5 October—It looks like the People’s Republic of China—familiarly known as Red China or Mainland China—is ramping up its bellicosity by doing things like flying fighter planes over the Republic of China—familiarly known as Nationalist China or Taiwan, after its main island—and generally violating nautical territorial boundaries of American allies in the Pacific.

The People’s Republic—the bad guys—huge in area (3.7 million square miles) and population (1.5 billion), has since its founding in 1949 maintained that the Republic—the good guys—minuscule in area (14,000 square miles) and population (23.5 million), is really still a part of the mainland political entity and merely a province of the big red monster state.

It was in 1971, despite valiant diplomatic efforts of the United States, that the United Nations, to no one’s surprise, screwed Taiwan by kicking the little democracy out in favor of the big red dictatorship; and in 1979 that the Carter maladministration followed suit. The United States also abrogated our mutual defense treaty with Taiwan at that time, replacing it with the Taiwan Relations Act, which was all that was possible given that we no longer officially recognized the good guys. Typical.

Cutting to the chase, then, the People’s Republic isn’t just posturing to show its military might in order to get what it wants. And it wants more than little Taiwan, to be sure. No, the PRC is actually goading the United States and our and Taiwan’s allies to see how far we’ll go to defend the only bastion of democracy in the area.

It’s not a happy prospect, by any means. And how far will we good guys go? When diplomacy fails, war follows.

But I can just see doughty old President Joe Biden coming back from a peace conference in Beijing, standing on the White House lawn, having disembarked from Marine One, waving a piece of paper (I won’t speculate as to the brand) and declaring, “I have returned from China with peace in our time.”

Biden, of course, would be plagiarizing (and typically misquoting) British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938, after being sweet-talked and hoodwinked by Hitler in Munich, echoed Benjamin Disraeli’s declaration after the 1878 Congress of Berlin, “I have returned from Germany with peace for our time.” And, lest we forget, Disraeli himself had taken the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer.

Peace for our time? Dream on. And why the hell isn’t the People’s Republic of China considered part of the Axis of Evil? Along with Russia, of course . . .