What Happened to the Population Bomb?

Only you older readers have clear memories of 1968, but I remember it well. That was nearly 60 years ago, and it was a pivotal year in my career. I also remember it because of a book that was published that year, a work that had widespread societal as well as personal impact. 

Paul Ehrlich was the author of The Population Bomb (1968), the book just mentioned. He was born in Philadelphia in 1932, and after graduating from Pennsylvania University in 1953, he received the Ph.D. degree in Entomology (the scientific study of insects) in 1957 from the University of Kansas. From 1959 to 1968, he was a professor at Stanford University.

When Ehrlich’s soon-to-be bombshell book was first released in May 1968, it was initially ignored—no major newspaper reviewed it for four months. Its rise to prominence came through a different route entirely. In February 1970, Johnny Carson invited Ehrlich onto the Tonight Show, and the book soon became a bestseller.

The book received the Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award in 1970, selling over two million copies. It raised general awareness of population and environmental issues as well as influencing public policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

It should be noted that Paul, with the assistance of his wife Anne, wrote the first draft in about three weeks, based on his lecture notes. The publisher, though, insisted on listing only Paul's name—a decision Ehrlich later called a mistake he was “stupid enough to go along with.” Anne was genuinely the co-author from the beginning.

Paul died on March 13 at the age of 93, and Anne, his wife for 71 years, is still living and now 92 years old.

Why would a biology professor be qualified to write a book about human overpopulation? The answer is found in his emphasis on “coevolution,” about which he wrote a landmark paper in 1964. That work, co-written with botanist Peter Raven, was titled “Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution and published in the journal Evolution.

Ehrlich’s entomology background trained him to think in terms of populations, limits, adaptation, and ecological relationships rather than just individual organisms. That perspective made it easier for him to frame human population growth as part of a larger biological system with finite resources.

In his ecological studies, Ehrlich repeatedly saw that when a population (of any species) undergoes exponential growth, it then experiences a subsequent crash as it has grown beyond what its environment can support. Since his research led him to believe that to be true, then humanity, he thought, was due to experience a cataclysmic downsizing of the population.

As it turned out, Ehrlich's dire prophecy proved self-defeating. The alarm he sounded was taken seriously enough to trigger responses that averted the catastrophe he foresaw for the 1970s.

Ehrlich himself was a keynote speaker at the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, helping to shape the day's sense of urgency. In addition, the Green Revolution, international family planning initiatives, and agricultural investment in vulnerable regions also contributed substantially to staving off the outcome he feared.*

Although there were an impressive 8-9 million people at the No Kings protests on March 28, that is far less than half the number estimated to have participated in the first Earth Day activities. However, the latter covered a very broad range of activities while the No Kings figure refers to concentrated, single-day marches and rallies, which makes comparison tricky.

What was averted in the 1970s has been coming true in the 2020s. Since what he predicted in 1968 didn’t come true in the 1970s, Ehrlich changed his position during that decade and later. In the present decade, however, what is happening in the Global South resonates powerfully with his original warning.

The population explosion Ehrlich feared in 1968 largely did not materialize in the wealthy nations he was most focused on, but population growth now is concentrated in the poorest and most climate-vulnerable regions, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and other vulnerable regions of the Global South.**

The main issue now is climate-related disasters displacing millions—what many now call “climate refugees.” Drought, desertification, erratic rainfall, and crop failures is displacing large numbers of people primarily in the Sahel region (Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso) and the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea).

Next month, Earth Day will be termed Earth Week, with major activities beginning on April 18 and continuing through April 25. Those activities will likely be much smaller but potentially more important than the No Kings activities on March 28. What will you do for humanity and for Mother Earth that week?

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 * The Green Revolution refers to a series of agricultural research and development initiatives, spanning roughly the 1940s through the 1970s, that dramatically increased food production in developing countries, particularly in Asia and Latin America. It was led principally by American agronomist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

** The Progress Network posted “The Underpopulation Bomb” in their March 26 newsletter. It is largely critical of Ehrlich’s “prophecy of catastrophe” in The Population Bomb and, contrastingly, writes of the current concern with underpopulation and pronatalism. That article, and the Progress Network itself, is overly focused on the wealthy West and negligent of the population and ecological issues of the Global south.

Note: Research assistance provided by Claude (Anthropic).

 

Three “Lunatics” Supporting the Lunatic-in-Chief

“Is Trump a Lunatic?” is the title of my previous blog post. Bruce Maples, founder of the “Forward Kentucky” website, recently referred to Trump as “the Lunatic-in-Chief.”* This post highlights the “lunacy” (used in the metaphorical sense) of three men closely associated with the POTUS. 

(Pete Hegseth as depicted by Rachel Bitecofer)

Trump delivered an “address to the nation” on December 17. That same day, Maples portrayed the speech as an unhinged, lie-filled, 20‑minute tirade marked by bragging, blame‑shifting toward Biden and the Democrats, and disjointed nonsense.

Andy Curtis is an applied linguist and former president of the TESOL International Association. Back in 2018, he labeled Trump the ‘Lunatic‑in‑Chief.’ Maples cast the December 17 address as yet another performance that fully merited that description. In a 2019 post, Curtis also called Trump the “most famous liar in the world today.”

There are, not surprisingly, many loyalists who support Trump’s prevarication, misleading statements, and gaslighting. This post is a brief look at three “lunatics” who are his main supporters.

Steve Bannon (his given name is Stephen, but he is called Steve in the media and public life), has been closely associated with Trump since 2016.

Bannon (b. 1953) was a close ally of Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News. After Breitbart’s death in 2012, Bannon became its executive chairman and shaped in into a nationalist, pro‑Trump website. Consequently, Breitbart News came to be known as “the platform for the alt‑right” and was widely seen as “Trump Central” during the 2016 campaign.

After breaking with Trump in early 2018, Bannon started his “War Room” podcasts early in 2019, releasing new episodes five or six times a week. His podcast on March 19, 2026, was labeled as #5227. Bannon’s War Room is often depicted as “ultra-conservative” or “hyper-partisan right,” and it is widely seen as “a hub for extreme MAGA rhetoric.”

Currently, Bannon is clearly one of the “lunatics” actively supporting the Lunatic-in-Chief.

Stephen Miller (although he has the same given name as Bannon, he goes by the full name, never by Steve) has also long been a Trump supporter. Miller (b. 1985) is said to have felt an intense personal connection upon Trump’s June 2015 candidacy announcement, viewing ‘it as aligning perfectly with his longstanding anti-immigration views. At Bannon’s and Jared Kushner’s urging, in 2016 Miller joined Trump’s campaign full-time as a senior policy advisor, writing Trump’s early speeches and embedding nationalist rhetoric like “radical Islam.” His loyalty proved unwavering through Trump’s first term and his 2024 campaign.

Since January 2025, Miller has served as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in President Trump’s administration. That position gives him broad oversight of immigration enforcement, homeland security, and domestic policy execution, including mass deportations and executive orders.

Without question, Miller is one of the three main “lunatics” currently supporting the President.

Pete Hegseth (although his given name is Peter, he universally goes by Pete) assumed his first paid federal government role in Trump’s second term, when he nominated Hegseth for secretary of defense in November 2024. The Senate confirmed him after a tie-breaking vote by VP Vance, and he was sworn in on January 25, 2025.

Hegseth (b. 1980) is clearly one of the most important and most dangerous men in the U.S. today. As the Secretary of Defense/War, he is the official most responsible for launching/conducting the current “war” against Iran. As the oft-quoted anonymous saying puts it, “The most dangerous people are those who commit violence believing they are doing God’s will."

As is widely known, Hegseth is a conservative evangelical Christian who embraces a literal interpretation of what the Book of Revelation says about Armageddon and the Rapture. His current involvement in the war on Iran seems clearly to be based on his fundamentalistic Christian beliefs.**

Hegseth has said he will practice “no quarter” in Iran, which means he will refuse to spare enemy lives or take prisoners but will execute all who surrender or are captured. Supposedly, that is legitimate since, in his eyes, all Muslims are going to “fry when they die” (my words, not his) anyway.

Robert Reich’s March 16 Substack post was titled Trump’s Stupidest Cabinet Member, and he said Hegseth, this third of Trump’s “lunatic” enablers, is “a clear winner.”

With the rampant presence and power of these three “lunatics,” I repeat what I said at the end of my previous post: Heaven help us!

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  * Following his unsuccessful run for Louisville Metro Council in 2014 as a Democrat and frustrated by weak progressive voices in those elections, Maples founded Forward Kentucky in 2015.

** For those not familiar with the common conservative evangelical view of the end times, see the following articles: “Evangelicalism’s Twin Engines of Destruction: The Theological Innovation Sanctifying Trump’s War in Iran,” “Armageddon is not a strategy for peace in Iran,” and “The Pentagon’s Armageddon Problem,” Rachel Bitecofer’s March 12^th Substack post. (The image at the top of this post was taken from the latter.)

Is Trump a Lunatic?

“Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.” Those striking words posted by David Rothkopf on March 7 led to the writing of this blog article. 

David Rothkopf

It was early on the morning of March 8 that I read Rothkopf’s words cited above, and I have been thinking about them ever since. Heather Cox Richardson included those words in her March 7 Substack post, and when she quotes and makes positive statements about someone, I pay attention.

I had never heard of David Rothkopf before reading his March 7 Substack post, which began with the words cited above. The title of his article is “Living in a Time of Lunatics and Monsters,” and he has good reason to call Hitler a lunatic/monster. Rothkopf is Jewish, and during the Holocaust, his father, Ernst, was able to escape from Europe and come to the United States.

However, more than three dozen of Ernst’s (and, thus, David’s) relatives were killed, as were most of his childhood friends. One aunt had the misfortune to live with her husband and children in Oswiecim, Poland—the town the Germans called Auschwitz.

Even though I had not heard of David Rothkopf (b. 1955), he has written ten books and more than 1,000 articles on international themes for many mainstream publications such as The New York Times and Foreign Affairs.

It is quite clear to me that what he posted in his March 7 “Need to Know” Substack article should be considered with resolute seriousness.

Rothkopf’s article is the sharpest criticism of a U.S. President that I have ever read—and for good reason. That is what makes his piece so important—and so alarming. In his second paragraph, he asserts that

at this moment in history, the fate of virtually everyone on the planet is being impacted by the toxic cocktail of character flaws, insecurities, and pathologies that are shaping the actions of the President of the United States.

Many of us are incensed that the POTUS has started a war against Iran, and Rothkopf’s criticism is strong, indeed. He says that Trump launched that war “on a whim.” Why? Not only because “he’s insane,” but also because “he’s a malignant narcissist,” “a sociopath,” and “has a fragile ego.”

Trump’s “lunacy,” referring to Rothkopf’s term, is seen in the following ways (among a multitude of others):

** The reason/purpose for his ordering the bombing of Iran is completely unclear. Trump has suggested various reasons, but it seems that even he doesn’t know why he decided to do that—or that he won’t admit what his motive was. (Epstein files? Increasing cost of living prices? Falling polling numbers? All of the above? Something else? Who knows!)

** His calling for an “unconditional surrender of Iran” and even suggesting that perhaps he should pick the new ayatollah—which certainly would not have been the son of the ayatollah who was chosen to rule just two or three days ago.

** And now, he has suggested the takeover of Cuba, perhaps in a manner similar to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela on January 3. Perhaps that would align well with his changing the name Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, a name nobody outside the U.S. uses.

In addition, there is the whole problem of Trump’s love for and use of tariffs, his current insistence on the passing of the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) ahead of the midterm elections, and the possibility that he will do whatever it takes to keep a “big Blue wave” from happening in the November elections.

In light of all I have mentioned above, it is appalling that Trump’s term of office doesn’t end until January 20, 2029, nearly three years from now! “Heaven help us!” as the old-timers used to say.

But don’t forget the No Kings! protests planned for March 28. The promoters explicitly expect it to be the largest political protest in U.S. history. Surely that will have significant ramifications for the November elections.

What is Real? (Three Levels of Reality)

Everything is more complex than we generally think. What we experience daily is thought to be unquestionably “real.” Yet the deeper we look, the more we realize that reality is at least three-layered—shaped by our seeing, sustained by our shared meanings, and rooted in ultimate truth that, according to AI, “precedes us, holds us, and does not depend on our perception to be real.” 

Level one: From the time we get up in the morning until bedtime each night, we have no question that the family members we greet, what we eat for breakfast, the news we read in paper or online, the car we drive to work or to the store, the work we do by our hands or on the computer, etc., etc. are all real.

On this first level of reality, the question of what is real is seldom raised, as there is no need at all to doubt it. But there are other levels that many people do think about, although it seems that there are some who are content to live their lives only on this first level. For them it may be true, to a certain extent, that “ignorance is bliss.”

Level two: Things get more complicated when we enter the realm of thought and reflection rather than remaining in the world as experienced by our five senses. Further consideration indicates that much of what we consider real is actually socially constructed.

Peter L. Berger (1929~2017) was an Austrian‑born American sociologist and Protestant theologian, best known for his work in the sociology of knowledge and of religion. He ended his long teaching career as University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University from 1981 until his retirement in 2009.

Berger’s book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), co-authored with Thomas Luckmann (1927~2016), is a classic in the sociology of knowledge. It asserts that what we humans experience as “reality” in everyday life is largely a human, social product rather than a fixed, purely objective given.**

In their book, Berger and Luckmann introduce the concept of “plausibility structures,” and Berger further develops that idea in his next book, The Sacred Canopy (1967). That concept was then popularized by the British theologian Lesslie Newbigin in his influential book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989).

In July 2018, I posted a blog article titled “There Really Are ‘Alternative Facts’," and I encourage you to read that important post (here). The point is that on this second level, “facts” are only what the society one belongs to agrees upon as being real or true. For example, for those who are die-hard MAGA supporters, whatever the POTUS says is considered true and trustworthy.

On the other hand, most of the rest of us are painfully aware that every day he says things that are false or misleading. We so often disagree with what he claims to be factually true. Our plausibility structure is based on the anti-Trump Democrats and Independents who think that much of what he says is neither true nor trustworthy.

So, what is “real” in this case? The answer depends almost entirely upon the “society” to which we belong. Thus, what we consider to be real in the realm of religion, philosophy, and politics is socially constructed, formed by our thought-community.

Level three: Finally, we are challenged to consider whether there is ultimate reality, and if so, what that might be. From the ancient past, there have been some/many who have explored the profoundly important metaphysical and religious question of what is ultimately real.

There are those, of course, who don’t acknowledge this third level. But I believe AI is right: ultimate reality “precedes us, holds us, and does not depend on our perception to be real.” Most of us need to spend more time and effort exploring, evaluating, and engaging with this level of reality. While it may or may not be “blissful,” that is where we find the real meaning of life.

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** In addition to this seminal book, Berger is also the author of two significant sociological/theological works: The Sacred Canopy (1967), a foundational text in the sociology of religion, exploring religion as a protective framework for understanding existence amid modernity, and A Rumor of Angels (1969), which examines signals of transcendence in modern society, challenging secularization theories. In addition, he is also the editor of a much later book of interest, Between Relativism and Fundamentalism (2010).

In Memory of LBJ

 Lyndon Baines Johnson was never one of my favorite presidents as a man—he seemed quite unrefined, especially compared with the suave John F. Kennedy whom he succeeded after JFK’s shocking assassination. Yet I’ve come to rank him among America’s most effective presidents, thanks to his unmatched legislative triumphs like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. 

Those of you who were born by 1950 certainly remember Kennedy’s assassination on November 23, 1963, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s sudden elevation to the presidency aboard Air Force One on that fateful day.

Although Johnson ran for the Democratic nomination for president, JFK (who was nine years younger) secured that nomination on the first ballot at the July 1960 Democratic National Convention. He then promptly selected a running mate, offering that position to Senate Majority Leader Johnson, who had placed second in the presidential balloting.

Johnson thus became the 36^th POTUS and was elected for a full four-year term by a landslide in the 1964 election. By that time, he was widely known as just LBJ, and in that presidential campaign he widely used the phrases “All the way with LBJ” and “LBJ for the USA.” 

LBJ was born in Texas in 1908, and in 1930 he graduated from what is now Texas State University in San Marcos with a Bachelor of Science in history and a high school teaching certificate. (TXST compares unfavorably with the other two public Texas Universities, UT Austin and TAMU.) He taught at Sam Houston High School in 1930-31 and also entered politics that year.

Johnson served as a congressional aide from 1931 until 1937, the year he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served for over 23 years. In 1949 he was elected as a U.S. senator, and he served as the Democratic whip from 1951 until 1953.

In January 1953, LBJ was chosen as Senate minority leader by his fellow Democrats, the most junior senator ever elected to that position. In 1954, Johnson was re-elected, and since the Democrats won the majority in the Senate, he became the majority leader, and some say he was the most effective Senate majority leader ever.

The first years after LBJ’s election as POTUS in 1964 were highly successful. Many months ago, I first thought about writing this tribute to Pres. Johnson upon thinking about the importance of the legislation he was able to pass in 1964 and ’65. I didn’t realize at the time, though, that it was partly because he was finalizing the legislation initiated by JFK.

That connection was portrayed well by the 2016 movie LBJ. Although it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it didn’t reach theaters until November 2017. I wish it had been released immediately after it premiered, as it could well have changed the outcome of that very close, and very unsatisfactory, 2016 presidential election.

The film, which I don’t know why June and I didn’t watch in 2017, didn’t make me think any more highly of LBJ as a man; I didn’t like his cussing and crudeness at any point in his life. But it did cause me to think even more highly of him as a president and helped me to agree with a recent ranking of Johnson as the ninth best president in U.S. history, one notch above JFK.

If you are at all interested in learning more about one of the most prominent U.S. presidents, I encourage you to watch the movie LBJ, which was directed by Rob Reiner, who was tragically stabbed to death two months ago (in Dec. 2025). It is available for free streaming on Kanopy, available on DVD in many public libraries, and for rent at just $4 at Prime Video.

LBJ, quite unlike the current POTUS, was a man of integrity, who overcame his southern prejudices and signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In spite of his later over-involvement with the Indochina War in the 1960s, he is a man well worth remembering and honoring still.

The Affordability Conundrum

According to a recent online post by CNBC, “Affordability is a buzzword right now.” That certainly seems to be the case, but what does affordable mean? Dictionaries define affordable as “able to be afforded” or “having a cost that is not too high”—but those definitions are so ambiguous they have little meaning. Despite its current popularity, affordability seems clearly to be a conundrum. 

Marked cost-of-living increases in the past year have sparked widespread discussion about affordability. In campaigning for the 2024 election, the current POTUS promised that “starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again.”

In a September 2024 speech, Trump promised to get gasoline “below 2 dollars a gallon,” and said this would bring down “the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares, and housing costs.” Obviously, that hasn’t happened, so what the president says about affordability and what a majority of the voters perceive is a distinct part of the affordability conundrum.

In 2025, gas prices did go down by about 30 cents a gallon (from an average of $3.10 to about $2.80). That has made gasoline more affordable, but $2.80 is a long way from below $2.00—and that decrease is mostly due to lower crude oil prices and weaker global demand rather than due to something Trump did or didn’t do. No president has much influence on gas prices.

As you know, the Olympic Winter Games are now in progress, but the drawing for inexpensive tickets for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles went on sale last month. In fact, I decided to write this blog article when I saw an announcement saying, “Affordable tickets for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics start at $28.”

But, I thought, what about travel and lodging expenses? What is the use of buying an affordable ticket if you don’t have enough money for traveling to LA or staying in a hotel there? According to AI, it is estimated that round-trip flights from Kansas City (where I live) to LA will likely be $400 to $800, and a two-night stay in a LA hotel about the same—a minimum of $1,200 for one person!

So, the “affordable” ticket ends up not seeming so affordable after all.

What about “affordable housing”? There is much in the news media about that issue currently. What is termed affordable housing typically limits costs to 30% of household income to avoid burdening limited means. Obviously, what is “affordable” for middle- and top-income households is certainly not affordable for low-income families.

“Affordable groceries” also depends on one’s income. From what I have found, low-income households spend almost 33% of their after-tax income on food. According to 2023 USDA data, those in the lowest income quintile have an average after-tax income of $16,171, and the average spent annually for food was $5,278.

That percentage of income far exceeds the 10-15% typical for median earners and especially the slightly more than 8% for high earners. And my guess is that the median- and certainly the high-earners eat far better (more delicious and more nutritious) food than low-income people. So, affordability relates to far more than just how much something costs.

The most reasonable approach to affordability seems to be with those who advocate democratic socialism, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City (the same three I also mentioned at the end of my Nov. 10 blog post).

Mayor Mamdani has repeatedly said that affordability is the central crisis facing New Yorkers, and he frames most major policy proposals around lowering the cost of living for working‑class residents. His public statements emphasize rent relief, affordable housing construction, cheaper essentials, and investments that help families stay in the city.

Mamdani links affordability to daily essentials, proposing city‑owned grocery stores to reduce food prices; fast, fare‑free buses to cut transportation costs; no‑cost childcare and support for newborns. He argues these reduce the financial burden on families and help them remain in the city. This, he says, can and will be done by levying higher taxes on those who are wealthy.

So, as we think about the affordability conundrum, let’s consider what that means for all our fellow citizens and not just for us in the middle class. And let’s continue to oppose the present administration’s policies that have shifted so much money from the lower classes to the billionaires who are profiting “bigly” from their benefactor in the White House.   

Considering Taiwan: Past and Present

Most of you remember Formosa being the name often used for the island that lies between the East China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. That name came from Portuguese sailors, who, upon sighting the island in 1542, reportedly exclaimed “Ilha Formosa!” – “Beautiful Island.” But ever since that island came under Chinese sovereignty, the official name has been Taiwan. 

Taiwan was incorporated into China’s Qing Empire in 1684 and remained under Chinese sovereignty until it was ceded to Japan in 1895. At the close of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Treaty of Shimonoseki contained a provision that ceded Taiwan to Japan “in perpetuity.”*

On October 25, 1945, the Republic of China (ROC) accepted Japan’s surrender in Taipei, Taiwan, and took over the island’s administration and unilaterally declared Taiwan a province of China and termed it “Retrocession Day.” The Allied powers, though, did not formally recognize that unilateral annexation.

One of my faculty colleagues at Seinan Gakuin University from 1968 to the 1990s was born in Taiwan in the 1930s. He was one of the roughly half a million Japanese residents living in Taiwan at the end of WWII. Almost all these Japanese civilians were sent back to Japan, and this process was largely completed by the end of 1946.

Chiang Kai-shek relocated the Republic of China (ROC) government to Taiwan in December 1949, following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Mainland China under Mao Zedong (or Tse-tung until 1958) officially became the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, and remains so to this day.

Chiang became the sole head of the ROC in a de facto sense by 1928, but he was not formally inaugurated as the first president of China until May 1948, and then he resigned after eight months. After relocating to Taiwan, though, he was re-elected and served as the ROC president for 25 years, from March 1950 until his death (at age 87) in April 1975.

Chiang’s arrival in 1949 was opposed/resisted by many Taiwanese, who viewed Chiang and the leaders of the Nationalist Party as outsiders imposing mainland authority over the island. And indeed, most Taiwanese citizens were unable to vote directly for their president from the ROC’s relocation to Taiwan until the first direct presidential election in 1996.

Taiwan is now under direct political threat from PRC President Xi Jinping, who insists the island will eventually be “reunited” with the mainland and refuses to renounce the use of force.

At the same time, President Trump’s assertive foreign policy has demonstrated a willingness to use military power for strategic objectives, from operations in Venezuela to repeated statements that the United States “needs” Greenland, leaving open the possibility of force.

With Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi—who has led Japan since October—openly stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could justify Japanese military action alongside the United States, the growing normalization of force by major powers risks lowering the threshold for Xi Jinping to pursue reunification of Taiwan by military means.

This piece has been a brief summary of Taiwan’s past from 1684 until 1996, and a bit about the current situation there. But who knows what will happen in the near future! Let’s pray that the uncertain present doesn’t lead to a major conflagration.