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I think that peaceful reunification is the base scenario at this point and Americans are a bit high on their own supply. It's not that there's more enthusiasm for it, but there is definitely less visceral rejection. The fundamental case against it has been not «freedoms and democracy» (Taiwanese adopted LGBT stuff largely to please their patrons) but the belief that the Mainland is a big, embarrassingly poor North Korea where you worship Mao, eat gutter oil, work like a dog at Foxconn and die.
It's still popular with the older Taiwanese, but facts change and speak for themselves. As a young graduate you can earn more in tier 1 city like Guangdong than in Taiwan, and Guangdong is plainly newer and bigger and cooler. The Mainland is increasingly seen as «awesome» by local influencers, DPP is unpopular (eg for shutting down their nuclear power on a Germany-tier green platform, which ironically makes reunification-via-blockade a lot easier, they'll run out of coal and gas in 2 weeks and their civilian society, nevermind those fabs, stops dead) and getting censorious in apparent desperation, KMT is likely to win this time, Ukraine as of 2025 serves as a warning rather than inspiration. The military buildup on China, including specialized assets like these zany barges that defeat the «few landing-worthy beaches» objection, seems very serious and increasingly impossible to deter. Basically, if you're against China, you can't rely on any shithole level deterrence like geography, they can simply engineer and build their way over it. You need to rely on hard military capability.
And that's the problem, because no matter how porcupine Taiwan gets, the real muscle has to come from the US. And they believe less and less that it will come. Lutnick-style opportunism is widely seen as dismantling their Silicon Shield, and I think they're right – the US that can make chips at home doesn't have an existential stake in Taiwan. China cares about the First Island Chain and about finishing the civil war. The US stopped caring about that back in 1979-1980, and using Taiwan as an opportunity to contain China is only worthwhile if that's the relatively cheap option. It doesn't look cheap. Only chips, then – and once chips are made in Arizona, not even that. There's broader logic about «our allies in the Indopacific» but at the end of the day that's hubris and imperial overextension, all of these arguments are downstream of the ambition to contain China and Win History, and as Trump's National Security Strategy demonstrates, ambitions can be downscaled in response to new circumstances. The US can keep Guam and Okinawa in a world where Taiwan has fallen, and will try to.
So I think that by default, China takes Taiwan within 5-20 years, either by a face-saving «1 Country 2 Systems» arrangement, or with a brief blockade followed by polite demonstration of overwhelming power. I believe China (Xi) has a similar theory and so won't rush into a hot conflict, which serves everyone for the moment just fine, even if me and Xi are in fact wrong.
P.S. People who argue about blockading China are not very familiar with the facts. They aren't dependent on imported food, these soybeans are for pigs. They don't actually biologically need to eat that many pork bellies. They have vast stockpiles too. They're electrifying very rapidly, from cars to trucks to ships now, and in a few short years their core logistics and power generation will be able to maintain wartime economy without any maritime fossil fuel supplies. Commodities like iron ore are harder but that's not even a blockade issue, the US can compel Australia/Brazil/Chile to stop exports. Even then, it's not going to be decisive. The Chinese can just do things, it's actually mesmerizing to see.
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