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The US placates Beijing to try to delay or avoid Beijing just going ahead and invading and taking it by force (if China ultimately believes there is no other pa

The US placates Beijing to try to delay or avoid Beijing just going ahead and invading and taking it by force (if China ultimately believes there is no other path). The US can't stop China from taking Taiwan. 20 or 30 years ago it would have been very difficult to stop that, today it's impossible. The US isn't even ready yet for that confrontation, it needs to deploy a massive number of ballistic missiles along the island chain off the coast to have a chance to at least make it a costly annexation (targeting their navy, as the US navy won't be able to get close enough). China's Deng Xiaoping strategy of hide your strength and bide your time, that's a stall tactic to buy time (in that case the time between when something is actual and something is publicly known, a knowledge-time gap). The US placating China is also a stall tactic, hoping to buy time for a better scenario favoring the US and Taiwan more than China (for example a liberalized China, which was still a naive hope as recently as 10 years ago; that was always unlikely but it was better than driving China toward forced annexation sooner).

someperson 6y ago
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I used to think it was inevitable that China will be able to successfully invade Taiwan, but its almost impossible to pull of an amphibious invasion. Taiwan's geography makes this particularly difficult.
- caycep 6y ago
  This. I think if China wanted to go all out, it could take Taiwan via massive force but it would be extremely costly for them and I don’t think the calculus of risk vs benefit adds up for them politically or practically. They certainly can maybe sink an American carrier, maybe, if their missiles are as good as they say, but that’s a big If.
  - lumost 6y ago
    In WW2 the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise ending to the dominance of the battleship, marking the first time that a power attempted to attack Battleship's by air. While this had been theorized for a few decades, all of the great powers continued to invest in battleships. No power has attempted to sink a carrier since 1945, there is ultimately limited data on how effective any anti-carrier weapon developed in the last 80 years would be in practice.
    - corty 6y ago
      Modern naval mines are torpedoes waiting on the sea floor for a carrier swimming by. Place a few where you know the carrier will drive over by sub, carrier sunk. Or just use the sub directly, modern small electric subs are undetectable in exercises, the sub will only be sunk when firing torpedoes. By then it is too late for the carrier. Saturation by long-range antiship missiles is also possible to work, if the Falkland War is any indication. And then there are the "deorbit a tungsten telephone pole" kind of ideas that just might work on a carrier, have no defense and are within the realm of possibility for both China, Russia and basically every state with the capability to get a few tons into some low orbit. Against sophisticated enemies, carriers are giant billboards with "shoot me" written on them.
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      The Battle of Taranto preceded Pearl Harbor and was a direct inspiration for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto Italian battleships were targeted & 3 were disabled. Also the British tried to sink the Argentinian aircraft carrier during the Falkland War and it escaped preatty much just due to luck.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
      - njarboe 6y ago
        There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
- adventured 6y ago
  China wins in every military confrontation scenario. They don't have to immediately pull off an invasion. Tomorrow they could begin a draconian blockade, while strategically bombing the island and begin an assassination & disruption campaign by inserting special forces. They can do it (rather inexpensively) on an indefinite basis, as long as they care to. Nobody can stop that and they have zero concern for the humanitarian disaster it would cause, with their eye on the long-term goal. Taiwan wouldn't last very long in that simple and very obvious scenario, it would rapidly degrade their condition. The world (those standing opposed to China's move) would quickly capitulate, understanding full well that the alternative is all out war with China; the UN would be begging for a settlement peace within weeks (which would result in China de facto taking over Taiwan). Mostly all that would happen to China are some sanctions, which China would shrug off (along with some dramatic, harshly worded PR releases). At the end of it, China won't need to invade with a large amphibious assault, it'll enter Taiwan largely unopposed as part of the brokered peace settlement. China is very rapidly building up its naval capabilities. It will be able to invade Taiwan this decade. That isn't a maybe, it's a certainty.
  - someperson 6y ago
    On China's (in)ability to successfully invade Taiwan, we can agree to disagree.
  - jake_morrison 6y ago
    I agree. Something that would help would be focusing on dealign with saboteurs and small unit attacks, and making it difficult to hold the island thorough guerrilla warfare. There is no indication that they are doing that. Even more effective for China is to simply invest a few billion Dollars into bribing politicians. Some would argue that this has already been done with the KMT. They can also put pressure on the owners of the first generation of factories in China, which tend to be related to KMT. They will give up Taiwan in order to keep their business.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Modern weapons make a successful amphibious invasion much easier. If the invading party can assert total air superiority, then the only bottleneck left is actually crossing the sea, which is not that big of an issue as long as the distance is low. The waters of the strait are also shallow enough that submarines are not that effective. Basically, it is certainly possible to pull of such an amphibious assault, and the US Navy's simulations recognize as much.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > If the invading party can assert total air superiority That is the hard part. Not only would you have to deal with US carrier based air assets, but also air assets from bases in Japan and South Korea. In addition, Aegis based cruisers also have a heavy anti-aircraft armament.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Establishing air superiority and creating a beachhead would be a matter of one day or two, at most. It would be impossible for a US carrier strike group to intervene by then. Same for Aegis. As for Japan, it is much too far from Taiwan to contribute. South Korea will not get involved for obvious reasons.
beerandt 6y ago
Yeah, I'm scared of Chinese military strategy, especially social engineering and psyops, but I still see enough sloppy military execution that I remain confident in overall US superiority. Look at how much trouble they've had building and attempting to operate an aircraft carrier. I think they finally figured out how to manufacture bearings for ballpoint pens in the last couple years. For both of these things, it's basically assumed that they stole US plans/technology/IP years/decades ago, yet still struggled/struggle to actually execute. What's the best example of a successful, overt, non-domestic Chinese military operation, since deciding to go the totalitarian capitalism route? Although now I'm also asking myself the same re: the US, and have sudden doubts. As a bit of a tangent: I don't buy most of the current China conspiracy theories, but I struggle to think of what a non-traditional attack by China would look like that might be more effective than our current reality. If nothing else, we've just supplied blueprints on how to successfully wage a future covert/non-traditional first-strike offensive.
- adventured 6y ago
  Aircraft carriers are very difficult to build, it makes sense they would have a hard time mastering it - only a few nations can even attempt to build them. They'll have four or five operational aircraft carriers this decade. They fully understand how to build them now. Their next step is catching up to the US aircraft carrier standard and being able to field a comprehensive blue-water navy (which is what they're reaching for by beginning to arrange naval bases around the globe). The problem with China is straight-forward: time is on their side in all cases. They're a rising global power with expanding resources and capabilities (and a moral flexibility to do whatever they want, anytime they want), while the US can no longer afford its positioning militarily around the world (and that context will be far worse in another ten years). The US has already lost Asia to China, its bureaucrats are just too arrogant - still swimming in the past - to realize it (and I say that both as an American and as someone who thinks that outcome is bad for the world). China will rule Asia in terms of power balance before another 10-15 years passes by and the US will be forced to cede more of its post WW2 positioning there. Have you seen what's going on in the US over the last few years? Of course you have, everyone has. That's not Trump, that's not blah blah blah (insert the fake excuses thrown around by pop media & 'journalists'). It's an eroding standard of living problem (that crashed off a cliff as the facade fell off with the 2009 crash) and everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about (healthcare, education, jobs, demographics, wages, household wealth, opioids, suicides, life expectancy, social chaos and strife that comes with many tens of millions of people being left adrift with no hope and they're all getting more angry and violent by the day on all political sides). The extraordinary mismanagement of the US by the clowns in DC over the last 20 years has tipped it over into shrink and recede mode (and that's just basic extrapolation, takes 30 seconds to calculate that forced outcome); the demands of the domestic population for social welfare improvement is getting violently loud and will get far louder this decade, which forces an eventual either or (this or that) decision for the politicians (this is how you get so many Republicans supporting $2,000 stimulus checks (an incomprehensible thing for that political side just 20 years ago), even some of them sense what's happening). In the short-term the US will print magic fiat (eat its wealth by debasing its currency) to pay for the costs of being a badly over-extended superpower, in the longer-term it has to recede because its finances are in an accelerating death spiral (Japan scenario). China doesn't have to do anything, it's pushing outward, and Asia is its backyard (whereas it's extremely expensive for the US to be positioned across Asia and put up a defensive front against China there).
s1artibartfast 6y ago
>The US can't stop China from taking Taiwan. Can’t or won’t? Certainly the US do a lot of damage to the mainland if they chose to engage in a hot total war. A nuclear barrage of Chinese military facilities and supply lines would shut down an amphibious assault. I imagine that the US can still do tremendous damage with conventional bombing and ballistics as well, though not without cost. Both of these are basically MAD scenarios.
- blackrock 6y ago
  > A nuclear barrage of Chinese military facilities Do you really want to entertain this ridiculous idea? A nuclear assault on Chinese soil, would invite a nuclear retaliation on American soil. Do you really want to lose Los Angeles or New York City, to a nuclear ICBM? And if it comes that, then both sides should just launch all their nukes, and see who is left afterwards to pick up the pieces. America is now a nuclear wasteland. And all because some people couldn’t swallow their pride, and realize that Taiwan is not their core interest.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Do you really want to entertain this ridiculous idea? Yes. Of course. Xi invading Taiwan would involve killing Americans, including American soldiers. It’s an attack on America and on our ally. If they use nuclear weapons and we demur, it’s a failure of deterrence. America has given its word to come to Taiwan’s defence. If we don’t like the implications of that promise, we should withdraw it. Keep in mind: a nuclear barrage (or ersatz nuclear, with nuclear-scale tonnage from non-nuclear warheads) of military assets is different from bombing Beijing. And being open to nuclear retaliation is different from attacking with nuclear weapons. Appeasement didn’t work for Hitler. I don’t see why we think this time would be different[1]. Nobody wants this. But a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with nuclear weapons would be clear escalation by Beijing. Hopefully, level heads prevail. [1] Not equating Xi with Hitler. I don’t think Beijing seriously plans on invading Taiwan. But if Xi does, we’ve miscalculated somewhere. And these comparisons become more apt.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    > America is now a nuclear wasteland. And all because some people couldn’t swallow their pride, and realize that Taiwan is not their core interest. In you opinion, was fighting Nazi Germany irrational too?
totetsu 6y ago
I find it hard to reconcile this prospect of inevitable conflict with how genuinely easy to get along and reach mutual understanding with, all the people from China and Taiwan I have taught, lived/studied/worked with over the years have been. Maybe there's a big domestic base of nationalists that we don't get to interact with in the Anglosphere..
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  1. Have you explicitly asked them about their thoughts on the status of Taiwan? 2. Did they give polite noncommittal answers or their actual thoughts? In the workplace, you don't usually have coworkers interrogating other coworkers about their geopolitical views around the watercooler and basing their future professional interactions on those views.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    well once in Japanese 101 a kid yelled out Taiwan is not a country when we were learning country names.. I ususlly have more tact than to ask explicitly geopolitical quwstions in the workplace. I am talking about how I dont get the same sense of intransigence from afore mentioned people as i do from say Japanese or Anglosphere
perennate 6y ago
If the fascist Chinese "Communist" Party sends the PLA to invade Taiwan, the US will be forced to respond, and if the CCP persists then it could devolve into a nuclear war that will destroy humanity. Hopefully Nazi Xi Jinping doesn't take the world down that path, but given his other actions, like waging a campaign of genocide against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, it's not impossible.

someperson 6y ago

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I used to think it was inevitable that China will be able to successfully invade Taiwan, but its almost impossible to pull of an amphibious invasion. Taiwan's geography makes this particularly difficult.

caycep 6y ago
This. I think if China wanted to go all out, it could take Taiwan via massive force but it would be extremely costly for them and I don’t think the calculus of risk vs benefit adds up for them politically or practically. They certainly can maybe sink an American carrier, maybe, if their missiles are as good as they say, but that’s a big If.
- lumost 6y ago
  In WW2 the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise ending to the dominance of the battleship, marking the first time that a power attempted to attack Battleship's by air. While this had been theorized for a few decades, all of the great powers continued to invest in battleships. No power has attempted to sink a carrier since 1945, there is ultimately limited data on how effective any anti-carrier weapon developed in the last 80 years would be in practice.
  - corty 6y ago
    Modern naval mines are torpedoes waiting on the sea floor for a carrier swimming by. Place a few where you know the carrier will drive over by sub, carrier sunk. Or just use the sub directly, modern small electric subs are undetectable in exercises, the sub will only be sunk when firing torpedoes. By then it is too late for the carrier. Saturation by long-range antiship missiles is also possible to work, if the Falkland War is any indication. And then there are the "deorbit a tungsten telephone pole" kind of ideas that just might work on a carrier, have no defense and are within the realm of possibility for both China, Russia and basically every state with the capability to get a few tons into some low orbit. Against sophisticated enemies, carriers are giant billboards with "shoot me" written on them.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    The Battle of Taranto preceded Pearl Harbor and was a direct inspiration for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto Italian battleships were targeted & 3 were disabled. Also the British tried to sink the Argentinian aircraft carrier during the Falkland War and it escaped preatty much just due to luck.
- njarboe 6y ago
  I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
    - njarboe 6y ago
      There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
adventured 6y ago
China wins in every military confrontation scenario. They don't have to immediately pull off an invasion. Tomorrow they could begin a draconian blockade, while strategically bombing the island and begin an assassination & disruption campaign by inserting special forces. They can do it (rather inexpensively) on an indefinite basis, as long as they care to. Nobody can stop that and they have zero concern for the humanitarian disaster it would cause, with their eye on the long-term goal. Taiwan wouldn't last very long in that simple and very obvious scenario, it would rapidly degrade their condition. The world (those standing opposed to China's move) would quickly capitulate, understanding full well that the alternative is all out war with China; the UN would be begging for a settlement peace within weeks (which would result in China de facto taking over Taiwan). Mostly all that would happen to China are some sanctions, which China would shrug off (along with some dramatic, harshly worded PR releases). At the end of it, China won't need to invade with a large amphibious assault, it'll enter Taiwan largely unopposed as part of the brokered peace settlement. China is very rapidly building up its naval capabilities. It will be able to invade Taiwan this decade. That isn't a maybe, it's a certainty.
- someperson 6y ago
  On China's (in)ability to successfully invade Taiwan, we can agree to disagree.
- jake_morrison 6y ago
  I agree. Something that would help would be focusing on dealign with saboteurs and small unit attacks, and making it difficult to hold the island thorough guerrilla warfare. There is no indication that they are doing that. Even more effective for China is to simply invest a few billion Dollars into bribing politicians. Some would argue that this has already been done with the KMT. They can also put pressure on the owners of the first generation of factories in China, which tend to be related to KMT. They will give up Taiwan in order to keep their business.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sudosysgen 6y ago
Modern weapons make a successful amphibious invasion much easier. If the invading party can assert total air superiority, then the only bottleneck left is actually crossing the sea, which is not that big of an issue as long as the distance is low. The waters of the strait are also shallow enough that submarines are not that effective. Basically, it is certainly possible to pull of such an amphibious assault, and the US Navy's simulations recognize as much.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > If the invading party can assert total air superiority That is the hard part. Not only would you have to deal with US carrier based air assets, but also air assets from bases in Japan and South Korea. In addition, Aegis based cruisers also have a heavy anti-aircraft armament.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Establishing air superiority and creating a beachhead would be a matter of one day or two, at most. It would be impossible for a US carrier strike group to intervene by then. Same for Aegis. As for Japan, it is much too far from Taiwan to contribute. South Korea will not get involved for obvious reasons.

beerandt 6y ago

Yeah, I'm scared of Chinese military strategy, especially social engineering and psyops, but I still see enough sloppy military execution that I remain confident in overall US superiority. Look at how much trouble they've had building and attempting to operate an aircraft carrier. I think they finally figured out how to manufacture bearings for ballpoint pens in the last couple years. For both of these things, it's basically assumed that they stole US plans/technology/IP years/decades ago, yet still struggled/struggle to actually execute. What's the best example of a successful, overt, non-domestic Chinese military operation, since deciding to go the totalitarian capitalism route? Although now I'm also asking myself the same re: the US, and have sudden doubts. As a bit of a tangent: I don't buy most of the current China conspiracy theories, but I struggle to think of what a non-traditional attack by China would look like that might be more effective than our current reality. If nothing else, we've just supplied blueprints on how to successfully wage a future covert/non-traditional first-strike offensive.

adventured 6y ago
Aircraft carriers are very difficult to build, it makes sense they would have a hard time mastering it - only a few nations can even attempt to build them. They'll have four or five operational aircraft carriers this decade. They fully understand how to build them now. Their next step is catching up to the US aircraft carrier standard and being able to field a comprehensive blue-water navy (which is what they're reaching for by beginning to arrange naval bases around the globe). The problem with China is straight-forward: time is on their side in all cases. They're a rising global power with expanding resources and capabilities (and a moral flexibility to do whatever they want, anytime they want), while the US can no longer afford its positioning militarily around the world (and that context will be far worse in another ten years). The US has already lost Asia to China, its bureaucrats are just too arrogant - still swimming in the past - to realize it (and I say that both as an American and as someone who thinks that outcome is bad for the world). China will rule Asia in terms of power balance before another 10-15 years passes by and the US will be forced to cede more of its post WW2 positioning there. Have you seen what's going on in the US over the last few years? Of course you have, everyone has. That's not Trump, that's not blah blah blah (insert the fake excuses thrown around by pop media & 'journalists'). It's an eroding standard of living problem (that crashed off a cliff as the facade fell off with the 2009 crash) and everyone knows exactly what I'm talking about (healthcare, education, jobs, demographics, wages, household wealth, opioids, suicides, life expectancy, social chaos and strife that comes with many tens of millions of people being left adrift with no hope and they're all getting more angry and violent by the day on all political sides). The extraordinary mismanagement of the US by the clowns in DC over the last 20 years has tipped it over into shrink and recede mode (and that's just basic extrapolation, takes 30 seconds to calculate that forced outcome); the demands of the domestic population for social welfare improvement is getting violently loud and will get far louder this decade, which forces an eventual either or (this or that) decision for the politicians (this is how you get so many Republicans supporting $2,000 stimulus checks (an incomprehensible thing for that political side just 20 years ago), even some of them sense what's happening). In the short-term the US will print magic fiat (eat its wealth by debasing its currency) to pay for the costs of being a badly over-extended superpower, in the longer-term it has to recede because its finances are in an accelerating death spiral (Japan scenario). China doesn't have to do anything, it's pushing outward, and Asia is its backyard (whereas it's extremely expensive for the US to be positioned across Asia and put up a defensive front against China there).

s1artibartfast 6y ago

>The US can't stop China from taking Taiwan. Can’t or won’t? Certainly the US do a lot of damage to the mainland if they chose to engage in a hot total war. A nuclear barrage of Chinese military facilities and supply lines would shut down an amphibious assault. I imagine that the US can still do tremendous damage with conventional bombing and ballistics as well, though not without cost. Both of these are basically MAD scenarios.

blackrock 6y ago
> A nuclear barrage of Chinese military facilities Do you really want to entertain this ridiculous idea? A nuclear assault on Chinese soil, would invite a nuclear retaliation on American soil. Do you really want to lose Los Angeles or New York City, to a nuclear ICBM? And if it comes that, then both sides should just launch all their nukes, and see who is left afterwards to pick up the pieces. America is now a nuclear wasteland. And all because some people couldn’t swallow their pride, and realize that Taiwan is not their core interest.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Do you really want to entertain this ridiculous idea? Yes. Of course. Xi invading Taiwan would involve killing Americans, including American soldiers. It’s an attack on America and on our ally. If they use nuclear weapons and we demur, it’s a failure of deterrence. America has given its word to come to Taiwan’s defence. If we don’t like the implications of that promise, we should withdraw it. Keep in mind: a nuclear barrage (or ersatz nuclear, with nuclear-scale tonnage from non-nuclear warheads) of military assets is different from bombing Beijing. And being open to nuclear retaliation is different from attacking with nuclear weapons. Appeasement didn’t work for Hitler. I don’t see why we think this time would be different[1]. Nobody wants this. But a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with nuclear weapons would be clear escalation by Beijing. Hopefully, level heads prevail. [1] Not equating Xi with Hitler. I don’t think Beijing seriously plans on invading Taiwan. But if Xi does, we’ve miscalculated somewhere. And these comparisons become more apt.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > America is now a nuclear wasteland. And all because some people couldn’t swallow their pride, and realize that Taiwan is not their core interest. In you opinion, was fighting Nazi Germany irrational too?

totetsu 6y ago

I find it hard to reconcile this prospect of inevitable conflict with how genuinely easy to get along and reach mutual understanding with, all the people from China and Taiwan I have taught, lived/studied/worked with over the years have been. Maybe there's a big domestic base of nationalists that we don't get to interact with in the Anglosphere..

magicsmoke 6y ago
1. Have you explicitly asked them about their thoughts on the status of Taiwan? 2. Did they give polite noncommittal answers or their actual thoughts? In the workplace, you don't usually have coworkers interrogating other coworkers about their geopolitical views around the watercooler and basing their future professional interactions on those views.
- totetsu 6y ago
  well once in Japanese 101 a kid yelled out Taiwan is not a country when we were learning country names.. I ususlly have more tact than to ask explicitly geopolitical quwstions in the workplace. I am talking about how I dont get the same sense of intransigence from afore mentioned people as i do from say Japanese or Anglosphere

perennate 6y ago

If the fascist Chinese "Communist" Party sends the PLA to invade Taiwan, the US will be forced to respond, and if the CCP persists then it could devolve into a nuclear war that will destroy humanity. Hopefully Nazi Xi Jinping doesn't take the world down that path, but given his other actions, like waging a campaign of genocide against the Uighur people in Xinjiang, it's not impossible.