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So as one of the resident Taiwan pessimists, I have surprising news. Contrary to all my expectations, Trump might have actually pushed back a Taiwan invasion. I'm always a little suspicious of the variable quality of Time magazine stories, but this laid out a pretty cogent case. First, my prior base case:
You can definitely still make this case. I'm almost tempted to. On a very substantial fact-based level, the US in the next 1-2 years especially will be possibly at the lowest level or readiness in a great while: large portions of the fleet will need refits, interceptor stocks will take years to recover even under optimistic scenarios, other precision munitions are also low, every conflict lowers US domestic appetite for more, and contrarily war would improve domestic approval within China that's otherwise a little grumpy with recent so-so growth. Additionally, there's some mild but decent evidence that US defenses are indeed still vulnerable to the new classes of hypersonic missiles. US capacity and abilities are sure to spike again in the 3-5 year time frame as the US not only implements highly relevant fixes to problems that have been exposed recently, but also continues to re-orient its efforts to prioritize things that threaten China more both directly and indirectly, so the window is real but closing.
However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed. It has the capacity to plan carefully thousands of targets, kidnap or assassinate world leaders (though with nuclear-armed China I disagree that this is very relevant), completely overwhelm air defenses without losses (including at least some amount of Chinese-made equipment in both Venezuela and Iran), sustain and project power across the globe, process an enormous amount of intelligence and surveillance with decent accuracy, and more. And clearly the President can unilaterally do whatever they want, with Trump in particular shedding a previous (avowed) aversion to conflict. DPP is not weak exactly, but definitely having some down moments compared to the more pro-China KMT within Taiwan, mildly raising hopes of a political reunification. And Taiwanese self-defense efforts as far as I can tell remain pretty lackluster despite continuing to shell out for some high end systems. Furthermore this is a tiny little dry run of how badly the global oil supply can get screwed with even a regional war, doubtless actual action would be worse, and I'm guessing China feels a bit of that pain.
And sure enough this seems to be the initial reaction. Here for example, we have a typical bellwether academic at a flagship university saying stuff like this:
Reading between the lines, the obvious message is: wow, actually, the US is doing really well at deterrence recently in all of these three areas, especially demonstrated capacity and resolve, and China has, well, very little to show for its own efforts. No big operations besides military exercises. No real allies willing to pitch in. Unclear transmission of internal resolve to America, too. So in our how-the-world-actually-works framework, China is missing the essential psychological ingredients to actually pull off deterrence even if I still believe that in terms of the nuts and bolts, China could win pretty handily even if the US intervenes (in terms of a conflict itself) and has more cards to play in terms of the "how". They know it, too, but that's likely not going to be enough.
As such I'll take a predictive L in advance. My predictions about 4-5 years ago that a Taiwanese invasion would happen in approximately this timeframe was wrong. Difficult to foresee political factors significantly distorted the general strategic picture, which I assert remains accurate. My primary failing was underweighting the political side of things and the significant variance there, along with its impact on the strategic calculations necessary to pull the trigger on a big move.
Let’s say that by 2030, a significant proportion of global chip production has moved out of Taiwan. China invades or otherwise ‘reunifies’ (use whatever euphemism you prefer) with Taiwan, with minimal or no US intervention. What happens? What are the actual consequences for the world?
China has no stated designs on Japan or even South Korea. Their relationship with North Korea, which actually does have designs on the latter, has in any event deteriorated over the years. The “nine dash line” (or eleven for Taiwan) in the South China Sea is one of the few things both the ROC and PRC agree on as far as territorial claims go, so that isn’t affected - and it’s a much less emotive issue for Chinese nationalists than Taiwan is.
So all in all, why should America care?
Put simply, it increases China's power, especially locally, to a dramatic degree. China gains the ability to meaningfully project power further in the region without real restraint, including ruling the seas there completely. Historically, this kind of naval+regional dominance always leads to the power getting used or abused. It's naive and wrong to think that wars only start of territorial greed, and therefore no territorial ambitions means no risk of war, though I'm not sure if that's what you were implying or not.
At any rate, I think there's a pretty reasonable case to make that China getting more powerful and influential is bad for the world. I don't think it's awful for the world, but definitely bad in relative terms, and bad for America as well. Global power isn't really zero-sum, but I think American power would diminish at least proportionally in a lot of areas simply because we've nearly 100% occupied a few particular global niches for a while, which leads to some similar dynamics.
Diplomatically, and this is probably the big one, there's no way this wouldn't result in a hit to American reliability, already somewhat in question. This kind of soft diplomatic capital is really hard to replace, and really valuable. Speaking frankly, there's always this element of reputation+raw power that serves as a background to even seemingly unrelated negotiations. The US has leveraged this to our advantage over the years; it can work in reverse, too. It's like a meta-multiplier.
While it's clear that ideological dominos isn't really a thing, I would argue that it's possible to kick off a cascade of weakened alliances. Like it or not the US has essentially provided some degree of security guarantee for decades and decades to Taiwan. On top of NATO doubts, this means that functionally all of our 'guarantees' are increasingly seen as pure convenience. Mechanistically, this is bad because alliances have synergistic effects based on mutual trust that dissipate when trust decreases. As an illustration, think of a vendor relationship. A little wiggle room based on trust can be mutually beneficial to adapt to changing circumstances, or even provide material improvement like how banks give better lending terms to certain outfits; once the trust is gone, though, lawyers start to enter the room, threats start to happen, and transactions shrink in size and scope.
Economically, I think you're underrating the knock-on effects. Sure, we've reduced our reliance on China a bit, but where has that reliance gone? Its neighbors, mostly. If China suddenly gets a stronger grip on Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, etc. this greatly reduces trade leverage, even if our relationship with South Korean and Japan were to remain identical.
More subjectively, it would also be morally quite sad. Taiwan is a functioning, independent democracy with strong claims to self-determination.
It's also likely to kick off a regional nuclear arms race, although you might view this as being good. I am at least modestly open to our relatively stable allies getting access to nuclear weapons (at this point North Korea has them anyway, so it's hardly like it's setting a bad regional precedent.)
This does however reduce US power compared to the rest of the world, and thus is arguably against US interests.
Personally I'm against expansion in the number of nuclear-armed states, full stop, no matter how virtuous. Because the nukes don't easily go away, if at all, and I do worry about tail risks. Mostly of the variety: some idiot breaks the strong taboo and drops a "tactical" nuclear bomb, and then the taboo is way weaker and more shit can happen (direct response or down the road), though you can't entirely discount accidents/misunderstandings/etc as a potential source of disaster. The way it seems to work is risk scale much more strongly with the number of independent actors involved, not number of nukes, so while a mutual US-Chinese nuclear arms race would be bad, I think it's bracketed for me within the 'normal' level of badness. Way less risky in relative terms than allowing someone like, say, Japan (lol) to get nukes even if they seem trustworthy in the near and medium term. There's something to be said for the (sadly now defunct) Cold War arms treaties limiting stuff like intermediate range nuclear-capable missiles simply for the human fact that a 5-minute snap decision is quantitatively and qualitatively much worse than a 15-minute snap decision, though I'm hopeful this logic is clear enough most actors don't meaningfully arm missiles with nukes at those ranges even if the treaty is dead.
As to whether the relative risk of an emboldened China contributing to generalized nuclear tension is greater than the risk of a conventional fight over Taiwan escalating to nuclear exchange(s), that I'm not quite sure. I think a purely nuclear POV probably says that direct global powers at war is the higher risk. As to whether China believes that Taiwan is so 1000% "China proper" that they'd be willing to risk using nukes? On paper they do, but I think it's mostly clear that in practice they don't.
Yeah, I think there's something to be said for the argument that increased nuclear weapons reduces war by increasing risk...but also there's something to be said for the argument that reducing war by increasing risk is still increasing risk.
I feel compelled to point out that such treaties left SLBMs in place. You can fire a sub-launched ICBM on a depressed trajectory, and you could probably put those ~anywhere you could put land-based missiles. That's not to say the treaty did nothing - Trident II is going to be more expensive than a Tomahawk on a truck, or something - but for better or for worse the US and possibly the USSR could still have put people in a 5-minute decision dilemma.
I definitely wonder if a China that's strong and aggressive enough to take Taiwan might become the same China that says "you know what? I don't think you've got the guts for it, and we have missile defense" in some spat with a nuclear Vietnam or Japan a decade down the road.
That's fair, but usage of subs is a substantially higher bar both operationally as well as in the decision-making of things. Notably, an SLBM launch tends to generate substantially fewer false positives (as an absolute number, more relevant here for nuclear risk) than INF-type intermediate-range missiles (which already proliferate not just in presence but usage as well) simply because it generates dramatically fewer positives to begin with. Not that e.g. China ever participated in said INF treaty, though, but the logic still applies to actually being willing to mount, or actually mounting, these types with nuclear warheads. I hope. Unfortunately AFAIK their IRBMs and the like are capable of quick swap, and recent trends towards a launch-on-warn, hair-trigger profile bodes poorly. So the hope comes in the form of: China being smart enough to never ever get caught mounting them (or ideally even thinking about doing so). Thankfully due to physical realities, mainland US is far enough away from Russia that this kind of thing is, well not quite a non-issue, but less worrisome, so maybe it's half-moot.
So yeah, in theory those short windows still exist, but risk-wise the two things are orders of magnitude apart.
The SK-Japan-China axis is especially hard to gauge, because to be honest none of them have really managed to set aside historical grievances or fears. China is big and scary, Japan did some horrific stuff in WW2, SK doesn't want to be the little kid on the block anymore, and then there's ancient history too, lol. I lowkey think that dynamic is way harder to predict in the next 50 years than NK is. Still my feeling is the same: fewer actors -> less risk.
Bringing up Japan is a good point. If Japan as seems likely were to help the US defend Taiwan, that would fundamentally change the Chinese-Japanese relationship far beyond the current trends. However, I'm skeptical that even a more warlike Japan would get their own nukes. Nuclear sharing is the most on the table and that's not that weird - it's still a US-Chinese dynamic. I will grant that what I've ignored here is the substantially closer physical proximity to these allies and time zone issues means that nuclear dynamics on this local axis (with presumed remote US decision making) is a major challenge that can't really be mitigated easily.
Along the lines of spreading nukes around to allies, if the US actually were to follow through and let Saudi Arabia get nukes, that would be absolutely disastrous. That's in my mind the most likely path to countries like Vietnam wanting to sign up too.
Yes, I think you're right that shore-launched conventional ballistic missiles are much more common. I believe the South Koreans have tactical non-nuclear SLBMs but you're right about the lower "false positive" set.
Maybe! Japan can likely produce them quite quickly, and they seem to view Taiwan as a red line of sorts. If Taiwan did fall I think they might seriously reconsider their stance on nuclear weapons.
I think the rumored understanding is that Saudi Arabia already has nukes, they are just stored in Pakistan.
In both of the above cases, though, I think the nuclear breakout is unlikely unless the US demonstrates the inability or unwillingness to be an adequate replacement. So the US shellacking Iran right now probably has made the Saudis feel more comfortable leaving their nuclear weapons parked elsewhere. Similarly, it seems to me that Japan is unlikely to reach for nuclear weapons as long as Taiwan remains outside of CCP control.
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