World War Z author Max Brooks went off on a nonsensical hypothetical tangent on HBO’s Friday episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In the context of a larger conversation about the need to keep Chinese fingerprints off of critical infrastructure, Brooks mused that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping could blackmail President Donald Trump over Taiwan in order to avoid more plane crashes like the nation witnessed earlier this week at Reagan National Airport.
Brooks, who is also a fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, began by making the more reasonable argument that the U.S. learned the wrong lesson from Operation Desert Storm, “This goes back to a point in history called Desert Storm. In 1991 we fought a war and annihilated the world's fifth largest army in 100 hours… we wiped them out on CNN, and that was on purpose that we let the press embed because we thought we were teaching deterrence. We thought we were teaching the world, if you mess with America on the battlefield, we will annihilate you. What we were teaching our enemies was asymmetry, right?”
Tying the lesson to China and today, Brooks moved to shakier ground as he blamed Ronald Reagan, although not by name, for opening the door to the Chinese threat, “The idea that okay, if you're going to mess with America, don't use bullets and bombs because they are way ahead of us. Use alternative means. Cyber is one of them, and they are ahead. You can see a scenario right now because they weaponized the private sector in a way the Soviets never could because they were communist, and in the 1980s we deregulated the private sector.”
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