The European “sleepwalker” theorists are out. They want people to believe that nobody is responsible for the looming nuclear holocaust, but that, somehow, the world is just slipping toward the end of humanity.

They are just parroting around the arrant nonsense of a “sleepwalking hypothesis” that supposedly led to World War I, causing 40 million of military and civilian casualties.

And that is against overwhelming historical evidence that such a conflagration was meticulously prepared by Wilhelm II, the German Emperor and the King of Prussia – the man the Russian Tsar Alexander III (“The Peacemaker”) called a “badly brought-up boy.”

A convenient war trigger came when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Austrian occupied Balkans on June 28, 1914. Wilhelm II then not only pushed Austria to start the World War I, but he also gave Vienna assurances of Germany’s full support.

Unfortunately, by that time the German Chancellor Bismarck was dead. He was unceremoniously fired by Wilhelm II in 1890 for urging caution and diplomacy, saying, among other things, that “the whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

The “sleepwalkers” finding acceptable quarters in what Europeans now presumptuously call their post-modern democracies (whatever that means) can be safely ignored, because the course of history shows that German and Japanese capitulations in 1945 were acts of a relatively stable armistice until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Events shaping our world are no accidents

Since that time, the European Cold War peace architecture began to crumble. Russia went through a deepening economic, social and political crisis during the 1990s, coupled with what Moscow considers an existential threat of the powerful trans-Atlantic military alliance knocking at its highly vulnerable western borders.

Asia fared much better, except for an unstable armistice, signed in 1953, on an apparently irreconcilably divided Korean Peninsula.

China agreed to establish formal relations with the United States by signing the Shanghai Communiqué on February 27, 1972, where Beijing thought that it clearly established the principle of one-China policy. Indeed, that document stated that Taiwan "is China's internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere."

The United States agreed that "all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China."

In spite of that, Washington affirms that it did not formally recognize Beijing’s jurisdiction over the self-administered island of Taiwan, and that it opposes any unilateral measures to change the actual status quo.

Beijing does not agree. It insists that Taiwan is a key issue of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and it stands ready to defend its one-China principle by all necessary means.

China is responding to an epochal challenge

Indeed, that’s clearly stated in a white paper “The Taiwan Question and China's Reunification in the New Era," published on August 10, 2022. According to that document, Beijing wants a peaceful reunification with Taiwan in the form of “one country, two systems.” But China will leave no space, including by military actions, to Taiwan’s separatists and their foreign enablers.

Taiwan, however, wants none of that; its current government is strongly opposed to any talk of unification with mainland China. In fact, the governing center-left Democratic Progressive Party is attached to Taiwan’s nationalism, and it favors close relations with Japan, United States and the ten Southeast Asian countries (ASEAN).

That is a stark refusal of one-China policies. And Taiwan’s most recent demonstration of a relentless quest for independence is a slew of high-level visits by American and European parliamentarians, topped up by last week’s visit of the third highest U.S. official – the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Beijing, it seems, will no longer tolerate that. Significant economic sanctions against Taiwan and continuing military exercises – invasion mockups – are signs that China will keep up the pressure until Taiwan caves in and agrees to a unification program.

That, of course, would be a forced change of the status quo the U.S., and its allies, have pledged to stand up against, without ever clarifying what they were prepared to do.

The U.S. has several air carrier battle groups in the vicinity of Taiwan Straits, but, so far, they have not responded to China’s Eastern Theater Command air and naval operations that are completely blocking access to Taiwan island.

China is doing that while cutting off all communication channels with the Pentagon. One more proof that Beijing is firmly determined to isolate Taiwan from the rest of the world and prevent any further one-China violations.

Think of Bismarck again. He died a broken man, desperately waiting at his Friedrichsruh manor to wean Wilhelm II off his destructive ways that would scuttle his life and Germany’s Second Reich. But no call came through. Bismarck, however, consigned some of those thoughts to his biography – a required history reading for any aspiring statesman.