7.6 magnitude
tsunami soon to follow
hopefully this chaos doesn’t give China an opening to move on Taiwan
The problem for Washington is that most people in Taiwan want to peaceful relations with Beijing and have no interest in provoking a war by declaring independence.
Biden’s policy with China has been to scream loudly while waving a small stick. While claiming that China is the biggest threat, Biden has been taking weapons from Japan and Korea. President Xi gets to point to the rhetoric from Washington to unite opinion within China while the US is demilitarizing its allies in the Pacific–a win-win for China.
It looks like China’s investment in the Bidens has paid off handsomely.
Not everything is a Tom Clancy esque techno thriller. Taiwan will be fine.
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What chaos? 
you sure?
That’s official Chinese policy. Nothing new there. What’s insane is the idea that an earthquake off Japan’s coast makes it a reasonable fear that China is going to go after Taiwan. That comes from Clancy/Bond/Slater and worse authors. Although no one is worse than Ian Slater in my opinion. And that’s saying a lot.
Four months ago China’s economy was grinding downward. It would seem to me that internal economic problems would cause the Chinese to pause any aspirations of the annexation of Taiwan. Not that it wouldn’t be any surprise but maybe not just now.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-global-markets-xi-deflation-property-housing-evergrande-developers-2023-8?amp
Tom Clancy was always right.
Ha! I grew up reading Clancy. It got crazy to the end when he made his main character explain how all tax, abortion and social security…there were more…policies were wrong and his ideas were right. With the worst kind of false Socratic method…I get why you’d like him. And no logical person could disagree. Clearly. 
He was better when he stuck with his Soviet/Russian/NATO/American techno thriller stuff that involved the navy. After that he got kind of weird. Gotta love his book about environmentalist trying to destroy the world with a plague and Jack Ryan had to take them down. That was…interesting.
I didn’t say I liked him. I said he was right.
Japan is focused on a major disaster. What better time…
There was a time when Master Strategists walked among the people. I suppose it"s been replaced by data.
What would Sun Tzu do.
I think one of Tom Clancy novels involve China making a move on Russia far east for resources.
Which makes sense considering today’s circumstances.
China’s big opportunity to invade Taiwan and get away with it Scot free was in late February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine, while they had thousands of foreign visitors to detain “for their protection.” They let it go by, which tells us that they aren’t ready yet to make that move.
This little (by Japanese standards) earthquake will have zero effect on China’s geopolitical ambitions.
To be fair every Chinese paramount leader has said the same thing since Mao first postulated about it in 1949.
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