Unfortunately, Trump has actually been very consistent indeed. It’s not hard to predict how he will behave in a given situation. For instance, there’s no chance he will take a pro-Ukraine stance, call for fossil fuels to be ditched, tone down his rhetoric, become pro-choice/pro-LGBT/pro-feminism, etc.
It can be assessed with fairly high certainty how he’d behave with regards to China in the thread-topic OP scenario.
Any invasion of Taiwan would be killing the golden goose; there’s no way Taiwan would be viable as a chip-producing place post-invasion. It’s not just about the technology, but also about the human talent.
The chips aren’t so much secret as it is that TSMC does the process really well. China itself is already down to about 7 nanometers and slowly catching up anyway. But it’s the teamwork and decades of practice that enable TSMC to get high wafer yields and minimized errors.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Taiwan makes a point of blowing up the chip manufacturing facility itself, if it comes to that.
And if they don’t, the US will.
China doesn’t want Taiwan for the golden goose of chip factories, or practical economic reasons.
China must re-conquer Taiwan , to restore its dignity as a nation.
It is like a religious duty, and they are as fanatic about it as the Taliban are about forcing women to wear burkas.
They see the existence of Taiwan as an offense to the dignity of the 5000 year history of the True Chinese People.
As an analogy: For the Chinese, allowing Taiwan to continue remaining on the map is as inexcusable as it would be for American and European democracies to allow slavery.
It is a visceral, fundamental axiom of their core identity.
China will take Taiwan, as soon as they have the opportunity. Trump may well give it to them.
Man, irredentism is a hell of a drug.
Yeah. There seems to be some disagreement on my main questions, but I’m pretty sure this is true.
Seems like it might be a good time to stock up on spares of anything we need that’s made in Taiwan…
Well, we didn’t have WWIII under Nixon, we didn’t go to war with China, and we ended the Viet Nam war. not sure what other standards you are using,
The absolutely worst things didn’t transpire, so he must have been doing something right? I guess that’s why Nixon quit when he did; he successfully accomplished all of his goals and had no more empires left to conquer!
Stranger
I’m not sure why you have to be a contrarian. You’re the one that called Nixon the “Madman”, yet he managed to NOT start a war with China. Can we say the same thing about trump? I guess we’ll see.
46 presidents, including Nixon, Reagan and that idiot W, have managed to avoid WWIII. Does this streak end? Don’t blame Nixon.
Of course it has only been notionally part of China since the late 17th century and not functionally fully absorbed until essentially the 20th, post-Japanese occupation. But irredentism is always more emotional than logical.
I feel like you’re giving James K. Polk more credit for averting nuclear war than he probably deserves.
I think Washington was close to dropping nukes on the airports during the Revolutionary war and only Jefferson kept him in check.
I “have to be a contrarian” because this is an incredible line of non sequiturs. First of all, nowhere did I call Nixon “the ‘Madman’”; I referred to the “Madman Theory” of international relations, in which according to Nixon’s Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman (a notorious liar) Nixon allegedly named it as his ‘strategy’ of convincing the North Vietnamese government of doing anything up to and including the use of nuclear weapons to win the War. It’s a nonsense theory of political brinksmanship that has no basis in fact and certainly not in wargaming scenarios, and quite obviously did non accomplish the desired goals even if this was a rare case of Haldeman actually telling the truth.
We ‘didn’t go to war with China’ over Vietnam because China wasn’t looking for a war and would have been further devastated after the famines of the Great Leap Forward and the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Although China had a small inventory of nuclear weapons they had no means to deliver them to the United States. China also had very little interest in defending Vietnam beyond keeping the United States from having a compliant nation on its southern border, and in fact launched its own incursion into Vietnam less than four years after the US withdrawal.
Trump has no interest in starting a shooting war with China, particularly over Taiwan, nor will the US military promote such a conflict as they are ill-prepared to engage in a naval conflict halfway around the world in the shallow waters of the Taiwan Strait and within land-based missiles, drones, and direct surveillance of the Chinese mainland. He might very well start or expand WWIII (which I suspect history will record has already begun) but not over Taiwan which he doesn’t give a 4 AM shit about.
Stranger
Not in direct words, but since Nixon was the only one who could use nuclear weapons, Nixon was effectively the “madman” in his own policy. Calling Haldeman a liar is disingenuous. They all were liars, all the time, if required. At any rate, Nixon had plenty of time to correct the lie, were it such.
You’re portraying this as way too easy for the PRC to pull off.
The only county with experience in amphib operations is the US, it certainly isn’t China. They are virtually impossible to accomplish (and keep supplied) without complete air and sea superiority, and that’s not an easy task.
While the PLA(N) has come a long way over the last decade, they are still well behind the US Navy. The day may come when they are superior, but it’s not today. Additionally, many if not most of the major nations in the pacific rim are not supportive of more domination by China. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Viet Nam and the like would support the US and Taiwan to some degree.
And I don’t believe that the PRC wants to start a nuclear war of Taiwan either.
As I’ve said in past threads, I think it’s far less likely than a lot of western media likes to portray, and we should be wary of people implying we need to do something to stop a supposedly imminent attack.
Not that China are the good guys, but they are generally happy to play the looong game. Munching on islands in the SCS and gradually being more bold in the strait is their style. If you were to tell Xi that Taiwan would be reunited in 50 years he’d be delighted.
China successfully invaded Hainan. In 1950.
The problem is American military planners assume that the only way an amphibious invasion can be successfully conducted is the way American military planners would do it.
Another problem is military planners are often too complacent about ignoring changes in military technology. They tend to assume that whatever factors determine military superiority remain unchanged - until a battle destroys their assumption.
Prior to WWII, navies assume that naval superiority was based on how big your battleships were and how many of them you had. Then the war started and countries found out that battleships were generally irrelevant because a plane or a submarine could sink one long before it ever saw an enemy battleship.
The same thing might be happening now. The American navy bases itself around aircraft carriers and assumes it has naval superiority because it has more carriers than all the other countries in the world combined.
But China has developed a series of missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers at a range of several hundred miles. And it’s been deploying hundreds of these missiles along its coast. And extensively training and test firing them.
So what happens when all of America’s plans to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion assume the presence of American carriers - and those carriers find they can’t approach within five hundred miles of Taiwan?
IMHO, America would be well-suited to employ only stealth bombers and submarines against China in a Taiwan scenario. Those two things have the advantage of being 1) hard to detect and also 2) putting relatively few American lives at risk, while still packing firepower. Aircraft carrier battle groups, while bringing additional firepower and air cover, would not be worth the potential loss of many thousands of lives.
But in response to the talk about amphibious invasion, there is also the alternate method China might use, of air assault. With Taiwan being only 90 miles away, it is well within range of helicopters. If China used its 1,500 or so helicopters, it could conceivably put, say, a hundred thousand invasion troops on Taiwan in 24 hours’ time, with the choppers flying back and forth on repeated ferry trips. But those helos would be vulnerable to Stingers and other SAMs, and those infantry would likely have no heavy weapons they could bring for firepower.
In general I agree with your POV that China plays long & slow and has done so reliably for ~75 years now.
OTOH …
Xi himself is a bit of a man in a hurry. He’s now age 71 with maybe another 15 years of vigor left in him. He unquestionably wants China to have Taiwan. He also wants to be the guy who did it.
All the various arguments about “Peak China” due to demographics, economics, pollution, political change, climate change, etc., indicate a society with at least some awareness that although they go from strength to strength now, that window may be closing soon. Which is another force that counsels impatience, not patience.