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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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South Korean decapitation strike on the absolute monarch of an insecure nuclear power seems like a very risky ploy.

Well, tell it to the South Koreans. I don't think that North Korea and China are joined at the hip the way you seem to think they are (ditto for South Korea and the United States), nor do I think sending some guys to Ukraine, at zero risk to the North Korean regime, is any indicator of how they will behave in a potentially existential situation.

If swarms of relatively cheap Shaheds and FPV drones are the way of the future, then it plays into China's biggest strengths in industrial scale

Now you're just taunting me. You know that FPVs are not the future of naval warfare.

The Chinese economy grows faster than the US, they're breaking into more and more markets globally, everyone started bitching about overproduction.

I wouldn't be so confident about the Chinese economy if I was you – but this is a positive reason why China may decide to sit around and do nothing. And yet if they do that, I think there is a good chance that the US is actually able to procure enough missiles, mines and torpedoes to make shutting down the strait a foregone conclusion. China can try to build more ships than LRASMs, more interceptors than the cheap hypersonic and LUCAS cruise missiles the US is producing, but they will be on the wrong side of the cost curve in doing so.

Even their geography has its advantages, they're right next to the places they'd be fighting, whereas America is on the other side of the world.

Sort of - in some ways, the US has the best of both worlds here. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines host US bases, and if a war kicks off, the entire Chinese navy will be ranged by missiles based there, while portions of the US Navy will be safely out of range of conventional Chinese missiles. China does have strategic depth, but it is mostly for their land and air forces.

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