The Art of War

Sun Tzu

It seems rather little noticed, in the midst of the general apocalypse, but Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency yesterday. Not because of the coronavirus; that was already a declared state of emergency. About a threat to the power grid.

He says foreign adversaries are creating and increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities.

The emergency order bans the importation of equipment from “adversary nations.”

Something is going on, and it does not sound good.

I argued in this space a few days ago that war between the US and China was improbable; both had more to lose than to gain.

But I was thinking of conventional war.

What seems to have happened, and become apparent suddenly, is the emergence of a new Cold War, between the US and China, in which China is seeking dominance by non-military means, but no other holds barred. By indirection.

It is strange that this is coming to a head at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic, if the coronavirus pandemic is not a part of this plan.

It is too much to think the Chinese deliberately let the virus loose In Wuhan; the virus is indiscriminate, and they would not start by killing their own people. But once it was loose, they seem to have behaved suspiciously: shutting down travel out of Wuhan except overseas, by air. There are signs they deliberately spread the virus to north Italy: one guy who was part of a Chinese government front organization was standing on street corners asking for hugs with the sign “I am not a virus.” They withheld and suppressed information to other governments, while buying up all the protective equipment they could on the world market. Now they are shipping out protective equipment, and test kits, that turn out to be defective. Is this incompetence, or design?

It may be, too, that the virus escaped from a government lab. And it may be that the lab was working on weaponizing viruses.

Meantime, things seem to be heating up in the South China Sea. This seems to have been initiated by China, sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat, then driving off a US Navy ship. They are trying, as they were inevitably going to sooner or later, to assert sovereignty over those sea lanes. Perhaps they hope the US will be too distracted by the virus to respond.

The rumours are spreading that, apart from electrical equipment, many things being imported from China have built-in vulnerabilities allowing Chinese spying and, potentially, control: 5G, Zoom for teleconferencing, HuaWei phones, and so forth.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Trump called out the navy to stop drug trafficking, suggesting there was a sudden surge in the middle of the pandemic. We have long been thinking the problem was Mexico, and I was thinking Venezuela. On that basis, the call made little sense: the border with Mexico was closed. And the navy was of no use at that border. But the ultimate source for most of these opioids is China. They must come across that ocean. Has China been deliberately flooding the Americas with these drugs, inspired by what opium did to disrupt and weaken Qing Dynasty society?

It is beginning to look, as well, as though China has been doing a lot of bribery around the world. The belt and road initiative has been buying governments, but that is above board. There is something else going on. The WHO is in their pocket. This does not seem to be adequately accounted for by the official funding: as Trump keeps saying, the US pays ten times the portion of their budget that China does. It looks as though people, government officials and others, are being bought individually. We are recently hearing of American academics having been bought. The absurdly pro-regime coverage recently from the CBC makes me suspect that Canadian journalists are being bought. Other evidence is how media outlets in the US and Canada swiftly fell in line behind the claim that it was racist to call COVID-19 the "Chinese virus." YouTuber JJ McCullough tells of being offered money by the Chinese government to spread their propaganda on his channel.

It belatedly occurs to me that this is exactly the Chinese way. No open conflict. Everything is done through “back doors.” One day you wake up, and someone new is calling the shots.

It’s war, Jim, but not war as we know it.