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David Pancost's avatar

Great article. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if pundits and our govt are thinking in terms of China as Japan but China as the USSR. Could you explore that? In my ignorance, I think they're making a serious mistake. China, unlike the USSR, doesn't pose an ideological threat at all and it poses even less of a military threat to friends in Asia than the USSR did in Europe. The logistics of modern war are so daunting that only the US can put even moderate forces overseas; I know of no evidence that China is making the effort to build up anything capable of conquering Taiwan.

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Charles Ryder's avatar

>>>BUT, if China does end up going to war with the West — or even have a protracted Cold War type struggle — it will be an infinitely more dangerous foe than Japan ever could have been<<<

I've been reading Noah since he first started writing Bloomberg pieces, and I'm generally a big fan. But I find on geopolitics -- which in his case more often than not involves Asia -- his writing is like a teenager who's really, really (really!) enthusiastic about the board game Risk. Several hundred words comparing a potential Sino-US conflict with WW2's Japan-USA theater, and nary a word about the most obvious (and terrifying) difference between the PRC of then and the Japan of now: the former possesses a large, lethal and growing nuclear arsenal (and by their own admission are endeavoring to rapidly grow that arsenal). THAT is what makes a PRC-US war "infinitely" more dangerous than America and Japan's titanic struggle all those years ago. (A single nuclear weapon detonated over a US metro could easily cause more causalities than the country took during the entirety of its 57 month-long war against Japan). A Sino-US war in the Pacific isn't going to look anything like '41-'45. There will be no long, bloody slogs through tropical archipelagos that you can read about in the newspaper from the comfort of your living room. There will be no lengthy, multi-year stage when the economy is mobilized and production is ramped up in preparation for protracted campaigns. There will be no five million man army. And so on. Also, Japan had virtually no ability to hit the US homeland (well, there was a weaponized balloon that blew up over Oregon late in the war). That's very definitely not the case with China.

Very early on in such a conflict, one side or another (probably the side that's on the verge of losing) will either quit or go nuclear. A PRC-USA war (in addition to being as unthinkable* as a USSR-USA war was back in the day) will be short and unfathomably violent.

I suggest boning up on one's firemaking skills.

*Yeah, I know, somebody has to think about these things; but hopefully they do so mostly with an eye toward preventing them from occurring.

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