Donald Trump spoke good common sense about Ukraine and China on the Clay and Buck show on July 29:
That’s why you have Russia-Ukraine, and that’s why you may very well have Taiwan. And you could end up in World War III. And this would be a world war the likes of which nobody’s ever seen because the weaponry is so powerful, nuclear and other things. But the weaponry is so powerful. We’ve never been in this position. And we have a man who’s not capable — and wasn’t capable in prime time, by the way, but he’s certainly not capable now. We’re in big trouble as a country.
There was no way that Putin was going into Ukraine with me. …I don’t think he ever intended to start. I think that was a great negotiation. He went, he put troops on the board, and I think it was a great negotiation. I said, “Well, he’s a good negotiator.” I never thought he was gonna go in. He would have never… He knew that he would have been under attack, and he understood that, and I told him that, and it would have never happened, and to see what’s happened now…
They could have given up Crimea. They could have done something with NATO, “Okay, we’re not gonna join NATO,” and you’d have a country, because I believe Putin wanted to make a deal. And now I don’t think he wants to make a deal. I think it’s much tougher to make a deal. He’s blowing up the whole place. I mean, he’ll take over the whole place. And it’s very, very sad to watch what happened with Ukraine. Very, very sad.
And he posted at TruthSocial about Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan adventure:
Why is Nancy Pelosi getting involved with China and Taiwan other than to make trouble and more money, possibly involving insider trading and information, for her cheatin’ husband? Everything she touches turns to Chaos, Disruption, and “Crap” (her second big Congress “flop” happening now!), and the China mess is the last thing she should be involved in – She will only make it worse. Crazy Nancy just inserts herself and causes great friction and hatred. She is such a mess!!!
You won’t find a mention of Trump’s common sense on policy in the U.S. media — not even on the major social media outlets, which have banned the ex-president. I first heard about his Clay and Buck interview from an Austrian newspaper. America’s foreign policy elite blunders into war and silences a former president who calls it out.
The Biden administration has managed to blunder its way into near-confrontations with two nuclear powers that the U.S. is not prepared to win. We have never had a presidency that approaches this degree of incompetence. Biden is the godfather who makes you an offer you can’t understand. Exactly as Trump said, Putin was ready to make a deal. The deal had a name: Minsk II, and it came down to regional autonomy for Russian-speaking areas within a sovereign and neutral Ukraine. Biden ditched it with the encouragement of British PM Boris Johnson, and Putin invaded. Ukraine can’t throw the Russians out, and we can’t get into the fight without risking nuclear war. Just as Trump says, it is a totally unnecessary war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.
The Pelosi provocation in China is even more dangerous. China isn’t a nation. It’s a polyglot empire where a minority of the population speaks Mandarin. It’s held together by a common written language, a common bureaucracy, and a common tax collector. It has broken apart countless times in history. No regime in Beijing will tolerate a “rebel province,” because one breakaway region can set a precedent for many. That is why China will go to war over Taiwan. It’s an existential issue for the Chinese state, whether capitalists, Communists, or Confucians are in power.
Richard Nixon restored diplomatic relations with China in 1972 based on the One China policy, which simply says that the mainland and Taiwan are one country and that they will settle the issue in the future, without U.S. interference. That means we don’t recognize Taiwan as a separate country. If the U.S. president or VP were to visit Taiwan, that would verge on diplomatic recognition. Constitutionally, the Speaker of the House is next in line to the president after the VP, so an official visit by the Speaker of the House verges on verging on diplomatic recognition. China has to respond. Above all, Xi Jinping has to respond: He is seeking an unprecedented third term for a five-year stint as president at November’s Party Congress and can’t show weakness in the face of his neo-Maoist hardline opponents.
Biden stumbled into a war in Ukraine and found that Russia outguns Ukraine 16:1 and that the U.S. annual production of artillery shells would last Ukraine about 10 days of fighting. We have a few high-tech weapons to provide (remember when Switchblade drones were the magic bullet that would defeat Russia); we’ll deliver 16 HIMARS rocket launchers when 100 might make a difference. The best we can hope for in Ukraine is a bloody stalemate.
China is a much more dangerous situation. As I explained in my 2020 book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, China has neglected its land army, but put massive resources into coastal defense. It has at least 1,300 modern anti-ship missiles stationed on its coast, as well as 1,000 modern interceptor aircraft and at least 50 diesel-electric submarines that make as much noise as turning on a light bulb. Here is what Air Force strategist Oriana Skylar Mastro wrote in the New York Times on May 28:
China’s missile force is also thought to be capable of targeting ships at sea to neutralize the main U.S. tool of power projection, aircraft carriers. The United States has the most advanced fighter jets in the world but access to just two U.S. air bases within unrefueled combat radius of the Taiwan Strait, both in Japan, compared with China’s 39 air bases within 500 miles of Taipei.
When I consulted for the Pentagon in the early 2010s, the late Andrew Marshall, the long-time director of the Office of Net Assessment told me that Chinese missiles can sink U.S. carriers. We have some defenses like the Aegis system, but China has too many missiles. And that was before the Chinese tested hypersonic glide vehicles against which there presently is no defense.
We have a colonial police force masquerading as a military in bed with a military-industrial complex that has sold us the same systems for thirty years. We’re woefully behind in hypersonics and pretty much nowhere in missile defense. If we get into a scrap with China on its home court, we’ll probably lose it. Then what happens? Read Admiral Stavridis’ 2022 thriller 2034. The next step is nuclear war.
In a Law & Liberty essay on July 18, I argued that we need to avoid war with China and Russia and rebuild our high-tech military, the way we did during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States invented the Digital Age as a byproduct of beating Russia in the Cold War.
Sadly, Trump used most of his time with Clay and Buck to claim once again that he was robbed in the 2020 election. That’s a dead horse, and he should stop beating it. He’s a voice for sanity in world politics in a situation that may drag us into a global calamity on a scale humanity has never suffered before. We are led by mad, bad, and dangerous people who are sleepwalking into unnecessary wars. None of this would have happened if Trump were still president.
