My Take | Trump machine gun has the US enemy No 1 China in crosshairs

Oh well, I guess it’s the third world war. A clear method is emerging from Donald Trump’s madness in selecting his top cabinet. In key federal agencies or departments, the president-elect seems determined to do the equivalent of putting Al Capone in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What could possibly go wrong?

But what alarms many people the most are those he will put in charge of China policy, which you can already guess, is to box in America’s enemy No 1, everywhere, every time, in everything. If it’s maximum pressure you seek on China, who can do better than uber-hawks Florida’s senior Republican senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, and Mike “Green Beret” Waltz as national security adviser?

The Hang Seng Index promptly dropped 580 points on the news. Go figure.

“Communist China is the most powerful adversary the United States has faced in living memory,” Rubio wrote in an advisory foreign policy report for Trump during the latter’s election campaign.

Never mind, it’s an absurd statement. China is not even a real communist country. And in living memory? Does that include the Soviet Union? Perhaps the memory and historical knowledge of the 53-year-old senator do not extend to before the 1990s?

The important thing is, the man believes it. He was co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the bipartisan locus of anti-China propaganda in the US Congress. Now Rubio gets to translate paranoid fantasy into actual policy.

As a hardcore member of the House of Representatives’ Republicans’ China Task Force, Waltz matches Rubio’s extremism on China point by point. The Financial Times once quoted him as saying China constituted “an existential threat” to the US. Existential? The overly dramatic phrase is way overused in US discourse, but no one has ever gone broke in Washington by going nuclear on China.