Wild if true.
"Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.
One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.
The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
https://archive.is/nmNWr
How do you figure? It's not like Biden hasn't approved airstrikes in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Iraq.
In short, Republicans want there to be a full-on U.S. Empire. They're fully supportive of invading and indefinitely occupying countries and carrying on genocidal counterinsurgencies. You can trace this from the invasions of the Bush administration through "100 years in Iraq/bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" McCain through Trump tearing up a major diplomatic agreement with Iran and driving us to the brink of invading. Three beers deep, Republicans want the imperialism 1.0 of the peak British Empire.
Democrats are still awful, of course, but since Vietnam they've wanted to avoid the Big War and indefinite occupations/counterinsurgency fights that Republicans badly want. Democrats have been trying to avoid the next Vietnam while Republicans have been saying "we'll totally win this time bro, trust me." Democrats will still do coups, airstrikes, operator terrorism, and all manner of economic neoimperialism, but they at least want to avoid (for purely selfish reasons) the bloodiest and most destructive aspects of imperialism. Three beers deep, you'll still be arguing with a Democrat about the term "U.S. Empire," because they don't think we have one and they don't want to be one. This is why they'll occasionally do decent stuff like pulling out of Afghanistan, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Obama-era thaw on Cuba. They honestly buy shit like "surgical strikes" while Republicans are dipping bullets in bacon grease to do War on Terror blood magic.
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Imperialism is a bipartisan consensus, but the parties want to prosecute imperialism in noticeably different ways. The Democratic way leads to substantially less death and destruction, even though it still leads a lot of death and destruction.
Glossing over the real differences between parties is just lazy "both sides are the same" thinking.
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