Slouching Toward War?

I saw this from InstaPundit reader Bart Hall and it got me thinking:

I notice interesting military trends which more than hint at a pattern, at least from an historical perspective.

Taiwan, Japan, and Australia are seriously arming up. South Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam ... less so, but significantly.

India are close to a largely indigenous nuclear "triad" [ICBMs, bombers, and submarines] and are pushing hard to field a powerful Indo-Pacific blue-water navy.

Britain and France are harmonising their nuclear "deterrent" systems, navies, air forces, and (France) land armies. Poland is massively buttressing its military, as are (smaller) Sweden and Finland. Turkey and its Kurdish rebels are working on an enduring end to the PKK guerrilla war ... to "focus on larger issues".

The US is onshoring everything possible, as fast as possible and pushing defence production on steroids, as well we should IMO.

The scenes are being built. The actors are moving into place during rehearsals. It will focus on Taiwan, and that it will probably [be what it takes] to rid the world of communism-- at least outside of university faculty lounges.

China is definitely being surrounded, and that’s its own fault. In it’s pre-Xi mercantile days, people weren’t particularly scared. The Chinese have alarmed their neighbors into, effectively, hemming them in. China could probably beat any of these neighbors (well, maybe not Japan or Korea, possibly not India, though terrain makes a full-blown land war with India difficult to even start) but it can’t beat all of them, and the costs of going to war with any of them are substantial, especially given China’s economic and political fragility. (And the fragility of the Three Gorges Dam, rumored to be Taiwan’s chief target in a war, which would drown huge numbers of people and even huger proportions of China’s productive capacity.)