This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Considering how much of current American culture war debates revolve around national identity, sovereignty, and international influence, it makes me wonder: are conflicts like Russia’s move into Ukraine and China’s posture towards Taiwan fundamentally rooted in the same security dilemma, rather than pure expansionism?
I’ve been thinking about the deeper drivers behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s stance on Taiwan.
For Russia, Ukraine joining NATO would have meant that a major military alliance would sit directly on its border, severely shrinking Russia’s strategic buffer zone. Similarly, for China, the growing U.S. military presence around Taiwan raises a direct security concern.
Since U.S.-China relations have deteriorated, there has been increasing discussion about the possibility of the U.S. deploying missiles or even establishing a permanent military presence in Taiwan. Given Taiwan’s geographic position, major Chinese cities like Fuzhou, Xiamen, and even Shanghai would fall within the range of intermediate-range missiles.
This makes the Taiwan issue not purely about nationalism or ideology, but also about very tangible security calculations.
In 2024, U.S. defense reports indicated a rising focus on “hardening Taiwan” against potential Chinese action（https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/19/2003375866/-1/-1/1/2024-NDS.PDF”
China has repeatedly emphasized that foreign military deployments in Taiwan would cross a “red line”（https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-says-us-should-stop-official-exchanges-with-taiwan-2024-03-05/）
On the one hand – actually, yes.
On the other hand – this is already the case. Taiwan (by itself) already has intermediate-range missiles. They can probably strike the Three Gorges Dam, which I am given to understand – if successful – could be "pretty bad" (millions dead).
Furthermore, if you look at the Chinese coastline, you'll see that it is hemmed in by its rivals – Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are, on paper, trivially able to establish a maritime blockade of China. This is probably why China has gone to such great lengths to establish a perimeter in the Spratlys and other island groups. Controlling Taiwan goes a long way toward mitigating this problem and giving China an avenue "out" into the Pacific, allowing them to operate carrier groups and nuclear submarines to their full advantage. (It also lets them turn the tables on Japan and blockade Japan instead of the other way around much more easily, which I think is part of why Japan has shown so much willingness to get involved).
The TLDR; is that there are very tangible security reasons for China to want Taiwan.
However I do question if Taiwan is a stable stopping point. Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia can still keep China cut off from maritime trade with Europe and Africa in that scenario. So I definitely wonder if a reunification of Taiwan with China would satisfy Chinese security risks, or simply cause them to turn towards other potential threats.
While I appreciate the direction of thought (control over Taiwan certainly does enable more “offensive” options), it’s incorrect to say that anyone, even a coalition, would be able to effectively blockade China. They simply have too much coastline and too large a navy. Maybe 20 years ago yes, but currently? No. That’s not projected to change in the next 20 years either no matter how big a peacetime buildup of their neighbors.
Also, I personally believe the South China Sea moves to be primarily about resources (fishing, oil, etc) than a power projection, but reasonable people can absolutely disagree there.
The United States could do it, almost certainly. Keep in mind that the US has the largest (by VLS cells) and most capable navy on Earth, and the Houthis (with, to be fair, powerful backers) have been able to run a fairly effective local blockade against their wishes. A pan-Asian coalition (including India, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia) might also be able to do it right now. Frankly...a single Asian nation could probably do it effectively for a limited time just with sea mines.
Let me walk through this, just a little bit – basically, surface ships are very vulnerable. If you don't have them to escort your cargo ships, then your cargo ships will all get captured by helicopter boarding parties, or sunk by maritime patrol aircraft and submarines. Or, if they have to transit a strait (like Malacca) they are vulnerable to even cheaper weapons systems, like short-range anti-ship missiles, speedboats, and artillery.
So you need to escort them with destroyers and frigates to keep away the helicopters and submarines (there's no guarantee you do anything to American submarines except get sunk by them, of course). But destroyers and frigates by themselves aren't sufficient to run a blockade by an opponent with combat aircraft – a country like India or the United States will locate your surface ship and then dispatch tactical aircraft with Brahmos or LRASM missiles to sink it, and a country like Singapore, or the Philippines can just mass anti-ship fires, or even use the good old artillery tactic, and then you're back where you started, because surface ships (unsupported) are not good at finding and destroying shoot-and-scoot weapons like missile launchers.
And that's without getting into mines. The best way to close Malacca is with anti-ship mines – they are small and terribly cheap (it would probably be affordable for Malaysia or Indonesia to buy tens or even hundreds of thousands of mines) and it could require hours to clear each one. You're going to have to escort specialized (practically unarmed) minesweepers to the area to slowly clear the entire strait of mines. Said minesweepers will die without adequate protection against submarines and aircraft. But of course if your destroyers and frigates get too close to provide that cover, they will die to mines.
So you're going to need to more than run a few escort ships if your threat is greater than maritime patrol aircraft and submarines. If you want to transit Malacca opposed, you might need to actually seize territory around the strait to make it safe. A lot of territory. Or, you'll need to destroy all the potential anti-ship weapons in all of Malaysia and Indonesia – which is not easy. It's definitely something you can't do with just surface ships, you'll need marines.
And then, even if you clear out the strait, with your surface ship group, you're going to only be able to escort one convoy at a time, because even if you seize all the tactical air bases the bomber threat is real. Against the United States, even a large flotilla will be sunk by bombers. The US bomber force can attack you anywhere on Earth and they're going to lob missiles at you. Even if your air defenses are perfect, they can do this until your VLS cells are dry. Then they're going to sink you with 1000-lb bombs. (Actually realistically you just get sunk by a submarine but we're pretending like our surface ships can prevent that for a moment).
So now you need something that can defend you against bombers. And that's the aircraft carrier. China has three. This means they can probably keep one on station for an extended period of time (rotating between the three carriers). One carrier isn't enough to defend shipping between China and Europe against the American navy (probably not enough to defend it against India, either). The US has bigger, better carriers and tactical carrier aircraft than you do, and more of them, so it's going to steam out with two of them, shoot down all your planes, and then kill your ships with bombers, and then blockade you again.
So, to "bust a blockade" against the United States or a similar maritime power, you need to be able to patrol thousands of square miles against submarines and defeat the enemy navy at sea.
Let's review real quick – against a pan-Asian coalition, to make the sea lanes clear reliably, you need to
(These countries, by the way, combined, have more submarines than China does!)
I am very skeptical that China can do this. I'm skeptical the US Navy could do this.
And to defeat a blockade by the US, you're plausibly going to need to defeat their entire navy on the high seas (otherwise they can far blockade you), not to mention the above mentioned anti-submarine operations, and to say nothing of doing something about the bombers and maritime patrol aircraft.
Sure, this seems plausible.
You've convinced me I overstated the case. Good comment. But still, there are some considerations that make it not entirely clear-cut. This map taken from this Naval War College report on an oil blockade demonstrates that yes, there are a number of choke points for trade flows out of China. I should note however that Taiwan being Chinese controlled or not makes a big deal to Japan/SK, but doesn't necessarily provide a better defensive blockade escape route in general - there's already quite a bit of water in that direction, as you can see, that directly isn't a choke point for non-Taiwanese conflicts, where Taiwan is surely sitting out.
Naval mining would be pretty effective yes in the straights but in a blockade-first scenario (i.e. not-war) I don't see it happening (would the surrounding nations be mad? Almost certainly. And it would hinder trade to our own allies too - Japan/SK are supplied via the same channels). There's also the matter of scale to consider. Although the PLAN doesn't have great force projection capabilities right now, the US naval readiness is also quite lackluster, which is fairly well-documented. The US would only be able to bring over a little over half of their fleet, I bet - would it be able to sustain a blockade operation against thousands of ships attempting to blockade-run for more than a couple of months? The US would probably say yes, but I actually think that's uncertain. There are a lot of ships that transit, and all of them would need to be checked or identified on some level. Again I struggle to come up with a scenario where Taiwan would ever be an active participant in a blockade (would be poking the bear) unless they were already under existential threat. And going down that reasoning just leads to circular, tautological reasoning (you can't threaten Taiwan's existence and then use actions it would take to secure its own existence as evidence for threatening Taiwan's existence). Even then, it seems to me a far more likely scenario that China is blockading Taiwan, which I think the PLAN is currently capable of doing (if just barely).
So yeah, we are basically left with the war scenarios. Blockades are already acts of war on some level. The linked report concludes that an oil embargo probably wouldn't work, but the reasons given are mostly non-military. I stand corrected on that front.
Thanks :)
I think a lot of this depends on the exact scenario at hand. The US has a lot of submarines and they have very good endurance, and you don't need that many aircraft to run a blockade properly (especially if you've just decided to sink all shipping). Similarly the US is likely to lay mines via aircraft. I think that surface fleet endurance is likely to be more limited.
And, to clarify my position a bit: my position is that a successful blockade could be put in place, not necessarily established indefinitely (for instance I could see China eventually beating a pan-Asian coalition).
It's pretty simple to ID ship types - you can do this acoustically, and most large navies surely have libraries of ~all ship types just to help IFF in wartime.
Discriminating between individual ships might be harder, I'm not sure exactly how hard it would be, if that's an already solved problem, or how much it would matter in a blockade scenario - I could see a world for instance where we just presumptively turn back (or sink) all traffic that we haven't already green-flagged (doubtless in "coordination with our allied and partner nations"). It might also be possible that just type identification is good enough for our purposes here.
Yes, this I tend to agree with. And like you said, any blockade is likely to be part of a war. And I think that the US - whose mine stockpiles are very limited compared to Chinese stockpiles - would probably focus on hitting more specific targets closer to home. Why mine Malacca when you could mine the Taiwan Strait, or the Qiongzhou Strait, or the entrance to the PLA's submarine pens in Hainan? :trollface:
Without having read it (although I might, thanks for linking!) I tend to agree. I suspect they would be able to get what they needed for the duration of a war from Russia overland, although I seem to recall a prior commenter noting that they had no oil pipeline hookup and thus it would be an insanely inefficient way to get oil.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These countries also need the strait, don't they? Why would they want to blockade it for everyone?
Except for Vietnam and Singapore, I think the other countries have ports with access to the Indian or Pacific Oceans.
But I think the real answer to your question is "yes, as long as you can control the strait, you wouldn't want mine it." But if the Chinese were going to wrest control of it from you, they'd be able to use it to blockade you anyway...so you might as well lay the sea mines.
At least that's what I think.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And this is the point of the "First Island Chain" logic.
If the anti-China coalition controls Taiwan, then they can maintain an effective blockade of China using mostly land-based aircraft operating out of bases in Japan (and its islands), Taiwan, the Philippines, and Malaysian Borneo. If China controls Taiwan, then maintaining the blockade means either bringing US carriers within range of Chinese land-based aircraft operating out of Taiwan, or engaging Chinese short-range fighters with American long-range fighters. Both of these are generally believed to be insta-lose conditions against a peer competitor.
China appears to be building a blue-water navy. This only makes strategic sense if they can break out into the Pacific beyond the First Island Chain, which either means they plan to take Taiwan, or that they know something we don't and think they can run a blockade.
Yes.
To be fair to China, I think a pocket blue-water force to respond to overseas contingencies does make sense, particularly as China and Chinese companies begin to do more and more business overseas. I rather doubt this is the ultimate intent for the large blue-water build up they are doing, however.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link