Beijing is not stupid and the Taiwan question is not existential to Xi or the CCP. There would be no reason for this conflict to escalate to either country's homeland, let alone into strategic nuclear war. (Tactical nukes hitting e.g. carrier groups may be on the table.)
The U.S. has plenty of West Pacific purely-military assets which would be in play for China should the Taiwan Strait require U.S. protection.
A war where nuclear weapons are used on the battlefield would be a nuclear war by definition. It is also one of the more realistic scenarios leading to a broader nuclear war.
> But it still wouldn't merit a strategic nuclear counterstrike.
I don't believe this is widely accepted.
Consider that the last time the US lost significant naval assets, we committed to a hugely costly war and effectively annihilated the attacker. It was the original impetus for developing nuclear weapons in the first place, and it remains the only time they've been used against an enemy.
> Point is, there is a lot of room for escalation before we go into strategic nuclear war.
My understanding of the military and political thinking around the use of nuclear weapons is that the use of tactical nuclear weapons inevitably leads to their strategic use.
Destroying a US carrier via conventional means would carry significant risk of nuclear retaliation. Doing it through nuclear means effectively guarantees it.
China has a strong no first use policy, at least publicly. Luckily, it is unlikely they'd attack a carrier battle group with nuclear weapons.
They also have a strategy of assured retaliation and maintain a countervalue stance. Hopefully, we won't have to find out whether or not they will follow through with it...
I missed this news. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. This is terrifying and probably one of the most significant changes in (public) nuclear policy in years.
> China has a strong no first use policy, at least publicly.
That statement isn't worth the electrons we're wasting on displaying it. Authoritarian regimes have no policies. Their "policy" every day is what the autocrat feels like when he wakes up, and if he's constipated during his morning dump the "policy" can change before breakfast.
The last time around, Nuclear weapons were not available to complicate the equation. This time, the response will need to be painful enough to punish the aggressor but not too painful that you would risk a strike on major cities. It won't be pretty.
> the large majority are certainly against the CCP taking over
It was even, occasionally, integration leaning. Then Xi screwed the pooch by getting impatient with Hong Kong. There is an alternative universe where Beijing was patient and peacefully absorbed both islands.
Taiwan hasn't leaned toward reuinification for quite some time now. Their current president explicitly rejects the "one country, two systems" concept. The previous president was a member of the opposition party, and barely won with 51% of the votes.
As of a year ago, only 12% of the public polled supported reunification. Interestingly, a year prior that number was only 10% (probably within the margin for error, though). A majority (54%) actually do support outright independence, with the rest being a mix of keeping the status quo and not having an opinion.
The current Hong Kong mess only kicked off in early- to mid-2019; I think it'd be hard to attribute the 2019 poll's 10% number to Xi getting impatient with HK. Even if it was 20% pre-HK-protests, that's still not a big number, and I think that would still be a stretch to assume.
Either way, I expect somewhere close to 0% of Taiwanese people would be ok with China taking over via military invasion. And I do agree that the HK fiasco makes it even less likely that many previously on-the-fence Taiwanese people would fall down on the side of even peaceful reunification.
Taiwan is an incredibly different place to the countries you listed. It's a very modern society with a homogeneous population.
Most importantly to this discussion, Taiwan has mandatory military service for the express purpose of defending the island against Chinese attack. Taiwan is a country that should be assisted in it's independence, if it comes down to it.
There's a bunch to say about this, not much of it all that good.
First, consider the source. The mere fact that this polling is conducted by a think tank should give anyone - regardless of political party or ideological position - some pause, as think tanks are explicitly "state-external agents of change". Advocacy organizations, in other words. This is fine, such as it is, but as think tanks of all stripes present themselves as anything but ideological or partisan (including this one, the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs) and often seek to couch themselves in the ostensibly more dispassionate language of science and academia, there's frequently a bit of a trick being played. I think we should watch out for that. It's cheesy to say, maybe, that "these people have an agenda", but these people have an agenda. They're not a university (which, yes, is also occupied by human beings who are biased), but they'd be happy if you thought they were.
Second, and relatedly, we need to look at what a think tank's interest is. Twelve seconds of Googling shows that the Chicago Council's current President was for 4 years the Permanent US Representative to NATO -- not exactly someone with a disinterested relationship to American empire and how this country treats the rest of the world, Taiwan/China or otherwise. (And NATO is nothing if not expansionist, continuing to grow -- hell, to exist -- long after its raison d'etre, the USSR, ceased to be.) I'm editorializing / speculating here, but these are the same ghouls who start every American war, the same guys at the UN handing slides to Colin Powell about non-existent (which they knew) Iraqi WMD.
Lastly there's the poll itself. I don't have time to dig into the details, but in my view the poll's results -- or anyway, the headline of its results -- fits perfectly in the steady drumbeat, growing ever louder, of civilizational confrontation with China, and the manufacturing of American consent for such a project. In my view there's some pretty straightforward Chomskian stuff happening in the zeitgeist around this, and this poll headline only serves to further it: "See? Americans are okay with confronting China aggressively!" Which of course gives elites permission to push more for these stances, a nice feedback loop. With headlines like these, they're laying the groundwork for bloodshed in the not-too-distant future. They know this full well, and they're okay with it, because neither they nor their children will be sent to die for this paranoia.
My wish for HN readers looking at this would be to be critical, even suspicious, of things like these, regardless of what one thinks about Taiwan. There's a method here.
EDIT: And, in case anyone's feeling rah-rah themselves about "defending" Taiwan, know that we'd get our shit absolutely rocked in a war with China over Taiwan. It'd be bloody, it'd be long, and we'd lose. Not to be critical of think tanks only to turn around and cite one, but plenty of entities, including RAND and the US military itself, have done war games and simulations about this scenario and it does not end well for the US. Easily googleable.
We could go on for a decade about this without convincing each other. Probably not productive.
So I'll just say that if the situation were inverted -- if e.g. Russia was sitting in Mexico "promoting democracy" -- we'd be engaging in "multiple unprovoked invasions" too. Reagan and NATO told Gorbachev pre-collapse that there'd be no NATO expansion in the future. They lied. We've forgotten that. You think the Russians have? Should they?
Furthermore, the situation was inverted -- look at the Cuban missile crisis. Does anyone say that the US shouldn't have threatened to vaporize the island to get the Russians out of there? It's our backyard! Surely we were justified in feeling threatened.
I don't care for the Russian regime whatsoever, and Putin's a little Napoleon-complex turd. A weak, insecure little man. But I'm sorry pal, we're the ones threatening these people in their neck of the woods. NATO should've disbanded the day the hammer and sickle stopped flying over the Kremlin.
My claim is that you'd behave in the exact same way.
NATO is a defensive alliance. It's not threatening Russia. It's not planning to invade Russia.
Yes, it's moving eastward. (And yes, apparently we promised not to.) But why is it moving eastward? Because NATO invaded, say, Poland? No, because Poland desperately wanted into NATO. Why? Because they've had a taste (or a belly full) of Russian aggression, invasion, occupation, and even partition. They wanted into NATO because they're afraid of Russia.
So how are we the ones threatening these people again? The only threat we pose to Russia is to not let them push other people around. And if that's a threat to them, well, it says more about Russia than it says about NATO.
Again, from the Russian side, it was first Poland that joined, then talk of Ukraine joining. So an ever east-ward expansion of NATO. Meanwhile economic sanctions and exclusion. When that happened, Russia simply reacted. Much like the U.S. reacted to Cuba. Russian aggression is reactive and the predictable outcome of the behavior of NATO and Western economies.
Is it any wonder that Ukraine wanted to join NATO, given what happened with Crimea?
I'll make no judgment as to whether Crimea and its people are better off as a part of Russia or Ukraine (they very well might be better off a part of Russia), but invading and annexing is just not ok. (Same as if China decided to do the same to Taiwan.)
I just don't see the problem with NATO expansion. As a parent poster pointed out, it's a defensive alliance; if Russia has a problem with other countries promising to defend each other in the case that Russia wants to get aggressive, that's, well... Russia's problem.
Nope. "Is it any wonder that X, given Y?" says nothing about chronology. "Is it any wonder that she wanted to divorce him, given that he killed her?" would be an oxymoron under your erroneous reasoning; with your logic she would have to be dead before she could want a divorce. To reasonable people, the murder was obviously just the culmination of a long chain of events.
> Again, from the Russian side, it was first Poland that joined, then talk of Ukraine joining. So an ever east-ward expansion of NATO.
So what? When the western-most provinces of Russia itself start revolutions to liberate themselves from Moscow, and promptly apply for NATO membership, will that also be NATO's fault; will you still refuse to see that it says more about Russia?
Russian aggression is "reactive"... To the reactions to Russian aggression.
Ok, name them. But remember Russia has never involved itself where it does not have deep cultural ties. Or where it's actually been invited, like Syria.
Both Georgia and Ukraine "invite" (plead really) NATO and the US to help them. They know that unless they have a Putin lapdog as head of state, they will face and have faced brutal consequences.
A significant proportion of Ukraine's population does not want Nato or the West. They want Russia... so much so that there is an ongoing civil war in Ukraine, and there are self-proclaimed republics in the East of Ukraine
>Kievan Rus' (Old East Slavic: Роусь, romanized: Rusĭ, or роусьскаѧ землѧ romanized: rusĭskaę zemlę, "Rus' land") or Kyivan Rus',[2][3] was a loose federation of East Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century,[4][5] under the reign of the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik.[5] The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestors
Copied from the Wikipedia, so if anything that suggests we need to bring back the USSR and reunite all the Slavs under one flag.
роусьскаѧ землѧ literally translates to "Russian land"
> if anything that suggests we need to bring back the USSR and reunite all the Slavs under one flag
Okay, taking that at face value, nothing says Moscow has to be in charge. And the Mongols once controlled Russian territory. Speaking of which, Moscow hasn't controlled its eastern territories for long--should we dissolve Russian influence east of the Urals?
Returning "historical" lands is the casus belli of every dictator. It's arbitrary, empty and infinitely extensible.
They were helping you to commit war crimes in Iraq/Afghanistan. They should have stayed at home, and cultivated a healthy relationship with Russia instead.
Interesting that the US fled from Kabul, leaving Ukrainian and Georgian mercenaries, but taking service dogs with them. But, by all means, continue to believe in American good will. Anyone who continues to believe in the US is an idiot. Get real.
B) is claimed as predecessor by the current Russian regime.
It's not as if Georgia ever claimed Crimea, Siberia, and the Baltic states on the premise that "They were once ruled by Stalin, a Georgian, so they belong to us".
It's hard to say if your desperate non-sequiturs in defense of the kleptocratic Russian goon regime are more funny than pathetic or more pathetic than funny.
I would probably agree with the broader outcome of your argument, but I don’t think rationalizing the violation of territorial sovereignty through “cultural ties” is a very strong foundation. If the rule of law is to exist, borders have to be respected - they are known, measurable. Cultural ties has a long history of rationalizing invasion, and is demonstrably (from historic examples) a very nebulous and qualitative argument that can be molded to fit needs of the invader. Just because we speak the same language or have a similar hat style doesn’t mean I want your government controlling my town and its resources.
> But remember Russia has never involved itself where it does not have deep cultural ties
What a convenient way of excluding entirely relevant points of argument. Ukraine suffered the first forced change of national borders in Europe since World War II
Heavy cultural ties does not grant anyone a right to annex the territory of another sovereign nation
> know that we'd get our shit absolutely rocked in a war with China over Taiwan
This is at best debatable, it’s definitely not a forgone conclusion. A war for Taiwan would be a largely naval and aerial confrontation, and the US holds an incredibly significant qualitative lead in those two areas.
If you believe the military on this, and I’m not saying you necessarily should, none of the war games paint a good picture for our success in Taiwan. There are many reasons for that - response time being a big one. China could physically occupy the territory rapidly before we could show up to present a serious defense. Then you’re not repelling them from the island but rooting them out. Next to their logistical home base. With significant trade interruption. It’s not a sparsely populated Falkland Island scenario.
So given that the military says it would suck, I’m would not agree that it’s at best debatable. A good outcome is doubtful to start with based on war game exercises to test out this specific subject. It’s an upward fight to get it into “debatable” territory, though I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning.
I've seen material saying the opposite. The buildup necessary to properly invade Taiwan would take several weeks at least, and would be impossible to hide. Taiwan would be as ready as they could be for an amphibious invasion. Amphibious invasions are incredibly hard to pull off, and rely heavily on the element of surprise.
Given that we have a pretty good example of such an invasion in living memory I'd say it is doable, and China would be in a pretty good position to attempt this compared to that other example where the attacking force had to go against a heavily fortified position.
> the attacking force had to go against a heavily fortified position.
It mostly wasn’t. The Atlantic wall was mainly a fevered Hitler dream. Parts were impressive and incredibly strong. However even strong parts were mostly taken in a few hours.
It was devastating, but was less than the Allies estimated before launching. The actual deaths on the day were less than it was feared the airborne alone would suffer, and utterly dwarfed by those from the battle of Normandy as a whole.
I've visited the war graves there on multiple occasions helping people to locate graves of family members. The numbers are astounding, and the battles went on for far longer than just that first day. But on that first day alone the casualties are well into the thousands.
So on D-day it was less than predicted, but once the beachhead was established it was far from over. The total number of dead is in excess of 200,000 on the allied side alone in the battle of Normandy.
I highly doubt that retaking Taiwan after a successful invasion would be something that the general public would have the stomach for, I also highly doubt that putting the required number of troops to defend Taiwan in harms way if it came to that would be an option.
On the Chinese side there would not be any question about whether or not public opinion would be behind such a move.
Spy satellites didn't exist during WWII, for one thing (spy planes, sure, and I know elaborate ruses were made for that exact reason, but satellites are a different beast).
For another, the Allies gained significant air superiority well in advance, over the channel and over northern France, for it to happen.
Also, the German surface fleet was already mostly toast or otherwise neutralized, and even their submarines couldn't really operate in the channel with much success (see again: air superiority).
Further, Germany couldn't focus only on repelling a naval invasion in one small area—they were fighting the Allies on the Italian front already, and supporting a huge front in Russia, and had to garrison large regions of Northern Europe against possible air or naval invasion (I mean, the Allies had already tried that once in Market Garden, so it was a real possibility), not to mention to suppress occupied territories.
Plus, we're not at war and have relatively free travel. That, plus modern tech, makes spying much easier. Even if the satellites didn't spot it, a person would. We're talking about a lot of equipment, ships, and people moving around.
I would agree that the pace of war has accelerated such that some of those steps might take hours rather than months to years, but I still think the build-up would be nearly impossible to hide. You need a lot of equipment to land a force and then supply & reinforce them such that they don't become sitting ducks, and it has to be nearby from the beginning.
"But they could destroy the satellites, at least".
OK sure, but 1) they better get them all, and 2) the US would begin moving forces toward and to Taiwan within hours, if that happened—it's pointless, because they'd have already tipped their hand. It would confer no advantage for preparing a surprise invasion.
> 2) the US would begin moving forces toward and to Taiwan within hours, if that happened—it's pointless, because they'd have already tipped their hand. It would confer no advantage for preparing a surprise invasion.
Those troops would either have to arrive on planes or in boats, and in either case they'd be heading toward an absolute hornets nest of missiles.
The most likely thing if things pop off in the western Pacific is the US fleets immediately turn tail and sail east as fast as they can to avoid ending up on the bottom of the ocean. The fleets haven't faced a modern opponent with a full armament of advanced anti-ship missiles.
The only realistic scenario where the US 'wins' in a major confrontation with China is to use nuclear weapons first, and we would still take many hits to our own cities in the process. There's no scenario where millions of Americans don't die in that war.
I wasn't posting about the winability of a US/China war, but the likelihood of a surprise invasion. If the fighting's already started, it's not a surprise.
[EDIT] that is, I don't think you can hide a build-up for a surprise invasion of Taiwan given modern surveillance, and fairly free travel to/from China, with no existing state of war. I think any actions likely to improve China's ability to hide invasion prep, would also make it very clear what they're doing and kick things off even earlier, so, still no surprise invasion.
That's a reasonable assessment. If military confrontations kick off, it's probably going to be at the tail end of a lot of buildup probably including diplomatic breakdown, major economic sanctions on both sides, etc. I would wager that before China invades they would've already cut the US off from any supplies that might help in a conflict, and vice versa, for example.
Afghanistan is about as irrelevant of an example as I could think of in this case. I struggle to think of ways in which it is even remotely related.
War is about supply chains. Even if (big if) you managed to land several tens of thousands of Chinese regulars onto a Taiwanese beach, they are toast if you cannot resupply them. To establish these supply lines you would have to basically eliminate all enemy submarines, surface fleet, aircraft, and nearby airbases. It is a near impossible task. If the Chinese managed to do this, it would easily be the greatest military achievement in human history. It would make D-Day look like amateur hour.
This won't be a war. This will be a military showing up and declaring, "this territory is ours" when the established government leadership flees.
This is effectively what the Taliban did. But since you struggle with that example, how about looking at Russia's take over of Crimea in 2014?
My prediction is, there will be widespread protests in Taiwan, which Chinese sleeper agents will attempt to turn violent. Then Chinese commandos storm the presidential building taking Tsai Ing-wen and her cabinet hostage, the military will be ordered to stand down. Then the subsequent riots will be crushed.
You're saying Taiwan will essentially give up without a fight, which is laughable. If you think the Taiwanese and the Afghans were in similar situations, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
If Taiwan were just a land border neighbor to China, you might have a point. But that 100 miles of water is literally the main factor that has kept Taiwan independent since the Chinese civil war. To ignore that is downright idiotic. It is called GEO-politics for a reason. Human history is mostly shaped by geography.
I'm not expressing any position here but it should be noted that the strait between Taiwan and China's mainland is not that wide and any navy would be hard pressed to defend itself against land based anti-ship missiles. It's just very asymmetrical.
Most surveys you encounter are published to either change your mind (see, your view is a weird minority take) or reinforce your viewpoint (see, smart people think the same way, you must be smart).
Taiwan is a shit show. If we had a magic wand, of course they should be defended from ChiCom aggression. We don’t have a magic wand. We don’t have the political or cultural willpower to get into winnable kinetic conflict with China. Witnessing the buffoons running the military/intelligence apparatus in the US today, who would want to entrust their kids’ lives to it in a new land war in Asia? The best this country could do is unshackle Japan and Korea and let the chips fall where they may, hoping if things got bad enough that India had some influence in the outcome as well.
Sad, but if the world did nothing as the Crimean peninsula was annexed, or as Hong Kong was blatantly steamrollered, I have a hard time putting faith in any western power going to the mat for Taiwan, whether France, Germany, or UK. Nobody’s in the global empire business anymore for all intents and purposes, even China. China’s has an increasing level of influence in the world but it’s territorial interests, while expansive, are all close to home.
I agree with most of that. To me the most terrifying thing is the intense uninhibited popularity of articles describing some of China's activities as genocide. This to me is the type of ultimate 'rationale' that will be used to motivate hundreds of millions of Americans to work hard to attempt to murder hundreds of millions of Chinese. And visa versa, American wartime activities will be used to motivate the Chinese to murder us.
But I believe if the strategic advantages the US enjoys, such as shipping lanes and the relationship with Taiwan manufacturing, are disrupted, then the US dollar could lose more than half of it's value and therefore drastically reduce the wealth of more than a billion people. This is the real thing that will motivate WWIII, with all of the propaganda about what monsters the other side is used to dehumanize and make the mass killing seem moral.
Genocide specifically refers to the organized extermination of a people. That's not what's happening in Xinjiang. Nobody claims that. They claim it's a 'cultural genocide', which is a very incendiary way of saying China is trying to stamp out Uyghur culture.
During the first world war, the UK made a lot of claims about what Germany was doing in Belgium. It turned out that these claims were untrue. The Germans were undoubtedly brutal, but they were also not nearly so monstrous as the allies made them out to be.
This lead to a lot of people treating early reports of the Holocaust with skepticism.
I think the chinese state is also undoubtedly brutal, but nobody claims Australia is committing genocide when they demolish aboriginal holy sites, arrest aboriginal people, or take away their children. A pattern of brutality centered around reproductive rights, the destruction of cultural symbols, and mass incarceration is common to many oppressed minorities around the world.
All this stuff is obviously terrible, and China should be condemned for its reversal of a traditionally great record on minority rights, but turning the Ughyurs into proxies for an essentially cynical US-China rivalry helps noone.
PS: I also imagine those reports are likely all true. Police are typically brutal. Police in authoritarian regimes are worse. That doesn't make it genocide.
Well, they don't meet the definition the other poster put up - unless you want to interpret it in a very loose sense that would certainly tar a lot of nations, for instance India.
I'm not really attached to the word or it's definition. It just occurs to me that 'genocide' is the causus beli for every well-remembered war the west have had since WW2. When the word starts getting thrown around in the middle of a trade war, when US hegemony is being contested, when the world has a new number one in terms of economic and industrial might, well, I think its deployment is basically cynical.
Insofar as it has already forced changes for (I think) the better in Chinese government policy, I'm glad. But I also think the airtime would be better spent less cynically, on countries like India, who are probably way easier to pressure and frankly just as bad. If world leaders like the UK go on air to call what's happening in Xinjiang genocide while selling arms to the Saudis so they can bomb the Houthis, then they just look about as cynical as they are. And that's what the Chinese domestic audience probably thinks, because ultimately, the west doesn't have moral credibility when it only makes a fuss over human rights when it's also in the west's strategic interest.
That's a common misconception. The definition adopted by the UN in the 1940s, states:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
* Killing members of the group;
* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I think people are misunderstanding what I am claiming.
I am not saying that isn't the right word. The problem is that people are so enthusiastic about declaring it as genocide, without a single qualification, and no concern about the consequences in terms of using it as "justification" for a global war.
It's horrible what they are doing. But the problem is people are just saying "yep, they are evil" and are going to consent to any and all types of mass killing against the Chinese on that basis. Similarly the Chinese will find things Americans have done, say they are all evil, and proceed with the mass killing attempts (war) with a clear conscience.
Upvoted but how could anyone have known whether or not iraq had or was about to have WMDs if they actively resisted and subverted all of the internationally sanctioned inspections? Perhaps they could have attached some probability to each possibility but I have yet to find good evidence that they knew.
Second, in a war with China wouldn’t the elites and their families be just as dead as everyone else after nuclear bombs land on major US cities? I can imagine elites or private companies encouraging political movements toward war or tangential to war but I can’t imagine them wanting war to actually happen.
> how could anyone have known whether or not iraq had or was about to have WMDs if they actively resisted and subverted all of the internationally sanctioned inspections?
> how could anyone have known whether or not iraq had or was about to have WMDs
Powell, on behalf of the U.S. government, said they were certain, and was wrong. I guess one could wonder if it was on purpose or not, but credibility is damaged either way.
> Upvoted but how could anyone have known whether or not iraq had or was about to have WMDs if they actively resisted and subverted all of the internationally sanctioned inspections? Perhaps they could have attached some probability to each possibility but I have yet to find good evidence that they knew.
At the time, an awful lot of current and past weapons inspectors who'd worked in Iraq, including US nationals, said US claims were complete bullshit.
[EDIT] Oh and then there's how they relaxed their resistance to inspections in the face of imminent invasion, such that we'd have been able to uncover anything they'd somehow managed to hide, but disarming them was never the point, invasion was, so we withdrew the inspectors and invaded anyway. If anyone had any doubts left, that should have erased them.
> know that we'd get our shit absolutely rocked in a war with China over Taiwan
Then we should make haste to station more military in Taiwan. A significant, sustained increase of presence on the island itself, instead of only aircraft carriers.
Once that has been accomplished, recognize Taiwan's independence. 2 months later, hold a referendum in Taiwan on becoming a US state with a few special rights. This is done with half the fleet there, plus the very heavy presence on bases on the island.
Taiwan free, China contained. Plus the US have a good base to project power in the future.
I've listened to a few US military strategists talk about it, and they generally say that forward deployment is a good way to lose all your forward deployed forces in the early hours of an engagement. So deploying loads of troops would probably not be a good tactic.
The other side of this is the Chinese would view it as intolerably provocative, just as the US would if China started deploying a ton of troops in Cuba, if Cuba was a good deal closer. So you'd massively increase the likelyhood of a war.
I think realistically speaking, China won't ever invade Taiwan unless they are forced to do so by domestic political forces. That is way more likely to happen if they feel already in a cold-war situation. The best protection for Taiwan would be therefore if all the aforementioned US military strategists that go on panels and talk up war just went on holiday for a few months or years or honestly, decades.
> My wish for HN readers looking at this would be to be critical
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that after saying:
> I don't have time to dig into the details
So essentially you're attempting to discredit this poll while at the same time admitting you don't feel like expending the effort to do any more than what amounts to ad hominem and just-so arguments.
Not saying you're wrong -- you may be right! -- but your argument is pretty low on substance here.
Thanks for writing this. I've been noticing the same disturbing trend - and I hate it because people don't realize how easy it is to end up in a dumb war by accident.
If you have a whole load of talking heads talking war, politicians feel like they have to forward deploy troops on both sides, then there's some stupid accident, and suddenly you're in WW3. There is no rational reason for China to invade Taiwan, and there is absolutely no realistic military way for the US to defend Taiwan, especially when you start thinking about stuff like missile bombardments or blockades.
The most likely outcome from talking tough on either side is that Xi Jiping, or the US president, gets forced into unwise strategic decisions by domestic political pressure. Then you get one of the aforementioned accidents, then all hell can break loose.
I think that we should be helping Taiwan now and doing whatever it take so that it doesn’t get to that. Defending Taiwan with troops is world war three even if it is the right thing to do.
> we should be helping Taiwan now and doing whatever it take so that it doesn’t get to that
If you look at the questions asked, the most support is for these measures. Signing a free-trade agreement, recognizing Taiwan and supporting its international recognition, et cetera.
At the point we get to even selling arms to Taiwan, the split become even, mirroring the support for sending troops. (In defence of that divergence, sending troops would presumably be in response to a Chinese offensive. Sending arms is a provocation in itself.)
>> At the point we get to even selling arms to Taiwan, the split become even, mirroring the support for sending troops. (In defence of that divergence, sending troops would presumably be in response to a Chinese offensive. Sending arms is a provocation in itself.)
The US has been selling arms to Taiwan for decades:
>> Sorry, I meant strategic weaponry. Long-range weapons that would let Taiwan legitimately threaten e.g. Beijing.
The US has naval vessels and aircraft that can do that from the strait of Taiwan or elsewhere.
Why would the US sell such weapons to Taiwan when the US could employ them directly if needed?
In theory the US could position ground-based strategic weapons in Taiwan (Cuban missile crisis-style), but that would be too aggressive and could provoke an attack. Besides, a submarine, ship, or aircraft could employ similar weapons without being a fixed target.
It would be WWIII whether the US defends it or not. Because it gives China free reign to invade other areas, such as the disputed South China Sea. This will lead to conflict with Vietnam and the Phillipines. The dominoes will continue to fall until the US intervenes eventually to protect de facto NATO countries Australia and New Zealand.
So as not to slop over its brims. It has been found that having the body of water exactly aligned with its containing basin at all times is the optimal solution, especially for residents of coastal areas.
More that their Commonwealth status means Britain would intervene, which means the US probably would too, and at that point it's about 90% of the way to being a NATO action even if no-one else joins.
Even so, I think Britain refusing to aid a Commonwealth member under credible foreign military threat would be pretty surprising. More so with Australia and New Zealand especially, since they share a head of state. Besides, ANZUS and Five Power exist to pull the US and Britain, respectively, into a conflict that threatens those states.
New Zealand will cave and sell out, long before any war comes along. It’s bad for business to have principles, and we have stuck to that course over multiple China issues and multiple governments. ‘Our’ politicians (are they ours or Chinas?) have had financial interests in China throughout their terms and there was even a Chinese communist party member and trained Chinese intelligence member in our parliament.
Although Vietnam keeps its head down and is welcoming and nice to US, they're still a single party system named the Communist Party dabbling in marxist and modern state capital systems. They still predictably squash dissent and put them in gulags/reducation camps, and the lack of this news only points to them being too small and insignificant for us to care.
Do we really care if two Communist Parties attack each other?
Communist, democratic, (il)liberal -- the rhetoric all doesn't matter. Containment of China and an international balance of power is the issue, not which flavor of governance domestically.
>Although Vietnam keeps its head down and is welcoming and nice to US, they're still a single party system named the Communist Party dabbling in marxist and modern state capital systems.
China and Vietnam have fought a war with each other more recently than either has fought the US.
In our lifetime we will again see the US Navy based at Cam Ranh Bay, and the USAF based at Tan Son Nhut. (Same with Subic and Clark in the Philippines.)
So is helping Estonia after a Russian invasion. And that’s already part of NATO Article V. “Whatever it takes so it doesn’t happen” is a long laundry list of things, but number one is always to convince the attacker that the invasion would cost more than could be gained.
Saying that Taiwan will definitely be defended and hesitating after the fact is much better than hesitating in policy.
Lithuania would get invaded long before Estonia, after all, once Lithuania is 'done' the rest of the Baltics will be cut off from Western Europe by land.
Note that it is only a very tiny strip of land that separates the Russian enclave at the Baltic sea from Belarus, a country very much friendly to Russia. I'd happily bet that there are many different plans on how to occupy that strip in a hurry should it come to that and just as many plans on how to deal with those attempts.
I think there are two mindsets here. Russia is a gangster, brutal and clumsy, yet rational. However Russia is also barely hanging on to first world status, they are not a global balance of power threat. China is a threat to shifting the balance of power decisively towards China and away from America and the West. They mean it when they say this will be the China century.
The problem is that your opponent also knows this. And therefore will discount the fact that you said it and make their own judgment about whether you actually would respond.
Large wars happen when antagonists misjudge how protagonists will react.
Therefore it is extremely important to only say that you will do things that you absolutely know that you will do, to take the guessing out of it for your opponents. Because if they credibly think you might have bluffed, at some point they will call with drastic results. (And every time you're caught in a bluff, your credibility goes down for the next conflict. See the German invasion of Austria.)
This is true for a purely bilateral situation like US-China, but the situation is different if there are more parties involved. For example, the public policy drives what policy other countries have (mutual assurances). Policy also can’t be merely an oral statement it’s also action. A credible policy to defend Taiwan means massive investment in ability to do so. It’s what makes the bluff expensive enough to call at any odds.
Oh, please. Anschluss isn't even remotely comparable to the possible China - Taiwan situation. If you meant that about the reaction of other countries i think you can't really draw any meaningful parallels there either.
Oh please, yourself. Winston Churchill wrote an excellent series on WW II and the invasion of Austria was one of the key points that WW II could have been prevented.
The fact that Britain and France failed to enforce the Treaty of Versailles after Hitler's violations demonstrated to Hitler that he could continue violating the treaty and nobody would stand up to him.
That is why, when Germany decided to invade Poland, they didn't expect that Britain and France would actually fight. And the cowardice that they had seen displayed left them convinced that Britain would quickly sue for peace when put to the test.
Furthermore HAD Britain and France responded with force in 1938, Germany wasn't ready and would have backed down. In fact the big reason why Germany wanted Austria was to secure Austrian steel that Germany needed for war manufacturing.
If you put a line in the sand and your enemy crosses it without consequence, you shouldn't expect that they will believe your next line in the sand, no matter how strongly worded your statement is.
China initiating military invasion of Taiwan would start WWIII, the US has no choice but to defend. The world is likely more than a decade away from any sort of reliable chip infrastructure with parity to the current south Asian concentration. China is driving the world to nuclear conflict, especially with the first strike noises they've been making in recent months.
From a development point of view, I suspect taking step back to the previous semiconductor node would be preferable to a nuclear WWIII. However, humanitarian concerns and international obligations seem to be a better framework for analyzing this sort of decision, and thankfully that's all over my head. Hopefully it doesn't come up.
Defend _how_ though? How do you defend against an adversary with ICBMs, fleet, and air force who, on top of that, can draft an army that exceeds the entire population of the US? "Nuclear conflict" only works as a deterrent when the situation is one-sided. That is very much not the case here.
China could certainly wreck Taiwan with air and missile strikes, however an invasion is far more difficult. China has limited amphibious lift capacity and those ships would be very vulnerable while crossing the strait. Due to geography there are only a few beaches and ports where an invasion force could put ashore, and those all have extensive defenses. So it doesn't matter how large China's population is if they can't get them to Taiwan, and then maintain the necessary logistic train.
From a traditional amphibious assault? Absolutely, because they are a fucking nightmare to pull off. Amphibious assault basically negates the population advantage that China has.
Of course if China wanted to just bombard Taiwan into rubble, there is nothing Taiwan could do about that. But the cost/benefit of such an action is really bad.
Amphibious invasions are notoriously difficult. Prior to D-Day, the most large-scale invasion in history that went successfully was what, William the Conqueror in England?
There are a whole bunch of modern examples, no need to go back to Willy the Bastard.
* At least three big landings in the Gallipoli campaign in WW1
* Dozens of huge naval landings in all theatres in WW2. The Med, North Africa, the Baltic, Rangoon, Pacific island hopping, you name it. Besides D-Day, the battle of Anzio was also huge with 100s of thousands participating.
* The naval invasion of Hainan in 1950 is particularly pertinent, pitting the Chinese communists against the Republic of China.
* Battle of Inchon in Korean War. Big, decisive, victorious naval landing.
And yes there were sizeable successful opposed naval landing operations in every sizeable war since - Suez, Vietnam, Falklands, Iran-Iraq, Gulf Wars 1 and 2. There only weren’t any in Afghanistan because it is landlocked and at 10k feet altitude…
Actually, no. It's the USSR that stopped the invasion of Great Britain. It would have fallen otherwise, if Germany wasn't otherwise occupied. Also, Hitler didn't have Germans on both sides of the moat, nor did he have an extensive embedded network of intelligence agents in all places that matter.
Missiles would get through, then there would be retaliatory strikes, and all those pretty little islands China has been building will get reduced to rubble. China talks a good show, but they've got nowhere near the arsenal the US has, and if China is going to fuck the world's supply chains anyway, I have no doubt their factories and foundries would be destroyed. There's a lot of naval and air power concentrated in that part of the world, and the US doesn't need to worry about the land war in Asia conundrum . Not to mention cyber warfare, and the immediate isolation from the west. The US isn't just a nuclear superpower, it's got an absurdly over-large conventional arsenal.
I wonder how many of the people that wouldn’t support it understand just how critical Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is. Not only critical to our national interest, but to their day-to-day lives.
Look at what the current semiconductor shortage is doing to our internal manufacturing industry. I don’t think many Americans would be OK with a genocidal dictatorship holding a switch that could literally turn our economy off and on at will.
This is a bad reason to go to war. It would be cheaper, to say nothing of cost fewer lives, to spend the tens of billions of dollar it would cost to replicate that capacity in America.
And time. Say we even put $1T into replacing TSMC's capabilities stateside, it would take years, potentially decades, to get the people, knowledge, processes and technology.
This seems to be a popular talking point but also completely wrong.
It's the least critical bits of the east asian semi supply chain, i.e. not essential to military and majority of established industries. Leading edge TSMC fabs gets destroyed, we lose a few nodes and some industries / gamers get set back 10 years. Start a broader war with PRC over TW, PRC will start hitting semi supply chains in Korean / Japan where US assets are and basically global semi infra get set back decades. The difference is a few high tech US industries collapsing versus essentially all of US high tech manufacturing / way of life collapsing for decades. Semi capability is so rare and concentrated in east Asia that PRC has the button on silicon mutually assured distruction. At the end of the day, US/west who has broad leadin IC loses much more than PRC in a semi MAD scenario.
It would cost American lives. We're war weary--I don't think we've fought a legitimate war in generations. That takes a lot to get over. It's, ironically, similar to the situation that led to European appeasement the last time this happened.
No, Americans love a good war. If they want one and high approval ratings for their elected officials, it just needs a catalyst of some sort. Spanish American War (USS Maine), WW2 (Pearl Harbor), Vietnam War (Gulf of Tonkin), Afghanistan War (9/11), Iraq War (WMDs). Catalyst can be real or imagined. It seems there is a lot of well-deserved mistrust in China by the West, so a war with China wouldn't be surprising even if only by proxy (Cold War).
I thought WMDs were the lie that justified invading Iraq? The Afghanistan lie was that ObL was hiding in a cave there rather than openly living down the street from the Pakistan Military Academy. I'll admit that as the stories pile up it gets hard to keep them straight. It seems possible that the war pigs have gone a bit overboard with the stories in the last several decades. They've turned the knob so far that it may have broken off. After the "disastrous" aspects of the recent withdrawal have been hyped so much in the war media, I've heard normal red-blooded high-school-educated Ozark hillbilly Americans laughing out loud at e.g. CNN's instant backflip on the performance of Biden as president. It has been made exceedingly clear which interests really decide what's news.
WMDs have nothing to do with Afghanistan or the justification for invading Afghanistan. It's wild you can talk so confidently while being less knowledgeable than literal children. You criticize Americans but the way you bullshit you seem indistinguishable from the dumbest lot of them.
Oh, yeah lol. That was Iraq, so many I'm misremembering. I'll edit in both. As far as "war weary", I don't remember the Cold War ending when the Vietnam War ended. It was just a foreign intervention the Americans lost, like the Soviets lost Afghanistan.
Bogus WMDs was the excuse for the second war in Iraq, not Afghanistan. We invaded Afghanistan because they wouldn’t hand over Bin Laden.
Historically, American public sentiment has swung between periods of imperialism and isolationism. Based on the last few years, I think we’re swinging back towards isolationism. But yea, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a near-future President looking for an easy military victory (e.g. Panama).
I very much sympathize with Taiwan and have known some wonderful Taiwanese people in my life who will suffer greatly if there is a war. I just don't think America should get into a hot war with China over the island. We didn't for Tibet, Macau, Hong Kong, etc. The reason the hawks care more about Taiwan rather than Tibet is because of semiconductor manufacturing.
I also think we should host a sovereign election and ask the Taiwanese people what they think we should do.
>I also think we should host a sovereign election and ask the Taiwanese people what they think we should do.
Taiwan already has a democractically-elected President. Instead of holding a "sovereign election," you could just listen to her:
>Tsai expressed her solidarity with Hong Kong protesters, remarking that Taiwan's democracy was hard-earned and had to be guarded and renewed. Pledging that as long as she was Taiwan's president, she would never accept "one country, two systems", Tsai cited what she considered to be the constant and rapid deterioration of Hong Kong's democracy over the course of 20 years.
Forgive me if I'm missing your joke, but most of the American public did think that way. Most of the American public was against war until Japan attacked America. And responding to an attack is not what I would call being "world police". Nor is going to war with Germany after Germany declared war on America.
This is why America entered the war so late. If America were thinking of itself as world police at the time, why did it take America so long to actually go to war?
Video game parts? This is probably the most naïve comment I've read on Hacker News. Have you heard about what is happening with cars now and everything else with microchips?
It's on the other side of the world from the US, there's no particular economic / strategic US interest in defending it, and on top of that it's current arrangement with China seems to be working for everyone.
I find the notion that China would invade and that the US should then step in to be mystifying.
There is actually great strategic interest in Taiwan.
China is mostly contained by seas that are surrounded by island groups, which means that almost all its military and external trade passes close by potential hostile islands.
With Taiwan part of China, it has direct access to the pacific ocean and a naval blockade will be much less effective.
Most of Chinese GDP relies on external trade and a naval blockade would cut it off from vital resources to be able to conduct war against western targets.
PRC already has direct access to pacific ocean / SCS, and is more or less dominating waters within second island chain despite USN efforts. Any attempt of blockade being discuss right now is outside of 1st island chain where TW isn't. The last "strategic" benefit of denying PRC SSBNs from direct access to deep waters is being rapidly invalidated by PRC's new ICBM silo build up.
Also PRC, along US has the LEAST trade:GDP dependency among major countries in the world. And PRC, unlike Japan has enough domestic resource production to be more or less self sufficient to run a war economy to support a military multiple it's current size.
37% of China GDP is reliant on foreign trade and it lacks significant domestic resources like rare-earth metals, copper and oil.
All which have to be imported.
The Chinese belt & road initiative is a huge project to reduce the reliance on the china sea with a hallmark project opening a new main economic corridor to Karachi & Gwadar in Pakistan. That would allow for an alternative import-route through less hostile waters and dramatically increase the cost of a blockade.
China is very interested in Afghanistan because it provides a route for an oil-pipeline to Iran and has large mineral deposits, reducing their dependency on the seas.
Maybe it could military counter-blockade some of these islands, but that would not prevent the US from enacting an efficient naval blockade in the chinese seas.
US trade GDP is 27%. Most major OECD countries' trade GDP is 60%+. PRC is relatively well insulated at "only" 37%, closer to US which is generally considered as self-sufficient. Covid19 demonstrated even worse disruptions are survivable short term. Essentially every major trading country is going to lose more than PRC if they support a US led blockade, which isn't guaranteed. Almost no one wants the US to unilaterally disrupt global trade over TW. Thanks to wolf warrior counter sanctions, even non-US sanctions aren't guaranteed. As for copper, there's a strategic reserve, and again PRC will be on a time limited war economy. PRC currently has 80% share of rare earth and a monopoly on processing that will take decades to erode. Again, it hurts everyone else more. As for imports, while PRC imports a lot to sustain the normal economy, PRC also produces enough for a massive war economy. Domestic petroleum, iron ore production, RE + reserves is sufficient to field assets multiple times the size of USN. The US simply can't starve the PRC strategically like Japan.
BRI hype is mostly theatre / exporting excess infra capacity, it will take decades to cultivate alternate routes and still won't rival shipping via water. The numbers don’t add up. Almost every country with PRC supply route is subject to US bombing in full scale war - US think tanks already proposed landing missiles in SCS islands even if against wishes of SCS nations if shit hits the fan. The US will have no problem bombing infra in the Stans to contain the PRC. Only viable secure route is via Russia due to nuclear deterrence but again land routes are simply insufficient longer term alternatives.
Ultimately US-PRC confrontation / PRC breaking US containment for good will be decided in the waters. In case of the USN attempting a blockade on PRC (legally an act of war), the battles will be decisive, with existential consequences. PRC has options to undermine blockade like bait the USN into defending Japan / Korea, or counter blockade of everything in the 1st island chain from the US. Or destroy all east Asian semi supply chains which set back US manufacturing for decades. Or massive crippling cyber attacks. There are multiple domains of MAD, not just nuclear that makes prolonged confrontation unfavorable. PRC is not just going to sit there and take it.
Also, even if the US sinks the entire PLAN fleet, PRC may still force pyrrhic costs on the US. Every ship in the USN fleet has to dock eventually, including nuclear powered, PRC has enough conventionally tipped ICBMs to hit them without complex kill chain considerations. Destroying the oilers and replenishment ships while in port and the nuclear USCGs that’s hiding out at sea become useless. People aren't fathoming scenarios where both sides lose terribly, but ultimately the US loses more because she started so far ahead. A US unable to honor her global security commitments because she lost so much assets to the PRC loses her hegemony. Is TW worth that? All interest calculus points to no. Especially considering PRC is much easier to contain once she takes over TW. Most countries in the region will become MORE willing to US assets to contain PRC once the TW conundrum is resolved, because they want to deter PRC, but not at the cost of being dragged into war over TW.
It may very well be that the US doesn't initiate a war over Taiwan, but what guarantee do we have that the PRC's ambition would end with Taiwan?
China claims about 80% of the SCS which would give them control over 60% of global maritime trade and yield enormous leverage over dozens of SEA nations.
Taiwan is as good a place to make a stand as the inevitable next island.
So your justification is that so we can continue to dominate and bottle-up China, because we are good and they are bad? Do you really think they have plans to attack the west?
Remember that they were colonized/humiliated by the west, then occupied by Japan, up until Mao secured their independence. The foreign supported force fled to Taiwan. Do you think they might look at their situation differently than we do?
EDIT: changed 'foreigner force' to 'foreign supported force'
> That's not their perspective. Hard to argue effectively against someone without understanding where they are coming from.
So what? Who cares? I have no delusions that they are going to be convinced of what is wrong with wanting to invade and take over a country. Why bother trying to convince them of anything?
Country to country interactions, in the context of war and invasions, aren't really solved in the marketplace of ideas, of rousing debate, to totally prove that the other side is wrong.
Instead, such problems are solved with power.
The way to stop an invasion from china, is to put in disincentives. Arm up opposing forces, establish treaties, trade relations, and economic sanctions, such that an invasion would cause china a huge of amount of damage, if they did decide to do that.
And if they ignore that, and go through with the invasion, then you follow through on your threat, and actually cause as much damage, in terms of economics, PR, and lives as you can get away with, while reducing the same from your own side.
If you don't understand their perspective you are at a disadvantage. You won't be able to do a good job predicting what they will do. You may unnecessarily start a war. You may be manipulated into starting a war. You may start a war that you can't win. You may be wasting resources. You may be operating out of emotional fear rather than calculated reason.
Wars are lost over such misunderstandings. In the case of the United States that would include Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Lots of blood and treasure wasted. One might also add the cold war, given what is now known about how the maliciousness and capabilities of the Soviets were vastly overestimated, meaning we wasted a vast amount of resources there, also.
In this case I suppose it would be important to understand their motives and capabilities. Are they posturing for domestic consumption? They have said before that they are not in a rush to reclaim Taiwan. Is that still true? How do they feel about the trade-offs involved in a war? How would the war most likely be started and fought from their side? And can we stop them? Are we willing to make the trade-offs that would be involved.
I'm wary of anyone who calls for war and hasn't looked into these things. Blood and treasure for wars doesn't grow on trees.
No, you are rephasing thing, and pretending like you weren't trying to excuse their actions, Which is what I was responding to. I was responding to your attempt to excuse or justify china's actions, not have some tactical discussion of the best way to defeat them.
The original statement that you responded to, was this "It is China that is bullying Taiwan, not other countries bullying China."
And you responded to that statement, by saying that it is "not their perspective".
By responding to that point, in that way, you are basically saying "Well maybe china is right!".
They aren't right on that. They are wrong on that specific point, and it doesn't matter if from their perspective, they think they are correct, except as it comes to defeating that perspective.
So, to rephrase your original statement, instead of saying "thats not their perspective", you should have instead said "Yep, they are totally wrong, and should be stopped, but we need to figure out the best way to stop them from invading taiwan", or something like that.
You also said this "because we are good and they are bad". Which is a true statement, but you are being dismissive about it. Yes, their actions are bad, if they include invading Taiwan. And by saying that, you are basically disagreeing with that idea, by saying it dismissively.
So, please, don't do this bait an switch, where you are now pretending like you care about, uhh, the most effective way to stop China's bad actions, when instead you were quite clearly, quitely obviously, attempting to excuse their actions.
That is what you are doing, when you say this "because we are good and they are bad". You are dismissively attempting to excuse their actions, to support them invading Taiwan, because, well, according to you, "its just their perspective".
I think that both the U.S. and China do some pretty horrible things in the name of perpetuating their power. Big countries are bullies.
My original reply in this thread was that I didn't think that the fear of China attacking the West was worthy justification for the U.S. to go to war with China over Taiwan.
I never said that I support China invading Taiwan. That would mean I advocate sending troops to help China, which I don't. That would be like saying that I support the regime in Saudia Arabia because I don't want to go to war with them. Or that the U.S. supported communist China because we built them up through trade, knowing the whole time they wanted Taiwan back. Maybe these are bad examples, I don't mean to sidetrack things.
I mentioned perspective because Taiwan used to be part of China and I'm sure they look at it differently than other countries which were never part of China. I say this beause I don't believe their desire to retake Taiwan is also a desire to attack the West. I assume they have something comparable to "American Exceptionalism" and psychologically don't want to permanently loose Taiwan, so they bide their time. Just like the Reconquista - lots of Mexicans want Texas back. That doesn't mean they want to attack Europe! Also I do believe that understanding a country's perspective, China, Taiwan, and the U.S. in this case, allows for better outcomes and less possibility of costly mistakes.
On the other hand, in regards to your opinion of this matter, I wonder what would you have thought of Spain attacking the U.S. during the civil war in support of the Confederacy because a re-united U.S. was more of a threat to Spanish control over South and Central America? We eventually went on to treat a lot of those countries like shit, making banana republics of many, etc. Would this Spanish attack have been justified according to the original posters logic, because the U.S. would be an eventual threat to other countries?
There's a variety of nuances to this stuff, if one can get past the "we are good, they are evil" version of things. Maybe that's not always possible.
> I never said that I support China invading Taiwan. That would mean I advocate
No, stop. I said nothing about you supporting troops. I am talking about support of the moral argument, about how we can, from a moral perspective, disregard their "perspective", when thinking about what is right or wrong, or to get moral advice.
If their perspective is that they want to invade that other country, in a moral discussion, I don't care about their perspective, when determining if that is right or wrong.
So then, you would agree with me that if they invaded that you would absolutely condemn them, morally, and say that they are wrong and that you don't care about their moral opinion on the matter, as you disagree with it.
> I don't believe their desire to retake Taiwan is also a desire to attack the West.
Them wanting to invade Taiwan is a good enough reason, in and of itself, to arm Taiwan, and engage in severe economic or political actions against China, if they ever follow through with that.
Ideally, they wouldn't do that through, due to our actions in arming the opposition though.
Obviously, it would be way better if China simply never invaded, due to our actions, and if we could avoid war, and could avoid anyone being invaded.
The best action, is not to give in to their perspective, instead it is to make it so if they ever invaded, they would take a lot of damage, so that they then decide to not do it in the first place, and there is neither any war or invasion.
Do you really think geopolitics is based on morals?
A much better case could be made that wars are really started over greed and fear. And that's what I was talking about originally. This thread started with me objecting to the assertion that a justification for militarily defending Taiwan was to prevent China from attacking the West. I don't think they plan on attacking the West. What do they plan on doing? To know that requires thinking from their perspective. This is what the state department does. This is the level I was talking on. I personally think that the world would be a better place if citizens everywhere better understood the reasons for problems between nations.
I don't think that this has anything to do with morality. I didn't bring morality up. I've studies a lot of history, and that doesn't appear to be how these things work. That's why the U.S. does many immoral things, supports many regimes that do immoral things, ignores many others, and changes their mind sometimes. Same as every other country. The bigger and more powerful a country is the more immoral they tend to become. Given all that it hardly makes sense to single out Taiwan for special treatment based on morals. If you want to go on discussing morality in relation to Taiwan you have a lot of contradictions to deal with, our support of Saudi Arabia for example, our abandonment of the Kurds, Afghanistan, etc. Morality is not why wars are fought. Morality is how wars are sold to the masses that have to suffer and pay for them. I apologize if you already know this and we are otherwise miscommunicating.
Look, if you just want to retreat entirely to a "might makes right" ideology, you can go ahead and do that.
Just be aware, that if you do that, you can't complain about anything at all, regarding any moral issue, what so ever.
And you cannot complain, when people, who actually do care about right or wrong, treat you equivalently to the worst of any political ideology that you can think of, and call you horrible political slurs, regarding the obvious bad ideologies that should immediately come to mind.
If you want to bite the bullet on that, and say "yes, I dismiss any arguments at all, relating to morality, and the people who do care about that stuff, should definitely treat me like the obvious trope evil ideologies that come to mind", then fine. Just say that.
But that is your position. Own it, and say it to the world, so that others can treat you, how they treat other such proponents of such ideologies.
> Look, if you just want to retreat entirely to a "might makes right" ideology, you can go ahead and do that.
It's not an ideology. I'm saying that it's simply the way geopolitics works. The way things have been throughout history, including the modern era. It's what all the books on this topic talk about. Might does makes right when it comes to countries relations with each other. Countries act in their self interest. The strongest country gets their way. The law of the jungle. There's no judge or god for a country to appeal to or to enforce rules of morality. Ultimately there's only armies and allies. If the group of people running things in one country think they can dominate another country to their advantage, they do. That's why all large empires ultimately make so many enemies, causing their downfall. In this case I think that China wants to regain their traditional territory and expand their influence in their neighborhood region, and the U.S. doesn't want to give up an inch if they don't have to. At stake is economic and political influence in South East Asia. The rich and powerful care about that, not morality.
I personally have a quite different ideology when it comes to these matters, but I'm not the one in charge. I wouldn't send people to fight a war over Taiwan. I don't think it's justified based on a fear of them attacking the West, nor because some people think China is evil. Is it better for China to quickly take Taiwan or for us to enable a war that could kill millions? If you want to raise money and hop on a plane to fight the Chinese over Taiwan, I'm cool with that.
> Just be aware, that if you do that, you can't complain about anything at all, regarding any moral issue, what so ever.
> And you cannot complain, when people, who actually do care about right or wrong, treat you equivalently to the worst of any political ideology that you can think of, and call you horrible political slurs, regarding the obvious bad ideologies that should immediately come to mind.
I saw your comment above before you edited it. You seem to be quite emotional about this, and quite hostile towards me in this thread.
You seem to look at international politics very differently than anything I've studied, and I'm not sure that I understand. I've tried to explain my understanding of the way the world works in this regard, but you haven't much explained how you think. Worst case I might assume that you just get enraged over whatever the news headlines tell you to, but that wouldn't be very charitable.
I'm genuinely curious and have a lot of questions. How should a country choose what evil in the world to oppose, seeing as how there is so much? If we don't always confront evil, does that mean that other considerations are more important? Do you think that the leaders of countries think of good and evil in their calculations, or money and power? Does it bother you that the U.S. sometimes supports evil regimes? Or sometimes does evil things itself?
I'm wondering if you have answers for any of these questions. I know a lot of people haven't thought much about this stuff.
> I personally have a quite different ideology when it comes to these matters, but I'm not the one in charge
Ok fine. Then if that is the case, then you should have no problem saying "Yes, I completely and totally agree with you, that the people who want to invade Taiwan, are extremely evil, should be condemned, and the people and individuals who support that, are morally equivalent to the obvious extremely evil ideologies, that come to mind, and should be treated as such by society."
If you agree with that statement, then great. In that situation, you reject that other ideology, entirely, and agree that such people, including individuals, can and should be treated the same as any other horrible evil political group, with all of the implications that this implies.
> If you want to raise money and hop on a plane to fight the Chinese over Taiwan
Whoa, I have already given other options. Such as for example, continuing doing what we are currently doing, which is to arm Taiwan, as much as possible, so that if a war breaks out, a whole lot of damage is caused to china.
Such an action, would likely disincentive china from invading in the first place, which would be the goal. Arming the opposition, and economic and political sanctions and measures, are likely more than enough to prevent an invasion, without a war.
> Is it better for China to quickly take Taiwan or for us to enable a war that could kill millions
Or, instead of that, we could give them the ability to cause as much damage as possible, without us needing to be directly involved.
Such a situation, would provide strong disincentives, that would likely cause china to not start the war in the first place.
> I completely and totally agree with you, that the people who want to invade Taiwan, are extremely evil, should be condemned
Yes, I would condemn it. I think any group of people who want to be independent should be able to be independent. Also I assume the system in China is more the cause of evil, as opposed to all the people, so many of whom are along for the ride.
But that doesn't mean I'd be in favor of going to war with China over Taiwan.
> Whoa, I have already given other options. Such as for example, continuing doing what we are currently doing
The main article that we are commenting on, and the start of this thread, was about defending Taiwan if China invades. I thought that was what we were talking about.
Any chance of you answering any of those questions I asked? Or maybe this is one of those emotional things that are difficult to reason about?
> Yes, I would condemn it. I think any group of people who want to be independent should be able to be independent.
Great! Finally! Glad you agree with me completely, and are no longer dodging the questions about morality.
> was about defending Taiwan if China invades.
There are a whole lot of ways to defend another country, without launching a thousand nukes and ending society as we know it.
Such a word, "defending", could include a multitude of options.
> Any chance of you answering any of those questions I asked?
"How should a country choose what evil in the world to oppose, seeing as how there is so much?"
You do what you can, whereever possible, and you disregard people who say "well, you are saying that X is bad, but did you know that there is also Y that is bad?"
If you want the world to do more to stop bad things that are happening in the world, you should not say "Keep doing X, because we are doing Y", instead you should say "stop doing Y which is bad, and also don't do X which is also bad!".
> Does it bother you that the U.S. sometimes supports evil regimes
You can be bothered as much as you want about whatever, but do not use whataboutism, to disregard someone else saying that Z is bad.
> Great! Finally! Glad you agree with me completely.
I'm pretty sure that I do not agree with you, most certainly we don't reason about these things the same.
Along the way during this conversation I wondered if I'd learn anything about your position. I'm not sure if I did. It seems like you'd rather bully your way through a debate, like with the above statement and many others you have made. Some of the things you said left quite an impression. Personality differences, I guess.
> I wondered if I'd learn anything about your position. I'm not sure if I did.
Its pretty simple. When people say stuff like "X is bad", there are people out there who hide their real position, and try to attack that idea by saying "well stopping it impractical!" or "You say we should stop X, but what about Y thing that is also bad!", or "X is only bad from your perspective!".
They do this to misdirect around their real position, which is that they do not actually agree that X is bad. It is a bad faith way of hiding someone's beliefs, and not actually talking about the main point.
Next time, if you don't want to be confused with these bad faith people, just start off by say "Hey, I totally and completely agree with you that X is very bad! That is a good moral position for you to have! But what about these other things, or issues with how we go about stopping X?"
This much more accurately seems to be your position, that you completely agree with me that X is bad in this case.
Because if you don't do that, and just start talking about "Well what about if from their perspective, actually they don't think X is bad", then that very clearly implies that actually you don't think that X is bad, but you just don't want to admit it, and back up your position, and are acting in bad faith.
Leaving aside how we got here, that is something interesting to think about, the insight you just offered about our miscommunication around this issue.
I knew I was not engaging in misdirection. At first I did leave unsaid that I always believe it is wrong to impose on others (China and Taiwan, for example). It's hard to completely state ones position in every comment. I jumped right into a geopolitical discussion, where I'm still convinced that might makes right is the primary driver of interactions between countries, as opposed to morality, given that countries are run by less than perfect politicians. I was thinking more along the lines of the practicality of the U.S. getting involved, factors driving that, likely outcomes, how motivated the parties involved are, etc. Wars so often create more tragedy, and it seems there's so often questionable motives involved.
I guess that it's often the case that it takes a while to sort through the different context people bring to a discussion. I've seen this before, a better discussion after getting the initial yelling back and forth over assumptions out of the way.
> > Look, if you just want to retreat entirely to a "might makes right" ideology, you can go ahead and do that.
> It's not an ideology. I'm saying that it's simply the way geopolitics works.
But none of us here is a geopolitical power, so for you to argue as if you were is just fucking silly. You are, AFAIK, an ordinary human (unless bots have developed a heck of a lot while my back was turned?), so discussing as if you weren't is not just hilariously pretentious but ultimately meaningless.
> I mentioned perspective because Taiwan used to be part of China
But again you are viewing things with a twisted perspective. The legitimate Chinese government is the one that had to flee the evil usurpers, and ended up on the island of Formosa. It's actually kind of the other way around: Mainland China "used to be part of" what is now Taiwan. So, sure, reunite them: Give China back to Taiwan.
China is acting as an aggressor in the region, the US is only providing shields and containment to nations that seek their assistance.
The US strategy is to enforce peace through strength which is what you can expect from a democratic country and which is widely supported by allied nations.
Dictatorships tend to seek external enemies to boost a rally-around-the-flag narrative that boosts centralized control. It's a very old playbook that works everywhere (also in US domestic politics).
The Chinese communist party will need these distractions more and more as the GDP growth will stall due to internal corruption (they rank lower than Ghana and Tunesia in corruption indexes).
I think we can agree that whatever the communist party thinks it needs to stay in power should not lead to WWIII
I would say that the U.S. is an aggressor in the region, also, with deployed military forces and its own agenda.
I agree about external enemies. I think that both China and the U.S. are playing that dangerous game.
I also agree that the Chinese communist party will come under more pressure domestically. besides the things you mentioned are also some tough demographic changes coming up.
I also assume that the communist party in China doesn't want WWIII.
China claims 80% of the South China Sea as "ancestral lands" and they are actively building capability to take it by force. How would you feel if you are in charge of Indonesia or the Philipines?
For the last 70 years America, it's politicians, media, and cultural exports (holywood) has claimed to be the "leader of the free world", the "global policeman", a defender of democracy, a champion of liberty, a knight in shining armour against the hoards of commumism/terrorism
We've seen in the last few weeks in Kabul that that era is over, but that would be an answer to "why"
Also could USA defend Taiwan? Looking at numbers and map makes that rather questionable. Also I wonder how fast the sentiment would change as soon as goods stop rolling in the shops...
1. we just finished a 20 year war with nothing to show for it. Jumping into a new war is probably worth some cost/benefit analysis beyond "well, why not?"
2. correct if wrong, but I assume the projection of power backing your usage of "we" actually means "policed by others, who are not me"
I'm not sure I want to see a new generation of kids slurped up into another war (formally declared or otherwise) on the other side of the globe to dubious end effect.
Bluntly because the US can't. No one is going to say it out right, but the PRC’s military has modernized sufficiently that the US is likely incapable of defending TW anymore. Which is ultimately secondary to the goal of containing PRC that the US still could accomplish in other ways. It's simply not in US interest outside of short term semiconductor concerns that's rapidly being reshored stateside to potentially embarrass itself failing to defend TW. Worse if formal promises or commitments are made, and catastrophic if the US loses trying.
e: account throttled, last reply for this thread
@Ekaros
I think in case of war prior to TSMC productions shifting off island, the survival of those fabs would be the only point of agreement and deconfliction between the mexican standoff. The idea that US would negotiate conceding TW to PRC over fab sharing access / where US controlled supply chains ultimately determine the fabs viability is not inconcievable. The US is fucking negotiating with the Taliban over civilians. Thre are tons of US civilians AND economic interests in TW worth preserving, even if it means handing TW over to PRC, as long as said economic interest has US leash. Which TSMC supply chains are absolutely tethered to. Why would TW agree? Because they're a developed country who doesn't want to be Yemen if conflict gets seroius, it's their only short term barginning chip.
Also whole semiconductor thing is kinda pointless in this context... If there was war those would likely be on the first list to go or suffer... If not intentionally then unintentionally...
Depends what you mean by "run". If you mean the actual workers in TSMC's clean rooms, then maybe not: Where would they go, where they'd be needed -- when the whole problem in the first place is that the world is dependent on TSMC because there are no chip factories anywhere else?
The risks involved in going up against a nuclear power are very high, the costs involved (both monetary and in lives) would be high, and success isn't guaranteed.
I could well imagine Biden consulting with his military advisors and coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. We saw a similar thing play out with Obama and Crimea.
The winning strategy for the U.S. right now seems to be to convince China we would defend Taiwan so they don't attempt an invasion in the first place. But that's hard to do when it looks like the U.S. has pretty compelling reasons to stay out of it if it came to that.
(This is all assuming that Taiwan asks for our help. I don't know why they wouldn't, but I feel like it's an important caveat that we shouldn't involve ourselves in conflicts we aren't invited into by at least one party.)
US PR campaign against PRC finally digging itself into a corner. Wonder if polling will change post Afghanistan withdrawal shenanigans.
Essentially all of PLA modernization is designed to mitigate US intervention in TW scenarios, especially near PRC shores. Current planning on both sides largely dismiss the possibility of US being able to defend TW on island proper or within the 1st island chain where force balance does not favor the US. The workable strategy is to blockade PRC at SLOC choke points and push confrontation to the 2nd island where PRC has relatively weaker projection capabilities. But even that advantage will diminish each year, especially until the 2030s where the USN procurement timeline is about to get very depressing. The TLDR is the US can still contain PRC, but the US cannot defend TW anymore. Hence strategic ambiguity / lack of security guarantee, because bluntly PRC has too much capability now for the US to make impossible promises. Recent shifts in policy / think tanks / blob circles outside the most fervent China Hawks are pushing the “porcupine” model where the US provides TW arms but does not commit explicitly to defense.
Now US has riled up it's own domestic sentiment against PRC sufficiently that domestic politics could influence unwanted confrontations in PRC's favor. It's a recipe for potential disaster and embarrassment that could further undermine US interests / hegemony. If US had to intervene, PRC would like nothing more than a near shore slog with US where she is strongest. Keep in mind PRC fought a nuclear US and USSR when she wasn't a nuclear power over sovereignty issues much less significant than TW.
> planning on both sides largely dismiss the possibility of US being able to defend TW
First I'm hearing of this. Occupying Taiwan would require massive Chinese troop transport. That, and every re-supply, are naval and aerial projects the U.S. is capable of making super, super costly in terms of materiel.
PRC doesn't need to occupy TW to destroy it and demonstrate US security commitments are hollow.
TW is an island 5% the size of Yemen off the coast of the PRC military umbrella. Mainland rocket and air forces can glass TW with impunity with assets on the mainland and the US likely wouldn't do shit because hitting PRC territory opens up US CONUS soil as well. Not to mention PRC nuclear forces are entangled with conventional forces, there's no way to hit Chinese assets without risking nuclear escalation, by design.
PRC invading TW with an unprecedented amphib campaign is based on PRC capabilities from before the 90s. Before PLA modernization where Chinese military was weak by even WW2 standards. Times have changed, US blob is finally recognizing the PRC is looking at Desert Storm, not Normandy. Think blockades, and other forms of coercion short of direct invasion. PLA amphib acquisitions in the past 10 years have shown very little investment in sealift capabilities. Almost all resources dedicated to countering USN in blue water theatres. If an invasion were to happen, the island's defenses would already have been crushedand the PLA would be using civilian assets which are built to military standards.
I agree that the U.S. has no way of defending Taiwan against Beijing deciding to obliterate it. But short of Xi needing to pull a Falklands, that is unlikely. If China moves on Taiwan, it would be to control the territory and--most likely--its people.
Xi is an authoritarian, but he isn't a totalitarian. If he does anything to insane, like flatten a country of 24 million people and the 20th largest economy by GDP by PPP, he would get removed. This isn't some comic book movie where there are insane supervillains willing to commit wanton total destruction.
Right, and this is the thing I find frustrating about conversations like this. Could China completely destroy Taiwan without the US or anyone else being able to do anything about it? Sure, of course. But the odds of that being their goal, or even a backed-into-the-corner endgame are so low it's not even worth considering.
China wants to govern Taiwan and its people. They certainly want to directly own Taiwan's economy. They can't do any of that if they burn it to the ground. And if they did commit an atrocity like that, they'd be signing their own death warrants on the global political stage.
While I do believe China could successfully invade and occupy Taiwan, it would be incredibly bloody and costly to do so, and I don't think they're quite to the point where they want to take that leap.
CCP wants peaceful reunion foremost. But forceful reunion is not off the table. And there are a variety of scenarios and redlines where PRC will at minimum destroy all TW defenses and more depending on level of resistence or foreign involvement.
> reunion
reunion of what? China never owned Taiwan to begin with. China had presence in Taiwan but failed to control the country for 200 years. In 1887 after 200 years, one day they were like 'oh, lets call Taiwan a Provence", then when Japan invaded they were like "oh, yeah, no we don't want it" and bailed on Taiwan.
When Japan left, they signed over Taiwan to the ROC, not to the PRC. So China and the PRC have no claim over Taiwan to begin with.
Seriously, China's claim is the equivalent of a bunch of Americans setting up home in a city in Canada, then 200 years later saying "lets call Canada a State of America". Despite the fact that Americans never ruled in the country to any extent.
PRC assumed all of ROC holdings when UN recognition switched. Though really none of it matters, PRC / ROC is in an ongoing civil war over territories that both parties currently occupy. Historical narratives used to rationalize legitimacy and legality is just the veneer over domestic and geopolitics. While PRC having legal claims over TW helps, ultimately PRC will conduct even an illegal war over TW as police actions if it has to, just like how the US conducts illegal war around the world. The Chinese civil war never ended.
At the end of the day, it's really that simple. If ROC/TW wants to hold on to what it conquered from natives of Formosa, they will have to defend it with blood. Ditto with Americans who think they can deter PRC on core sovereignty issues, when they couldn't even deter PRC from fighting over Korea while the US was a nuclear power. The west can craft whatever ahistorical story they want to cope, but until they commit to exchanging SanFrancisco/Sydney/Tokyo for Shanghai over Taipei, their opinions simply don't matter for PRC calculations over TW.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the keystone of our entire digital economy. The US should probably diversify supply chains in ways that make an island vulnerable to Chinese takeover not the keystone of our modern way of life. Until we do that, you'd better believe America has an interest in defending Taiwan—probably more of an interest than any other single place on the globe right now.
A significant interest may be more indicative of strategic failure in supply chain management than it it would have any bearing on the wisdom of getting into a kinetic conflict with China.
...
"The comments were made at the first ever regional security dialogue between the ruling parties of Taiwan and Japan -- a meeting, already condemned by Beijing, that comes amid growing Chinese aggression in the region."
Another approach China is taking that no one seems to mention here is taking over Taiwan by taking over its internal politics and media. This would allow them to do it legally by persuasion and voting, avoiding bloodshed. Granted, Hong Kong shows that this isn't a smooth process.
I don't think 'legally' is a good term to describe what happened with Carrie Lam and the Hong Kong ruling local government.
As a whole the West does not generally believe that tactics of barring opponents from running, criminalizing dissent, disappearances, soft violence and threats is a fair Democracy or election, if it even meets the definition at all.
While perhaps technically 'legal' on paper, my point is that once the Law is coopted by one person (or CCP as an entity) with total control, the Law becomes the Emperors will and not a legitimate legal system by our norms.
We are in the equivalent of 1935. Xi has fully captured all of the levers of power and dictator for life. They are in mobilization mode. We either get real about stopping Nazi China now or we try to stop them in ten years after they have subjugated half the world at the cost of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of lives.
Half of Americans are confirmed imbeciles then, who should have their voting rights withdrawn. There's nothing whatsoever we can do if China really wants to take Taiwan other than impose self-destructive and ineffective economic sanctions. We couldn't even do anything about the Taliban, let alone a nuclear armed country 4.5 times the size of the US, with a _million_ active service men and reasonably modern weaponry.
At the moment Taiwan would be wise to wire their chip fabs to blow, like those Swiss mountain tunnels.
Chinese takeover? The United States has officially recognized Taiwan as part of China since 1972. Documents declassified nearly 20 years ago reveal that Nixon promised China the United States would neither suppress nor support a Taiwanese uprising. Talking about China "invading" Taiwan sounds as ridiculous to me as talking about the United States "invading" Puerto Rico. That we've allowed Taiwan to become a critical part of our economy is a result of our own short-sightedness. Seems crazy we'd want to start a war with China at a time when we're wrapping up a 20 year misadventure in Afghanistan.
> Talking about China "invading" Taiwan sounds as ridiculous to me as talking about the United States "invading" Puerto Rico.
No, that is nonsense.
Taiwan is already its own country. It has its own laws, taxes, borders, and army, and it has been that way, for decades. That makes it a country, no mater what china says on the matter.
That is a much different situation than puerto rico.
What makes something a country, is not some document somewhere. Instead, what makes something a country is the facts on the ground of the situation.
IE, who controls the laws, taxes, borders, and military. All of which, are clearly not controlled by china.
You completely ignored everything that I was talking about, and misdirected to some other thing, about "promises", lol.
My initial post was about how Taiwan is already a country, no matter what words are on a piece of paper.
What makes something a country, is the fact that it has its own laws, borders, taxes, and army, and it has been that way for decades. That was my point.
And no words on a piece of paper change those facts on the ground.
People living in states, still have to pay federal taxes. They still have to follow federal laws. And federal armies still have bases, in these states, and defend those borders.
People living in Taiwan do not have to pay taxes to China. They do not have to follow China laws. And if a fighter plane, from china, flew across Taiwan, it would get shot down by the Taiwanese military.
That is why Taiwan is a country, and is different than the states example.
Yup. And to the question whether China should be reunited under a single regime... Sure, OK, let's discuss that.
The default position is of course that if this were to happen, it would be under the legitimate government in Taipei, not the usurpers in Peking. Right?
To be fair, the misadventure was in nation building. I don't support either (ok, I kinda-but-not-really support the Chinese case because I'm hyper anti-communist, but even I'm not sure the human cost is worth it), but if US can somehow destroy the Chinese govt as effectively as we destroyed the Taliban government (or Iraqi, or Libyan), that would be more than sufficient to defend Taiwan. No rebuilding necessary.
I wonder how many of these people also understand, and are willing to accept the fact, that defending Taiwan against an invasion will almost certainly involve successful attacks on USA soil.
China is in a whole other league from the adversaries that the country has faced in generations. The have a world class air force, navy, and ground force complete with advanced aircraft, tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines, missiles, satellites, etc.
Given how poorly the country fared in the pandemic, I'm not so sure the country could hold together in the event of an attack. There's a reasonable chance that Americans will use the opportunity to destroy the government from within.
I support Taiwanese independence, but I'm not sure I support it with my life.
> I'm not so sure the country could hold together in the event of an attack
I'm not American, but if anything I would think that nothing would unify the US like the threat of an external invader. I have a hard time thinking people would care about who's democrat or who's republican if a foreign nation is dropping paratroopers in your neighborhood.
> There's a reasonable chance that Americans will use the opportunity to destroy the government from within.
I seriously doubt it. Even the most fervent, gun-loving, militant libertarians realize that sabotaging your own government during a war is not in your self interest.
> I support Taiwanese independence, but I'm not sure I support it with my life.
If the US declares war, it doesn't really matter. It's not like the US involvement in WW2 or Vietnam was put to a referendum, if your country is at war, you are at war, unless you have enough money to flee the country: but realistically a war between China in the US would be a world war, or at the very least (best case) a Nato - China war, which is why it's _extremely_ unlikely to happen. Neither the US nor China has anything to gain from an all out war. And even if China is a formidable opponent, it would certainly tank their entire economy.
> I'm not American, but if anything I would think that nothing would unify the US like the threat of an external invader. I have a hard time thinking people would care about who's democrat or who's republican if a foreign nation is dropping paratroopers in your neighborhood.
This is a great point. Look at how united America was after 9/11. George W. Bush's approval rating soared. While politics are bitterly divided here, when it comes to an external threat, those divisions will still get put aside (at least for a while). Not much unites a country like a (non-civil) war.
I disagree to the threat on the American mainland. A Chinese assault on Taiwan would have to be an all out invasion against a standing army of 170,000[1]. Plus I count about 6 million citizens of capable fighting age, Taiwanese batteries at the ocean[2], plus the eyes-in-the-sky of Japan, Australia, America, India, and quite possibly Vietnam. To invade you would need at least a million, possibly more. If the USA etc. saw that kind of preparation and launch, all hell would break loose. China doesn't have to just worry about a street by street battle for Taiwan, while the media rains holy hell in High Definition TV. Not many will just sit by, and it won't be a quick victory, nor do I expect India and Vietnam to not take a shot or two at a Chinese frigate.
All that to say, that's a lot of money, death, destruction, and for what? China is a capitalist country now, and they really like the money flowing in. An invasion of Taiwan could disrupt the spigot and cause another Tiananmen Square.
Taiwan is part of China, ok? they speak Chinese, indepent country? your guys seriously? if half of americans favors, let me tell you the real truth, near 99.9999% chinese mainland people won't let it happen, that's not include taiwan people.
drop your prejudice, just go to china and taiwan, listen to its own people voice, don't just to watch media and listen to politician，they all have kinds of their own interests and opinions
Oh yes, let's get in a 100 year war with China while 99% of our manufacturing is based there and their military is four times our size
I bet at least half of everything on a US military base has "made in china" stamped on its parts
Mandatory draft for every single adult in America in a front-line unit on a rotating basis, then this will have my support, what the hell is with people volunteering others to die
So when are we liberating North Korea? Because it's 100 times worse than Afghanistan, definitely worse than Taiwan and the people there are suffering and tortured daily with work camps
292 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadBeijing is not stupid and the Taiwan question is not existential to Xi or the CCP. There would be no reason for this conflict to escalate to either country's homeland, let alone into strategic nuclear war. (Tactical nukes hitting e.g. carrier groups may be on the table.)
The U.S. has plenty of West Pacific purely-military assets which would be in play for China should the Taiwan Strait require U.S. protection.
The US can - and should - respond to such an attack with overwhelming force.
Destroying a US carrier group means the death of tens of thousand of American troops and the destruction of tens of billions of dollars of materiel.
I agree. It wouldn't be a small escalation. But it still wouldn't merit a strategic nuclear counterstrike.
Point is, there is a lot of room for escalation before we go into strategic nuclear war. Or even physically damage on either side's mainland.
I don't believe this is widely accepted.
Consider that the last time the US lost significant naval assets, we committed to a hugely costly war and effectively annihilated the attacker. It was the original impetus for developing nuclear weapons in the first place, and it remains the only time they've been used against an enemy.
> Point is, there is a lot of room for escalation before we go into strategic nuclear war.
My understanding of the military and political thinking around the use of nuclear weapons is that the use of tactical nuclear weapons inevitably leads to their strategic use.
Destroying a US carrier via conventional means would carry significant risk of nuclear retaliation. Doing it through nuclear means effectively guarantees it.
They also have a strategy of assured retaliation and maintain a countervalue stance. Hopefully, we won't have to find out whether or not they will follow through with it...
Yeah we know that's false now, it's just something they claimed and will never uphold, after they threatened to obliterate Japan.
That statement isn't worth the electrons we're wasting on displaying it. Authoritarian regimes have no policies. Their "policy" every day is what the autocrat feels like when he wakes up, and if he's constipated during his morning dump the "policy" can change before breakfast.
I'd hestitate to describe the US as a nation who could politically accept a one-sided nuclear strike.
As long as war is something that can be done to other people, though, it's an easy sell.
The same was true for Afghanistan and Vietnam and the list goes on.
Source? I know the large majority are certainly against the CCP taking over according to polls of civilians there.
It was even, occasionally, integration leaning. Then Xi screwed the pooch by getting impatient with Hong Kong. There is an alternative universe where Beijing was patient and peacefully absorbed both islands.
As of a year ago, only 12% of the public polled supported reunification. Interestingly, a year prior that number was only 10% (probably within the margin for error, though). A majority (54%) actually do support outright independence, with the rest being a mix of keeping the status quo and not having an opinion.
The current Hong Kong mess only kicked off in early- to mid-2019; I think it'd be hard to attribute the 2019 poll's 10% number to Xi getting impatient with HK. Even if it was 20% pre-HK-protests, that's still not a big number, and I think that would still be a stretch to assume.
Either way, I expect somewhere close to 0% of Taiwanese people would be ok with China taking over via military invasion. And I do agree that the HK fiasco makes it even less likely that many previously on-the-fence Taiwanese people would fall down on the side of even peaceful reunification.
Most importantly to this discussion, Taiwan has mandatory military service for the express purpose of defending the island against Chinese attack. Taiwan is a country that should be assisted in it's independence, if it comes down to it.
First, consider the source. The mere fact that this polling is conducted by a think tank should give anyone - regardless of political party or ideological position - some pause, as think tanks are explicitly "state-external agents of change". Advocacy organizations, in other words. This is fine, such as it is, but as think tanks of all stripes present themselves as anything but ideological or partisan (including this one, the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs) and often seek to couch themselves in the ostensibly more dispassionate language of science and academia, there's frequently a bit of a trick being played. I think we should watch out for that. It's cheesy to say, maybe, that "these people have an agenda", but these people have an agenda. They're not a university (which, yes, is also occupied by human beings who are biased), but they'd be happy if you thought they were.
Second, and relatedly, we need to look at what a think tank's interest is. Twelve seconds of Googling shows that the Chicago Council's current President was for 4 years the Permanent US Representative to NATO -- not exactly someone with a disinterested relationship to American empire and how this country treats the rest of the world, Taiwan/China or otherwise. (And NATO is nothing if not expansionist, continuing to grow -- hell, to exist -- long after its raison d'etre, the USSR, ceased to be.) I'm editorializing / speculating here, but these are the same ghouls who start every American war, the same guys at the UN handing slides to Colin Powell about non-existent (which they knew) Iraqi WMD.
Lastly there's the poll itself. I don't have time to dig into the details, but in my view the poll's results -- or anyway, the headline of its results -- fits perfectly in the steady drumbeat, growing ever louder, of civilizational confrontation with China, and the manufacturing of American consent for such a project. In my view there's some pretty straightforward Chomskian stuff happening in the zeitgeist around this, and this poll headline only serves to further it: "See? Americans are okay with confronting China aggressively!" Which of course gives elites permission to push more for these stances, a nice feedback loop. With headlines like these, they're laying the groundwork for bloodshed in the not-too-distant future. They know this full well, and they're okay with it, because neither they nor their children will be sent to die for this paranoia.
My wish for HN readers looking at this would be to be critical, even suspicious, of things like these, regardless of what one thinks about Taiwan. There's a method here.
EDIT: And, in case anyone's feeling rah-rah themselves about "defending" Taiwan, know that we'd get our shit absolutely rocked in a war with China over Taiwan. It'd be bloody, it'd be long, and we'd lose. Not to be critical of think tanks only to turn around and cite one, but plenty of entities, including RAND and the US military itself, have done war games and simulations about this scenario and it does not end well for the US. Easily googleable.
You say this like there hasn't been multiple unprovoked invasions by Russia in just the last 7 years...
So I'll just say that if the situation were inverted -- if e.g. Russia was sitting in Mexico "promoting democracy" -- we'd be engaging in "multiple unprovoked invasions" too. Reagan and NATO told Gorbachev pre-collapse that there'd be no NATO expansion in the future. They lied. We've forgotten that. You think the Russians have? Should they?
Furthermore, the situation was inverted -- look at the Cuban missile crisis. Does anyone say that the US shouldn't have threatened to vaporize the island to get the Russians out of there? It's our backyard! Surely we were justified in feeling threatened.
I don't care for the Russian regime whatsoever, and Putin's a little Napoleon-complex turd. A weak, insecure little man. But I'm sorry pal, we're the ones threatening these people in their neck of the woods. NATO should've disbanded the day the hammer and sickle stopped flying over the Kremlin.
My claim is that you'd behave in the exact same way.
Yes, it's moving eastward. (And yes, apparently we promised not to.) But why is it moving eastward? Because NATO invaded, say, Poland? No, because Poland desperately wanted into NATO. Why? Because they've had a taste (or a belly full) of Russian aggression, invasion, occupation, and even partition. They wanted into NATO because they're afraid of Russia.
So how are we the ones threatening these people again? The only threat we pose to Russia is to not let them push other people around. And if that's a threat to them, well, it says more about Russia than it says about NATO.
And for about half of the USSR's existence before it collapsed... Possibly more of it than it was Russian?
I'll make no judgment as to whether Crimea and its people are better off as a part of Russia or Ukraine (they very well might be better off a part of Russia), but invading and annexing is just not ok. (Same as if China decided to do the same to Taiwan.)
I just don't see the problem with NATO expansion. As a parent poster pointed out, it's a defensive alliance; if Russia has a problem with other countries promising to defend each other in the case that Russia wants to get aggressive, that's, well... Russia's problem.
You have the chronology exactly backwards.
So what? When the western-most provinces of Russia itself start revolutions to liberate themselves from Moscow, and promptly apply for NATO membership, will that also be NATO's fault; will you still refuse to see that it says more about Russia?
Russian aggression is "reactive"... To the reactions to Russian aggression.
"Self-proclaimed"... With some help from a bunch of little green men.
On that basis NATO could legitimately support a military intervention by Kiev into Moscow. It was originally the Kievan Rus, after all.
Copied from the Wikipedia, so if anything that suggests we need to bring back the USSR and reunite all the Slavs under one flag.
роусьскаѧ землѧ literally translates to "Russian land"
Okay, taking that at face value, nothing says Moscow has to be in charge. And the Mongols once controlled Russian territory. Speaking of which, Moscow hasn't controlled its eastern territories for long--should we dissolve Russian influence east of the Urals?
Returning "historical" lands is the casus belli of every dictator. It's arbitrary, empty and infinitely extensible.
Those are some ties. It was less than 100 years ago that genocide was Russian policy. The Holodomor murdered 3.3-7.5 million Ukrainians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
A) Consisted mainly of Russia and Russians, and
B) is claimed as predecessor by the current Russian regime.
It's not as if Georgia ever claimed Crimea, Siberia, and the Baltic states on the premise that "They were once ruled by Stalin, a Georgian, so they belong to us".
It's hard to say if your desperate non-sequiturs in defense of the kleptocratic Russian goon regime are more funny than pathetic or more pathetic than funny.
What a convenient way of excluding entirely relevant points of argument. Ukraine suffered the first forced change of national borders in Europe since World War II
Heavy cultural ties does not grant anyone a right to annex the territory of another sovereign nation
This is at best debatable, it’s definitely not a forgone conclusion. A war for Taiwan would be a largely naval and aerial confrontation, and the US holds an incredibly significant qualitative lead in those two areas.
So given that the military says it would suck, I’m would not agree that it’s at best debatable. A good outcome is doubtful to start with based on war game exercises to test out this specific subject. It’s an upward fight to get it into “debatable” territory, though I’d be interested in hearing more about your reasoning.
It mostly wasn’t. The Atlantic wall was mainly a fevered Hitler dream. Parts were impressive and incredibly strong. However even strong parts were mostly taken in a few hours.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Wall
A lot of the problems were also not universal to the landings, with Omaha and Juno taking far more casualties than the other 3 beaches combined. https://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/05/opinion/lauder-eisenhower...
So on D-day it was less than predicted, but once the beachhead was established it was far from over. The total number of dead is in excess of 200,000 on the allied side alone in the battle of Normandy.
I highly doubt that retaking Taiwan after a successful invasion would be something that the general public would have the stomach for, I also highly doubt that putting the required number of troops to defend Taiwan in harms way if it came to that would be an option.
On the Chinese side there would not be any question about whether or not public opinion would be behind such a move.
Yes, Normandy was a horrific grind and taking the region was a massive and bloody undertaking. The beaches were a precursor to massive loss of life.
For another, the Allies gained significant air superiority well in advance, over the channel and over northern France, for it to happen.
Also, the German surface fleet was already mostly toast or otherwise neutralized, and even their submarines couldn't really operate in the channel with much success (see again: air superiority).
Further, Germany couldn't focus only on repelling a naval invasion in one small area—they were fighting the Allies on the Italian front already, and supporting a huge front in Russia, and had to garrison large regions of Northern Europe against possible air or naval invasion (I mean, the Allies had already tried that once in Market Garden, so it was a real possibility), not to mention to suppress occupied territories.
Plus, we're not at war and have relatively free travel. That, plus modern tech, makes spying much easier. Even if the satellites didn't spot it, a person would. We're talking about a lot of equipment, ships, and people moving around.
I would agree that the pace of war has accelerated such that some of those steps might take hours rather than months to years, but I still think the build-up would be nearly impossible to hide. You need a lot of equipment to land a force and then supply & reinforce them such that they don't become sitting ducks, and it has to be nearby from the beginning.
"But they could destroy the satellites, at least".
OK sure, but 1) they better get them all, and 2) the US would begin moving forces toward and to Taiwan within hours, if that happened—it's pointless, because they'd have already tipped their hand. It would confer no advantage for preparing a surprise invasion.
Those troops would either have to arrive on planes or in boats, and in either case they'd be heading toward an absolute hornets nest of missiles.
The most likely thing if things pop off in the western Pacific is the US fleets immediately turn tail and sail east as fast as they can to avoid ending up on the bottom of the ocean. The fleets haven't faced a modern opponent with a full armament of advanced anti-ship missiles.
The only realistic scenario where the US 'wins' in a major confrontation with China is to use nuclear weapons first, and we would still take many hits to our own cities in the process. There's no scenario where millions of Americans don't die in that war.
[EDIT] that is, I don't think you can hide a build-up for a surprise invasion of Taiwan given modern surveillance, and fairly free travel to/from China, with no existing state of war. I think any actions likely to improve China's ability to hide invasion prep, would also make it very clear what they're doing and kick things off even earlier, so, still no surprise invasion.
Now consider that Afghanistan is like 10x larger than Taiwan, much less geographically diverse, and only like 100mi from the coast of China.
It's totally possible that Taiwan could fall in a day to an overwhelming force.
War is about supply chains. Even if (big if) you managed to land several tens of thousands of Chinese regulars onto a Taiwanese beach, they are toast if you cannot resupply them. To establish these supply lines you would have to basically eliminate all enemy submarines, surface fleet, aircraft, and nearby airbases. It is a near impossible task. If the Chinese managed to do this, it would easily be the greatest military achievement in human history. It would make D-Day look like amateur hour.
This is effectively what the Taliban did. But since you struggle with that example, how about looking at Russia's take over of Crimea in 2014?
My prediction is, there will be widespread protests in Taiwan, which Chinese sleeper agents will attempt to turn violent. Then Chinese commandos storm the presidential building taking Tsai Ing-wen and her cabinet hostage, the military will be ordered to stand down. Then the subsequent riots will be crushed.
If Taiwan were just a land border neighbor to China, you might have a point. But that 100 miles of water is literally the main factor that has kept Taiwan independent since the Chinese civil war. To ignore that is downright idiotic. It is called GEO-politics for a reason. Human history is mostly shaped by geography.
Taiwan is a shit show. If we had a magic wand, of course they should be defended from ChiCom aggression. We don’t have a magic wand. We don’t have the political or cultural willpower to get into winnable kinetic conflict with China. Witnessing the buffoons running the military/intelligence apparatus in the US today, who would want to entrust their kids’ lives to it in a new land war in Asia? The best this country could do is unshackle Japan and Korea and let the chips fall where they may, hoping if things got bad enough that India had some influence in the outcome as well.
Sad, but if the world did nothing as the Crimean peninsula was annexed, or as Hong Kong was blatantly steamrollered, I have a hard time putting faith in any western power going to the mat for Taiwan, whether France, Germany, or UK. Nobody’s in the global empire business anymore for all intents and purposes, even China. China’s has an increasing level of influence in the world but it’s territorial interests, while expansive, are all close to home.
There, FTFY.
But I believe if the strategic advantages the US enjoys, such as shipping lanes and the relationship with Taiwan manufacturing, are disrupted, then the US dollar could lose more than half of it's value and therefore drastically reduce the wealth of more than a billion people. This is the real thing that will motivate WWIII, with all of the propaganda about what monsters the other side is used to dehumanize and make the mass killing seem moral.
How would you describe what’s going on with the Uyghurs (or Tibet for that matter)?
That's also awful, but it's not genocide.
There are claims of genocide, including ones made the The US Secretary of State and UK parliament. They are not outliers with these claims.
There are reports of rape, gang rape, torture, forced sterilisation, forced abortion and forced contraception.
People are missing and relatives can’t find them after the Chinese state took them.
Prison cities for their race have been built and are being expanded.
It isn’t ovens and gas, but it’s a lot more than ‘just’ an attack on their culture.
Searching “Uyghur Genocide” returns no shortage of hits and disturbing stories of vicious abuse.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55723522
https://theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/22/uk-mps-declare-chi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
This lead to a lot of people treating early reports of the Holocaust with skepticism.
I think the chinese state is also undoubtedly brutal, but nobody claims Australia is committing genocide when they demolish aboriginal holy sites, arrest aboriginal people, or take away their children. A pattern of brutality centered around reproductive rights, the destruction of cultural symbols, and mass incarceration is common to many oppressed minorities around the world.
All this stuff is obviously terrible, and China should be condemned for its reversal of a traditionally great record on minority rights, but turning the Ughyurs into proxies for an essentially cynical US-China rivalry helps noone.
PS: I also imagine those reports are likely all true. Police are typically brutal. Police in authoritarian regimes are worse. That doesn't make it genocide.
Amnesty don’t call it genocide, but also note that all observers are blocked from entry.
https://www.amnesty.org.nz/uyghurs-nowhere-feels-safe
I'm not really attached to the word or it's definition. It just occurs to me that 'genocide' is the causus beli for every well-remembered war the west have had since WW2. When the word starts getting thrown around in the middle of a trade war, when US hegemony is being contested, when the world has a new number one in terms of economic and industrial might, well, I think its deployment is basically cynical.
Insofar as it has already forced changes for (I think) the better in Chinese government policy, I'm glad. But I also think the airtime would be better spent less cynically, on countries like India, who are probably way easier to pressure and frankly just as bad. If world leaders like the UK go on air to call what's happening in Xinjiang genocide while selling arms to the Saudis so they can bomb the Houthis, then they just look about as cynical as they are. And that's what the Chinese domestic audience probably thinks, because ultimately, the west doesn't have moral credibility when it only makes a fuss over human rights when it's also in the west's strategic interest.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
* Killing members of the group;
* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
* Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
* Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
* Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I am not saying that isn't the right word. The problem is that people are so enthusiastic about declaring it as genocide, without a single qualification, and no concern about the consequences in terms of using it as "justification" for a global war.
It's horrible what they are doing. But the problem is people are just saying "yep, they are evil" and are going to consent to any and all types of mass killing against the Chinese on that basis. Similarly the Chinese will find things Americans have done, say they are all evil, and proceed with the mass killing attempts (war) with a clear conscience.
Second, in a war with China wouldn’t the elites and their families be just as dead as everyone else after nuclear bombs land on major US cities? I can imagine elites or private companies encouraging political movements toward war or tangential to war but I can’t imagine them wanting war to actually happen.
Blix said they were clean :
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-...
Also, as far as I remember, Scott Ritter claimed the same.
Powell, on behalf of the U.S. government, said they were certain, and was wrong. I guess one could wonder if it was on purpose or not, but credibility is damaged either way.
At the time, an awful lot of current and past weapons inspectors who'd worked in Iraq, including US nationals, said US claims were complete bullshit.
[EDIT] Oh and then there's how they relaxed their resistance to inspections in the face of imminent invasion, such that we'd have been able to uncover anything they'd somehow managed to hide, but disarming them was never the point, invasion was, so we withdrew the inspectors and invaded anyway. If anyone had any doubts left, that should have erased them.
Then we should make haste to station more military in Taiwan. A significant, sustained increase of presence on the island itself, instead of only aircraft carriers.
Once that has been accomplished, recognize Taiwan's independence. 2 months later, hold a referendum in Taiwan on becoming a US state with a few special rights. This is done with half the fleet there, plus the very heavy presence on bases on the island.
Taiwan free, China contained. Plus the US have a good base to project power in the future.
The CCP has a lot of "red lines" that gets crossed all the time, and they don't do anything about it.
Until they actually follow through on any of their burning, do not cross, red lines, I am not going to take such threats seriously.
The other side of this is the Chinese would view it as intolerably provocative, just as the US would if China started deploying a ton of troops in Cuba, if Cuba was a good deal closer. So you'd massively increase the likelyhood of a war.
I think realistically speaking, China won't ever invade Taiwan unless they are forced to do so by domestic political forces. That is way more likely to happen if they feel already in a cold-war situation. The best protection for Taiwan would be therefore if all the aforementioned US military strategists that go on panels and talk up war just went on holiday for a few months or years or honestly, decades.
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that after saying:
> I don't have time to dig into the details
So essentially you're attempting to discredit this poll while at the same time admitting you don't feel like expending the effort to do any more than what amounts to ad hominem and just-so arguments.
Not saying you're wrong -- you may be right! -- but your argument is pretty low on substance here.
If you have a whole load of talking heads talking war, politicians feel like they have to forward deploy troops on both sides, then there's some stupid accident, and suddenly you're in WW3. There is no rational reason for China to invade Taiwan, and there is absolutely no realistic military way for the US to defend Taiwan, especially when you start thinking about stuff like missile bombardments or blockades.
The most likely outcome from talking tough on either side is that Xi Jiping, or the US president, gets forced into unwise strategic decisions by domestic political pressure. Then you get one of the aforementioned accidents, then all hell can break loose.
If you look at the questions asked, the most support is for these measures. Signing a free-trade agreement, recognizing Taiwan and supporting its international recognition, et cetera.
At the point we get to even selling arms to Taiwan, the split become even, mirroring the support for sending troops. (In defence of that divergence, sending troops would presumably be in response to a Chinese offensive. Sending arms is a provocation in itself.)
The US has been selling arms to Taiwan for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwa...
Sorry, I meant strategic weaponry. Long-range weapons that would let Taiwan legitimately threaten e.g. Beijing.
The US has naval vessels and aircraft that can do that from the strait of Taiwan or elsewhere.
Why would the US sell such weapons to Taiwan when the US could employ them directly if needed?
In theory the US could position ground-based strategic weapons in Taiwan (Cuban missile crisis-style), but that would be too aggressive and could provoke an attack. Besides, a submarine, ship, or aircraft could employ similar weapons without being a fixed target.
New Zealand will cave and sell out, long before any war comes along. It’s bad for business to have principles, and we have stuck to that course over multiple China issues and multiple governments. ‘Our’ politicians (are they ours or Chinas?) have had financial interests in China throughout their terms and there was even a Chinese communist party member and trained Chinese intelligence member in our parliament.
We picked our side.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/300054428/parliamentary-inqui...
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/122094310/jian-yang-...
Perhaps you couldn't say the same thing about Vietnam (I don't know enough about it), but you definitely could about Philippines.
Do we really care if two Communist Parties attack each other?
China and Vietnam have fought a war with each other more recently than either has fought the US.
In our lifetime we will again see the US Navy based at Cam Ranh Bay, and the USAF based at Tan Son Nhut. (Same with Subic and Clark in the Philippines.)
Saying that Taiwan will definitely be defended and hesitating after the fact is much better than hesitating in policy.
Note that it is only a very tiny strip of land that separates the Russian enclave at the Baltic sea from Belarus, a country very much friendly to Russia. I'd happily bet that there are many different plans on how to occupy that strip in a hurry should it come to that and just as many plans on how to deal with those attempts.
https://www.google.com/maps/@54.2105194,22.8701257,10.42z
All it would take is to take out two highways, one major, one minor and it's done.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Large wars happen when antagonists misjudge how protagonists will react.
Therefore it is extremely important to only say that you will do things that you absolutely know that you will do, to take the guessing out of it for your opponents. Because if they credibly think you might have bluffed, at some point they will call with drastic results. (And every time you're caught in a bluff, your credibility goes down for the next conflict. See the German invasion of Austria.)
Oh, please. Anschluss isn't even remotely comparable to the possible China - Taiwan situation. If you meant that about the reaction of other countries i think you can't really draw any meaningful parallels there either.
The fact that Britain and France failed to enforce the Treaty of Versailles after Hitler's violations demonstrated to Hitler that he could continue violating the treaty and nobody would stand up to him.
That is why, when Germany decided to invade Poland, they didn't expect that Britain and France would actually fight. And the cowardice that they had seen displayed left them convinced that Britain would quickly sue for peace when put to the test.
Furthermore HAD Britain and France responded with force in 1938, Germany wasn't ready and would have backed down. In fact the big reason why Germany wanted Austria was to secure Austrian steel that Germany needed for war manufacturing.
If you put a line in the sand and your enemy crosses it without consequence, you shouldn't expect that they will believe your next line in the sand, no matter how strongly worded your statement is.
I don’t think the party leaders in China believe that massive sanctions would be balanced by the nationalistic boost of invading Taiwan.
I have read about this war of super super sonic weapons which is scary to me.
Of course if China wanted to just bombard Taiwan into rubble, there is nothing Taiwan could do about that. But the cost/benefit of such an action is really bad.
* At least three big landings in the Gallipoli campaign in WW1
* Dozens of huge naval landings in all theatres in WW2. The Med, North Africa, the Baltic, Rangoon, Pacific island hopping, you name it. Besides D-Day, the battle of Anzio was also huge with 100s of thousands participating.
* The naval invasion of Hainan in 1950 is particularly pertinent, pitting the Chinese communists against the Republic of China.
* Battle of Inchon in Korean War. Big, decisive, victorious naval landing.
And yes there were sizeable successful opposed naval landing operations in every sizeable war since - Suez, Vietnam, Falklands, Iran-Iraq, Gulf Wars 1 and 2. There only weren’t any in Afghanistan because it is landlocked and at 10k feet altitude…
Look at what the current semiconductor shortage is doing to our internal manufacturing industry. I don’t think many Americans would be OK with a genocidal dictatorship holding a switch that could literally turn our economy off and on at will.
This is a bad reason to go to war. It would be cheaper, to say nothing of cost fewer lives, to spend the tens of billions of dollar it would cost to replicate that capacity in America.
https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/2033
This seems to be a popular talking point but also completely wrong.
It's the least critical bits of the east asian semi supply chain, i.e. not essential to military and majority of established industries. Leading edge TSMC fabs gets destroyed, we lose a few nodes and some industries / gamers get set back 10 years. Start a broader war with PRC over TW, PRC will start hitting semi supply chains in Korean / Japan where US assets are and basically global semi infra get set back decades. The difference is a few high tech US industries collapsing versus essentially all of US high tech manufacturing / way of life collapsing for decades. Semi capability is so rare and concentrated in east Asia that PRC has the button on silicon mutually assured distruction. At the end of the day, US/west who has broad leadin IC loses much more than PRC in a semi MAD scenario.
It would cost American lives. We're war weary--I don't think we've fought a legitimate war in generations. That takes a lot to get over. It's, ironically, similar to the situation that led to European appeasement the last time this happened.
I thought WMDs were the lie that justified invading Iraq? The Afghanistan lie was that ObL was hiding in a cave there rather than openly living down the street from the Pakistan Military Academy. I'll admit that as the stories pile up it gets hard to keep them straight. It seems possible that the war pigs have gone a bit overboard with the stories in the last several decades. They've turned the knob so far that it may have broken off. After the "disastrous" aspects of the recent withdrawal have been hyped so much in the war media, I've heard normal red-blooded high-school-educated Ozark hillbilly Americans laughing out loud at e.g. CNN's instant backflip on the performance of Biden as president. It has been made exceedingly clear which interests really decide what's news.
Historically, American public sentiment has swung between periods of imperialism and isolationism. Based on the last few years, I think we’re swinging back towards isolationism. But yea, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a near-future President looking for an easy military victory (e.g. Panama).
I also think we should host a sovereign election and ask the Taiwanese people what they think we should do.
Taiwan already has a democractically-elected President. Instead of holding a "sovereign election," you could just listen to her:
>Tsai expressed her solidarity with Hong Kong protesters, remarking that Taiwan's democracy was hard-earned and had to be guarded and renewed. Pledging that as long as she was Taiwan's president, she would never accept "one country, two systems", Tsai cited what she considered to be the constant and rapid deterioration of Hong Kong's democracy over the course of 20 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai_Ing-wen
This is why America entered the war so late. If America were thinking of itself as world police at the time, why did it take America so long to actually go to war?
Why would we defend Taiwan?
It's on the other side of the world from the US, there's no particular economic / strategic US interest in defending it, and on top of that it's current arrangement with China seems to be working for everyone.
I find the notion that China would invade and that the US should then step in to be mystifying.
With Taiwan part of China, it has direct access to the pacific ocean and a naval blockade will be much less effective.
Most of Chinese GDP relies on external trade and a naval blockade would cut it off from vital resources to be able to conduct war against western targets.
Also PRC, along US has the LEAST trade:GDP dependency among major countries in the world. And PRC, unlike Japan has enough domestic resource production to be more or less self sufficient to run a war economy to support a military multiple it's current size.
All which have to be imported.
The Chinese belt & road initiative is a huge project to reduce the reliance on the china sea with a hallmark project opening a new main economic corridor to Karachi & Gwadar in Pakistan. That would allow for an alternative import-route through less hostile waters and dramatically increase the cost of a blockade.
China is very interested in Afghanistan because it provides a route for an oil-pipeline to Iran and has large mineral deposits, reducing their dependency on the seas.
Maybe it could military counter-blockade some of these islands, but that would not prevent the US from enacting an efficient naval blockade in the chinese seas.
BRI hype is mostly theatre / exporting excess infra capacity, it will take decades to cultivate alternate routes and still won't rival shipping via water. The numbers don’t add up. Almost every country with PRC supply route is subject to US bombing in full scale war - US think tanks already proposed landing missiles in SCS islands even if against wishes of SCS nations if shit hits the fan. The US will have no problem bombing infra in the Stans to contain the PRC. Only viable secure route is via Russia due to nuclear deterrence but again land routes are simply insufficient longer term alternatives.
Ultimately US-PRC confrontation / PRC breaking US containment for good will be decided in the waters. In case of the USN attempting a blockade on PRC (legally an act of war), the battles will be decisive, with existential consequences. PRC has options to undermine blockade like bait the USN into defending Japan / Korea, or counter blockade of everything in the 1st island chain from the US. Or destroy all east Asian semi supply chains which set back US manufacturing for decades. Or massive crippling cyber attacks. There are multiple domains of MAD, not just nuclear that makes prolonged confrontation unfavorable. PRC is not just going to sit there and take it.
Also, even if the US sinks the entire PLAN fleet, PRC may still force pyrrhic costs on the US. Every ship in the USN fleet has to dock eventually, including nuclear powered, PRC has enough conventionally tipped ICBMs to hit them without complex kill chain considerations. Destroying the oilers and replenishment ships while in port and the nuclear USCGs that’s hiding out at sea become useless. People aren't fathoming scenarios where both sides lose terribly, but ultimately the US loses more because she started so far ahead. A US unable to honor her global security commitments because she lost so much assets to the PRC loses her hegemony. Is TW worth that? All interest calculus points to no. Especially considering PRC is much easier to contain once she takes over TW. Most countries in the region will become MORE willing to US assets to contain PRC once the TW conundrum is resolved, because they want to deter PRC, but not at the cost of being dragged into war over TW.
China claims about 80% of the SCS which would give them control over 60% of global maritime trade and yield enormous leverage over dozens of SEA nations.
Taiwan is as good a place to make a stand as the inevitable next island.
Remember that they were colonized/humiliated by the west, then occupied by Japan, up until Mao secured their independence. The foreign supported force fled to Taiwan. Do you think they might look at their situation differently than we do?
EDIT: changed 'foreigner force' to 'foreign supported force'
It is China that is bullying Taiwan, not other countries bullying China.
> It is China that is bullying Taiwan, not other countries bullying China.
That's not their perspective. Hard to argue effectively against someone without understanding where they are coming from.
So what? Who cares? I have no delusions that they are going to be convinced of what is wrong with wanting to invade and take over a country. Why bother trying to convince them of anything?
Country to country interactions, in the context of war and invasions, aren't really solved in the marketplace of ideas, of rousing debate, to totally prove that the other side is wrong.
Instead, such problems are solved with power.
The way to stop an invasion from china, is to put in disincentives. Arm up opposing forces, establish treaties, trade relations, and economic sanctions, such that an invasion would cause china a huge of amount of damage, if they did decide to do that.
And if they ignore that, and go through with the invasion, then you follow through on your threat, and actually cause as much damage, in terms of economics, PR, and lives as you can get away with, while reducing the same from your own side.
If you don't understand their perspective you are at a disadvantage. You won't be able to do a good job predicting what they will do. You may unnecessarily start a war. You may be manipulated into starting a war. You may start a war that you can't win. You may be wasting resources. You may be operating out of emotional fear rather than calculated reason.
Wars are lost over such misunderstandings. In the case of the United States that would include Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Lots of blood and treasure wasted. One might also add the cold war, given what is now known about how the maliciousness and capabilities of the Soviets were vastly overestimated, meaning we wasted a vast amount of resources there, also.
In this case I suppose it would be important to understand their motives and capabilities. Are they posturing for domestic consumption? They have said before that they are not in a rush to reclaim Taiwan. Is that still true? How do they feel about the trade-offs involved in a war? How would the war most likely be started and fought from their side? And can we stop them? Are we willing to make the trade-offs that would be involved.
I'm wary of anyone who calls for war and hasn't looked into these things. Blood and treasure for wars doesn't grow on trees.
The original statement that you responded to, was this "It is China that is bullying Taiwan, not other countries bullying China."
And you responded to that statement, by saying that it is "not their perspective".
By responding to that point, in that way, you are basically saying "Well maybe china is right!".
They aren't right on that. They are wrong on that specific point, and it doesn't matter if from their perspective, they think they are correct, except as it comes to defeating that perspective.
So, to rephrase your original statement, instead of saying "thats not their perspective", you should have instead said "Yep, they are totally wrong, and should be stopped, but we need to figure out the best way to stop them from invading taiwan", or something like that.
You also said this "because we are good and they are bad". Which is a true statement, but you are being dismissive about it. Yes, their actions are bad, if they include invading Taiwan. And by saying that, you are basically disagreeing with that idea, by saying it dismissively.
So, please, don't do this bait an switch, where you are now pretending like you care about, uhh, the most effective way to stop China's bad actions, when instead you were quite clearly, quitely obviously, attempting to excuse their actions.
That is what you are doing, when you say this "because we are good and they are bad". You are dismissively attempting to excuse their actions, to support them invading Taiwan, because, well, according to you, "its just their perspective".
My original reply in this thread was that I didn't think that the fear of China attacking the West was worthy justification for the U.S. to go to war with China over Taiwan.
I never said that I support China invading Taiwan. That would mean I advocate sending troops to help China, which I don't. That would be like saying that I support the regime in Saudia Arabia because I don't want to go to war with them. Or that the U.S. supported communist China because we built them up through trade, knowing the whole time they wanted Taiwan back. Maybe these are bad examples, I don't mean to sidetrack things.
I mentioned perspective because Taiwan used to be part of China and I'm sure they look at it differently than other countries which were never part of China. I say this beause I don't believe their desire to retake Taiwan is also a desire to attack the West. I assume they have something comparable to "American Exceptionalism" and psychologically don't want to permanently loose Taiwan, so they bide their time. Just like the Reconquista - lots of Mexicans want Texas back. That doesn't mean they want to attack Europe! Also I do believe that understanding a country's perspective, China, Taiwan, and the U.S. in this case, allows for better outcomes and less possibility of costly mistakes.
On the other hand, in regards to your opinion of this matter, I wonder what would you have thought of Spain attacking the U.S. during the civil war in support of the Confederacy because a re-united U.S. was more of a threat to Spanish control over South and Central America? We eventually went on to treat a lot of those countries like shit, making banana republics of many, etc. Would this Spanish attack have been justified according to the original posters logic, because the U.S. would be an eventual threat to other countries?
There's a variety of nuances to this stuff, if one can get past the "we are good, they are evil" version of things. Maybe that's not always possible.
No, stop. I said nothing about you supporting troops. I am talking about support of the moral argument, about how we can, from a moral perspective, disregard their "perspective", when thinking about what is right or wrong, or to get moral advice.
If their perspective is that they want to invade that other country, in a moral discussion, I don't care about their perspective, when determining if that is right or wrong.
So then, you would agree with me that if they invaded that you would absolutely condemn them, morally, and say that they are wrong and that you don't care about their moral opinion on the matter, as you disagree with it.
> I don't believe their desire to retake Taiwan is also a desire to attack the West.
Them wanting to invade Taiwan is a good enough reason, in and of itself, to arm Taiwan, and engage in severe economic or political actions against China, if they ever follow through with that.
Ideally, they wouldn't do that through, due to our actions in arming the opposition though.
Obviously, it would be way better if China simply never invaded, due to our actions, and if we could avoid war, and could avoid anyone being invaded.
The best action, is not to give in to their perspective, instead it is to make it so if they ever invaded, they would take a lot of damage, so that they then decide to not do it in the first place, and there is neither any war or invasion.
A much better case could be made that wars are really started over greed and fear. And that's what I was talking about originally. This thread started with me objecting to the assertion that a justification for militarily defending Taiwan was to prevent China from attacking the West. I don't think they plan on attacking the West. What do they plan on doing? To know that requires thinking from their perspective. This is what the state department does. This is the level I was talking on. I personally think that the world would be a better place if citizens everywhere better understood the reasons for problems between nations.
I don't think that this has anything to do with morality. I didn't bring morality up. I've studies a lot of history, and that doesn't appear to be how these things work. That's why the U.S. does many immoral things, supports many regimes that do immoral things, ignores many others, and changes their mind sometimes. Same as every other country. The bigger and more powerful a country is the more immoral they tend to become. Given all that it hardly makes sense to single out Taiwan for special treatment based on morals. If you want to go on discussing morality in relation to Taiwan you have a lot of contradictions to deal with, our support of Saudi Arabia for example, our abandonment of the Kurds, Afghanistan, etc. Morality is not why wars are fought. Morality is how wars are sold to the masses that have to suffer and pay for them. I apologize if you already know this and we are otherwise miscommunicating.
So where do you want to go from here?
Just be aware, that if you do that, you can't complain about anything at all, regarding any moral issue, what so ever.
And you cannot complain, when people, who actually do care about right or wrong, treat you equivalently to the worst of any political ideology that you can think of, and call you horrible political slurs, regarding the obvious bad ideologies that should immediately come to mind.
If you want to bite the bullet on that, and say "yes, I dismiss any arguments at all, relating to morality, and the people who do care about that stuff, should definitely treat me like the obvious trope evil ideologies that come to mind", then fine. Just say that.
But that is your position. Own it, and say it to the world, so that others can treat you, how they treat other such proponents of such ideologies.
It's not an ideology. I'm saying that it's simply the way geopolitics works. The way things have been throughout history, including the modern era. It's what all the books on this topic talk about. Might does makes right when it comes to countries relations with each other. Countries act in their self interest. The strongest country gets their way. The law of the jungle. There's no judge or god for a country to appeal to or to enforce rules of morality. Ultimately there's only armies and allies. If the group of people running things in one country think they can dominate another country to their advantage, they do. That's why all large empires ultimately make so many enemies, causing their downfall. In this case I think that China wants to regain their traditional territory and expand their influence in their neighborhood region, and the U.S. doesn't want to give up an inch if they don't have to. At stake is economic and political influence in South East Asia. The rich and powerful care about that, not morality.
I personally have a quite different ideology when it comes to these matters, but I'm not the one in charge. I wouldn't send people to fight a war over Taiwan. I don't think it's justified based on a fear of them attacking the West, nor because some people think China is evil. Is it better for China to quickly take Taiwan or for us to enable a war that could kill millions? If you want to raise money and hop on a plane to fight the Chinese over Taiwan, I'm cool with that.
> Just be aware, that if you do that, you can't complain about anything at all, regarding any moral issue, what so ever.
> And you cannot complain, when people, who actually do care about right or wrong, treat you equivalently to the worst of any political ideology that you can think of, and call you horrible political slurs, regarding the obvious bad ideologies that should immediately come to mind.
I saw your comment above before you edited it. You seem to be quite emotional about this, and quite hostile towards me in this thread.
You seem to look at international politics very differently than anything I've studied, and I'm not sure that I understand. I've tried to explain my understanding of the way the world works in this regard, but you haven't much explained how you think. Worst case I might assume that you just get enraged over whatever the news headlines tell you to, but that wouldn't be very charitable.
I'm genuinely curious and have a lot of questions. How should a country choose what evil in the world to oppose, seeing as how there is so much? If we don't always confront evil, does that mean that other considerations are more important? Do you think that the leaders of countries think of good and evil in their calculations, or money and power? Does it bother you that the U.S. sometimes supports evil regimes? Or sometimes does evil things itself?
I'm wondering if you have answers for any of these questions. I know a lot of people haven't thought much about this stuff.
Ok fine. Then if that is the case, then you should have no problem saying "Yes, I completely and totally agree with you, that the people who want to invade Taiwan, are extremely evil, should be condemned, and the people and individuals who support that, are morally equivalent to the obvious extremely evil ideologies, that come to mind, and should be treated as such by society."
If you agree with that statement, then great. In that situation, you reject that other ideology, entirely, and agree that such people, including individuals, can and should be treated the same as any other horrible evil political group, with all of the implications that this implies.
> If you want to raise money and hop on a plane to fight the Chinese over Taiwan
Whoa, I have already given other options. Such as for example, continuing doing what we are currently doing, which is to arm Taiwan, as much as possible, so that if a war breaks out, a whole lot of damage is caused to china.
Such an action, would likely disincentive china from invading in the first place, which would be the goal. Arming the opposition, and economic and political sanctions and measures, are likely more than enough to prevent an invasion, without a war.
> Is it better for China to quickly take Taiwan or for us to enable a war that could kill millions
Or, instead of that, we could give them the ability to cause as much damage as possible, without us needing to be directly involved.
Such a situation, would provide strong disincentives, that would likely cause china to not start the war in the first place.
Yes, I would condemn it. I think any group of people who want to be independent should be able to be independent. Also I assume the system in China is more the cause of evil, as opposed to all the people, so many of whom are along for the ride.
But that doesn't mean I'd be in favor of going to war with China over Taiwan.
> Whoa, I have already given other options. Such as for example, continuing doing what we are currently doing
The main article that we are commenting on, and the start of this thread, was about defending Taiwan if China invades. I thought that was what we were talking about.
Any chance of you answering any of those questions I asked? Or maybe this is one of those emotional things that are difficult to reason about?
Great! Finally! Glad you agree with me completely, and are no longer dodging the questions about morality.
> was about defending Taiwan if China invades.
There are a whole lot of ways to defend another country, without launching a thousand nukes and ending society as we know it.
Such a word, "defending", could include a multitude of options.
> Any chance of you answering any of those questions I asked?
"How should a country choose what evil in the world to oppose, seeing as how there is so much?"
You do what you can, whereever possible, and you disregard people who say "well, you are saying that X is bad, but did you know that there is also Y that is bad?"
If you want the world to do more to stop bad things that are happening in the world, you should not say "Keep doing X, because we are doing Y", instead you should say "stop doing Y which is bad, and also don't do X which is also bad!".
> Does it bother you that the U.S. sometimes supports evil regimes
You can be bothered as much as you want about whatever, but do not use whataboutism, to disregard someone else saying that Z is bad.
I'm pretty sure that I do not agree with you, most certainly we don't reason about these things the same.
Along the way during this conversation I wondered if I'd learn anything about your position. I'm not sure if I did. It seems like you'd rather bully your way through a debate, like with the above statement and many others you have made. Some of the things you said left quite an impression. Personality differences, I guess.
Its pretty simple. When people say stuff like "X is bad", there are people out there who hide their real position, and try to attack that idea by saying "well stopping it impractical!" or "You say we should stop X, but what about Y thing that is also bad!", or "X is only bad from your perspective!".
They do this to misdirect around their real position, which is that they do not actually agree that X is bad. It is a bad faith way of hiding someone's beliefs, and not actually talking about the main point.
Next time, if you don't want to be confused with these bad faith people, just start off by say "Hey, I totally and completely agree with you that X is very bad! That is a good moral position for you to have! But what about these other things, or issues with how we go about stopping X?"
This much more accurately seems to be your position, that you completely agree with me that X is bad in this case.
Because if you don't do that, and just start talking about "Well what about if from their perspective, actually they don't think X is bad", then that very clearly implies that actually you don't think that X is bad, but you just don't want to admit it, and back up your position, and are acting in bad faith.
I knew I was not engaging in misdirection. At first I did leave unsaid that I always believe it is wrong to impose on others (China and Taiwan, for example). It's hard to completely state ones position in every comment. I jumped right into a geopolitical discussion, where I'm still convinced that might makes right is the primary driver of interactions between countries, as opposed to morality, given that countries are run by less than perfect politicians. I was thinking more along the lines of the practicality of the U.S. getting involved, factors driving that, likely outcomes, how motivated the parties involved are, etc. Wars so often create more tragedy, and it seems there's so often questionable motives involved.
I guess that it's often the case that it takes a while to sort through the different context people bring to a discussion. I've seen this before, a better discussion after getting the initial yelling back and forth over assumptions out of the way.
> It's not an ideology. I'm saying that it's simply the way geopolitics works.
But none of us here is a geopolitical power, so for you to argue as if you were is just fucking silly. You are, AFAIK, an ordinary human (unless bots have developed a heck of a lot while my back was turned?), so discussing as if you weren't is not just hilariously pretentious but ultimately meaningless.
But again you are viewing things with a twisted perspective. The legitimate Chinese government is the one that had to flee the evil usurpers, and ended up on the island of Formosa. It's actually kind of the other way around: Mainland China "used to be part of" what is now Taiwan. So, sure, reunite them: Give China back to Taiwan.
The US strategy is to enforce peace through strength which is what you can expect from a democratic country and which is widely supported by allied nations.
Dictatorships tend to seek external enemies to boost a rally-around-the-flag narrative that boosts centralized control. It's a very old playbook that works everywhere (also in US domestic politics).
The Chinese communist party will need these distractions more and more as the GDP growth will stall due to internal corruption (they rank lower than Ghana and Tunesia in corruption indexes).
I think we can agree that whatever the communist party thinks it needs to stay in power should not lead to WWIII
I agree about external enemies. I think that both China and the U.S. are playing that dangerous game.
I also agree that the Chinese communist party will come under more pressure domestically. besides the things you mentioned are also some tough demographic changes coming up.
I also assume that the communist party in China doesn't want WWIII.
China claims 80% of the South China Sea as "ancestral lands" and they are actively building capability to take it by force. How would you feel if you are in charge of Indonesia or the Philipines?
Which territory does the US claim?
We've seen in the last few weeks in Kabul that that era is over, but that would be an answer to "why"
TSMC is one of the most important companies for the US.
1. we just finished a 20 year war with nothing to show for it. Jumping into a new war is probably worth some cost/benefit analysis beyond "well, why not?"
2. correct if wrong, but I assume the projection of power backing your usage of "we" actually means "policed by others, who are not me"
I'm not sure I want to see a new generation of kids slurped up into another war (formally declared or otherwise) on the other side of the globe to dubious end effect.
e: account throttled, last reply for this thread
@Ekaros
I think in case of war prior to TSMC productions shifting off island, the survival of those fabs would be the only point of agreement and deconfliction between the mexican standoff. The idea that US would negotiate conceding TW to PRC over fab sharing access / where US controlled supply chains ultimately determine the fabs viability is not inconcievable. The US is fucking negotiating with the Taliban over civilians. Thre are tons of US civilians AND economic interests in TW worth preserving, even if it means handing TW over to PRC, as long as said economic interest has US leash. Which TSMC supply chains are absolutely tethered to. Why would TW agree? Because they're a developed country who doesn't want to be Yemen if conflict gets seroius, it's their only short term barginning chip.
I could well imagine Biden consulting with his military advisors and coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. We saw a similar thing play out with Obama and Crimea.
The winning strategy for the U.S. right now seems to be to convince China we would defend Taiwan so they don't attempt an invasion in the first place. But that's hard to do when it looks like the U.S. has pretty compelling reasons to stay out of it if it came to that.
(This is all assuming that Taiwan asks for our help. I don't know why they wouldn't, but I feel like it's an important caveat that we shouldn't involve ourselves in conflicts we aren't invited into by at least one party.)
Essentially all of PLA modernization is designed to mitigate US intervention in TW scenarios, especially near PRC shores. Current planning on both sides largely dismiss the possibility of US being able to defend TW on island proper or within the 1st island chain where force balance does not favor the US. The workable strategy is to blockade PRC at SLOC choke points and push confrontation to the 2nd island where PRC has relatively weaker projection capabilities. But even that advantage will diminish each year, especially until the 2030s where the USN procurement timeline is about to get very depressing. The TLDR is the US can still contain PRC, but the US cannot defend TW anymore. Hence strategic ambiguity / lack of security guarantee, because bluntly PRC has too much capability now for the US to make impossible promises. Recent shifts in policy / think tanks / blob circles outside the most fervent China Hawks are pushing the “porcupine” model where the US provides TW arms but does not commit explicitly to defense.
Now US has riled up it's own domestic sentiment against PRC sufficiently that domestic politics could influence unwanted confrontations in PRC's favor. It's a recipe for potential disaster and embarrassment that could further undermine US interests / hegemony. If US had to intervene, PRC would like nothing more than a near shore slog with US where she is strongest. Keep in mind PRC fought a nuclear US and USSR when she wasn't a nuclear power over sovereignty issues much less significant than TW.
First I'm hearing of this. Occupying Taiwan would require massive Chinese troop transport. That, and every re-supply, are naval and aerial projects the U.S. is capable of making super, super costly in terms of materiel.
TW is an island 5% the size of Yemen off the coast of the PRC military umbrella. Mainland rocket and air forces can glass TW with impunity with assets on the mainland and the US likely wouldn't do shit because hitting PRC territory opens up US CONUS soil as well. Not to mention PRC nuclear forces are entangled with conventional forces, there's no way to hit Chinese assets without risking nuclear escalation, by design.
PRC invading TW with an unprecedented amphib campaign is based on PRC capabilities from before the 90s. Before PLA modernization where Chinese military was weak by even WW2 standards. Times have changed, US blob is finally recognizing the PRC is looking at Desert Storm, not Normandy. Think blockades, and other forms of coercion short of direct invasion. PLA amphib acquisitions in the past 10 years have shown very little investment in sealift capabilities. Almost all resources dedicated to countering USN in blue water theatres. If an invasion were to happen, the island's defenses would already have been crushedand the PLA would be using civilian assets which are built to military standards.
China doesn't. But Xi might.
I agree that the U.S. has no way of defending Taiwan against Beijing deciding to obliterate it. But short of Xi needing to pull a Falklands, that is unlikely. If China moves on Taiwan, it would be to control the territory and--most likely--its people.
China wants to govern Taiwan and its people. They certainly want to directly own Taiwan's economy. They can't do any of that if they burn it to the ground. And if they did commit an atrocity like that, they'd be signing their own death warrants on the global political stage.
While I do believe China could successfully invade and occupy Taiwan, it would be incredibly bloody and costly to do so, and I don't think they're quite to the point where they want to take that leap.
When Japan left, they signed over Taiwan to the ROC, not to the PRC. So China and the PRC have no claim over Taiwan to begin with.
Seriously, China's claim is the equivalent of a bunch of Americans setting up home in a city in Canada, then 200 years later saying "lets call Canada a State of America". Despite the fact that Americans never ruled in the country to any extent.
At the end of the day, it's really that simple. If ROC/TW wants to hold on to what it conquered from natives of Formosa, they will have to defend it with blood. Ditto with Americans who think they can deter PRC on core sovereignty issues, when they couldn't even deter PRC from fighting over Korea while the US was a nuclear power. The west can craft whatever ahistorical story they want to cope, but until they commit to exchanging SanFrancisco/Sydney/Tokyo for Shanghai over Taipei, their opinions simply don't matter for PRC calculations over TW.
(If you mean the US would lose out particularly because it hosts so many large technology companies, I agree.)
I mean, your comment might be correct but I cannot read it except in a defeatist way.
... "The comments were made at the first ever regional security dialogue between the ruling parties of Taiwan and Japan -- a meeting, already condemned by Beijing, that comes amid growing Chinese aggression in the region."
As a whole the West does not generally believe that tactics of barring opponents from running, criminalizing dissent, disappearances, soft violence and threats is a fair Democracy or election, if it even meets the definition at all.
While perhaps technically 'legal' on paper, my point is that once the Law is coopted by one person (or CCP as an entity) with total control, the Law becomes the Emperors will and not a legitimate legal system by our norms.
War is of vital importance to the state. If victory is certain, you MUST attack.
At the moment Taiwan would be wise to wire their chip fabs to blow, like those Swiss mountain tunnels.
Its a bit more subtle than this.
Something along the lines of the US recognizes the One-China policy but doesn't accept it leaving the whole situation in a limbo status.
I think this video tries to explain it: https://youtu.be/cA8VoY3dUFU
No, that is nonsense.
Taiwan is already its own country. It has its own laws, taxes, borders, and army, and it has been that way, for decades. That makes it a country, no mater what china says on the matter.
That is a much different situation than puerto rico.
What makes something a country, is not some document somewhere. Instead, what makes something a country is the facts on the ground of the situation.
IE, who controls the laws, taxes, borders, and military. All of which, are clearly not controlled by china.
This isn't our fight. Never mind we gave China our word we wouldn't interfere. Does our word mean nothing anymore?
My initial post was about how Taiwan is already a country, no matter what words are on a piece of paper.
What makes something a country, is the fact that it has its own laws, borders, taxes, and army, and it has been that way for decades. That was my point.
And no words on a piece of paper change those facts on the ground.
People living in states, still have to pay federal taxes. They still have to follow federal laws. And federal armies still have bases, in these states, and defend those borders.
People living in Taiwan do not have to pay taxes to China. They do not have to follow China laws. And if a fighter plane, from china, flew across Taiwan, it would get shot down by the Taiwanese military.
That is why Taiwan is a country, and is different than the states example.
Yup. And to the question whether China should be reunited under a single regime... Sure, OK, let's discuss that.
The default position is of course that if this were to happen, it would be under the legitimate government in Taipei, not the usurpers in Peking. Right?
China is in a whole other league from the adversaries that the country has faced in generations. The have a world class air force, navy, and ground force complete with advanced aircraft, tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines, missiles, satellites, etc.
Given how poorly the country fared in the pandemic, I'm not so sure the country could hold together in the event of an attack. There's a reasonable chance that Americans will use the opportunity to destroy the government from within.
I support Taiwanese independence, but I'm not sure I support it with my life.
I'm not American, but if anything I would think that nothing would unify the US like the threat of an external invader. I have a hard time thinking people would care about who's democrat or who's republican if a foreign nation is dropping paratroopers in your neighborhood.
> There's a reasonable chance that Americans will use the opportunity to destroy the government from within.
I seriously doubt it. Even the most fervent, gun-loving, militant libertarians realize that sabotaging your own government during a war is not in your self interest.
> I support Taiwanese independence, but I'm not sure I support it with my life.
If the US declares war, it doesn't really matter. It's not like the US involvement in WW2 or Vietnam was put to a referendum, if your country is at war, you are at war, unless you have enough money to flee the country: but realistically a war between China in the US would be a world war, or at the very least (best case) a Nato - China war, which is why it's _extremely_ unlikely to happen. Neither the US nor China has anything to gain from an all out war. And even if China is a formidable opponent, it would certainly tank their entire economy.
This is a great point. Look at how united America was after 9/11. George W. Bush's approval rating soared. While politics are bitterly divided here, when it comes to an external threat, those divisions will still get put aside (at least for a while). Not much unites a country like a (non-civil) war.
All that to say, that's a lot of money, death, destruction, and for what? China is a capitalist country now, and they really like the money flowing in. An invasion of Taiwan could disrupt the spigot and cause another Tiananmen Square.
1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/taiwan/#mil...
2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2020/10/26/to-thwart-i...
Having abandoned allies also will make future engagements with local allies that much more difficult to accomplish because of trust issues.
All these will embolden actors like China, Russia, etc to see who will blink first.
This perception is very important
The deal was made a year+ ago the then-current Afghan govt wasn't party to the agreement.
drop your prejudice, just go to china and taiwan, listen to its own people voice, don't just to watch media and listen to politician，they all have kinds of their own interests and opinions
I bet at least half of everything on a US military base has "made in china" stamped on its parts
Mandatory draft for every single adult in America in a front-line unit on a rotating basis, then this will have my support, what the hell is with people volunteering others to die
So when are we liberating North Korea? Because it's 100 times worse than Afghanistan, definitely worse than Taiwan and the people there are suffering and tortured daily with work camps