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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.
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