An invitation to war

Re: “Pelosi visit ups ante in Taiwan chess match,” (Opinion, Aug 13).

One thing about great power politics is that the playbook is usually published way in advance of the actual events. Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. WW2 started in 1941.

In 1992 the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, warned that if the West kept pushing Nato eastward, there would be a dangerous backlash one day. Today, we have the Ukraine conflict.

In 2016 the Rand Corporation, a USA military think-tank, published a US government-sponsored report entitled “Exploring the Course and Consequences of a Sino-US War”.

The paper pointed out that the economic consequences of a limited war in the South China Seas would be much more damaging to China than to the USA. It was suggested that this could be one way to slow down or even derail the rise of China as an economic power.

Despite being portrayed as unplanned, the recent trip by Nancy Pelosi simply follows this playbook written six years ago.

But the difference between past eras and today is the speed at which information spreads via the internet. Hopefully, everybody has read the Rand playbook, but who can stop it from being implemented if not the USA? M L SAKSIRI KRIDAKORN