In the short run, Russia is important. In the long run, Russia is China's gas station.
Ironically, I think the Ukraine invasion has hurt China's strategy almost as badly as Russia's. Yes, Ukraine currently distracts our attention from China. But it's also taught everybody, especially Europeans, that dictators still launch stupid wars, and democracies still have to deter them from trying.
Thanks to Putin, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan no longer sounds like a ridiculous hypothetical to Europeans, a catastrophic Chinese stranglehold on a key economic resource sounds awfully familiar to them, and Europe doing their part to deter China isn't a crazy idea that has to be killed in committee.
In other words, by legitimating fears of a "New Axis," Putin may have done more for anti-Chinese unity and deterrence than any American President.
Incidentally, it looks like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) is so critical to the world economy that "protect Taiwan and its chips, politically convenient or not" may become our new version of the old "protect the Gulf oil states, politically convenient or not."
If China blockades or invades Taiwan, critical business all over Europe and the USA will shut down. We saw a preview of that with the auto chip shortage during the pandemic. If we lose TSMC to extended blockade or invasion, that promises lost jobs and economic hemorrhage all over the world.
Deterring China on Taiwan isn't about idealism anymore. It isn't even about all the other allied democracies that would be next under Chinese intimidation.
Protecting Taiwan, in today's world, is simply economically critical. Because of chips.
FWIW, while chip fabs are incredibly expensive, it's much more plausible that we could build a bunch of new chip fabs in the next decade, than that people in the '50s-'60s could come up with a replacement for all of the oil in the Middle East in a decade. In the end of course we did diversify our oil supply -- but the fracking revolution took much longer than one decade. With chips, it's not like the actual technology TSMC is employing is completely inaccessible to the US. To the extent TSMC has any special IP, well, they're a giant company already -- they easily could take all that IP and start building plants in the US and Europe. It would just take a ton of money and several years.
Maybe. Taiwan would also represent an incredibly valuable naval base to the Chinese Communists. Perhaps as valuable, or more, than what Hawaii represents to the U.S. It would also be nice if Taiwan could spend more than 2% of its GDP on defense. At one point, I believe it spent in excess of 5%. Does the government of Taiwan have its head in the clouds?
Respectfully your analysis is flawed because it rests on false assumptions.
The number one false assumption is that somehow western economies are democracies and that this war is a stupid war brought by a single caricatural dictator for absolutely no reason. It is a very cartoonish view of reality.
The second assumption is that somehow China would force an invasion on Taiwan. China and Taiwan have been in a state of co-dependence for decades with most of Taiwanese exports going to China. Furthermore a 1972 document by the US government "Joint Communique between the United States and China", outlines the USA's official position towards China and Taiwan. In short it stipulates that the USA acknowledges the "One-China Policy" whereby Taiwan is considered to be part of the greater mainland China.
The agitation provoked by the US establishment (Nancy's visit) are in direct violation of the USA's official position. But then again, the USA is trying to pick a bone with China since they failed with Russia in Ukraine (as we speak Russia has been issuing passports to the citizen of the areas they snatched and business has resumed in those areas).
Although I endorse your points, I think they will actually backfire towards creating a set of “New Allies.” The stronger and more self-sufficient America becomes I think it will be less inclined to intervene in foreign affairs. The USA is presently the largest consumer market. If it grew to 1 billion Americans and was able to provide for its population entirely in-house, imagine how self-sufficient it would be and how disengaged it would be.
The personal costs of American engagement globally since 1990 have been born by a very small sliver of the US population. US aid to Ukraine of $40 billion, although a lot, does not seem to affect Americans’ daily lives in a meaningful way.
Now imagine a massive war. Can we picture the following?
(1) Huge swathes of Americans donating their cellphones or other consumer electronics in wartime public drives so that America can manufacture more guided missiles.
(2) The US military currently faces a staffing crisis as it struggles to meet its recruitment deadlines. It is doubtful that the military could accomplish its manpower goals through an all-volunteer force in the event of a large scale war in East Asia.
(3) The American public responding positively to the activation of selective service (i.e. the draft). Since the present draft is male-only, can you imagine the lawsuits that would follow a draft activation? Given the conservatism of much of America do you think Americans would allow their daughters to be drafted into combat in mass?
America would have to feel VERY threatened to mobilize in this way.
Most developing economies might not be with “New Allies” who seem to assume that their problems are the world’s problems. Pls also understand that despite ongoing India-China diplomatic confrontation, China remains India’s large trading partner. So it might be naive to assume that India will go with New Allies just because there’s a boundary dispute with China
China is America's largest trading partner too...I wish that trading links prevented conflict and war, but sadly they do not. Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners on the eve of WW1...
❝Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners on the eve of WW1...❞ But that war was not anticipated, an accidental war even. Poor communications, a creaking system of alliances, railway timetables, and Prinzip's good luck. But the c19 world of the Great Powers seems the best model for the coming world. US, Turkey, Iran, India will all be independent players. But how to think of the EU?
War between Britain & Germany was much more anticipated before ww1 than a US-China war is now. The main danger of a US-China war comes from a series of accidents spiraling out of control like we had in ww1.
IIRC, the literature shows that greater trade does predict less armed conflict - just not nearly as strongly as we'd like to hope.
Rather stronger predictors of peace have been (1) "both countries are in alliance with a common larger third country" and/or (2) "both countries are established democracies."
Alas, neither predictor will apply anytime soon to the USA-China pair.
Good point - only thing is that India is not part of the British or American orbit nor is China going to war with India anytime soon. As for “Quad” it is neither a military alliance nor a diplomatic voice. It will be optimistic to see the NATO-Russia conflict as somehow a harbinger for a new cold/ hot war.
India is much better prepared today than before - including good infrastructure for troop deployment and tactical superiority in the Ladakh region. Cold Start doctrine is in place. Also China doesn’t gain anything from a war with India. So the cat and mouse game might continue but a war is unlikely mostly because india today is NOT the feeble India of 1962. And in any case, the US and it’s fellow NATO allies are not the most reliable partners - the story of their hasty running away from Afghanistan is well know .
Um, there is no way that 20 years, tens of billions of dollars, and thousands of deaths and injuries can be characterized as "hasty".
China clearly views India as a strategic opponent and there is history of hostilities, including in the last few years. I would like to see India and the US get much closer- would be good for global stability.
This is an important piece. It seems to be missing one big thing: China's food supply.
Edward Luttwak has been claiming that China is so dependent on food imports from the US and its allies (such as Australia) that it would quickly run low on food during a war, or even just an embargo. He uses this in support of the claim that, if rational, China will not launch a war over Taiwan:
>China imports much of its protein from US/allies (150 million metric tonnes/annum of meat, soy, not easily smuggled) It can reduce fuel use + increase fuel imports from Ru/Kazakh .But today's Chinese would starve on a Mao diet & its vast rice stocks will not do. Empty threats
>... in the 1960s, the average Chinese person consumed less than 5 kg of meat annually. But as in comes soared following Deng Xiaoping’s market-driven “reform and opening” of the late 1970s, consumption rose to 20 kg per capita by the late 1980s and has now reached 63 kg. Today, China consumes 28% of the world’s meat, including half of all pork.
Meat tends to be more expensive per calorie, partly because it requires more land per calorie.
What would most likely happen if the Chinese government tried to abruptly return the populace, not to its Mao-era famine diet, but its late 1980s diet? How would the populace handle the drastic change? How quickly could Chinese farmers switch from producing meat to vegetables and grains? (Factory farming implies a lack of space available for crops.)
Have we learned anything relevant from countries whose financial crises slash their food imports? Perhaps Lebanon in recent years?
Have seen these tweets too and it's hard to know how much weight to give it. Germany fought in WW2 knowing the difficulty it would have securing oil supplies I think? Japan set maximalist war aims largely to secure oil supplies. These analogies would suggest that if China does decide to go to war with US and allies then it would be necessary for them to extend far beyond taking Taiwan, going on to push allied influence out of supply routes. If they ever feel capable of doing so over say a 1 to 2 year conflict then war is a viable option. This is dangerous because China may feel it can win a hot war but is guaranteed to lose a cold war with trade embargos. For that point of view, deepening trade links between Russia and China would be good as it would remove the 'need' for China to attack aggressively to secure supplies of both food and fuel. Thus may make a cold war scenario more likely.
Fascinating, thank you for sharing! It seemed like these wargamers in 2019 were overly optimistic about Russia's military capabilities?
If I were to design a game of this sort, I might make it more about cultural and economic influence, with military conflict as an option (but not a certainty-- e.g. the Russian player could, instead of a military invasion of Ukraine, focus on expanding it's influence on other parts of the world).
It would be really cool to simulate strategies and outcomes based on possible scenarios, i.e. does India side with the Allies, Axis, or remain neutral? Does North Korea take its chance to invade / shell / nuke South Korea? Chance card: Iran finishes an atomic bomb. That would be some real RAND Corporation $&@!.
I wonder if India could be the wedge the divides the Axis (even as some kind of loose grouping) in similar ways that Vietnam was able to leverage the Soviet-Sino split and if the "Allies" could do anything to exacerbate that. e.g. if India could by virtue of its trade with both, put pressure on Russia to slow or reduce shipment of fuel while also putting pressure on China to not just become Russia's manufacturing center.
I think Western observers often overlook how much China distracted the USSR during the Cold War. (c.f. the undeclared war in 1969 between them that lasted 7 months and involved the mobilisation of 1.5 million troops.)
Would Vietnam join the New Allies? I understand the China-Vietnam relationship has become rockier. Would be nice to ally-shore some manufacturing there.
Not really? (It's complicated.) One of the bedrocks of Vietnam's defense policy is the "Three Nos" policy. No alliances, no foreign military bases, no reliance on other countries for combat. In a 2019 interview Vietnam's defense minister said their goal was to make friends, not enemies.
Plus we share a 1,300km border with China. It is BY FAR our biggest trading partner and has been since 2004 or so. Vietnam has generally adopted a "China plus one" economic strategy, where it acts as a complement to (not a competitor to) China's manufacturing so economic conflict would be painful.
Looking at Western pocketbook hesitance over Ukraine it seems clear that the Allies would almost certainly be unwilling to foot the military and economic cost to Vietnam if it actually directly antagonised China.
(Also it hasn't really "become rockier". It has always been rocky! Check out when China invaded Vietnam in 1979, for instance. Or the 2014 anti-China riots in Bình Dương and other cities.)
Lingering thought of mine - for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year? Russia has made its move - the longer China waits the longer the west has to prepare. Chinese demographics are only set to get worse and we all know that the Chinese economy is likely far worse off than what's officially being reported. Michael Pettis has done a great job documenting the looming issues for the Chinese economy - and if China decided to develop and implement policies aimed at increasing consumer spending it COULD turn things around in the medium and long term.
BUT...in the short term it has a HUUUUGE property sector implosion and nowhere to allocate supply side stimulus in a productive fashion. Ongoing Covid lockdowns continue to suppress the economy and the recent reports showcase their economy limping along on exports (record trade surplus - flatlining imports indicating minimal consumption growth). So Xi doesn't want to give out money to stimulate consumption because of inflation and possibly also sees creating a legitimately large middle class with GDP per capita closer to Estonia as a threat to his power as well (Perhaps when people are wealthier they will ask more questions, feel more empowered, be less concerned with living day to day, etc).
If I'm China I need something to unite the country, direct it's attention and focus (away from lingering internal concerns - Covid, Housing, aging, no safety nets, etc), and launching an attack on Taiwan in October would really fit this bill...
>>>for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year?<<<
Perhaps they're more rational and coldly calculating than we think?
National pride is a dangerous—and not a very rational thing. But Taiwan is plainly not about to declare independence. So why start a war that could end in disaster?
China's economy would only increase by about 5% if it re-took Taiwan (probably less given the damage to Taiwan's economy). Its population by only about 2%. Its land area by under 1%. And it can't hope to capture Taiwan's chip sector intact. Invading Taiwan can't pass even the most far-fetched, rose-tinted risk analysis for Beijing.
Do I have a lot of hope CCP top leadership is thinking fully rationally on this issue? Not at all; but you asked for a reason as to why they might not pull the trigger soon. Lack of idiocy (finger crossed) might be one such reason.
Even if you take as a given that "retaking Taiwan" is a non-negotiable goal, I'm pretty sure the rational thing would be to wait. Xi Jinping and the CCP tend to speak as if 2049 is the deadline for reuniting with Taiwan. If that's the case, China will almost certainly have a better opportunity sometime in the late 2020s or early 2030s.
Right now they are only spending 2% of GDP on defense. You'd probably want a decade of elevated military spending before attempting to take Taiwan, since you'll need a *lot* of ships and missiles stockpiled.
Xi is already in charge, and doesn't face a citizens' election. For him, starting a fight over Taiwan can cost him power, if he loses badly, but can't gain him power. So his reason to fight isn't current popularity but long-term ambitions.
So ideally, Xi would like Taiwan to wait until he has a little less on his hands at home - the pandemic, the real estate crackdown, etc.
Sure, in two or three years Xi may well think it's "now or never," because of improving Taiwanese defenses and/or strengthening American and Japanese support.
>>>For him, starting a fight over Taiwan can cost him power, if he loses badly, but can't gain him power. <<<
And what if he wins?* Or, what if is his generals are telling him what they believe he wants to hear?
One of the dangers is that the Taiwan situation in Beijing (just like in DC) is viewed through the prism of domestic politics. I'm not suggesting we've reached this precipice at present, but it's not very difficult to envisage a scenario whereby Xi calculates invading Taiwan is less risky than not doing so in terms of *holding onto power.* There are rumors flying that he faces nontrivial and perhaps growing opposition to his rule (very, very cautious opposition, to be sure). Dictators have been known to use security or foreign policy crises for reasons of domestic politics.
*I frankly have no idea what to believe is likely to transpire if an actual shooting war broke out between the US and the PRC, other than to fear it could be the most dangerous moment for our species in 70,000 years. But if the US doesn't go to war over a China invasion of Taiwan, I don't think we can conclude China would fail to take the island, can we? They might not succeed, true! Who knows? But a military victory for the PRC is hardly beyond the realm of possibility. Also, just like Taipei, Beijing, too, has likely been taking notes since Putin invaded Ukraine, and probably won't move unless/until it thinks it is sufficiently well-prepared.
"for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year?"
China is betting that time is on its side.
It is popular in the West to point out that China has looming demographic challenges. Much less discussed is the pace of Chinese human capital and industrial technology upgrading.
In both the EU and the US, the share of young people entering the work force with tertiary education has mostly stagnated over the past generation. In China, that number has gone from < 1% in 1980 to 45% today.
The robot density of China's industrial base went from 36/100k workers in 2014 to 246/100k in 2020. At this rate, China will overtake US and most of the EU in robot density within the next 2-3 years.
China is rapidly catching up in every area of technology. In a decade China will have absolute military superiority in the Western Pacific regardless of what the US/EU does. The US + EU industrial base simply does not have the capacity to match China in an arms race. Even a semi-serious attempt to prepare for a conflict with China will just make inflation worse in the West.
Strong agreement on all of these points. If China wanted to conquer Taiwan, we'd expect to see several years of very high military spending towards that end building landing craft, training millions of soldiers, stockpiling missiles, etc. These expenditures would occupy a large share of China's manufacturing capacity and therefore be ones that the rest of the world couldn't feasibly match / could only feasibly match with a united India-Europe-America front.
Unless Covid Zero permanently stops China's catch-up growth, China's moment of maximum opportunity to take Taiwan is probably still in the future. China would probably wants its nominal GDP to be equal to the US *and* to then have a decade of spending 10% of GDP on military hardware [which the US would struggle to match for domestic politics reasons] before it tries to attack. It'll need a *lot* of ships to take Taiwan, given that missiles seem to be advantaging defense over offense.
But does Xi want to wait for that? I don't think he'll be in power long enough for that to come to fruition. The time for catch up growth has passed them - the reforms that are necessary can be done but China has to be willing to empower a large portion of its population. It's absolutely astounding how low China's GDP per capita is and a testament to how much misallocation has gone on over the past decade. And there's a tradeoff with waiting too...that allows the west to make up for the shortfalls outlined in this article. Is the tradeoff worth it? What advantages does China have now that it might not in ten years? You look at Europe giving themselves this year and the next to decouple from Russian commodities...that's a much more aggressive timeline.
It's also interesting that there's a lot of uproar in China over a possible visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi - pretext for a buildup of military forces across the strait? I imagine we'd see something like that in the news at some point (depending on how transparent our government wants to be - transparency worked wonders in Ukraine). If I start to hear about that then I can only assume the worst.
There is always the issue of face here as well - I'm not discounting that - public officials in Taiwan are constantly playing a game of words. So is China and to a lesser extent we are too buuuut...we always have been. What makes this different is what's already happened in Ukraine and China's affirmation of unlimited support to the Russian regime. This is...different.
Xi Jinping appears to have stabilized his position as ruler-for-life, so unless there are domestic pressures we don't know about, his time limit is "his life expectancy". As a wealthy Chinese man aged 69, that life expectancy is probably >15 years.
"The time for catch up growth has passed them" Not really. The conditions for catch-up growth exist as long as your GDP per capita is way behind the OECD average, and China's GDP per capita is still way behind the OECD average. China *might* shoot itself in both feet and legs repeatedly and stall out its entire economy, but that's not the guaranteed outcome.
"China has to be willing to empower a large portion of its population."
It hasn't had to empower anyone so far. So far in China, "making people richer" does not appear to make them "more politically empowered", and China's poor demographics really help its societal stability because old people are far less likely to riot.
"It's absolutely astounding how low China's GDP per capita is and a testament to how much misallocation has gone on over the past decade."
You mean the decade from 2012-2022 that saw China's GDP per capita rise from ~$6,300 USD in 2012 to ~$11,200 USD in 2021?
This doesn't look like misallocation, this looks like "country that used to be crushingly poor thanks to that being the default state of mankind is becoming much-less-poor very quickly"
"And there's a tradeoff with waiting too...that allows the west to make up for the shortfalls outlined in this article. Is the tradeoff worth it? What advantages does China have now that it might not in ten years?"
The US military has a massive capital stock of ships, planes, and trained officers to command and use those pieces of complicated hardware. The gap between that capital pile and China's military-equivalent capital pile is much much larger than the gap between current-year US military spending and current-year Chinese military spending would suggest. By waiting, China buys time to start to close that gap, as well as build, test, and refine the sorts of complicated systems needed to pull of an amphibious assault in the age of the guided missile (blanket radar and waste heat jammers? Submarine pop-up landing craft? IDK, but some news things probably need to be invented).
If China was serious about taking Taiwan, they have the chance to do it almost-peacefully by outbidding the New Allies for it. Specifically, if they take a decade to do a huge military build-up focused on the capabilities necessary to take Taiwan, and while that is happening give the West time to build up replacement chip-making capabilities so they are not economically forced to go to war for Taiwan, then they might be able to make the conquest of Taiwan a fait accompli. Ukraine didn't roll over and surrender in the face of Russian aggression because they *could* stop them getting to Kiev. If China is willing to mobilize 25 million soldiers for the invasion, and the US/Europe look at the situation and go "we have no critical interest worth an equivalent mobilization", Taiwan will fold.
"It's also interesting that there's a lot of uproar in China over a possible visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi - pretext for a buildup of military forces across the strait? I imagine we'd see something like that in the news at some point (depending on how transparent our government wants to be - transparency worked wonders in Ukraine). If I start to hear about that then I can only assume the worst."
It depends on the scale of the mobilization. As we saw in Ukraine, an invasion force is so large that it's impossible to hide. As we also saw in Ukraine, 200,000 soldiers isn't a large enough invasion force. My impression is that if the CCP wanted to seize Taiwan in two months, they physically could not do it in the face Taiwanese military opposition because they don't have enough landing craft.
My read on the outrage about Pelosi's visit is a combination of:
(1) The CCP authorities cultivating a very hawkish stance towards Taiwan as a way to prepare the ground for a future invasion (something Putin essentially failed to do in the Ukraine situation)
(2) Nationalism being a hell of a drug, and being channeled into safe anti-American instead of anti-CCP outlets
(3) The CCP slowly ratcheting up rhetoric so the West understands that it is serious about Taiwan
(4) The CCP trying to psychologically exhaust the Taiwanese into surrendering
TL;DR co-ordination is hard, and you'd expect to see a lot of saber rattling before the saber is drawn if a country is expecting to fight a real war and not a "special military operation". Note that the Russo-Ukrainian War is still not a full-scale war by the standards of the Russian state.
My understanding was that China can't invade in October because the Taiwan Straight becomes too stormy for amphibious operations by mid October. So they'd have to start in September with missile strikes, naval embargo, etc in preparation for the amphibious assault before weather means they can't do it until March of the following year.
And most people seem pretty sure we'd see troop build ups at least 60 days in advance, so we're probably already past the point where they can do anything this year.
TBF China's logical next move on Taiwan is to seize the tiny border islands or set up a blockade. Neither of those would be as weather-dependent, or tip their hand as early, as full invasion.
Countries aren't always logical about war, of course. But while Russia has long liked dramatic surprise strikes (Hungary 1956, Crimea 2014, etc), China has usually aimed for a "just enough" or "salami slicing" military approach, where both they and the other side have room to back down from total war. (USSR 1969, Vietnam 1979, Chinese troops at the Himalayan borders today.)
So while I don't expect China to go straight to full invasion, for just that reason I also don't expect them to be bound by the weather or revealed by satellite. An upsurge in "final warning" language from Chinese diplomats may actually be, well, the final warning.
ZERO COVID. Try running an invasion with a Zero Covid policy on the home front. I know this sounds silly, but wars often bring disease with them, if only because troops and workers move around in large groups and bring their diseases with them. I'm not saying China couldn't do this, but it would have to be seriously motivated.
Taking Taiwan is, if anything, harder than taking the Ukraine Taiwan has mountainous terrain and limited landing areas. The Ukraine has a broad flat wheat belt. Taiwan's water barrier is wider than any river so that means water transport. Even assuming the US doesn't get directly involved, Taiwan will be hard to conquer and pacify.
Ignore all of that and try for a Zero Covid policy. How do you invade when you have to lock down cities and army camps when Covid starts to spread? How good are the Chinese vaccines? How many people in China have any antibodies to Covid? China would have to choose Covid or Taiwan.
Then, throw in the sanctions. When your total economy is based on being the manufacturing center of choice for the world, even half hearted sanctions, poorly enforced can hurt and a lot more seriously than the same sanctions hurt Russia. War manufacturing and mobilization could take up some of the slack, but transitioning to a war time economy would mean accepting major changes. Russia was willing to sacrifice its oil and gas markets. Is China willing to sacrifice the market for its manufactured goods.
Due to demographic collapse, it’s very likely that all of these strengths of the new axis won’t last. As China’s population dwindles to as low as 600-700 million people by 2100, it will lose global manufacturing share and its’ relative economic strength and population size. Even if China’s GDP passes that of the US, we would likely repass them sometime later in the century.
However, this isn’t something to be optimistic about. As Chinese elites begin to take a pessimistic view of the future, they may feel compelled to lash out now and attempt to take what they can before the window of opportunity closes. To quote foreign affairs “it’s a decade of living dangerously”.
China had a One-Child Policy (with many loopholes) in place from 1980-2015. In 2015 it became a Two-Child Policy. In May of 2021, this became a Three-Child Policy, then in July 2021 all family size limits and penalties were removed.
China is thus barely 1 year into "no anti-natalist policies", and hasn't yet begun to roll out large-scale pro-natalist policies. If the CCP decides that it wants China's population to be 2 billion in 2100 and makes that a central goal of state policy-making, I'm fairly confident that they will be able to accomplish that.
Examples of levers the CCP could pull to increase fertility:
(1) Starting in 2040, the only adults with at least 2 living biological full-siblings will allowed to attend any form of post-secondary educational institution.
(2) Starting in 2030, only adults with at least 4 biological children will be eligible for promotion within the Communist Party
(3) Starting in 2040, only adults with at least 3 biological children will be allowed to own property in tier-one cities, and only adults with at least 2 biological children will be allowd to own property in tier-two cities.
(4) Starting in 2025, urban hukou status will be automatically granted to any adult with at least 3 biological children.
(5) From 2025-2035, tax rates will be adjusted. Each year, each tax-payer will get a 2% discount on taxes for each living biological child between age 0 and 18, with headline rates adjusted to keep total tax collection constant (so 2% per child in 2026, 20% per child in 2035), stabilizing at 20% per children from 2035 on.
(6) Rolling out large-scale state-funded pension plans that pay out zero yuan to people with zero children, increasing with number of children.
(7) Interference in the private sector to force companies to discriminate against hiring single-children in favor of people with siblings.
Any policy against single children, especially now only punishes the children of people who lived by the rules 7 years ago. It does nothing to encourage older people many of whom are passed their prime to have children.
Additionally, this set of policy proposals could backfire. Instead of having more children people may choose to just forego college or live in a poorer community/region. These are outcomes that would hurt China’s development.
Finally, policies against hiring people with only one child may mean foregoing talent. For example, what if the best computer engineer in the country is infertile? Should companies be banned from hiring him/her? Not to mention the millions of men who will never be able to find a wife because of the large imbalance of men to women or members of the LGBT community.
These seven points might seem strong at first, but the potential drawbacks are enormous and the benefits untested.
"Any policy against single children, especially now only punishes the children of people who lived by the rules 7 years ago."
Right, which is why nearly all of these policies have clear clocks to only start far enough in the future that current-childbearing-age women can respond to them.
" It does nothing to encourage older people many of whom are passed their prime to have children."
True but also irrelevant. The older people who can no longer have children will never have any impact on future demographics (unless a tragedy matters and they die prematurely). What matters for China's future demographics is the decisions made by still-potentially-fertile couples.
"Instead of having more children people may choose to just forego college or live in a poorer community/region. These are outcomes that would hurt China’s development."
China already limits who can move to rich cities/regions (hukou system) because in their estimation avoiding the creation of slums is more important than maximizing next-year GDP growth. Whether they think this maximizing GDP growth in the medium term or instead minimizes unrest is unclear.
As for forgoing college:
"In 2021, the gross enrollment rate in tertiary education in China reached 57.8 percent of the respective age cohorts."
This is likely already higher than is optimal for economic growth. College is two things stapled together:
(1) An irreplaceable way to create highly skilled technical workers
(2) A very expensive way to signal that you are smart and conscientious and high-status
The number of workers in category (1) is small (less than 20% of the population) so there's a lot of room to cut back on college enrollment without reducing the productive capacity of the economy.
Because higher education is so tied up with the signalling game, rich/smart families crawl over broken glass to ensure that their kids get into college (in both China and America and basically every modern society). If the rules are changed to require that rich family to have more kids, they'll do it. Then if the rich/smart are having a lot more kids, the rest of society will start to have more kids to imitate high status people.
"Finally, policies against hiring people with only one child may mean foregoing talent."
Correct. This is a policy that very clearly has medium-term economic costs. However, if you are committed to never allowing large-scale immigration, a policy that raises the birth-rate in exchange for short and medium term economic costs will have a long-term economic benefit, at least in terms of Chinese-GDP-size-in-2100, unless the % reduction in per-capita-GDP-in-2100 exceeds the % increase in population from the policy.
"For example, what if the best computer engineer in the country is infertile? Should companies be banned from hiring him/her?"
(1) Someone who is the best computer engineer in the country is rich enough to pay for surrogacy. Very few people are so infertile that they can't have biological children through surrogacy.
(2) Discrimination doesn't necessarily mean being banned from hiring. It could be preferential tax breaks to the companies on the basis of the fertility of their employees, allowing them to offer higher salaries to employees with many children.
"Not to mention the millions of men who will never be able to find a wife because of the large imbalance of men to women or members of the LGBT community."
If the CCP was committed enough to having China's population in 2100 be 2.0 billion, this is also a very solveable problem. Options include (disclaimer many of these are mildly to very evil):
(1) Large-scale importation of foreign women to be government-issued waifus
(2) Government-facilitated polyandry ensuring that every man has a wife and at least one child, and poor women can more easily support their children since they have two poor men helping them
(3) Government-required double-coupling pairing up gay and lesbian couples into family units of 4 for child-rearing
(4) Government sponsored surrogacy programs paying poor women who already have the number of kids they want to have children for single men who can then be single fathers
"These seven points might seem strong at first, but the potential drawbacks are enormous and the benefits untested."
The potential drawbacks to economic efficiency are not that large. The benefits are certainly untested because no country in the world has successfully raised fertility a large amount (>+1.0 TFR) through government intervention before. We have a lot of data on what is insufficient (better childcare, etc) but no firm data on what works, which is why I pitched a wide ranging menu of options that are all *not* things that have already failed.
Also, these seven points are what I, a guy on the internet, came up with off the cuff. If the CCP turned its multi-million-person family planning apparatus *that they already have* on the problem, they'd probably find hundreds more, up to and including [extremely extremely evil policy warning] "we have a three child policy. That means women who don't have three children by the time they are 30 will be repeatedly forcibly impregnated until they have three kids or die"
So what would induce India to join the Western alliance and stick with it ? As far as I can see, India's best move would be to stay neutral and play each side off against the other. Each bloc would be forced to offer India better deals for it's goods and services to keep pace with the other. The worst position for New Delhi to find itself in would be to be locked into a monopoly supplier for vital materials, finance or technologies.
The only possible deal breaker here is the contested border in the North West between India China and Pakistan. there is a very real possibility that unresolved conflict could lead to war with all three parties armed with nuclear weapons. However, joining an anti-Chinese alliance in order to press it's territorial claims in the Himalayas could very well turn out to be a poisoned chalice for India. I strongly recommend Pravin Sawhney, editor of Force Magazine analysis here.
It's a bit complex, but he has said words to the effect of "China's answer to success on the first front (The USA) may run through the second front (India)".
Basically if Beijing can inflict a major defeat on India then it could collapse "The Quad" by demonstrating that Washington cannot protect them. India hold a very weak hand in the border dispute in the North West. Domestic electoral politics make a permanent settlement highly unlikely but to full achieve it's stated goals, New Delhi would have to seize tens of thousands of square miles of some of the harshest terrain in the world from a larger and stronger army that is dug in and waiting for them.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Noah, as always, thank you for the insightful analysis. Do you see this as the death knell for Globalization?
Is it possible that there will actually a much more fragmented world than a bipolar Cold War system? If countries “re-shore,” “near-shore,” or “friend-shore” most of their production, it makes sense that they would have far less global interests. For example, if most of America’s manufacture returns to the USA, why would it be interested in East Asia, Europe, Africa, or anywhere really? I think America is a very insular country—as is India. Both nations have a natural tendency to focus on internal matters.
Autarkic policies allow nations to become more self-sufficient but they also make them more parochial. Once a country achieves economic self-sufficiency there are very few incentives for it to venture into international conflagrations.
Instead of bifurcating, I foresee the Global Order shattering into a series of regional orders with regional power blocs competing over regional issues with little interest in events outside their “near abroads”.
> For example, if most of America’s manufacture returns to the USA, why would it be interested in East Asia, Europe, Africa, or anywhere really?
I'm curious to read Zeihan's thesis, since it seems he must address this but: even when America was the manufacturing center of the world it still was massively interested in Europe and East Asia. So I'm not sure why one follows the other.
Zeihan’s thesis is that the post-WW2 Bretton Woods and then subsequent WTO system of reasonably unimpaired global trade is fragmenting. The US lacks the will (and increasingly the ability) to keep the global maritime, space and cyberspace Commons open. A true naval war anywhere would end international shipping as we know it. According to Zeihan this would have many second and third order effects for agriculture and manufacturing (almost all negative). Zeihan argues that Bretton Woods and the Rules Based Order was an American attempt to fashion a global alliance to check the Soviets. If it could spread market capitalism successfully then the Communist world would become isolated and eventually die. According to Zeihan, with the USSR gone, the rationale for the Global Order disappeared and now it is dying.
America has, up until 1945, been very isolationist. It certainly kept itself appraised on European and Asian issues but it really was not a major player in either region until at least 1900. It generally stayed out of European disputes. Ironically, of all the Western imperial nations during the time of colonialism, America was the most committed to an independent China. You could actually make the case that it was American support to the KMT that set it on collision course with Imperial Japan in the 1930s.
The Western Hemisphere is the region which America has only truly ever been fully engaged with since its founding. I concur with Zeihan’s thesis that after Globalization, the US will assume a strongly inward focused posture and just disengage from much of the world.
I recently finished a book about the war in the Pacific called The Fleet at Flood Tide. It covers the past-Midway, past-Solomon's period until the end of the war. My takeaway from the book is that the US drowned the Japanese empire in a flood of steel and aviation gas. The Japanese and American fleets were of roughly comparable size at the start of the war. America's tremendous manufacturing capacity overwhelmed the Japanese. And, oh yes, also win the European war, too. Based upon that, reshoring basic materials production seems essential. I would say that I have little faith in the capacity of existing military industrial complex to meet these challenges. Boring built the bombers which rained destruction of Japan. These days they can't even keep production running.
You really think an actual shooting war between China and the United States is going to bear even a passing resemblance to '42-'45, with Rosie the Riveter producing ever higher levels of carriers, destroyers and combat aircraft, month after month, hard jungle slog after hard jungle slog, eventually culminating in "a flood of seel and aviation gas?" (Nice turn of phrase there).
The next great power war, if we're unlucky enough to find ourselves in one, is going to be violent, destructive, terrifying (think millions of people fleeing cities and supermarkets quickly selling out of food) and probably very short (days, rather than years), culminating either in A) a ceasefire if the two belligerents come to their senses, or, B) a nuclear exchange. This planet will never again see a multi-year great power world war characterized by grand campaigns sprawling over myriad, far-flung battle theaters involving millions of troops and the full mobilization of the economy (there won't be enough time).
Jasper, I respectfully disagree. I think you are right that a nuclear is quite possible but I very much doubt a war between the US and China would be short. It would likely be a years long effort.
Simply ask what are the victory conditions in a war absent a nuclear exchange? Unconditional surrender? What is China’s plan for invading the USA? Likewise, could America feasibly sustain an invasion of mainland China?
Unless there is a nuclear exchange any war between the US and China will likely turn into the equivalent of Britain and France’s Hundred Years War. A slow burn on again-off again conflict.
The sheer distance between China and the US would give the defender a major advantage. It takes a week at 35 knots to get from San Diego to Okinawa. Whoever is defending has a major advantage because they are saving 2 weeks of round-trip time. They would have far higher force availability as a result.
Imagine if USN and PLAN fights a naval battle near China, then each side pulls back to repair battle damage. Everything being equal, the Chinese fleet would be able to get repaired, go sack Australia, and be ready for round 2 with the USN.
James M: wars between peer states are almost never short. They are usually long affairs or they turn into decades long on-again and off-again military campaigns. Every historical analogy will be somewhat inadequate for the case at hand. My main point is the only resolution for a US-China war is unconditional surrender by one or the other party. What other victory condition could there be after initial hostilities?
What is China’s plan for invading the continental United States? How would America invade mainland China? Where would either land their forces? Even if both nations blew the equivalent of 50% of their GDP on military spending (not uncommon in previous great power wars) they would still have to cross the world’s largest ocean. After doing so they would have to land forces, establish a bridgehead and proceed to invade and occupy their rival.
The war would likely be a serious of successive stalemates until one (both sides collapsed). Between the stalemates it is unlikely peace could be established.
Hmm. I agree that a nuclear exchange is not guaranteed, but it seems more likely than a modern Hundred Years War. The Hundred Years War dragged on for as long as it did because:
(1) Castles gave defense a large advantage over offense
(2) States were both weak (couldn't muster large forces) and decentralized (many scattered powerbases to staff the aforementioned castles)
(3) The stronger nation (France) was more political divided and the weaker nation (England) had a large tech advantage (the longbow), both of which prevented either side from landing knock-out blows (France could absorb large losses, England almost never experienced large losses)
(4) Both sides had leadership that could maintain their power despite having decade-long losing streaks
None of those conditions hold today, except perhaps for guided missiles favoring defense over offense. The most relevant factor today that would make the conflict escalate towards a WWII scale, I think, is the fact that modern warfare is capital-intensive & both sides are spending much less on their militaries than they have the capability to. Using WWII as a ceiling for % of economy a modern state can spend on the military, the US could 10x spending and China could 20x spending.
Once a war started, either side could gain a decisive upper hand by massively increasing military spending if the other side didn't match them; if both sides massively increase military spending, the size of armies balloons and their sheer size drives both countries to seek a way to end the war and return to peacetime spending.
If the war didn't end in 6 months, it's far more likely to look like World War 2.2 than the Hundred Years War.
It depends. If you believe the Chinese, their nuclear doctrine assumes that nuclear weapons will only be used in a full nuclear exchange.*
If true, this means that there definitely could be a non-nuclear high-intensity war between America and China, since both sides would prefer losing a non-nuclear conflict to having a full nuclear exchange. The danger here is that America might try to use tactical nuclear weapons to make up for an inferiority of conventional forces in the Taiwan theater, which could result in the Chinese high command thinking that a full nuclear war had started.
If China is serious about nuclear weapons only being used in a full exchange, and America is serious about nuclear weapons being available for tactical use, that's a very dangerous state of affairs.
*They haven't developed tactical nuclear weapons, as far as we can tell, and maintain a much smaller nuclear arsenal than either Russia or America
I agree but I think there was more to it than that. Very successful militaries usually boast one of three distinct advantages. These are:
(1) They are either very large, or,
(2) Well-trained, or,
(3) Well-equipped (I.e. have good technology and logistics).
WW2 was unique in that the USA fielded a very large military (12M), was well trained (I.e. had close to a 1:1 kill ratio despite usually being on offense) and was well-equipped.
The real question is whether the USA can replicate such a feat if there ever was another large scale conventional war.
The modern US military is very well-trained and very well-equipped but it is not even close to 12M personnel.
Historically, you had to be well-equipped to be very large, because if you were living off the land, the army couldn't be supported above a certain size.
Similarly, you had to be well-trained to be very large, because maintaining control of very large forces is hard.
Steppe nomads (Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, Turks) managed to field armies that were very well-trained (steppe nomads come very-well-trained in cavalry archery out of the box) & very well-equipped (bows, arrows, extra horses) & very large
What of the African nations? Frontline has an episode featuring China's massive investment in infrastructure in Africa ("The New Silk Road - China's Belt and Road Initiative"). It says to me that China has been preparing for this new reality for years. In addition, needing to feed its population, Chinese companies own many of the world's largest producers of protein - Smithfield Foods for example. What role will a country's ability to feed it's people play in this new international arrangement?
The PLAN is still very far behind the USN. If China was relying on African calories and protein to feed its population in a war with America in 2023, China would starve.
That being said, I don't think China is planning on Africa as a vital food source. The CCP seems to put a lot of work into making sure China is approximately self-sufficient for calories and only importing things like meat that they could live without if push came to shove.
Manufacturing is very important, but I wouldn’t discount everything else as just Napa wine tours and wedding photographers. It’s organizational capacity, logistics, software, design, science research, and so on. And to the extent that it is things that are truly inessential, that reflects a latent capacity that can be mobilized.
I came out with a significantly larger ratio when I did this a while back, but that’s including Taiwan, SK, Canada, Australia, and so on. I don’t think it’s necessary to exclude even wavering countries embedded in the EU, because in practice it’s more important who they trade with. Even if they aren’t churning out artillery shells, they’re making other products to trade with those that do. See Sweden or Switzerland in WWII.
To a lesser degree, the same is true for some countries in the Americas - Mexico most strongly.
Of course that also applies for Russia and China. Kazakhstan could claim to be neutral but they’re not exactly over-supplied with alternative trading neighbors. The same goes for many of the rest of the ‘stans presumably. The problem for China & Russia is that none of those neighbors provides them with any new capabilities. Whereas for the West just having access to low-cost labor is useful. In an emergency the US could simply open the valve for immigration and receive tens of millions of workers from its south.
Most important is not the actual waging of any war, but the demonstrated capacity to do so without breaking a sweat. That does cost money: probably 5% of GDP everywhere is necessary. It also requires demonstrated control of supply chains so there is no ambiguity over the ability to mobilize the economy for conflict if necessary.
The US and parts of the EU also have an enormous but hard-to-quantify advantage in military experience, for complex combined-arms operations, COIN, carrier operations, and large-scale ground operations. Not much against true peers. China has essentially none. Russia has some but hardly seems to be shining.
Both the Atlantic and Pacific are Allied oceans. That’s a great advantage in ability to block trade. And as usual the geographic isolation of the US makes it invulnerable to conventional attack.
The concessions to China since the 1970s have been truly idiotic. Without exports to the US, especially early on through the offshoring of American plants, China could never have grown its current manufacturing capabilities. Even ten years ago the US was in a much stronger relative position, where moves to reduce ties would have hurt China far more than the US. There is still some question of export dependence, but in a true crisis the cutoff of export trade can be handled by repurposing that capacity to military production using printed money. (The handy thing about military production is that it doesn’t result in gluts that destroy prices; I mean really, can you ever have too many tanks?)
I think the American advantage in military experience is real but overstated. Experience in the last military paradigm may no mean much in the next/ The carrier experience is certainly real, but experience against whom ? The USA military hasn't flown against an integrated air defense system since Kosovo 1999, that's a generation ago, they haven't flown against an aircraft carrier since July 1945, that's 4 generations ago. A similar story could be told about other military forces, armor for example. The battle of 73 Easting was 30 years ago and it's very unlikely such a technological gap will occur next time .
I must recommend military analyst Pravin Sawhney of Force India magazine for your consideration.
As a former Indian officer he isn't beholden to Washington/NATO and has been watching China for a long time. He made some comments that really struck home with me, he say that the next war with China will be fought in 6 war fighting domains, the 3 old ones of Land, Air and Sea and the 3 new ones of Space, Cyberspace and the Electromagnetic Spectrum. A defeat in one domain could lead to a defeat in the other 5. The USA certainly has an advantage of experience in the first 3 (although Russia has experience there too) but the last 3 are still anyone's game.
I don't really want to get into a long thread about USA's vs Chinese space programs, that's probably better saved for another time and place, but here is China's first reusable rocket (probably)
there's a lot of technical back and forth we could do here but consider this, the first American astronaut was Alan Shepard in 1961. The first Chinese astronaut was Yang Liwei in 2003, that's a gap of 42 years. That test flight by Deep Blue Aerospace's Nebula M1 was in May of this year. To my admittedly non-expert eyes this looks roughly equivalent to SpaceX's Falcon 9 test 20 in December 2015.
That's a gap of 6~7 years. This next space race will be far from effortless dominance by the USA.
As for the effects of cyberspace and electromagnetic dominance on space weapons, those first two domains host the command and control systems for the third. Control of those domains could mean that space (and other weapons) are blocked, surveilled or spoofed. So the "Rods from God" never launch, their target is gone before impact or the impact is in San Francisco.
"To my admittedly non-expert eyes this looks roughly equivalent to SpaceX's Falcon 9 test 20 in December 2015."
They're quite a bit further behind than 6-7 years, since that Falcon 9 launch actually put satellites into orbit. A 1-km "hop" without releasing a payload more like the Grasshopper test flights that SpaceX did back in 2012-2013
So, I stand by "Until China demonstrates reuseable rockets on par with SpaceX, the US probably also has close to effortless dominance in space". China could certainly develop that technology given time, but the time involved is anywhere from 5-10 years, which is eternity if a shooting war over Taiwan started this year.
"Control of those domains could mean that space (and other weapons) are blocked, surveilled or spoofed. So the "Rods from God" never launch, their target is gone before impact or the impact is in San Francisco."
There's no such thing as "control" over the "domain" of "cyberspace". There are clean systems & compromised systems (in cyberspace) and systems capable of operating in the face of jamming or not (in EM spectrum). The most dramatic demonstration of cyberspace capabilities we've seen was Stuxnet, which used a zero-day exploit to then make a number of centrifuges spin slightly faster until they broke.
If SpaceX is launching "Rods from God", it's absolutely possible that the system that is trying to do that will be a compromised system that will fail the first time it is used. But then the system will be cleaned and the second (or third) time will work. There aren't that many zero-day exploits in the world, and even if you find one getting your software into the enemy's codebase is hard (Stuxnet relied on someone picking up and plugging in a USB key, if reports can be believed). So cyberspace/EM might buy you days, possibly weeks, but after a month SpaceX will be able to drop iron rods on PLA troops concentrations in Fujian province.
Cyberspace and EM capabilities look like they will be hiccups, not gamechangers. The IRL sanity check for this is Russian-Ukraine. Russia's cyber capabilities were widely believed to be ahead of China's, but it has been unable to shut down Ukrainian cell towers or power or anything of note.
Thanks or the reply, it’s appreciated but I think it risks falling down the rabbit hole of speculating about how complex systems, the details of which we can’t possibly know, might react in hypothetical situations we can’t possibly know will ever occur.
Those sort of speculations should be kept for another more technically orientated thread (any suggestions ?). This is Noah Smith commentary on the large scale geo-political map so instead of hacking through the weeds and tall grass we should zoom out and take a more helicopter’s eye view of the whole garden.
I still maintain that Pravin Sawhney’s frame of 6 war fighting domains, air, land, sea, space, cyberspace and electromagnetic is a useful one and that a dominance (or failure) in one could lead to a dominance (or failure) in another. Further more, I maintain that American experience in the last 3 is contested, speculative and certain not anything close to “ near effortless dominance”.
I don’t want to raise the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld too much here but what he said about “Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” is correct. For everything we know or think we know about these systems and the things we guess might possibly be the case, there is no way we can know what we don’t know about them let alone how they might interact together.
If you want something a little more tangible to chew over, consider this story about American/Chinese competition from a couple of years ago.
We need to be very careful about what we think about the accuracy of any of the claims made in this story. Personally I’m trying to be agnostic. Even if everyone quoted is actually real and totally telling the truth, there’s no way they are telling the WHOLE story. Nobody could possible know it, and naturally, everyone wants to put the best spin possible on their own actions.
However, in all the discussion about that particular story I never encountered anyone who said it’s impossible and could never have happened. I don’t know if the Chinese intelligence services compromised the CIA’s encrypted communications and rolled up their entire in-country network, but they could have. And if it happened once there it could happen elsewhere and indeed could have already happened more than once. Has the Navy been compromised ? The Air Force ? We don’t know, but it’s not impossible.
There’s another point that I’d like to make, even though it’s a bit metaphysical. When thinking about Rumsfeld’s 3 flavors of known, I vaguely recalled that every ones favorite Slovenian Lacanian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek (OK maybe not favorite but certainly top 5) had commented on the very same topic.
Zizek is quite right here, (not about the bees, that’s dumb) but Rumsfeld HAS left out a crucial fourth quadrant, The Unknown Known. Zizek calls them “things we don't know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it”. They are our blind spots, the things we don’t see, not because our eyes don’t work but because our brains won’t turn our heads to look at them. I might also call them things we know, but that just aren’t the case. They are the things that will make a war with China far from a near total American dominance.
“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.”
"“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.”
And there we have it, Unknown Knowns."
This is actually an Unknown Unknown, since you are claiming that they are wrong. Usually Unknown Knowns only get you into trouble when they become Unknown Unknowns, which can happen without you noticing because Unknown Knowns are rarely examined.
"However, in all the discussion about that particular story I never encountered anyone who said it’s impossible and could never have happened. I don’t know if the Chinese intelligence services compromised the CIA’s encrypted communications and rolled up their entire in-country network, but they could have. And if it happened once there it could happen elsewhere and indeed could have already happened more than once. Has the Navy been compromised ? The Air Force ? We don’t know, but it’s not impossible."
It's a very believable story, but compromised communications networks matter much more for intelligence (where vast majority of 'asset value' is concentrated in a tiny number of people who are fixed in position, and can be all eliminated at the same time once found in one strike) than for warfighting (where the vast majority of 'asset value' is constantly moving, and spread out over many more people, ships, planes, etc). The Allies had totally compromised the German "Enigma machine" in WWII for multiple years, but they had to be careful about how they used it otherwise the Germans would have changed their communication channel. So compromising the Enigma machine certainly gained them some value, but not so much that it swung the war on its own.
"They are the things that will make a war with China far from a near total American dominance."
I was not claiming that a war with China was near total American dominance. I was claiming that America has near total dominance in *space specifically* and will continue to have that dominance there for 5-10 years. The other 5 domains are more contested. The US also has advantages in the sea and air, while China has a huge advantage on land (in the form of the mainland and all the missiles there).
There has not yet been an example of EM or cyberspace dominance actually mattering in a war, unless you are claiming that the Chinese have more an advantage in cyberspace over the Americans than the Russians have over the Ukrainians.
I was much more sympathetic to the claims of the importance of cyberspace *before* the war in Ukraine, but every month that goes by with the Ukrainian power grid & internet still running is a month where cyberspace power appears to be not particularly relevant to 21st century warfare.
"I still maintain that Pravin Sawhney’s frame of 6 war fighting domains, air, land, sea, space, cyberspace and electromagnetic is a useful one and that a dominance (or failure) in one could lead to a dominance (or failure) in another."
I still think this is a paradigm that conceals more than it illuminates. The domains are not equal. In Ukraine, the land domain is the most important one, Russia continuing to be unable to defeat Ukraine on land is negating Russia's massive advantages on sea, in the air, in space, in cyberspace, and in the EM domain.
In the case of Taiwan, the sea domain is the most important one, followed by air, followed by land. Space, cyberspace, EM continue to be bit players.
"This is Noah Smith commentary on the large scale geo-political map so instead of hacking through the weeds and tall grass we should zoom out and take a more helicopter’s eye view of the whole garden."
The helicopter's eye view of the whole garden is that 21st century warfare is a land+sea+air affair, but one that relies more on missiles than 20th century warfare. We have had a lot of 21st century wars now, and at least one that involves a Great Power using the bulk of its military, and this is still the picture.
The clear lesson from Ukraine is that if an invasion of Taiwan is attempted in the next decade, the surprises (or lack thereof) are likely to be driven by missile technology, and the start-of-war complement of Taiwanese missile stockpiles will matter a great deal.
Man, this was the most depressing column I've read in a long time. I'm not saying anything in it is not true; quite the contrary it's quite convincing. It's just that the Internet made me hope I would live out the rest of my life in a world that was increasingly aware of the humanity of people different from ourselves, not another planetwide confrontation between Good and Evil with hundreds of millions of lives at stake.
Thank you for putting things in such a clear perspective.
Would you elaborate (or point to studies others have done) that will take a closer look at the differences in manufacturing, especially the capacity in the secondary sector of the economy?
For example, China dominates consumer goods manufacturing, but would shifting those low value-add industries elsewhere help win the competition? Or should the US and its allies focus on other more worthwhile things (say, resource extraction, heavy industry, etc)?
In the short run, Russia is important. In the long run, Russia is China's gas station.
Ironically, I think the Ukraine invasion has hurt China's strategy almost as badly as Russia's. Yes, Ukraine currently distracts our attention from China. But it's also taught everybody, especially Europeans, that dictators still launch stupid wars, and democracies still have to deter them from trying.
Thanks to Putin, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan no longer sounds like a ridiculous hypothetical to Europeans, a catastrophic Chinese stranglehold on a key economic resource sounds awfully familiar to them, and Europe doing their part to deter China isn't a crazy idea that has to be killed in committee.
In other words, by legitimating fears of a "New Axis," Putin may have done more for anti-Chinese unity and deterrence than any American President.
Incidentally, it looks like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) is so critical to the world economy that "protect Taiwan and its chips, politically convenient or not" may become our new version of the old "protect the Gulf oil states, politically convenient or not."
If China blockades or invades Taiwan, critical business all over Europe and the USA will shut down. We saw a preview of that with the auto chip shortage during the pandemic. If we lose TSMC to extended blockade or invasion, that promises lost jobs and economic hemorrhage all over the world.
Deterring China on Taiwan isn't about idealism anymore. It isn't even about all the other allied democracies that would be next under Chinese intimidation.
Protecting Taiwan, in today's world, is simply economically critical. Because of chips.
FWIW, while chip fabs are incredibly expensive, it's much more plausible that we could build a bunch of new chip fabs in the next decade, than that people in the '50s-'60s could come up with a replacement for all of the oil in the Middle East in a decade. In the end of course we did diversify our oil supply -- but the fracking revolution took much longer than one decade. With chips, it's not like the actual technology TSMC is employing is completely inaccessible to the US. To the extent TSMC has any special IP, well, they're a giant company already -- they easily could take all that IP and start building plants in the US and Europe. It would just take a ton of money and several years.
Maybe. Taiwan would also represent an incredibly valuable naval base to the Chinese Communists. Perhaps as valuable, or more, than what Hawaii represents to the U.S. It would also be nice if Taiwan could spend more than 2% of its GDP on defense. At one point, I believe it spent in excess of 5%. Does the government of Taiwan have its head in the clouds?
Respectfully your analysis is flawed because it rests on false assumptions.
The number one false assumption is that somehow western economies are democracies and that this war is a stupid war brought by a single caricatural dictator for absolutely no reason. It is a very cartoonish view of reality.
The second assumption is that somehow China would force an invasion on Taiwan. China and Taiwan have been in a state of co-dependence for decades with most of Taiwanese exports going to China. Furthermore a 1972 document by the US government "Joint Communique between the United States and China", outlines the USA's official position towards China and Taiwan. In short it stipulates that the USA acknowledges the "One-China Policy" whereby Taiwan is considered to be part of the greater mainland China.
The agitation provoked by the US establishment (Nancy's visit) are in direct violation of the USA's official position. But then again, the USA is trying to pick a bone with China since they failed with Russia in Ukraine (as we speak Russia has been issuing passports to the citizen of the areas they snatched and business has resumed in those areas).
1. Reshore as much as possible
2. Much more immigration, especially STEM
3. 1 billion Americans
That will win. Can we do it ?
Greg,
Although I endorse your points, I think they will actually backfire towards creating a set of “New Allies.” The stronger and more self-sufficient America becomes I think it will be less inclined to intervene in foreign affairs. The USA is presently the largest consumer market. If it grew to 1 billion Americans and was able to provide for its population entirely in-house, imagine how self-sufficient it would be and how disengaged it would be.
The personal costs of American engagement globally since 1990 have been born by a very small sliver of the US population. US aid to Ukraine of $40 billion, although a lot, does not seem to affect Americans’ daily lives in a meaningful way.
Now imagine a massive war. Can we picture the following?
(1) Huge swathes of Americans donating their cellphones or other consumer electronics in wartime public drives so that America can manufacture more guided missiles.
(2) The US military currently faces a staffing crisis as it struggles to meet its recruitment deadlines. It is doubtful that the military could accomplish its manpower goals through an all-volunteer force in the event of a large scale war in East Asia.
(3) The American public responding positively to the activation of selective service (i.e. the draft). Since the present draft is male-only, can you imagine the lawsuits that would follow a draft activation? Given the conservatism of much of America do you think Americans would allow their daughters to be drafted into combat in mass?
America would have to feel VERY threatened to mobilize in this way.
Most developing economies might not be with “New Allies” who seem to assume that their problems are the world’s problems. Pls also understand that despite ongoing India-China diplomatic confrontation, China remains India’s large trading partner. So it might be naive to assume that India will go with New Allies just because there’s a boundary dispute with China
China is America's largest trading partner too...I wish that trading links prevented conflict and war, but sadly they do not. Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners on the eve of WW1...
❝Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners on the eve of WW1...❞ But that war was not anticipated, an accidental war even. Poor communications, a creaking system of alliances, railway timetables, and Prinzip's good luck. But the c19 world of the Great Powers seems the best model for the coming world. US, Turkey, Iran, India will all be independent players. But how to think of the EU?
War between Britain & Germany was much more anticipated before ww1 than a US-China war is now. The main danger of a US-China war comes from a series of accidents spiraling out of control like we had in ww1.
That war was long anticipated. Read something like The Riddle of the Sands. In some ways, the Third Reich was less anticipated.
IIRC, the literature shows that greater trade does predict less armed conflict - just not nearly as strongly as we'd like to hope.
Rather stronger predictors of peace have been (1) "both countries are in alliance with a common larger third country" and/or (2) "both countries are established democracies."
Alas, neither predictor will apply anytime soon to the USA-China pair.
Good point - only thing is that India is not part of the British or American orbit nor is China going to war with India anytime soon. As for “Quad” it is neither a military alliance nor a diplomatic voice. It will be optimistic to see the NATO-Russia conflict as somehow a harbinger for a new cold/ hot war.
I don't think that is optimistic...I think it's pessimistic.
The real start will be a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
“ nor is China going to war with India anytime soon” - what makes you say this? Isn’t this the same complacency we saw in 1962?
India is much better prepared today than before - including good infrastructure for troop deployment and tactical superiority in the Ladakh region. Cold Start doctrine is in place. Also China doesn’t gain anything from a war with India. So the cat and mouse game might continue but a war is unlikely mostly because india today is NOT the feeble India of 1962. And in any case, the US and it’s fellow NATO allies are not the most reliable partners - the story of their hasty running away from Afghanistan is well know .
Um, there is no way that 20 years, tens of billions of dollars, and thousands of deaths and injuries can be characterized as "hasty".
China clearly views India as a strategic opponent and there is history of hostilities, including in the last few years. I would like to see India and the US get much closer- would be good for global stability.
This is an important piece. It seems to be missing one big thing: China's food supply.
Edward Luttwak has been claiming that China is so dependent on food imports from the US and its allies (such as Australia) that it would quickly run low on food during a war, or even just an embargo. He uses this in support of the claim that, if rational, China will not launch a war over Taiwan:
>China imports much of its protein from US/allies (150 million metric tonnes/annum of meat, soy, not easily smuggled) It can reduce fuel use + increase fuel imports from Ru/Kazakh .But today's Chinese would starve on a Mao diet & its vast rice stocks will not do. Empty threats
(https://twitter.com/ELuttwak/status/1553403264959483904)
So I've looked into China's meat consumption:
>... in the 1960s, the average Chinese person consumed less than 5 kg of meat annually. But as in comes soared following Deng Xiaoping’s market-driven “reform and opening” of the late 1970s, consumption rose to 20 kg per capita by the late 1980s and has now reached 63 kg. Today, China consumes 28% of the world’s meat, including half of all pork.
(https://time.com/5930095/china-plant-based-meat/)
Meat tends to be more expensive per calorie, partly because it requires more land per calorie.
What would most likely happen if the Chinese government tried to abruptly return the populace, not to its Mao-era famine diet, but its late 1980s diet? How would the populace handle the drastic change? How quickly could Chinese farmers switch from producing meat to vegetables and grains? (Factory farming implies a lack of space available for crops.)
Have we learned anything relevant from countries whose financial crises slash their food imports? Perhaps Lebanon in recent years?
Have seen these tweets too and it's hard to know how much weight to give it. Germany fought in WW2 knowing the difficulty it would have securing oil supplies I think? Japan set maximalist war aims largely to secure oil supplies. These analogies would suggest that if China does decide to go to war with US and allies then it would be necessary for them to extend far beyond taking Taiwan, going on to push allied influence out of supply routes. If they ever feel capable of doing so over say a 1 to 2 year conflict then war is a viable option. This is dangerous because China may feel it can win a hot war but is guaranteed to lose a cold war with trade embargos. For that point of view, deepening trade links between Russia and China would be good as it would remove the 'need' for China to attack aggressively to secure supplies of both food and fuel. Thus may make a cold war scenario more likely.
Informative analysis as always, thank you Noah!
It would be a lot of fun to design a board game involving this situation.
Any other Axis & Allies fans out there?
Haha oh dear...
There are already games on the subject. Check out Next War: Taiwan by GMT Games (the premier publishing company of conflict simulations)
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/135796/next-war-taiwan
The military is actually using this game to study strategy
https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/how-does-the-next-great-power-conflict-play-out-lessons-from-a-wargame/
Fascinating, thank you for sharing! It seemed like these wargamers in 2019 were overly optimistic about Russia's military capabilities?
If I were to design a game of this sort, I might make it more about cultural and economic influence, with military conflict as an option (but not a certainty-- e.g. the Russian player could, instead of a military invasion of Ukraine, focus on expanding it's influence on other parts of the world).
It would be really cool to simulate strategies and outcomes based on possible scenarios, i.e. does India side with the Allies, Axis, or remain neutral? Does North Korea take its chance to invade / shell / nuke South Korea? Chance card: Iran finishes an atomic bomb. That would be some real RAND Corporation $&@!.
I wonder if India could be the wedge the divides the Axis (even as some kind of loose grouping) in similar ways that Vietnam was able to leverage the Soviet-Sino split and if the "Allies" could do anything to exacerbate that. e.g. if India could by virtue of its trade with both, put pressure on Russia to slow or reduce shipment of fuel while also putting pressure on China to not just become Russia's manufacturing center.
I think Western observers often overlook how much China distracted the USSR during the Cold War. (c.f. the undeclared war in 1969 between them that lasted 7 months and involved the mobilisation of 1.5 million troops.)
Would Vietnam join the New Allies? I understand the China-Vietnam relationship has become rockier. Would be nice to ally-shore some manufacturing there.
Not really? (It's complicated.) One of the bedrocks of Vietnam's defense policy is the "Three Nos" policy. No alliances, no foreign military bases, no reliance on other countries for combat. In a 2019 interview Vietnam's defense minister said their goal was to make friends, not enemies.
Plus we share a 1,300km border with China. It is BY FAR our biggest trading partner and has been since 2004 or so. Vietnam has generally adopted a "China plus one" economic strategy, where it acts as a complement to (not a competitor to) China's manufacturing so economic conflict would be painful.
Looking at Western pocketbook hesitance over Ukraine it seems clear that the Allies would almost certainly be unwilling to foot the military and economic cost to Vietnam if it actually directly antagonised China.
(Also it hasn't really "become rockier". It has always been rocky! Check out when China invaded Vietnam in 1979, for instance. Or the 2014 anti-China riots in Bình Dương and other cities.)
Yeah. Plus Vietnam doesn't really have power projection capability. It would only fight China if China invaded again.
Thanks. I knew it was a complicated question and this is a really informed answer. Appreciate it!
Maybe!
Lingering thought of mine - for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year? Russia has made its move - the longer China waits the longer the west has to prepare. Chinese demographics are only set to get worse and we all know that the Chinese economy is likely far worse off than what's officially being reported. Michael Pettis has done a great job documenting the looming issues for the Chinese economy - and if China decided to develop and implement policies aimed at increasing consumer spending it COULD turn things around in the medium and long term.
BUT...in the short term it has a HUUUUGE property sector implosion and nowhere to allocate supply side stimulus in a productive fashion. Ongoing Covid lockdowns continue to suppress the economy and the recent reports showcase their economy limping along on exports (record trade surplus - flatlining imports indicating minimal consumption growth). So Xi doesn't want to give out money to stimulate consumption because of inflation and possibly also sees creating a legitimately large middle class with GDP per capita closer to Estonia as a threat to his power as well (Perhaps when people are wealthier they will ask more questions, feel more empowered, be less concerned with living day to day, etc).
If I'm China I need something to unite the country, direct it's attention and focus (away from lingering internal concerns - Covid, Housing, aging, no safety nets, etc), and launching an attack on Taiwan in October would really fit this bill...
>>>for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year?<<<
Perhaps they're more rational and coldly calculating than we think?
National pride is a dangerous—and not a very rational thing. But Taiwan is plainly not about to declare independence. So why start a war that could end in disaster?
China's economy would only increase by about 5% if it re-took Taiwan (probably less given the damage to Taiwan's economy). Its population by only about 2%. Its land area by under 1%. And it can't hope to capture Taiwan's chip sector intact. Invading Taiwan can't pass even the most far-fetched, rose-tinted risk analysis for Beijing.
Do I have a lot of hope CCP top leadership is thinking fully rationally on this issue? Not at all; but you asked for a reason as to why they might not pull the trigger soon. Lack of idiocy (finger crossed) might be one such reason.
Even if you take as a given that "retaking Taiwan" is a non-negotiable goal, I'm pretty sure the rational thing would be to wait. Xi Jinping and the CCP tend to speak as if 2049 is the deadline for reuniting with Taiwan. If that's the case, China will almost certainly have a better opportunity sometime in the late 2020s or early 2030s.
Right now they are only spending 2% of GDP on defense. You'd probably want a decade of elevated military spending before attempting to take Taiwan, since you'll need a *lot* of ships and missiles stockpiled.
Xi is already in charge, and doesn't face a citizens' election. For him, starting a fight over Taiwan can cost him power, if he loses badly, but can't gain him power. So his reason to fight isn't current popularity but long-term ambitions.
So ideally, Xi would like Taiwan to wait until he has a little less on his hands at home - the pandemic, the real estate crackdown, etc.
Sure, in two or three years Xi may well think it's "now or never," because of improving Taiwanese defenses and/or strengthening American and Japanese support.
But right now, Xi's kind of busy.
>>>For him, starting a fight over Taiwan can cost him power, if he loses badly, but can't gain him power. <<<
And what if he wins?* Or, what if is his generals are telling him what they believe he wants to hear?
One of the dangers is that the Taiwan situation in Beijing (just like in DC) is viewed through the prism of domestic politics. I'm not suggesting we've reached this precipice at present, but it's not very difficult to envisage a scenario whereby Xi calculates invading Taiwan is less risky than not doing so in terms of *holding onto power.* There are rumors flying that he faces nontrivial and perhaps growing opposition to his rule (very, very cautious opposition, to be sure). Dictators have been known to use security or foreign policy crises for reasons of domestic politics.
*I frankly have no idea what to believe is likely to transpire if an actual shooting war broke out between the US and the PRC, other than to fear it could be the most dangerous moment for our species in 70,000 years. But if the US doesn't go to war over a China invasion of Taiwan, I don't think we can conclude China would fail to take the island, can we? They might not succeed, true! Who knows? But a military victory for the PRC is hardly beyond the realm of possibility. Also, just like Taipei, Beijing, too, has likely been taking notes since Putin invaded Ukraine, and probably won't move unless/until it thinks it is sufficiently well-prepared.
"for what reason would China delay attacking and attempting to take Taiwan this year?"
China is betting that time is on its side.
It is popular in the West to point out that China has looming demographic challenges. Much less discussed is the pace of Chinese human capital and industrial technology upgrading.
In both the EU and the US, the share of young people entering the work force with tertiary education has mostly stagnated over the past generation. In China, that number has gone from < 1% in 1980 to 45% today.
The robot density of China's industrial base went from 36/100k workers in 2014 to 246/100k in 2020. At this rate, China will overtake US and most of the EU in robot density within the next 2-3 years.
China is rapidly catching up in every area of technology. In a decade China will have absolute military superiority in the Western Pacific regardless of what the US/EU does. The US + EU industrial base simply does not have the capacity to match China in an arms race. Even a semi-serious attempt to prepare for a conflict with China will just make inflation worse in the West.
Strong agreement on all of these points. If China wanted to conquer Taiwan, we'd expect to see several years of very high military spending towards that end building landing craft, training millions of soldiers, stockpiling missiles, etc. These expenditures would occupy a large share of China's manufacturing capacity and therefore be ones that the rest of the world couldn't feasibly match / could only feasibly match with a united India-Europe-America front.
Unless Covid Zero permanently stops China's catch-up growth, China's moment of maximum opportunity to take Taiwan is probably still in the future. China would probably wants its nominal GDP to be equal to the US *and* to then have a decade of spending 10% of GDP on military hardware [which the US would struggle to match for domestic politics reasons] before it tries to attack. It'll need a *lot* of ships to take Taiwan, given that missiles seem to be advantaging defense over offense.
But does Xi want to wait for that? I don't think he'll be in power long enough for that to come to fruition. The time for catch up growth has passed them - the reforms that are necessary can be done but China has to be willing to empower a large portion of its population. It's absolutely astounding how low China's GDP per capita is and a testament to how much misallocation has gone on over the past decade. And there's a tradeoff with waiting too...that allows the west to make up for the shortfalls outlined in this article. Is the tradeoff worth it? What advantages does China have now that it might not in ten years? You look at Europe giving themselves this year and the next to decouple from Russian commodities...that's a much more aggressive timeline.
It's also interesting that there's a lot of uproar in China over a possible visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi - pretext for a buildup of military forces across the strait? I imagine we'd see something like that in the news at some point (depending on how transparent our government wants to be - transparency worked wonders in Ukraine). If I start to hear about that then I can only assume the worst.
There is always the issue of face here as well - I'm not discounting that - public officials in Taiwan are constantly playing a game of words. So is China and to a lesser extent we are too buuuut...we always have been. What makes this different is what's already happened in Ukraine and China's affirmation of unlimited support to the Russian regime. This is...different.
Xi Jinping appears to have stabilized his position as ruler-for-life, so unless there are domestic pressures we don't know about, his time limit is "his life expectancy". As a wealthy Chinese man aged 69, that life expectancy is probably >15 years.
"The time for catch up growth has passed them" Not really. The conditions for catch-up growth exist as long as your GDP per capita is way behind the OECD average, and China's GDP per capita is still way behind the OECD average. China *might* shoot itself in both feet and legs repeatedly and stall out its entire economy, but that's not the guaranteed outcome.
"China has to be willing to empower a large portion of its population."
It hasn't had to empower anyone so far. So far in China, "making people richer" does not appear to make them "more politically empowered", and China's poor demographics really help its societal stability because old people are far less likely to riot.
"It's absolutely astounding how low China's GDP per capita is and a testament to how much misallocation has gone on over the past decade."
You mean the decade from 2012-2022 that saw China's GDP per capita rise from ~$6,300 USD in 2012 to ~$11,200 USD in 2021?
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita
This doesn't look like misallocation, this looks like "country that used to be crushingly poor thanks to that being the default state of mankind is becoming much-less-poor very quickly"
"And there's a tradeoff with waiting too...that allows the west to make up for the shortfalls outlined in this article. Is the tradeoff worth it? What advantages does China have now that it might not in ten years?"
The US military has a massive capital stock of ships, planes, and trained officers to command and use those pieces of complicated hardware. The gap between that capital pile and China's military-equivalent capital pile is much much larger than the gap between current-year US military spending and current-year Chinese military spending would suggest. By waiting, China buys time to start to close that gap, as well as build, test, and refine the sorts of complicated systems needed to pull of an amphibious assault in the age of the guided missile (blanket radar and waste heat jammers? Submarine pop-up landing craft? IDK, but some news things probably need to be invented).
If China was serious about taking Taiwan, they have the chance to do it almost-peacefully by outbidding the New Allies for it. Specifically, if they take a decade to do a huge military build-up focused on the capabilities necessary to take Taiwan, and while that is happening give the West time to build up replacement chip-making capabilities so they are not economically forced to go to war for Taiwan, then they might be able to make the conquest of Taiwan a fait accompli. Ukraine didn't roll over and surrender in the face of Russian aggression because they *could* stop them getting to Kiev. If China is willing to mobilize 25 million soldiers for the invasion, and the US/Europe look at the situation and go "we have no critical interest worth an equivalent mobilization", Taiwan will fold.
"It's also interesting that there's a lot of uproar in China over a possible visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi - pretext for a buildup of military forces across the strait? I imagine we'd see something like that in the news at some point (depending on how transparent our government wants to be - transparency worked wonders in Ukraine). If I start to hear about that then I can only assume the worst."
It depends on the scale of the mobilization. As we saw in Ukraine, an invasion force is so large that it's impossible to hide. As we also saw in Ukraine, 200,000 soldiers isn't a large enough invasion force. My impression is that if the CCP wanted to seize Taiwan in two months, they physically could not do it in the face Taiwanese military opposition because they don't have enough landing craft.
My read on the outrage about Pelosi's visit is a combination of:
(1) The CCP authorities cultivating a very hawkish stance towards Taiwan as a way to prepare the ground for a future invasion (something Putin essentially failed to do in the Ukraine situation)
(2) Nationalism being a hell of a drug, and being channeled into safe anti-American instead of anti-CCP outlets
(3) The CCP slowly ratcheting up rhetoric so the West understands that it is serious about Taiwan
(4) The CCP trying to psychologically exhaust the Taiwanese into surrendering
TL;DR co-ordination is hard, and you'd expect to see a lot of saber rattling before the saber is drawn if a country is expecting to fight a real war and not a "special military operation". Note that the Russo-Ukrainian War is still not a full-scale war by the standards of the Russian state.
My understanding was that China can't invade in October because the Taiwan Straight becomes too stormy for amphibious operations by mid October. So they'd have to start in September with missile strikes, naval embargo, etc in preparation for the amphibious assault before weather means they can't do it until March of the following year.
And most people seem pretty sure we'd see troop build ups at least 60 days in advance, so we're probably already past the point where they can do anything this year.
TBF China's logical next move on Taiwan is to seize the tiny border islands or set up a blockade. Neither of those would be as weather-dependent, or tip their hand as early, as full invasion.
Countries aren't always logical about war, of course. But while Russia has long liked dramatic surprise strikes (Hungary 1956, Crimea 2014, etc), China has usually aimed for a "just enough" or "salami slicing" military approach, where both they and the other side have room to back down from total war. (USSR 1969, Vietnam 1979, Chinese troops at the Himalayan borders today.)
So while I don't expect China to go straight to full invasion, for just that reason I also don't expect them to be bound by the weather or revealed by satellite. An upsurge in "final warning" language from Chinese diplomats may actually be, well, the final warning.
ZERO COVID. Try running an invasion with a Zero Covid policy on the home front. I know this sounds silly, but wars often bring disease with them, if only because troops and workers move around in large groups and bring their diseases with them. I'm not saying China couldn't do this, but it would have to be seriously motivated.
Taking Taiwan is, if anything, harder than taking the Ukraine Taiwan has mountainous terrain and limited landing areas. The Ukraine has a broad flat wheat belt. Taiwan's water barrier is wider than any river so that means water transport. Even assuming the US doesn't get directly involved, Taiwan will be hard to conquer and pacify.
Ignore all of that and try for a Zero Covid policy. How do you invade when you have to lock down cities and army camps when Covid starts to spread? How good are the Chinese vaccines? How many people in China have any antibodies to Covid? China would have to choose Covid or Taiwan.
Then, throw in the sanctions. When your total economy is based on being the manufacturing center of choice for the world, even half hearted sanctions, poorly enforced can hurt and a lot more seriously than the same sanctions hurt Russia. War manufacturing and mobilization could take up some of the slack, but transitioning to a war time economy would mean accepting major changes. Russia was willing to sacrifice its oil and gas markets. Is China willing to sacrifice the market for its manufactured goods.
Due to demographic collapse, it’s very likely that all of these strengths of the new axis won’t last. As China’s population dwindles to as low as 600-700 million people by 2100, it will lose global manufacturing share and its’ relative economic strength and population size. Even if China’s GDP passes that of the US, we would likely repass them sometime later in the century.
However, this isn’t something to be optimistic about. As Chinese elites begin to take a pessimistic view of the future, they may feel compelled to lash out now and attempt to take what they can before the window of opportunity closes. To quote foreign affairs “it’s a decade of living dangerously”.
China had a One-Child Policy (with many loopholes) in place from 1980-2015. In 2015 it became a Two-Child Policy. In May of 2021, this became a Three-Child Policy, then in July 2021 all family size limits and penalties were removed.
China is thus barely 1 year into "no anti-natalist policies", and hasn't yet begun to roll out large-scale pro-natalist policies. If the CCP decides that it wants China's population to be 2 billion in 2100 and makes that a central goal of state policy-making, I'm fairly confident that they will be able to accomplish that.
Examples of levers the CCP could pull to increase fertility:
(1) Starting in 2040, the only adults with at least 2 living biological full-siblings will allowed to attend any form of post-secondary educational institution.
(2) Starting in 2030, only adults with at least 4 biological children will be eligible for promotion within the Communist Party
(3) Starting in 2040, only adults with at least 3 biological children will be allowed to own property in tier-one cities, and only adults with at least 2 biological children will be allowd to own property in tier-two cities.
(4) Starting in 2025, urban hukou status will be automatically granted to any adult with at least 3 biological children.
(5) From 2025-2035, tax rates will be adjusted. Each year, each tax-payer will get a 2% discount on taxes for each living biological child between age 0 and 18, with headline rates adjusted to keep total tax collection constant (so 2% per child in 2026, 20% per child in 2035), stabilizing at 20% per children from 2035 on.
(6) Rolling out large-scale state-funded pension plans that pay out zero yuan to people with zero children, increasing with number of children.
(7) Interference in the private sector to force companies to discriminate against hiring single-children in favor of people with siblings.
Any policy against single children, especially now only punishes the children of people who lived by the rules 7 years ago. It does nothing to encourage older people many of whom are passed their prime to have children.
Additionally, this set of policy proposals could backfire. Instead of having more children people may choose to just forego college or live in a poorer community/region. These are outcomes that would hurt China’s development.
Finally, policies against hiring people with only one child may mean foregoing talent. For example, what if the best computer engineer in the country is infertile? Should companies be banned from hiring him/her? Not to mention the millions of men who will never be able to find a wife because of the large imbalance of men to women or members of the LGBT community.
These seven points might seem strong at first, but the potential drawbacks are enormous and the benefits untested.
"Any policy against single children, especially now only punishes the children of people who lived by the rules 7 years ago."
Right, which is why nearly all of these policies have clear clocks to only start far enough in the future that current-childbearing-age women can respond to them.
" It does nothing to encourage older people many of whom are passed their prime to have children."
True but also irrelevant. The older people who can no longer have children will never have any impact on future demographics (unless a tragedy matters and they die prematurely). What matters for China's future demographics is the decisions made by still-potentially-fertile couples.
"Instead of having more children people may choose to just forego college or live in a poorer community/region. These are outcomes that would hurt China’s development."
China already limits who can move to rich cities/regions (hukou system) because in their estimation avoiding the creation of slums is more important than maximizing next-year GDP growth. Whether they think this maximizing GDP growth in the medium term or instead minimizes unrest is unclear.
As for forgoing college:
"In 2021, the gross enrollment rate in tertiary education in China reached 57.8 percent of the respective age cohorts."
This is likely already higher than is optimal for economic growth. College is two things stapled together:
(1) An irreplaceable way to create highly skilled technical workers
(2) A very expensive way to signal that you are smart and conscientious and high-status
The number of workers in category (1) is small (less than 20% of the population) so there's a lot of room to cut back on college enrollment without reducing the productive capacity of the economy.
Because higher education is so tied up with the signalling game, rich/smart families crawl over broken glass to ensure that their kids get into college (in both China and America and basically every modern society). If the rules are changed to require that rich family to have more kids, they'll do it. Then if the rich/smart are having a lot more kids, the rest of society will start to have more kids to imitate high status people.
"Finally, policies against hiring people with only one child may mean foregoing talent."
Correct. This is a policy that very clearly has medium-term economic costs. However, if you are committed to never allowing large-scale immigration, a policy that raises the birth-rate in exchange for short and medium term economic costs will have a long-term economic benefit, at least in terms of Chinese-GDP-size-in-2100, unless the % reduction in per-capita-GDP-in-2100 exceeds the % increase in population from the policy.
"For example, what if the best computer engineer in the country is infertile? Should companies be banned from hiring him/her?"
(1) Someone who is the best computer engineer in the country is rich enough to pay for surrogacy. Very few people are so infertile that they can't have biological children through surrogacy.
(2) Discrimination doesn't necessarily mean being banned from hiring. It could be preferential tax breaks to the companies on the basis of the fertility of their employees, allowing them to offer higher salaries to employees with many children.
"Not to mention the millions of men who will never be able to find a wife because of the large imbalance of men to women or members of the LGBT community."
If the CCP was committed enough to having China's population in 2100 be 2.0 billion, this is also a very solveable problem. Options include (disclaimer many of these are mildly to very evil):
(1) Large-scale importation of foreign women to be government-issued waifus
(2) Government-facilitated polyandry ensuring that every man has a wife and at least one child, and poor women can more easily support their children since they have two poor men helping them
(3) Government-required double-coupling pairing up gay and lesbian couples into family units of 4 for child-rearing
(4) Government sponsored surrogacy programs paying poor women who already have the number of kids they want to have children for single men who can then be single fathers
"These seven points might seem strong at first, but the potential drawbacks are enormous and the benefits untested."
The potential drawbacks to economic efficiency are not that large. The benefits are certainly untested because no country in the world has successfully raised fertility a large amount (>+1.0 TFR) through government intervention before. We have a lot of data on what is insufficient (better childcare, etc) but no firm data on what works, which is why I pitched a wide ranging menu of options that are all *not* things that have already failed.
Also, these seven points are what I, a guy on the internet, came up with off the cuff. If the CCP turned its multi-million-person family planning apparatus *that they already have* on the problem, they'd probably find hundreds more, up to and including [extremely extremely evil policy warning] "we have a three child policy. That means women who don't have three children by the time they are 30 will be repeatedly forcibly impregnated until they have three kids or die"
So what would induce India to join the Western alliance and stick with it ? As far as I can see, India's best move would be to stay neutral and play each side off against the other. Each bloc would be forced to offer India better deals for it's goods and services to keep pace with the other. The worst position for New Delhi to find itself in would be to be locked into a monopoly supplier for vital materials, finance or technologies.
The only possible deal breaker here is the contested border in the North West between India China and Pakistan. there is a very real possibility that unresolved conflict could lead to war with all three parties armed with nuclear weapons. However, joining an anti-Chinese alliance in order to press it's territorial claims in the Himalayas could very well turn out to be a poisoned chalice for India. I strongly recommend Pravin Sawhney, editor of Force Magazine analysis here.
https://forceindia.net/about-the-editors/
It's a bit complex, but he has said words to the effect of "China's answer to success on the first front (The USA) may run through the second front (India)".
Basically if Beijing can inflict a major defeat on India then it could collapse "The Quad" by demonstrating that Washington cannot protect them. India hold a very weak hand in the border dispute in the North West. Domestic electoral politics make a permanent settlement highly unlikely but to full achieve it's stated goals, New Delhi would have to seize tens of thousands of square miles of some of the harshest terrain in the world from a larger and stronger army that is dug in and waiting for them.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
WOPR "WarGames" 1983
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU
Noah, as always, thank you for the insightful analysis. Do you see this as the death knell for Globalization?
Is it possible that there will actually a much more fragmented world than a bipolar Cold War system? If countries “re-shore,” “near-shore,” or “friend-shore” most of their production, it makes sense that they would have far less global interests. For example, if most of America’s manufacture returns to the USA, why would it be interested in East Asia, Europe, Africa, or anywhere really? I think America is a very insular country—as is India. Both nations have a natural tendency to focus on internal matters.
Autarkic policies allow nations to become more self-sufficient but they also make them more parochial. Once a country achieves economic self-sufficiency there are very few incentives for it to venture into international conflagrations.
Instead of bifurcating, I foresee the Global Order shattering into a series of regional orders with regional power blocs competing over regional issues with little interest in events outside their “near abroads”.
> For example, if most of America’s manufacture returns to the USA, why would it be interested in East Asia, Europe, Africa, or anywhere really?
I'm curious to read Zeihan's thesis, since it seems he must address this but: even when America was the manufacturing center of the world it still was massively interested in Europe and East Asia. So I'm not sure why one follows the other.
Zeihan’s thesis is that the post-WW2 Bretton Woods and then subsequent WTO system of reasonably unimpaired global trade is fragmenting. The US lacks the will (and increasingly the ability) to keep the global maritime, space and cyberspace Commons open. A true naval war anywhere would end international shipping as we know it. According to Zeihan this would have many second and third order effects for agriculture and manufacturing (almost all negative). Zeihan argues that Bretton Woods and the Rules Based Order was an American attempt to fashion a global alliance to check the Soviets. If it could spread market capitalism successfully then the Communist world would become isolated and eventually die. According to Zeihan, with the USSR gone, the rationale for the Global Order disappeared and now it is dying.
America has, up until 1945, been very isolationist. It certainly kept itself appraised on European and Asian issues but it really was not a major player in either region until at least 1900. It generally stayed out of European disputes. Ironically, of all the Western imperial nations during the time of colonialism, America was the most committed to an independent China. You could actually make the case that it was American support to the KMT that set it on collision course with Imperial Japan in the 1930s.
The Western Hemisphere is the region which America has only truly ever been fully engaged with since its founding. I concur with Zeihan’s thesis that after Globalization, the US will assume a strongly inward focused posture and just disengage from much of the world.
Thanks for that synopsis. It spurred me to get his book on my Kindle.
True, although Peter makes his case in a much more sophisticated way than I.
I recently finished a book about the war in the Pacific called The Fleet at Flood Tide. It covers the past-Midway, past-Solomon's period until the end of the war. My takeaway from the book is that the US drowned the Japanese empire in a flood of steel and aviation gas. The Japanese and American fleets were of roughly comparable size at the start of the war. America's tremendous manufacturing capacity overwhelmed the Japanese. And, oh yes, also win the European war, too. Based upon that, reshoring basic materials production seems essential. I would say that I have little faith in the capacity of existing military industrial complex to meet these challenges. Boring built the bombers which rained destruction of Japan. These days they can't even keep production running.
Notably, a lot of that crucial fleet expansion started before the war.
The first 11 Essex carriers (fleet carriers, not light carriers) were all ordered in 1940:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex-class_aircraft_carrier
For reference, Japan started the war with 10 fleet aircraft carriers, America had 7, and Britain had 8.
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Japanese_Navy_in_World_War_II#Aircraft_carriers
You really think an actual shooting war between China and the United States is going to bear even a passing resemblance to '42-'45, with Rosie the Riveter producing ever higher levels of carriers, destroyers and combat aircraft, month after month, hard jungle slog after hard jungle slog, eventually culminating in "a flood of seel and aviation gas?" (Nice turn of phrase there).
The next great power war, if we're unlucky enough to find ourselves in one, is going to be violent, destructive, terrifying (think millions of people fleeing cities and supermarkets quickly selling out of food) and probably very short (days, rather than years), culminating either in A) a ceasefire if the two belligerents come to their senses, or, B) a nuclear exchange. This planet will never again see a multi-year great power world war characterized by grand campaigns sprawling over myriad, far-flung battle theaters involving millions of troops and the full mobilization of the economy (there won't be enough time).
Jasper, I respectfully disagree. I think you are right that a nuclear is quite possible but I very much doubt a war between the US and China would be short. It would likely be a years long effort.
Simply ask what are the victory conditions in a war absent a nuclear exchange? Unconditional surrender? What is China’s plan for invading the USA? Likewise, could America feasibly sustain an invasion of mainland China?
Unless there is a nuclear exchange any war between the US and China will likely turn into the equivalent of Britain and France’s Hundred Years War. A slow burn on again-off again conflict.
The sheer distance between China and the US would give the defender a major advantage. It takes a week at 35 knots to get from San Diego to Okinawa. Whoever is defending has a major advantage because they are saving 2 weeks of round-trip time. They would have far higher force availability as a result.
Imagine if USN and PLAN fights a naval battle near China, then each side pulls back to repair battle damage. Everything being equal, the Chinese fleet would be able to get repaired, go sack Australia, and be ready for round 2 with the USN.
James M: wars between peer states are almost never short. They are usually long affairs or they turn into decades long on-again and off-again military campaigns. Every historical analogy will be somewhat inadequate for the case at hand. My main point is the only resolution for a US-China war is unconditional surrender by one or the other party. What other victory condition could there be after initial hostilities?
What is China’s plan for invading the continental United States? How would America invade mainland China? Where would either land their forces? Even if both nations blew the equivalent of 50% of their GDP on military spending (not uncommon in previous great power wars) they would still have to cross the world’s largest ocean. After doing so they would have to land forces, establish a bridgehead and proceed to invade and occupy their rival.
The war would likely be a serious of successive stalemates until one (both sides collapsed). Between the stalemates it is unlikely peace could be established.
"wars between peer states are almost never short"
Franco-Prussian War
6 Day War
Yom Kippur War
Russo-Japanese War
US-Mexican War
"My main point is the only resolution for a US-China war is unconditional surrender by one or the other party."
Peer states almost never unconditionally surrender to other peer states.
"What other victory condition could there be after initial hostilities?"
Chinese victory condition: China seizing Taiwan and the US deciding it costs too much to liberate.
American victory condition: the US repels the initial invasion of Taiwan and China decides it costs too much to try again.
"What is China’s plan for invading the continental United States? How would America invade mainland China?"
Neither of these will happen.
"Between the stalemates it is unlikely peace could be established."
French and Germany being at peace 1871-1914 and 1919-1939 say hi. Neither of those were unconditional surrenders, btw.
Hmm. I agree that a nuclear exchange is not guaranteed, but it seems more likely than a modern Hundred Years War. The Hundred Years War dragged on for as long as it did because:
(1) Castles gave defense a large advantage over offense
(2) States were both weak (couldn't muster large forces) and decentralized (many scattered powerbases to staff the aforementioned castles)
(3) The stronger nation (France) was more political divided and the weaker nation (England) had a large tech advantage (the longbow), both of which prevented either side from landing knock-out blows (France could absorb large losses, England almost never experienced large losses)
(4) Both sides had leadership that could maintain their power despite having decade-long losing streaks
None of those conditions hold today, except perhaps for guided missiles favoring defense over offense. The most relevant factor today that would make the conflict escalate towards a WWII scale, I think, is the fact that modern warfare is capital-intensive & both sides are spending much less on their militaries than they have the capability to. Using WWII as a ceiling for % of economy a modern state can spend on the military, the US could 10x spending and China could 20x spending.
Once a war started, either side could gain a decisive upper hand by massively increasing military spending if the other side didn't match them; if both sides massively increase military spending, the size of armies balloons and their sheer size drives both countries to seek a way to end the war and return to peacetime spending.
If the war didn't end in 6 months, it's far more likely to look like World War 2.2 than the Hundred Years War.
It depends. If you believe the Chinese, their nuclear doctrine assumes that nuclear weapons will only be used in a full nuclear exchange.*
If true, this means that there definitely could be a non-nuclear high-intensity war between America and China, since both sides would prefer losing a non-nuclear conflict to having a full nuclear exchange. The danger here is that America might try to use tactical nuclear weapons to make up for an inferiority of conventional forces in the Taiwan theater, which could result in the Chinese high command thinking that a full nuclear war had started.
If China is serious about nuclear weapons only being used in a full exchange, and America is serious about nuclear weapons being available for tactical use, that's a very dangerous state of affairs.
*They haven't developed tactical nuclear weapons, as far as we can tell, and maintain a much smaller nuclear arsenal than either Russia or America
https://warontherocks.com/2020/09/the-dangerous-myths-about-chinas-nuclear-weapons/
I agree but I think there was more to it than that. Very successful militaries usually boast one of three distinct advantages. These are:
(1) They are either very large, or,
(2) Well-trained, or,
(3) Well-equipped (I.e. have good technology and logistics).
WW2 was unique in that the USA fielded a very large military (12M), was well trained (I.e. had close to a 1:1 kill ratio despite usually being on offense) and was well-equipped.
The real question is whether the USA can replicate such a feat if there ever was another large scale conventional war.
The modern US military is very well-trained and very well-equipped but it is not even close to 12M personnel.
Historically, you had to be well-equipped to be very large, because if you were living off the land, the army couldn't be supported above a certain size.
Similarly, you had to be well-trained to be very large, because maintaining control of very large forces is hard.
Steppe nomads (Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, Turks) managed to field armies that were very well-trained (steppe nomads come very-well-trained in cavalry archery out of the box) & very well-equipped (bows, arrows, extra horses) & very large
What of the African nations? Frontline has an episode featuring China's massive investment in infrastructure in Africa ("The New Silk Road - China's Belt and Road Initiative"). It says to me that China has been preparing for this new reality for years. In addition, needing to feed its population, Chinese companies own many of the world's largest producers of protein - Smithfield Foods for example. What role will a country's ability to feed it's people play in this new international arrangement?
The PLAN is still very far behind the USN. If China was relying on African calories and protein to feed its population in a war with America in 2023, China would starve.
That being said, I don't think China is planning on Africa as a vital food source. The CCP seems to put a lot of work into making sure China is approximately self-sufficient for calories and only importing things like meat that they could live without if push came to shove.
Manufacturing is very important, but I wouldn’t discount everything else as just Napa wine tours and wedding photographers. It’s organizational capacity, logistics, software, design, science research, and so on. And to the extent that it is things that are truly inessential, that reflects a latent capacity that can be mobilized.
I came out with a significantly larger ratio when I did this a while back, but that’s including Taiwan, SK, Canada, Australia, and so on. I don’t think it’s necessary to exclude even wavering countries embedded in the EU, because in practice it’s more important who they trade with. Even if they aren’t churning out artillery shells, they’re making other products to trade with those that do. See Sweden or Switzerland in WWII.
To a lesser degree, the same is true for some countries in the Americas - Mexico most strongly.
Of course that also applies for Russia and China. Kazakhstan could claim to be neutral but they’re not exactly over-supplied with alternative trading neighbors. The same goes for many of the rest of the ‘stans presumably. The problem for China & Russia is that none of those neighbors provides them with any new capabilities. Whereas for the West just having access to low-cost labor is useful. In an emergency the US could simply open the valve for immigration and receive tens of millions of workers from its south.
Most important is not the actual waging of any war, but the demonstrated capacity to do so without breaking a sweat. That does cost money: probably 5% of GDP everywhere is necessary. It also requires demonstrated control of supply chains so there is no ambiguity over the ability to mobilize the economy for conflict if necessary.
The US and parts of the EU also have an enormous but hard-to-quantify advantage in military experience, for complex combined-arms operations, COIN, carrier operations, and large-scale ground operations. Not much against true peers. China has essentially none. Russia has some but hardly seems to be shining.
Both the Atlantic and Pacific are Allied oceans. That’s a great advantage in ability to block trade. And as usual the geographic isolation of the US makes it invulnerable to conventional attack.
The concessions to China since the 1970s have been truly idiotic. Without exports to the US, especially early on through the offshoring of American plants, China could never have grown its current manufacturing capabilities. Even ten years ago the US was in a much stronger relative position, where moves to reduce ties would have hurt China far more than the US. There is still some question of export dependence, but in a true crisis the cutoff of export trade can be handled by repurposing that capacity to military production using printed money. (The handy thing about military production is that it doesn’t result in gluts that destroy prices; I mean really, can you ever have too many tanks?)
I think the American advantage in military experience is real but overstated. Experience in the last military paradigm may no mean much in the next/ The carrier experience is certainly real, but experience against whom ? The USA military hasn't flown against an integrated air defense system since Kosovo 1999, that's a generation ago, they haven't flown against an aircraft carrier since July 1945, that's 4 generations ago. A similar story could be told about other military forces, armor for example. The battle of 73 Easting was 30 years ago and it's very unlikely such a technological gap will occur next time .
I must recommend military analyst Pravin Sawhney of Force India magazine for your consideration.
https://forceindia.net/about-the-editors/
As a former Indian officer he isn't beholden to Washington/NATO and has been watching China for a long time. He made some comments that really struck home with me, he say that the next war with China will be fought in 6 war fighting domains, the 3 old ones of Land, Air and Sea and the 3 new ones of Space, Cyberspace and the Electromagnetic Spectrum. A defeat in one domain could lead to a defeat in the other 5. The USA certainly has an advantage of experience in the first 3 (although Russia has experience there too) but the last 3 are still anyone's game.
Until China demonstrates reuseable rockets on par with SpaceX, the US probably also has close to effortless dominance in space.
How could a win in Cyberspace or the Electromagnetic Spectrum stop SpaceX from dropping iron rods on PLA troop concentrations in Fujian province?
I don't really want to get into a long thread about USA's vs Chinese space programs, that's probably better saved for another time and place, but here is China's first reusable rocket (probably)
https://news.sky.com/video/chinas-first-reusable-rocket-launched-by-deep-blue-aerospace-12609440
there's a lot of technical back and forth we could do here but consider this, the first American astronaut was Alan Shepard in 1961. The first Chinese astronaut was Yang Liwei in 2003, that's a gap of 42 years. That test flight by Deep Blue Aerospace's Nebula M1 was in May of this year. To my admittedly non-expert eyes this looks roughly equivalent to SpaceX's Falcon 9 test 20 in December 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_flight_20
That's a gap of 6~7 years. This next space race will be far from effortless dominance by the USA.
As for the effects of cyberspace and electromagnetic dominance on space weapons, those first two domains host the command and control systems for the third. Control of those domains could mean that space (and other weapons) are blocked, surveilled or spoofed. So the "Rods from God" never launch, their target is gone before impact or the impact is in San Francisco.
"To my admittedly non-expert eyes this looks roughly equivalent to SpaceX's Falcon 9 test 20 in December 2015."
They're quite a bit further behind than 6-7 years, since that Falcon 9 launch actually put satellites into orbit. A 1-km "hop" without releasing a payload more like the Grasshopper test flights that SpaceX did back in 2012-2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Testing
So, I stand by "Until China demonstrates reuseable rockets on par with SpaceX, the US probably also has close to effortless dominance in space". China could certainly develop that technology given time, but the time involved is anywhere from 5-10 years, which is eternity if a shooting war over Taiwan started this year.
"Control of those domains could mean that space (and other weapons) are blocked, surveilled or spoofed. So the "Rods from God" never launch, their target is gone before impact or the impact is in San Francisco."
There's no such thing as "control" over the "domain" of "cyberspace". There are clean systems & compromised systems (in cyberspace) and systems capable of operating in the face of jamming or not (in EM spectrum). The most dramatic demonstration of cyberspace capabilities we've seen was Stuxnet, which used a zero-day exploit to then make a number of centrifuges spin slightly faster until they broke.
If SpaceX is launching "Rods from God", it's absolutely possible that the system that is trying to do that will be a compromised system that will fail the first time it is used. But then the system will be cleaned and the second (or third) time will work. There aren't that many zero-day exploits in the world, and even if you find one getting your software into the enemy's codebase is hard (Stuxnet relied on someone picking up and plugging in a USB key, if reports can be believed). So cyberspace/EM might buy you days, possibly weeks, but after a month SpaceX will be able to drop iron rods on PLA troops concentrations in Fujian province.
Cyberspace and EM capabilities look like they will be hiccups, not gamechangers. The IRL sanity check for this is Russian-Ukraine. Russia's cyber capabilities were widely believed to be ahead of China's, but it has been unable to shut down Ukrainian cell towers or power or anything of note.
Thanks or the reply, it’s appreciated but I think it risks falling down the rabbit hole of speculating about how complex systems, the details of which we can’t possibly know, might react in hypothetical situations we can’t possibly know will ever occur.
Those sort of speculations should be kept for another more technically orientated thread (any suggestions ?). This is Noah Smith commentary on the large scale geo-political map so instead of hacking through the weeds and tall grass we should zoom out and take a more helicopter’s eye view of the whole garden.
I still maintain that Pravin Sawhney’s frame of 6 war fighting domains, air, land, sea, space, cyberspace and electromagnetic is a useful one and that a dominance (or failure) in one could lead to a dominance (or failure) in another. Further more, I maintain that American experience in the last 3 is contested, speculative and certain not anything close to “ near effortless dominance”.
I don’t want to raise the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld too much here but what he said about “Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” is correct. For everything we know or think we know about these systems and the things we guess might possibly be the case, there is no way we can know what we don’t know about them let alone how they might interact together.
If you want something a little more tangible to chew over, consider this story about American/Chinese competition from a couple of years ago.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/
We need to be very careful about what we think about the accuracy of any of the claims made in this story. Personally I’m trying to be agnostic. Even if everyone quoted is actually real and totally telling the truth, there’s no way they are telling the WHOLE story. Nobody could possible know it, and naturally, everyone wants to put the best spin possible on their own actions.
However, in all the discussion about that particular story I never encountered anyone who said it’s impossible and could never have happened. I don’t know if the Chinese intelligence services compromised the CIA’s encrypted communications and rolled up their entire in-country network, but they could have. And if it happened once there it could happen elsewhere and indeed could have already happened more than once. Has the Navy been compromised ? The Air Force ? We don’t know, but it’s not impossible.
There’s another point that I’d like to make, even though it’s a bit metaphysical. When thinking about Rumsfeld’s 3 flavors of known, I vaguely recalled that every ones favorite Slovenian Lacanian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek (OK maybe not favorite but certainly top 5) had commented on the very same topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/28/wildlife.conservation
Zizek is quite right here, (not about the bees, that’s dumb) but Rumsfeld HAS left out a crucial fourth quadrant, The Unknown Known. Zizek calls them “things we don't know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it”. They are our blind spots, the things we don’t see, not because our eyes don’t work but because our brains won’t turn our heads to look at them. I might also call them things we know, but that just aren’t the case. They are the things that will make a war with China far from a near total American dominance.
“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.”
And there we have it, Unknown Knowns.
"“The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.”
And there we have it, Unknown Knowns."
This is actually an Unknown Unknown, since you are claiming that they are wrong. Usually Unknown Knowns only get you into trouble when they become Unknown Unknowns, which can happen without you noticing because Unknown Knowns are rarely examined.
"However, in all the discussion about that particular story I never encountered anyone who said it’s impossible and could never have happened. I don’t know if the Chinese intelligence services compromised the CIA’s encrypted communications and rolled up their entire in-country network, but they could have. And if it happened once there it could happen elsewhere and indeed could have already happened more than once. Has the Navy been compromised ? The Air Force ? We don’t know, but it’s not impossible."
It's a very believable story, but compromised communications networks matter much more for intelligence (where vast majority of 'asset value' is concentrated in a tiny number of people who are fixed in position, and can be all eliminated at the same time once found in one strike) than for warfighting (where the vast majority of 'asset value' is constantly moving, and spread out over many more people, ships, planes, etc). The Allies had totally compromised the German "Enigma machine" in WWII for multiple years, but they had to be careful about how they used it otherwise the Germans would have changed their communication channel. So compromising the Enigma machine certainly gained them some value, but not so much that it swung the war on its own.
"They are the things that will make a war with China far from a near total American dominance."
I was not claiming that a war with China was near total American dominance. I was claiming that America has near total dominance in *space specifically* and will continue to have that dominance there for 5-10 years. The other 5 domains are more contested. The US also has advantages in the sea and air, while China has a huge advantage on land (in the form of the mainland and all the missiles there).
There has not yet been an example of EM or cyberspace dominance actually mattering in a war, unless you are claiming that the Chinese have more an advantage in cyberspace over the Americans than the Russians have over the Ukrainians.
I was much more sympathetic to the claims of the importance of cyberspace *before* the war in Ukraine, but every month that goes by with the Ukrainian power grid & internet still running is a month where cyberspace power appears to be not particularly relevant to 21st century warfare.
"I still maintain that Pravin Sawhney’s frame of 6 war fighting domains, air, land, sea, space, cyberspace and electromagnetic is a useful one and that a dominance (or failure) in one could lead to a dominance (or failure) in another."
I still think this is a paradigm that conceals more than it illuminates. The domains are not equal. In Ukraine, the land domain is the most important one, Russia continuing to be unable to defeat Ukraine on land is negating Russia's massive advantages on sea, in the air, in space, in cyberspace, and in the EM domain.
In the case of Taiwan, the sea domain is the most important one, followed by air, followed by land. Space, cyberspace, EM continue to be bit players.
"This is Noah Smith commentary on the large scale geo-political map so instead of hacking through the weeds and tall grass we should zoom out and take a more helicopter’s eye view of the whole garden."
The helicopter's eye view of the whole garden is that 21st century warfare is a land+sea+air affair, but one that relies more on missiles than 20th century warfare. We have had a lot of 21st century wars now, and at least one that involves a Great Power using the bulk of its military, and this is still the picture.
The clear lesson from Ukraine is that if an invasion of Taiwan is attempted in the next decade, the surprises (or lack thereof) are likely to be driven by missile technology, and the start-of-war complement of Taiwanese missile stockpiles will matter a great deal.
Man, this was the most depressing column I've read in a long time. I'm not saying anything in it is not true; quite the contrary it's quite convincing. It's just that the Internet made me hope I would live out the rest of my life in a world that was increasingly aware of the humanity of people different from ourselves, not another planetwide confrontation between Good and Evil with hundreds of millions of lives at stake.
Thank you for putting things in such a clear perspective.
Would you elaborate (or point to studies others have done) that will take a closer look at the differences in manufacturing, especially the capacity in the secondary sector of the economy?
For example, China dominates consumer goods manufacturing, but would shifting those low value-add industries elsewhere help win the competition? Or should the US and its allies focus on other more worthwhile things (say, resource extraction, heavy industry, etc)?