China’s vast fleet is tipping the balance in the Pacific

Great. I doubt this is the beginning of WW3 but considering what's happening with Vietnam and Myanmar I'd bet that we'll have a new hegemony that Taiwan falls under if nothing changes in the next 5 years or so. Does anyone have any books on the economics of war/war of economics and such? I'm wondering where else this could go.

Caspian Report on youtube is a good start

That's normal in every empire, right? Enough people start siphoning off of whatever system is in place in order to fatten their wallets and then gtfo before the populace kills them or another country/invade steals everything from them.

The newish breed (maybe not new but more recent) seems to be to destabilize countries which can be strip mined cleaned while everything is just barely out of control of the local government, or you just pay off the government which may just be a military junta and buddies because they understand that if they try to pull a Gadaffi they get bombed out of existence and replaced because they're not big enough.

What is so worrying about China's massive military build up is that there's no benign explanation. China has long had enough conventional power to defend itself and more than enough nuclear weapons to hold up its side of MAD.

It really just looks a lot like the king of China is preparing to start a war. It seems like in the best case he is preparing to take Taiwan and in the worst case he's planning to take all of Asia while perhaps his ally, the king of Russia, takes Europe.

The simple fact is that if these two dictators can figure out how take out the U.S. then there's nothing stopping them from taking over the entire world. The giant has been sleeping since it declared victory in the cold war decades ago.

No one can sleep well until the U.S. massively revamps its nuclear triad and either Japan or Europe create their own highly independent nuclear response capability. The future of humanity is currently relying on a single point of failure and it may already be too late.

Before anyone else has to go to the trouble of looking these up: "Destined for War" is a book by Graham Allison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison. The others are books by Henry Kissinger (!).