China vows to boost 'combat readiness' after U.S. sails two warships near South China Sea islands...

Nothing is more foolish than thinking your opponents are morons, It will always bite you on the ass.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
That is from a Chinese "moron", that is probably the most respected military philosopher in history.

I'm sorry, I follow., sorry for letting invective carry me away, I agree with you, certainly, and, I'm assuming, Sun Tzu, of course...one just gets weary hearing about every knew Commie success or, if not success, forward move...I just find myself wishing, whenever I read stuff about them, that they'd disavow such an obviously historically worthless so called political philosophy, however, I suppose that isn't going to happen, obviously...it's just that they become most incredibly tiresome, one wonders what their whole society might've achieved had Hciang Kai Shek won, and set that whole place on the proper path toward legitimate democratic capitalism, instead of the capitalist facade they presently wear over a their all too obvious present Commie base...now the whole world is so economically interwoven into their so called society, hat extricating the rest of the world is proving to be all but effectively impossible, leading to this whole ongoing economic symbiosis with a Come monster...perhaps monster is a more adequate substitute for moron, in that I can certainly see your point, obviously...once again, sort for the sweeping generalized invective,..I forget who generated the phrase, maybe Machiavelli, to the effect the diplomacy and/or economics are merely a different kind of warfare...I'd suppose from a zero sum game theoretic perspective, I'd agree with that, one just finds oneselfmwishing the human race had philosophically and/or sociologically advanced slighltly further than it evidently has, as a whole, in three quarters ot a century since WW2., you know?

Yeah, I'd seen !mention of that, there was another thread mentioning that, I obv said, good, I didn't know if you might've noticed that....

Actually, I just realized that quote about diplomacumamd economics being war in another format, might not have been Machiavelli, it might've been Clausewitz...just a thought, of course....

You may be right, just far enough away from the islands or the ship does not run a ground or damage itself. Good point!

The issue is whether those islands are actually Chinese territory , other than military force they have no valid claim to those islands.