Pat Buchanan: Where will all these war games lead?

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers.

Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands.

Query: With the ISIS caliphate dead and buried, why are 500 U.S. troops still in Syria a year after Donald Trump said we would be pulling them out? What are they doing there to justify risking a clash with Russian troops who are in Syria as the invited allies of the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad, whether we approve of his regime or not?

Nor was this the only U.S.-Russian faceoff last week.

Over the Black Sea, two Russian military jets swept past the nose of an American B-52, one of the bombers on which the airborne leg of our strategic deterrent depends. The Russian Su-27s flew so close to the B-52 that their afterburners shook the eight-engine bomber.

What was a nuclear-capable B-52 doing over the Black Sea, which is to Russia what the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are to us?

That B-52 overflight of the Black Sea was part of an exercise in which six U.S. B-52s overflew all 30 NATO nations in one day — from the U.S. and Canada to Spain and the Balkans and to the eastern Baltic Sea — in a military exercise to test Russian air defenses.

Also in late August, on the other side of the world, China conducted a huge naval exercise in the South and East China seas and Taiwan Strait.

After an American U-2 overflew its ships during the exercise, Beijing denounced the “naked provocation” and test-fired four ballistic missiles into the South China Sea. Two of those missiles have been described as “carrier killers.” They are said to have been developed to attack aircraft carriers such as the 100,000-ton vessels that serve as the backbone of the fleets the U.S. Navy deploys in these same waters.

The U.S. has been sending its own warships into what an angry China claims are its territorial waters around the atolls and reefs it has fortified and converted into air and naval bases in the Paracel and Spratly islands.

What exactly is our ultimate goal here?

China has also been ramping up pressure on Taiwan by having military planes and warships circumnavigate the island and by sending aircraft across midpoint in the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan recently purchased 66 US F-16s for delivery over the next 10 years. Yet, its armed forces are no match for Beijing’s. And China has put the world on notice that any move by Taiwan toward independence would cross a red line and be crushed by Beijing.

Is America prepared to fight China over fortified rocks and reefs in the South China Sea to which we have no territorial claim? Are we prepared to fight China to prevent the gradual absorption of Taiwan, which Richard Nixon conceded in 1972 we do not deny is a part of China?

Potential collisions between the U.S., Russia or China are not even back-burner issues this election year. Meanwhile, we are consumed by the coronavirus, the crashed economy, racial divisions and riots that have ripped apart cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha since the Memorial Day death of George Floyd.

Still, Leon Trotsky had a point when he said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”