I was wondering how they “punctured” this military vessel, then I watched the video… They’re fighting it out on freaking zodiacs.
The Chinese are pursuing a very weird passive aggressive strategy here that I do not at all understand.
“Surely if we spray water at the other boats and run our boats into them and jump on board the opposing ships with poking weapons like some kind of Maori tribesmen the rest of the world will get sick of it and go away and give us what we want i.e. full control of the South China Sea, without us having to actually start a war about it”
I really don’t understand. I can’t even say for sure it is a bad idea, because like I say I just don’t understand, but it seems unlikely that it’s going to produce the impact that they seem like they want it to produce.
It’s the “I’m not touching you” of international geopolitics. They’re doing everything they can think of, short of actual war.
It reminds me of this tradition. Especially this quote from a modern incident “Successfully counting coup disgraces your opponent. It’s a way of publicly shaming them. We believe that if you are shamed, you must admit defeat.” It makes me wonder how much of the motivation for the incidents is internal consumption. Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.
Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.
That actually might be it. We can’t look to people in our own government / own country like we’re anything other than the boss and everyone knows it, but also, we definitely don’t want to pick a massive fight with another nuclear armed power and our biggest trading partner for literally no reason at all. And so, let’s play this stupid fighter-plane-chicken game with them and spin it at home like we’re out there telling them what’s what.
IDK if I buy it. It sorta makes sense.
It’s hard to square that, though, with actually fucking up the sailors on Filipino ships in a way that seems like it should demand some kind of response. Maybe the orders were to just be pushy in a non-escalational way and things got out of hand on the ground in a way that for-real wasn’t intended?
I only have two ideas:
They’re seeing what they can get away with. Or, and more likely, normalizing more and more aggression in pursuit of seeing what they can get away with.
Have you seen videos of the skirmishes at the Kashmiri border? It’s absurd, like something out of a bad alternate history movie.
imo, I think they’re playing the plausible deniability card.
They can always say they don’t know what is happening in the lower ranks. Once the other side raises arms, suddenly they’re going to play the self-defense card.
On the other side, they preach about how asians should support each other against the power and influences of the west.
More of this will happen if the west doesn’t support Philippines or Ukraine Enough
Philippines is a shithole that willingly elected the fascist Duterte as their president, they deserve no support.
America did it too and is trying to again
So an act of war, right?
Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.
Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).
I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, ‘You can claim those waters if you want, but you can’t possibly keep us from entering them, so we’re just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we’re gonna call in big brother America.’
