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Good post and good quoted post too.
I think the way his X post framed the question makes it a mismatch for the argument I was advancing. I agree that militarily the conflict doesn't change the calculus that much but if it does it's in the direction of "China would win". Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that. Or maybe it's that I think his "political" bullets are missing a bullet or two.
What it changes is how threats are communicated and how those threats can evolve into action. And it does in a big way. First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations. And they've been loud and annoying for decades about Taiwan so leaders are desensitized. Now, as a world citizen that's awesome and cool but it doesn't help them in the sense that a big stick doesn't work as a threat if people don't see its size correctly. (By the way, I also don't believe for a second that China's relative noninterventionism would or will continue, because the rhetoric around 'self-determinism' is not only just as fake as say America's in the Mexican-American war, but also because Exhibit A about ignoring self determination is literally the topic of this discussion.)
In Kissinger's setup, China has the capacity to inflict damage, probably has (internally) resolve and willingness to follow through, but cannot meaningfully communicate this resolve nor this capacity, at least not at scale. That's a crucial missing piece of the trifecta, which means that China's deterrence power is fundamentally flawed. The contrast is obvious: America not only makes threats but makes good on them and other countries fully recognize those threats, even more so after events of the last year.
Why, might you ask, does deterrence even matter? Overall, China patently still prefers (and prefers strongly) peaceful reunification for, I think, super obvious reasons, and prefers a military takeover without fighting anyone besides Taiwan equally as strongly over igniting a regional war with US or Japanese involvement (or even worse, Philippines and SK and Australia or something too). That is: political takeover >> military takeover >> military takeover and a fight with the US >> military takeover and a fight with the US and a fight with multiple regional allies of theirs, all separated by significant gaps. If you're proposing that they'd actually prefer a fight, or feels ambivalent about if the US or other allies intervene, or some other way I have that list of preferences wrong, I'm all ears to that argument but I don't think that's what you are saying? Because that changes the discussion considerably, if so.
Even if you're an internal, hawkish CCP member in the PLA, a war is risky as fuck even in optimistic scenarios, and the global fallout is probably even more unpredictable than that. So yeah, if I'm China I'm much more concerned about our chances of pulling off a Taiwanese takeover without anyone else intervening because that's the preferred solution anyways. ALL of that is downstream from deterrence (i.e. how much respect and fear you generate), and if China's deterrence has a problem the whole strategy has a problem. Thus, the second quote in the OP.
Briefly, btw, I think if we do use his list: 2, 3, and to a lesser extent 4 (base hardening, air power, space/cyber power) are a bit TBD, but maybe. 6 (casualty tolerance) might come into play but I think it's a useless data point. 7 (worth a war) probably nudges them a bit towards yes. 8 (war fever) is almost hilariously irrelevant, because Trump didn't even try to whip any up. 9 (ally commitment), the Pacific allies might get a low-scale idea how local populations might react or how their US bases would be exposed. 14 (economic damage to China) will be a very interesting data point to look at, TBD right now. 17 (deindustrialization) could go either way, but this conflict will probably have a minor impact. 18 (American innovation) works slightly against China here: the saying is that the military always prepares to fight "the last war" and the "last war" is increasingly looking more similar to China than it did 10 or 15 years ago. 19 (China's foreign influence) also works against China in a bigger way: they seem to be entirely impotent to affect this conflict in any meaningful way, even diplomatically. I think that's a bit of a reality check moment for them. Unrelated technically, but for 20 (counterintel) China just hacked the FBI pretty bad, as far as I can tell they are dominating there.
Why does this matter? The big geopolitical question in 2027 isn't going to be China's capacity to deter America - it will be America (plus some bit player allies)'s capacity to deter China from invading Taiwan. If China wants to attack Taiwan and thinks they can win, they just do it. The act is self-communicating.
The core point that Tanner Greer is making is that America curb-stomping a weak enemy in days rather than the expected weeks* doesn't change the credibility in Chinese eyes of American deterrence very much.
* No, there isn't a huge body of establishment Iran doves claiming that Iran could beat America. The standard Iran dove argument was (and is) that
I addressed this:
I stated right at the top that in terms of an actual conflict, I think China would win relatively decisively. But even if you think you will probably win, that's not the only option on the table. I think that on balance, military options should be downweighted because of pre-existing preferences to take it over without US intervention. Why?
To oversimplify, to take Taiwan without a major intervention, you're counting on one of these:
Here's my logic. Since China has realized that it's bad at meaningfully bluffing, this makes the relative chances of pulling off a non-intervention takeover much lower in relation to the risk of an intervention. The risk shifts to military conflict. And of course in all of this, there's the "nothing happens/waiting" scenario. Since China's "utility function" is afraid of risk, and weights a nonintervention so much higher than a risky direct conflict, the overall effect of this risk shift is, somewhat counterintuitively but valid mathematically, towards "nothing happens". That's what I'm trying to get across: not all these options are of equal desirability, and this new reality where Chinese deterrence is ineffective means the most desirable options are less likely to work.
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If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.
Burma does not impress anyone -- wake me when they head into India...
Why would China want to do that? It's not like the US ever fought a nuclear power and for good reason.
Doing easy things is not a good demonstration of military prowess -- that doesn't make the hard things smart to do, but it would be impressive if China could take territory from India. (preferrably without getting nuked, but AIUI there's not a real MAD situation in play with India -- so I'd still be impressed if the Chinese got their hair mussed a little)
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I think the reason is looking at the shitshow of American and Russian interventions across the world and deciding do nothing and win is a pretty good ethos.
Yeah unless the USA start directly hitting China or maybe some crazy AGI situation it seems pretty clear they'll overtake sooner or later economically on the current trend. Why spazz and complicate things
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