I feel like this is a bit over-stated, but Taiwan does project a great deal of naval power into the surrounding waters.
Also, though this article reads a bit like HoI4 analysis. I think you need to more carefully consider all of the nations agency and motivation rather than consider them victory points to be won or lost.
"Losing". As if Taiwan and Japan are owned by the USA. The title itself speaks loudly about the mindset of the author and the American ruling class, but reveals also the truth. Taiwan is an ex military dictatorship born as a puppet state for the USA to counter communist China.
> Taiwan is an ex military dictatorship born as a puppet state for the USA to counter communist China.
It is immaterial what Taiwan was born as. It is a self-governing, free country, and the only thing that matters should be the wishes of the people who live there. And that overwhelmingly is to not be a part of communist China.
If only we are consistent in applying this standard. Are Hawaiian, native American, Puerto Rican, Ryuku etc independence activists' wish also important or is only Taiwan's wish important? If only Taiwan, then we do truly believe in this standard or is it just a moral cover for geopolitical interest?
This is kind of a silly comment. Of course the US interest in Taiwan has to do with geopolitical interest rather than a moral standing.
That doesn't stop me (or anyone else) from believing that the Taiwanese should be entitled to self-determination. Or the Hawaiians, Indigenous peoples, or Puerto Ricans for that matter. If support for that aim happens to come from the US then that's fine by me. Moral consistency from a national government is not something I require or expect.
Taiwan has been independent in fact for a long time. Changning the status quo seems to require more justification. If large majorities of Taiwanese want to join China than that is their prerogative.
Or Eastern Ukraine for that matter. If there were actually concern about the self-determination of people who lived there, they would have been asked. We don't ask, because we know what the answer would be.
The vast majority support the status quo[1], which the West is investing billions in interfering with on the military, economic, and political fronts. It’s doing so for its own reasons, not out of any affection for the people of Taiwan (of which it has none).
Status quo is being able to run their own country and free-and-fair elections. And besides, the question was asked under the threat of China's automatic invasion if it ever formally declared independence - I suppose people don't want to die.
I agree, people don’t want to die. So absent an outside force stoking antagonisms, they will generally find a way to resolve disputes with their neighbors peacefully.
> The vast majority support the status quo[1], which the West is investing billions in interfering with on the military, economic, and political fronts. It’s doing so for its own reasons, not out of any affection for the people of Taiwan (of which it has none).
Did you vote on the policies being carried out by Western governments and institutional apparatuses or is it just a coincidence that you have the same opinion on this issue as the people on TV? :)
It is a self-governing, "free" "country" whose founding political party supports the policy of "one China, two systems," and where recent elections saw China-hostile politicians decimated.
Two systems as in Hong Kong? Btw, those were local elections and if you've been reading Taiwanese news sources, you'd find that nobody saw those elections as a referendum on joining China.
Hong Kong was a British colony seized from China by force, and reverted to Chinese governance as scheduled. The idea that China should respect Britain's status quo is laughable.
Politics are, as they say, local. The KMT doing well in recent elections are due to a lot of different issues, not necessarily something as abstract and high-minded as the status of the nation. A periodic election is not the same thing as a national referendum.
It's almost as if you didn't read the article you linked, which summarizes, "the elections likely hinged on local issues, not China."
Polls indicate that the Taiwanese overwhelmingly want to either "maintain the status quo" or "maintain the status quo with incremental movement toward independence" (https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963), which is entirely what the US policy is intended to support! Like the Taiwanese people, we also don't want an apocalyptic conflict with China when the status quo is already de facto independence, regardless of what we call it to appease nationalist factions in Chinese domestic politics.
"If Not Cross-strait Issues, What Are The 2022 Elections About?"
> CROSS-STRAIT RELATIONS are not the dominant frame of this election cycle. Namely, nine-in-one elections, which serve as midterms between presidential elections, are primarily about local issues rather than cross-strait issues. Cross-strait relations are for Taiwanese, after all, largely a matter of foreign policy.
> As such, it would not surprise if the KMT performed well in this set of elections. The KMT has always had a stronger grip over local politics, seeing as its local clientelist and patronage networks date back to the authoritarian period. As the party that rose out of Taiwan’s democracy movement in past decades–and which may have had two presidents but never controlled the Taiwanese legislature until the first term of the Tsai administration–the DPP is still unable to break the stranglehold of the KMT over local politics.
> However, the key domestic election issues that voters will be voting on return to Taiwan’s economic outlook and its demographic challenges. Taiwan’s economy has seen growth, particularly with regards to exports, due to the minimized effects of COVID-19 after going for more than a year without any lockdowns as the rest of the world saw, and outbreaks that were contained with relative speed when COVID-19 did finally enter Taiwan. But such growth has not trickled down to the population writ large. As such, the issue of stagnant wages is a major issue up for contention.
That is NPR's analysis of the situation, based on expertise, available information, and reliable polling such as that which I linked above. "Opinion" is reading an article, then entirely ignoring its conclusions and supporting data because you think you know better.
How do the Catalonians feel about being part of Spain, or the russophone Ukrainians about being part of Ukraine? Not great. Do you care? If the answer is no, then what you are concerned about is not Taiwanese independence.
Well, how do the Catalans feel about being part of Spain? Seems like none of the referenda that were held had close to 100% participation, since anti-independence votes boycotted them. Certainly Catalonian nationalism/sovereignty shouldn't be discounted, but is it as comparable as you'd say? Maybe somewhere like Palestine would be a better analogy, as that is also a case where a long-standing autonomous government has actually existed.
A people should have a right to self-determination. I can believe that just fine regardless of which people it's applied to. The current focus is in this discussion is about Taiwan, so naturally discussions about Taiwanese self-determination are going to be the focus in this thread. Maybe we'll get a thread about Catalonia sometime. When that happens we can discuss that. For now, let's bound our conversation to the article topic please, and stop trying to derail discussion with whataboutism.
> let's bound our conversation to the article topic please, and stop trying to derail discussion with whataboutism.
There's been no actual discussion about the self-determination of the Taiwanese, because the Taiwanese have not been asked whether they want to be separated from China, and any indication that they don't has been scrupulously ignored.
Polls indicating support of the status quo are obviously in response to the threats of war, and doing one's best to avoid it. Support for reunification however has fallen off a cliff.
It's good that you ask the question that most of people get information from English media.
Taiwan as many people mentioned here is a democracy. It has freedom of speech. So it's easy to get the information from the source inside Taiwan.
Long story short:
It's very mixed. There are people want to re-unit with China and even expect the mainland using military means. Pro-independence group is much larger but majority like to keep the existing status while tend to independence.
Here are some media that show views against Western perception which seems originated from MSM .
There are much more. But again as I mention they are minority
(Claim: I'm not saying that MSM is trusted by Western audience. On the contrary a lot of people especially young generation don't trust or even disdain MSM. However the Taiwan issue is an exception.）
This suggests that the position of US about of the issue is that "This land is yours" is debatable.
However the majority opinion of western world which is shaped by MSM has another view that "(A) This land is not yours and (B)it's not debatable". They only mention the issue is "debatable" when the position of US official position is against their opinion. Underneath they still believe there's no controversy that Taiwan is not part of China due to their hidden ideology.
Decoding hidden part of people's mind based on their output is more interesting than the original topic and also itself is quite controversial.
"This suggests that the position of US about of the issue is that "This land is yours" is debatable."
Fair point. The wording is intentionally vague and up for interpretation - because as you say, we all know US's opinion is that China is China, and Taiwan is Taiwan, but in order to avoid pissing off China, we keep things as ambiguous and vague as we can.
What are native Formosans? The indigenous aboriginal Austronesian people of the island, or the Han and Hakka settlers who arrived from the mainland since the 13th century? And you should look up what happened after that occupying army relaxed martial law and the dictatorship fell away.
While killing a few thousand protesters is surely bad, it is a drop in the bucket compared to those murdered under the commies. So I am very glad the commies didn't get Taiwan, or it would've been a 100 times worse.
Sure, and China used to be a sclerotic caste-based bureaucracy ruled by a hereditary elite. Things change. Taiwan isn't ruled by Chiang Kai-shek anymore; it's a sovereign, democratic society with a flourishing economy and a sense of identity distinctive from that of mainland China.
Control over Taiwan means far more than just semiconductors.
US naval strategy is based on Taiwan. With Taiwan in the fold, China's trade can be effectively blockaded should the situation deteriorate to war. It's a last ditch measure, for sure, but a valuable card to hold nonetheless. China is building more pipeline and rail to de-risk this, but ultimately they want full access to the Pacific. Taiwan and South China Sea militarization give them this.
Taiwan going to China turns the tides of Western influence in Asia. Many nations friendly to the West would "switch sides", including close Western allies like Japan and South Korea. This would have tremendous impact to the West's economy, jobs, cost of goods, cost of energy, etc.
Taiwan is perhaps one of the most important subjects that will define this century. There's a reason all eyes are on it.
Can we apply the same logic for China's influence in Africa, for example? Does geographic location matter more than, say, trade volume? Given that there isn't anything between the US and China (or Taiwan) except the ocean does that not give credence to the US being a partner in that area since it's a Pacific nation?
If we're talking about the west, US, Japan, South Korea are either close or exceed Taiwan's trade with China, and that only includes western nations that are part of the Pacific Ocean directly (and doesn't include Canada, Australia, or New Zealand either).
> The United States is Taiwan’s second largest trading partner, accounting for 12.6 percent of total trade and 10.2 percent of Taiwan imports. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, accounting for 25.2 percent of total trade and 21.6 percent of Taiwan’s imports in 2021. In terms of total trade, other major Taiwan trading partners include Japan (10.3 percent), Hong Kong (7.8 percent), and the Republic of Korea (6.1 percent). [1]
But let’s assume the numbers you listed are correct (I’m sure trade varies by year and breakdown and I assume good faith). What does it matter? Does China get 41% influence over Taiwan and the US, Japan, and South Korea get 25.4% influence?
The whole line of reasoning that started this was nonsense from the start and it doesn’t even include The Jungle [2] that is relations between nation states.
[2] In international relations might largely makes right. Powerful countries are able to impose their will and influence on other countries. For example, the US imposes its will on China w.r.t Taiwan regardless of the amount of trade that occurs between nations.
The US hasn’t been at war with peer militaries, and it’s been generally losing if you haven’t kept up. Russia is winning, but few in the West are willing to admit that yet. Here’s one who is: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukrai...
Notice how the US only picks fights with countries where it can trivially establish air superiority and carry out shock and awe bombing runs. How curious. :D
You don’t even need some exotic ramscoop or anything.
I think “Donfeng 6” is the IRBM that easily destroys a George Washington class carrier from beyond the effective range of an F18 and costs like 5 million bucks, which is why the PLA has a zillion of them.
Sailing a carrier battle group into the Strait with violence on the table would be a very bad call…
There’s a reason everyone puts the most powerful weapons on submarines, or so all the squids in my hometown of San Diego tell me.
Does the concept of civilian even make sense in totalitarian regime, where everyone serves the state equally?
In any case, either might makes right, and China can invade Taiwan and run all the genocides they do because they are big - but them it is also fine for US to naval blockade China into collapse and famine, if it so pleases because might makes right.
Or there are universal values and human rights, and the West would be evil for destroying China and causing untold suffering, but then China is also evil for attacking their neighbours and for running bunch of genocides.
I am against the US meddling in affairs on the other side of the world not because I believe in any liberal nonsense about human rights or any of the media lies devoid of hard evidence but because a lot of Americans will die in the process of our country’s defeat and it will speed along the collapse in standard of living which is already underway here.
That’s a good argument immediately following World War II prior to the decades of global economic integration and ICBM development. Less so today.
Now it is very much our business what is going on in Asia, particularly since the risk is the subjugation of our allies by a totalitarian regime. It is better to have a strong and independent Taiwan, a strong Japan and strong Korea and even strong Philippines and Vietnam to counteract a strengthening PLA Navy, but we also want them to not be hostile to the USA, and we also want it to cost the PRC to even think nukes are the easy way to check the ambitions of their immediate neighbors. That does mean keeping our military promises to Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Simply put, there is no World from where we stand today where unchecked-by-us PRC ambition is an acceptable path forward.
Hopefully none, but if we come to blows we won’t have a choice in how many to accomplish our objectives, now will we? That’s the risk of war; so the PRC needs to back down over Taiwan.
They aren't my objectives and they aren't yours either because we don't get a say in deciding them. China will never abandon the One China policy, so you should come up with a real number of how many American sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers you think it's reasonable to sacrifice for this doomed policy of hubris.
No, I don’t think I will. The goal is to avoid war, if possible, and defend Taiwan if we have to, and to make the PRC regret having chosen to invade Taiwan because they couldn’t relinquish their One China position. Deferring to the CCP’s chosen policy is not an option.
War costs a lot of lives, but a hot war between adversaries means making the adversarial position suffer more for having taken up arms in the first place. A defensive war over Taiwan and keeping our promise doesn’t need a number on the table in advance to make it worth doing. It’s crass to even ask. How many American lives will it take to sink every boat belonging to or commandeered by the PLA in the Taiwan Strait, shoot down every jet that flies above and mow down every pair of PLA boots that lands on Taiwan’s beaches, and destroy every military shipyard on their coastline? Let’s assume this isn’t purely an American fight, you know, for the sake of argument.
If you can figure that one out, you’ll have something close to your answer.
At this point, the One China policy is a political fig leaf that both sides of the strait cling to to pragmatically stave off renewed warfare, which is prudent. On the other hand, a lot of that de jure formality is constantly being played around with.
For instance, just recently the likely next DPP/pan-green presidential candidate is declaring that Taiwan is already de facto sovereign and independent, and so there is no need to formally declare independence:
Odds are, this entire discourse in this HN thread is just a lot of fulminating hot air by people who don't even live in Asia, grognarding hypothetical wargames and war toys, while the actual people in China and Taiwan will peaceably and gradually figure it out over time.
Absent outside influences, I agree the issue would be resolved peacefully over time. The problem is the Western elite want to use the issue to justify aggression and containment of China since China poses a mortal threat to the US-centric global financial system which is in a deepening state of crisis.
I am against the CCP meddling in the affairs on the other side of the Strait. If they were to commit this horrible atrocity, it is the unfortunate role of Team America: World Police to support the poor, innocent, independent, free people of Taiwan.
I'd prefer no Americans die in the course of this, similar to Ukraine. But certainly the number of Americans worth dying to heroically save a country of nearly 25 Million from genocide and slavery isn't 0.
While I've seriously thought about it, it wouldn't mean much. I'd be some rear-echelon POG sitting in a cubicle somewhere. So unless it comes to full-scale nuclear war, my personal risk wouldn't be much different than what it is right now.
This hypocritical application of different standards to US annoys me too, you see it all the time with Russia.
Somehow Russia gets to play "great power politics" (although I think, personally, they must've lost their great power license by now lol). But when the US even helps the country being attacked, it's immoral and we have to stay neutral on moral grounds? Wtf, pick a standard. If Russia gets to play great power politics, so do we.
So, you are saying that "Might Makes Right"; the rulers of largest economy in the region should rule the region, regardless of what the people of that region want. I doubt you will find many people in Taiwan or Japan who would rather live under the government of CCP.
So, Why should the West have more influence?
Because any person or group of people who want to live a self-determined life and with a self-determined government, must always be better armed, better prepared, and have better alliances than the abusers and autocrats who will steal from them and rule over them the instant they are given the chance.
If you don't stop the neighborhood bully, he'll steal your lunch every day and keep you from walking where he likes to walk.
At this point in history, all the "...-ism"s are irrelevant, and we can see what it is - a deadly serious conflict between autocracies and democracies. It is now a hot war with Russia waging a genocidal war of aggression in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland, Germany, etc.. Zero of those countries want to live under Russia's rule, even though you think Russia should have the right because it is the largest and nearest player.
China is openly threatening the entire south China Sea, none of which, again want to live under CCP rule.
If it is not stopped, Russia, China, Iran, and other authoritarians will not stop. If you would rather live under the rule of Putin or the CCP, I suggest you move there, rather than attempt other free people to not defend themselves.
Because the PRC is a nation subject to an authoritarian party that is antagonistic to the liberal democracies in that region that given half a chance looks for new and innovative ways to subject private society to more of its influence and control. Nobody should have any reason to think that short of being contained that it will stop at the “boundaries” of Asia, nor does anyone in Asia actually deserve to live subject to the CCP.
The meaning of "to lose" obviously changes depending on the context. You can't apply the meaning it has when talking about friendship whn you're talking about geopolitics. I'd expect a bit more of literary finesse from a writer on a website called "The Scholar's Stage".
Nations don't have friends, they have interests. Leaders may act friendly towards one another, and policies may seem friendly when interests correlate, but no nation sends their young men and women off to die on foreign soil for the power of friendship alone.
I understand your point but if the world and human experience was truly this cynical, then how do you explain the European people supporting their governments assisting Ukrainians, when continuing the conflict is causing themselves direct discomfort and expense?
> how do you explain the European people supporting their governments assisting Ukrainians
I'm European and I still have to meet someone ready to sacrifice something for Ukraine. People are extremely worried about the state of our economy, much more so than they are about what's happening in Ukraine.
I keep hearing members of the elite like Stoltenberg talking about being ready to make sacrifices for Ukraine, but Stoltenber won't actually have to sacrifice anything. A 50% rise in the cost of living won't affect his lifestyle in the slightest, while it will destroy the livelihood of many families.
In any case, we've all been subjected to unprecedented levels of propaganda. It's not a surprise that many feel more concerned about what's happening in Ukraine than in Yemen.
I don’t actually think you responded to anything I said, instead responded to a strawman about elite politicians, generalised your circle of friends to a whole continent (there have been polls on the support you know) and finally made the dubious argument that warm feelings towards Ukrainians don’t count because there are other things happening in the world as well.
> how do you explain the European people supporting their governments assisting Ukrainians, when continuing the conflict is causing themselves direct discomfort and expense?
I replied
> we've all been subjected to unprecedented levels of propaganda. It's not a surprise that many feel more concerned about what's happening in Ukraine than in Yemen.
Everything else I wrote is what I think about the concept of "sacrifice" that the elites fill their mouths with knowing it won't really affect them.
Whether my argument is dubious or not to you, it is still an argument and a valid answer to your question.
You might want to explain why my answer doesn't convince you, rather than simply dismissing it as "beside the point" when it isn't.
Don't worry I read it.
So fair enough, it was an answer. But it is predicated on the belief that the support can't possiby be due to anything but propaganda or deceiving elites or things like that.
I find that wholly unconvincing.
You seem to think that the only reason people care is due to media coverage that you deem as pure propaganda.
Might it be that the media coverage is in fact more than for instance coverage of Yemen, because people care more (however unfair that may be to the Yemeni)?
> Might it be that the media coverage is in fact more than for instance coverage of Yemen, because people care more (however unfair that may be to the Yemeni)?
I can tell you nobody cared at all (most people outright ignored the situation) about Ukraine in the 2014-2022 period, even though Ukrainians were dying for all those years. When Russia took Crimea, that was minor news in my country.
People are used to conflicts happening in the world and we've grown cynical about it, which is why nobody really cares about the Yemenis, for example.
The reason we now care (even though trust me, from a personal point of view nobody really "cares") is that there is a daily stream of Ukraine related news, reporting exclusively the point of view of Ukraine and the statements from their government, often without double checks.
"News just came from Ukrainian officials that the Russians raped 50 children". Even without any evidence, when a statement is repeated ad nauseam by every news source it becomes reality. In the meantime Ukrainians artillery killed several civilians in Russia-occupied Donetsk, but there is no mention of it. This is how propaganda works.
That seems unnecessarily dismissive, how many people said in 1942 that Germany would never succeed in invading France?
As far as I am aware Japan doesn't have a particularly large standing military, and isn't that far away. Meanwhile the Chinese could, and probably would, be willing to drown the entire island in human wave tactics.
The PLAN has gotten much better. They have started building a proper aircraft carrier. They have been building good destroyers. China has the second best navy in the world.
The problem is that it isn't enough for amphibious invasion of Japan or Taiwan. They don't have enough amphibious ships. And the ships would be very vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. Truck-mounted anti-ship missiles, which Japan has a bunch and Taiwan should be buying, have changed things. The other thing that has made amphibious invasion infeasible are multiple rocket launchers, like HIMARS given to Ukraine, which can wipe out an entire beachhead.
> Can you imagine what a landing beach would look like being pounded by drone spotted artillery? See war in Ukraine. Forget the approach, anti ship missiles, mines, sheer volume of logistics needed. Stepping on the landing beach is a suicide without absolutely astronomical advantage in air power and ability to suffer huge attrition, even then.. 155mm hidden under camo/thermal nets, DJI drone rigged with magazines of small bombs.. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson Childs play, this would make Diep and Galipoli look like walk in the park.
> I would go as far as to say that US Army + Marines + Navy could not land on Taiwan without suffering multiple brigades of attrition AFTER at least a year long blockade and air campaign. It is that hard.
> PRC has to surpass US in GDP, then spend 10-20 years of US level military spending, then maybe.
For all of the invocations of Putin in this discussion, Russia already intervened in Ukraine less than a decade ago with their Little Green Men, and they were recently present in Syria. Never mind their invasion of Georgia and the Chechen Wars. Much more combat experience than the modern PLA.
One thing to keep in mind is that Japan could easily develop nuclear weapons. They are banned by the constitution and unpopular with the people but that could change if US withdrew protection and were under threat from China. Japan has the largest stockpile of plutonium in the world.
I've long believed that Japan, while technically not having any nuclear weapons, has the separate components on hand to assemble them within days if they so chose.
China has already stated that they fully intend for Taiwan to revert back to Chinese control by 2050. It will be pretty interesting over the next 30 years to see how the geopolitics evolve around this, I hope I live long enough to see it.
China has been promising reunification with Taiwan since ever. They've made it into an eternal political issue for the CCP's own benefit. It's anyone guess as to whether they will ever try to change or act on that.
China was fully committed to zero Covid until protests started happening, then it was scrapped in no time flat. And 2050 is just conveniently far enough away for it sound politically serious and yet have basically no need for actual immediate action.
It's common to see a correlation and assume causation. There are many other reasons for the abandonment of zero covid. The WHO claims that zero covid was no longer working before it was scrapped.
2050 (2049 actually) is the 100yr anniversary of the CCP's takever of China and the founding of the PRC. That's why it's the target date, they want to complete reunification before then.
However, there is some speculation that the CCP observed from the 1989 Tienneman massacre that the West takes roughly 20yrs to forget stuff like that, so the CCP actually wants to reunify Taiwan by 2030, so it will be forgotten by 2050. Hence the rapid military buildup happening now.
Yeah there's fear it could be even sooner, because the Arleigh Burke destroyer fleet has reached the end of its hull life and is being retired, but there will be a gap of a few years before it's replaced by the new destroyer design.
There's a vid on youtube about this I can't find atm, an interview with a Navy vet Congresswoman concerned about the "missile gap", when the US Navy is at its smallest fleet size and deployed missile quantity over the next few years. China may assess their best chance at retaking Taiwan is during that gap, before US shipbuilding ramps up to close it. She's trying to convince the DoD to extend the Burkes service life until the new destroyers start coming off the production lines.
The Arleigh Burkes were built from 1991 to today. The Flight I are getting close to retirement and Navy decided not to extend service life. But that means only handful will be retired before replacement class is are ready. If it was a problem, or the replacement class is delayed, then they can order more Flight III.
I hope you are talking about living long enough to see China stopped from this, because otherwise, you are wishing an unwelcome autocracy on almost 24 million people, almost all of whom are willing to fight and die to retain their freedom rather than be ruled by the CCP.
If you are actually hoping that the CCP can rule over Taiwan in your lifetime, I have some unprintable words for you, and suggest you rethink your life.
China has never stated this. It's speculation by American analyst based on the goal of "build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious"
Honestly, it probably doesn't even need to be said due to how obvious it is.
If we (the "west") loses Japan, we've essentially waived our claims to South Korea as well. We'll have lost legitimacy and lost our word to protect (Taiwan) what is a epicenter of global technological development (semiconductors). Japan and South Korea (and to a lesser, but significant extent, AUS&NZ) will look at the west's inability to protect Taiwan, and say "well, looks like we'd better buddy up to China, because they're the big dogs now". And that will be that.
I think you'll have to be more specific than that.
If your hangup is that this is yet another instance of Westerners attempting to decide the fate of a people on the otherside of the planet from them, I think we can grant that there isn't a stellar track record there. Still, ideal scenarios of perfect sovereignty don't exist in the real world and I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect e.g. Japan to ask for continued American involvement.
I have no idea what you are advocating. Chinese people are geographically closer and ethnically more similar to Japanese people than the US population as a whole, and therefore should be given some kind of weird consideration in Japanese desires for US military bases?
It's hard to remember now, but the US's war on Iraq was declared with widespread popular support.
Many people today seem to feel that Taiwan and Ukraine are interests worth using military force to defend. I do wonder how well that support would hold up if either of those potential wars becomes reality.
I remember it clearly. The support was huge...only a fringe few who were labeled crazy had the audacity to say "wait, so a bunch of Saudi dudes who were trained in Afghanistan by the CIA to fight the Russians, and funded by Saudi royals ended up attacking us, and as a result we're going to invade Iraq? How does that make any sense?"
I remember it too, but my memory is that a large portion of the US population opposed it, just not a majority. The majority supported it. Mainstream media was mostly on board, in manufacturing consent mode, though they had some problems navigating Colin Powell's less than convincing presentation at the UN on supposed Iraqi WMD, but they succeeded anyway.
I'd say the majority of the voting public was pretty uninformed at the time about what was what regarding anything in the middle east. They were trusting that other people knew what they were talking about. Most of the reason most people know anything about it now is because it has been discussed at length as a result of the mistake.
I think people forget that the country was still somewhat raw from 9/11 and didn't know how to treat the uncertainty regarding future attacks. This was the timeframe when the "1% doctrine" was proposed, where if a threat was thought to have a 1% probability, it had to be treated as a certainty and response was more important than analysis.[1] In that context it doesn't take much to convince someone, even if in hindsight, Powell's presentation was "less than convincing."
There were very large demonstrations in NYC and DC. These were underreported. The press began loosing credibility after 9/11 but when WP stuck this in "Metro" that was the end of it for me.
"A headline in some editions of the Oct. 27 Metro section incorrectly stated that Saturday's antiwar demonstration in the District was the largest since the 1960s. The rally, according to police and estimates of the organizer, was the largest antiwar demonstration in the District since the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975."
< ! >
Honestly, if this demo -- it was huge -- happened in say Cairo, wouldn't it be splashed all over front pages for days?
-- ps --
"Demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tokyo and Mexico City, were held to coincide with the Washington march, and in San Francisco, thousands marched through downtown."
Do they teach this at Columbia's School of Journalism?
- There were demonstrations in lots of major capitals all over the world. Put it in 'international' section?
I remember it also. I remember lots of people speaking out against it, and a lot of hand wringing on CNN about weapons of mass destruction that no one could find.
> US's war on Iraq was declared with widespread popular support.
While "widespread" might be accurate generally speaking, it is also accurate to say that it was the least popular war in my life time by a giant margin.
The protests were huge. The House vote for Iraq was extremely one-sided politically. Obama ran, and won, on having voted against it. It was really dependent on your political scene whether Iraq II was normalized or not.
As an American I am in favor of us helping Ukraine and Taiwan over something like Iraq/Afghanistan/something-like-Vietnam because it is just as much about preserving self-determination and liberty as it is realpolitik.
Iraq is not really comparable because you can’t separate support for the war there in its early days from 9/11 and the desire to “do something.”
But this is also not a Vietnam situation in which the US is propping up a relatively unpopular government and fighting personally in the conflict at great cost of American lives (maybe Taiwan could go down like that, but I think that makes the prospect of actual conflict unlikely, because neither the US nor China wants to nuke the other).
Ukraine was a bit different because they were not as US-aligned before the conflict. But especially with regards to Taiwan, I’d consider an attack against them the same as an attack against any European or ANZAC ally.
It won’t take many direct attacks and loss of life and the majority will be behind both of those wars. I know I will be.
Ukraine has to be won because a Russian victory means they’re emboldened, and the Kremlin preys on weakness. Eventually Poland is hit, Russia will be crushed by NATO, and then the US and Russia exchange nukes. We can’t allow that. Any financial cost and life lost in Ukraine is worth it. We’re not nearly doing enough for Ukraine. It’s vital to world security.
For China, it’s unclear other than nationalism why they want Taiwan. They think they’ll control the world with it, and theoretically that’s true. They just don’t have the expertise to keep TSMC running on their own. And they’re incredibly vulnerable, China is the world’s #1 importer of energy and food. They got excited with all of the foreign investment, but there’s no possible future where China challenges the west. Their peaceful rise and integration was the only way forward, unfortunately, Xi is a madman.
Putin’s war makes at least some sense, on multiple levels. China’s war will be fought as well, but it’s entirely in vain. The CCP will do as much good for Taiwan as Hong Kong.
Both Ukraine and Taiwan represent the life that the Russians and Chinese could have, and ultimately that’s why they’re targets even when it makes little sense otherwise.
NATO and the Quad have no choice but to fight these respective wars. I’m personally willing to fight and die in either conflict because I know what’s at stake.
they are a different ballgame but the song remains the same in that AUS's largest trading partner is China and we've seen China exert a ton of soft power in AUS in many ways. They'll march to China's tune eventually if we don't actively keep China in check - because they'll have no choice in the matter.
The EU's largest trading partner is China. For the US, China is the 3rd largest trading partner with a mere 10 billion difference from being the largest trading partner.
We all sing to the tune of China, and we fully enabled that. We want cheap garbage without difficult questions about human rights and the environment. This very movement has eroded western society.
Considering the enormous population of the countries in that part of the world, for how long the west could claim influence on them anyway?
The center for technological advancements have already shifted to that region too. The west still holds as a cultural powerhouse but as the technology enables cheap production and distribution of media, that is also bound to vanish.
Overall a fairer world where westerners work as hard as the asians is the most likely scenario IMHO. Flipping burgers in NYC should end up with similar compensation as flipping burgers in Shanghai.
Could be painful but at the end it can be beneficial for the west too. Since a while we live in a world where engineers who deal with atoms are poorly compensated in the west because everything is made in China and our best and brightest spend their lives in the advertisement and gambling business disguised as tech and finance. That part of the world becoming an equal power to the west can be beneficial on the long run.
> Considering the enormous population of the countries in that part of the world, for how long the west could claim influence on them anyway?
As long as China is aggressive with its neighbors (e.g. Vietnam), they automatically fall into being friendly with the west and in to the west's sphere of influence. But if Taiwan is conquered by the mainland, all bets are off. There would basically be no counter-balance to China in Asia.
The value of flipping burgers is dependent on the productivity of who you are feeding.
In an ideal world, it would be worth about the same everywhere, but it will take many years until the GDP per capita is uniform everywhere. Especially now that China’s population and its workforce has started to decline.
The point is that it's a positive progress to have China stepping up it's game, assuming they don't turn into some kind of aggressive state. Surely their demographics is a mess but quite frankly only the US has good demographics in the west.
My concern is that the western burger flippers might have been overcompensated due to artificially inflated productivity in some sectors and once that's over the west might find that they can't match the productivity in China due to destruction of some industries leading undercompensation and as a result, severe lack of talent and know how in those.
The question really is if the US will continue to fight by proxy like with Ukraine or take an active role.
The CCP has been preparing for a long time. They know the real battle is one of public opinion and policy making in the US. The big resounding lesson from Ukraine is that an invasion must be swift and overwheling with careful logistical planning as well as PR and anti-sanction measures.
The worst possible thing China can do is attack a US target like a ship or a plane. It will be like pearl harbor, losing all that precious intel network capacity in the US along with US voter's opinions.
All of Europe and Asia can combine forced and will still likely lose against the US military in any conflict. But even the smallest nation can win if they manage to change americans' opinions.
The US didn't "lose": it didn't suffer a military defeat forcing any kind of surrender, it simply gave up and went home.
"Losing" a war, in this context, means you surrender to the enemy, or at least quit and sign some kind of treaty to end hostilities formally. The US has never done that. The US has never lost on the battlefield. With Vietnam, it was too unpopular and was fighting with one hand tied behind its back anyway. With Afghanistan, it won military, but gave up on trying to prop up the Afghani government and pulled out.
>The US didn't "lose": it didn't suffer a military defeat forcing any kind of surrender, it simply gave up and went home.
Giving up and going home is a loss where Taiwan is concerned as it was in Korea.
The more astute observers understand this war is already over. More Chinese people are willing to die to maintain their country's integrity than Americans willing to do the same for an island on the otherside of the planet.
The US will lose twice if it continues down this path. It will secondly earn the hate of the vast majority of Asian countries as an outsider bringing yet another uneccessary war to their neighborhoods over what the majority of Asians consider a settled topic.
What majority of Asian countries? South Korea and Japan, both nations similarly connected to the U.S. as Taiwan is? India, which has no love for China and is a Quad member? Vietnam, which is in the Quad Plus?
Incorrect. Most Asians are anti-war and understand the biggest war monger by far is the USA. It really is that simple for ~4 billion people.
An insignificant minority of the people on this planet feel Taiwan is their concern and are interested in involving themselves in a Chinese domestic dispute. Most of them are western European imperialists that have no legitimate business interfering in Asian affairs.
South Korea and Japan are a tiny minority of the Asian population and most civilians in those countries (and the rest of Asia) don't care what Taiwan's status is.
One could presume that in the event of any sort of aggressive war by a larger neighbor, smaller neighbors would be concerned. Much like how Russia's nearby Eastern European nations (e.g. Poland) are right now. Do you really think Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. wouldn't be alarmed by the outbreak of war? The disruption to shipping alone would be a massive issue.
You also completely sidestepped the issue of India, whose current government dislikes that of China.
It's pointing out that you are making a comparison that is of little value besides demonstrating your own apparent inability to make reasonable comparisons
Nobody can "beat Afghanistan" because forcing people who have no interest in running a country the way the rest of the world runs a country to do so a black hole for money and lives.
There's a lesson about wars of occupation with ill-defined objectives in there.
The way Afghanistan was (90s) and is governed by the Taliban and how that authority and responsibility interacts with the local tribal authorities and governing responsibilities is a unique system outside of history books. It is not a "modern state" with the characteristic strong central government that all states have had for ~200yr or so.
Well in theory, it could be done, if one were willing to do it for 50-100 years. I.e. you'd have to indoctrinate the young for at least 1 generation, but probably 2-3 generations into power.
I don't see anyone having that long of a timeline wanting to do it. The US did it for 20-ish years, and clearly that wasn't long enough.
I don't understand what you are saying. Could you reword that?
Taiwan will be in a defensive conflict if they are attacked. Who has said that the US will attack China??
Chinese policy is that Taiwan is part of China and has a separatist faction of rulers. Talking about the US attacking China, which isn't going to happen, does nobody any favors.
Militarily, the US will have to fight what would be identical to an offensive war naval and aerial against China, as they will not have the opportunity to exploit defensive positions in Taiwan.
That would again require an offensive to degrade Chinese military assets, not the defense of a position.
The Chinese are very unlikely to attempt a landing in force as the first line of attack. They are most likely to try to blockade Taiwan using air assets, naval mines, and submarines. Therefore the most likely US scenario is going to be breaking a siege, which is an offensive action.
If the siege doesn't work China will have to land forces in Taiwan, but even if we are assuming they can't get a beachhead despite holding a siege, they can still deploy and supply an estimated 300,000 troops from the air. This ought to be enough to establish a beachhead from the ground, or at least secure/improvise airfields.
For the US to be able to defend Taiwan, being able to attack and destroy Chinese naval assets is absolutely necessary. It is not possible to defend Taiwan otherwise.
The US Military can crush any other military force in the world into dust. What they can't do is force people at gunpoint to adopt American and/or modern or western values. That was never going to work. It never worked in Afghanistan even when the people trying it were Afhgani. It didn't work when the British tried it there, nor when the Soviets tried it there, and of course it didn't work when America tried it there. 20th century Afghani history is long list of people who attempted to impose social reform and ultimately lost.
> The US Military can crush any other military force in the world into dust.
There are no examples of this ever happening, but multiple examples of the US retreating in shame, creating opportunities for very dramatic photography as we leave our allies to die.
Outside of the retreat in Korea after the entry of China I can't think of an example where the US lost a tactical encounter after WW2. We lost wars but not due to military reasons. We were not defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
No, I think the GP comment is fair. The US is bad at counterinsurgency and occupation, because it's not comfortable with naked imperialism. I read 'on the battlefield' as specifically referring to force-on-force military conflict, which is something different.
And for the people talking about Vietnam.. a lot has changed in 50 years. America got stronger while most other nations, except China, got much weaker. China is the single plausible refutation to my claim above.
The British army defeated the colonial army at every major encounter except for yorktown and lost the war. Hannibal was undefeated except for Zamma and lost the war. Battlefield success and war success are correlated but not determinative.
Iraq 1. Iraq 2. Korea (before china entered). All hot warfare in Vietnam (Tet). D-day. Battle of the bulge.
No army is perfect, can you list the retreats? We left Afghanistan after a decade? We didn’t outlast the NVA? We lost the Philippines for a few years. That’s it?
The US military was unable to defeat the conventional Vietnamese military. It was very much a different war to Afghanistan. The US military failed to degrade Vietnamese logistics and force generation capability to prevent North Vietnam from invading and occupying South Vietnam. There were guerilla tactics, but the NVA was very much an industrialized and mechanized military, despite failed US attempts to degrade that.
> What they can't do is force people at gunpoint to adopt American and/or modern or western values
The Soviets didn't have to do it. They were acting in support of an existing Afghan state which was fighting a war against Pakistan and US funded Mujahideen which wanted to overthrow them. Plenty of people in Afghanistan were open to modern values. The issue with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that the USSR fell, and the issue with the American invasion is that there was no pre-existing state and that the US didn't have a compelling value proposition for Afghans to die in defence of after they pulled out.
Afghanistan is not some kind of bizarre land where everyone hates the concept of modernity. The Americans just didn't figure out how to organize an Afghan state, and didn't figure out how to win militarily either. The Soviets figured out the former, but they collapsed. Though their state survived the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan until the collapse of the USSR and the end of economic aid.
The US can easily wipe the floor with any conventional military. Even fighting multiple fronts at once.
Again, conventional warfare. Keeping countries occupied or forcing a certain regime in you favor? Totally different ball game. You can not force other people to adopt your values, even if you think they are THE GOOD VALUES(TM).
When David has the popular support and stands against your oppression, they can even beat the US Goliath.
Because vietnam and afghanistan changed US voter's minds. The loss was political boredom not military. Civilians lead even in matters of war with the US. That's why I said China will use it's intel network to win any war before it starts
The US got distracted from Afghanistan for a war in Iraq.
But both of those demonstrate the limitations of outside military superiority in establishing stable rule against domestic resistance, especially (as in Vietnam) with strong outside military support.
Which, in a PRC-invasion of Taiwan, doesn't cut against the US.
This is Americans saying they would lose. They just can’t actually say it.
In the scenarios, the success of the ground battle in Taiwan depends almost entirely on Taiwan’s forces.
Doesn't sound too discouraging in a world where plucky Ukraine is winning against its big bad neighbour. But, as will become clear to everyone later this year, that is not the world we live in.
> Cancian explained that the Chinese missile force is devastating to the U.S. and its allies for as long as their inventory of missiles lasts.
> Cancian said submarines and bombers that can launch long-range missiles are “particularly important” for the success of the U.S. side
I don't contest that the US would have casualty but the fact that they know this alone tells you it is unlikely for the US to attack head on with fighter jets and carriers. The bases around china and inter-continental targeting capabilities are crucial in disabling their defenses. Both sides would lose millions but the US military industrial comples is unrivaled. It will basically replace important ammunition, missiles,etc... at a decent pace once it is mobilized. It will take 4weeks+ before a ground invasion in the mean time there is no scenario where China's navy won't get wiped out before a ground invasion. So it would be a matter of who can maintain their supply chain the longest without running out of soldiers and airmen.
Keep in mind, the US military practices an invasion every generation. The PLA has less battle experience and much like the US and it's voters the CCP must maintain internal support despite their economy getting decimated. On the other hand, Americans will be more squeamish about things like civilian targets which is a major weakness in the short term but the possibility of actual economic recovery if a US friendly regime takes over leadership in China will be a huge advantage in winning the war without going nuclear.
My vague one sentence summary is exactly what the article is saying.
> I don't contest that the US would have casualty but the fact that they know this alone tells you it is unlikely for the US to attack head on with fighter jets and carriers. The bases around china and inter-continental targeting capabilities are crucial in disabling their defenses.
The person quoted in the article claims this is not possible:
> Cancian said part of the reason for the heavy U.S. losses is that the U.S. cannot take down China’s defenses without first moving in close and putting themselves at risk.
There are bases in Japan and Korea as well as Taiwan. So that guys opinion needs to be backed up with an explanation of why those positions are not close enough short-medium range stealth bombers are a thing?
ROC and PRC economies are so strictly intertwined that I won't ever be able to take seriously these analysis focused only on geographical maps and military budgets.
PRC needs this strategic economic partner, they won't bring the devastating effects of war on the same industries that they work with.
A lot of people thought Xi would not crack down on tech companies either, because it would hurt the economy, but he did anyway.
The Chinese government's top priority is the supremacy of the party. They will invade Taiwan no matter what kind of economic damage it would do, if they believe it will strengthen Xi and the party in the long run.
Xi's crackdown on tech companies doesn't appear to be some sort of huge disruption that would lead to an existential crisis. Meanwhile, the PRC launching a hugely expensive preemptive war, risking untold amounts of diplomatic condemnation, economic sanctions, and chaos to international supply chains could very well break the entire global economy. It'd be burning down your neighborhood to spite your face.
Not if it destroys all of the developmental progress they've made since Deng! Blowing up world trade is highly detrimental to a country's standard of living.
Russia is yet again proving that destroying standards of living in a dictatorship does not threaten the rulers which is the only thing that matters. CCP survived Mao’s policies and so they will survive the changes in GDP per capita whichever way they go.
They have far more to lose now. I suspect things are rather different once you attain a certain level of prosperity and preeminence, which causes one to reevaluate one's appetite for risk.
Exactly, like in 1914 when the Austro-Hungarian empire and the German Empire were the worlds 2nd and 3rd leading exporters of electrical appliances, and had this massive trade network where German goods were going all over Europe, financed by English capital.
No country would be stupid enough to bring all that crashing down because some stupid nationalist dispute in the Balkans, that would be idiotic and stupid. Clearly people are to rational for that.
It would be certainly be a stupid thing to do so after the precedence of the Great War is already firmly entrenched in everyone's imaginations, not to mention the advent of nuclear weapons, which makes outright open warfare between the great powers a historical memory thus far (which also explains why the U.S. is fighting a proxy war rather than an actual war in Ukraine).
Wars continue to happen for even dumber reasons; they just rarely involve the largest nations clashing anymore.
If you’re betting on human rationality over time in the hands of people with a lot of centralized power, you’re making the losing bet. There’s a reason people were genuinely afraid of nuclear war (and still should continue to be): if it happens, it will involve very few people and there will be nothing any one of the billion’s of others can do about it.
There is a solution: the dispersal of power tends to work well; but the risk you run up against is charismatic individuals acting as a locus for a majority’s power, so you also need anti-majoritarian institutions and a culture that values them. Hard to get all three.
You're right it would be a stupid idea for Russia to march on Germany, given the precedence of the Napoleonic Wars that killed so many. Not to mention the advent of chemical weapons and high powered artillery which makes outright open warfare between the great powers a historical memory thus far (which also explains why the Russians are fighting a proxy war rather than an actual war in Serbia)
It wasn't stupid at all, Russia wanted to maintain its buffer states against the Austrians and the Ottomans, as well as retaining vital passage through the Dardanelles. They also wanted to help the Sick Man of Europe along to his demise, and they were right- the Ottoman Empire did fall; it's just they went along for the ride.
I don't think you know as much about history as you think you do the Ottomans didn't enter the war until late 1914 long after they had marched on Germany. Of which there were no buffer states at the time between them and Russia.
Futher the Ottomans were the ones who attacked Russia first, after the war had already gone on several months.
Russian involvement with Germany had almost nothing to do with Eastern European political ambitions and everything to do with the treaty between Russia and France guarenteeing Russia's protection of France in the event of conflict with Germany. Russia only got involved, not out of a desire to beat down Austria-Hungry but to protect Serbia, which had an implicit promise of protection from Russia, against the Austro-Hungarians.
Russia's only major gain from the great war was ever going to be the squashing of German power before it could challenge Russia in the East, and turned out to be the biggest mistake in Russian history.
I mean it’s not like the Austrohungarians were angels; didn’t they annex Bosnia just before (and upset the Serbians quite a bit who then reiterated the need for help...)
A more recent example: Putin invaded Ukraine even though it was obvious to everyone outside Russia that it was a bad idea and the resulting sanctions would hurt Russia even if he won.
World leaders are generally logical within the bounds of their incentives -- and China's incentives are probably such that an invasion of Taiwan makes more sense to them than it does to outside observers.
An invasion of Taiwan would also be much more expensive and difficult than a land invasion, and unprecedented for China to boot. Russia conducted a soft invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and seized Crimea long before 2022. China has also not fought a recent war- even prior to the war in the Donbas, Russia had already invaded Georgia. So it's not necessarily as easy a mistake to make, with different cost-benefit calculations.
I'm not sure it was so obvious that it was a bad idea. I for one expected Russia to roll Ukraine; I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't happen that way.
But even if it did... did Putin think that there would be no sanctions? Did he think that Finland and Sweden would not see this as their cue to join NATO? Did he think that the rest of the world would just sit there and ignore it?
> But even if it did... did Putin think that there would be no sanctions? Did he think that Finland and Sweden would not see this as their cue to join NATO? Did he think that the rest of the world would just sit there and ignore it?
That is what makes it a bad idea. Almost everyone expected Russia to win quickly. But even if they did win, all the things you mentioned would offset whatever they would gain from their victory.
Putin was probably hoping that the EU would not be willing to go without Russian gas after the war had ended -- and maybe that would have been true, but there would still be other sanctions, other countries joining NATO, etc.
>"A lot of people thought Xi would not crack down on tech companies either, because it would hurt the economy, but he did anyway."
From what I read the crackdown was temporary and is now coming to an end. I guess they've achieved whatever goals were pursued and it is back to business as usual.
Xi cracked down on SV-type of tech. Which isn't useful tech. It's ad and addiction tech that is a net negative to society. It makes a few people filthy rich but does nothing for the productive basis of your country.
Before WW1 people stated similar reasons why a war would not start.
People also thought that Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine because the economic consequences would be devastating, especially for Russia. Seems dictators don't really care about their own countries. Now with Xi grabbing more and more power in China he may also lose grounding in reality.
They are also "too big to fall" - any economic sanctions against China would hurt the West equally (if not more) than them. China produces half of everything you buy.
I think the pain in the West would be relatively short-term while they are rebuilding manufacturing capacity. Globalization has hurt a lot of workers in the West so it may actually positive for them. China on the other hand would have nobody to sell their stuff to.
I heard similar arguments about Russia in Jan 2022. I have a clear memory of my confusion: any invasion ends with Putin at the end of a rope, but all the evidence was of a looming invasion. And here we are.
Yeah, except that Russia wants raw natural resources from the Ukraine territories it wants to annex. They can kill all Ukrainians and destroy all of their cities and still be able to extract what they want.
Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
People said the exact same thing before WW1. That "the economies are to interdependent", "no one would want a war it would make things worse for everyone.", "anyone that tried to start a war would be bankrupt in days"
It turns out that economic interdependence didn't stop the Germans from marching on France when the Russians declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once it started it turns out the economics weren't powerful enough to stop a way in progress.
Economic realities only are in play so long as no one feels they are fighting for their survival as the world geo-political maps continues to change, Russia facing a complete collapse, the coming Chinese demographic problems combined with their food supply issues, etc, many nations will see their only future being through conquest.
You don't even have to go so far back. In January 2022 few believed that Russia would invade Ukraine because Russia was heavily depending on exporting gas and oil to the EU. The sanctions in 2014 for the annexation of Crimea were deemed to scare Russia away from doing so.
Then Russia invaded anyways and is apparently now in the process of doubling down by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits.
Dictators dream of conquest, often against economic or strategic realities. If the law prohibits that, call it a special operation and not a declaration of war.
Yeah, except that Russia wants raw natural resources from the Ukraine territories it wants to annex. They can kill all Ukrainians and destroy all of their cities and still be able to extract what they want.
Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
True, but with less revenue in the future and higher inflation. Also, they are killing off lots of the men needed in their workforce. Higher revenue is just being burned in $100MM missile strikes.
Yea Putin is no good but that could be worse. Better the devil you than the devil you don't? He fucked that up by invading Ukraine so somethings gotta give.
How would conquest benefit the PRC, other than vague symbolism of "uniting the country" and depriving the U.S. of a potential base? Yes, there's power in the rally-round-the-flag effect, but that only goes so far from distracting citizens of the matters of survival.
Also, the world is exponentially more economically interdependent than it was a century ago. Was the trade between the Central Powers and the Entente really comparable to that between the PRC and the rest of the world today? Or even between modern Russia's trade with the world and China's trade with the world? I suspect these are all different cases that need to be examined in full, not brushed away with rhetorical flourishes.
An immense amount of consumer electronics are manufactured in China. But also, most of China's energy is imported by sea. Don't think their Belt and Road projects have managed to substitute those naval routes yet. So in the case of war, both China and its trading partners are at the risk of slitting each others' throats in a jiffy. Is that comparable to Russia, an energy exporter?
> How would conquest benefit the PRC, other than vague symbolism of "uniting the country" and depriving the U.S. of a potential base? Yes, there's power in the rally-round-the-flag effect, but that only goes so far from distracting citizens of the matters of survival.
Ask Putin. Symbolism might seem weak sauce, unless you're a totalitarian state whose choices are more symbolism (aka distraction) or collapse, because Door #3, liberalizing reform, is not a permissible option.
Putin's economic analysis is different from Xi's. Russia is far less reliant on energy or food imports. Not to mention, not as many gains in recent decades to risk losing, as China does. This changes the options quite a bit.
You could make a very similar argument for Germany pre WW-I, Germany pre-WWII, Russia invading Ukraine more recently and the effects in Europe, and on and on.
Dictators do what I would call "irrational" things, though one could have a long, pointless, define-your-word fight about what "rational" means here. Over time, they become surrounded by yes-men and more and more insulated from the real world. Many of them also have very selective readings of history (e.g. Putin seems to think Ukraine should be part of Russia based on a slanted reading of history; he seems to have ignored the parts of history in which failed invasions lead to the dictator's head being separated from his body).
The "economies are so strictly intertwined" argument which finds that war isn't going to happen, particularly when applied to dictators, doesn't stand up to casual scrutiny.
One major virtue of democracies is that they never or almost never (again, fights about definitions here) go to war against each other.
Angela Merkel and the Germans thought the same thing about Putin. That is, Russia would never launch a war that would destroy its own economy. It makes sense, and I admit to thinking the same thing before February 2022.
What we, living in democratic societies, fail to appreciate is that autocrats don't mind destroying their economies in order to pursue their personal ambition. Putin has no qualms about sacrificing tens (hundreds?) of thousands of ordinary Russian men to secure his status as a great historical figure. The Russian standard of living will decline as it descends into a totalitarian state, but Putin and those around him have no elections to face. Even if the disastrous Ukraine invasion had been successful it would not have improved the lives of ordinary Russians, but it would have secured Putin's legacy.
The same goes for Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is no longer "Communist" in any Marxist sense, except in their rejection of democracy. As economic growth stalls, Xi is turning to xenophobic nationalism to bolster his legitimacy. The Chinese people will in no way benefit from an invasion of Taiwan. But Xi and the CCP aren't looking out for the benefit of the Chinese people, they are looking out for themselves.
Those are two very different articles. Yours is all about Taiwan and US policy, but the OP is all about Japan. OP explains and shows how China taking Taiwan could enable the PLAN to strangle Japan's major shipping lanes, crash the Japanese economy, shut down the industry Japan needs for resupply in a war against China, and potentially even cause a famine in Japan. None of that has changed since it was published.
Edit: I don't mean to dismiss your argument that things with regard to Japan have not changed since then. Reasonable people can disagree on if that's true or not (I think you're mostly right).
This piece was also written during Tanner Greer's "Taiwan can win a war with china" period, he's gotten considerably less stupid / ignorant now. Even during 2020, PRC didn't need Taiwan to completely destroy Japan. IRBMs to energy import terminal and other critical infra can turn JP into Yemen over night. So it wouldn't even matter if JP shipping reroutes, simple reality as PRC antishipping, and various space infra improvces, the A2AD bubble will cover JP, making JP shipping perenially vunerable to PRC attack going forward. Taiwan doesn't substantially improve JPs home island defense, most of which are closer to PLA mainland basing anyways. If anything Taiwan island can still be kept in check by Ryukyu islands. Then and now, worst case scenario for JP is US loses so much assets in TW scenario it can no longer defend JP. The TLDR should be even fighing potentially pyrrhic battle over TW may lose JP. TBH almost anything Greer wrote pre 2021 that has assumptions based on military balance / capabilities is not worth taking seriously.
The war in Ukraine should make it clear to everyone that China is militarily weak compared to a country outfitted with current generation western arms. Ukraine didn't even have a modern air force, but they were able to beat back Russia. Militarily, there should be no reason for the world not to step up and support Taiwan
China's military is rated as weaker than Russia's.
It is modeled after Russias.
It has much less combat experience.
An invasion of Taiwan is much more difficult than an invasion of Ukraine.
Economically, the world needs to continue to decouple from China. Unfortunately they aren't our friends.
This chap does presentations on military logistics with a side of Aussie humour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5TlcMo_m4 and tackled China. In short, you're probably not correct. China has had a better military than Russia for some time. They've been building up, they have more money, more discipline, improving or better technology, an actual build up plan that makes sense, less corruption.
On the other hand you're right that if they invade Taiwan it won't just be a one sided war where they waltz in.
A big difference though is that many people suspect Russia had very bad pre-war intel, driven by corruption, that led them to believe they had a lot more support and local allies on the ground than they did. I do not think that China will make a similar mistake - they will invade when they think they can win.
The best thing the west can do is make sure they never think they can win.
China has also not fought an actual war since their tussle with the Vietnamese in 1979, so really hard to say how the modern PLA would actually perform in a conflict. Seems rather overambitious to go from zero to D-Day-esque massive naval operation.
As we've seen over and over in history, including as recent as last year, countless men are perfectly happy to throw their lives away in a meatgrinder for someone's pride.
I don't know how China's military could be rated as weaker than Russia's or by whom, but that can't be inaccurate, unless you're including nukes, which Russia has far more of.
I could see China's army perhaps being weaker, but even then I doubt it given how piss poor Russia's army has turned out to be. But both China's Navy and Air Force are far larger, better equipped, and more capable than Russia's. And those are the primary forces involved in attacking Taiwan.
> China is militarily weak compared to a country outfitted with current generation western arms.
So who has the funding and the manufaturing capabilities and stockpiles of those current generation western arms? Not a lot of countries, not a lot of manufaturing capabilities, not a lot of stock around.
I'm surprised how a attack by what is supposed to be an "half-assed", "crazy person" with "incompetent and low-tech army" can strain current generation western arms supply chains as is.
Taiwan is conveniently located to be pirate land in a way, choking off both China and Japan. The bad actors in both countries can easily sustain Taiwan and siphoning off resources from their own motherlands... an independent and impartial Taiwan is in everyone's interest; even more so for those within the region, whether they realise it or not. I think it'd be centuries after dismantling of CCP before they can fully realise their full potential, such waste.
> I am sure someone in Japan must have calculated the likely economic costs of rerouting Japan-bound traffic this way (or in a more extreme circumstance, replacing Middle Eastern energy supplies with North American ones) but I have not yet seen any actual numbers. But given alternate sea lane possibilities, I doubt clearing Japanese shipping out of Taiwanese waters entirely would be enough to threaten Japan with “famine.”
I remember reading a decade old analysis for this scenario and JP shipping costs went up like ~10%, or some fairly marginal number. For years (like 2005-2015), entire JP shipping was threatened because PRC successfully took over TW narrative specifically overlooking the obvious to build up the PRC threat. Now to be fair, within the last 5 years, PLA capabilities have gotten to the point where the threat is legitimate, irrespective of TW ownership. PLAN ships now regularly operate east of TW so reroutes would have to be further, meanwhile PLA rocket force can destroy JP critical infra purely from the mainland and turn island nation reliant on calorie or energy imports to Yemen.
The TLDR is currently US/JP military has capability to ward off an maritime invasion, but no capability to actually "defend" TW, or JP, or SKR from existing as developed economies. Ergo best avoid the fight, because if JP has to politically pick between preventing a TW invasion by hosting US forces, or become Yemen (let's face it PRC still has grudges), then that's likely how US/JP security alliance may fracture. Alternatively, US loses so much hardware it can no longer support JP long term even if wanted to. It isn't so much losing TW means losing JP as merely fighting large war over TW could lose JP.
Wouldn't China be astronomically more deterred from invading Japan under any circumstances, given that it would lead to all out war with the US (wouldn't it?)
If the US is intervening in the TW scenario from JP, then it's already all out war and there's every reason to hit JP targets. Historically CCP/PRC has fought with the US, USSR and threatened the UK, all nuclear powers over redline issues much less important than TW, sometimes while PRC not nuclear power herself. IMO there is no astronomically deterring PRC when it comes to TW. PLA TW war planning for the last few years (post Xi's PLA modernization) pretty much assumes US and JP will be involved, she's already on the hit list, as are most US military infra in the 1st and 2nd island chain. Would not be surprised if US infra in AU as well.
Final consideration is as the balance of backyard war swings increasingly in PRC favour, an all out war might be in PRC strategic interests. Ultimately that's what it takes to kick the US out of East Asia - destroy so much US hardware that she can't project even if she wanted to, and target an US security partner (JP) and kick her face in so hard that the region would not even consider hosting US forces after. The biggest reason why the region is not signing up for PRC containment is no one wants to be missile sinks for the TW scenario, the second TW card is off the table, the region is free to pivot and go all in on US security hedging. This is bad for the PRC in the long term. There are so many other geopolitical benefits of elimnating JP as a regional power as well.
so Japan (and South Korea?) secretly want Taiwan to go China, because that will make it easier for them to be all-in on the American security umbrella?
Regions interests best served by status quo first and foremost. Then a peaceful political resolution. Then a limited TW scenario that doesn't spread to the rest of the region. Lastly, broad regional war. Which could end in PRC defeat, which ruins regions economics and will ensure long term instability because PRC will try again. Or ends in US defeat which removes the US as a security hedge to balance PRC. Basically they want the least disruptive PRC-TW settlement, after which they (not just SKR/JP) can enhance US presence without TW damocles hanging over their heads.
The whole concept of a conventional war between China and Japan is pretty ridiculous. This article is quite a stretch from the actual implication which is that “shipments to Japan will have to take a longer route if they’re not allowed in the Taiwan Strait” which is already something that seems relatively unlikely.
It does mention submarines, of which shipping traffic going around the far side of the Philippines would be exposed to. More so because of the depth of the water.
If China is using submarines to prevent Japanese shipments outside of their territorial water, the conflict has already gone hot and ICBMs are in the air.
> the conflict has already gone hot and ICBMs are in the air.
I see this reasoning a lot and it feels like an artifact of cold-war MAD thinking. The scenario in which I feel nukes are likely from China is the one from fallout where on the losing end of a global war, the last remnants of the CCP launch an attack as a last ditch effort, I think it is unlikely an nation state (excepting Israel) would use strategic nuclear weapons except as a last ditch resort. Tactically maybe, but not strategically, because everyone wants something, the reasoning in the Cold war was "there are only two powers so you must make sure you are as big and scary as the other guy so they don't try anything". In contrast China seems to simply want to become a world superpower and rule the world not destroy it, in the coldwar we had two diametrically oppossed ideologies competing in a battle for survival that both insisted the other could not be allowed to exist. Now things are very different.
That's the thing is that China doesn't want to rule over a wasteland. If another war goes hot it will take a long time before it goes strategically nuclear because everyone knows that once that genies out of the bottle it allows your enemies to retaliate in kind. Even Putin who most people think is insane, and completely unhinged hasn't even used nuclear weapons despite suffering significant losses, being at a technological disadvantage and giving up ground every day. He might use them tactically but unless he's hiding in a bunker in Moscow as the Ukrainian armed forces are bearing down on him I think he is unlikely to decide to drop the nukes on Kyiv.
An unspoken legacy of the cold war is the way it drives so many foreign/military policy debates toward stupid extremes. Nothing short of nuclear war matters (which has opened the door to absolutely egregious conventional outcomes, but hey, at least it's not nuclear). Anything nuclear is totally unacceptable forever, even if it's rational (North Korea or Iran wanting tp have nukes as a guarantee against getting rolled conventionally).
I think this is an example of science progressing one funeral at a time effect. For decades the analysts and intelligence communities had every single action, thought, and breath colored by a bi-polar world on the brink of extinction; that whole paradigm suddenly collapsed in the early 90's and no one really rethought what that meant.
So now our military and intelligence apparatuses are to paraphrase an old quote "perfectly prepared to fight the last war", without taking into account the multi-polar nature of the world.
When a piece of land the size of and location of Taiwan is in play you bet there are a lot of massive implications and unseen ones to most people are at play here. Not just tangible effects like economic and location but all sorts of derivative effects short medium and long term politically
Hmm. One of the most frightening things I ever read pointed out that Hitler conquered Denmark (home of Niels Bohr) and Norway (source of the only industrial heavy water supply) before opening the large-scale war by invading France. In hindsight, that's terrifying. (I don't know to what degree those reasons played into choosing those two moves.)
China is incredibly vulnerable to a seaborn blockade itself. It’s navy is a bad joke next to the US and they are highly dependent on energy and food imports. Russia can weather sanctions because although its economy is a mess, it’s quite diversified and they produce their own food and energy. They can drop down to a stable subsistence mode.
China is almost entirely dependent on energy imports. On paper they’re also self sufficient in food, but that food production depends on massive fertiliser imports, and inputs of hydrocarbons to make fertilisers. If China was subject to the same sanctions as Russia, they’d be on their knees in a few months due to energy shortages. A year of it would tear China apart as food production would collapse. They have no stable subsistence level they can safely degrade to absent massive imports of survival commodities. The Chinese know this.
My wife is a Chinese so I’ve been interested in Chinese news, economics and geopolitics for 20 years now. I also have friends who have lived there for years, including one who’s father in law is, I’ll just say well connected*. I can’t give you one source, I read almost everything about China I come across.
* His perspective on the internal politics of zero covid isn’t anything I’ve seen reported anywhere so I can’t corroborate it in any way, but it’s jaw dropping. Basically his position is that the extreme swings in policy implementation by the regions is a deliberate attempt to discredit Hu. Since Hu has deeply identified covid policy with himself personally, and all the regional party factions absolutely hate his guts (which I know is true), they’re deliberately blowing it large style on covid policy. One clue this might be correct is national news now doesn’t mention Hu in relation to covid any more, but regional news often still does.
Your last word is very interesting. The equivalents have been used in many places. It has more meaning than it appears.
There's no really good research on decoding the mind of modern human specie' yet and even there was one, there would be little impact because the result will be consumed by human mind so if there were bugs then they won't be fixed because the bugs are in human mind.
The conflicts in the world are caused by those bugs, in AI's opinion(in future)
I have zero expertise in this area, but I did read an article earlier today suggesting that the bigger naval fleet almost always wins against a technically superior but smaller fleet, and that China already has the world’s largest navy [0]
The problem the Chinese fleet has is zero operational experience. Their carriers are barely capable of peacetime air operations. You’re making the same mistake everyone made about the Russian army a year ago, big on numbers and big on hardware so big on threat. But all that hardware doesn’t do you much good if the actual soldiers (or seamen) have no idea how to function in an actual war.
China has the world's 2nd largest navy, by any metric that makes sense.
It's only the largest if you count the number of ships, counting every ship equally. Counting a small coastal patrol boat the same as an aircraft carrier is manifestly absurd. China currently has 3 aircraft carriers, only one of which is a "supercarrier" on par with American carriers. The US has 11 supercarriers. One could make similar comparisons with nuclear-powered submarines and many other types of ships.
Overall tonnage is a better metric: the Chinese navy weighs about 1.3 tons, while the US navy weighs about 4.5 million tons. Of course, there are many other factors beyond this one-dimensional metric, but this nevertheless gives you an idea of the large gap between the US and Chinese navies.
China is catching up with the US quickly, because of China's growing industrial might, but it will still take decades to reach full parity.
Russia won't be joining the sanctions against China. Russia and China share a border. China will continue to eat Russian food as they have since trump scared them off reliance on US soy without disruption.
Furthermore, the imagined might of the US navy in the age of drones is as obsolete as the fleets of World War One in the age of aircraft carriers.
Almost all of those Russian exports go by sea, not land. They’re coming from the wrong end of Russia and the rail links have very limited capacity. China has been trying to get that upgraded as part of belt and a road, but it’s been slow going and far more expensive than they thought and much of the capacity that does exist goes through the stans. A decent capacity gas pipeline only got approved after the Ukraine war and will take a decade or more to get operational.
Drones are too slow and too short range to be anything more than a near coastal threat. China’s sea lane supply routes stretch from south China all the way to the Persian gulf, Suez and round Africa. Only a real global navy can secure shipping across that sort of territory, and only the USA has a real global navy on that scale these days.
Also where are all the Chinese naval bases to support such operations? The US and its allies have naval bases peppered over that whole area. China has one in Djibouti. It’s their only overseas naval base.
The primary mission of the US navy globally is to guarantee freedom of navigation for everyone in international waters. That includes for shipping to and from China. The Chinese know this very well. The truth is Chinese and US commercial and strategic interests align almost completely in practice because their economies complement each other much more than they compete and their strategic dependencies are mostly shared (Gulf oil being a biggie), the problems are political.
They're major political problems for sure and they lead to strong economic rivalry for geopolitical reasons, but take away the political dimension and they'd be natural allies, IMHO. It's the same way that Japan and the USA went from being direct competitors to natural allies after WW2. Before WW2 that would have been unimaginable, after WW2 it became obvious. I think it's the same with China.
Also Russia actually, it's why the Ukraine invasion caught the USA completely by surprise. They just don't see what Russia could possibly gain from it because they view the world in commercial terms. If Russia was a liberal democracy them and the USA would be best friends ever, but authoritarian regimes must have enemies in order to justify their repression.
You cannot speak coherently about geopolitics without discussing currency politics and financial hegemony. What defines US geopolitical relationships is not whether a country is "authoritarian" but how it relates to the petrodollar/IMF/World Bank global financial system. A government can behave however it wants and never be bothered by the US as long as it submits its economy to this system. This explains why some oil-rich countries are sworn enemies of the US and some aren't much better than "freedom and democracy".
What defines China specifically as a malign actor from the US perspective is that it is offering countries outside the West a second choice for how to finance and pursue development. The mere presence of this competition is a mortal threat to the entire established order.
I think you're vastly underestimating the havoc that can be wrought by a single submarine briefly surfacing near a carrier group, belching out a giant swarm of expendable drones and disappearing under the waves again.
And the US is incredibly vulnerable to having its 130 refineries destroyed by PRC conventional global strike - ultimately no better able to defend her energy and calorie inputs as PRC. The Malacca dilemma / PRC blockade was viable in an era where the US could unilaterally enforce with impunity. That game theory doesn't exist anymore, PRC can simply run blockade and threaten to take down comparable levels of US energy production that will reverberate down the chain into fertilizer and agriculture. Fortress America doesn't hold when an adversary like PRC can hit strategic targets on CONUS, hence US energy "security" is relegated to energy autonomy, the resources exist, but their processing cannot be secured in war. Think Saudi. Functionally, the CONUS is now as existentially vulnerable as the PRC in the event of war. The US knows this.
In terms of sanctions, which energy producer is going to sanction PRC? We already see with RU war that bulk cargo will just get transshipped through various middle men. Or that PRC can always double down on coal conversion to make fertilizer - was previously curtailed to reduce emissions, but coal is making way back on the menu in the last few years. Projection of the PRC blockade scenario has PRC stretching out reserves and rationing for multiple years. Which TBH is longer than modern war will last, and by that time, in terms of attrition, US homefront would be as dire as PRC. Zeihan stans keep wanking about virtues of USN blue water projection and energy security as if PRC needs to match like for like to be able to challenge the US. PRC doesn't need to spend 30 years building 11 carriers to secure trade, it needs 5 years to build enough conventional global strike backed by ongoing nuke expansion to deter anyone from messing with her SLOCs in the first place.
When you’re talking about global strikes between nuclear powers and converting massive amounts of coal to fertilizer, you have already exceeded the optimal costs for a splendid little war. China blundering into more than it bargained for over Taiwan is one thing, are you really expecting it’s going to commit to a world war-level of production and economic transformation over one island, no matter how much it might believe it to be its patrimony? And as if the U.S. wouldn't retaliate with transpacific conventional strikes in kind?
As we see in the reversal over zero COVID, even the Chinese government has to listen to the sentiments of its well-to-do urbanized population created by Dengist reforms, regardless of how objectionable it might find them. Can you not imagine those coastal elites and middle classes complaining about wartime austerity, the blow to the quality of life they're used to?
At some point devising so many elaborate hypothetical war plans is just technothriller novelizing. Which is just fine with me, Tom Clancy left us no true heirs.
This isn’t anything new, IIRC PRC was converting ~50 million tons of fertilizer using coal gasification, which it has curtailed significantly under Xi to focus on emission goals by relying more on imports. But now that great power competition is back, security > environment. Combined with moving to better ag practices where net fertilizer use is decreasing while output increasing (PRC previously used a stupid amount of fertilizer / unit). Peak PRC fertilizer production was like 100M tons, current consumption is ~50M, down from high 60M. Circling back to ops point = PRC can indigenously supply their own fertilizer with domestic inputs which is enough for food security in terms of calories.
>elaborate hypothetical war plans
If by elaborate hypothetical war plans you mean establishing deterrence to mitigate world war levels of destruction by establishing more rungs of escalation than homeland strikes straight to nukes, I call that responsible planning. PRC pursuing a prompt global strike is part of the PLA's 2020 Science of Military Strategy, and acknowledged by the 2022 DoD report on PRC military. It’s no different than various US blob/warplanners plotting interventions on a TW scenario, replete with mainland strikes. If the US expects to escalate that far, of course the PRC is willing (and most importantly, increasingly able) to reciprocate.
Ultimately, this is merely the flip side of US efforts of "integrated deterrence", US wants to deter PRC reclaiming TW, and PRC wants to deter US from "blundering" into greater conflict by showing existential cost is now mutual. Then it circles back to the question of who wants it more. I imagine US polity wondering if intervening in TW is worth it if war follows to the US homeland. Not just revolutionary skirmishes but existential destruction that the US has so far been isolated against. I can imagine that impacts actual US decision making regardless of propaganda layer. What I can also imagine is CCP telling coastal elites, as it has consistently, that peaceful reunification is preferable but military force is not out of the question, and in the event of military force, mutual vulnerability to deter homeland strikes means their QoL will not spiral out of control. If the US is deterred from intervening, PRC can prosecute TW like US conducted wars in the Middle East, with little impact on domestic affairs, even less with strict media controls.
They may make plans, but when it comes time to actually wage a war against a fellow nuclear power that drops DEFCON levels, will they actually commit to a path such as striking American soil that will so inevitably wreck the very globalized interconnected system of political and economic ties that made modern China in the first place? Not to mention, it's all very well to build such intercontinental rockets, hard to say they will work as expected in an actual conflict. Perhaps the Pentagon will bring back Star Wars. Imperial Japan had such innovations as midget submarines and balloon bombs too, not all innovations work out in war, outside the imagination.
> mutual vulnerability to deter homeland strikes means their QoL will not spiral out of control
We are talking about a situation where the sheer disruption to world trade, never mind sanctions and the like, would drop quality of life. The sheer economic shocks and supply chain disruptions would be massive. You expect normal shipping to take place near a war zone, sanctions or no sanctions? The government can make all of the promises they'd like, things have a tendency to spiral out of control in war.
> PRC can prosecute TW like US conducted wars in the Middle East, with little impact on domestic affairs, even less with strict media controls.
On this I am of two minds. On one hand, it seems that inevitably, the Chinese public will lose the stomach for a protracted conflict that hurts their fellow Han people, especially those who they consider as fellow Chinese nationals, especially people whom they have not been at actual war with in seven decades, who they have shared plenty of trade, cultural, tourist ties with. On the other, I have read that often the contemporary popular sentiment is actually more raring for war than the actual current government is; perhaps in a way not dissimilar to U.S. public sentiment towards war in the Middle East after 9/11. So your guess is as good as mine as how the general population reacts to war. But I still believe that as modern China sees itself as a developed, advanced, optimistic society, there would be no shortage of people not wanting to commit to a brothers' war, at the very least because they consider it to be beneath the conduct of a civilized, stability-obsessed society.
Now flip the question. Will the US strike PRC mainland targets in a TW scenario, or will be deterred from doing so because PRC can hit CONUS? That's the point of deterrence, it figures as much in making plans as preventing plans of adversaries. PRC is as committed to counter striking American soil as the US is committed to striking PRC soil in what is legally an ongoing Chinese civil war. Which is to say, with proper deterrence in place, hopefully not very committed.
> not all innovations work out in war
PRC tests 100s of advanced missiles every year for more advanced targets, more than the rest of the world combined and has a sophisticated space program. At the end of the day, hitting large fixed targets like a refinery or power plant or data warehouse, all you need is sub 100m CEP - basically 80s technology. It’s maybe rocket science but not hard or innovative rocket science like hitting a moving ship at sea with all of the countermeasures and no way comparable to WW2 tier midget subs and unguided balloon bombs. Even Tom Clancy wouldn't make that comparison.
>expect normal shipping
Depending on scenario, if no outside intervention, then likely yes, TW ability to disrupt has relatively little window to counter strike PRC ports or ability threaten PRC shipping after being defanged. Probably just Xiamen has to be redirected, otherwise it's hard to overstate levels of force overmatch between PRC and TW. Like even the most ardent TW porcupine advocates don’t expect TW to put up a fight outside the island. Bay of Pigs disrupted the US minimally / not at all, because the US could simply prevent Cuba from hitting back.
>would drop quality of life
Question is by how much and who bears what cost? PRC exports to the west whose most likely to sanction is like >10% of GDP and decreasing, assuming all trade ceases, which it likely won't because supply chains at that scale aren't as fungible as energy. Also keep in mind PRC trade:GDP is lowish (35% trending down from 65% high), not US low (25% down from 30% high), but low enough that trade disruptions don't impact it as much as actual trade dependent actors (over 60%). Host of western countries fit that bill and would hurt more sanctioning PRC. It’s one reason why US can fuck around the world with relatively little domestic impact. Will QoL drop, sure, but the goal is to prevent scenarios where QoL will spiral, which assuming broader war is deterred, is possible. There’s also considerations that breaking TW will cause others QoL to drop more, i.e. west is going to suffer much more without high end TW semis where they get disproportionate value capture that’s already being denied to PRC.
While reality is complicated, half the reason people worry about TW scenarios AND trying to build up costs/deterrence is because conceivably, PRC can eat the cost. Like if Xi is offered to prosecute TW without US intervention in exchange for cutting off all trade with the west, he’d probably take it.
E: Over post limit, leaving this thread now.
>how the general population reacts to war
See how PRC gen pop reacted to HK protests / riots. Narcissism of small differences / manufacturing consent against related peoples is much easier than one thinks. In the end IMO a battle over TW is conditional based, not capability based, IMO PRC wouldn’t move against TW even if she has ability to, at least not for another 20 years. Trigger will be either TW moves towards independence in which case narrative writes itself, or US intervenes in which case protracted conflict is even easier to justify. After all, US intervention was why the civil war remains unresolved all these years. I think gen pop anywhere doesn't want war, but cross strait dynamic has always been averting resumption of war that could (and have) popped off several times in the last 70 years. Anyone over 50 in PRC knows the history, that includes anyone in senior leadership in the foreseeable future.
> TW ability to disrupt has relatively little window to counter strike PRC ports or ability threaten PRC shipping after being defanged.
Taiwan needn’t even attack mainland ports for there to be a slowdown in trade. No insurance company in the world is going to underwrite shipping through an active war zone, so routes that are near a blockade, let alone naval warfare, would be affected.
Insurance underwrites active war zones all the time with war risk cover / premium. Otherwise PRC has the 2nd largest (and growing) merchant fleet and can insure on their own in event of sanctions, which is unlikely because many trade dependent nations are much more vulnerable to disruption. Overall, affected sure, but again it’s a matter of how much. I contend not much, at least not enough to deter in a limited TW scenario with only PRC and TW as belligerents. Attacks on commercial shipping happen near coasts, look at where Mokova hit Iranian attacks on Gulf shipping occurred in the last few years, and that’s from define belligerents operating from much more permissive conditions. All the while energy continues to flow from the Gulf. Strait / adjacent routes “near” TW warzone can be diverted even further out, a few 100 nms to be nowhere "near '' active warzone, incidentally why this article's assumption that PRC controlled TW would threaten JP shipping is stupid. Naval warfare between PRC + US where shipping can be disrupted is a different story, but again, that’s why PRC building CONUS strike deterrent. Otherwise, limited PRC-TW scenario I imagine much less than zero covid levels of shipping disruption, few months to a year depending on how fast PRC rushes blockade, with single digit % hit on economy.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadAlso, though this article reads a bit like HoI4 analysis. I think you need to more carefully consider all of the nations agency and motivation rather than consider them victory points to be won or lost.
E.g., losing a friend to a drunk driver.
Not ownership of the district, but definitely a decrease of the party's (owned) influence and power due to that districts allegiance.
Another more mundane analogy, a sports team can lose a player in the say way.
It is immaterial what Taiwan was born as. It is a self-governing, free country, and the only thing that matters should be the wishes of the people who live there. And that overwhelmingly is to not be a part of communist China.
That doesn't stop me (or anyone else) from believing that the Taiwanese should be entitled to self-determination. Or the Hawaiians, Indigenous peoples, or Puerto Ricans for that matter. If support for that aim happens to come from the US then that's fine by me. Moral consistency from a national government is not something I require or expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...
Should they be asked again? Maybe. But it’s impossible to do fairly at the present time.
[1] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4350512
I'm part of The West :)
Probably a coincidence.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/26/1139270577/taiwan-election-pr...
edit: What the US is doing with Taiwan is not being done based on consultation with the Taiwanese people. It is not for the Taiwanese.
Polls indicate that the Taiwanese overwhelmingly want to either "maintain the status quo" or "maintain the status quo with incremental movement toward independence" (https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963), which is entirely what the US policy is intended to support! Like the Taiwanese people, we also don't want an apocalyptic conflict with China when the status quo is already de facto independence, regardless of what we call it to appease nationalist factions in Chinese domestic politics.
It's almost as if this is NPR's editorial opinion, rather than a fact about Taiwan. I intentionally linked a hostile article.
"If Not Cross-strait Issues, What Are The 2022 Elections About?"
> CROSS-STRAIT RELATIONS are not the dominant frame of this election cycle. Namely, nine-in-one elections, which serve as midterms between presidential elections, are primarily about local issues rather than cross-strait issues. Cross-strait relations are for Taiwanese, after all, largely a matter of foreign policy.
> As such, it would not surprise if the KMT performed well in this set of elections. The KMT has always had a stronger grip over local politics, seeing as its local clientelist and patronage networks date back to the authoritarian period. As the party that rose out of Taiwan’s democracy movement in past decades–and which may have had two presidents but never controlled the Taiwanese legislature until the first term of the Tsai administration–the DPP is still unable to break the stranglehold of the KMT over local politics.
> However, the key domestic election issues that voters will be voting on return to Taiwan’s economic outlook and its demographic challenges. Taiwan’s economy has seen growth, particularly with regards to exports, due to the minimized effects of COVID-19 after going for more than a year without any lockdowns as the rest of the world saw, and outbreaks that were contained with relative speed when COVID-19 did finally enter Taiwan. But such growth has not trickled down to the population writ large. As such, the issue of stagnant wages is a major issue up for contention.
https://newbloommag.net/2022/11/24/cross-domestic-issues-202...
There's been no actual discussion about the self-determination of the Taiwanese, because the Taiwanese have not been asked whether they want to be separated from China, and any indication that they don't has been scrupulously ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Taiwanese_i...
Taiwan as many people mentioned here is a democracy. It has freedom of speech. So it's easy to get the information from the source inside Taiwan.
Long story short: It's very mixed. There are people want to re-unit with China and even expect the mainland using military means. Pro-independence group is much larger but majority like to keep the existing status while tend to independence.
Here are some media that show views against Western perception which seems originated from MSM .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t6ep7auypk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvACcb9qrt4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UEz3CyD1ME
There are much more. But again as I mention they are minority
(Claim: I'm not saying that MSM is trusted by Western audience. On the contrary a lot of people especially young generation don't trust or even disdain MSM. However the Taiwan issue is an exception.）
It recognizes the CCP's claim to Taiwan as part of China.
Recognizing that Taiwan is part of China is not part of the act, and was deliberately written as such.
There's a vast difference between diplomatically saying "this land is yours" versus "we understand that you claim that this land is yours".
Night and day. The deliberate vagueness was the whole point of the language used in the act.
However the majority opinion of western world which is shaped by MSM has another view that "(A) This land is not yours and (B)it's not debatable". They only mention the issue is "debatable" when the position of US official position is against their opinion. Underneath they still believe there's no controversy that Taiwan is not part of China due to their hidden ideology.
Decoding hidden part of people's mind based on their output is more interesting than the original topic and also itself is quite controversial.
Fair point. The wording is intentionally vague and up for interpretation - because as you say, we all know US's opinion is that China is China, and Taiwan is Taiwan, but in order to avoid pissing off China, we keep things as ambiguous and vague as we can.
Strategic obfuscation, if you will.
.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
US naval strategy is based on Taiwan. With Taiwan in the fold, China's trade can be effectively blockaded should the situation deteriorate to war. It's a last ditch measure, for sure, but a valuable card to hold nonetheless. China is building more pipeline and rail to de-risk this, but ultimately they want full access to the Pacific. Taiwan and South China Sea militarization give them this.
Taiwan going to China turns the tides of Western influence in Asia. Many nations friendly to the West would "switch sides", including close Western allies like Japan and South Korea. This would have tremendous impact to the West's economy, jobs, cost of goods, cost of energy, etc.
Taiwan is perhaps one of the most important subjects that will define this century. There's a reason all eyes are on it.
Can we apply the same logic for China's influence in Africa, for example? Does geographic location matter more than, say, trade volume? Given that there isn't anything between the US and China (or Taiwan) except the ocean does that not give credence to the US being a partner in that area since it's a Pacific nation?
If we're talking about the west, US, Japan, South Korea are either close or exceed Taiwan's trade with China, and that only includes western nations that are part of the Pacific Ocean directly (and doesn't include Canada, Australia, or New Zealand either).
41% of Taiwan’s exports by dollar value went to China + Hong Kong in 2020 versus 25.4% for US + Japan + RoK.
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/twn
But let’s assume the numbers you listed are correct (I’m sure trade varies by year and breakdown and I assume good faith). What does it matter? Does China get 41% influence over Taiwan and the US, Japan, and South Korea get 25.4% influence?
The whole line of reasoning that started this was nonsense from the start and it doesn’t even include The Jungle [2] that is relations between nation states.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/taiwan-marke...
[2] In international relations might largely makes right. Powerful countries are able to impose their will and influence on other countries. For example, the US imposes its will on China w.r.t Taiwan regardless of the amount of trade that occurs between nations.
How's Russia doing, given their "hypersonic missiles?"
So much for the wise mandarins.
I think “Donfeng 6” is the IRBM that easily destroys a George Washington class carrier from beyond the effective range of an F18 and costs like 5 million bucks, which is why the PLA has a zillion of them.
Sailing a carrier battle group into the Strait with violence on the table would be a very bad call…
There’s a reason everyone puts the most powerful weapons on submarines, or so all the squids in my hometown of San Diego tell me.
My Navy buddies seem pretty confident the Virginia class fast attack boat is the one that goes home after a scrap.
In any case, either might makes right, and China can invade Taiwan and run all the genocides they do because they are big - but them it is also fine for US to naval blockade China into collapse and famine, if it so pleases because might makes right.
Or there are universal values and human rights, and the West would be evil for destroying China and causing untold suffering, but then China is also evil for attacking their neighbours and for running bunch of genocides.
You can't have it both ways!
Now it is very much our business what is going on in Asia, particularly since the risk is the subjugation of our allies by a totalitarian regime. It is better to have a strong and independent Taiwan, a strong Japan and strong Korea and even strong Philippines and Vietnam to counteract a strengthening PLA Navy, but we also want them to not be hostile to the USA, and we also want it to cost the PRC to even think nukes are the easy way to check the ambitions of their immediate neighbors. That does mean keeping our military promises to Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Simply put, there is no World from where we stand today where unchecked-by-us PRC ambition is an acceptable path forward.
War costs a lot of lives, but a hot war between adversaries means making the adversarial position suffer more for having taken up arms in the first place. A defensive war over Taiwan and keeping our promise doesn’t need a number on the table in advance to make it worth doing. It’s crass to even ask. How many American lives will it take to sink every boat belonging to or commandeered by the PLA in the Taiwan Strait, shoot down every jet that flies above and mow down every pair of PLA boots that lands on Taiwan’s beaches, and destroy every military shipyard on their coastline? Let’s assume this isn’t purely an American fight, you know, for the sake of argument.
If you can figure that one out, you’ll have something close to your answer.
How many people do you think the CCP will sacrifice to take Taiwan?
For instance, just recently the likely next DPP/pan-green presidential candidate is declaring that Taiwan is already de facto sovereign and independent, and so there is no need to formally declare independence:
https://twitter.com/brianhioe/status/1615638156367507456
Odds are, this entire discourse in this HN thread is just a lot of fulminating hot air by people who don't even live in Asia, grognarding hypothetical wargames and war toys, while the actual people in China and Taiwan will peaceably and gradually figure it out over time.
I'd prefer no Americans die in the course of this, similar to Ukraine. But certainly the number of Americans worth dying to heroically save a country of nearly 25 Million from genocide and slavery isn't 0.
Somehow Russia gets to play "great power politics" (although I think, personally, they must've lost their great power license by now lol). But when the US even helps the country being attacked, it's immoral and we have to stay neutral on moral grounds? Wtf, pick a standard. If Russia gets to play great power politics, so do we.
So, Why should the West have more influence?
Because any person or group of people who want to live a self-determined life and with a self-determined government, must always be better armed, better prepared, and have better alliances than the abusers and autocrats who will steal from them and rule over them the instant they are given the chance.
If you don't stop the neighborhood bully, he'll steal your lunch every day and keep you from walking where he likes to walk.
At this point in history, all the "...-ism"s are irrelevant, and we can see what it is - a deadly serious conflict between autocracies and democracies. It is now a hot war with Russia waging a genocidal war of aggression in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland, Germany, etc.. Zero of those countries want to live under Russia's rule, even though you think Russia should have the right because it is the largest and nearest player.
China is openly threatening the entire south China Sea, none of which, again want to live under CCP rule.
If it is not stopped, Russia, China, Iran, and other authoritarians will not stop. If you would rather live under the rule of Putin or the CCP, I suggest you move there, rather than attempt other free people to not defend themselves.
China would never succeed in invading Japan.
I'm European and I still have to meet someone ready to sacrifice something for Ukraine. People are extremely worried about the state of our economy, much more so than they are about what's happening in Ukraine.
I keep hearing members of the elite like Stoltenberg talking about being ready to make sacrifices for Ukraine, but Stoltenber won't actually have to sacrifice anything. A 50% rise in the cost of living won't affect his lifestyle in the slightest, while it will destroy the livelihood of many families.
In any case, we've all been subjected to unprecedented levels of propaganda. It's not a surprise that many feel more concerned about what's happening in Ukraine than in Yemen.
You asked
> how do you explain the European people supporting their governments assisting Ukrainians, when continuing the conflict is causing themselves direct discomfort and expense?
I replied
> we've all been subjected to unprecedented levels of propaganda. It's not a surprise that many feel more concerned about what's happening in Ukraine than in Yemen.
Everything else I wrote is what I think about the concept of "sacrifice" that the elites fill their mouths with knowing it won't really affect them.
Whether my argument is dubious or not to you, it is still an argument and a valid answer to your question.
You might want to explain why my answer doesn't convince you, rather than simply dismissing it as "beside the point" when it isn't.
I find that wholly unconvincing.
You seem to think that the only reason people care is due to media coverage that you deem as pure propaganda.
Might it be that the media coverage is in fact more than for instance coverage of Yemen, because people care more (however unfair that may be to the Yemeni)?
I can tell you nobody cared at all (most people outright ignored the situation) about Ukraine in the 2014-2022 period, even though Ukrainians were dying for all those years. When Russia took Crimea, that was minor news in my country.
People are used to conflicts happening in the world and we've grown cynical about it, which is why nobody really cares about the Yemenis, for example.
The reason we now care (even though trust me, from a personal point of view nobody really "cares") is that there is a daily stream of Ukraine related news, reporting exclusively the point of view of Ukraine and the statements from their government, often without double checks.
"News just came from Ukrainian officials that the Russians raped 50 children". Even without any evidence, when a statement is repeated ad nauseam by every news source it becomes reality. In the meantime Ukrainians artillery killed several civilians in Russia-occupied Donetsk, but there is no mention of it. This is how propaganda works.
Artillery killed several Ukrainian civilians in Russia-occupied Donetsk because Russia occupied Donetsk.
And the context of geopolitics is much closer to friendship than ownership.
As far as I am aware Japan doesn't have a particularly large standing military, and isn't that far away. Meanwhile the Chinese could, and probably would, be willing to drown the entire island in human wave tactics.
The problem is that it isn't enough for amphibious invasion of Japan or Taiwan. They don't have enough amphibious ships. And the ships would be very vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. Truck-mounted anti-ship missiles, which Japan has a bunch and Taiwan should be buying, have changed things. The other thing that has made amphibious invasion infeasible are multiple rocket launchers, like HIMARS given to Ukraine, which can wipe out an entire beachhead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33248946
> Can you imagine what a landing beach would look like being pounded by drone spotted artillery? See war in Ukraine. Forget the approach, anti ship missiles, mines, sheer volume of logistics needed. Stepping on the landing beach is a suicide without absolutely astronomical advantage in air power and ability to suffer huge attrition, even then.. 155mm hidden under camo/thermal nets, DJI drone rigged with magazines of small bombs.. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson Childs play, this would make Diep and Galipoli look like walk in the park.
> I would go as far as to say that US Army + Marines + Navy could not land on Taiwan without suffering multiple brigades of attrition AFTER at least a year long blockade and air campaign. It is that hard.
> PRC has to surpass US in GDP, then spend 10-20 years of US level military spending, then maybe.
[0]https://www.army-technology.com/features/japan-as-the-third-...
Related, never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
Maybe hours.
However, there is some speculation that the CCP observed from the 1989 Tienneman massacre that the West takes roughly 20yrs to forget stuff like that, so the CCP actually wants to reunify Taiwan by 2030, so it will be forgotten by 2050. Hence the rapid military buildup happening now.
https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1571401031539367939
There's a vid on youtube about this I can't find atm, an interview with a Navy vet Congresswoman concerned about the "missile gap", when the US Navy is at its smallest fleet size and deployed missile quantity over the next few years. China may assess their best chance at retaking Taiwan is during that gap, before US shipbuilding ramps up to close it. She's trying to convince the DoD to extend the Burkes service life until the new destroyers start coming off the production lines.
If you are actually hoping that the CCP can rule over Taiwan in your lifetime, I have some unprintable words for you, and suggest you rethink your life.
From the article:
> In truth, it is an argument to retreat from East Asia. That argument can be made, but I would prefer to see it made openly.
I guess the points basically include RoK.
If we (the "west") loses Japan, we've essentially waived our claims to South Korea as well. We'll have lost legitimacy and lost our word to protect (Taiwan) what is a epicenter of global technological development (semiconductors). Japan and South Korea (and to a lesser, but significant extent, AUS&NZ) will look at the west's inability to protect Taiwan, and say "well, looks like we'd better buddy up to China, because they're the big dogs now". And that will be that.
We'd better fucking help Taiwan.
If your hangup is that this is yet another instance of Westerners attempting to decide the fate of a people on the otherside of the planet from them, I think we can grant that there isn't a stellar track record there. Still, ideal scenarios of perfect sovereignty don't exist in the real world and I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect e.g. Japan to ask for continued American involvement.
Those of us who believe in liberal democracy will need to stand up for it. We can no longer take it for granted, even at home.
Many people today seem to feel that Taiwan and Ukraine are interests worth using military force to defend. I do wonder how well that support would hold up if either of those potential wars becomes reality.
Yet here we are....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine
"Thousands" buried in "Metro":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/10/27/thou...
"A headline in some editions of the Oct. 27 Metro section incorrectly stated that Saturday's antiwar demonstration in the District was the largest since the 1960s. The rally, according to police and estimates of the organizer, was the largest antiwar demonstration in the District since the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975."
< ! >
Honestly, if this demo -- it was huge -- happened in say Cairo, wouldn't it be splashed all over front pages for days?
-- ps --
"Demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tokyo and Mexico City, were held to coincide with the Washington march, and in San Francisco, thousands marched through downtown."
Do they teach this at Columbia's School of Journalism?
- There were demonstrations in lots of major capitals all over the world. Put it in 'international' section?
- Sister cities. Metro.
The protests against the Iraq war were international in scope and generally regarded as the largest political demonstrations in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
While "widespread" might be accurate generally speaking, it is also accurate to say that it was the least popular war in my life time by a giant margin.
The protests were huge. The House vote for Iraq was extremely one-sided politically. Obama ran, and won, on having voted against it. It was really dependent on your political scene whether Iraq II was normalized or not.
Iraq is not really comparable because you can’t separate support for the war there in its early days from 9/11 and the desire to “do something.”
But this is also not a Vietnam situation in which the US is propping up a relatively unpopular government and fighting personally in the conflict at great cost of American lives (maybe Taiwan could go down like that, but I think that makes the prospect of actual conflict unlikely, because neither the US nor China wants to nuke the other).
Ukraine was a bit different because they were not as US-aligned before the conflict. But especially with regards to Taiwan, I’d consider an attack against them the same as an attack against any European or ANZAC ally.
Ukraine has to be won because a Russian victory means they’re emboldened, and the Kremlin preys on weakness. Eventually Poland is hit, Russia will be crushed by NATO, and then the US and Russia exchange nukes. We can’t allow that. Any financial cost and life lost in Ukraine is worth it. We’re not nearly doing enough for Ukraine. It’s vital to world security.
For China, it’s unclear other than nationalism why they want Taiwan. They think they’ll control the world with it, and theoretically that’s true. They just don’t have the expertise to keep TSMC running on their own. And they’re incredibly vulnerable, China is the world’s #1 importer of energy and food. They got excited with all of the foreign investment, but there’s no possible future where China challenges the west. Their peaceful rise and integration was the only way forward, unfortunately, Xi is a madman.
Putin’s war makes at least some sense, on multiple levels. China’s war will be fought as well, but it’s entirely in vain. The CCP will do as much good for Taiwan as Hong Kong.
Both Ukraine and Taiwan represent the life that the Russians and Chinese could have, and ultimately that’s why they’re targets even when it makes little sense otherwise.
NATO and the Quad have no choice but to fight these respective wars. I’m personally willing to fight and die in either conflict because I know what’s at stake.
We all sing to the tune of China, and we fully enabled that. We want cheap garbage without difficult questions about human rights and the environment. This very movement has eroded western society.
The center for technological advancements have already shifted to that region too. The west still holds as a cultural powerhouse but as the technology enables cheap production and distribution of media, that is also bound to vanish.
Overall a fairer world where westerners work as hard as the asians is the most likely scenario IMHO. Flipping burgers in NYC should end up with similar compensation as flipping burgers in Shanghai.
Could be painful but at the end it can be beneficial for the west too. Since a while we live in a world where engineers who deal with atoms are poorly compensated in the west because everything is made in China and our best and brightest spend their lives in the advertisement and gambling business disguised as tech and finance. That part of the world becoming an equal power to the west can be beneficial on the long run.
As long as China is aggressive with its neighbors (e.g. Vietnam), they automatically fall into being friendly with the west and in to the west's sphere of influence. But if Taiwan is conquered by the mainland, all bets are off. There would basically be no counter-balance to China in Asia.
In an ideal world, it would be worth about the same everywhere, but it will take many years until the GDP per capita is uniform everywhere. Especially now that China’s population and its workforce has started to decline.
My concern is that the western burger flippers might have been overcompensated due to artificially inflated productivity in some sectors and once that's over the west might find that they can't match the productivity in China due to destruction of some industries leading undercompensation and as a result, severe lack of talent and know how in those.
The CCP has been preparing for a long time. They know the real battle is one of public opinion and policy making in the US. The big resounding lesson from Ukraine is that an invasion must be swift and overwheling with careful logistical planning as well as PR and anti-sanction measures.
The worst possible thing China can do is attack a US target like a ship or a plane. It will be like pearl harbor, losing all that precious intel network capacity in the US along with US voter's opinions.
All of Europe and Asia can combine forced and will still likely lose against the US military in any conflict. But even the smallest nation can win if they manage to change americans' opinions.
The US couldn't beat Vietnam or Afghanistan.
"Losing" a war, in this context, means you surrender to the enemy, or at least quit and sign some kind of treaty to end hostilities formally. The US has never done that. The US has never lost on the battlefield. With Vietnam, it was too unpopular and was fighting with one hand tied behind its back anyway. With Afghanistan, it won military, but gave up on trying to prop up the Afghani government and pulled out.
Giving up and going home is a loss where Taiwan is concerned as it was in Korea.
The more astute observers understand this war is already over. More Chinese people are willing to die to maintain their country's integrity than Americans willing to do the same for an island on the otherside of the planet.
The US will lose twice if it continues down this path. It will secondly earn the hate of the vast majority of Asian countries as an outsider bringing yet another uneccessary war to their neighborhoods over what the majority of Asians consider a settled topic.
An insignificant minority of the people on this planet feel Taiwan is their concern and are interested in involving themselves in a Chinese domestic dispute. Most of them are western European imperialists that have no legitimate business interfering in Asian affairs.
You also completely sidestepped the issue of India, whose current government dislikes that of China.
There's a lesson about wars of occupation with ill-defined objectives in there.
The US and Europe aren't "the world," and the actual world has plenty of theocracies.
Compare to Pakistan or Iran if you want.
I don't see anyone having that long of a timeline wanting to do it. The US did it for 20-ish years, and clearly that wasn't long enough.
FTFY.
Taiwan will be in a defensive conflict if they are attacked. Who has said that the US will attack China??
Chinese policy is that Taiwan is part of China and has a separatist faction of rulers. Talking about the US attacking China, which isn't going to happen, does nobody any favors.
The Chinese are very unlikely to attempt a landing in force as the first line of attack. They are most likely to try to blockade Taiwan using air assets, naval mines, and submarines. Therefore the most likely US scenario is going to be breaking a siege, which is an offensive action.
If the siege doesn't work China will have to land forces in Taiwan, but even if we are assuming they can't get a beachhead despite holding a siege, they can still deploy and supply an estimated 300,000 troops from the air. This ought to be enough to establish a beachhead from the ground, or at least secure/improvise airfields.
For the US to be able to defend Taiwan, being able to attack and destroy Chinese naval assets is absolutely necessary. It is not possible to defend Taiwan otherwise.
There are no examples of this ever happening, but multiple examples of the US retreating in shame, creating opportunities for very dramatic photography as we leave our allies to die.
When at first you don't succeed, redefine success?
And for the people talking about Vietnam.. a lot has changed in 50 years. America got stronger while most other nations, except China, got much weaker. China is the single plausible refutation to my claim above.
No army is perfect, can you list the retreats? We left Afghanistan after a decade? We didn’t outlast the NVA? We lost the Philippines for a few years. That’s it?
> What they can't do is force people at gunpoint to adopt American and/or modern or western values
The Soviets didn't have to do it. They were acting in support of an existing Afghan state which was fighting a war against Pakistan and US funded Mujahideen which wanted to overthrow them. Plenty of people in Afghanistan were open to modern values. The issue with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is that the USSR fell, and the issue with the American invasion is that there was no pre-existing state and that the US didn't have a compelling value proposition for Afghans to die in defence of after they pulled out.
Afghanistan is not some kind of bizarre land where everyone hates the concept of modernity. The Americans just didn't figure out how to organize an Afghan state, and didn't figure out how to win militarily either. The Soviets figured out the former, but they collapsed. Though their state survived the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan until the collapse of the USSR and the end of economic aid.
Again, conventional warfare. Keeping countries occupied or forcing a certain regime in you favor? Totally different ball game. You can not force other people to adopt your values, even if you think they are THE GOOD VALUES(TM).
When David has the popular support and stands against your oppression, they can even beat the US Goliath.
The US got distracted from Afghanistan for a war in Iraq.
But both of those demonstrate the limitations of outside military superiority in establishing stable rule against domestic resistance, especially (as in Vietnam) with strong outside military support.
Which, in a PRC-invasion of Taiwan, doesn't cut against the US.
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/08/us-loses-half-its-f...
In the scenarios, the success of the ground battle in Taiwan depends almost entirely on Taiwan’s forces.
Doesn't sound too discouraging in a world where plucky Ukraine is winning against its big bad neighbour. But, as will become clear to everyone later this year, that is not the world we live in.
You seem awfully confident. Not sure what analysis you are reading to give you this impression.
> Cancian explained that the Chinese missile force is devastating to the U.S. and its allies for as long as their inventory of missiles lasts.
> Cancian said submarines and bombers that can launch long-range missiles are “particularly important” for the success of the U.S. side
I don't contest that the US would have casualty but the fact that they know this alone tells you it is unlikely for the US to attack head on with fighter jets and carriers. The bases around china and inter-continental targeting capabilities are crucial in disabling their defenses. Both sides would lose millions but the US military industrial comples is unrivaled. It will basically replace important ammunition, missiles,etc... at a decent pace once it is mobilized. It will take 4weeks+ before a ground invasion in the mean time there is no scenario where China's navy won't get wiped out before a ground invasion. So it would be a matter of who can maintain their supply chain the longest without running out of soldiers and airmen.
Keep in mind, the US military practices an invasion every generation. The PLA has less battle experience and much like the US and it's voters the CCP must maintain internal support despite their economy getting decimated. On the other hand, Americans will be more squeamish about things like civilian targets which is a major weakness in the short term but the possibility of actual economic recovery if a US friendly regime takes over leadership in China will be a huge advantage in winning the war without going nuclear.
> I don't contest that the US would have casualty but the fact that they know this alone tells you it is unlikely for the US to attack head on with fighter jets and carriers. The bases around china and inter-continental targeting capabilities are crucial in disabling their defenses.
The person quoted in the article claims this is not possible:
> Cancian said part of the reason for the heavy U.S. losses is that the U.S. cannot take down China’s defenses without first moving in close and putting themselves at risk.
PRC needs this strategic economic partner, they won't bring the devastating effects of war on the same industries that they work with.
The Chinese government's top priority is the supremacy of the party. They will invade Taiwan no matter what kind of economic damage it would do, if they believe it will strengthen Xi and the party in the long run.
No country would be stupid enough to bring all that crashing down because some stupid nationalist dispute in the Balkans, that would be idiotic and stupid. Clearly people are to rational for that.
If you’re betting on human rationality over time in the hands of people with a lot of centralized power, you’re making the losing bet. There’s a reason people were genuinely afraid of nuclear war (and still should continue to be): if it happens, it will involve very few people and there will be nothing any one of the billion’s of others can do about it.
There is a solution: the dispersal of power tends to work well; but the risk you run up against is charismatic individuals acting as a locus for a majority’s power, so you also need anti-majoritarian institutions and a culture that values them. Hard to get all three.
Futher the Ottomans were the ones who attacked Russia first, after the war had already gone on several months.
Russian involvement with Germany had almost nothing to do with Eastern European political ambitions and everything to do with the treaty between Russia and France guarenteeing Russia's protection of France in the event of conflict with Germany. Russia only got involved, not out of a desire to beat down Austria-Hungry but to protect Serbia, which had an implicit promise of protection from Russia, against the Austro-Hungarians.
Russia's only major gain from the great war was ever going to be the squashing of German power before it could challenge Russia in the East, and turned out to be the biggest mistake in Russian history.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/35758/why-did-ru...
World leaders are generally logical within the bounds of their incentives -- and China's incentives are probably such that an invasion of Taiwan makes more sense to them than it does to outside observers.
But even if it did... did Putin think that there would be no sanctions? Did he think that Finland and Sweden would not see this as their cue to join NATO? Did he think that the rest of the world would just sit there and ignore it?
That is what makes it a bad idea. Almost everyone expected Russia to win quickly. But even if they did win, all the things you mentioned would offset whatever they would gain from their victory.
Putin was probably hoping that the EU would not be willing to go without Russian gas after the war had ended -- and maybe that would have been true, but there would still be other sanctions, other countries joining NATO, etc.
From what I read the crackdown was temporary and is now coming to an end. I guess they've achieved whatever goals were pursued and it is back to business as usual.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/economy/china-economy-guo-shu...
Xi cracked down on SV-type of tech. Which isn't useful tech. It's ad and addiction tech that is a net negative to society. It makes a few people filthy rich but does nothing for the productive basis of your country.
People also thought that Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine because the economic consequences would be devastating, especially for Russia. Seems dictators don't really care about their own countries. Now with Xi grabbing more and more power in China he may also lose grounding in reality.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00784-6
For the average Russian during the 1990s life was worse after economic liberalisation.
What can a vast country like Russia, China or the USA not produce domestically, keep people employed and keep profits at home?
How much is wasted on advertising and market casinos?
On the one hand globalisation expands the labor pool and access to capital. On the other the more labor there is the lower its unit value.
So under autarky prices would rise but so would wages (labor would be more scarce).
So for a big country it is not clear that people are worse off in the long run going alone.
So called comparative advantages are more a function of structure of the economy than long term inherit capabilities.
When people are scarcer their price goes up.
Yeah, except that Russia wants raw natural resources from the Ukraine territories it wants to annex. They can kill all Ukrainians and destroy all of their cities and still be able to extract what they want. Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
It turns out that economic interdependence didn't stop the Germans from marching on France when the Russians declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once it started it turns out the economics weren't powerful enough to stop a way in progress.
Economic realities only are in play so long as no one feels they are fighting for their survival as the world geo-political maps continues to change, Russia facing a complete collapse, the coming Chinese demographic problems combined with their food supply issues, etc, many nations will see their only future being through conquest.
Then Russia invaded anyways and is apparently now in the process of doubling down by mobilizing hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits.
Now do that in Taiwan. Are you going to mine semiconductors from under a rock? Do that while an army of Taiwan partisans keeps fighting for decades?
True, but with less revenue in the future and higher inflation. Also, they are killing off lots of the men needed in their workforce. Higher revenue is just being burned in $100MM missile strikes.
Also, the world is exponentially more economically interdependent than it was a century ago. Was the trade between the Central Powers and the Entente really comparable to that between the PRC and the rest of the world today? Or even between modern Russia's trade with the world and China's trade with the world? I suspect these are all different cases that need to be examined in full, not brushed away with rhetorical flourishes.
An immense amount of consumer electronics are manufactured in China. But also, most of China's energy is imported by sea. Don't think their Belt and Road projects have managed to substitute those naval routes yet. So in the case of war, both China and its trading partners are at the risk of slitting each others' throats in a jiffy. Is that comparable to Russia, an energy exporter?
The almost dictator of Brazil, Bolsonaro, brags that his biggest achievement when in power was to bring the colors of the flag back to people’s lives
Like, wtf, how is this important?
But that’s not the point, the point is people in power will do whatever they want and have their reasoning for it
https://twitter.com/AssLatam/status/1615321859066560514
Ask Putin. Symbolism might seem weak sauce, unless you're a totalitarian state whose choices are more symbolism (aka distraction) or collapse, because Door #3, liberalizing reform, is not a permissible option.
Dictators do what I would call "irrational" things, though one could have a long, pointless, define-your-word fight about what "rational" means here. Over time, they become surrounded by yes-men and more and more insulated from the real world. Many of them also have very selective readings of history (e.g. Putin seems to think Ukraine should be part of Russia based on a slanted reading of history; he seems to have ignored the parts of history in which failed invasions lead to the dictator's head being separated from his body).
The "economies are so strictly intertwined" argument which finds that war isn't going to happen, particularly when applied to dictators, doesn't stand up to casual scrutiny.
One major virtue of democracies is that they never or almost never (again, fights about definitions here) go to war against each other.
What we, living in democratic societies, fail to appreciate is that autocrats don't mind destroying their economies in order to pursue their personal ambition. Putin has no qualms about sacrificing tens (hundreds?) of thousands of ordinary Russian men to secure his status as a great historical figure. The Russian standard of living will decline as it descends into a totalitarian state, but Putin and those around him have no elections to face. Even if the disastrous Ukraine invasion had been successful it would not have improved the lives of ordinary Russians, but it would have secured Putin's legacy.
The same goes for Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party is no longer "Communist" in any Marxist sense, except in their rejection of democracy. As economic growth stalls, Xi is turning to xenophobic nationalism to bolster his legitimacy. The Chinese people will in no way benefit from an invasion of Taiwan. But Xi and the CCP aren't looking out for the benefit of the Chinese people, they are looking out for themselves.
Greer's most recent Taiwan essay is here:
https://scholars-stage.org/we-can-only-kick-taiwan-down-the-...
Edit: I don't mean to dismiss your argument that things with regard to Japan have not changed since then. Reasonable people can disagree on if that's true or not (I think you're mostly right).
China's military is rated as weaker than Russia's.
It is modeled after Russias.
It has much less combat experience.
An invasion of Taiwan is much more difficult than an invasion of Ukraine.
Economically, the world needs to continue to decouple from China. Unfortunately they aren't our friends.
On the other hand you're right that if they invade Taiwan it won't just be a one sided war where they waltz in.
A big difference though is that many people suspect Russia had very bad pre-war intel, driven by corruption, that led them to believe they had a lot more support and local allies on the ground than they did. I do not think that China will make a similar mistake - they will invade when they think they can win.
The best thing the west can do is make sure they never think they can win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan
Curiously, Clausewitz (drink!) knew better and yet it still didn't stop Germany from their love of plans and order.
Even with a world of techno-gadgetry, I don't see the Taiwan Plan will go any different than Schlieffen's. Friction always wins
And while I hope if they try they fail, I hope more they never try. It would be a disastrous loss of life for nothing but the pride of the CCP.
I could see China's army perhaps being weaker, but even then I doubt it given how piss poor Russia's army has turned out to be. But both China's Navy and Air Force are far larger, better equipped, and more capable than Russia's. And those are the primary forces involved in attacking Taiwan.
So who has the funding and the manufaturing capabilities and stockpiles of those current generation western arms? Not a lot of countries, not a lot of manufaturing capabilities, not a lot of stock around.
I'm surprised how a attack by what is supposed to be an "half-assed", "crazy person" with "incompetent and low-tech army" can strain current generation western arms supply chains as is.
> I am sure someone in Japan must have calculated the likely economic costs of rerouting Japan-bound traffic this way (or in a more extreme circumstance, replacing Middle Eastern energy supplies with North American ones) but I have not yet seen any actual numbers. But given alternate sea lane possibilities, I doubt clearing Japanese shipping out of Taiwanese waters entirely would be enough to threaten Japan with “famine.”
The TLDR is currently US/JP military has capability to ward off an maritime invasion, but no capability to actually "defend" TW, or JP, or SKR from existing as developed economies. Ergo best avoid the fight, because if JP has to politically pick between preventing a TW invasion by hosting US forces, or become Yemen (let's face it PRC still has grudges), then that's likely how US/JP security alliance may fracture. Alternatively, US loses so much hardware it can no longer support JP long term even if wanted to. It isn't so much losing TW means losing JP as merely fighting large war over TW could lose JP.
If the US is intervening in the TW scenario from JP, then it's already all out war and there's every reason to hit JP targets. Historically CCP/PRC has fought with the US, USSR and threatened the UK, all nuclear powers over redline issues much less important than TW, sometimes while PRC not nuclear power herself. IMO there is no astronomically deterring PRC when it comes to TW. PLA TW war planning for the last few years (post Xi's PLA modernization) pretty much assumes US and JP will be involved, she's already on the hit list, as are most US military infra in the 1st and 2nd island chain. Would not be surprised if US infra in AU as well.
Final consideration is as the balance of backyard war swings increasingly in PRC favour, an all out war might be in PRC strategic interests. Ultimately that's what it takes to kick the US out of East Asia - destroy so much US hardware that she can't project even if she wanted to, and target an US security partner (JP) and kick her face in so hard that the region would not even consider hosting US forces after. The biggest reason why the region is not signing up for PRC containment is no one wants to be missile sinks for the TW scenario, the second TW card is off the table, the region is free to pivot and go all in on US security hedging. This is bad for the PRC in the long term. There are so many other geopolitical benefits of elimnating JP as a regional power as well.
I think this conflict can still be stopped with non-physical violence though.
I see this reasoning a lot and it feels like an artifact of cold-war MAD thinking. The scenario in which I feel nukes are likely from China is the one from fallout where on the losing end of a global war, the last remnants of the CCP launch an attack as a last ditch effort, I think it is unlikely an nation state (excepting Israel) would use strategic nuclear weapons except as a last ditch resort. Tactically maybe, but not strategically, because everyone wants something, the reasoning in the Cold war was "there are only two powers so you must make sure you are as big and scary as the other guy so they don't try anything". In contrast China seems to simply want to become a world superpower and rule the world not destroy it, in the coldwar we had two diametrically oppossed ideologies competing in a battle for survival that both insisted the other could not be allowed to exist. Now things are very different.
That's the thing is that China doesn't want to rule over a wasteland. If another war goes hot it will take a long time before it goes strategically nuclear because everyone knows that once that genies out of the bottle it allows your enemies to retaliate in kind. Even Putin who most people think is insane, and completely unhinged hasn't even used nuclear weapons despite suffering significant losses, being at a technological disadvantage and giving up ground every day. He might use them tactically but unless he's hiding in a bunker in Moscow as the Ukrainian armed forces are bearing down on him I think he is unlikely to decide to drop the nukes on Kyiv.
So now our military and intelligence apparatuses are to paraphrase an old quote "perfectly prepared to fight the last war", without taking into account the multi-polar nature of the world.
Japan was trying to wipe China off the map 80 years ago. China is upset still.
Ukraine controlling the supply of neon gas needed for lasers and Taiwan controlling the knowledge and talent pool used for innovation?
The parent is giving me somewhat similar vibes...
Have you seen a map of Denmark and where it sits in Europe with regards to Germany?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30457490
China is almost entirely dependent on energy imports. On paper they’re also self sufficient in food, but that food production depends on massive fertiliser imports, and inputs of hydrocarbons to make fertilisers. If China was subject to the same sanctions as Russia, they’d be on their knees in a few months due to energy shortages. A year of it would tear China apart as food production would collapse. They have no stable subsistence level they can safely degrade to absent massive imports of survival commodities. The Chinese know this.
* His perspective on the internal politics of zero covid isn’t anything I’ve seen reported anywhere so I can’t corroborate it in any way, but it’s jaw dropping. Basically his position is that the extreme swings in policy implementation by the regions is a deliberate attempt to discredit Hu. Since Hu has deeply identified covid policy with himself personally, and all the regional party factions absolutely hate his guts (which I know is true), they’re deliberately blowing it large style on covid policy. One clue this might be correct is national news now doesn’t mention Hu in relation to covid any more, but regional news often still does.
There's no really good research on decoding the mind of modern human specie' yet and even there was one, there would be little impact because the result will be consumed by human mind so if there were bugs then they won't be fixed because the bugs are in human mind.
The conflicts in the world are caused by those bugs, in AI's opinion(in future)
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/16/asia/china-navy-fleet-siz...
It's only the largest if you count the number of ships, counting every ship equally. Counting a small coastal patrol boat the same as an aircraft carrier is manifestly absurd. China currently has 3 aircraft carriers, only one of which is a "supercarrier" on par with American carriers. The US has 11 supercarriers. One could make similar comparisons with nuclear-powered submarines and many other types of ships.
Overall tonnage is a better metric: the Chinese navy weighs about 1.3 tons, while the US navy weighs about 4.5 million tons. Of course, there are many other factors beyond this one-dimensional metric, but this nevertheless gives you an idea of the large gap between the US and Chinese navies.
China is catching up with the US quickly, because of China's growing industrial might, but it will still take decades to reach full parity.
Furthermore, the imagined might of the US navy in the age of drones is as obsolete as the fleets of World War One in the age of aircraft carriers.
Drones are too slow and too short range to be anything more than a near coastal threat. China’s sea lane supply routes stretch from south China all the way to the Persian gulf, Suez and round Africa. Only a real global navy can secure shipping across that sort of territory, and only the USA has a real global navy on that scale these days.
Also where are all the Chinese naval bases to support such operations? The US and its allies have naval bases peppered over that whole area. China has one in Djibouti. It’s their only overseas naval base.
Is this the "Chinese aggression" I’ve been hearing so much about?
They're major political problems for sure and they lead to strong economic rivalry for geopolitical reasons, but take away the political dimension and they'd be natural allies, IMHO. It's the same way that Japan and the USA went from being direct competitors to natural allies after WW2. Before WW2 that would have been unimaginable, after WW2 it became obvious. I think it's the same with China.
Also Russia actually, it's why the Ukraine invasion caught the USA completely by surprise. They just don't see what Russia could possibly gain from it because they view the world in commercial terms. If Russia was a liberal democracy them and the USA would be best friends ever, but authoritarian regimes must have enemies in order to justify their repression.
What defines China specifically as a malign actor from the US perspective is that it is offering countries outside the West a second choice for how to finance and pursue development. The mere presence of this competition is a mortal threat to the entire established order.
In terms of sanctions, which energy producer is going to sanction PRC? We already see with RU war that bulk cargo will just get transshipped through various middle men. Or that PRC can always double down on coal conversion to make fertilizer - was previously curtailed to reduce emissions, but coal is making way back on the menu in the last few years. Projection of the PRC blockade scenario has PRC stretching out reserves and rationing for multiple years. Which TBH is longer than modern war will last, and by that time, in terms of attrition, US homefront would be as dire as PRC. Zeihan stans keep wanking about virtues of USN blue water projection and energy security as if PRC needs to match like for like to be able to challenge the US. PRC doesn't need to spend 30 years building 11 carriers to secure trade, it needs 5 years to build enough conventional global strike backed by ongoing nuke expansion to deter anyone from messing with her SLOCs in the first place.
As we see in the reversal over zero COVID, even the Chinese government has to listen to the sentiments of its well-to-do urbanized population created by Dengist reforms, regardless of how objectionable it might find them. Can you not imagine those coastal elites and middle classes complaining about wartime austerity, the blow to the quality of life they're used to?
At some point devising so many elaborate hypothetical war plans is just technothriller novelizing. Which is just fine with me, Tom Clancy left us no true heirs.
This isn’t anything new, IIRC PRC was converting ~50 million tons of fertilizer using coal gasification, which it has curtailed significantly under Xi to focus on emission goals by relying more on imports. But now that great power competition is back, security > environment. Combined with moving to better ag practices where net fertilizer use is decreasing while output increasing (PRC previously used a stupid amount of fertilizer / unit). Peak PRC fertilizer production was like 100M tons, current consumption is ~50M, down from high 60M. Circling back to ops point = PRC can indigenously supply their own fertilizer with domestic inputs which is enough for food security in terms of calories.
>elaborate hypothetical war plans
If by elaborate hypothetical war plans you mean establishing deterrence to mitigate world war levels of destruction by establishing more rungs of escalation than homeland strikes straight to nukes, I call that responsible planning. PRC pursuing a prompt global strike is part of the PLA's 2020 Science of Military Strategy, and acknowledged by the 2022 DoD report on PRC military. It’s no different than various US blob/warplanners plotting interventions on a TW scenario, replete with mainland strikes. If the US expects to escalate that far, of course the PRC is willing (and most importantly, increasingly able) to reciprocate.
Ultimately, this is merely the flip side of US efforts of "integrated deterrence", US wants to deter PRC reclaiming TW, and PRC wants to deter US from "blundering" into greater conflict by showing existential cost is now mutual. Then it circles back to the question of who wants it more. I imagine US polity wondering if intervening in TW is worth it if war follows to the US homeland. Not just revolutionary skirmishes but existential destruction that the US has so far been isolated against. I can imagine that impacts actual US decision making regardless of propaganda layer. What I can also imagine is CCP telling coastal elites, as it has consistently, that peaceful reunification is preferable but military force is not out of the question, and in the event of military force, mutual vulnerability to deter homeland strikes means their QoL will not spiral out of control. If the US is deterred from intervening, PRC can prosecute TW like US conducted wars in the Middle East, with little impact on domestic affairs, even less with strict media controls.
> mutual vulnerability to deter homeland strikes means their QoL will not spiral out of control
We are talking about a situation where the sheer disruption to world trade, never mind sanctions and the like, would drop quality of life. The sheer economic shocks and supply chain disruptions would be massive. You expect normal shipping to take place near a war zone, sanctions or no sanctions? The government can make all of the promises they'd like, things have a tendency to spiral out of control in war.
> PRC can prosecute TW like US conducted wars in the Middle East, with little impact on domestic affairs, even less with strict media controls.
On this I am of two minds. On one hand, it seems that inevitably, the Chinese public will lose the stomach for a protracted conflict that hurts their fellow Han people, especially those who they consider as fellow Chinese nationals, especially people whom they have not been at actual war with in seven decades, who they have shared plenty of trade, cultural, tourist ties with. On the other, I have read that often the contemporary popular sentiment is actually more raring for war than the actual current government is; perhaps in a way not dissimilar to U.S. public sentiment towards war in the Middle East after 9/11. So your guess is as good as mine as how the general population reacts to war. But I still believe that as modern China sees itself as a developed, advanced, optimistic society, there would be no shortage of people not wanting to commit to a brothers' war, at the very least because they consider it to be beneath the conduct of a civilized, stability-obsessed society.
> not all innovations work out in war
PRC tests 100s of advanced missiles every year for more advanced targets, more than the rest of the world combined and has a sophisticated space program. At the end of the day, hitting large fixed targets like a refinery or power plant or data warehouse, all you need is sub 100m CEP - basically 80s technology. It’s maybe rocket science but not hard or innovative rocket science like hitting a moving ship at sea with all of the countermeasures and no way comparable to WW2 tier midget subs and unguided balloon bombs. Even Tom Clancy wouldn't make that comparison.
>expect normal shipping
Depending on scenario, if no outside intervention, then likely yes, TW ability to disrupt has relatively little window to counter strike PRC ports or ability threaten PRC shipping after being defanged. Probably just Xiamen has to be redirected, otherwise it's hard to overstate levels of force overmatch between PRC and TW. Like even the most ardent TW porcupine advocates don’t expect TW to put up a fight outside the island. Bay of Pigs disrupted the US minimally / not at all, because the US could simply prevent Cuba from hitting back.
>would drop quality of life
Question is by how much and who bears what cost? PRC exports to the west whose most likely to sanction is like >10% of GDP and decreasing, assuming all trade ceases, which it likely won't because supply chains at that scale aren't as fungible as energy. Also keep in mind PRC trade:GDP is lowish (35% trending down from 65% high), not US low (25% down from 30% high), but low enough that trade disruptions don't impact it as much as actual trade dependent actors (over 60%). Host of western countries fit that bill and would hurt more sanctioning PRC. It’s one reason why US can fuck around the world with relatively little domestic impact. Will QoL drop, sure, but the goal is to prevent scenarios where QoL will spiral, which assuming broader war is deterred, is possible. There’s also considerations that breaking TW will cause others QoL to drop more, i.e. west is going to suffer much more without high end TW semis where they get disproportionate value capture that’s already being denied to PRC.
While reality is complicated, half the reason people worry about TW scenarios AND trying to build up costs/deterrence is because conceivably, PRC can eat the cost. Like if Xi is offered to prosecute TW without US intervention in exchange for cutting off all trade with the west, he’d probably take it.
E: Over post limit, leaving this thread now.
>how the general population reacts to war
See how PRC gen pop reacted to HK protests / riots. Narcissism of small differences / manufacturing consent against related peoples is much easier than one thinks. In the end IMO a battle over TW is conditional based, not capability based, IMO PRC wouldn’t move against TW even if she has ability to, at least not for another 20 years. Trigger will be either TW moves towards independence in which case narrative writes itself, or US intervenes in which case protracted conflict is even easier to justify. After all, US intervention was why the civil war remains unresolved all these years. I think gen pop anywhere doesn't want war, but cross strait dynamic has always been averting resumption of war that could (and have) popped off several times in the last 70 years. Anyone over 50 in PRC knows the history, that includes anyone in senior leadership in the foreseeable future.
Taiwan needn’t even attack mainland ports for there to be a slowdown in trade. No insurance company in the world is going to underwrite shipping through an active war zone, so routes that are near a blockade, let alone naval warfare, would be affected.
/s