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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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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:

With the U.S. military depleted and distracted by a conflict on the other side of the globe, observers worried that Chinese strongman Xi Jinping may never have a better opportunity to move on the democratic island of 23 million, whose “reunification” he has called “the great trend of history.” The fear is that Trump’s transactional bearing and embrace of a “might is right” doctrine—both in his own actions and his ambivalence regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—could be interpreted as a green light by Xi.

“Will Xi be tempted to take advantage of U.S. potentially exhausting smart munitions and attack Taiwan even if the PLA is not fully ready?” asks Prof. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “Possible.”

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:

Li Yihu, dean of the Taiwan Research Institute at Peking University, said the reunification process would enter an “accelerated phase” in the next five years and the mainland needed to do more to communicate an understanding of what he said was the inevitability of the process.

“Currently, we are doing very well in terms of building the capacity and the resolve to use [military deterrence], but we still need to work on ensuring that … both overt and potential adversaries fully understand the consequences of deterrence and the gains and losses,” he said.

He was referencing the deterrence theory of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who argued that deterrence was a product of the physical military capacity to inflict damage, the resolve and willingness of leadership to act and the potential rivals’ perception and understanding of the deterrer’s power and resolve.

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.

Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed

But without proper planning or strategy. Trump apparently didn't consider that Iran might close the straits of Hormuz, only now is there bleating about insuring vessels, only now are defence company executives being summoned to boost production. The plan seems to have been 'big strike package and then we win', which just isn't how things work.

Maybe nobody in the US decision-making cabal knows that Taiwan imports the vast majority of its food, energy and fertilizer by sea. Maybe they aren't aware that Taiwan can be blockaded into submission while China retains access to land markets and enjoys self-sufficiency in grain if not meat. Maybe American leaders are still thinking in terms of wars lasting a few days or weeks, rather than years. Wars between strong powers tend to drag on for a lot longer than expected. What is the plan to defeat China in attritional, industrial warfare?

THAAD getting wrecked by Iran's missile and drone arsenal is also pretty alarming. THAAD is what's supposed to defend Guam and other US bases necessary for this war.

Capability is not just tactical success but understanding the nature of the war you're going to fight, preparing the proper force and choosing the right missions and tactics. Executing the wrong approach proficiently isn't good enough.

“Currently, we are doing very well in terms of building the capacity and the resolve to use [military deterrence], but we still need to work on ensuring that … both overt and potential adversaries fully understand the consequences of deterrence and the gains and losses,” he said.

He could well be saying 'how do we deter Trump, he doesn't seem to think strategically at all.' And that is indeed a nightmarish situation to be in, since quantitative superiority means nothing to a man who doesn't understand numbers, just makes them up. Qualitative superiority is useless since Trump always thinks he has the biggest and best of everything. What can you do but roll the dice and let the outcome speak for itself? Or just wait for more unforced errors? The waiting for unforced errors strategy seems to have been going pretty well for China thus far.

THAAD getting wrecked by Iran's missile and drone arsenal is also pretty alarming.

This is news to me. Further details?

There are pictures of an allegedly destroyed radar all over Twitter. What that actually means or even if it’s real are questionable.

Destroying a single radar isn't "getting wrecked". The whole system is a lot more than just the radar and even then "getting wrecked" carries the connotation that the missiles and drones are able to penetrate the system with regularity and hit their intended targets rather than merely destroy some of its infrastructure.

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