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Larry Wilkerson
Kevin Rudd is a Mandarin speaker and in many respects an expert on China. I don't happen to agree, full-throatily, with what he said, but I do think that, like my conversation not too long ago with John Mearsheimer, where John said it's inevitable that we go to war with China, China goes to war with us, that it's getting closer to that possibility and it's extremely dangerous, as you intimated, that that possibility is closer. It's extremely dangerous that it's anywhere out there in our future if it is.
As for the sitting prime minister, I'm not aware of his intellectual bona fides or his predisposition toward China one way or the other, so I can't really comment. I am aware of a lot of my Australian friends who don't think he's a very good prime minister. All in all, this is, as you intimated, again, a very, very dangerous time. Not simply because we have an incompetent baboon sitting in the Oval Office with all manner of sycophant baboons arrayed all around him. But we also have a situation in the world that ought to be turning primus inter pares, that is to say, several states that more or less look at each other as equals and work diplomatically, economically, financially and otherwise to try to cooperate, to meet some really awesome challenges, two of which you hinted at climate crisis and nuclear weapons rather than be as we are, sitting around contemplating, not just contemplating, but working up new reasons for warfare. You can say that it's a product of the national security state that the United States has most assuredly become since World War Two, you can say it's a product of Xi Jinping and the enlarged power and capability within their national security decision making the process of their military. That's what you do when you feed it with lots of money and grow it up and stoke it with some nationalism and so forth.
You turn around one day if you're a civilian on the Politburo and you say, "My God, what have I created?" Well, that's where they almost are now in China, much the way we've been for some time now, at least since 9/11, possibly even before that, dominated by the military instrument, dominated by war, dominated by national security. China's very much in that boat too. The belligerence they've shown recently towards India in the South China Sea and elsewhere is an indication of that. So it's not a good time. I'm sitting at lunch with one of the premier, if not the premier realist thinkers in America, John Mearsheimer, as I said, and he tells me it's inevitable that we're going to war with China.
Paul Jay
Well, within what time frame is he talking about?
Larry Wilkerson
We didn't have a chance to discuss that. I suspect John would say, " Well, it will take a confluence of events that will take in itself a precipitating event". I think the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, I could think of several precipitating events. The most likely in my mind is something to do with Taiwan, although increasingly I see Taiwan as almost a fait accompli, should China decide to move. It will not move in an overt military fashion, it will simply let Taipei know that if it doesn't cooperate much, the way it let Hong Kong's leaders know, if it doesn't cooperate more fully with the mainland and it will spell out what that "more" fully means, time is running out for Taipei, and I think that pressure will probably be acknowledged, perhaps protested for a short time, probably not publicly, but in private over Beijing, Taipei channels. And then Taipei will more or less, as Hong Kong has done, subside. That is to say, it will become a part of the imperial mandate of heaven.
And I don't think the United States will do a darn thing. We'll probably issue de'marches. Congress will stand up on its hind legs and pontificate and pass all kinds of Taiwan protection acts and everything else. I don't think we're going to go to war with China over Taiwan. I may be wrong. Congress may just plunge us right into it, and we'll find out very quickly that the way to resolve that conflict after we've taken brutal blows on both sides is nuclear weapons and then we're at a really bad place.
Paul Jay
Well, what you've said in interviews with me, previously, that every war game that you were part of, the kind of work through what would happen with an armed conflict with China, winds up in a nuclear war. And everybody, in theory, everybody that is at all informed knows that's the end of China, the United States and most human life on Earth. So presumably they're in no hurry to get to that, even in spite of saber-rattling.
Larry Wilkerson
I don't know that the central party school, the strategic thinkers for Beijing and the Politburo itself, and Xi Jinping himself, I don't know that they think that way. I hope they do. I certainly hope they do, but I don't know that.
Paul Jay
I mean, China, for the last while, has been objecting. It gets almost no coverage in the American press and Western press objecting to the Trump getting out of these nuclear treaties and calling nuclear arms treaties and calling for new ones.
Larry Wilkerson
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