I don’t know about China, but the US rhetoric on the matter feels like we’re hyping ourselves up for an extermination campaign. That war will be cataclysmic because it’s going to be a matter of survival.
Tbh think that that kind of rethoric has been a thing in every conflict since ever, countries need to justify war by talking to the enemy as if it is an existential threat which will destroy us if we don’t destroy them first.
Countries at war or preparing to be generally talk about how the other nation is a threat for the current international political order, how they are a threat to our “way of life” and “culture”, how it is a “terrorists regime” or whatever… All stuff that implies a need to strike first before too much damage is done, it implies that fighting is a necessity. People are not going to be persuaded to enlist by saying “china is kind of minding his buisness but if the MIC manages to get us into a war with them we might have to defend a couple of island bases thousands of kms away from here”
To that i would add that by now we have it on good faith that people are not going to nuke each other. Just like they didn’t in the cold war, even if at points it felt almost certain that nukes were gonna fly
I don’t know about China, but the US rhetoric on the matter feels like we’re hyping ourselves up for an extermination campaign. That war will be cataclysmic because it’s going to be a matter of survival.
Tbh think that that kind of rethoric has been a thing in every conflict since ever, countries need to justify war by talking to the enemy as if it is an existential threat which will destroy us if we don’t destroy them first.
Countries at war or preparing to be generally talk about how the other nation is a threat for the current international political order, how they are a threat to our “way of life” and “culture”, how it is a “terrorists regime” or whatever… All stuff that implies a need to strike first before too much damage is done, it implies that fighting is a necessity. People are not going to be persuaded to enlist by saying “china is kind of minding his buisness but if the MIC manages to get us into a war with them we might have to defend a couple of island bases thousands of kms away from here”
To that i would add that by now we have it on good faith that people are not going to nuke each other. Just like they didn’t in the cold war, even if at points it felt almost certain that nukes were gonna fly