WORLD NEWS: “U.S. Proposes $6.43 Billion Arms Sale to Taiwan: Plan to Boost Island’s Defense Follows New Leader’s Warming Relations With China, but Sparks Protests in Beijing,” by Ting-I Tsai and Kara Scannell, Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2008.

In principle, I have no problem with this. But in a grand strategic sense, this is simply feeding a sunk cost instead of moving the PLA in the direction it needs to go. I talk about America shifting from the “indispensable nation” to the “insolvent Leviathan” in Great Powers. The best way to manage that reality up-front is to slowly rebrand the PLA as an interventionary Core force, just like I’d like to rebrand the Russian military, which we know—by recent demonstration—likes to go places and blow shit up. Or I can wait on NATO forever, and put my bucks into places like tiny Taiwan. Frankly, we should be selling military hardware to the mainland, not the island. We get nothing, long term, from this effort. And when you’re sucking wind financially, I don’t see the sense in this. Leave the f—king romanticism of the Cold War in the 20th century. That history, as Fukuyama correctly noted, is dead and buried. We fight different battles today that require different allies. China is about 30 years old, post-Mao. It should be treated as such. Russia is just coming up on 20, making it your typical, hard-to-control 18-year-old, full of bluster and desirous of a fight. This is why Obama’s election is so important: we need to bury the Cold War once and forever. It’s all that McCain knows, whereas Obama really doesn’t have a clue. I can train up the latter, but I cannot deconstruct the former. So I voted for the conservative, eschewing the radical.