Sounds like when Russia is finished doing what they're doing, China is next up to bat. Happy 2023, everyone.
* Russia has spent years financially divorcing itself from the West. China has no economy without the West. Being an energy exporter makes you much more independent than being a manufacturer.
* Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task. Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
* The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause.
OTOH China believes that their balance of military power is increasing relative to Taiwan and the west so an invasion will be easier in the future. Better to wait than invade in 2023.
Loosing West as a trade partner will really hurt China but it will not be the end. There is the rest of the world to trade with. China is building trade with Africa, South America, Asia etc. etc.
Besides I do not think a real decoupling will happen bar some major catastrophe. It will be as much economic disaster for the West at its current stage as it will be for China.
As energy importer China can rely on Russia, SA and other oil rich countries whom the US does not love very much. So I'd say they're safe in this regard.
>"The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause."
I do not think China even needs this example. They can just simply wait.
Being an export economy losing your market is much more devastating.
How? Oh please remove the blockade, we'll be a good girl from here on? Yeah sure. You think they would even let it get to the stage when harbors are mined?
The only realistic and safe course of actions is for the West to get their shit together and start very gradual decoupling. This will of course be reciprocal and the end result will be multi-polar world with ever changing alliances.
And after a while the trade between "enemies" will resume again and the circle will continue.
The US will not attack China's ships (assuming China did not start the war). Doing this is straight WWIII scenario. All bets are off in this case. You think the US is suicidal?
Pretending to.
True, but by the same token the West (and the rest of the East, and the world) has no economy without China. It makes everything higher stakes for everyone involved.
> * Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task.
Also true, but supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
> Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-senator-...
For better or worse, the US is easily the most powerful force projection entity in world history. This was true before Russia was revealed to be badly broken and is more true now.
And the US cares a lot more about Taiwan than Ukraine, but there's an equally large gap between how much China cares about Taiwan and how much the US does.
Will China be able to guarantee continued oil shipments safely reaching China? Food? Can China afford a slow economic burn while it blockades Taiwan for ambiguous gains?
But it would be able to wage its war. For food it's fine, although people would certainly be eating much less pork for a long time. Oil is the critical limiting resource; China consumes around 15 million barrels a day. But it domestically produces 4 million barrels a day (it once was doing around 5, but shut down some as they became uneconomic), can scale up to around a million barrels per day of imports from Russia and Central Asia, and has a stockpile of around a billion barrels. Most manufacturing except for militarily relevant industries would be shut down, and it would impose domestic rationing to decrease its baseline consumption by a couple million barrels. Depending on how you model things, China could maintain its wartime footing for at least a year and potentially indefinitely.
Painful for China, yes, but also economically horrendous for the rest of the world. As soon as the war starts, all of East Asia would be thrown into an immediate depression, as at a minimum 10% of economic activity is shut down overnight. Oil prices fall, putting severe pressure on oil producers whose economies themselves collapse. The EU and the USA themselves tumble into recession, as supply chains are destroyed. Domestic politics would react negatively to the new reality, and there'd be no Pearl Harbor event to motivate Western voters to prosecute a war for an island most can't even locate on a map.
Everyone would be in for a world of pain, and everyone would want a resolution of the crisis as quickly as possible. If China starts a war, it will be because it believes it can maintain itself in an economic calamity longer than the US and its allies can.
Every year this becomes increasingly the wrong question to ask.
Who is going to blockade PRC? US?
Entire Malacca dilemma / anxiety / blockade scenario from 10+ years ago was underpinned by US having full naval escalation dominance with CONUS impunity because adversaries had no technical means to meaningfully undermine US homefront.
That leverage has essentially eroded with PRC ICBMs being able to conventional strike against CONUS infra in the last few years. PRC can simply run blockade and dare US to enforce by threatening to hit 130 refineries that sustains US existential viability. Fortress America era that has worked in US favour for 200+ years is over (vis a vis increasing PRC peer capabilities), if both PRC and US critical infra gets reset to zero, neither country has energy mix options or ag production (which depends on inputs derived from oil) that can even marginally sustain current society. The same ability to CONUS strikes also threatens major military capital projection assets.
The geostrategic reality when big bois have increasingly precise conventional long range strikes is US becomes Saudi Arabia, all the domestic production doesn't matter if you can't protect it against motivated advesary that has capbility to strike your extraction infra. PRC will guarantee continued SLOC access by guaranteeing US won't have access to any energy or calories if it attempts to to deny like access to PRC.
The pertinent question now is:
Can US afford an existential war with PRC for ambiguous gains? Medium/long term PRC incentive is stacked towards gambling an existential fightng US (using TW as proxy) to kick US out of PRC back yard, vs US who can afford to retreat to CONUS and pull strings as offshore balancer with intact navy and society at much less relative cost. US, by virtue of being hegemon has much more to lose if she gambles to lose everything versus foregoing something. VS PRC has everything to gain in TW scenario while long term game theory for worst case scenario is converging towards pyrrhic victory for US that would deter substantial US intervention at all.
With respect to TW, old nuclear consensus was PRC was more willing to trade Beijing for TW than US willing to trade Los Angeles for TW. US response at height of conventional military primacy was, if PRC wants TW than US, but we will impose crippling conventional costs in lieu of going nuclear. New conventional dynamic PRC is setting is, PRC wants TW more than US and if US tries to intervene then there will be existential costs on both homelands.
Both EU and US would actually benefit from manufacturing moving back. EU needs to do something about its stupidly car-centric economy and for US it just might help bring about a cultural shift away from extreme consumerism towards something more sustainable.
> ... supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China. They will just claim that they are defending their independent country while China can't really domestically explain carpet or nuclear bombing "their own citizens". And there are unofficial communication lines open to work around censorship.
> I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize. But Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
How do you expect anyone to take the rest of your comment serious when you state something like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/qu1ob8/european_c...
Not as car centric as US or Canada but compared to the rest of the world EU is very car centric. At least the US and Canada are vast and their cities are much more young.
Americans have this romantic view of Europe as old dense cities.
https://www.confused.com/car-insurance/average-cars-around-t...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...
If the US's best defense against a China-initiated economic war is to give up consumerism, that doesn't give me a great deal of hope for Taiwan.
More generally, it would be great for manufacturing to move back to the EU and the US. But that can't happen on the scale of months or even years; in a war with China, we'd face huge supply chain disruptions for the duration.
> They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China.
This isn't a realistic appraisal of Taiwan's military capabilities. China dominates Taiwan on all aspects of military power; fanciful ideas about blowing up the Three Gorges Dam aside, China doesn't worry too much about Taiwan's military.
> I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize.
As bad and dumb as this outcome would be, China would consider it a total victory.
> Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
You have to get those weapons to Taiwan somehow, and Taiwan would need to be able to launch them from somewhere. China has effective countermeasures to both if American engagement is limited to that.
Assuming the CCP is willing to throw the PLA(N) into a charnel house, there are certain scenarios where they can trickle them in after a fashion. The eastern seaboard of China has more than 500,000 fishing vessels that can be mustered across the Strait, even in inclement weather if safety of the boats, crews, and the fire team to squad level passengers and their gear was ignored.
QUAD and Taiwan together doesn’t have enough missiles and anti-ship weaponry to sink enough of these boats to avoid a beachhead being established. In inclement conditions target acquisition of the small boats is very difficult. Not all boats need to hold troops. Not all of them need to be manned at all. Plenty of convoying drones in self-organizing meshes can carry supplies and surviving hulls can run aground at the beachhead to offer supply depots plus cover and concealment for manned boats. The CCP could use the massacre of this missile-absorbing force as a pretext to go nuclear on US CBG’s. They could “throw away” these lives on an unimaginably cruel scale.
And still have more than enough troops left over to mount a legitimate invasion with “real” ships after pretty much all missiles are expended.
There are many ways it can go pear-shaped in a hurry for either side. The only winning move is not to play.
If China started amassing amphibious invasion forces near Taiwan, I’d expect the US to fill Taiwan with every javelin and stinger missile they can spare.
Are there any that many left?
Taiwan already has things like Patriot missiles and harpoons.
Taiwan is close to key US allies (Japan and Korea) and several other nations that aren't huge fans of China lately. It's also more protected than Ukraine by natural features, i.e. a strait the Chinese invasion force would have to cross in an amphibious assault.
The deterrent from Ukraine is that conflict's showing how effective large numbers of man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles can be on an invasion force.
Taiwan definitely got the Ukraine message, incidentally: https://twitter.com/MPWangTingyu/status/1607702645296492545
Both countries prefer a defensive posture in military deployment. If it isnt a threat to South Korea and Japan's territory, they will be reluctant to engage.
I don't expect either to risk escalating kenetic engagement with China for a 3rd party like Taiwan. This reunification glacier is moving in one direction and nobody in the neighborhood (except Taiwan) will be willing to stand in its path.
If Russia falls apart, and as the last grand colonial empire, it bloody well should, China should have a lot of influence over the regional pieces.
It's hard to imagine something this ingrained ending, but nothing is forever.