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Notes -
What are the odds China moves on Taiwan in the next 12 months?
The Ukraine war seems to be ushering in a major political realignment in the West. Previously staunch pacifists are penning pieces about how they went from left to center-left, as yesterday's liberals become today's neoliberals and tomorrow's neocons. The circle of life turns, I suppose? It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards. Noah Smith is writing hawkish piece after hawkish piece claiming we've entered a new cold war, with a new Axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea opposing America and NATO & Friends. He linked to this article making the case for a new cold war, and specifically China moving on Taiwan:
Most of the time, the arguments I see putting China's invasion 5-10 years in the future focus on the second scenario and claim China is still lacking amphibious materiel/experience to pull off a D-day tier invasion. I've only rarely seen the third possibility discussed, but it seems much more likely. The recent military exercises to point in this direction.
This is all wildly outside of my lane. What do people think the odds are that China instigates some kind of blockade or customs control over Taiwan in the next 12 months? The bull case:
The bear case:
I'm interested in whether people think this is largely driven by Gell-Mann amnesia and I'm being irrationally swayed by an increasingly hawkish media environment/overly focused on domestic US politics, or whether the odds of China invading are much higher than people seem to think (although I could only find a betting market for a hot-invasion).
Worse than that: this was clear as early as 2022 if not from Jan 6 2021, so the (highly non-trivial) preparations for war could be made. Indeed, back in late 2022 when I posted this, my unstated conclusion was "the Five Eyes have detected an in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan" (I'm still not 100% confident of that, but I can't see any other likely scenarios in which "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and an active decision to avert it is required).
With that said, the chance is not 100%. As Symon noted, we can turn off a linear path; leaders can make decisions. An in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan means only that Xi thinks the option of an attack is worth the cost of the preparations; he could still very easily call "no-go" before the trigger's pulled if circumstances look less than favourable.
I think the "indirect control" plan, if it can even be called a "plan", is bananas and unworkable; the PRC has no jurisdiction over the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (which is a formal member of the WTO) and any attempt to declare border controls would be a legal nullity and would be ignored. I'm not saying they won't claim to be doing this - the PRC claims a lot of things - but they would have to back it up with at least an actual blockade (either shooting or mining) and they know this. So that leaves us with three real options:
...with the latter two both having the option of pre-emptive strikes on US/Korean/Japanese assets in East Asia, or not doing that out of hope of keeping them neutral. Frankly, I'm not enough of a tactician to figure out which they're planning on; there've been exercises relating to all three primary scenarios so it's entirely possible they're intending on some degree of flexibility depending on how the situation develops.
Overall numbers - with the horizon of 12 months, I'd say a very uncertain 50%. I'm anchoring on the Paul Symon interview with WWIII being the default case (note that I think it's like 80% that the West comes in conditional on a Taiwan play, and 90% that cities get nuked conditional on the West intervening in a Taiwan play), but I've heard some noises more recently saying it might be more like 2027 so I've shaved a bit off.
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