China's an export based economy that's going through a slowdown and still struggling with pandemic lockdowns. War would shut down the Taiwanese straight for shipping and it's one of their busiest export lanes in the world. It's not helping that their housing market is in pretty dire straights. So the CCP's not in super great water popularity wise (although sometimes wars can bring people together, I'm not sure that's as true with acts of aggression as it is with acts of defense).
China and the US are both heavily dependent on Taiwan for semiconductor manufacturing, especially for state of the art chips. War would shut China off from that tap. Those labs are incredibly advanced and not easy to rebuild. And the US dependence on those chips give the US a strong reason to defend Taiwan. Both countries are ramping up their own chip production in order to make this less of an issue but it's certainly the case at the moment.
An invasion across the Taiwanese straight _would not be a cakewalk_. China's military is certainly much stronger than it used to be, but at some point you need to move troops across that straight in greater numbers than jumping out of the back of bomber planes can provide. A mass landing is likely to result in huge casualties and may not be successful. The US has been arming Taiwan for decades now and it's certain they're planning for that cross channel invasion.
Anti-China sentiment in the US is fairly strong at the moment and the current US President has said the US would defend Taiwan. China will invade when the US is divided on the issue and thus more likely not to step up to the plate. Similarly, where the US goes it'll have help from its partners.
China's not in a great position at the moment, at the end of the day, despite a lot of rolling around on the ground trying to scratch for fleas the United States is still a pretty big dog in this world. And going toe to toe with it in something that's not a proxy war probably isn't something any regime has much appetite for.
That's my assessment at the moment.
In terms of public opinion, I think you underestimate the extent to which Chinese people believe that Taiwan is a rightful part of China. Their domestic audience would not view it as invading another nation, but rather the rightful culmination of a long effort to reunify territory lost during the century of humiliation (eg. Hong Kong, Macau).
Biden's statement that the US would defend Taiwan was an unscripted gaffe in response to a question that the White House walked back within hours. In reality, the US has no legal obligation or treaty compelling it to defend Taiwan. Again, there are pretty clear parallels to Ukraine, where the US provides materiel and support, but isn't willing to actually guarantee military intervention.
My takeaway is that this visit will ratchet up tensions and has a very small probability of escalating into a serious crisis, for no appreciable foreign policy benefit. It just looks like a cynical attempt to shore up foreign policy weakness before the midterms, after the mess in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Taiwan is a global, single point of failure for advanced CPU manufacturing. My guess is that the US will never allow this to fall in Chinese hands.
Expensive chips for a while is probably cheaper than WWIII.
The US government can’t allow the Chinese to have absolute power and control over the technology that the _world_ runs on. It’s an existential threat.
Can you imagine, at the height of the Cold War, the US outsourcing nuke construction to the Soviet Union?
I’m pretty sure the US is ok with the world being set backwards a bit in tech if they get to reacquire chip leadership. A more cynical person could suggest that the US is agitating for a war in order to precipitate this very outcome.
An even more cynical person (me) would suggest that the democrat party is facing a pretty tough mid term, and nothing gets voters to back the part in charge more than a good old fashion conflict...
The cynical person in me says none of them care or even think about trade, tech leadership, or anything beyond retaining power in the next election
Your scenario only makes sense if the US was almost on the verge of achieving technological parity with TSMC, say within months or maybe a couple of years. But that is not the case. Heck, building a fab from scratch takes longer than that. What happens in the interim? And what happens to the rest of the world? The disruption on a global scale would make the pandemic look mild.
The rest of us will just have to get used to paying more for less.
Just because something is incredibly destructive doesn’t mean politicians won’t do it. I’m sure many people would like to punish TSMC customers for not buying American in the first place.
The U.S. had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan until 1980 for heaven's sake; this is nothing like the situation in Ukraine.
Go read this one next: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act ... which is still in force.
Also refer to multiple occasions this year where Biden has said that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan was similar to NATO Article 5, or otherwise that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan:
https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-s...
Compare that with ... nothing at all of any similar kind of legislative or executive message w.r.t to Ukraine. There is no strategic ambiguity about the U.S. defending Ukraine military; the U.S. is absolutely not committed to that course of action and has never been - the strongest language on this point being a non-binding memorandum from 1994.
All Biden's statements prove is that he struggles to function without a teleprompter. The White House has repeatedly had to walk back his unscripted statements on Taiwan: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-walks-back-taiwan-com...
With respect to Ukraine, Ukraine hosted US and NATO training missions, did joint naval drills with NATO, and in December Biden was still promising Ukraine a path to NATO membership: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zel...
As with Taiwan, with respect to Ukraine the US did not guarantee military intervention, but reserved the option to intervene and made statements to that effect. In recent months, they did clarify that they would not send US troops to intervene directly, but I expect we would see similar statements from the White House if China started preparing for an imminent invasion.
... and then a Fox News article; OK; I mean, you choose you own sources ... I'm going with my source from the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
You clearly aren't here to engage in good faith discussion, so I'm done.