It's hard to know "what could have been," but what aspect of current life/ society/ the world wouldn't be significantly different today?
It was culmination of long process started by Nixon in 1972. Shanghai Communique pledged to work toward the full diplomatic relations. Ford and Carter followed trough the process.
Taiwan really didn't matter during the Cold War. Relations with China was strategic move to help create distance between Soviet Union and China.
It was probably Kissinger with rosy “divide and conquer” thinking given Moscow & Beijing had a fall out.
But of course, you're correct.
And Carter (and Nixon and Ford) obviously didn't have the foresight to realize the ultimate impact of the process/decision. Yet they would have been aware it was a major, influential policy decision.
Does "starting the process" count as an ultimately-weighty-political-decision?
Along the lines of "Deciding to drop the bomb on Hiroshima," if you want to count that as a decision by one person. Of course it was also just one node of a decision tree that was a long, complicated chain-of-events.
The US had plenty of time to safely pivot to a different position regarding China/Taiwan (e.g. letting Taiwan get nukes in the 70s-80s; Shifting diplomatic position and recognizing Taiwan right after the Cold War was over; Not allowing Globalization to go so far in the 90s-00s). If the US didn't take that option, one can blame successor presidents rather than Nixon.
Giving Taiwan nukes would’ve been a casus belli situation.
This would’ve caused China to invade. Damned be the consequences or cost of lives.
The same is true today. If America arms Taiwan with too many advanced weapons, then it will also trigger a casus belli event on China’s part.
If America couldn’t beat China in North Korea in 1950, when the Chinese were literally fighting with bows and arrows, and America had air power and carpet bombing, then do you really think America can beat China in 2021? Or 2030? Or 2050?
At that time, the PLA was in a poor state. China simply did not have the ability to invade Taiwan or even get air superiority. They'd have lost, badly, so long as the US kept supporting Taiwan, quite likely the US wouldn't have had to even get involved directly. That's a consequence the CCP can't afford, they'd have had to get used to nukes. Of course, now the balance has changed and that's not practical.
E: You're assuming China always gets stronger over time. Recently that's true, but at the time China was picking itself up from the Cultural Revolution, while the US was rearming after Vietnam. US had a far bigger advantage in 1975-1985 over China than in 1950. This scenario would have also required the PLA to make an air or amphibious assault without (at the time) sufficient airplanes or boats, while 1950 was just a land assault.
A war with Taiwan is a completely different story.
If Nixon hadn't started the process, if carter hadn't recognize the communist government of China.
- Offshoring/globalization may not have been the boom it is today, due to the lack of a major source of cheap/obedient labor force. In the 70s offshoring occured in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and others SE Asia countries but they didn't have enough cheap labors to continue. American companies would have been timid to shift operations to Indonesia and India when they lacked severe infrastructure, with no totalitarian government to enforce cheap labor.
- As a corollary, GE/Intel would not not have shed all its capabilities to Asia, and be greatly diminished today.
- Wall street might not have been able to push companies to greatly shed cost and ship capabilities overseas due to national security issues. As a result, US unions would have been intact somewhat and the jobs would not have been shipped to China. Flyover states would have enjoyed greater strength as they did in the 60s and 70s.
- the great crash of 2008 would not have happened (Chinese entry into WTO greatly reduced manual jobs in US and Europe, crashing both economies)
- Trump would not have been elected. Trump was a reaction to much jobs lost and much sufferings in flyover states caused by China.
- Coronavirus spread around the world and all the deaths that occurred may not have happened (China would have been still a closed off country, not unlike what Xi Jing Ping is trying to do today). No mass flights out of Wuhan or Beijing.
The Chinese would’ve come online, sooner or later. The WTO sped up the process of course, but China’s technological ascendancy was inevitable.
The other theory is that if China was denied entry into the WTO, then they would’ve just created their own international trading agreement. And in 2020, they did just that, and called it the RCEP.
Besides, without China, then your iPhone would’ve probably never been created. Apple would’ve never made enough money from the iPod, to justify further investment into the iPhone. China and the iPhone, really are symbiotic. Instead, we might all be living in a Blackberry world.
I dispute that anything is inevitable - China was an economic and scientific mess in the 80s and 90s, thanks to the Cultural Revolution and Communist anti-truth thought control ideology.
The US and our democratic allies had a fleeting opportunity in the 90s to collectively pressure China into making a grand bargain, where in return for permanent access to Western markets, they enact major democratic and human rights reforms - multiple political parties allowed, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, military serves the national constitution rather than a specific political party, etc.
This is what should have happened, but in Wall St. and corporate America's rush to cash in on cheap labor and a potentially large new market, we replaced that grand bargain with wishful thinking and a rose-tinted predictions of an authoritarian regime that just a few years earlier in 1989 violently crushed a nascent effort at Democracy.
This was likely the most costly strategic mistake in US history. We spent 50yrs fighting a cold war to push back authoritarianism, and won, only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 90s due to short-term greed. Now we'll have to fight that cold war all over again this century, against a much more formidable adversary that has been able to learn how to meld state authoritarianism with effective economic development and Orwellian technological thought control.
Are you the guy that keeps spamming blogs about "TSMC, chips and how taiwan is so important to the US" to HN?
> Furthermore, the Taiwanese people deserve the right to self-determination
Taiwan has 20 million people. Mainland china has 1.4 billion people. I believe the "self-determination" part is already settled.
> and our support if they decide to go their own way.
Nope. Let them settle it. We shouldn't have been involved in the first place.
> it's always been odd to me that the U.S. chooses to placate Beijing, at the risk of losing a reliable partner (Taiwan) in a strategic industry.
Are you serious? One is the second largest economy in the world. The other is taiwan.
Every week, there is some bullshit blog spam about how important TSMC is. Why is that? Who is paying for it?
What does population have to do with self determination?
> Nope. Let them settle it. We shouldn't have been involved in the first place.
Except they were allied with the US and deals were drawn up that should be honored.
> Are you serious? One is the second largest economy in the world. The other is taiwan.
He said in a strategic industry, which semiconductors are.
If there is TSMC spam it's probably because this is a tech forum and they is a lot of movement in the field in the last year, mostly related to the failings of Intel and the rise of TSMC.
Simple test, if you go talk to anyone on the street, in English, they will try to answer in bad English(if they can). this is especially true for young/highly educated demography like me because we are educated in western value since very young.
If you came from southeastern, say, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam. There's very good chance you see people look them in distain. Because those are usually imported labor for manual tasks.
I'd hazard a traveler's experience can highlight a culture's stereotypes more easily than it can the experience of a naturalized member of the community.
I used to love watching Bourdain's travel series for exactly this reason; he seemed to always want to get the deeper context and insight from the people he'd meet and his narration showed a firm understanding of how who he was and where he came from influenced his experience of a place/culture and the conclusions he'd draw (if any).
Are you really sure only westerners are having an awesome time in Taiwan? Have a look at the data for who travels most to Taiwan (and presumably enjoys it):
Would you say the same thing for the Hawaiians?
A lot of them want independence from the colonial United States. They want their nation and its territory back.
So, using your logic, would you grant them their wish?
I think not.
But it's a false equivalency anyway given that:
1. No such efforts are underway.
2. Taiwan is not presently part of the PRC.
3. Taiwan merely seeks de jure recognition of its de facto independence.
It is another false equivalency as the PRC has never ruled over Taiwan. And the CSA did not enfranchise their populace fairly. Any such referendum was not an expression of the will of the people but merely the slave holding classes.
It is not true that the United States waged the war to end slavery. Though of course slavery is why the Southern states seceded, the North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union. After all, the institution of slavery remained legal in the US at the outset of the war in '61, with no end in sight--Lincoln had been selected by the Republicans specifically because he was not a radical abolitionist. Only after the North struggled to defeat the South in a timely manner (in large part due to the fact that slave labor allowed the South to field ~80% of able bodied free men) did Lincoln put out the Emancipation Proclamation in '63--expressly as a matter of military necessity. The document gave only a cursory nod to it being "believed to be an act of justice", and it only freed Southern slaves.[0]
Slavery remained legal in the United States until 1865.
[0] https://www.historynet.com/emancipation-proclamation-text
The union was forced as much by economics as it was by human rights, unless all the northern states would also undo their abolitionist views.
China's Deng Xiaoping strategy of hide your strength and bide your time, that's a stall tactic to buy time (in that case the time between when something is actual and something is publicly known, a knowledge-time gap). The US placating China is also a stall tactic, hoping to buy time for a better scenario favoring the US and Taiwan more than China (for example a liberalized China, which was still a naive hope as recently as 10 years ago; that was always unlikely but it was better than driving China toward forced annexation sooner).
No power has attempted to sink a carrier since 1945, there is ultimately limited data on how effective any anti-carrier weapon developed in the last 80 years would be in practice.
Saturation by long-range antiship missiles is also possible to work, if the Falkland War is any indication.
And then there are the "deorbit a tungsten telephone pole" kind of ideas that just might work on a carrier, have no defense and are within the realm of possibility for both China, Russia and basically every state with the capability to get a few tons into some low orbit.
Against sophisticated enemies, carriers are giant billboards with "shoot me" written on them.
Italian battleships were targeted & 3 were disabled.
Also the British tried to sink the Argentinian aircraft carrier during the Falkland War and it escaped preatty much just due to luck.
The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.
On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned.
P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is.
They don't have to immediately pull off an invasion. Tomorrow they could begin a draconian blockade, while strategically bombing the island and begin an assassination & disruption campaign by inserting special forces. They can do it (rather inexpensively) on an indefinite basis, as long as they care to. Nobody can stop that and they have zero concern for the humanitarian disaster it would cause, with their eye on the long-term goal. Taiwan wouldn't last very long in that simple and very obvious scenario, it would rapidly degrade their condition. The world (those standing opposed to China's move) would quickly capitulate, understanding full well that the alternative is all out war with China; the UN would be begging for a settlement peace within weeks (which would result in China de facto taking over Taiwan). Mostly all that would happen to China are some sanctions, which China would shrug off (along with some dramatic, harshly worded PR releases). At the end of it, China won't need to invade with a large amphibious assault, it'll enter Taiwan largely unopposed as part of the brokered peace settlement.
China is very rapidly building up its naval capabilities. It will be able to invade Taiwan this decade. That isn't a maybe, it's a certainty.
Even more effective for China is to simply invest a few billion Dollars into bribing politicians. Some would argue that this has already been done with the KMT. They can also put pressure on the owners of the first generation of factories in China, which tend to be related to KMT. They will give up Taiwan in order to keep their business.
The waters of the strait are also shallow enough that submarines are not that effective.
Basically, it is certainly possible to pull of such an amphibious assault, and the US Navy's simulations recognize as much.
That is the hard part. Not only would you have to deal with US carrier based air assets, but also air assets from bases in Japan and South Korea. In addition, Aegis based cruisers also have a heavy anti-aircraft armament.
As for Japan, it is much too far from Taiwan to contribute. South Korea will not get involved for obvious reasons.
Look at how much trouble they've had building and attempting to operate an aircraft carrier. I think they finally figured out how to manufacture bearings for ballpoint pens in the last couple years. For both of these things, it's basically assumed that they stole US plans/technology/IP years/decades ago, yet still struggled/struggle to actually execute.
What's the best example of a successful, overt, non-domestic Chinese military operation, since deciding to go the totalitarian capitalism route?
Although now I'm also asking myself the same re: the US, and have sudden doubts.
As a bit of a tangent: I don't buy most of the current China conspiracy theories, but I struggle to think of what a non-traditional attack by China would look like that might be more effective than our current reality.
If nothing else, we've just supplied blueprints on how to successfully wage a future covert/non-traditional first-strike offensive.
The problem with China is straight-forward: time is on their side in all cases. They're a rising global power with expanding resources and capabilities (and a moral flexibility to do whatever they want, anytime they want), while the US can no longer afford its positioning militarily around the world (and that context will be far worse in another ten years). The US has already lost Asia to China, its bureaucrats are just too arrogant - still swimming in the past - to realize it (and I say that both as an American and as someone who thinks that outcome is bad for the world). China will rule Asia in terms of power balance before another 10-15 years passes by and the US will be forced to cede more of its post WW2 positioning there.
Have you seen what's going on in the US over the last few years? Of course you have, everyone has. That's not Trump, that's not blah blah blah (insert the fake excuses thrown around by pop media & 'journalists'). It's an eroding standard of living problem (that crashed off a cliff as the facade fell off with the 2009 crash) and everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about (healthcare, education, jobs, demographics, wages, household wealth, opioids, suicides, life expectancy, social chaos and strife that comes with many tens of millions of people being left adrift with no hope and they're all getting more angry and violent by the day on all political sides). The extraordinary mismanagement of the US by the clowns in DC over the last 20 years has tipped it over into shrink and recede mode (and that's just basic extrapolation, takes 30 seconds to calculate that forced outcome); the demands of the domestic population for social welfare improvement is getting violently loud and will get far louder this decade, which forces an eventual either or (this or that) decision for the politicians (this is how you get so many Republicans supporting $2,000 stimulus checks (an incomprehensible thing for that political side just 20 years ago), even some of them sense what's happening). In the short-term the US will print magic fiat (eat its wealth by debasing its currency) to pay for the costs of being a badly over-extended superpower, in the longer-term it has to recede because its finances are in an accelerating death spiral (Japan scenario). China doesn't have to do anything, it's pushing outward, and Asia is its backyard (whereas it's extremely expensive for the US to be positioned across Asia and put up a defensive front against China there).
If the US has "lost" Asia as a partner, can it maintain its supply chain dependence?
The US hasn't lost Asia as a partner and it's not going to in an absolute manner. The US is losing its hegemony over Asia, which it has had since WW2. Those are two very different things.
Can the US keep Asia as a partner? Yes, mostly, through accepting that it will have to be less of a dominant hegemony in Asia and more of an at-the-table partner with the other nations in Asia that are not very willing to capitulate to China (Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Vietnam, India, etc).
For example the US is intentionally flooding Vietnam with trade right now to build it up and working with them militarily to improve their positioning vs China. US imports from Vietnam are now equal to 23% of their economy; US imports from Vietnam will have increased by about 21% in 2020 (despite the pandemic). That will rapidly improve Vietnam in the same way it did China; in the next 20-30 years Vietnam will become a middle income nation comparable to Thailand or Malaysia. They're a quasi perma enemy of China, which is why they're so happy to be a strategic partner with the US (and why next to Israel the people of Vietnam like the US more than any other nation, accoring to Pew Research). The US can maintain supply chains with countries like Vietnam quite easily. The US will pull some of its dependency away from China and relocate it to other nations (whether Vietnam, India, Mexico, or similar).
The US can also simply increasingly accept its real context in Asia and cede more ground to China in exchange for maintaining trade with them (the EU is showing that it's happy to follow that path for example, it's plausible the US will partially capitulate in a similar manner). The US and China may continue to be quasi-enemies and competitors for global positioning, that trade with eachother, for a long time (and who knows what comes after Xi).
For their own self-defense, both South Korea and Japan should acquire nuclear weapons (if I were them); I wouldn't count on a receding US military superpower to come to the rescue, nor would I count on the thrashing-about-in-agony US population to take a self-interest in what China does in Asia (the growing stance in the US against foreign military adventurism will only increase by the year, as the US population demands an ever-increasing re-focus onto their well-being).
This could also mean US food production capabilities.
There's an insane amount of agricultural (and other) land being purchased by China controlled interests, both in the US and worldwide. Reliance on domestic food production is obviously something they're very concerned about, especially with the history of agricultural disease outbreaks. I suspect the seizure of Chinese owned/controlled property under US jurisdiction (or areas of influence) would be a significant blow, with respect to that. (As archaic as starving the enemy might be- we're talking about war.)
As much as I hesitate to suggest a new govt database:
We need a system tracking all foreign ownership of US land. Including owned by companies with Chinese stakeholders.
An incredibly difficult task, given the majority of US land records are kept at the county level.
It might actually be easier to track it based on crop production, commodity trading, exports, or financial transactions, all of which all at least have some extant system for national data collection, but this is way over my head.
Ideally yes. Would love that. But almost never-never-never gonna happen.
Culturally, Japan does a much better job than most in teaching (and learning from) war history. Hiroshimaa and Nagasaki are still quite fresh in their minds. They're not Germany; Japan still identifies as, acknowledges being, and is deeply ashamed that they are the same nation/people that bombed Pearl Harbor and fought in WW2.
The power plant meltdowns also don't help, but is probably less culturally entrenched.
Only chance of changing that is maybe one-day for parity with N Korean capabilities, or an imminent major war with China.
It'd be... historically & culturally interesting, if Japan accepted US nukes or technology as assistance in a wartime emergency. Could potentially create one hell of a bond between allies, if played right. Or a whole lot of hate, if Japan's public opinion isn't won over first.
As for South Korea, and in the context of North Korea:
As long as N Korea is N Korea, I don't know if we want to just drop nukes into the equation, as is, unless we're talking about US-controlled weapons-sharing. With the downside of being a less effective threat due to direct US involvement, and culpability.
What would be ideal is:
Somehow make Korean reunification happen, under a democratic government that inherits NK's nuke program. And then advances it with US blessings and/or assistance (either openly or modeled on something like the Israeli program).
Japan won't like it, but it also might be enough to encourge them to overcome their aversion, Hiroshima/Nagasaki be damned.
It would require overcoming a constitutional ban, so not easy. But they make an increasing number of exceptions for weapons constitutionally limited to "defensive capabilities," which somehow now includes two aircraft carriers with F-35Bs.
And which China already hates.
Yes, but it has to maintain it in a different way (The same way that nearly all other nations maintain trading partners).
When there's something unusual that it wants, instead of being able to negotiate via the threat of gunboat diplomacy (or by offering protection from gunboat diplomacy), it must come to the negotiating table with concessions on offer.
I was of the impression it was more an operations issue, in that there wasn't insight into many of the design decisions that they were copying.
They're iterating on the design with some experience now, and as you said, they'll have real, useable carriers soon...
But is there reason to believe they've really improved and figured out carrier ops? Let alone tactics, support/logistics, force-projection, or whatever other strategic uses they intend to pursue?
2) I didn't intend to make a political statement, just a hypothetical of "What would an art-of-war destabilizing campaign look like?"
I obviously share many of your concerns, but even if most of that is true, I don't necessarily think a declining society will weaken the country militarily, at least not initially. If anything the US military is good at training and making use of people of all beliefs/ political leanings/ levels of intelligence/ etc. As long as technology is roughly on par, and the money printing presses run, the military will do fine. The political and civilian side of the (non-DOD) government, however, is an entirely different question.
3) >this is how you get so many Republicans supporting $2,000 stimulus checks
Partially and/or maybe. But there's an alternative, conservative-consistent reasoning, in that mandatory shut-downs constitute a government taking (or even expropriation) under the law, and therefore "victims" should be compensated.
In practice, the SBA and PPP programs had this more of that type of structure, while of course the stimulus checks were done as a social welfare program.
But also, yes, there are many "conservatives" that seem to approve of populist social programs now. It'll be interesting to see the ultimate party/policies realignment.
Chinese military modernization is explicitly designed to counter US in Taiwan invasion scenario. They have no other security commitments, the goal is singular and funded by a budget that is equivalent to 87% of Pentagons by PPP. China doesn't have hundreds of bases, expensive pensions, legacy system to maintain. Last year alone they seem to have figured out most of the pressing turbojet issues as well as completed enough space infrastructure for full maritime surveillance persistence in SCS. These were the largest deficiencies western analysts had to doubt Chinese capabilities. Basically, any piece on Chinese military capabilities from 2+ years ago is out of date. That's how fast things are moving.
>social engineering and psyops
As far as I'm aware, there is no credible research to demonstrate Chinese conducts large influence operations in English abroad. It's mostly limited to mandarin targeting Chinese diaspora. That said, things will certainly be interesting if China actually decided to invest heavily in this capability. English fluency is still somewhat valuable resource in China, it's not being wasted to troll western net. But pool of English literacy is growing massively in recent years and there will be a surplus ready for weaponization.
I didn't mean to imply that they currently do. (Or don't. Idk.) Just that it's an area of major concern, where we'll be vulnerable as a country and lack parity.
But as you say, interesting possibilities.
2) >IMO The ballpoint anecdote has been severely misinterpreted...
I'm aware, but it's still a very relevant case-study. I'm not making fun of them- Manufacturing is hard.
You're correct, in that it was a lack of high precision, high quality manufacturing, and yes, they are catching up quickly...
But there's still a gap (for now) in this area, especially when 1) there is institutional knowledge required to make something correctly, and 2) said knowledge is non-public, a trade-secret, or similarly-restricted, and 3) no one has opened a factory to willingly transfer such knowledge to Chinese factory workers.
I believe one example is in industrial tooling, but I don't know if that's still true.
More abstractly:
When so much industrial knowledge in a country has come from external sources... Find out what they haven't had to learn on their own.
What capabilities will be missing or disadvantaged within their war-machine? Exploit them.
-Obviously China has its own ability to research and invent things (on its own), and I'm not implying that can't. But we're taking about competitive advantage and looking for weaknesses here.
I am interested in what military tactics and strategy a hypothetical non-traditional war with China might look like. Especially if China decided to strike-first with an art-of-war, covert and/or subversive type attack on society/ culture (and not military).
I guess my overall point is:
I'm more concerned with lack of parity in the non-traditional and non-military cultural warfare possibilities that a conflict with China might present.
Not so-much with overall military capabilities, even as military-tech approaches parity.
And that the US will once again find itself "fighting it's previous war."
Can’t or won’t? Certainly the US do a lot of damage to the mainland if they chose to engage in a hot total war. A nuclear barrage of Chinese military facilities and supply lines would shut down an amphibious assault. I imagine that the US can still do tremendous damage with conventional bombing and ballistics as well, though not without cost. Both of these are basically MAD scenarios.
Do you really want to entertain this ridiculous idea?
A nuclear assault on Chinese soil, would invite a nuclear retaliation on American soil.
Do you really want to lose Los Angeles or New York City, to a nuclear ICBM?
And if it comes that, then both sides should just launch all their nukes, and see who is left afterwards to pick up the pieces.
America is now a nuclear wasteland. And all because some people couldn’t swallow their pride, and realize that Taiwan is not their core interest.
Yes. Of course. Xi invading Taiwan would involve killing Americans, including American soldiers. It’s an attack on America and on our ally. If they use nuclear weapons and we demur, it’s a failure of deterrence. America has given its word to come to Taiwan’s defence. If we don’t like the implications of that promise, we should withdraw it.
Keep in mind: a nuclear barrage (or ersatz nuclear, with nuclear-scale tonnage from non-nuclear warheads) of military assets is different from bombing Beijing. And being open to nuclear retaliation is different from attacking with nuclear weapons. Appeasement didn’t work for Hitler. I don’t see why we think this time would be different[1].
Nobody wants this. But a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with nuclear weapons would be clear escalation by Beijing. Hopefully, level heads prevail.
[1] Not equating Xi with Hitler. I don’t think Beijing seriously plans on invading Taiwan. But if Xi does, we’ve miscalculated somewhere. And these comparisons become more apt.
In you opinion, was fighting Nazi Germany irrational too?
The parent post said that America could not stop China from taking Taiwan. I want to know what they mean by this.
What do you think are the US core interests? Is maintaining and defending our allies not one? Would it be different if it was Australia or Canada? What about Alaska? Where would you draw the line?
2. Did they give polite noncommittal answers or their actual thoughts?
In the workplace, you don't usually have coworkers interrogating other coworkers about their geopolitical views around the watercooler and basing their future professional interactions on those views.