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One possible negative consequence of the Iran war that I haven't seen talked about much is that it might encourage both the American establishment and the American public to think too lightly of war with China. More the latter than the former, really - I am sure that the former at least understand the danger of nuclear war and have no interest in getting personally hit by nuclear weapons. But even they might become a bit too reckless as a result of these easy military victories. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the public has very little understanding of military affairs and probably don't really understand the difference in power between China and every other US rival. The way I would put it, the Iran war is like an NBA team playing a college team, maybe even a high school team. Yes, Iran is keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and are pulling off the occasional successful strike against Israel and the Gulf countries. But that is happening because they are lucky in terms of geography to be sitting next to one of the world's most economically important waterways and are also right next to the Gulf countries. In terms of pure military-on-military action, the US military is dominating while suffering barely a scratch.
War against China would be like an NBA team playing another NBA team, maybe a weaker NBA team but an NBA team nonetheless. There is a danger of insufficient caution causing a series of minor escalations to blossom into full-scale war against China.
The Persian war, our battle of Carrhae, is giving China pause about its Taiwan invasion plans if it has any brains. If Iran can close the straight of Hormuz then Japan can close the south China sea.
Okay, let's not get over-excited.
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Unless the Chinese leaders are total idiots, I think they probably realized many years ago that effective closure of all of their sea-going trade routes is a likely outcome of an attempt to invade Taiwan. So I doubt that the Iran war has changed their calculus in that regard. I'm sure that they have been very busy analyzing the war to get other kinds of information, though.
I don't know if China has any serious intention of attempting to grab Taiwan, but certainly they have plans drawn up for how to go about it if they do decide to try. My guess is that, unless they are total idiots, they have baked in the assumption that they will lose most or all sea-going trade for the duration of the war, and they might be banking on the assumption that their industrial might will compel countries to trade with them again after the war concludes. Not all countries, but at least enough countries that the invasion may end up having been worthwhile.
If I were the Chinese leaders, though, I probably wouldn't try an invasion regardless of how the Iran war is going. There is just not enough possible gain given the risk.
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No, not really. Does Japan have a network of defensive and offensive emplacements that had been put in place over decades? Do they have a massive indigenous drone program that does not rely on foreign imports? As a society, are they tightly integrated into the global economy (and hence dependent upon foreign imports) or are they mostly self sufficient? Is their primary foe on the other side of the world with an anemic manufacturing base, or is it directly adjacent to them and with a huge domestic manufacturing base? In another world, Japan could close the south China sea without any problems - but not in this one.
Japan could probably mine the SCS pretty easily with their fleet of submarines, which might close it to international traffic based on the risk profiles we've seen.
They have a pretty large submarine fleet incidentally, nearly as many AIP submarines as China does, and a competitive production rate.
This does nothing to change their position - Japan is far more dependent upon sea-based imports than China, and any kind of escalation will result in them hurting themselves far more than they hurt China. If China was somehow completely cut off from the sea, they'd still have access to extensive land-based trade networks, including Russian fossil fuel supplies. If Japan is cut off from sea-based trade, which China would be able to do far more easily, they have no other options.
Yes, it's absolutely true that Japan versus China wouldn't be much of a contest.
But note that part of the Chinese situation is that they are locked "behind the first island chain" which creates chokepoints. Japan doesn't have the same weakness because their back is to the Pacific.
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This is such a brain dead analysis. What’s the US military “dominating” exactly? What did they achieve after a whole month apart from killing a bunch of useless geriatrics? Every single US base in the region is either abandoned or is operating under routine fire and losing planes on the ground daily. The aircraft carriers are hiding behind the landmass of Oman and Saudi Arabia. Regime change is obviously not coming. Kurds are not rebelling. I have not seen any evidence at all that American bombers can operate over Iran without resorting to standoff ammunition (or well, getting shut down). Fantastically expensive and limited weapon systems for all of this nonsense is mainly being transferred from Asia-Pacific.
Unless Trump can pull off some incredible feat of deal making/chickening out and salesmanship, this is turning into one of the most spectacular military quagmires in modern history. The only consolidation will be that there won’t even be an option of US fighting China anymore so the world might become a safer place for it.
The US military has caused vastly more destruction to the Iranian leadership and military than the Iranian military has caused to the US leadership and military. This is just an objective fact. I'm not rooting for the US in this war, in case you're curious, though I'm not rooting for the Iranian government either. Actually I'd be pretty happy if Trump, Hegseth, and their entire crew somehow got blown up by an Iranian bomb tomorrow, although my happiness would be tempered by the knowledge that this would almost certainly lead to a devastating retaliation against Iran, and also by the knowledge that the Iranian leaders are complete scumbags to their own population. The thing is, the US military is so large and powerful that the lost soldiers and aircraft and so on that Iran has caused is just a tiny scratch. The carriers might be hiding, but that's because there is no compelling need for them to come closer that is worth, to the Trump administration, the bad optics of seeing a carrier on fire. In an existential war, they would come out. Same with the bases, the only reason they've been evacuated is because this is a war of choice for the US, not an existential war.
I'm not saying that Iran is losing strategically, although I think that is a complex and very fast-evolving matter. Note that I said "in terms of pure military-on-military action the US is dominating". Which is true, it's like a grown man kicking the shit out of an infant.
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I think both what you and @Goodguy wrote is true.
On the one hand, the US can clearly bomb Iran with impunity, their air defense seems to do little to keep the bombers away. (The aircraft carriers are indeed hiding, but that might also be an abundance of caution. Are they effective from where they are currently anchored? If so, it is probably clever to keep them out of harm's way, if not, that would indeed showcase the (presumed) effectiveness of Iranian anti-ship missiles.) They probably killed more senior leadership in a few days of war than what the Allies managed between 1933-45. They managed to pull off an impressive rescue operation. The casualties have been just as lopsided as in the Gaza war.
The problem is that you can win every battle and still lose the war, tactical victories are meaningless without achievable strategic objectives. So they turned the Ayatollah into a martyr and are instead dealing with Ayatollah Jr, whose father and wife they just killed in an airstrike. How is that an improvement? They have the firepower to level Tehran, but that would only get them a cozy cell in the Hague, not prevent IRGCs from continuing to launch missiles from 100km of coastline against any oil tanker for the forseable future. They are spending a shit-ton of taxpayer money to dominate a battlefield while also being totally unable to prevent Iran from wrecking the world economy to a degree which is presidency-ending.
I mean, even Operation Barbarossa took six months to go from optimism to 'why are the Soviets not sticking to our plan?', and a further six months to go to 'oh shit'. Trump's plan went well for the day when he killed the Ayatollah, and then he was completely unprepared for Iran not being Venezuela and surrendering at the earliest opportunity, but instead closing the strait (as everyone had predicted they would).
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Now you have.
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Then you're not looking in the right places
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We haven't really seen what PLA is capable off. So the answer is we don't know.
I can only speak for myself, but this is one of the questions, alongside with other great questions of mankind like What does it feel like to stick your penis into a toaster? where I am perfectly willing to keep my ignorance.
Even if China was merely an upscaled Iran who took a beating while lobbing missiles at regional US allies and disrupting the SE Asia trade, attacking them would dwarf any other Trump decision in stupidity by orders of magnitude. And in reality, they are certainly not just an upscaled Iran.
Of course, the other unknown is the US military, which has not been in a conflict against peer adversaries since WW2. A lot of the funding of military hardware seems to be as much about state politics as it is about enhancing capabilities, and if it turns out that their hardware is not so much better that it makes the Chinese hardware moot, the production capabilities of China might prevail in attritional warfare.
The US easily beating Iran on a tactical level (and only there!) does not prove anything, they are spending more on this war per week than Iran spends on defense per year. At this level of disparity, anything less lopsided would indicate total incompetence on the part of the stronger party. (Nor would these figures stay the same if the US foolishly tried to occupy Iran.)
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There's a decent chance that in reality the PLA would stomp the US military in any Asia Pacific conflict. Their latest gen weapons are very very efficient and the whole military industrial complex rot that infests the US military doesn't really exist over tere.
Didn't they just disappear the guy in charge of their anti-stealth tech because in the aftermath of said tech being utterly ineffective in Venezuela and Iran they discovered that the guy had just made up the data saying it would work on US stealth bombers?
China has large cultural problems of it's own, and I frankly wouldn't be surprised to discover Russian levels of materials were garbage or simply non-existent because they were secretly sold off the back of a truck.
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And then there's a decent change they're a paper tiger like it turned out the USSR had been since at least the 1980s.
This is not clear whatsoever.
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The US military is far more combat experienced, has a more flexible doctrine, and Chinese equipment hasn't performed with flying colours in Persia.
What equipment does Iran have from China? There was a report that they were going to sell them anti ship missiles but that was before the war. It's possible that radars were smuggled in as a test, but you can't hide those things, they have to be sitting out in the open to do their job.
https://dominotheory.com/hq-nein-analysts-say-no-evidence-iran-is-using-modern-chinese-air-defense-systems/
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I don't think this is quite true.
It does not follow, of course, that just because the China MIC has serious corruption issues that their stuff doesn't work. But I think imagining the Chinese as blessedly serious and entirely above all the petty squabbles in the US of A is grass-is-greener thinking.
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I think this is what happened with Venezuela and Iran, but I don't think the results of the Iran war are all that encouraging to take on someone even bigger.
Two movies, one screen. All my Republican Boomer relatives are convinced that we’re kicking ass in Iran and that the Iranian people are on verge of revolting and forming a new democratic government with our help. I’m pretty sure they’d be happy to see us take on China as well in a few months.
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