History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, meaning it semi-repeats. The last time the US was attacked by a rising power in Asia was in 1941 by Japan at Pearl Harbor. Upset by Japanese brutal attacks on the Asian mainland, the US had cut off oil and scrap iron exports to Japan and they felt “backed into a corner.”
This time we’re upset by China’s huge mercantilist trade imbalance and other hostile acts short of war. In reaction we’re imposing tariffs that threaten the collapse of the enormous Chinese manufacturing-for-export sector.
If China feels “backed into a corner,” what sort of retaliatory lashing out might this emergent Asian power undertake? Probably not an attack on Pearl Harbor, maybe one on Guam?
That would be a shame, Guam and its people are super nice. The culture is a mix of Asian, Hawaiian, Filipino/Spanish colonial and US. Their family names reflect ancestors who were born Spanish, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Pacific Islander, and other European-American.
The DrsC spent a year on Guam some decades ago. The largely Roman Catholic islanders, who style themselves the Chamorro after the pre-Magellan indigenes, are US citizens who call the US “the mainland.”
