!War is over? --- agk's diary 28 May 2023 @ 16:35 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 after church while it rains and birds sing --- Friends in my country's military branches tell me the effects of peace China brokered over the last two months---between Saudi and Iran, in Yemen, in Syria, and peace's stabilizing influence in Iraq. Navy sailors are coming home in large numbers from the region's land bases with post-traumatic stress from on-base sexual assault, hearing shots at a distance, & other hazards of base life. It's hard to exploit Saudi-Iran peace. 3 US administrations, over more than 15 years wanted out, to "pivot." The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, highest-ranking military post in my country and president's military advisor, is an Air Force guy. The chairman who resigned opposed escalation in Ukraine and held the correct position China has no near-term plan to invade Taiwan. Like my congressman, the new guy doesn't care my country lacks industrial capacity to win near-peer conflict, as Russia showed in Ukraine. They want WWII, this time farce not tragedy. They want Euro- pean land war, war in the Pacific, a bomb, sweet rebuilding contracts. Navy's brand new medic training no longer assumes same-day treatment in Germany for wounded sailors. Now they're told they may be all their guy'll get for a week, an assumption that points to the South Pacific and contested airspace. War's over where my country bombed, droned, starv- ed, assassinated, occupied, grifted, and lost for 30 years. China wants peace to do business there, beginning with rebuilding. The world's worst human- itarian disaster, in Yemen, can end. Papua New Guinea planned to meet my county's presi- dent about a new submarine base or something this month. The meeting day was declared a national hol- iday in PNG. My Prez skipped to endorse domestic austerity in this year's debt ceiling circus. PNG won't soon forget the insult. Other regional players know what it means. Maybe war won't come to the Pacific, ocean of peace. There'll be fat contr- acts & sweetheart deals but purely speculative vio- lence because now everybody knows Patriot missile batteries, aircraft carrier groups, and F-35 jets won't survive drone swarms or hypersonic gliders. And there's nowhere left to sanction.