Foreign policy thinker George Friedman launches a trial balloon theory of what’s going on with relations between the US and China. He sees this as signaled by two bits of semi-opaque information.
The first, and possibly more important, is the sacking of several generals and admirals by the PLA. “Several” is a number too large for it to be coincidence. It definitely signals something, exactly what is unclear.
The second is the invitation to the US of the leader of Taiwan’s opposition party - the Kuomintang. This party is viewed as less hostile to the PRC than that of the current President. This would be like the CCP inviting the head of our Democrats to visit China, as they’re the party out of power at the moment.
Friedman hypothesizes that these two indicia may point to a decision by China to be less hostile to the US than has recently been the case. He speculates (1) the ousted military leaders may have been unwilling to give up their dream of a military confrontation with the US. And (2) weakness in China’s economy makes giving up exporting to the lucrative US market seem unwise.
Because I would like this to be an accurate decoding of the signals being sent, I am therefore doubly reluctant to endorse this rosy scenario. We humans need to resist the temptation to assume things have taken a turn for the better, because too often our hopes mislead us.
What I wrote in the previous paragraph reminds me of a line spoken by Scott Glenn playing CIA Director Ezra Kramer in one of the later Bourne films, here paraphrased from memory. “My policy is to hope for the best and plan for the worst.”