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So as one of the resident Taiwan pessimists, I have surprising news. Contrary to all my expectations, Trump might have actually pushed back a Taiwan invasion. I'm always a little suspicious of the variable quality of Time magazine stories, but this laid out a pretty cogent case. First, my prior base case:
You can definitely still make this case. I'm almost tempted to. On a very substantial fact-based level, the US in the next 1-2 years especially will be possibly at the lowest level or readiness in a great while: large portions of the fleet will need refits, interceptor stocks will take years to recover even under optimistic scenarios, other precision munitions are also low, every conflict lowers US domestic appetite for more, and contrarily war would improve domestic approval within China that's otherwise a little grumpy with recent so-so growth. Additionally, there's some mild but decent evidence that US defenses are indeed still vulnerable to the new classes of hypersonic missiles. US capacity and abilities are sure to spike again in the 3-5 year time frame as the US not only implements highly relevant fixes to problems that have been exposed recently, but also continues to re-orient its efforts to prioritize things that threaten China more both directly and indirectly, so the window is real but closing.
However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed. It has the capacity to plan carefully thousands of targets, kidnap or assassinate world leaders (though with nuclear-armed China I disagree that this is very relevant), completely overwhelm air defenses without losses (including at least some amount of Chinese-made equipment in both Venezuela and Iran), sustain and project power across the globe, process an enormous amount of intelligence and surveillance with decent accuracy, and more. And clearly the President can unilaterally do whatever they want, with Trump in particular shedding a previous (avowed) aversion to conflict. DPP is not weak exactly, but definitely having some down moments compared to the more pro-China KMT within Taiwan, mildly raising hopes of a political reunification. And Taiwanese self-defense efforts as far as I can tell remain pretty lackluster despite continuing to shell out for some high end systems. Furthermore this is a tiny little dry run of how badly the global oil supply can get screwed with even a regional war, doubtless actual action would be worse, and I'm guessing China feels a bit of that pain.
And sure enough this seems to be the initial reaction. Here for example, we have a typical bellwether academic at a flagship university saying stuff like this:
Reading between the lines, the obvious message is: wow, actually, the US is doing really well at deterrence recently in all of these three areas, especially demonstrated capacity and resolve, and China has, well, very little to show for its own efforts. No big operations besides military exercises. No real allies willing to pitch in. Unclear transmission of internal resolve to America, too. So in our how-the-world-actually-works framework, China is missing the essential psychological ingredients to actually pull off deterrence even if I still believe that in terms of the nuts and bolts, China could win pretty handily even if the US intervenes (in terms of a conflict itself) and has more cards to play in terms of the "how". They know it, too, but that's likely not going to be enough.
As such I'll take a predictive L in advance. My predictions about 4-5 years ago that a Taiwanese invasion would happen in approximately this timeframe was wrong. Difficult to foresee political factors significantly distorted the general strategic picture, which I assert remains accurate. My primary failing was underweighting the political side of things and the significant variance there, along with its impact on the strategic calculations necessary to pull the trigger on a big move.
I'm sorry, but it seems a bit of an unjustified update. Taiwan timeline likely didn't change a bit.
Right, the war with Iran has already wasted years' worth of production of interceptors, and you've even got a $1.1B radar and it seems multiple of those vaunted THAAD systems destroyed. This looks extemely bad for any future conflict with China but not because you'll take time to replenish this stuff. I've given to understand that Americans have a certain logarithmic sense for prowess of different adversary nations: Venezuela and Cuba are like "5-6", Iran and Russia are "7", China is maybe "8". In reality the differences are measured in the orders of magnitude. If Iran can exhaust these interceptors in a week, a massive Chinese strike would probably take hours to burn through Guam, Okinawa, and whatever is on Taiwan. They're making 31 million cars a year, just for example; mobilized, they can make not thousands but tens of millions of flying mopeds if they want. Interceptor-based defense is just inadequate against a superior industrial power; it barely works against an inferior one.
Yes, one can argue that this doctrine is getting obsolete if DEW-based defense advances, but similar logic applies to whatever comes next, and what's happening now isn't a case of getting caught by surprise – like a third of your naval power is in the theater, amid long-established bases, with local cooperation; and you've been watching the war in Ukraine for over 4 years, these are the same damn Shaheds (maybe with a few modifications) Russians had been using early on, from the OG Shahed maker. Where are Palmer Luckey's Roadrunners or Anvils knocking them out for cheaps? All these AI-driven turrets? Lasers, EW systems? The anti-ballistic front is less embarrassing but still economically sad. In light of all this, it's unclear to me why China would ever care about the "opportunity" presented by the US exhausting interceptors elsewhere.
This is a strange take too. Which observers believed that the US can't enjoy air superiority against Iran? Some doompillers who watched one too many recruitment ad with LGBT representation?
What actually matters is, for instance, whether they can detect and effectively engage your stealth aircraft. And this war is not teaching us much because Iranians don't have any modern Chinese assets or equivalents. I've been trying to find confirmations of hits of anything of that sort, because the entire internet is overflowing with claims how American-Israeli Power has proven inefficacy of Chinese temu radars/missiles. So far I've only learned that CENTCOM has taken out an HQ-2 SAM with something like a JDAM. It might be Sayyid 2, though. In any case both are close derivatives of the Soviet 75 Dvina, and 75 here is not for the year of commissioning, it actually dates back to 1957. It's probably the most widely deployed SAM in history, you've had trouble with it in Vietnam, and have learned a thing or two since then. There are some claims by pro-PRC third worldists and hawks alike that «China Arms Iran with 700km Anti-Stealth Radar Capable of Tracking F-35 and B-2 — YLC-8B» , and consequently now gloating that those radars have been destroyed. It's not impossible, after all having a long-range radar unit by itself doesn't imply you can react effectively, but I just hope that Americans and Israelis show photos of the wreckage. Same story with alleged Chinese missiles and everything else.
In Venezuela, it's not clear if any air defense systems were even operational, or stuck in half-disassembled mode. Looking up this stuff one is struck by the vast overrepresentation of American and Indian content, indeed Americans and Indians are becoming culturally indistinguishable.
This is just … I don't know how to describe it, some mix of naive idealism and narcissism. Is Xi a dictator or nah? Why would he need a "greenlight" in the form of example of belligerence from his main pacing threat? Where would he cash it in? Nobody important in, say, Europe will claim that whacking Iran is morally or legally equivalent to conquering Taiwan, so it changes nothing and is only good for domestic rhetoric about Western hypocrisy. I guess Americans are so powerful that they can afford to be solipsistic, and so might overrate the value of domestic moral rhetoric in the general case. But even on that front, China is quite unified in believing that reunification, including by violent means, is justified. United States is no standard or paragon. It's not making invasion more likely.
I think they've been quite sure they'll lose access to oil imports in the case of the full-scale war with the US, and will have to fight for it.
Basically I believe Americans strongly overrate how much their antics in random powerless Evil Nations affect Chinese plans one way or another way. They're just not informative.
If you think I'm a Chinese shill, here's a Chinese hawk with impeccable credentials: Tanner Greer.
The idea that the Iran operation was mostly about China, that it fundamentally changes Chinese perceptions of American strength, or that it has already altered the balance of power between China and America in any real way, is bizarre to me.
We know what metrics the Chinese judge their competition with the US by. We know the military measures they care about and we know the non-military elements of national power that they think are most important.
Very honestly: the upcoming war powers resolutions vote on Iran will likely matter more to Chinese perceptions of American capacity (if the admin fails to get the vote) than the actual military attacks on Iran. Not hard to predict the sort of analysis the Xie Tao types will write up.
To fundamentally change Chinese perceptions (or for that matter, realities, as IMHO the Chinese are largely looking at the right metrics) the Iran operation would have to change one’s answer to any of the following questions:
Anyways you get the idea. The Party leadership sees geopolitical competition between the United States and China as a contest of technological supremacy. The long run weaknesses they see in the United States are political and cultural; in turn, the thing they fear most is ideological subversion of their own regime. Militarily they prepare for a no-holds barred fight over the waters of the west Pacific —the key factors there are the willingness of US, Japan, and Taiwan to be a part of that fight and then our ability to sustain it in the face of great losses in both men and machinery. The Iran stuff is orthogonal to almost all of that.
Good post and good quoted post too.
I think the way his X post framed the question makes it a mismatch for the argument I was advancing. I agree that militarily the conflict doesn't change the calculus that much but if it does it's in the direction of "China would win". Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that. Or maybe it's that I think his "political" bullets are missing a bullet or two.
What it changes is how threats are communicated and how those threats can evolve into action. And it does in a big way. First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations. And they've been loud and annoying for decades about Taiwan so leaders are desensitized. Now, as a world citizen that's awesome and cool but it doesn't help them in the sense that a big stick doesn't work as a threat if people don't see its size correctly. (By the way, I also don't believe for a second that China's relative noninterventionism would or will continue, because the rhetoric around 'self-determinism' is not only just as fake as say America's in the Mexican-American war, but also because Exhibit A about ignoring self determination is literally the topic of this discussion.)
In Kissinger's setup, China has the capacity to inflict damage, probably has (internally) resolve and willingness to follow through, but cannot meaningfully communicate this resolve nor this capacity, at least not at scale. That's a crucial missing piece of the trifecta, which means that China's deterrence power is fundamentally flawed. The contrast is obvious: America not only makes threats but makes good on them and other countries fully recognize those threats, even more so after events of the last year.
Why, might you ask, does deterrence even matter? Overall, China patently still prefers (and prefers strongly) peaceful reunification for, I think, super obvious reasons, and prefers a military takeover without fighting anyone besides Taiwan equally as strongly over igniting a regional war with US or Japanese involvement (or even worse, Philippines and SK and Australia or something too). That is: political takeover >> military takeover >> military takeover and a fight with the US >> military takeover and a fight with the US and a fight with multiple regional allies of theirs, all separated by significant gaps. If you're proposing that they'd actually prefer a fight, or feels ambivalent about if the US or other allies intervene, or some other way I have that list of preferences wrong, I'm all ears to that argument but I don't think that's what you are saying? Because that changes the discussion considerably, if so.
Even if you're an internal, hawkish CCP member in the PLA, a war is risky as fuck even in optimistic scenarios, and the global fallout is probably even more unpredictable than that. So yeah, if I'm China I'm much more concerned about our chances of pulling off a Taiwanese takeover without anyone else intervening because that's the preferred solution anyways. ALL of that is downstream from deterrence (i.e. how much respect and fear you generate), and if China's deterrence has a problem the whole strategy has a problem. Thus, the second quote in the OP.
Briefly, btw, I think if we do use his list: 2, 3, and to a lesser extent 4 (base hardening, air power, space/cyber power) are a bit TBD, but maybe. 6 (casualty tolerance) might come into play but I think it's a useless data point. 7 (worth a war) probably nudges them a bit towards yes. 8 (war fever) is almost hilariously irrelevant, because Trump didn't even try to whip any up. 9 (ally commitment), the Pacific allies might get a low-scale idea how local populations might react or how their US bases would be exposed. 14 (economic damage to China) will be a very interesting data point to look at, TBD right now. 17 (deindustrialization) could go either way, but this conflict will probably have a minor impact. 18 (American innovation) works slightly against China here: the saying is that the military always prepares to fight "the last war" and the "last war" is increasingly looking more similar to China than it did 10 or 15 years ago. 19 (China's foreign influence) also works against China in a bigger way: they seem to be entirely impotent to affect this conflict in any meaningful way, even diplomatically. I think that's a bit of a reality check moment for them. Unrelated technically, but for 20 (counterintel) China just hacked the FBI pretty bad, as far as I can tell they are dominating there.
Why does this matter? The big geopolitical question in 2027 isn't going to be China's capacity to deter America - it will be America (plus some bit player allies)'s capacity to deter China from invading Taiwan. If China wants to attack Taiwan and thinks they can win, they just do it. The act is self-communicating.
The core point that Tanner Greer is making is that America curb-stomping a weak enemy in days rather than the expected weeks* doesn't change the credibility in Chinese eyes of American deterrence very much.
* No, there isn't a huge body of establishment Iran doves claiming that Iran could beat America. The standard Iran dove argument was (and is) that
I addressed this:
I stated right at the top that in terms of an actual conflict, I think China would win relatively decisively. But even if you think you will probably win, that's not the only option on the table. I think that on balance, military options should be downweighted because of pre-existing preferences to take it over without US intervention. Why?
To oversimplify, to take Taiwan without a major intervention, you're counting on one of these:
Here's my logic. Since China has realized that it's bad at meaningfully bluffing, this makes the relative chances of pulling off a non-intervention takeover much lower in relation to the risk of an intervention. The risk shifts to military conflict. And of course in all of this, there's the "nothing happens/waiting" scenario. Since China's "utility function" is afraid of risk, and weights a nonintervention so much higher than a risky direct conflict, the overall effect of this risk shift is, somewhat counterintuitively but valid mathematically, towards "nothing happens". That's what I'm trying to get across: not all these options are of equal desirability, and this new reality where Chinese deterrence is ineffective means the most desirable options are less likely to work.
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If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.
Burma does not impress anyone -- wake me when they head into India...
Why would China want to do that? It's not like the US ever fought a nuclear power and for good reason.
Doing easy things is not a good demonstration of military prowess -- that doesn't make the hard things smart to do, but it would be impressive if China could take territory from India. (preferrably without getting nuked, but AIUI there's not a real MAD situation in play with India -- so I'd still be impressed if the Chinese got their hair mussed a little)
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I think the reason is looking at the shitshow of American and Russian interventions across the world and deciding do nothing and win is a pretty good ethos.
Yeah unless the USA start directly hitting China or maybe some crazy AGI situation it seems pretty clear they'll overtake sooner or later economically on the current trend. Why spazz and complicate things
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I don't think air superiority is the right term for what the US enjoys above iran... What's above air supremacy? air superlativity?
The Coalition lost 70 planes in the first gulf war. Are there any confirmed plane losses, aside from the three who fell to Kuwaiti friendly fire? Or is this propaganda?
And the entire leadership was wiped out, that's new too. I thought the iranians had a chance to damage an american warship, since the ukrainians and argentinians managed to sink russian and english boats. It's a complete massacre, come on.
Firstly the US lost another F-15 to Iran, apparently they rescued the pilot, also lost a bunch of drones...
Secondly, air superiority in NATO parlance means 'the degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another that permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea, and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.' It is not derived from calculating losses of aircraft.
Thirdly, there is nothing above air supremacy. If the US possessed air supremacy US forces would not be under air attack.
The US doesn't actually have air superiority, partially on a definitional level because this is a weird air-only conflict... Both sides are just bombing eachother. Also, the US doesn't have air superiority because Iran is also launching their own air attacks against US forces and Israel, at times and places of Iran's choosing. This is why the US is launching all these standoff attacks and long in-air refuelling chains to bomb Iran, why even Hegseth is saying it will take some time to achieve air superiority. If the US held air superiority they could move closer in, secure the straits of Hormuz against air attack and focus on bombing Iran.
Yeah, I believe the paradigm was mostly invented as a complement to combined arms warfare, and as you point out since this isn't traditional combined arms warfare (no ground troops) it doesn't really apply.
However I think it's too early to really say definitively how close to air supremacy they are, insofar as that makes sense to say. They're being careful, but clearly have a desire to start using more guided bombs than missiles (or even gravity bombs). Looking at the news, as of one or two days ago the US started using its nonstealth bombers: B-52's and B-1B's in Iran. That sort of hints toward yes, but IMO true air supremacy these days at least implies that you can use helicopters more or less freely as well, which is plainly not the case right now.
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The war's not over, there's still going to be plenty of time for Iran to damage an American warship or shoot down American aircraft at this rate.
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What is the evidence that it was friendly fire, by the way?
The fact that the video was taken in Kuwait makes it highly likely that it was.
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But without proper planning or strategy. Trump apparently didn't consider that Iran might close the straits of Hormuz, only now is there bleating about insuring vessels, only now are defence company executives being summoned to boost production. The plan seems to have been 'big strike package and then we win', which just isn't how things work.
Maybe nobody in the US decision-making cabal knows that Taiwan imports the vast majority of its food, energy and fertilizer by sea. Maybe they aren't aware that Taiwan can be blockaded into submission while China retains access to land markets and enjoys self-sufficiency in grain if not meat. Maybe American leaders are still thinking in terms of wars lasting a few days or weeks, rather than years. Wars between strong powers tend to drag on for a lot longer than expected. What is the plan to defeat China in attritional, industrial warfare?
THAAD getting wrecked by Iran's missile and drone arsenal is also pretty alarming. THAAD is what's supposed to defend Guam and other US bases necessary for this war.
Capability is not just tactical success but understanding the nature of the war you're going to fight, preparing the proper force and choosing the right missions and tactics. Executing the wrong approach proficiently isn't good enough.
He could well be saying 'how do we deter Trump, he doesn't seem to think strategically at all.' And that is indeed a nightmarish situation to be in, since quantitative superiority means nothing to a man who doesn't understand numbers, just makes them up. Qualitative superiority is useless since Trump always thinks he has the biggest and best of everything. What can you do but roll the dice and let the outcome speak for itself? Or just wait for more unforced errors? The waiting for unforced errors strategy seems to have been going pretty well for China thus far.
Yeah, sometimes I get the impression people here are posting from a different universe.
The obvious conclusion I'd imagine the Chinese are taking from this is "they abandoned 5th Fleet HQ because they couldn't protect it from Iran so there's no way they'll stick around to try going toe-to-toe with us"
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I am very certain that the US military considered the possibility that Iran, known for threatening to close the straits of Hormuz for decades, might close the straights of Hormuz. I think the stuff about insurance was in response to rising insurance premiums - there's really no point in saying anything publicly about that ahead of time.
Trump has also been on the production thing for some time now.
Unlikely, CSIS has done public simulations of Taiwan blockades, and some of the players are or were in said cabal.
It's very unclear to me the extent to which this damage is real. A lot of reported hits on THAAD locations doesn't necessarily mean much given that it's a semi-mobile system. We'll see how it shakes out.
If it turns out that "the missile will always get through" – which is obviously true given enough missile mass – then that's bad for the power that needs successful missile defense to win a war in Taiwan. And that power is not the United States. China cannot win a war over Taiwan if their ships get sunk by missile salvos. If the US and Chinese Navies sink each other in a Taiwan fight, the status quo is maintained and the US wins.
But is the US military actually involved in decision-making, or is it more people like Hegseth and Laura Loomer? CSIS and RAND are serious about strategy. Are their reports actually read by the decisionmakers? The serious strategists have been saying for years that the US needs more cost-efficient SHORAD and anti-drone weapons and large-scale production of munitions yet the message doesn't seem to have filtered through.
If the US and Chinese Navies sink eachother in a Taiwan fight, the Chinese build a new navy much faster and win. They also bomb Taiwan's ports and energy infrastructure to threaten or actually inflict intolerable suffering on the island.
How are big, slow, flammable cargo ships supposed to get through to a port if the Chinese decide to sink them with missiles or just wreck the ports? These are the east coast ports not needed for invasion... How is Taiwan supposed to produce its own food without fertilizer, without power for food processing and refrigeration, without fuel for food distribution? How are the fuel storages and food storages supposed to survive bombing? All of those things go away if the Chinese decide to hit them with their huge arsenal of missiles and drones. The world's biggest drone producer is not going to have a shortage of drones.
That's where I disagree with the CSIS wargames, they assume a very rosy picture:
How are inventories going to be sustained and distributed under a constant bombing campaign? Hardening fuel storage is good but what about the engine rooms and pumping machinery needed to get the fuel out of storage? That's tricky to harden, needs ventilation...
And what are the chances this conflict is over within nine months? This would be a great power war and they last for years and years. China's greatest strength is in industrial power and manpower, they would prefer a quick victory but will accept attritional, industrial warfare too.
Yes.
This isn't true at all, as you'd know if you've been reading my posts - the Navy's been testing improved ammo for the 5-inch gun, we've deployed lasers and we've used laser-guided rockets (which pretty much fix the cost curve for Shahed-type weapons). Similarly the large-scale production ramp up is (at least supposedly) underway.
If the US ramps up said production to 1,000 Tomahawks a year (stated goal) then it can just blow up their port infrastructure and call it a day.
Possibly! But it's not exactly an EZ win for the United States, either, which means people are paying attention.
We'll see how this works on Iran. So far it hasn't worked on Ukraine.
A war with China over Taiwan? If they launch an invasion and the war is still going on after nine months, it means the invasion failed. I would say it depends on a lot of factors, as a flat-out invasion is not the only outcome, nor does its failure terminate the war, but consider that if it lasts over a longer term the Chinese inability to sustain their domestic consumption of oil will start to increasingly hurt them, and all of the stuff you've said about inflicting hurt on Taiwan will start to work against China writ large.
So far as I can see, US lasers have mostly been shooting down US drones from other departments on the Mexican border. They are not visibly defending key installations in the Middle East where they're actually needed, substituting for expensive ballistic missile interceptors.
If the US military had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing videos from soldiers of drones and missiles coming down on their bases, this stuff should have been sorted out before starting a war of choice. There should've been some destroyers sitting in the Gulf of Hormuz lasering down incoming missiles and small boats. But there aren't.
The large-scale ramp up doesn't just need to be 'underway', it needs to be yielding results. A few days into a war, there should be absolutely no talk about rebasing THAAD from Korea because there should already be enough munitions to fight that war. The US should also be able to outproduce Russia in shells outright, that is a baseline expectation for industrial warfare given the size of the US economy.
I don't think 3 Tomahawks a day would be sufficient to shut down all of China's naval production, assuming 80% penetration rate. Even if Chinese shipbuilding is suppressed, they can still drown Taiwan with their own missiles and drones. To win the US would need to suppress all of China's war industry, including arms production well inland.
Taiwan is a special case in that it's an island. Ukraine and Iran are/were energy exporters, Ukraine is a food exporter. Taiwan is the opposite, a huge and almost totally dependent on imports importer. China is merely a large importer of oil and food-secure in calories. If they rationalize consumption by killing herds, ration, halt most of their export industries, they can manage with what overland imports they retain access to. They only import 21% of their energy, not 95% like Taiwan.
China has enough domestic oil production for military usage and military-adjacent chemicals, only the civilian sector takes a hit.
You're shifting the goalpost from claiming that "the message hasn't filtered through" to claiming that things have not been moving fast enough for your liking (which is a fine criticism, but not the same thing.) It's worth noting that current known operational lasers in the US inventory are going to be either dazzlers or targeted mostly at subsonic weapons, not ballistic missiles. Nevertheless, on a quick Google, it looks at least one ship with an ODIN dazzler (USS Spruance), deployed with the Lincoln as we speak.
"If they had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing any videos of them taking losses during a major regional war" is not a reasonable criticism of any military in the world. It wasn't reasonable when people made this criticism of Russia, and it's not reasonable when they make it of the United States, and it won't be if they make it of China.
It is - the US has successfully used the Falco laser-guided rocket, as I mentioned earlier, against "one-way attack drones" (slow cruise missiles). We also reverse-engineered the Shahed and shot it back at Iran. It's unclear to me how it's coming on the more bespoke ammunition (as far as I know the exact numbers there are classified).
Really? Have you done any baseline research to see if the US has, in the past, moved any munitions from different theaters before to fight in a war after the war started? Have you considered that if the US prepositioned all of its valuable THAAD ammunition in the theatre prior to the initiation of hostilities and it got destroyed during the Iranian's large opening salvo people would be using that as evidence of US stupidity and incompetence instead?
I agree with this, with the caveat that I don't actually care about shells quite as much as I care about cruise missiles.
This is a really cool vision for a novel. Imagine trying to navigate the hellscape that remains of Taiwan in 2081, as PLA missiles, rockets, and killdrones rain down over the island, fired at random after the US destruction of the Chinese satellite ISR network. The Chinese have been issuing demands to surrender for the past 50 years, unaware that there is no government left to speak for the island. The only justice is death, the only law is the sword!
But I have to ask: why would China bother to do that? It has old liquid-fueled silo-based nuclear weapons with marginal deterrence value, it could just use those instead. In fact, it could probably do that tomorrow, skip the entire risk of regional war. Just obliterate the major cities and helicopter in some guys in MOPP gear to plant the flag.
"China chooses to crash their economy during the critical period of their transition to a greyer society, permanently altering their progress curve for the worse, to take Taiwan, the economic value of which they utterly destroyed with a period of prolonged bombardment after it refused to surrender" does not exactly sound like a win for China. I suppose it is possible that this is what happens anyway, but this is very obviously not ideal for them.
You brought up these lasers and cheap, effective anti-drone weapons. If these weapons are so great, why don't we see them in action? If they're not mature, then the sensible thing to do is not to start a war of choice against a power with a huge drone and missile arsenal. Again, that brings us back to my main point about the wise planners being sidelined by the actual policymakers.
Trump doesn't understand any of this stuff. He said the Iranians Tomahawked their own school, he's not capable of gauging what might even be believable as a lie, let alone what is actually going on in the real world.
Losses is one thing, bases and strategic radars being destroyed is another. Russia quite clearly did not have their ducks in a row for the invasion of Ukraine, for what it's worth. The initial plan failed and Russia switched strategy to a war of attrition.
But why aren't these systems you brought up deployed and defending? If they're worth bringing up, then they ought to be adding value.
The first thing that should've been considered in a regime change operation in Iran is what the actual goal is. Trump wants to appoint a leader (with what ground troops?), Rubio wants to blow up the navy and the missile production facilities, Bibi seems to want to make a chaotic mess. Trump has been saying the war is over but the US has won and needs to win more, it's an incoherent mess.
The second thing that should've been considered is preventing Iran closing the straits of Hormuz. There should've been US ships actually there, physically escorting freighters. They should be using these cheap effective anti-drone and anti-missile weapons to great effect. Not sitting back hundreds of kilometres, implicitly showing the straits of Hormuz aren't under US control. But that hasn't been done because the US navy is rightly concerned about air and missile attack sinking their ships. Which is why this war shouldn't have been started.
An administration whose military strategy and political ideology explicitly called for a refocus away from Middle Eastern wars shouldn't be sacrificing more important theaters for the sake of a Middle East war.
If the US can't manage to decentralize and safely store munitions (or produce munitions at scale) then it has no business launching a massive bombing offensive. Prepositioning stores to survive ballistic missile waves is pretty obvious stuff that the US should already know how to do, there should be lots of planning for this.
China's goal is to annex Taiwan. Taiwan doesn't want to starve. Thus it may attempt to besiege the island via airpower, targeting food and energy imports to secure submission. They want the island for political and strategic reasons not economic reasons, China has plenty of wealth already.
China would much prefer a quick blitz but they'd take a pyrrhic victory to a destabilizing defeat. They'd do just what Putin did, double down if the blitz fails. I expect a blitz to fail, amphibious operations are hard... Power is zero-sum, beating America and taking Taiwan might well let them achieve hegemony in East Asia. Colby worried about just that. America also inflicting considerable pain on its Asian allies is very unhelpful here for coalition building.
We...do? Here's Falco, and here's a picture of HELIOS in action, and, as a bonus, here's footage of the UAE shooting down drones with the 30mm on an Apache.
Obviously the Apache is not new technology at all and 30mm is pretty cheap, which goes to show you how meh drones can be against an enemy whose ability to fly defensive counter-air isn't really in question. I believe Ukraine has been shooting them down with cropdusters and machine-guns.
Munitions fail all the time, and sometimes in really nasty ways. You can get on YouTube and watch videos of airplanes shooting themselves down and interceptor missiles falling back on the launch vehicle. It seems pretty plausible to me because of the specific circumstances of the strike that it was a US weapon, but "military accidentally shoots their own side" incidents do happen.
Bases being "destroyed" (hit by missiles) isn't really a big deal in and of itself; troops can sleep in tents. In terms of high-value targets being hit, I've seen basically solid evidence of a single fixed strategic radar being destroyed (it's always very difficult to protect fixed targets) as well as a satcom array. It's unclear to me if any THAADs actually got tagged - I'm not convinced the circulating picture of the damaged THAAD radar is accurate and the satellite photos don't confirm the batteries actually got hit - but if they are, it's hardly surprising that Iran (with hundreds or thousands of ballistic missiles) could hit some strategic targets. That's what happens in war: you take losses. The US military lost eight attack aircraft in 2012 to an attack by the Taliban on Camp Bastion, and the Taliban were a much less well-equipped threat than the Iranians.
Why do you keep saying this? The USAF is almost certainly using Falco right now, it was operationally deployed and successfully used on wartime targets in the same theater last year!
You seem to have this idea that a countermeasure is magically 100% effective against all threats of that type and lets you operate with impunity against enemies armed with that weapon. But no countermeasure is 100% effective. Even if they were, the truth is that if you have 20 rockets and your enemy has 21, you are going to get hit regardless of how good your tech works. It also does not mean the tech is useless (the enemy hit you once instead of 21 times!)
Maybe, or maybe the US plays coy about their real goals for a number of reasons and they are succeeding despite what Trump's habit of indulging in rambling tangents would get you to think, or perhaps the war is going much more poorly than is actually known. Who can say? The people who can can't be trusted to speak truthfully.
"Preventing Iran from closing the straits of Hormuz" is not something you do in an afternoon. Air and missile attack are obviously a serious concern, but mine and torpedo attack is perhaps an even more serious one. US doctrine in these scenarios is going to be to degrade the Iranian defensive network with airstrikes over time, not rush a convoy through.
If China goes to war with Taiwan, you almost certainly won't see them escorting neutral shipping through the strait, either, and that implies nothing about how poorly or how well China is doing.
Yes, maybe not. I'm not sure this is the best course of action.
I also do think it's not exactly right to assess the progress of the war, as a war, by looking only at the losses of one side. You've been stacking up US losses to indicate that the US is doing poorly. But the (lack of) US losses indicate that the air campaign is going well. If we compare this to the Persian Gulf War, the US bombing campaign began January 17. Over the next ten days, though January 27, the US lost 11 aircraft, 10 of them to enemy fire, and had 10 pilots captured. (I assume there were other non-American coalition air losses but I can't find a decent source for it.) Where are the American pilots captured by Iran? So far it appears that that Iranian air defenses are performing much more poorly than the Iraqi air defenses in the Persian Gulf War, despite Iran having a much larger population than Iraq and also having decades to prepare against a US air war. The US could certainly still take losses, but it's notable that the Iranians haven't been able to parade any US pilots on TV yet.
(And it's also worth noting that Iraq managed to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with ballistic missiles! But this did not change the outcome of the war.)
One cool way to decentralize munitions, if you have the world's largest strategic airlift fleet, is to leave them in other theaters and tap those reserves when needed. It's certainly possible that the US burn rate of interceptors was more than calculated, but also the US shifting munitions from theater to theater isn't particularly unusual, I don't think.
I also did a little write up some time ago explaining that the US is actually capable of producing munitions at scale. US munitions shortages revolve around bespoke interceptors. But if you look at guided bombs, US stockpiles are likely at six-digits. Cruise missiles? Four, maybe five digits. Air-to-air missiles? Likely five digits.
Even in surface-to-air missiles, the US has five-digit numbers, it's just that there are a lot of ballistic missiles out there and many of our lower-performance missiles are optimized for air targets, not ballistic missiles.
Yes.
As I've discussed before on here, a decadal land war and sea war are very different things. As Elbridge Colby put it, "[t]he maritime domain's relative lack of concealment and cover matters because human beings are not, it hardly needs to be stressed, built to swim long distances, let alone fly." Certainly China could attempt this, but I think if they fail in their blitz their odds for winning an overall conflict are much lower than if they succeed.
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I tend to agree with this. I would just add that RandomRanger doesn't have much credibility when it comes to these sorts of issues. Earlier, he indicated that he was "confident" that Israel had bombed a girls' elementary school in Iran. Recent news reports are suggesting that if it was probably the United States. Of course it's too early to know for sure what happened -- and certainly too early for anyone to be "confident" that it was Israel.
It looks to me like RandomRanger is so consumed by hatred of Israel that he just isn't capable of critical or objective analysis when it comes to any issue that involves Israel.
Man, who cares? Neither the US nor Israel would just bomb one specific girls' school for kicks, it makes no sense. They are acting in a coalition. The news here is that the school got bombed and not by Iran.
It seems to have been absolutely the US, and it makes perfect sense. They bombed a half-dozen other buildings in the same complex, with the girls' school being in a walled off corner of same. But "US strike hits 7 buildings in IGRC base including semi-adjacent school" doesn't play well with anyone. The US doesn't want to talk about how they got a target wrong/out of date, and people who hate the US don't want to talk about how "yeah, this kind of thing happens in war, just like friendly fire, it sucks but it's understandable since it's not like the US is omniscient & omnipotent".
The problem with "shit happens in war" is that, while true, it still rests on an underlying belief that the war is justified. "We accidentally bombed a school while fighting against tyranny" is easier to swallow (assuming it's credible) than "we accidentally bombed a school while carrying out a raid because we didn't like their drug importation laws."
As the USG made approximately zero effort to sell the effort to the US public and has had incoherent messaging, that belief appears not to be particularly widespread. As civilian (and, for that matter, military) casualties continue to mount, it raises the question of what aim is justifying them. By the Trump admin's own words, we're not spreading democracy and we're not responding to an attack or imminent threat. Best I can tell, this has either been an exercise in kinetic gunboat diplomacy or the US getting suckered into doing the heavy lifting for an Israeli attempt at regime destabilization.
I'll note again that people were fairly willing to swallow the collateral damage of coalition air and artillery strikes around Raqqa and Mosul because it was generally accepted that the alternative of leaving ISIS in control of these cities was even worse. They were less willing to excuse civilian casualties resulting from bad targeting/intel (or callousness) when it came to the broader efforts of Inherent Resolve, where it simply seemed to be adding to the carnage of the Syrian Civil War rather than achieving anything desirable.
I mean didn't Iran just literally kill within an order of magnitude as many civilians in a week as Israel killed Gazans in the whole recent affair? Intentionally and not as collateral damage? Like I don't know, it's not hard for me to find the good guys in this conflict.
Do you still intend to justify this with speculative number of killed protestors when your country is burning Tehran wholesale?
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I'm not sure I see the relevance. Iran massacring tens of thousands of protestors would a strong point in favor regime change but that isn't what is happening. "We're the good guys because they're the bad guys" logic doesn't check out because not starting a war was an option. It is possible that both parties in a conflict are bad actors, and is possible that well-intentioned actors are exercising criminally poor judgment. The fact that collateral damage happens in war is why you need to think carefully and exercise judgment before going to war. Even if your adversaries are the most despicable people in history, you still have to ask yourself if starting a war will make things better.
In point of fact, we have very little reason to extend the benefit of the doubt to the current US administration. They've failed to articulate a clear purpose for war (basically everyone has offered a different rationale), but they have been openly disdainful of humanitarian concerns and dismissed democratization as a priority.
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RandomRanger, apparently, among other Israel-haters.
Of course not. But Israel-haters LOVE to seize upon these sorts of events.
Anyway, my point was about his lack of credibility, not about the event in particular.
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If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the moral quality and proclivities of our world leaders over the past few years “Heathen blood sacrifice to Ba’al to ensure success in the conflict” isn’t particularly loopy or out of the question.
No? The loopy ideologies involved in the conflict are misinterpretations of messianic prophecies which do not involve human sacrifice.
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No, it's actually insane schitzo shit.
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Iran didn't. Lloyds did. Dynacom (Greek shipping company) has been sending tankers through... not sure if self-insured or what.
Which, given that the problem is insurance, makes perfect sense.
One AN/TPY-2 radar was hit. I don't know about Trump, but I'm sure everyone below him in the DoD and military knows the enemy does sometimes take out your stuff. This does not take out all of THAAD. As for Guam, Iran has nothing that can reach it anyway.
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This is news to me. Further details?
There are pictures of an allegedly destroyed radar all over Twitter. What that actually means or even if it’s real are questionable.
Destroying a single radar isn't "getting wrecked". The whole system is a lot more than just the radar and even then "getting wrecked" carries the connotation that the missiles and drones are able to penetrate the system with regularity and hit their intended targets rather than merely destroy some of its infrastructure.
Without the radars, THAAD is not very useful. Yes, you can have uplink to other sensors but they've been hitting the uplinks too. Missiles and drones are getting through regularly, daily... And it's not just a single THAAD radar either that's been destroyed, 2-3 have been lost on the THAAD front and another very heavy fixed radar in Qatar got hit too. Losing one would be bad enough, there are only 8 THAAD batteries in the world. These are not easily replaced systems.
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The idea that Trump pushed back a Taiwan invasion only makes sense if there was, indeed, a plan for a Taiwan invasion. And I'm not sure of that, given the anemic support that China has been giving to Russia for the last 4 years. If China cares enough about its trade with the West to avoid providing significant support to a country that is actively engaged in a proxy war with the West, despite easily being able to provide such support, it seems weird to me that China would enter a possible open war with the West by attacking Taiwan.
I feel like in the last few years there has been a whole genre of "war between the US and China is inevitable" literature that has perhaps made it almost seem like such a war really is inevitable.
I'm not surprised by the popularity of the genre. It is entertaining, it has a certain "back in a Cold War" charm, it benefits China hawks and defense manufacturers.
But I believe that if such a war does happen it will represent not the outcome of inevitability, but rather a massive failure of diplomacy.
That said, I don't have a good track record of geopolitical predictions.
As far as I'm aware most of the narrative about inevitability is of the more 'timeless' Thucydides Trap flavor. However it's worth noting that I do sometimes read English-language Chinese propaganda: they are actually pushing this narrative! Their hope is that they can co-opt US intellectuals into thinking "we're too smart to fall into this silly trap". This is accompanied by (empty) blustering about how important "self-determinism" is and how they would never intervene in other countries' affairs (lol).
In parallel, they're trying to degrade American pride and nationalism more generally. No one is more happy than China (yes, even more than Russia IMO) at the flood of articles about homelessness in the US, racial violence, inequality, government dysfunction, etc). Interestingly, they seem to have tried to learn from the Communists of yesteryear: rather than explicitly promote left-wingers, they think that they can win on a pure negative-messaging platform. They will brag about how China can 'just do things' and is clean, orderly, family-friendly even, but they don't care if it catches on, they just want to provide a contrast. They don't care about promoting something like the IWW or Comintern or whatever. They view money as a more powerful ideological tool (internationally) than actual ideology. Of course, some of this is necessarily defensive: they don't want democracy to look attractive to Chinese people. But it's interesting to me nonetheless that this is the strategy that they've chosen to appeal to the Western intellectuals.
I do think China is less likely to intervene in other countries affairs then the US or Russia
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Yeah China needs to maintain the capability to invade Taiwan in case they declare independence so they can make good on their threats. But the status quo is pretty comfy and China is only getting stronger so I don't know that they feel much egency.
As for Ukraine China is an inward looking place and despite being friendly to Russia still has decent relations with Ukraine and Europe. A war with Taiwan likely wouldn't involve Europe so I'm not sure they see the Ukraine war as useful to weakening their actual rivals in the Asia-Pacific especially since the US has reduced support and it's mainly Europe propping up Ukraine.
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I mean, it seems obvious that China may be pro-Russia, but is unwilling to eat Russia's war bill because it's a big bill.
Also China bein friendly to Russia doesn't necessarily mean they are Anti-Ukraine
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Sure, but China could help Russia much more than it currently is helping, without breaking its own bank in the process. For example, China could spin up a few military drone factories.
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I listened to the radio today and CBS military analyst Mike Lyons (former Army Major and Desert Storm combat vetran) had a point about how this war is harming Chinese energy security in a way that is very bad for hypothetical Chinese military incursions. China buys almost all of Iran's oil and needs it very much.
In a way it's a bit of a dry run for the (significantly worse) interruption they'd encounter with Taiwan action (even if it ended up just being sanctions). I'm curious whether they conclude it's a survivable risk or discover that it's worse than they expected (and if there's anything they can do about it)
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It's been very revealing how many Americans (sincerely) and Israelis (opportunistically) appeal to "China buys almost all of Iran's oil" and seem to believe this also means "Iran's oil is a big fraction of Chinese energy purchases". Well, it's known that Americans can't do fractions (see their per capita kryptonite), but still, I've updated in the direction of even greater disbelief in American capacity to reason quantitatively.
At $80/barrel (probably the sustainable market cost if this situation creates lasting damage to Gulf infra), Iranian volume of oil sales would amount to like $40B annually. China has $1.2T trade surplus. Yes, they've been buying oil at a huge discount, paying something like $4B instead. But this is all such small potatoes.
This military analyst on the radio could be correct. It depends on the marginal impact of losing that portion of their oil. I get they still have most of their supply of oil. But is that enough? Can they simply replace the loss by purchasing from other sources or would it be too expensive? I naively doubt it is going to be easy to replace a significant minority of all of China's oil consumption. There will be a global price impact at least.
I am saying that it will be easy, yes. $40B is not a lot for China, a price hike is priced in.
Then I think you are missing an important point. You can't easily swap out the entirety of Iranian oil output for an equivalent amount of other oil. The "other oil" will need to go up price high enough to drive out the bottom portion of the market. Now we get a live experiment in finding a new equilibrium price which won't be $40 billion. Who is willing to divert oil away from existing customers to China and what sort of price will they be charging? This will be neither quick nor cheap.
Oil supply is elastic. Gulf Arabs are not operating at 100% capacity, nor are many other providers. It very likely will be on the order of $40B.
Usually oil supply is pretty elastic, but most of the quickest and largest elasticity comes from the exact spots that are currently blocked up, if I'm not mistaken.
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China imports about 70% of its oil. About 13% of that imported oil is from Iran. That means about 9-10% of China's oil supply is being cut off here.
Not if the oil market continues to clear.
If x% of the oil supply is cut off in a liquid market, then the price rises until the lowest-value x% of demand is suppressed. The Chinese war machine is not in the lowest-value x% of oil demand for reasonable values of x. And because demand for oil is price-inelastic, that could be a very large price increase with concomitant windfalls to a bunch of unsavoury people like Russia.
It is obvious from his rhetoric that Trump (who does not appear to understand how markets work, apart from the ultra-illiquid and heavily politicised real estate market) is imagining a world where the global oil market does not clear, and somehow Americans have access to $2/gallon gas on tap while the Chinese military has to beg. He even has a vague plan for getting there that would work if Russia didn't exist - namely invading countries which sell oil to China.
I don't know if the Trump administration has a contingency plan for imposing export controls in a way which doesn't create Nixon-era style gas lines, but even though the US is a net oil exporter the domestic politics of the US deliberately cutting oil supply on the global market are toxic-by-default.
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China, or any other country, cannot just snap their fingers and go to war. Spinning up the war machine takes time and is very visible. If there were any inkling that they were seriously moving towards a war footing, this pseudo regime change op would end.
The bigger relevance is that of volume. How many interceptors does the US have, and how many can it produce? Any Chinese invasion would be kicked off with missiles aimed at every US airfield in the region; can they be protected? What does the supply of radars look like? Etc.
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I'd say that the Trump admin's actions in the middle east (the little kids on the playground) are way less indicative of what the US would do with China (the big kid) than the admin's actions with Russia, who is the medium sized kid.
And what we have with Russia is a lot of appeasement and cowardice. Instead of just going in and bombing them, the Trump admin has consistently tried to coax Ukraine into abandoning territory they control in pursuit of a "deal". And when Putin continues to refuse and keeps trying with his invasion, Trump does ... basically nothing.
If it's not morals, and it's not rules of engagement and it's not international law or polling or anything else that holds the admin back from using power and force whenever they want wherever they want them it suggests one of two things when they don't take action 1. They actually support Russia somewhat or 2. They're too scared and don't think they have the power and force to meaningfully win. What else is there?
If this is how we treat the medium kid, with shaky fear and inaction then what will happen when the big kid comes in to bully? If Trump and Hegseth wanted to show actual power and courage against meaningful threats, they'd metaphorically punch Putin in the face and take it to Russia instead of acting like wimps who only take on the preschool next door, and a lot of that seems to only be with our emotional support Israel to comfort and guide us through the scary times.
Trump is not the only one who has refrained from bombing Russia. The Biden administration did not try either, nor did any European country.
Russia inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which happens to be the largest in the world. I am sure that their nukes are not in the best shape, but even if only a quarter of their ICBMs work, a nuclear war would easily dwarf the substantial meat grinder which has been Ukraine.
There is a certain etiquette about avoiding a shooting war between nuclear powers which has seen us through the Cold War. The understanding is that any direct military confrontation carries a risk of escalating (as conflicts often do). Getting through the CW without it escalating was tight as things were. I do not think it would have worked if NATO and USSR had fought conventional skirmishes, where any hit of a radar system might be in preparation of a first strike and any plane approaching an ICBM silo might aim to reduce your retaliatory capacity.
So if the US lands forces in South Vietnam, the USSR will not deploy to North Vietnam, but rather give them military aid. Likewise, if the USSR is fighting the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, the US will not send in the marines to bolster their ranks.
"Just going in and bombing them" would dispense with that. If you start bombers against Russia from NATO airbases, these NATO airbases will become legitimate targets. Likewise, it seems unlikely that you would achieve air superiority without destroying AA sites within Russia. Or you might directly give Putin the Ayatollah treatment and bomb the Kremlin. At least we would learn something about the effectiveness of US efforts to intercept long range missiles.
And Russia violated that etiquette by invading Ukraine. The rules of the game post-Korea were that you didn't attack the other side's client directly, only by arming your own client as a proxy. The only countries that a superpower invaded directly during the Cold War were their own clients in order to suppress rebellions. Vietnam is a good example - the Soviets could arm and defend North Vietnam, and the US could arm and defend South Vietnam, but when North Vietnam actually sent troops over the border and invaded the South they were Vietnamese. [The reason why the US couldn't win in Vietnam is that Cold War rules meant you couldn't win by invading the North, and you failed to build a South that could do defend itself without Americans at the pointy end of the spear].
Russia invaded Ukraine, justifying this by saying that Ukraine was a NATO client. They then said that they would consider NATO defending its client to be nuclear provocation. This isn't an obviously insane position, which is why we let Putin get away with it. But Russian troops invading a NATO client with no plausible deniability is a provocation that Stalin or Brezhnev (or Reagan) would have considered excessive. American and Russian planes shooting at each other over Ukraine is nevertheless worse.
Not really. The mechanism to protect a client is that their superpower builds an army base with some tripwire troops in it in their country.
I think that Russia's concerns were that Ukraine could join NATO, at which point they would be sacrosanct on pain of WW3. So they decided to do something about that before that happened.
This was not a breach of CW nuclear etiquette, just very stupid IMO. Sure, having an opposed military alliance in front of your doorstep is not really something anyone would be thrilled about, but realistically Russia is one of the most invasion-proof countries in the world. Historical attempts to conquer them became textbook examples of military disaster, and that was before they also acquired nukes. Russia was not worth starting World War Three over in the 1970s, and it most certainly is not in the 2020s. Any general who went "Now that Ukraine joined NATO, we can finally plan to send tanks into Moscow" would be considered fucking insane.
More realistically, Putin was not worried about invasion-proofing Russia, but simply wanted to extend his sphere of influence. Not that this worked out great for him either, between going through Soviet stockpiles, losing Syria, becoming dependent on Iranian drones and North Korean troops, reviving NATO and so forth.
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The difference lies in direct exposure and proxies. Ukraine offers a sort of weird middle ground, semi-proxy war of the type we've seen several times throughout the Cold War to varying degrees. Iran, we fundamentally expect to get punched back, directly, not even exclusively through Iran's proxies. Thus a fight over Taiwan, where we expect the punches to land directly face to face is much closer to Iran situationally. Taiwan is currently a latent proxy, but there is really only a few, very implausible scenarios where we'd support Taiwan only by proxy. If China makes a go at it, either we leave them to try to handle it themselves or we get directly in the fight.
In other words: we've seen Ukraine-like situations before a couple times and not much happened most all of those times. We've seen Iran though recently, and to an extent not previously seen (the Soleimani response and then even the 12-day 'war' response were qualitatively different) since Iraq.
There's once big exception to the rule: proxy wars don't usually escalate to direct wars. The Korean War. This actually works in my argument's favor, though, because the US put themselves directly in the fight and it led to direct confrontation.
Picture the following scale:
WW2 was a Type 1 war. These have not happened since WW2 for a reason. The Korean War was a Type 2 war. It's really the only Type 2 war, though Sino-Soviet border clashes might count if you squint, or India-Pakistan if you stretch. A Taiwan-triggered war would probably be closer to a Type 2 war than a type 1 war, but it definitely wouldn't be a Type 3 war. If you count Ukraine as a US proxy, then that was a Type 3 war. To understand what Type 3 wars usually look like, let's look at history, because these are much better understood:
Vietnam: the US thought about flirting with an upgrade (it's worth noting that Type 2 only actually happens if one side strikes and the other side fights back) but decided against it pretty deliberately. Yom Kippur (arguably), the Soviets threatened to put a trigger force into a collapsing Egypt. Both sides went on nuclear alerts but basically both sides pumped the brakes. Soviet-Afghan war, both sides avoided escalation, even though Pakistan was a US ally in the middle of getting their own nukes. The Syrian Civil War was a kind of Type 3.5 war, because air power blurs the lines a bit. No escalation occurred and both parties were pretty careful to avoid an upgrade.
In this context, Ukraine is very much a 'known quantity'. So yeah, even though it seems counterintuitive that a small, direct fight between a power and a small(ish) country is better as a signal than a big, direct fight against a proxy, Ukraine is virtually guaranteed in practical terms to remain a Type 3, while a Taiwan clash jumps from nothing straight to a Type 2 or even Type 1 (if China decided to do a first-strike kind of action, including in space), do not pass go, do not collect $200. This makes Iran a much better signal of how willing the US is to get into a big, direct fight, with direct exposure, because it is a direct conflict, and Iran has a population bigger than the size of Germany, and twice the size of Ukraine! So yes, it's a decent assessment of the risk appetite the US currently has as well as its competence.
The instant jump to a Type 2 war, or more serious, is because Taiwan is an island (and quite close to China), thus after combat begins no pure-proxy assistance is possible. There is no such thing as a protected airlift or sealift out of Taiwan, or meaningful weapon-smuggling into a warzone around it. You either break a blockade with force or you don't. Taiwan is fundamentally incapable of being a Type 3 conflict for this reason.
Where does the American Revolution, wrt Britain and France, fit in this schema?
As of 1776, type 3. By 1778, type 1. The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly thought was the least important theatre of a four-ocean mostly-naval World War. It was the global war that bankrupted the French monarchy, not the cost of the American intervention specifically.
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I only specifically framed this conversation as describing a post-WW2 paradigm for a reason. WW2 was kind of the final worldwide wake-up call that this is what "total war" does to countries (militarily but also economically), and we've only become more technically capable of that kind of thing since then. Nukes were the nail in the coffin but the culmination of that direction of things. The entire history of war in the world since then has recognized that wars of sufficient global-power scale is so destructive that this energy usually needs to be channeled into smaller, more narrow areas of conflict. Thus, proxy war as a logical "riskiest acceptable" war. This era of relative peace is not an accident. It is rooted in the technological and logistical realities we find ourselves in.
Although in theory a Type 2 war could still take place today, it requires a certain mutual understanding that tends to unravel as war grows more costly, which is a very slippery and quick gradient. It's very noteworthy that the only Type 2 war as I mentioned was before China themselves had nukes! And even then, it was only constrained to more local spheres in part because the US has managed to pull of the whole "oh no it's not OUR war, it's the United Nations' war". Which is almost impossible to replicate. Furthermore, the nature of modern missile and otherwise longer-range warfare means that restricting combat operations to only a specific theater is increasingly only a fiction (and certainly not militarily workable). China being so close to Taiwan only turbocharges this point.
Of course this mostly applies to global powers because they are the only ones capable of such large-scale total war but also because they have, frankly, much more to lose. You can see echoes of these dynamics on lower levels of power but it's strongest at the top tier and nukes are only part of the reason (a big part though).
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I would argue that this classification only came into effect when the lesson of the world wars (and a potential nuclear war) were learned, which is that a war between big powers is a disaster for everyone.
In earlier ages, big powers fought among themselves from time to time, and that could still be the best strategy for the decision makers of the winning side.
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By the end it was a type 2 verging on type 1. You had direct French vs. England naval and land conflict within the 13 colonies, and were starting to see limited naval engagements popping up around the world (the last battle of the American Revolutionary War was off the coast of India, and didn’t involve any Americans). The escalation risk was part of why Britain threw in the towel.
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Not to be a pessimist, but my prediction has long been that ROC and PRC would reunify in the near future, but that it would be primarily peaceful and political with minimal violence amounting to protests or riots rather than open war.
Accepting ad arguendo that the USA has demonstrated an ability to engage in impressive acts of violence. The Axis of Resistance basically hasn't had shit-all for the Western bloc in Iran and Ukraine.
But there's also been enormous signals of the decline of a unified Western bloc during the past year.
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.
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As one of those observers, and as someone strongly opposed to the previous foreign policy consensus, imagine the counterfactual world, where the US military was not in good shape, and we only found out about it after committing to a serious, high-stakes war with China, of the sort that has been generally assumed we were going to have within a decade.
One of the few silver linings to this whole debacle is getting an objective picture of our actual capabilities against a fairly serious opponent.
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So for Iran the big US interests in regime change is moving Iran into the Western coalition which historically they have done. Plus locking down Argentina hard and Venezuela lightly adds new allies too. Then you basically cut off all oil to China and even if that fails our hemisphere is safe.
I kind of think Iran is for the Jews, but turning them neutral or Western is a huge coup for America. Even if you can’t win Taiwan you completely cut China off.
I don't know how countries like Argentina could possibly not have already been considered quite allied with the US. Milei himself was certainly already allied with Trump.
More importantly, I am somewhat concerned about counting chickens early on making Iran an Israeli/Western ally. Why are we so certain that air superiority will mean regime change ibstead of a bunch of terrorism?
Peronism was communism light. Definitely unaligned for a while. Now 100% US on current government though vote share is less.
A leftist government does not make a country unaligned with a country or not. An authoritarian regime might, but Argentinian voters just made bad choices on electing irresponsible leftist populists for many years (I am not very educated on if the alternatives were much better). Argentina was still closely allied with the US throughout, a marked contrast with authoritarian leftists elsewhere.
I would say that Argentina was a US ally under the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, and since 1983 has, like most democracies, been a supporter of the so-called "rules-based international order" - i.e. the US-led system - but with the warmth of the Argentina-US relationship varying on which party is in power.
One of the issues with determining which countries are "pro-American" in the Trump era is that the RBIO and US leadership were sufficiently linked that being pro-RBIO and pro-US were practically the same thing, but now Trump is trying to overturn the RBIO as anti-American.
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Let’s say that by 2030, a significant proportion of global chip production has moved out of Taiwan. China invades or otherwise ‘reunifies’ (use whatever euphemism you prefer) with Taiwan, with minimal or no US intervention. What happens? What are the actual consequences for the world?
China has no stated designs on Japan or even South Korea. Their relationship with North Korea, which actually does have designs on the latter, has in any event deteriorated over the years. The “nine dash line” (or eleven for Taiwan) in the South China Sea is one of the few things both the ROC and PRC agree on as far as territorial claims go, so that isn’t affected - and it’s a much less emotive issue for Chinese nationalists than Taiwan is.
So all in all, why should America care?
That depends on what kind of government exists in China. I would be a lot less worried if the unified Chinese government were a multi-party democracy with strong civil liberties.
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Fish stocks collapse even faster than the already are
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Put simply, it increases China's power, especially locally, to a dramatic degree. China gains the ability to meaningfully project power further in the region without real restraint, including ruling the seas there completely. Historically, this kind of naval+regional dominance always leads to the power getting used or abused. It's naive and wrong to think that wars only start of territorial greed, and therefore no territorial ambitions means no risk of war, though I'm not sure if that's what you were implying or not.
At any rate, I think there's a pretty reasonable case to make that China getting more powerful and influential is bad for the world. I don't think it's awful for the world, but definitely bad in relative terms, and bad for America as well. Global power isn't really zero-sum, but I think American power would diminish at least proportionally in a lot of areas simply because we've nearly 100% occupied a few particular global niches for a while, which leads to some similar dynamics.
Diplomatically, and this is probably the big one, there's no way this wouldn't result in a hit to American reliability, already somewhat in question. This kind of soft diplomatic capital is really hard to replace, and really valuable. Speaking frankly, there's always this element of reputation+raw power that serves as a background to even seemingly unrelated negotiations. The US has leveraged this to our advantage over the years; it can work in reverse, too. It's like a meta-multiplier.
While it's clear that ideological dominos isn't really a thing, I would argue that it's possible to kick off a cascade of weakened alliances. Like it or not the US has essentially provided some degree of security guarantee for decades and decades to Taiwan. On top of NATO doubts, this means that functionally all of our 'guarantees' are increasingly seen as pure convenience. Mechanistically, this is bad because alliances have synergistic effects based on mutual trust that dissipate when trust decreases. As an illustration, think of a vendor relationship. A little wiggle room based on trust can be mutually beneficial to adapt to changing circumstances, or even provide material improvement like how banks give better lending terms to certain outfits; once the trust is gone, though, lawyers start to enter the room, threats start to happen, and transactions shrink in size and scope.
Economically, I think you're underrating the knock-on effects. Sure, we've reduced our reliance on China a bit, but where has that reliance gone? Its neighbors, mostly. If China suddenly gets a stronger grip on Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, etc. this greatly reduces trade leverage, even if our relationship with South Korean and Japan were to remain identical.
More subjectively, it would also be morally quite sad. Taiwan is a functioning, independent democracy with strong claims to self-determination.
It's also likely to kick off a regional nuclear arms race, although you might view this as being good. I am at least modestly open to our relatively stable allies getting access to nuclear weapons (at this point North Korea has them anyway, so it's hardly like it's setting a bad regional precedent.)
This does however reduce US power compared to the rest of the world, and thus is arguably against US interests.
Personally I'm against expansion in the number of nuclear-armed states, full stop, no matter how virtuous. Because the nukes don't easily go away, if at all, and I do worry about tail risks. Mostly of the variety: some idiot breaks the strong taboo and drops a "tactical" nuclear bomb, and then the taboo is way weaker and more shit can happen (direct response or down the road), though you can't entirely discount accidents/misunderstandings/etc as a potential source of disaster. The way it seems to work is risk scale much more strongly with the number of independent actors involved, not number of nukes, so while a mutual US-Chinese nuclear arms race would be bad, I think it's bracketed for me within the 'normal' level of badness. Way less risky in relative terms than allowing someone like, say, Japan (lol) to get nukes even if they seem trustworthy in the near and medium term. There's something to be said for the (sadly now defunct) Cold War arms treaties limiting stuff like intermediate range nuclear-capable missiles simply for the human fact that a 5-minute snap decision is quantitatively and qualitatively much worse than a 15-minute snap decision, though I'm hopeful this logic is clear enough most actors don't meaningfully arm missiles with nukes at those ranges even if the treaty is dead.
As to whether the relative risk of an emboldened China contributing to generalized nuclear tension is greater than the risk of a conventional fight over Taiwan escalating to nuclear exchange(s), that I'm not quite sure. I think a purely nuclear POV probably says that direct global powers at war is the higher risk. As to whether China believes that Taiwan is so 1000% "China proper" that they'd be willing to risk using nukes? On paper they do, but I think it's mostly clear that in practice they don't.
Yeah, I think there's something to be said for the argument that increased nuclear weapons reduces war by increasing risk...but also there's something to be said for the argument that reducing war by increasing risk is still increasing risk.
I feel compelled to point out that such treaties left SLBMs in place. You can fire a sub-launched ICBM on a depressed trajectory, and you could probably put those ~anywhere you could put land-based missiles. That's not to say the treaty did nothing - Trident II is going to be more expensive than a Tomahawk on a truck, or something - but for better or for worse the US and possibly the USSR could still have put people in a 5-minute decision dilemma.
I definitely wonder if a China that's strong and aggressive enough to take Taiwan might become the same China that says "you know what? I don't think you've got the guts for it, and we have missile defense" in some spat with a nuclear Vietnam or Japan a decade down the road.
That's fair, but usage of subs is a substantially higher bar both operationally as well as in the decision-making of things. Notably, an SLBM launch tends to generate substantially fewer false positives (as an absolute number, more relevant here for nuclear risk) than INF-type intermediate-range missiles (which already proliferate not just in presence but usage as well) simply because it generates dramatically fewer positives to begin with. Not that e.g. China ever participated in said INF treaty, though, but the logic still applies to actually being willing to mount, or actually mounting, these types with nuclear warheads. I hope. Unfortunately AFAIK their IRBMs and the like are capable of quick swap, and recent trends towards a launch-on-warn, hair-trigger profile bodes poorly. So the hope comes in the form of: China being smart enough to never ever get caught mounting them (or ideally even thinking about doing so). Thankfully due to physical realities, mainland US is far enough away from Russia that this kind of thing is, well not quite a non-issue, but less worrisome, so maybe it's half-moot.
So yeah, in theory those short windows still exist, but risk-wise the two things are orders of magnitude apart.
The SK-Japan-China axis is especially hard to gauge, because to be honest none of them have really managed to set aside historical grievances or fears. China is big and scary, Japan did some horrific stuff in WW2, SK doesn't want to be the little kid on the block anymore, and then there's ancient history too, lol. I lowkey think that dynamic is way harder to predict in the next 50 years than NK is. Still my feeling is the same: fewer actors -> less risk.
Bringing up Japan is a good point. If Japan as seems likely were to help the US defend Taiwan, that would fundamentally change the Chinese-Japanese relationship far beyond the current trends. However, I'm skeptical that even a more warlike Japan would get their own nukes. Nuclear sharing is the most on the table and that's not that weird - it's still a US-Chinese dynamic. I will grant that what I've ignored here is the substantially closer physical proximity to these allies and time zone issues means that nuclear dynamics on this local axis (with presumed remote US decision making) is a major challenge that can't really be mitigated easily.
Along the lines of spreading nukes around to allies, if the US actually were to follow through and let Saudi Arabia get nukes, that would be absolutely disastrous. That's in my mind the most likely path to countries like Vietnam wanting to sign up too.
Yes, I think you're right that shore-launched conventional ballistic missiles are much more common. I believe the South Koreans have tactical non-nuclear SLBMs but you're right about the lower "false positive" set.
Maybe! Japan can likely produce them quite quickly, and they seem to view Taiwan as a red line of sorts. If Taiwan did fall I think they might seriously reconsider their stance on nuclear weapons.
I think the rumored understanding is that Saudi Arabia already has nukes, they are just stored in Pakistan.
In both of the above cases, though, I think the nuclear breakout is unlikely unless the US demonstrates the inability or unwillingness to be an adequate replacement. So the US shellacking Iran right now probably has made the Saudis feel more comfortable leaving their nuclear weapons parked elsewhere. Similarly, it seems to me that Japan is unlikely to reach for nuclear weapons as long as Taiwan remains outside of CCP control.
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Japan and our little brown brothers in the Philippines have many reasons to be very concerned, and we're the global hegemon.
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