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Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
You don’t have to be a professor of international relations to see why this idea is retarded. So you accept Russian control of Eastern Ukraine and lift all sanctions on Russia, and then Russia has to ‘exit’ (ambiguous) its ‘military alliance’ (something that only partially exists on paper anyway) with China….or else…what? Vivek restores sanctions on Russia for not sufficiently breaking ties with China (pointless, even a temporary break in sanctions will allow for large scale repatriation or transfer of Russian capital in anticipation of future sanctions)? Are you going to trust Putin? How will that be measured? Why wouldn’t cooperation continue in an underhanded way? Once you force a Ukrainian defeat and unilaterally lift sanctions you’re not in a position of strength toward Russia, you’re in one of total weakness. And Vivek can’t threaten Putin with Ukrainian NATO membership because, as Putin knows, there are other member states that would be amenable to vetoing it regardless of what the US says.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan? Send Russia’s three remaining seaworthy warships to the South China Sea? And Vivek is an isolationist who only cares about Taiwan until 2028 or whatever anyway (when he believes TSMC will no longer be critical) so why care about a long-term ‘check on China’ at all?
Still, Vivek is a high verbal IQ arch-grifter who has never created a substantial, profitable business, bilked investors out of $400m to buy a $5m failed drug from GSK (and burned through that entire capital in a doomed pivot) and then himself pivoted into politics when the cheap money dried up. He has never accomplished anything that is both impressive and good for society in his entire life. Even Trump is a better businessman, so perhaps this is what America deserves.
One of the biggest limitations China has is a dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; if those are cut off sufficiently, any invasion of Taiwan is stillborn (and Xi runs the risk of his head ending up on a pike). Russia (and areas in Central Asia in which it has a lot of influence) is a very important backstop; with Malacca closed off, land-based imports of oil would still allow China to wage a war on the scale of a couple years instead of months. Russia offering a credible promise not to export fossil fuels to China would be worth a lot, if it were possible.
Oil and gas only matter if a war is fought on the years scale, not the weeks or months scale. This is virtually guaranteed not to be the case. Any Taiwanese conflict is going to be a months-long affair at best. And if it's longer, there are larger macroeconomic considerations more important than oil. I think you dramatically overestimate how much oil a country goes through mid-conflict. No one is going to boycott selling China oil in peacetime, either. In short, this entire line of reasoning is irrelevant and severing the so-called Russia-China military alliance (which mostly only exists on paper, it's not like the Russian fleet would ever, under any circumstances, fight alongside China against the US, which is the only thing of real value Russia even has in that theater.).
How would US even figure out whose submarines are attacking them?
They don't even need to surface. Even if you sank one, odds are that finding whose sub was it would require a deep diving ROVm
As any Clancy reader could tell you, from their distinctive audio signature.
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The war will last for only a couple months if one side or another gets a decisive victory. If it's more evenly matched, it will extend for years. Though I agree that if China does get that decisive victory, Russian oil will have been irrelevant and the world will quickly adapt to the new norm and eagerly sell fossil fuels to the new hegemon in the Western Pacific.
China obviously wants a 6-week campaign of victory after victory to happen, but that's not guaranteed. And if it gets stuck in long attritional warfare, it'll end up losing, but only after years of rationing and hopeful delusions being dashed. Without Russia enabling China to continue a war, all those delusions would be crushed much sooner, which is best for everyone involved.
There's pretty much zero chance that a conventional conflict over Taiwan lasts years. Maybe either a blockade or an insurgency could lass that long, but even those are unlikely. Taiwan is less than 6% of the size of Ukraine, while also being an island. Either a Chinese invasion gets stopped on the beaches, or it's pretty much game over. Taiwan's rugged terrain could plausibly let it fight for a few months, but little beyond that.
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I really cannot understand how you can believe that China, a nation with 1.4 billion people, would lose a war of attrition with Taiwan, a small island with a population of 23 million. Could you please explain or elaborate how China loses the war of attrition with Taiwan?
A war of attrition with the US, Japan, and every country which doesn't want China to be hegemon in the Western Pacific. Which is to say, all of China's neighbors. Vietnam and other regional players would maintain neutrality to not get too much on China's bad side, but they'd be rooting for US victory.
Here, Chinese victory would mean gaining control of Taiwan; US victory is not-Chinese victory.
So why would attrition mean China losing? If China can't get victory over ~3 months, its existing capabilities can't win it Taiwan. Over time, its warmaking capabilities will face increasing degradation relative to the US and its allies due to its sea lane imports being cut off. That's the core dynamic.
There are wildcards: China will be doing terribly economically, but so will US allies and the US itself. But less so than China. (Taiwan will be doing worst of all, but its military capabilities are irrelevant compared even to Japan's). That could cause domestic issues in those countries that would undermine warmaking efforts.
This is the bit that I can't understand. The US is currently unable to fully extricate Chinese gear from military supply lines and has frequent issues with counterfeit Chinese equipment showing up in military procurement. At the same time, the US navy agrees that China has approximately 232 times the amount of shipbuilding capacity that the USA does. Ukraine has proved that drones are now an increasingly important element to modern wars, and China's manufacturing capacity in that arena so dwarfs the US that there's barely even any comparison possible. At the same time, China's manufacturing base has made it a far more crucial trading partner to a lot of the world than the US. I just don't see how the US is going to interdict trade to and from China without causing the entire global economy to disintegrate overnight and make dedollarisation take place overnight rather than over a longer timespan.
In short, it comes down to oil. You need oil to make an economy run, which includes making jet fuel but also civilian purposes. China consumes around 15M barrels/day and produces only around 5M barrels/day domestically, with a strategic supply of around 1B barrels. There are workarounds--rationing, increasing imports from accessible sources--but the deficit after the strategic reserves are exhausted within 3-6 months will be crippling and destabilizing. You can run a pretty effective war machine on 5M barrels/day, but you can't sustain civil society on an 80% cut on civilian oil consumption.
The USA, for all its issues (both military and civilian), is not gonna be starved for oil. When China sinks its ships, the USA can rebuild them: it's true that China accounts for 48 per cent of global shipyard output, but South Korea (less likely) accounts for 25 per cent and Japan (more likely) does 15 per cent. Purely legal regulations prevent the US from taking advantage of those capacities, regulations that will be promptly discarded in the case of a real war.
It will happen, it will be brutal, and it will restructure the world economy. But I'm counting an obliterated world economy where China has failed to take Taiwan as a loss for China and a "win" for the US.
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