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I'm not Shakes, but I do share some of his American triumphalist views.
First, I want to push back on the idea that this is a cold war. I feel like that pays a disservice to just how serious and deadly the real cold war was. The world had just emerged from WW2, and everyone was armed to the hilt, epecially the Soviets. Both sides were building and testing nukes as fast as possible, with the main plan for WW3 to simply annihilate the other with mass nukes. Everyone was on a hair trigger alert, to the point where they had to make a special hotline between Washington and the Kremlin to de-escalate dangerous situations. US military spending as a percentage of GDP reached 13% in the 1950s Korean war, then 9% in the 60s Vietnam war, then 7% in the 80s. Soviet spending is hard to measure, but was likely an even greater burden for them, as they needed a massive military to keep their empire together.
Currently the US spends 3.4%, and that's projected to go down in the future. China spends around 1.5% (although with mass draft that doesn't count as spending). In other words, neither side is actually spending, or acting, as if there's a cold war. I feel like we're the two biggest kids in PE class, and everyone else around us keeps trying to get us to fight, when we really just want to play basketball. We can travel to each others countries as tourists quite easily and freely, which usually wasn't possible during the cold war. We're both each other's largest trade partner. These are peaceful times.
For right now the US still has the edge in Space and AI tech. Is it possible that China could catch up and take the lead? Sure, maybe. Maybe they land on the moon a few months ahead of us, or hit a new AI benchmark first. So what. The US would still have amazing tech in that area. I don't see a future where the US isn't at least a major player in tech, and the most likely possibility is that we'll still be the leader, since so many of the world's experts come here to work in AI. We're also, for what it's worth, investing heavily in using robotics and AI to compete with China in manufacturing- they used to have a huge advantage there with their large cheap labor force, but robots are even cheaper than that. For example, the US is now growing startups to break China's monopoly on rare earth refining.
You didn't even mention energy, where China is still massively dependant on oil and coal imports. They've handled the Iran crisis by... importing and burning even more coal, leading to horrendous pollution. Meanwhile the US just pumps more oil (and can now get it from Venezuela, as well as Canada or Mexico when necessary). Not to mention the interesting advances being made in new forms of nuclear. That said, I'm impressed with how much cheap solar PV China has been able to produce, and I wish them all the best in continuing to produce more. That seems like a huge win for humanity as a whole, not some cold war sputnik moment. (and the US is also producing lots of new solar. I worry about Europe's energy situation though... they don't have much oil, they seem culturally dead set against nuclear, and they have terrible geography for solar.)
Then there's demographics. The US has issues here too of course, but China really has issues. They're down to just 1 child per woman on average, despite a lot of effort to boost it, and they can't really do immigration like the US does. So in about 20-40 years, they'll be in a very awkward spot with massive population of retirees, very few working-age people to support them, and almost no children. That will put a huge strain on their economy and technological growth, unless of course the singularity comes along to change everything before then.
These are times in which the citizenry assumes peace. There is a difference. The EMH does not apply to military spending or popular sentiment.
Or to put it another way: when Xi Jinping told the PLA to prepare the capability to invade Taiwan in 2027 (he said this multiple years ago), do you think that he wasn't being serious?
I'm not saying we're definitely going to have a nuclear war next year. He might call no-go. The West might eat Beijing's cock. Or we might have a conventional war that doesn't go nuclear (this last one is very unlikely, though). But it's a live option. And, obviously, "decent chance of WWIII" is pretty serious. But we are not serious people.
Nobody takes great-power war into account, 'tis true. Nobody does cybersecurity as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (we mandate smart cars, because we're too used to the only hacker threat being organised crime who have nothing to gain by killing 50,000 people in rush hour). Nobody does reliance on space as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (the moment there's a great-power war, lol ASAT and LEO is destroyed by Kessler syndrome). Nobody does urban planning as though WWIII is a thing that might happen (YIMBY). I don't think that this is because WWIII's impossible. I think that this is because it's been 73 years since a great-power war and 81 years since a total war, most of the Western population is less than 78 years old, and the various other pressures on Western attention and business practices have had their way - after all, the IQ 100 way of learning to take something seriously is generally to get burned by it.
(There was a whole pile of commercial integration between the great powers in 1914, too. WWI happened anyway.)
Let me ask you this. How much time do you spend listening to Xi Jinping speeches? Are you fluent in Chinese? Do you keep up with all of his internal briefings and read all of his essays?
I'm going to guess the answer is no. Me neither. It's impossible to keep up with everything like that unless its your professional job. So I rely on trusting those professionals, instead of trying to figure it all out myself. But that means we can't take one statement out of context from a foreign leader and take it literally- let the professionals who analyze this stuff figure out what it means. If they're not worried, I'm not either.
Politicians love to talk, it's what they do. Most of it is aimed at whatever audiencee they're talking to at the time, not for foreign nations. So it sounds to me like he made some rah-rah patriotic "make the PLA great again!" speech to encourage the troops, which then got picked up by foreign media, and they've been scaremongering us for years. Because that's what media does.
Notice Xi Jinping hasn't done. He hasn't loudly repeated the threat over and over again, like real warmongers do. He's never said anything to Taiwan at all. He hasn't significantly increased military spending, or built any amphibious invasion craft, or worked the general public up into a militaristic frenzy like the leaders did before WW1. There's just no parallel at all in modern times to the massive nationalistic arms race that preceded WW1.
Your info may be out of date.
Ok, find and replace "any" with "a significant amount of." Five barges is not the sort of invasion force that threatens WW3.
The barges aren't ferries. The barges are mobile docks for ferries, with long ramps to overcome the various countermeasures Taiwan has at its beaches. That's why there aren't very many of them.
The ferries are ferries. The PRC is big on the idea of "civil-military fusion"; rather than commission a fleet of dedicated military transports, they told all their shipbuilders that all their roll-on-roll-off ferries (for moving cars over water) had to be tank-compatible.
Um.
They are, which is a very-large chunk of why I am.
(Also, if we're using Reliable Sources, I'll note that the actual, official Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it ever was in the Cold War. The experts are very concerned. What's different to the Cold War is the vibe among laymen.)
Taiwan will be anschluss-ed with China. That is inevitable. Even the KMT knows it. So far it seems that KMT is trying to get there the easy way and the DPP are trying to see how hard the hard way will be.
I don't think it is inevitable, although avoiding it may get a lot of Taiwanese (and others) killed.
If it goes nuclear, the USA has a lot more nukes; China would have to surrender. Of course, Taipei and Tainan would assuredly be nuked in the process.
(Also, I think the term "Anschluss" is misleading here; Austrians generally welcomed the actual Anschluss, while Taiwanese support for unification is lizardman since Xi pulled a Darth Vader on Hong Kong.)
sorry, this is simply delusional optimism. It's not even clear they'll take more damage relative to capacity, in the case of a full-scale exchange. Major Chinese cities are reinforced concrete with abundant shelters (overbuilt underground parkings and subways designed specifically for this scenario) and can absorb hundreds of nukes; Americans live in, basically, highly flammable straw huts they regularly abandon to weather events, air bursts would extinguish entire mega-suburbs. Even if the current exchange rate disfavors China, they can easily scale up the production of warheads and missiles to high thousands if they so choose. The fact that they do not choose to move faster simply speaks to their confidence that the US won't go nuclear over Taiwan, which is simply correct game theory. The US after a nuclear exchange with China might fall behind India and Israel for decades, even if China is leveled too, it's not worth it.
The real asymmetric factor is American design to have a reliable anti-ballistic defense. If that works and Chinese nuclear deterrence is neutralized, things obviously change. But it's not clear what timelines we're talking about.
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