Do Pandemics Promote Peace? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-04-23/do-pandemics-promote-peace?utm_medium=social An interesting (and plausible) thesis; and if he's right, this pandemic is a blessing. However ghastly it is, it is *nothing* compared to what a great power war, fought with modern armaments, would do. But ...

It isn't true, as he posits, that COVID-19 "is weakening all of the great and middle powers more or less equally." China's population is 1.393 billion. The US population is 328.2 million.

China is not behaving like a power that's "pessimistic about [its] military prospects."

To the contrary, it's all but overrun Hong Kong, conducted naval drills near Taiwan, flown into Taiwanese airspace, sunk Vietnamese fishing vessels, held complex drills in the South China Sea, gone right back to work building up the artificial islands--

harassed a Philippine Navy ship, unilaterally declared two new districts in waters claimed by the Philippines, sent ships into Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku islands, sent a coastguard boat into Indonesia's EEZ off the coast of the islands of Natuna;

sent a giant crane vessel almost up to the coast of Vietnam, forced South Korea to scramble its jets...this is just off the top of my head. Think of a dog marking its territory. They're pissing over the whole 9-dash line--and beyond.

Their propaganda organs are in full-screech.

Chinese Ambassadors have, by my count, recently been summoned and admonished by at least nine countries. (I'm probably missing a few.)

None of this is being reported in the US news, because we've got other things on our minds. This alone may well be misunderstood in Beijing.

China probably *did* have time to quarantine key military units. We did not.

They could well be thinking, "The US has been flattened by the pandemic. Clearly, no one's in charge over there. The POTUS *really is* a senile dotard.

"They've alienated all their allies, and they're in a state of near-civil war. We'll never have a better chance."

The 100th annivers­ary of the CCP is on July 21. The party's legitimacy has taken a nasty hit. They could use a boost.

Chasing the US out of the Pacific would be just that kind of boost.

The South China Sea is a flashpoint waiting to explode, and while Posen is surely right that a war with China is the last thing the US wants or needs, we could easily stumble right into it--

especially because "blaming China" is the GOP's explicit re-election strategy, and Trump's exactly the kind of president who might respond to a provocation by thinking, "I bet I can win reelection by suddenly doing something 'tough on China.'"

He probably understands the military briefings he receives about as well as he does the medical briefings. I doubt he's in any way capable of explaining what "his generals" tell him about what, exactly, would happen if we're nuked.

We know that occasionally he decides to do something highly dramatic and provocative (like killing Soleimani). He's apt to do something like that when November 3 is in sight and when it's clear from the polls he's about to lose everything.

His calculation will be: "I'm going to take a huge, reckless risk. Maybe China backs down, in which case I'll win re-election as 'The only man with the balls to face down China.' Or maybe they don't back down, and they nuke us." For him, it's win-win.

He'd prefer to take the whole world down with him than face rejection at the polls, I'm sure of that. That's the nature of his personality disorder. So while I hope very much that Posen's right (and he *is* making some good arguments), we'd be insane to bet on it.

We are, alas, in danger of being annihilated. The math is pretty simple: China can afford to lose a lot more people than we can, and might well tolerate losing them--might well tolerate a nuclear exchange--

if it saw a good change of emerging from the conflict with the United States pushed back to its hemisphere. Would they exchange a Chinese city for an American one? Perhaps. Would we back down? Hard to say.

If missiles land on Guam, any president who failed to respond would be toast. Trump's toast already, so he's desperate. And he's nuts. And he doesn't understand what his advisors tell him, at all.

So ... I hope Posen's right.