I'm not a big believer in the US weapons machine manipulating global events so there's always a reason to start wars. If that were the case the US would still be in Afghanistan, and probably dropping bombs and missiles onto Iran by now. IMO China is a real problem, and has been for a decade. It's pretty darn clear that Xi has expansionist aspirations in the asia/pacific as the evidence is glaringly obvious. Xi needs to be shown that the rest of the world doesn't agree with whats happening and are prepared to group together to give him a bloodied nose if necessary to make him pull his head in. The problem as I see it for Xi is to both back and save face at the same time, as I don't think he'd be silly enough to want war, as I doubt he'd have any chance at winning. If China lost a war badly anything could happen including their biggest fear of an uprising against the CCP. The unfortunate other casualty in any of that will be Oz as our biggest trading partner would be no more. Iron Ore prices are tumbling now so even taking about war has a big price to pay. It could be 1940 all over again for Oz....selling Iron to Japan so they can build their war machine and getting it back with interest. When will we learn.
