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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.
I'd say that the Trump admin's actions in the middle east (the little kids on the playground) are way less indicative of what the US would do with China (the big kid) than the admin's actions with Russia, who is the medium sized kid.
And what we have with Russia is a lot of appeasement and cowardice. Instead of just going in and bombing them, the Trump admin has consistently tried to coax Ukraine into abandoning territory they control in pursuit of a "deal". And when Putin continues to refuse and keeps trying with his invasion, Trump does ... basically nothing.
If it's not morals, and it's not rules of engagement and it's not international law or polling or anything else that holds the admin back from using power and force whenever they want wherever they want them it suggests one of two things when they don't take action 1. They actually support Russia somewhat or 2. They're too scared and don't think they have the power and force to meaningfully win. What else is there?
If this is how we treat the medium kid, with shaky fear and inaction then what will happen when the big kid comes in to bully? If Trump and Hegseth wanted to show actual power and courage against meaningful threats, they'd metaphorically punch Putin in the face and take it to Russia instead of acting like wimps who only take on the preschool next door, and a lot of that seems to only be with our emotional support Israel to comfort and guide us through the scary times.
The difference lies in direct exposure and proxies. Ukraine offers a sort of weird middle ground, semi-proxy war of the type we've seen several times throughout the Cold War to varying degrees. Iran, we fundamentally expect to get punched back, directly, not even exclusively through Iran's proxies. Thus a fight over Taiwan, where we expect the punches to land directly face to face is much closer to Iran situationally. Taiwan is currently a latent proxy, but there is really only a few, very implausible scenarios where we'd support Taiwan only by proxy. If China makes a go at it, either we leave them to try to handle it themselves or we get directly in the fight.
In other words: we've seen Ukraine-like situations before a couple times and not much happened most all of those times. We've seen Iran though recently, and to an extent not previously seen (the Soleimani response and then even the 12-day 'war' response were qualitatively different) since Iraq.
There's once big exception to the rule: proxy wars don't usually escalate to direct wars. The Korean War. This actually works in my argument's favor, though, because the US put themselves directly in the fight and it led to direct confrontation.
Picture the following scale:
WW2 was a Type 1 war. These have not happened since WW2 for a reason. The Korean War was a Type 2 war. It's really the only Type 2 war, though Sino-Soviet border clashes might count if you squint, or India-Pakistan if you stretch. A Taiwan-triggered war would probably be closer to a Type 2 war than a type 1 war, but it definitely wouldn't be a Type 3 war. If you count Ukraine as a US proxy, then that was a Type 3 war. To understand what Type 3 wars usually look like, let's look at history, because these are much better understood:
Vietnam: the US thought about flirting with an upgrade (it's worth noting that Type 2 only actually happens if one side strikes and the other side fights back) but decided against it pretty deliberately. Yom Kippur (arguably), the Soviets threatened to put a trigger force into a collapsing Egypt. Both sides went on nuclear alerts but basically both sides pumped the brakes. Soviet-Afghan war, both sides avoided escalation, even though Pakistan was a US ally in the middle of getting their own nukes. The Syrian Civil War was a kind of Type 3.5 war, because air power blurs the lines a bit. No escalation occurred and both parties were pretty careful to avoid an upgrade.
In this context, Ukraine is very much a 'known quantity'. So yeah, even though it seems counterintuitive that a small, direct fight between a power and a small(ish) country is better as a signal than a big, direct fight against a proxy, Ukraine is virtually guaranteed in practical terms to remain a Type 3, while a Taiwan clash jumps from nothing straight to a Type 2 or even Type 1 (if China decided to do a first-strike kind of action, including in space), do not pass go, do not collect $200. This makes Iran a much better signal of how willing the US is to get into a big, direct fight, with direct exposure, because it is a direct conflict, and Iran has a population bigger than the size of Germany, and twice the size of Ukraine! So yes, it's a decent assessment of the risk appetite the US currently has as well as its competence.
The instant jump to a Type 2 war, or more serious, is because Taiwan is an island (and quite close to China), thus after combat begins no pure-proxy assistance is possible. There is no such thing as a protected airlift or sealift out of Taiwan, or meaningful weapon-smuggling into a warzone around it. You either break a blockade with force or you don't. Taiwan is fundamentally incapable of being a Type 3 conflict for this reason.
Where does the American Revolution, wrt Britain and France, fit in this schema?
By the end it was a type 2 verging on type 1. You had direct French vs. England naval and land conflict within the 13 colonies, and were starting to see limited naval engagements popping up around the world (the last battle of the American Revolutionary War was off the coast of India, and didn’t involve any Americans). The escalation risk was part of why Britain threw in the towel.
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