From your high school history class to every other show about WWII on the History Chanel, what is one of the things that we keep telling ourselves that we will take as a hard won lesson from the last century?
You can not reward aggression. You cannot appease an expansionist power.
Well, that is what we tell ourselves, but like those who came before us, in our day to day existence with all its distractions and petty priorities, it is an easy sell to do just that; back away, appease, and with faith in hope over experience – wish that this time it will be different.
When Russian aggression took a few bits of the nation of Georgia, and then the Crimea followed by a sizable chunk of eastern Ukraine – what was the lesson? As sand dredge by sand dredge the Communist Chinese took bit by bit of the South China Sea – what was the lesson?
The lesson is – might makes right. If you are strong enough and make the cost too much – and are patience – you can “solve” a lot of outstanding territorial issues where the losing power is too weak to stop you – and distant powers would rather watch, pose, write letters and throw nerf encased sanctions against your national HESCO.
With the chaos COVID-19 has injected in to the global system, and in the FIFO way COVID-19 infection spreads Communist China is seemingly through the worst, is the latest from a 60-yr old frozen conflict really a surprise?
Via Al Aribiya;
China is expanding its high-altitude airbase near Ladakh, the site of some recent border skirmishes with India, India’s NDTV reported on Tuesday.
“Satellite images show massive construction activity at a high-altitude Chinese air base, located just 200 kilometers away from the Pangong Lake, the site of the skirmish between forces of India and China on May 5 and May 6,” the report said.
Several Indian and Chinese soldiers were injured in clash involving fistfights and stone-throwing at a remote but strategically important mountain pass near Tibet, the Indian Army said.
“Aggressive behavior by the two sides resulted in minor injuries to troops. It was stone-throwing and arguments that ended in a fistfight,” Indian Army Eastern Command spokesman Mandeep Hooda told AFP.
The buildup is more than just hype. Over at NDTV, they have an impressive overhead of the expansion of the Ngari Gunsa airport in Tibet.
Are the Communist Chinese trying to take advantage of a distracted India and global system to press another claim? The evidence so far tells us they are testing the waters. Time will tell more.
It is up to the worlds democracies, of which India is the largest, to remember our lessons.
As a side note, if the very name “Ladakh” does not wake you up, then you are sadly under-read. I highly recommend the entire Peter Hopkirk canon – but start with Trespassers on the Roof of the World.
