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DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
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DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10d ago
the US will plausibly be able spam so many antiship missiles from every corner of the first island chain that it will be the Chinese who are having interceptor shortfalls
Within a decade it's more likely that both sides have directed energy interception, which introduces its own problems. You're still living in this popular dream scenario where the opponent is static but the US is constantly improving. (Hence also all the embarrassing stuff about "not letting China win in robotics/industry" when they're like a century ahead.) It's not just a matter of buildup, they're not just an assembly floor, you're improving slower than them technologically.
Taiwanese might be more interested or, rather, less opposed to unification because the US is rapidly depleting their Silicon Shield in preparation for vacating the island, also coercing them into undesirable investment plans and imposing unfair tariffs.
One of them is just preventing rival economic/geopolitical entities from forming
Too late, too much main character syndrome.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10d ago
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I'm afraid this jingoistic intoxication will get worse when the US proceeds to topple some other incompetent country (probably Cuba next). This is all fine and good so long as the actual decisionmakers are sober and don't infer they can start anything with China, but will they be sober? Currently you're burning through interceptors and, if this is not AI fog of war slop, even losing F-15s (alledegely to friendly fire, I presume due to lack of relevant training. Should have called upon Ukrainians to teach you guys air defense). But long term, Iran is poised to lose the war, of course, so the sense of invulnerability will be restored.
First of all Iran was not a "military ally" to China in a way that matters, this is just cope to inflate the sense of achievement, just like hyping up Iranian "gigantic military built over 40 years" (I see you double down on it). For reference, India, Kazakhstan and Pakistan are also there, are they Iranian allies too? Are India and Pakistan allies? They've just had a war. "Heavily involved in selling oil" just means that due to sanctions their oil was selling at a discount, which the Chinese opportunistically exploited. Here's what Foreign Policy had to say last September about the nature of the relationship:
Contrary to much Western analysis, Iran never fully embraced China—even after Trump’s 2018 exit from the nuclear deal. As the conservative Farhikhtegan newspaper recently noted, Tehran long treated Beijing as a fallback, abandoning major proposals whenever fleeting openings with the West arose. The paper asserts that Xi Jinping offered a $40 billion investment package in 2016, but it went nowhere, while the much-touted 25-year cooperation road map remained largely symbolic for lack of Iranian initiative.
Indeed, in the brief window of sanctions relief after the 2015 nuclear agreement, Tehran handed lucrative contracts to Western firms such as Total, Airbus, and Boeing—sidestepping Chinese companies. As Hossein Qaheri, the head of the Iranian-Chinese Strategic Studies Think Tank, admitted: “Time and again, for short-term gains, we have abandoned China—and the Chinese have repeatedly said they do not have strategic trust in Iran.” …
That's diplomatic; on a personal level, Chinese consider Iranians worthless backstabbing third worlders. So, their lack of direct involvement is quite understandable. The article lists some symbolic gestures (Beijing inviting Iranians to Victory day parade, agreement on implementation of the 25 year investment pact) but that was transparently a panicked reaction to a crisis. Objectively they're given about the same treatment as Starmer, Macron, Carney and other foreign dignitaries. I don't want to say there's nothing to multipolar agenda, obviously China prefers Iran to remain a thorn in the US/Israeli side and also to buy cheaper oil. But that's a benefit of bounded and not great value, and ineptitude and duplicity of the mullah regime qualifies it further.
No, Iran is only about Iran and Israel, not China. Except psychologically (I'll return to this).
I think what we're learning is not so much that the US is a supreme military power but that it's been a very reluctant hegemonic empire indeed. Why do these shitholes even exist? Venezuela, Cuba? Seriously? The former is a pure petrostate that had failed to keep its oil rigs running due to decades of mismanagement and populism (and also sanctions). The latter is a country famous for sugarcane that's importing sugar now because Communists have ran the industry into the ground. Just months ago, Iran had almost collapsed due to a drought, not to mention that it's deeply infiltrated by Mossad. Why does the US tolerate such enemies instead of giving them a push? Why does it just allow the hostility to persist? Well, Trump has been asking himself just this, it seems. The answer is, there's no good reason. The US can afford to crush them, because it'll be pretty cheap (especially given the fixed costs of US military power).
The problem comes with assuming that China is anything like them. I get it, too – Communists, enemies of America, poor, theoretically allies (though China has no real allies except for North Korea and informally Pakistan, to counter India). But it's dangerously delusional. At the end of the day, the reason America can do this, the reason it has all those stealth jets and satellites and AI and smart munitions and everything else is that it has a large, productive, complex, technologically advanced economy. Even the industrial sector, for all the talk of hollowing out, is the world's second largest (though it depends on how you treat value-added figures – in physical output, it might be closer to Japan than to China). And these guys are so far down the line they barely have an economy.
I like the measure called Economic Complexity Index, maintained by Harvard Growth Lab. In intention, it tracks how capable a nation is of mainitaining industries that generate globally competitive products, though in reality is just measures export diversity. It's not pefrect – for example, Australia and the US get punished by the predominance of a few commodities in their export basket – but it's a decent proxy if you keep that in mind. Say, in 2024, Venezuela was ranked #133 out of 145 countrires. Cuba is #122. Afghanistan is #110. Iran is #87. Russia is #67. Canada (commodity exporter) is #35. USA is #20, between Hong Kong and France. The top 10 all have negligible commodity endowment. The list is as follows: Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Czechia, Israel, Slovenia, China (climbed 7 points in the last 16 years; the US has fallen down by 7 again). Discounting the fraction of the economy involved in fossil fuels and agriculture (a generous choice), I'd say the US would end up roughly as complex as China. They have a nice visualisation, you can click through it, eg here's the structure of American imports from China, and here are exports. Or, here are Chinese exports to Japan which as we know is number 1. And the other way around. It's quite clear to me that the ranking is directionally aligned with reality. And it's a ranking of complexity. In terms of volume or human capital employed in militarily relevant fields, it's not close. China doesn't need "allies" because it surpasses the entire Western bloc in scale.
plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do
Reminder that China is already testing two 6th generation jets in the open, and given that you haven't resolved the issue of launching 5th generation from Ford in over a decade (their EMALS works flawlessly btw), there are hardly any grounds to expect the gap to widen (or even to exist).
THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage
How's that working out? I see Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel online. Reminder that it's a barely functional theocracy, these aren't some fancy MIRVs or HGVs. Forget THAAD, actually, you're struggling wtih Shaheds.
oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical
Starship is a real argument for interception, but the gap in rocket technology is likely smaller than it seems. We'll see over 2026 if China can begin landing their boosters, and they won't need Starship unit economics to scale up production.
China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal
Currently estimated at 600 warheads, vs American stockpile of 3700. It's a completely sufficient deterrence. You glibly dismiss 50-90 million dead Americans, I suspect that's a lowball but the point is that you're unlikely to destroy China either, for all the memes about Three Gorges Dam. Their cities are denser but made of concrete far more resilient to nuclear flash than your suburbs, for starters. That said, we're all far from the genocidal peak of Cold War, and these assets on both sides would be used on counterforce strike.
What I want to say is that this isn't just a funny hypothetical. "How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners, and the answer is "we don't, not really". China is your only rival and pacing threat, China is likely to take Taiwan in years, and there are no adequate answers sans praying to AGI and Elon Musk to bail the US out. Accordingly this showboating in hostile shitholes, while inflating their alleged capability to proportionally inflate American dominance, to the extent that it's not executing on prior plans and commitments – is best understood as procrastination in the face of unsolvable strategic dilemma, with a nice bonus of inciting this feverish national pride and maybe improving the GOP's chances in the midterms.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
12d ago
There had just been massive protests, which the Iranian regime has drowned in blood. I am suspicious of exact numbers, but it sounds more that people were beaten into temporary submission with overwhelming violence than that they simply gave up. Uprising is plausible I think.
Idk about the serial numbers, but three? Well, in fairness, Kuwaiti defense forces seem to be at fault, so it's no great slight on the American hyperpower, and if anything goes to show the power of your air defense.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/02/middleeast/us-kuwait-aircraft-crash-iran-intl-hnk
Why do you presume they will lose any oil supply? Why do you think you get to just tell countries to stop exporting to China? They're broke and need some income. You're an oil exporter. Oil is a global commodity, more oil on the market mechanistically reduces prices. Trump has already said he won't stop Venezuelan exports to China. This is just more capeshit to rationalize actions compelled half by unilateral Israeli decision and half by procrastination as part of your competition with China.
Because I'm generous and as I've explained massive commodity sectors depress a nation's ECI. It is fair that on the physical level there's plenty of complexity in fracking (the Chinese think it's one of three impressive American industries) but the volume of exports dilutes your technological value-add.
Yes but it's hopeless for basic reasons of economic development and the tremendous success of American system. Every American with half a functioning brain is already gainfully employed, and very few of those are in manufacturing, and the rest are more or less ballast. You can increase the output somewhat but if you think you get to "catch up" to China or whatever, it's pure hubris. Like, when exactly are you going to build Shenzhen and staff it with whom? Do you even realize how far ahead they are in industrial automation, in integration of all ecosystems? That it's stopped to be about "cheap labor" maybe a decade ago? That your lofty plans of solving these issues with robots all depend on Chinese suppliers?
With South American imports. You mainly export pig feed (soybeans), and cattle feed (alfalfa), not human food. In the worst case, if you compel South Americans to also stop exports, they'll probably have to eat less beef and pork, as they had historically and as the Greatest Democracy India does today. Look at the calorie consumption in China over the years, they have developed a lot of slack.
American oil is irrelevant and replaceable, you're power-tripping. They depend more on the Gulf. So next comes the usual fantasy about closing the Malacca strait I guess. Of course this is an act of war which locals (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore) will likely resist so as to not become a battlefield, and the Chinese have and will have more than enough reserves and domestic production to operate their rapidly growing navy. Did you know that China is the world's sixth largest oil producer? That in terms of total primary energy production (domestic production yes), they're global number 1 and 40% higher than the US? And that they are very quickly making inland logistics oil-independent? They'll survive even if they stop getting any oil. I swear, almost everything about conflict with China is some rehashing of the 20th century arc with Japan plus something about Soviets.
Again, for some reason you assume that your dependencies (eg the rare earths threat, that forced Trump to halt the BIS Affiliate Rule last November) are easily fixable, despite decades of forewarning, literally 30 years of Chinese openly saying that they'll weaponize it one day. I guess it's nice to have such faith in your people, and dismiss previous ineptitude as enemy action or just carelessness. Not sure how warranted it is, though.
Ok, let's say this is the new strategy. How fast do you think China could make another 2, 3, 5 thousand warheads if they wanted to? Do you really want to go back to a nuclear arms race? Who is currently building over half of all new nuclear reactors in the world, entire fleets of nuclear submarines, a nuclear aircraft carrier? In economy, they dwarf the Soviet Union colossally, and their defense spending is a fraction of yours, around 2% GD. They could outrace you by a very solid margin.
Nuclear bluff has limits, your threats have to be credible. Psychologically, they're not terrified because they assume you're not retarded enough to sacrifice New York for Taipei, no matter the imbalance. That you might sacrifice New York just to take out Beijing and Shanghai is a bit of an alien thought to them. Perhaps they're wrong, but that's the reality of their decisionmaking.
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