You don’t need U.S. moral authority and leadership to sanction China. Even if the EU and the ASEAN countries hated our guts, they would still have their own incentives to sanction China - for similar reasons that they have supported Ukraine. They don’t want China (any more than Russia) to believe that a country can take a bite out of a neighbor without repercussions.
Ironically, the U.S.’ estrangement from our erstwhile friends makes it even a bit more likely that they might sanction China, lest they inadvertently encourage us to look more hungrily at Greenland or the Panama Canal or what have you.
It wouldn’t be “easy,” even if no other country in the world did anything to help. Taiwan isn’t unprepared for a Chinese invasion. They have well-developed and well-fortified defenses, massive investments in weaponry, a substantial army (both in absolute terms and proportional to their size), fairly sizable reserves, and massive geographic advantages (the coast of Taiwan is ill-suited for an amphibious invasion). The links I posted above spell it out really well - it would be a monumental undertaking for China to try to take Taiwan, due to Taiwan’s forces alone.
We certainly would prefer not to get into a protracted conflict with a nuclear superpower. But unless we’re willing to cede that entire region of the world - and Japan, Korea, Australia, and other important trading partners and allies - over to China we’ll probably need to push their nose in if they engage in any over military activity like an invasion. And defending Taiwan is perhaps the easiest way to do that - because you can defend Taiwan without using ground troops at all. All you need to do is crack all the Chinese ships open when they’re at sea, which is something we can do with the type of long-distance attacks that we actually favor.
Right now, it would be very difficult for China. Gh is wrong (sorry!). Referring back to Normandy, there is a reason the Germans never invaded England…the British navy would have demolished a German invasion force. The German navy wasn’t up to that challenge. So it is with China…for now. Germany only needed to get their forces over 20 miles of water, but they couldn’t do it. China could have a 10M man army, but they can’t get them across the Strait.
Which is why China is modernizing and expanding their navy. Give them 10 years, and if we haven’t countered**, they will be able to get their army across the Strait. Preserving the infrastructure they want would be trivial (i.e. not blowing up TSMC) while destroying military targets with smart weapons.
**And we aren’t. Giving up on the DDG(X) in favor of a BBG was stupid, and every analyst I’ve read concurs. We aren’t keeping up, and our procurement is a mess, amplified by an incompetent Executive branch, and our Arleigh-Burkes are showing their age.
Given advances in offensive capabilities against large slow targets (like any sizable ship), that may simply turn out not to be the case. Missiles can reach anywhere in the Strait, of course. But the Russia-Ukraine war has taught a lot of interesting battlefield lessons, and one of the big ones is that naval assets are pretty vulnerable to drones in a very asymmetric way:
The drone that sunk that ship cost only a few hundred thousand to make. These drones (and others) basically neutered the entire Russian Black Sea navy - destroying many vessels, and forcing the others to all-but-retreat from the theater entirely.
China can increase their number of large landing ships, for tanks or amphibious personnel craft, from their current 70+ to double or triple or even ten-fold that number. Can any of them get close enough to Taiwan to deploy their payload, given where drones are now?
That is a major shift in the relative position of folks defending a coastline vs. the forces trying to launch an amphibious assault. The old, expected strategy of flooding the Strait with hundreds or even a thousand vessels - both military and merchant marine - so that Taiwan had too many targets to take down at once seems almost quaint now. That might have been an option when Taiwan could realistically only expect to have about 800-1,200 missiles with ship-killing capacity. Get enough ships in the water, and you can exhaust that.
But now, Taiwan could manufacture ten thousand naval drones for the cost of ten Chinese landing ships/logistic support ships. For a fraction of their annual defense budget. Bump the Chinese navy to 400 ships, even supplemented with merchant marine, and they could still easily have ten drones to put into the water for each of your vessels. To say nothing of the fact that Taiwan will still have all those missiles that can reach any naval vessel within a thousand miles of their coast, let alone trying to get within landing distance.
I don’t know. Xi may really want to be able to take Taiwan via amphibious assault (rather than just bomb it out of existence), but might literally not be possible no matter the size of their navy.
Placing sanctions on China and exiling them from the world economic system are very different. Of course, the US could place sanctions on China; it has been doing so for nearly 10 years. However, in your scenario, China disregards that threat and proceeds anyway. Exiling them from the world economic system requires cooperation from dozens and dozens of entities on matters big and small. American leadership and moral authority were critical to isolating Iran and making gains against Russia. But it’s no longer clear whether the US Government possesses the expertise to accomplish such a feat after the dismissal of many SMEs. The best example so far is quite recent- Russia. More than 10 years after their invasion of Crimea and 4 after the most recent invasion of Ukraine, the Americans still haven’t been able to pull it off entirely. Russia is an economic and diplomatic pygmy compared to China.
There are lots of assumptions and complexities built into this. But one fundamental assumption that appears to underlay your argument is that U.S. political leadership will act rationally and the rest of the world will fall into line. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Donald is an impulsive chaos agent. He can’t even hold the line on Russian sanctions- his agents have been busy negotiating with Putin over withdrawing sanctions in exchange for access to Russian markets and likely presidential favors. There’s no evidence that he has any interest in a major struggle with China that would bring about a severe recession and possibly a depression. He’d likely posture and threaten, while China takes what it can. And why would EU and ASEAN countries automatically follow Donald’s supposed desires at the cost to their economies?
Again, this is pre-2025 thinking. The world has changed. No one is safe unless they have nuclear weapons.
Effectively exiling them from the world economic system really only requires the cooperation of a few groups of countries, though. It’s basically the US, the EU, the ASEAN nations, Japan and South Korea. Those countries make up the overwhelming bulk of China’s commercial interactions with the global economy. And all of them will have enormous incentive to strongly react to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
It would be enormously painful for all parties involved, of course. But nearly all of China’s current economic partners would likely judge it to be in their independent best interest to impose massive retaliatory measures against China. No U.S. leadership required.
Russia may be an economic pygmy compared to China, but China is vastly more dependent on interactions with the West than Russia. That’s the point. Russia’s main exports were almost entirely fungible energy products - and it had the much larger Chinese economy standing by to take up a lot of the lost volume that twould have gone to the West. And even so, it has still been severely damaged economically by sanctions. China, on the other hand, is far more deeply integrated into the economies of the developed West, exporting not fungible raw materials but manufactured goods for which there are no large markets in the event the West is closed to them.
Not at all. I don’t think U.S. political leadership is necessary at all. The “rest of the world” doesn’t need the U.S. in order to realize that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan cannot be allowed to stand, and I don’t think Japan or South Korea or any of the ASEAN countries or even the EU need anyone in the U.S. to tell them what the proper response is. Just like the EU isn’t letting Trump’s waffling on Russia affect their actions towards Ukraine, I don’t expect countries like Japan or Korea (or the EU again) to care all that much whether the U.S. demonstrates leadership or not.
Plus, I’m fairly certain that Trump’s ego won’t allow him to be the President who lost Taiwan to the Chinese - or that the GOP hardliners will let up on telling him that letting Xi get away with this make him look weak. Again, like Ukraine - Trump would probably rather be doing anything rather than being adverse to Russia, which he regards as a massive economic opportunity for the U.S. (and probably his own personal interests). But he still goes along with the sanctions, even if he’s wobbly, because he ego demands that he “win the peace” and not be seen as having been taken advantage of.
And even if Xi is whipping the PLA and PLAN to be ready to go to Taiwan by end of 2027, there’s a much higher likelihood that they’re not even ready to try anything until after Trump is out of office.
Very true. The Ukrainians have decimated the Black Sea Fleet, and they don’t even have a navy.
But China would have air superiority, plus missiles, and should be able to neutralize most threats before their amphibious forces leave their home ports. Of course, tech and tactics continue to advance. My statement was more of a “as things stand”. Whatever defense there is in the future, someone will develop an offensive capability to counter it. And then someone will develop a defensive counter to that new threat. So it has always been.
Right now the primary obstacle for China is their navy isn’t large enough to defeat AUKUS (plus Japan), which is what it would have to do. They don’t need a carrier, since they are only 100 miles away. They need amphibious assault ships, and destroyers (mostly). The Type 055 destroyer is not to be underestimated. It’s almost a given that they would “soften up” Taiwan before invading, which would include destroying defense installations and drone manufacturing sites. That would be done at a distance before a single ship left port (most likely, since a major amphibious movement would be detected pretty quickly, so defense would need to be neutralized prior).
Like I said…give them 10 years. Almost certainly not next year. That would be suicide for them.
I do not share your confidence. It took highly motivated experts within Treasury years to cut Russia out of the global economy, and they still haven’t been able to do so entirely. There are lots of ways to dodge sanctions and many countries aren’t interested in falling into line despite what Americans believe to be their interests. The banking system is surprisingly porous, and China is embedded deeply within the global economy.
Just to take one example, does South Korea work with its historic enemy, Japan, to remove China from its economy? Even if they no longer trust in U.S. protection? Or does they decide that it makes more sense to stay quiet since China is nearby and the U.S. is far away- and is showing less and less interest in its former Asian allies? Perhaps it depends on which party is in power. Now multiply that over and over again as nation after nation must decide. Turkey. Pakistan. Indonesia. Brazil. The petrostates. Even as U.S. power is waning. And how vigorous will their efforts be? Tariffs? Finding every possible Chinese bank and financial counterparty and cutting them out of all financial transactions? That’s a tall order, and a very difficult one. Without global leaders pressing them, I am skeptical.
Limited sanctions seem much more likely. Is that enough to stop Xi from his belief that his destiny is to unite China?
I think “as things stand,” this isn’t true. Amphibious invasions are hard. All your stuff has to be on boats, and boats are very vulnerable. They were vulnerable even before we saw these drone capability, since air superiority doesn’t insulate a naval fleet from missiles fired from the mainland. Even mobile missile launchers can have payloads that can sink many naval vessels, and your bombers won’t be able to eliminate all the Taiwanese fixed-location missiles. Plus, Taiwanese missiles can reach every point on the Chinese coastline - so even the boats in port are vulnerable to those missile strikes.
But now that we see what current drones can do? Man, it’s going to be hard to warplan around that. Taiwan could easily stockpile tens of thousands of naval drones. They’ll be able to be launched from anywhere. The Magura V5 is small and light enough to be deployed with a pickup truck, controlled by a guy with a briefcase, and has a range of nearly 500 miles. It would be shocking if “as things stand,” Taiwan couldn’t today put at least several naval drones in the water for each of the transport ships in China’s navy (72), and it’s exceedingly unlikely that China can stop them from doing that using distance strikes. And even if (somehow) they could put a dent in the drones coming from Taiwan by bombing and shelling, it wouldn’t protect them from the drones coming from Okinawa and Luzon.
Not impossible for them to overcome that, of course. But certainly not easy.
I can’t imagine any scenario where South Korea decides that it’s better for them to allow China to easily take Taiwan, rather than pay the same steep price that Putin is paying in Ukraine. I don’t think South Korean leaders are going to need any global leaders pressuring them - they’re going to realize that if China decides it no longer needs to refrain from using their military and navy to take tasty morsels in the region, South Korea is very high up on the "menu,” as it were.
You don’t need every country to participate. Pakistan, Brazil, Turkey - these are rounding errors. US, EU, Japan, South Korea, and ASEAN. Those five entities are enough to take out the overwhelming majority of Chinese global economic activity. Throw in Australia, and likely India, joining the party simply because they’d be fools not to respond powerfully to a direct military invasion of Taiwan. Oh, and Taiwan itself - which is China’s fourth largest trading partner behind the U.S., Japan and Korea.
The exile of China from the global economic system is a metaphor - it won’t be complete and absolute the way exiling a person is, any more than Russia’s has been. But it will be catastrophic for the Chinese economy, which completely depends on access to global export markets to function and whose output cannot be diverted to its non-Western allies the way Russia was able to. China would pay a steep price for invading Taiwan.
Never said it would be easy. Didn’t even imply it, I don’t think.
My only point was that “next year” was probably not do-able, but in 10 years given their rate of naval expansion, it would be very do-able. Unless AUKUS (and Japan, and Korea, etc) rise to meet that challenge. The US in particular isn’t doing that at the moment.
Nah. Tactics from 2,000 years ago - or 1962 - would work. Embargo. Simply don’t allow shipping into Taiwan. China has almost 400 surface ships and submarines, far more than enough to isolate the island, which is heavily dependent on agricultural imports to feed its population, and on raw materials imports to fuel its industries, and uh, fuel, to keep people warm and machines running.
A Berlin airlift type operation would be difficult to execute, given that there is more than 10 times the population of Taiwan as there was in Berlin, and Berlin, at the time, had little industry that needed to be fed as well.
In case you’re thinking a blockade wouldn’t work because of the new drone warfare, understand that most drones - at least the cheap and easy ones - have a range of 10-20 miles. There are some with more, but they are exponentially more expensive and rarer. It’s 100 miles to the China mainland - and 50 miles is more than plenty to ring the island. (The US embargo of Cuba used a ring of 500 miles, and because we were “near” and the USSR was “far” there was little chance of them overwhelming our gathered forces there.)
Easy? No. Provocative? Sure. But if you’re going to take a territory by force you have to expect a few broken eggs. Pardon the mixed metaphor.
Oh, hey, and let’s remember the war that startted when China re-subsumed Hong Kong just a few years ago. There wasn’t one? There was “condemnation” and “sanctions” and “suspension of treaties” and … nothing else. Not the same, of course, but not different, either.
That was more aimed at Goofy’s way (sorry, Goofy) - he was the one that had intimated that it would be easy for China to take Taiwan.
Again, I don’t think so. It’s too easy today to sink a boat.
The answer isn’t having more boats.
It wasn’t really an answer even before we had drones, since missiles are very effective against the types of boats you need in order to move people and tanks onto a beach. Taiwan is a very difficult target to attack in an amphibious assault, because the topography limits you to only a handful of potential landing areas. Again, D-Day doesn’t work if the Germans know in advance you have to land in Lombardy, and can have all their forces there.
But now? How on earth do you get a million men across the Straits of Taiwan in a world with effective sea-based drones that have a range of several hundred miles and can sink most ships?
a) 2025 is the dividing point between the previous world order largely arranged by the U.S. and its allies which benefited themselves enormously/others profited from relative stability and now. The reason- Donald’s 2nd term. As for nuclear weapons, it doesn’t take much insight to see how the world tackles problems with countries that have nukes and those that don’t. That’s why nations want them. And without a reliable U.S. ally and nuclear umbrella, it would not be surprising to see nuclear proliferation as nations seek deterrence from revisionist powers.
b) To be invaded and have its territory held? As in what the U.S. tried to do in Iraq in the 2000s? I suspect that the price in blood and treasure would be high. I question whether the U.S. military is large enough to hold all of Iran. And I really doubt the resolve of the American public for such an enterprise. But perhaps that doesn’t matter anymore?
I suggest you look at the drone that Ukraine used to drive the entire Russian Navy out of Sevastopol and back to Novorossiysk. They’ve basically closed the entire western Black Sea and rendered the navy functionally inactive. It has a range of about 500 miles, and only costs about $200-300K to make.
Um….it was entirely different. The UK gave Hong Kong back to China. Because they only had a 99 year lease, and the lease was up. China didn’t take Hong Kong by force. There wasn’t condemnation and sanctions or suspension of treaties, because China didn’t take Hong Kong by military action. My goodness, Prince Charles was even there to metaphorically turn over the keys!
Where China has been condemned is breaking the “one country, two systems” pledges they promised to uphold - but those are generally framed as condemning internal repression of China of its citizens, and not military invasion of a territory. So yeah, it’s pretty different.
Trade is much easier to control. But real financial exile would require an impressive degree of coordination and collaboration, and I have my doubts about that. We shall have to agree to disagree.
We are agreed that China would pay a steep price for an invasion. I’m not as sure that: 1) Xi isn’t willing to pay it; 2) the West is also willing to pay a steep price (though not as costly).
I mean - sure. If the West just looks at a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and (essentially) says, “Eh, whatever” - then China might be able to pull it off. Again, maybe not, given the extraordinary challenges of trying to get tanks and men across the water against a very well-armed (and forewarned) Taiwan. But that certainly would make things easier.
I just think it’s exceptionally unlikely that the West would do that. The Pacific nations aligned with the West (Japan, Korea, Australia, etc.) would be extremely loathe to allow China to pay a very small price, and I can’t see the EU being okay with it either. The U.S. Congress is filled with enough China hawks that it’s really hard to see the U.S. taking a backseat, either - at least when it comes to the economic and financial measures that are in the hands of Congress. Maybe if this happened during a lame duck end of Presidency DJT term? But I don’t think that timing is likely. China needs a lot more ships to be ready for an amphibious assault even with Taiwan’s current defenses - and they’ll need even more to be ready against what Taiwan will have in the next few years.