Are We Heading for War With China?

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Tim Pool

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Tim Pool is a journalist, political commentator, and host of the "Timcast" podcast and Youtube program.

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Take a look at the social media, what's going on with Twitter, Facebook. The CEO of YouTube, we'll start there, said on CNN, basically anyone who says anything out of line with the World Health Organization is a bit, it's banable. It's against our community guidelines. The World Health Organization has flip-flopped back and forth, you know, like several times already. Well, they're clearly spouting out Chinese propaganda too, particularly in January when they were saying that according to China, there's no evidence that you could be transmitted from person to person. And did you know the AP reported at that time China knew and withheld the information for six days? So the day that the World Health Organization tweeted out, no evidence according to China of human-to-human transmission, we now know according to the AP that China did know and purposefully withheld that. What you've got going on with China right now, I question whether or not we're getting close to an act of war. And I know that might be a little exaggerated, but they've got – this is a story that was published in BuzzFeed News. Trolls working either for China or within China trying to slow down the response in other regions like Spain, Italy, Taiwan. I think the BuzzFeed one was specifically about Taiwan, so in disinformation so it would slow their response, things like that. Why? Well, I think China wants Taiwan. Right. But that was – They don't like their rogue province, so they consider it. Yeah. Well, that's why they had instructed the World Health Organization to not even mention the name Taiwan. You saw that video? That video's crazy. Where the head of the World Health Organization is being interviewed, and in the interview, the woman asks him about Taiwan's response, and he says, I think China's done a great job. Right. Well, at first he ignores that. Yes. And then he hangs up on her. Yeah, he hung up on her. Wow. But he did say China, and she said Taiwan in specific, and I think that's when he hung up on her. And then he came back and she goes, well, let's get back to the question. Well, I think we've already covered it. China's done a great job. He's clearly avoiding. But why does he think he can do that? What does China have on them? Is it funding? Is it just China funding them? I mean, you saw what happened with the NBA and Blizzard. People don't want to give that cold, hard cash. They're making a bold bet. You know what I mean? Do you know what Thucydides' trap is? No. So this is – I was reading about this. The Atlantic wrote about this in 2015. Are we headed for a war with China? And Thucydides' trap says that whenever a growing power seeks to upset the dominant power, it results in war. And out of 12 out of 16 times over the past 500 years, it has happened. So people have been predicting a US-China war for a really long time because of this historical precedent. It's not absolute. But it looks like – I'm not going to put it like I'm a historical expert or anything like that. But it looks extremely probable to me. I thought a lot of people get mad at me saying that I was fear mongering by bringing this up. But the US just sent two warships into the South China Sea, which China considers their own territory. When you look at what China has been doing in terms of misinformation clearly lying about the numbers, they're – I can't remember who did this. I think it may have been Germany removing China's numbers from the charts saying they're not real. So China has been misleading the rest of the world, withholding information on how bad the infection is. They sent a strike group, an aircraft carrier, through the South China Sea near Taiwan putting Japan on alert. The US's aircraft carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, was disabled because of the coronavirus. They evacuated 80% of the personnel. The US does what they call an elephant walk in Guam where they have all these bombers. Then the US pulls them out because apparently China's got some kind of weapon that can just blanket Guam and wipe out our forces. Next thing I know, we sent – What kind of weapon do they have that can do that? I'm not entirely sure. I'm getting my information from just reading peripheral stories. I'm not a military guy, anything like that. So the US just sent two warships into the South China Sea. I think they're doing this because one of the things I read from a military website was that the strike force is testing US resolve. The last time that China has done this where they sent a strike force around Taiwan, actually tried to take it in some fashion, the US sent a couple supercarriers and everything calmed down. Now our supercarriers in the region were disabled by COVID. Well didn't China – didn't they go into a group exercise with Iran after we killed that guy? Oh, I don't know. Yeah. There was a group exercise with China and Iran in the sea. They did something like some sort of show of unity right after Trump had that guy assassinated. Do you see what happened with those Iranian gunboats? They were swarming US – the US naval vessels and then Trump ordered them. If they do it again, sink them, blow them up. Do you know that Venezuela tried commandeering a civilian yacht a couple of weeks ago? What? Venezuelan naval ship crashed into a German-owned private cruise liner. They were trying to – my understanding of the story because I know a lot of people are – they're not going to want to pry that analysis. They were trying to steal it. So they claim – Steal it? Yeah. The official word from Venezuela was they thought this was a fake cruise ship with assassins from Maduro or something. So they ordered it to come into their waters because they weren't. A Venezuelan naval ship started ramming it, sank itself. Yeah, I heard about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then sometime after, Donald Trump deploys two US naval vessels near Venezuelan waters, which he says are for drug-related operations. I'm not going to – like I know a lot of people are going to get heated saying, you know what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All I know is that's what was reported. Everyone knows what that means or what it leads to, but needless to say, with – you know, look, Russia is withholding wheat exports. Several European countries have closed their borders within the Schengen area. They're – people are starting to hoard food. And we just had a full-page ad in the New York Times Sunday edition, I think it was from Tyson, saying the food supply chain is breaking and we're getting ready for a major shortage of food. Yeah, they had to kill two million chickens. Wow. Because they didn't have anybody to butcher them. Here's my concern. When you have these nation states shoring up their borders, even within the European Union, that was crazy to me when you see Germany and France and Austria closing their borders to each other. Then you get these warships making these movements. You get people desperate for food. You see Venezuela ramming into a cruise ship. I say this. It could be that we're hyper-focused on it because we're bored. We don't only pay attention to the stuff. We normally pay attention to celebrity gossip and politics. Now that we're not doing anything, we're really focused on what's happening in international territory. Or perhaps it's that we're getting desperate and we're scared as the economy tanks. Well, if it wasn't for mutually assured destruction, I would say, yeah, we're probably moving into a place of war. When you have two nuclear superpowers like China and the US, it's like, what do they do? What are you going to do? One guy got to launch a missile. The other guy's going to launch a missile. What are they going to do? Are they going to go into a full-scale war and wipe out everyone on the planet? Because that's what would happen. I think so. I do. Who would be more willing to wipe out a giant chunk of the population? Would it be China or would it be the United States? I don't think it'd be the United States. I think it'd be China. I think it really depends on how strained they are for resources and whether or not they're really going to lose. The difficult ... Look, in China, when this broke out, we saw videos of them barricading people in their homes, welding their doors shut. The doctor, whistleblower. There's one story. A journalist was calling out all of these things, disappears for a month, comes back a month later all happy like, government's great. We love them. Really? Yeah. We know what they do. We've seen videos. Now, this could be propaganda because I'm in America, so of course I'm getting this information. Maybe the US is trying to build this up. I think you take a look at that kind of behavior, the willingness to do anything by any means necessary. At what point do you get one person who's in charge saying, I will not be the captain of a ship that sinks? I look to ... Well, I don't want to get super political in American history, but I view it as, you've got a leader of a country, and as people are looking at him, he says, this will be the year my country ceases to exist. F that. Press the button. I will not be the person who has it staying. It's hard to know though, because it could be a leader saying, I will not be the person who destroys the world. I would rather go down in history as the failure of my country. I think you back somebody into a corner, and you get fight or flight.