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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'm sorry, but it seems a bit of an unjustified update. Taiwan timeline likely didn't change a bit.
Right, the war with Iran has already wasted years' worth of production of interceptors, and you've even got a $1.1B radar and it seems multiple of those vaunted THAAD systems destroyed. This looks extemely bad for any future conflict with China but not because you'll take time to replenish this stuff. I've given to understand that Americans have a certain logarithmic sense for prowess of different adversary nations: Venezuela and Cuba are like "5-6", Iran and Russia are "7", China is maybe "8". In reality the differences are measured in the orders of magnitude. If Iran can exhaust these interceptors in a week, a massive Chinese strike would probably take hours to burn through Guam, Okinawa, and whatever is on Taiwan. They're making 31 million cars a year, just for example; mobilized, they can make not thousands but tens of millions of flying mopeds if they want. Interceptor-based defense is just inadequate against a superior industrial power; it barely works against an inferior one.
Yes, one can argue that this doctrine is getting obsolete if DEW-based defense advances, but similar logic applies to whatever comes next, and what's happening now isn't a case of getting caught by surprise – like a third of your naval power is in the theater, amid long-established bases, with local cooperation; and you've been watching the war in Ukraine for over 4 years, these are the same damn Shaheds (maybe with a few modifications) Russians had been using early on, from the OG Shahed maker. Where are Palmer Luckey's Roadrunners or Anvils knocking them out for cheaps? All these AI-driven turrets? Lasers, EW systems? The anti-ballistic front is less embarrassing but still economically sad. In light of all this, it's unclear to me why China would ever care about the "opportunity" presented by the US exhausting interceptors elsewhere.
This is a strange take too. Which observers believed that the US can't enjoy air superiority against Iran? Some doompillers who watched one too many recruitment ad with LGBT representation?
What actually matters is, for instance, whether they can detect and effectively engage your stealth aircraft. And this war is not teaching us much because Iranians don't have any modern Chinese assets or equivalents. I've been trying to find confirmations of hits of anything of that sort, because the entire internet is overflowing with claims how American-Israeli Power has proven inefficacy of Chinese temu radars/missiles. So far I've only learned that CENTCOM has taken out an HQ-2 SAM with something like a JDAM. It might be Sayyid 2, though. In any case both are close derivatives of the Soviet 75 Dvina, and 75 here is not for the year of commissioning, it actually dates back to 1957. It's probably the most widely deployed SAM in history, you've had trouble with it in Vietnam, and have learned a thing or two since then. There are some claims by pro-PRC third worldists and hawks alike that «China Arms Iran with 700km Anti-Stealth Radar Capable of Tracking F-35 and B-2 — YLC-8B» , and consequently now gloating that those radars have been destroyed. It's not impossible, after all having a long-range radar unit by itself doesn't imply you can react effectively, but I just hope that Americans and Israelis show photos of the wreckage. Same story with alleged Chinese missiles and everything else.
In Venezuela, it's not clear if any air defense systems were even operational, or stuck in half-disassembled mode. Looking up this stuff one is struck by the vast overrepresentation of American and Indian content, indeed Americans and Indians are becoming culturally indistinguishable.
This is just … I don't know how to describe it, some mix of naive idealism and narcissism. Is Xi a dictator or nah? Why would he need a "greenlight" in the form of example of belligerence from his main pacing threat? Where would he cash it in? Nobody important in, say, Europe will claim that whacking Iran is morally or legally equivalent to conquering Taiwan, so it changes nothing and is only good for domestic rhetoric about Western hypocrisy. I guess Americans are so powerful that they can afford to be solipsistic, and so might overrate the value of domestic moral rhetoric in the general case. But even on that front, China is quite unified in believing that reunification, including by violent means, is justified. United States is no standard or paragon. It's not making invasion more likely.
I think they've been quite sure they'll lose access to oil imports in the case of the full-scale war with the US, and will have to fight for it.
Basically I believe Americans strongly overrate how much their antics in random powerless Evil Nations affect Chinese plans one way or another way. They're just not informative.
If you think I'm a Chinese shill, here's a Chinese hawk with impeccable credentials: Tanner Greer.
The idea that the Iran operation was mostly about China, that it fundamentally changes Chinese perceptions of American strength, or that it has already altered the balance of power between China and America in any real way, is bizarre to me.
We know what metrics the Chinese judge their competition with the US by. We know the military measures they care about and we know the non-military elements of national power that they think are most important.
Very honestly: the upcoming war powers resolutions vote on Iran will likely matter more to Chinese perceptions of American capacity (if the admin fails to get the vote) than the actual military attacks on Iran. Not hard to predict the sort of analysis the Xie Tao types will write up.
To fundamentally change Chinese perceptions (or for that matter, realities, as IMHO the Chinese are largely looking at the right metrics) the Iran operation would have to change one’s answer to any of the following questions:
Anyways you get the idea. The Party leadership sees geopolitical competition between the United States and China as a contest of technological supremacy. The long run weaknesses they see in the United States are political and cultural; in turn, the thing they fear most is ideological subversion of their own regime. Militarily they prepare for a no-holds barred fight over the waters of the west Pacific —the key factors there are the willingness of US, Japan, and Taiwan to be a part of that fight and then our ability to sustain it in the face of great losses in both men and machinery. The Iran stuff is orthogonal to almost all of that.
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.
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.
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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