In the run-up to November’s election, Donald Trump’s position looks increasingly fraught as his poll ratings slip. If he does become more desperate he may look for a foreign diversion, perhaps a useful little war in a far-off place with not too big a country. An earlier column pointed to North Korea or Iran as possible ‘hosts’, especially as each has its own need for a political diversion. There are also indications, however, of rising tensions with a somewhat more powerful state.
A confrontation with China, over the contested islands of the South China Sea would be a particularly helpful for the US Navy, which has been having more than its fair share of problems recently. First came two collisions in 2017 involving US destroyers and merchant ships in the west Pacific, which killed seventeen sailors and pointed to serious deficiencies in training. As Defense News reported: "What was not thoroughly answered by the reviews was how it was possible, on two of the world’s most advanced warships, that the watch teams on the bridge and the radar monitors in the combat information center aboard the destroyers didn’t manage to coordinate to avoid the collisions."
More recently we had two of the navy’s nuclear-powered supercarriers being confined to port because of COVID-19 outbreaks. To rub salt in the wound the US Air Force, by pure coincidence of course, staged a series of intercontinental exercises with its strategic bomber force. All three bomber types – the B-1B, the B-2 and the B-52 – were used in demonstrations of global reach, the planes taking off from the continental US and heading to exercises in either western Europe or the west Pacific.
