United States Snubs Taiwan's President

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Corrected.



To which Hu would reply, "And al-Qaeda as well?"

Are you insinuating that the PRC has ties with al-Qaeda?

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


But not according to the US

So the US is The Decider of international boundaries?

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

[DaShi]

Actually, giving Taiwan nukes would be a good idea. This is one case where nukes could truly be used as a deterrent. China has been increasingly belligerent toward Taiwan, and its behavior threatens to destablize the region. Having nukes still leaves the option of peaceful reunification.

[DRoseDARs]

Actually, giving Taiwan nukes would be a phenomenally BAD idea. China would be all over the island like stink on dog***** the instant they caught verifiable word of there being nukes either on the island or on route to it and God help any US forces nearby...



Now, if the US had a military presence on the island per a Taiwanese government request for assistance, perhaps China would be much more hesitant to attack since they'd have to face us directly.



*Note: That is not an analogy comparing Taiwan to dog****. China stinks, though.

[DaShi]

Probably right, Taiwan is still under the US nuclear umbrella. Sadly, nuking or simply levelling the island is considered a viable option by the PRC.

[DaShi]

Re: Re: United States Snubs Taiwan's President

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Ewww, soundbites are always so impressive.

Have you ever posted anything that couldn't be considered a sound-bite?

It's like saying the governor of Quebec is SoL because he is not allowed to speak with various political big wigs in the US as head of an independent country.

Too bad.

The situations are entirely different.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Actually, giving Taiwan nukes would be a phenomenally BAD idea. China would be all over the island like stink on dog***** the instant they caught verifiable word of there being nukes either on the island or on route to it and God help any US forces nearby...

That sounds SO much like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[DaShi]

And that turned out ok.

[DRoseDARs]

Yeah, but a certain President serving as a certain poster's avatar was in charge of the US response to that nightmare then. I shudder violently to think of how the Bush Adminstration would have handled that situation...

[Vince278]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Yeah, but a certain President serving as a certain poster's avatar was in charge of the US response to that nightmare then. I shudder violently to think of how the Bush Adminstration would have handled that situation...

I'm channeling.

I'd shudder to think how the Cuban Missile Crisis would have went if Nixon won in 1960.

[Sikander]

New Mexico

[Sikander]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Yeah, but a certain President serving as a certain poster's avatar was in charge of the US response to that nightmare then. I shudder violently to think of how the Bush Adminstration would have handled that situation...

They can hardly be any more reckless than Kennedy was.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Sikander


They can hardly be any more reckless than Kennedy was.

Well, for starters, it would have been Vice President Cheney screaming, "We will BURY you!" not Khrushchev...

Funny, I don't remember reading about a nuclear exchange with the USSR. How, exactly, was the Kennedy Administration "reckless?"

[Tattila the Hun]

By leeting the chance to level SU slip!!

[Sikander]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs


Well, for starters, it would have been Vice President Cheney screaming, "We will BURY you!" not Khrushchev...

Funny, I don't remember reading about a nuclear exchange with the USSR. How, exactly, was the Kennedy Administration "reckless?"

We can start with Kennedy pretending that there was a "missle gap" in order to establish bogus security credentials during the 1960 campaign when as a member of the senate intelligence committee he knew full well that the Soviets were having a lot of trouble with their missle program and that the missles seen rolling through Red Square every year were simple tubes. To Nixon's credit he didn't expose this line of rhetoric for the b.s. it was.

The U.S. had nuclear missle bases in Turkey, bordering the Soviet Union. Why Kennedy thought that they should risk a full nuclear exchange over the Soviets doing the same thing in Cuba I do not understand. But he did. So the world goes on suicide watch until the Soviets decide that they don't want to destroy the world over nukes in Cuba. In exchange we remove our missles from Turkey. The unfortunate result of all this is that the reformist party in power in the S.U. is humiliated and within a couple of years the Soviet government is again in the hands of the Stalinists (Brezhnev et al) who had been out of favor since Stalin's death in 1953.

Think about the threat. Sure it was possible that the Soviets could have launched a devestating first strike from Cuba, but they could not have even begun to have prevented the complete and utter destruction of the Soviet Union in response. What we really got was a reprieve of 15 minutes or so for half of the country in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, at least until they were able to develop cruise missle launching subs. This seems like a pretty modest gain IMO.

The risk of course was that we'd trigger either a full nuclear exchange or at least a hot war with the S.U. and Cuba. Which of course meant that half the world would have been at war once again in either event. Can you honestly say you'd take that chance? The downside is huge and the upside is tiny. No wonder the commies didn't expect this sort of crap, and no wonder again that they'd rather deal with Nixon. At least he could be counted on to be more realistic in his appraisal of the situation each state was in.

Kennedy was a good-looking maniac with incredibly durable P.R. He slept with a Russian spy while he was president for god's sake. He waffled at the Bay of Pigs and at least winked at Diem's assassination in Vietnam. By the time I started school in the mid-1960s he was already canonized by the educational esablishment, the federal government and of course the Catholic church. I never heard a single argument against anything he did until I entered college in the late 1970s. His assassination reminds me a bit of 9/11 and how it effected Giuliani and Shrub's popularity. Unlike those two, Kennedy couldn't ever ruin his rep by his own actions.