I agree wholeheartedly. Tiger’s don’t change their stripes, and I don’t anticipate that two of the most historically defensive minded countries on planet earth will precipitate the conflict to reassert their regional authority except under extreme duress from external forces. Ball is, in effect, in the GAE’s court. Recent events, from the approval to deploy American LRM’s offensively, to the plan to deploy nearly 1,000,000 troops to Germany, seem to suggest that GAE has chosen the path of overt antagonism.

It remains to be seen if they can thwart the intentions of the incoming administration before Trump has a chance to take power, and whether or not the Russians and Chinese will take the bait, and how much their patience can be tested.

I also have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that another attempt will be made on Trump’s life either before or soon after the inauguration which will be pinned on a foreign power (likely Iran). Such a scenario would eliminate the war on the Administrative State by fiat, it’s main architect (if they manage to pull it off), and guarantee the global conflagration they so desperately desire. I just can’t shake it.

The West is in sharp decline. BRICS, now some 19 or so countries, has over half the world’s population and maybe 40 % of its GDP. It has most of the world’s resources. It has three nuclear superpowers.

The main question now is, Will the US neocons start WW III to hold onto to the GAE?

By 2018, “Vadim Mikhailov” (those familiar with “NRx” will no doubt find his style remarkably evocative of works published under a different byline) could spend A Week in Xinjiang’s Absolute Surveillance State and conclude that:

It’s basically impossible to commit violent crime in Xinjiang. A normal day will probably send you through at least half a dozen metal scanners and ID controls, from your home to your place of work, to any single establishment you visit. In the streets, you face ubiquitous police and dozens upon dozens of high-tech surveillance cameras… [Y]ou are controlled through your phone…, through the massive deployment of surveillance cameras and by police on the ground. They know everything.

Being a bad guy in Xinjiang has to be an extremely stressful life.

A wall made of millions of Han, occupying the geographically perilous border countries is a defensive dream come true for the Middle Kingdom as it enters the 21st century; of course looking to history as our guide the real threats to the regimes of the Chinese have ever come from within.

Once the Chinese have re-established a psychological comfortability in the inviolability of their homeland, and dispelled the last vestiges of the aberrant Century of Humiliation, they will once more return to form and fall to squabbling among themselves.