against Iraq in 1990.

Six years later, they understood just how far behind their military had fallen when the United States dispatched two aircraft carriers near Taiwan in response to China firing missiles into the seas near the island. After the American show of force, China backed down.

Robert L. Thomas, a former vice admiral who commanded the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Japan, recalled a meeting with a Chinese admiral in 2015. The admiral told him that the 1996 confrontation still stung nearly two decades later.
Since then, China’s leaders have poured money into the People’s Liberation Army. In a decade, military spending grew by 76 percent, reaching $252 billion in 2020, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (The United States spent $778 billion on its military last year.) Mr. Xi has also reorganized the military, raising the status of naval and air forces and pushing commanders to master joint warfare.

In an exercise last year, the military conducted a drill that simulated sealing off the Taiwan Strait from outside forces. What was unthinkable in 1996 could now be within reach. The exercise was like “trapping a turtle in a jar,” said a website run by China’s office for Taiwan affairs.
In war games since at least 2018, American “blue” teams have repeatedly lost against a “red” team representing a hypothetical Chinese force — in part by design, since the exercises are intended to test officers and war planners. In a game simulating a war around 2030, reported earlier by Defense News, the “blue” team struggled even when given new advanced fighter planes and other weapons still on the Pentagon’s drawing board.

The classified game culminated with China launching missile strikes against American bases and warships in the region, and then staging an air and amphibious assault on Taiwan, according to a Defense Department official. The officials concluded that Taiwan, backed by the United States, could hold out for maybe two or three days before its defenses crumbled.

The Pentagon’s annual assessments of China’s military have since 2000 chronicled its evolution from a large but ineffective force into a potential rival. Its latest report said Chinese capabilities have already surpassed the American military in some areas, including shipbuilding, conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and integrated air defense systems. All three would be essential in any conflict over Taiwan.

“I worry that they are accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States,” Admiral Philip S. Davidson, the retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then, and I think the threat is manifest during this decade; in fact, in the next six years.”
An internal assessment of the Chinese military by Taiwan’s defense ministry, reviewed by The New York Times, also documented the increasing challenge. China’s military, for example, has developed the capability to cripple communications around the island, the assessment found. That could hamper the arrival of American reinforcements.

“This really is the grimmest time I’ve seen in my more than 40 years working in the military,” Taiwan’s minister of defense, Chiu Kuo-cheng, told lawmakers on Wednesday. China already had the means to invade Taiwan, though still at a high price, he said. “By 2025, the cost and attrition will be squeezed lowest, and so then it could be said to have ‘full capability’.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/worl ... aiwan.html

Passing that resolution would be saber rattling by the US, I don't think it's a bad thing.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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Currently, China is the least of our problems, whether they attack Taiwan or not. We have a domestic seditionist / terrorist on the loose trying to destroy this nation from within. Our collective national electorate has gone mentally dense and obtuse. I do agree, regardless of what transpires, we're fucked!
"Being Republican is more than a difference of opinion - it's a character flaw." "COVID can fix STUPID!"
The greatest, most aggrieved mistake EVER made in USA was electing DJT as POTUS.

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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tonguengroover wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 12:14 pm China has all our money and debt. I doub't we could survive an economic war with china lets alone a military one. We're fucked.
Common right wing propaganda. The US has six times as much intragovernmental debt - money borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, for instance. Japan owns more of our debt than China does, unless you count both Taiwan and Hong Kong holdings along with the PRC. The UK, Ireland, and Cayman Islands together hold more than China. Mutual funds own more than 3x as much as China. The list goes on. Besides, they buy dollars to keep the yuan undervalued and promote exports.
https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the ... of-us-debt

Remember the trillion dollar coin trick? Yeah, if China called in their debt and we chose to pay it, that's an option. Don't spend it all in one place.

Economics is weird.

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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I read something similar about the US debt recently. The US dollar is still the main reserve currency for the world. The pandemic beat up all the worlds economies and everyone is recovering. With energy costs up, we're in better shape because of our domestic oil and natural gas production than Japan, China and the EU and that affects their currencies and economies.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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lurker wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 6:42 pm this is reminiscent of the cold war policy, Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD), which made ww3 unthinkable. want to destroy the world? start a war. no one will survive. we built a ring of alliances and treaties based on the notion that we could and would respond, up to and including nukes, to international aggression. korea, vietnam, afghanistan and any number of "conflicts" have skirted the question. now xi may be willing to test our resolve, but he knows better than to push us to the wall.

i believe we have a mutual defense agreement w/ nationalist china.
Another anomaly is the absence of an American treaty commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense if it were ever attacked. Such a treaty, the U.S.-ROC mutual defense treaty, existed from 1954 to 1979, but the Carter administration terminated it as a condition for establishing relations with the PRC. But the United States has sustained a political commitment to Taiwan, under the rubric of the Taiwan Relations Act, which was enacted in 1979. Substantively, moreover, the security relationship with Taiwan and its military is broad and deep. The United States seeks to enhance Taiwan’s military capabilities through substantial arms sales, fortified by ongoing contacts between the two defense establishments.

Increasingly, that security partnership will be tested by the continuing modernization of PRC armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). What Taiwan does to ensure its security is also a critical variable.
Beijing’s leaders, however, did not count on Taiwan’s democratization in the early 1990s. They came to fear that some of Taiwan’s leaders and one of its major political parties— the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—intended to pursue Taiwan independence through covert and gradual steps. Former presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian took actions that China interpreted as confirmation of its fears, whether or not they truly had a separatist intent.

To deter independence and punish Taiwan if deterrence failed, and to complicate any American attempt to come to Taiwan’s defense, the PRC began to build up military capabilities beginning in the late 1990s. The military dimension of the political dispute regained salience. Although Beijing says it would prefer peaceful unification, it asserts its resolve to use force if necessary and codified that resolve in the Anti-Secession Law of 2005.3 To make matters worse for Taiwan, the capabilities that China has created to deter what it fears, could also be used to compel what it wants (unification).
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/up ... liance.pdf

As crazy as MAD was we didn't have WWIII. We did have proxy wars with the Soviets and communists around the world such as Korea, Vietnam, Middle East...
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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China surprises U.S. with hypersonic missile test

The report late on Saturday said the Chinese military launched a rocket carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle that flew through low-orbit space, circling the globe before cruising towards its target, which it missed by about two dozen miles.

"The test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised," the report said, citing people briefed on the intelligence.

China's ministry of defence did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment from Reuters on Sunday.

The United States and Russia are also developing hypersonic missiles, and last month North Korea https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 2021-09-28 said it had test-fired a newly-developed hypersonic missile.

At a 2019 parade, China showcased advancing weaponry including its hypersonic missile, known as the DF-17.

Ballistic missiles fly into outer space before returning on steep trajectories at higher speeds. Hypersonic weapons are difficult to defend against because they fly towards targets at lower altitudes but can achieve more than five times the speed of sound - or about 6,200 km per hour (3,850 mph).
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/ch ... ar-AAPCAPB

Next we will have the Hyper Hyper super duper anti-missile Missile. It will be developed by Lockheed using software developed by Boeing running on a beta version of Windows 13.5
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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DJD100 wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 4:08 am Want to save Taiwan, give them some Nukes on the sly (worked with Israel, and it's working with North Korea too).

If Taiwan is able to destroy a number of China's cities before they're over run, China would think twice etc.
Well, right now China doesn't have the ability to 'invade' Taiwan. No real amphibious navy(9 ships) and aircraft/paratroopers isn't going to do that. If it becomes a shooting war, expect China's navy to be attacked pretty quickly(USN subs)....IF the US comes to Taiwan's aid, as in, a shooting war, expect this to go 'big heat' pretty quickly.

But China 'occupy' Taiwan? Doubt that is possible.

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Also some have mentioned that China and Taiwan could peacefully reunite, starting with diplomatic ties and negotiations. I say that is a bunch of fairy dust hogwash. The Taiwan government is not going to do that especially after what China did in Hong Kong after the British left them in charge.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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China's economy grew 4.9% in the third quarter of 2021 compared with a year earlier, the country's National Bureau of Statistics announced Monday.

The gross domestic product growth in the July-September period in the world’s second-largest economy marked the "weakest pace since the third quarter of 2020 and slowing from 7.9% in the second quarter," Reuters notes.

"September industrial output rose 3.1% from a year earlier, missing expectations, down from August's 5.3%, and marking the slowest growth since March 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic," Reuters added.

Driving the news: Contributing factors include computer chip shortages, power cuts at steel mills and a construction slowdown during the pandemic, as signs of stress pile up in China’s real estate development sector, per the New York Times.

"Growth is under pressure from government controls aimed at making the energy-hungry economy more efficient and at reducing reliance on debt that Chinese leaders worry is dangerously high and could cause financial problems," according to AP.
What they're saying: National Bureau of Statistics spokesperson Fu Linghui warned "the current international environment uncertainties are mounting, and the domestic economic recovery is still unstable and uneven," per an NYT translation.

China ended 2020 as the only major country to see its economy grow rather than shrink during the pandemic.

Chinese government officials in March set the country's annual economic growth target at over 6%.
https://www.axios.com/china-gdp-growth- ... fd690.html


The worldwide energy shortages are really hurting China. Plus defaults loom over its property development sector because of Evergrande. The US GDP grew at 5.7% in the 3rd quarter of 2021.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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Giving Taiwan nukes would be a violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Not that the PRC have been saints.

PLAN has demonstrated the creativity and flexibility to achieve a large scale naval invasion of Hainan using a large fleet of civilian ships. It's been a while. The straits of Formosa were a wee bit smaller. Still, expect a country with limited experience in this mode of warfare to stick with what's worked for them before. Infiltrate covert operatives ahead of time, use paratroopers to draw troops away from the beaches, and then put boats on every mile of the coast.

Re: Ascendant Democratic Warhawk Wants to Pre-Authorize War With China

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Baltimore (CNN)President Joe Biden said Thursday the US was committed to coming to Taiwan's defense if it comes under attack from China -- a stance that seems in opposition to America's stated policy of "strategic ambiguity."

Asked twice during CNN's town hall whether the US would protect Taiwan if China attacked, Biden said it would. "Yes, we have a commitment to do that," he said.

Biden has made similar statements in the past, only to have the White House say longstanding US policy had not changed toward the island. The US provides Taiwan defensive weapons, but has remained intentionally ambiguous on whether it would intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese attack.

Under the "One China" Policy, the US acknowledges China's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan. In recent weeks, Beijing has sent dozens of warplanes near into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), and Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that "reunification" between China and Taiwan was inevitable.

A White House official attempted to clarify Biden's comments on Taiwan after the town hall, saying the President was "not announcing any change in our policy and there is no change in our policy" in his remarks about China and Taiwan.

"The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act. We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan's self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo," the official said.
Biden said Thursday he was not concerned about an intentional military conflict with China — but indicated he was worried about unintentional escalation.

"China, Russia and the rest of the world knows we have the most powerful military in history of the world. Don't worry about whether they're going to be more powerful," he said. "But you do have to worry about whether or not they're going to engage in activities put them in a position where they may make a serious mistake."

Biden, citing his relationship with Xi, said he wasn't looking to enter a prolonged conflict.
"I have spoken and spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader has. That's why you hear people saying Biden wants to start a new cold war with China. I don't want a cold war with China. I want China to understand that we are not going to step back and change any of our views."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/21/politics ... index.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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