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Are we in a new age of hyperpower?
OK, this war in Iran is only 2 days old, and as we all know "truth is the first casualty of war." So this is very much a hot take, and we'll need a lot more time and thoughtful analysis to see how this plays out.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power. I can only imagine how Trump and other leaders must be feeling, let alone the actual soldiers who drop the bombs. Already this year we've fought and- it seems- won two wars! The first one with absolutely no losses, and this one also seems quite low casualty. This was done purely with American military (and help from Israel), no NATO help necessary. Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military, and now it all just looks like an absolute joke. All their leadership is dead within the first day, and the US has massive air superiority over most of the country. It's now basically just a choice of what targets we want to bomb.
I took this chance to go check back in on Venezuela. I couldn't find many good sources there, but so far it seems... basically fine? There's no civil war or hardline Maduro loyalists fighting to the death. The new president has taken over with basically no issues, and she seems to be cooperating quite well with the US. Lots of Venezuelans are happy that this happened. Of course there are still many problems with the country, but it's fair to chalk that war up as a win.
But what about China? We're supposed to be in a new "multipolar" age, right? The US can't just go throwing its weight around wherever it wants because there are other powers to stop us. Iran was heavily involved in selling oil to China, and was a military ally of them through the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. Well, so far all China has done is say mean things about us. They can't even say it openly, they have to do it in phone calls to Russia. So apparently they're not much of a counter at all.
I think we've reached a tipping point where US air power just crushes all of its adversaries with no counter. It's not any one weapon, but a combination of factors- more satellites, better human intelligence, more stealth aircraft, better radar, more JDAMs and stand off munitions, cyberattacks, and now AI to help us identify targets. The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground, unless we want to send special forces to arrest someone like we did to Maduro. And we've got 100 next-gen stealth bombers currently in production, plus... whatever the hell the F47 next-gen fighter can do, so I expect this dominance to increase over the next decade.
But what about nukes? Soviet nukes held the US in check throughout the cold war, surely those also put a break on US imperial ambitions? Well, to some extent they still do, but the US has made some very impressive progress in missile defense lately. THAAD is now hitting its targets with an impressively high success rate, and was recently used to help defend Israel against Iran's missile barage. The main limiting factor there is just building more interceptors, and Trump is pushing for massive funding there as part of his Golden Dome project. That also opens up some intriguing options in space- and, oh hey, would you look at that, the US also has SpaceX utterly dominating LEO launch, and it will likely get even more dominant there if/when Starship becomes practical. Meanwhile China has a relatively small nuclear arsenal, and Russia's is just leftover Soviet junk that might not even work anymore. I think we are rapidly reaching a point where the US has overwhelming nuclear dominance.
The question then becomes- what do we do with this power? Trump used to always preach the merits of isolationism, and he made a big splash early in the Republican primary by being the only candidate who strongly denounced the Iraq war. He clashed heavily with Marco Rubio over that issue. But now he has Rubio as his Secretary of State, and he seems to have rapidly "evolved" to favor military interventions. But, being Trump, he still makes speeches about "taking Venezuela's oil" and other me-first boasting. So far no such boasts about Iran, but I can only assume there will be some.
My guess? He keeps doing this. Cuba is an obvious target, they're pretty much falling apart already. Next would be Panama, where he always talked about wanting the Canal back. After that... I have no idea. Colombia? Mexico? Somalia? Cambodia? He could potentially attack all of those places, if each one is as fast and decisive as this current Iran war seems. I... don't think Trump would actually invade Greenland, or attack China, but... who can say? If he chose to do those things, who could stop him?
I'm afraid this jingoistic intoxication will get worse when the US proceeds to topple some other incompetent country (probably Cuba next). This is all fine and good so long as the actual decisionmakers are sober and don't infer they can start anything with China, but will they be sober? Currently you're burning through interceptors and, if this is not AI fog of war slop, even losing F-15s (alledegely to friendly fire, I presume due to lack of relevant training. Should have called upon Ukrainians to teach you guys air defense). But long term, Iran is poised to lose the war, of course, so the sense of invulnerability will be restored.
First of all Iran was not a "military ally" to China in a way that matters, this is just cope to inflate the sense of achievement, just like hyping up Iranian "gigantic military built over 40 years" (I see you double down on it). For reference, India, Kazakhstan and Pakistan are also there, are they Iranian allies too? Are India and Pakistan allies? They've just had a war. "Heavily involved in selling oil" just means that due to sanctions their oil was selling at a discount, which the Chinese opportunistically exploited. Here's what Foreign Policy had to say last September about the nature of the relationship:
That's diplomatic; on a personal level, Chinese consider Iranians worthless backstabbing third worlders. So, their lack of direct involvement is quite understandable. The article lists some symbolic gestures (Beijing inviting Iranians to Victory day parade, agreement on implementation of the 25 year investment pact) but that was transparently a panicked reaction to a crisis. Objectively they're given about the same treatment as Starmer, Macron, Carney and other foreign dignitaries. I don't want to say there's nothing to multipolar agenda, obviously China prefers Iran to remain a thorn in the US/Israeli side and also to buy cheaper oil. But that's a benefit of bounded and not great value, and ineptitude and duplicity of the mullah regime qualifies it further.
No, Iran is only about Iran and Israel, not China. Except psychologically (I'll return to this).
I think what we're learning is not so much that the US is a supreme military power but that it's been a very reluctant hegemonic empire indeed. Why do these shitholes even exist? Venezuela, Cuba? Seriously? The former is a pure petrostate that had failed to keep its oil rigs running due to decades of mismanagement and populism (and also sanctions). The latter is a country famous for sugarcane that's importing sugar now because Communists have ran the industry into the ground. Just months ago, Iran had almost collapsed due to a drought, not to mention that it's deeply infiltrated by Mossad. Why does the US tolerate such enemies instead of giving them a push? Why does it just allow the hostility to persist? Well, Trump has been asking himself just this, it seems. The answer is, there's no good reason. The US can afford to crush them, because it'll be pretty cheap (especially given the fixed costs of US military power).
The problem comes with assuming that China is anything like them. I get it, too – Communists, enemies of America, poor, theoretically allies (though China has no real allies except for North Korea and informally Pakistan, to counter India). But it's dangerously delusional. At the end of the day, the reason America can do this, the reason it has all those stealth jets and satellites and AI and smart munitions and everything else is that it has a large, productive, complex, technologically advanced economy. Even the industrial sector, for all the talk of hollowing out, is the world's second largest (though it depends on how you treat value-added figures – in physical output, it might be closer to Japan than to China). And these guys are so far down the line they barely have an economy.
I like the measure called Economic Complexity Index, maintained by Harvard Growth Lab. In intention, it tracks how capable a nation is of mainitaining industries that generate globally competitive products, though in reality is just measures export diversity. It's not pefrect – for example, Australia and the US get punished by the predominance of a few commodities in their export basket – but it's a decent proxy if you keep that in mind. Say, in 2024, Venezuela was ranked #133 out of 145 countrires. Cuba is #122. Afghanistan is #110. Iran is #87. Russia is #67. Canada (commodity exporter) is #35. USA is #20, between Hong Kong and France. The top 10 all have negligible commodity endowment. The list is as follows: Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Czechia, Israel, Slovenia, China (climbed 7 points in the last 16 years; the US has fallen down by 7 again). Discounting the fraction of the economy involved in fossil fuels and agriculture (a generous choice), I'd say the US would end up roughly as complex as China. They have a nice visualisation, you can click through it, eg here's the structure of American imports from China, and here are exports. Or, here are Chinese exports to Japan which as we know is number 1. And the other way around. It's quite clear to me that the ranking is directionally aligned with reality. And it's a ranking of complexity. In terms of volume or human capital employed in militarily relevant fields, it's not close. China doesn't need "allies" because it surpasses the entire Western bloc in scale.
Reminder that China is already testing two 6th generation jets in the open, and given that you haven't resolved the issue of launching 5th generation from Ford in over a decade (their EMALS works flawlessly btw), there are hardly any grounds to expect the gap to widen (or even to exist).
How's that working out? I see Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel online. Reminder that it's a barely functional theocracy, these aren't some fancy MIRVs or HGVs. Forget THAAD, actually, you're struggling wtih Shaheds.
Starship is a real argument for interception, but the gap in rocket technology is likely smaller than it seems. We'll see over 2026 if China can begin landing their boosters, and they won't need Starship unit economics to scale up production.
Currently estimated at 600 warheads, vs American stockpile of 3700. It's a completely sufficient deterrence. You glibly dismiss 50-90 million dead Americans, I suspect that's a lowball but the point is that you're unlikely to destroy China either, for all the memes about Three Gorges Dam. Their cities are denser but made of concrete far more resilient to nuclear flash than your suburbs, for starters. That said, we're all far from the genocidal peak of Cold War, and these assets on both sides would be used on counterforce strike.
What I want to say is that this isn't just a funny hypothetical. "How do we fight China" is the question on the mind of American planners, and the answer is "we don't, not really". China is your only rival and pacing threat, China is likely to take Taiwan in years, and there are no adequate answers sans praying to AGI and Elon Musk to bail the US out. Accordingly this showboating in hostile shitholes, while inflating their alleged capability to proportionally inflate American dominance, to the extent that it's not executing on prior plans and commitments – is best understood as procrastination in the face of unsolvable strategic dilemma, with a nice bonus of inciting this feverish national pride and maybe improving the GOP's chances in the midterms.
I don’t think in the end that there will be war with China. The Chinese are more rational than the Iranians or Cubans, and the Taiwanese are not as hostile to unification as many imagine. “The plan” for Taiwan (gradual rapprochement under the KMT or successors) is still viable. The US did not nuke the Soviet Bloc in the Cold War. Iran and Cuba are actually more internationalist than China, much moreso, they both even had Leninist ideas about exporting global revolution.
We don’t. You semi-dispute that answer but I think you discount it as a full possibility. At the least it is far from certain. Ideologically the zeal is not there. China is a rival in grand terms but not in local ones. China lacks even America’s ideological mission. If the Taiwanese accept peaceful reunification in a moment of crisis for America, what happens? A broken, fractured American government sends an expeditionary force to Taiwan? That is ridiculous.
The Middle East is the grand arena for Anglo civilization, as it has been for centuries, arguably for a millennium; the English were after all among the most zealous crusaders. Taiwan doesn’t have an influential diaspora preaching war (Jensen Huang would rather a peaceful, quick reunification so that he can resume frontier GPU sales to China), it doesn’t have a hundred million Americans who believe its fate portends the eschaton.
The heart of American warmongering simply isn’t in conflict with China. Nobody really cares about the Chinese. The racial insults are about as bland and unprovocative as “cracker”. They are not some terrifying martial enemy. You can read Islamic propaganda about a global caliphate. A Chinafied America just looks like America with longer working hours and less visible homelessness. What is scary there? Social credit? We have it at home. Even being responsible for the pandemic didn’t move the needle, not really.
The only reason to fight China is out of boredom.
It looks like about 7% of Taiwanese support unification. Support for unification is trending down over the decades; about 20% supported unification in 1994. Most Taiwanese either want to maintain the status quo indefinitely (about a third), kick the can down the road (about a quarter), or move towards independence without burning any bridges right now (about one-fifth).
A lot of people have convinced themselves that the longer things go on the stronger China will become. I tend to think the opposite. Allowing the United States and its allies half a decade to prepare for a Taiwan contingency might render all of the squabbling over whether or not aircraft carriers are survivable with a ballistic missile threat essentially moot; the US will plausibly be able spam so many antiship missiles from every corner of the first island chain that it will be the Chinese who are having interceptor shortfalls.
This would all be moot, of course, if Taiwanese were more interested in unification in five years, but right now I have no reason to believe that will be meaningfully the case.
The US has a pretty normal national interest in preventing China from gaining hegemony over the most valuable parts of the world (measured by GDP), for a couple of reasons. One of them is just preventing rival economic/geopolitical entities from forming. One of them is to avoid triggering a nuclear arms race.
Within a decade it's more likely that both sides have directed energy interception, which introduces its own problems. You're still living in this popular dream scenario where the opponent is static but the US is constantly improving. (Hence also all the embarrassing stuff about "not letting China win in robotics/industry" when they're like a century ahead.) It's not just a matter of buildup, they're not just an assembly floor, you're improving slower than them technologically.
Taiwanese might be more interested or, rather, less opposed to unification because the US is rapidly depleting their Silicon Shield in preparation for vacating the island, also coercing them into undesirable investment plans and imposing unfair tariffs.
Too late, too much main character syndrome.
The US and likely China already have this to a limited degree.
No, not at all. The problem for China is that amphibious assaults are fundamentally difficult. The problem of the United States and Taiwan is that they haven't taken advantage of that. It's infinitely easier to procure for a Taiwan contingency than it is to change Taiwan's geography.
I'd say if anything, you're the one in the fantasy dream scenario where the opponent is static but China is constantly improving. It seems to me you have a habit of taking relatively minor things as data points that build towards US comparative decline.
For instance, here you cite the fact that the US hasn't launched the F-35 using EMALs as a US L. Now, launching their stealth fighter off of their electromagnetic catapult system is certainly a W for the Chinese but if you lurked online in the right places you'd know the Navy has been happy with the F/A-18E/F and have not been in a rush to procure the F-35, which they are less happy with. The Navy's been skeptical about the effectiveness of stealth against Chinese systems and seems to be dissatisfied with their relationship with Lockheed. As I understand it, the Ford hasn't launched the F-35 because it hasn't gotten the necessary upgrades and it will at some point when the Navy does a refit on the ship. And while it's very typical to be wowed by "5th gen fighter" you of all people should be skeptical of Lockheed Martin's marketing: the truth is that your "aircraft generation" doesn't matter all that much, and Rhinos are perfectly capable of shooting down F-35s (including in beyond-visual-range combat) and will likely be capable of shooting down whatever 6th generation aircraft the Chinese push out, because air combat is more complicated than "numbers go up, higher numbers better."
(This cuts both ways, btw, nobody should think that the Chinese will be a pushover because Iran bought one of their radars and "it didn't work.")
Yeah, because the Chinese are operating from a technological inferior position and are converging on the position of the United States. They're likely decades behind in some very important areas, such as submarine quieting, and as they get data en masse from Russia or the United States via industrial espionage their technological level will improve (and has improved) very quickly. Extrapolating these trend lines out to infinity isn't the proper way to evaluate the situation.
Do let me know when that shows up in the polling data.
I've screamed on here since forever that pushing Russia and China together was a bad idea but it seems to me that the United States remains better at coalition-building than China.
Not really. Maybe against drones, but even HELIOS is underpowered for intercepting realistic incoming missiles. You need to get to 1MW level lasers. The US is in the lead in this research, admittedly.
Finally, geography is also much less of a factor than commonly assumed when you can have barges letting you disembark on virtually the entire coast (ofc there's the obvious objection that barges will be destroyed by brave defenders, I'll let you think through counterpoints). "Taiwan only has 2 suitable beaches" is a hypothesis fit for a shithole without shipbuilding industry, pardon my French.
No, I'm being realistic. The advantages of Chinese industry are compounding very quickly, they've reached escape velocity of sorts. The US definitely can improve but the gap is likely to get wider over the next decade or two.
it's illustrations.
I really don't share popular skepticism with regard to F-35, but this isn't just about planes. Ford EMALS is just an older, less reliable system, Ma Weiming's MVDC architecture is superior from first principles, it builds on common civilian Chinese advantages in electrical engineering that are expressed in their grid and battery dominance. This is also why they can put EMALS on 076, on some trucks, on trucks stacked on a container ship, basically play with it like LEGO. This again is illustrative of the disparity in industrial capacity and diversity and prospects for military procurement in the years to come.
this is dubious because the core feature and design principle of J-36 is overpowered electric generation and radars (again building on their civilian advantages) so at the very least they can be expected to notice your Rhinos first. I won't engage in spiderman vs batman analysis, none of this will be about 1 on 1 dogfights of course.
Maaaaaybe you can say this in aggregate, but there are many domains where you're behind and the gap is growing because they are still improving faster.
I mean, how hard can it be? Americans did it. Broke-ass Communist Russians with inferior metrology did it. I've known people who did similar things for the Soviet Union, they're not some John von Neumann geniuses shooting lightning out the arse, just normal engineers; there's not much to all this Cold War magic by modern standards, it's likely less g-loaded than CATL battery process engineering or TikTok recommender algos. China is crushingly dominant in materials science now, they author like 50% of top papers. We'll see soon if Type 09V reaches Virginia levels of quieting, probably it comes close, reducing the gap by 20+ years.
you overestimate the role and misunderstand the nature of industrial espionage, that's a popular cope. Eg recently there's been a big brouhaha about them stealing ASML IP and building a EUV prototype. The leader of the project is Lin Nan, head of light source technology between 2015 and 2021, "Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research". They have been advancing Western research until recently, and can do as well at home.
For one thing, prediction markets say it's almost certain that KMT wins the next elections, and everyone knows they're pro-cooperation with the Mainland; their representative insists on Chinese identity, is friendly towards Xi and opposes Taiwanese independence. Abuse from Trump and Lutnick is not very good alliance-building, Beijing barely needed to do a thing. Here's one perspective. There are such polls to drive the point home but I am not sure about it.
Things can change fast.
It seems this way.
As Colby points out in Strategy of Denial, blockade compulsion strategies rarely compel surrender. Now, I am not sure if the historical inferences hold given the modern necessity for energy but on the other hand if you're going to insist the historical record shows that amphibious assaults often work, I'm going to remind you that blockades and bombardments (by themselves) often do not.
Yes, I also think that an air assault is a viable strategy in addition to landing at pretty much any point across the island. This doesn't change the fundamental problem(s) with an assault on Taiwan. The barges are nice but they don't magically overcome the advantage of interior lines. And so forth.
So far the Chinese appear to be behind the United States (alone, and Australia, Japan, and South Korea are also relevant players here) in submarine manufacturing (quality and tonnage), space-to-orbit launch tonnage, aircraft manufacturing (quality, possibly still airframes as well, particularly considering US exports), directed energy weapons, and, if it matters, oil production and artificial intelligence. They do build a lot of boats, but the US and its allies can build antiship weapons faster and cheaper than China can build boats.
It's illustrative of your tendency to take something innovative and cool the Chinese have done (in a mock-up, mind you), not look for and therefore not find a comparable US example, and then declare the war over in favor of China. The US doing actual procurement such as putting lasers on their submarines (publicized 2020), flying next-gen fighter aircraft (also 2020), or flying a secret stealth electronic attack aircraft for over a decade (likely spotted 2014) - not interesting, nothing to see here.
You haven't thought through the implications of what you are saying. Now, there's doubtless a lot of secret sauce when it comes to the fine details of these things and how they work, but the laws of physics presumably still apply, and due to the inverse-square law, we should expect radar-warning receivers to detect emitters before the emitters detect a radar signature. I'll let you work out the implications of turning on that overpowered radar in a world of air-to-air antiradiation missiles.
This doesn't mean the J-36 is useless, by the way.
No they did not. The Russians were genuinely ahead in speed which is impressive in its own right, but they still haven't caught up to American quieting in nuclear submarines.
Not really "cope" so much as "a good idea" - the US government just launched copies of a Shahed at Iran and I think that's smart. I'm genuinely curious, while we're on the topic, to get your assessment of how the recent accusation by Anthropic that Deepseek used data harvesting to build their model.
Look, my position on the whole US v. China thing has not been US triumphalism. It's a war we could lose. But Chinese triumphalism rankles me the same way. It's very wrong to extrapolate from Venezuela and Day Two of Iran and conclude China would be a pushover too. But it's also very wrong to extrapolate from Chinese civilian shipbuilding numbers and conclude the US of A would be a pushover.
Going entirely off of this Wikipedia article, one could just as easily say that she opposes CCP rule over Taiwan, supports the status quo (the mainstream view), and wants closer relations with the United States.
This is almost certainly the best position for Taiwan to take, by the way, there's no point in provoking the mainland without material gain.
Yes.
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The prediction-market volume on Taiwanese elections is way too small to take seriously. It means jack shit. The KMT is very unlikely to win.
For starters, Taiwan’s presidential election is plurality-wins. You can take office with under 50% as long as you get more votes than everyone else. Chen Shui-bian, the first DPP president, won with 39% in 2000 because the KMT split. Song Chu-yu, a former KMT politician, ran as an independent and carved up the KMT vote (he got 36%). The official KMT candidate, Lien, got 23%. If the KMT hadn’t fractured, they very likely would’ve won in 2000 and I think the situation today would have been better had KMT not let their collective brainworms take over. The DPP has been dominant ever since except the Ma years. Right now the anti-DPP vote is split between the KMT (more seniors) and the TPP (more young people), which in some ways rhymes with 2000.
And KMT just does not have charisma whatsoever. It's the lame party. Arguably since the DPP is the ruling party for a decade it start to be the lame party now and young people are moving away from it, but KMT is associated with Chiang, with old KMT soldiers speaking mandarin with Shandong accent, with the Chinese communist party who is equally not charismatic. It'll be a miracle for them to regain power, sans dramatic happenings.
My view is obviously that Taiwanese identity is nonexistent beyond not Chinese. And since Taiwanese people speak Chinese and can (and will because of the gravitational pull) view Chinese media contents, cultural osmosis makes eventual reunification a matter of time (hence the ban on Xiaohongshu and other Chinese social media in Taiwan). Anecdotally late Gen Z and Gen Alpha already seem less pro-independence than millennials and early Gen Z who are the current major voting blocks. But in the short term I don’t think things are going to get meaningfully better.
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