Noah Smith today: Donald Trump has a tendency to support anyone who gives him a big bag of cash
Kathleen Weber Jul 17 liked by Noah Smith
I believe one reason why big business would be fine with Trump is because they know for a lousy $100 mil, they can get any executive order they want. That's a bargain!
Big corporate America has no preference in candidates this cycle or any cycle. They are the "establishment" of both parties, what some would call the "uniparty". The last time they really went to war against a candidate was Bernie in 2016, and that may well be the only example in my 50 years of life.
They're probably mildly concerned about Vance actually, since he speaks their language but doesn't subscribe to their ideology. Vance could lead a truly viable counter-elite and that is extremely dangerous to them.
As one who used to work in politics, the campaign cash buys positions argument isn't very accurate. It buys access. But you still have to convince the elected that you're right, or at least that you can hurt them. And the latter plan only works once. Good lobbyists know this, so they focus on being "friends" or being "issue resources" rather than talking up their campaign contributions. Trump is a different kind of politician, but he's not that different.
Campaign cash is not the only Strong Reason why Trump2 would fully roll over and go full Quisling on China.
There's also Trump's adoration of Putin and history of obedience to him in furthering Russian foreign policy goals. Since Russia is now an ally--or fully-owned subsidiary, if you prefer--of China, Trump will do anything Xi wants; then rationalize/normalize said behavior with the MAGA base as pro-American policy. There's also the darker likelihood that Trump is actually an FSB thrall and will fully betray our Natsec interests when ordered to do so by Moscow Centre.
It is FOX News coverage that will show us if, or to what degree, Trump2 will sell us out: A pronounced uptick of "Why waste American lives on a country (Taiwan) that won't even protect itself?" content will herald the formal GOP subordination to the Beijing consensus.
He's got Daddy issues as flavoring for his Malignant Narcissism. Overall, his psychopathology is off the charts. Exactly the type of flawed personality the old KGB (and new FSB) was particularly drawn to in recruitable assets. And once recruited, guess what field they encouraged their new assets to pursue? You guessed it: politics.
Isn't a stronger commonality between Russia's (male) fifth columnists in the West that they tend to be sex pests, or in Scott Ritter's case a bona fide convicted pedophile?
Ritter did sterling service in the lead up to Bush 2's Iraq invasion as a UN weapons inspector, saying repeatedly there were no WMD's (the main reason for our expensive and utterly pointless invasion). He took a lot of GOP shit for that.
To boil it down, DonOLD Trump is just too dumb and greedy to go toe to toe with China. “Do Xi a favor,”— I can see DJT playing a super old Michael Corleone in the next Godfather sequel.
One of the classical weaknesses of democratic type governments in dealing with autocratic type governments is the opportunity to buy off leaders and factions and set factions against each other, and this era magnifies that risk. Donald Trump strikes me as singularly susceptible, but one of the problems with a relatively unknown major candidate is that we really don't know how seriously Kamala Harris thinks about such things -- and I doubt that we will find that out prior to November. She will simply be the better choice by default.
Assuming we make it to November. If I were in China's shoes, the temptation to force the issue in the coming weeks would be very strong. A weak looking president, two factions far more concerned about the domestic power struggle than they are about Taiwan, and a communications system that can be flooded with misinformation at will. Hell, I can even imagine their trying for some kind of underhanded deal with one of the candidates.
I hope that she will keep most of Biden's national security and foreign policy team on. That should help keep the ship of state on even keel. I can't imagine her replacing them, because she does not have a deep background in the field.
I was listening to a podcast today (Pivot) and Scott Galloway said this would be a perfect moment for Kamala to argue for balancing the budget. Perhaps she could make a case for that and use Laura Duffy's blueprint from PPI's Center for Funding America’s Future? It looks like there's space to allocate/prioritize an increase in needed defense spending. If she argued against wonton deficit spending tailored with increased defense spending it's not clear to me how Trump/Vance/GOP effectively counter since Project 2025 is turning out to be a nonstarter.
If you haven’t, read ‘At The Edge Of Empire’—Edward Wong’s new history of his family and China. It captures the dilemma posed by Chinese exceptionalism and Xi to the United States in particular.
The reason is that the pro-growth things that are necessary and not populre with either the Left or Right
Lower, essentially zero fiscal deficits
Large expansion of merit based immigration
Cost Benefit Analysis vetting of increased public investment (an incentives to private investment)
Free trade within the OECD
Tax on net emissions of CO2 in lieu of most "green" subsidies and mandates
VAT instead of wage tax to fully fund social security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA (ideally strengthened to nibble away at employer-purchased health insurance)
Actual use (not just calculation) of Cost Benefit Analysis in taking regulatory decisions, especially in EPA, NRC, FDA, CDC and local government land and road use and building code agencies.
Shift from personal income tax to a progressive consumption tax.
Industrial policy executed by production subsidies not import restrictions.
Noah, you may want to rethink your choice of descriptions. For decades, "Chinese Nationalists" has referred to the Taiwan Kuomintang. You may want to use "mainland/PRC supporters/cheerleaders/patriots" instead.
I don’t think Taiwanese have deserved the “Chinese Nationalists” label for a LONG time; certainly not since we resumed relations with China in the 1970s.
Every Republican I know buys into the idea that Trump's foreign policy is fantastic because he "projects strength". I wish they could see what a paper tiger he is, as you do. Bluster and back down, it's truly the opposite of "speak softly and carry a big stick".
Taiwan's military don't seem to take the supposed threat of invasion seriously. They are still buying ships that wouldn't last five minutes in a real war (as happened to Ukraine's navy) rather than focusing all their efforts on anti-ship missiles and fortifying the potential landing sites. The explanation is the usual stuff about "grey zone" warfare, which basically means spending a fortune on pointless micro-aggressions (fortifying reefs, cutting fishing nets, buzzing each others planes etc), or else talk about ambiguously defined blockades.
I'd say that they judge, correctly, that the missiles they already have would be sufficient to hold off China's tiny fleet of dedicated landing ships, then destroy the civilian ferries that are supposed to transport the PLA across the Straits of Taiwan. So, like any military they are keen to keep buying shiny stuff.
To either stop or contain a PLA beachhead they need a rapid, mass mobilization of citizen militias, much as Ukraine did two years to stall and then push back the Russian advance. Building national guard armories in every town, and stocking them with small arms and man-portable anti-tank/anti-air missiles will turn Taiwan into an indigestible 23-million strong porcupine.
Will Taiwan put up a Ukrainian style fight with the PRC? Or will their industrial/political leadership make the calculation, once the missiles start flying, that the inevitable destruction that will rain down on their chip plants and other capital investments would be too great an exchange for the promises of democracy?
If that were the case (do you know this to be true or is this wishful thinking?), Taiwan holds the chips plants as a what, a hostage? That doesn't seem to be much of a tactical advantage.
If Trump follows through on a 10% tariff on everything then Australia will be under real pressure to dump AUKUS and go back to placating China so we can sell our Iron Ore, Wheat and other commodities and we won’t be the only ones
"appeared to argue that the island is indefensible"
While Trump is a poor vehicle for serious discussion on any topic, it's fair to ask if he might have a point here. The analogy to Cuba is apt. Taiwan is 1/3rd the size and 1/3rd closer to its continent. His comments about them "taking our chip business away" (it's untrue but a useful metaphor) hint at a solution that you yourself have previously mentioned though, Noah: open the floodgates for highly skilled Taiwanese immigration.
I prefer fab engineers and chip designers to day laborers from Venezuela, and reducing our incentive to go to war with a nuclear-armed rival strikes me as a nice plus. I'm not letting the war mongers draft my daughters to queer the Donbass. And the same goes for preserving Taiwan. And for Israel (although that one's a little harder for me.) And the Philippines (and my wife is Filipino.) Fundamentally, I'm done "going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." If we care about Taiwanese chips, our national interest is served far better by bringing the Taiwanese here to make them than by spending blood and treasure to protect fabs in Taiwan.
“. . .letting China do all the world’s manufacturing — would cause the country to liberalize. That attitude was already dangerously complacent in the early 2010s, and to bring it back now would be madness. But it’s possible that Harris might not realize this.”
So, Harris has spent almost four years as VP and not realized the effectiveness of the Biden administration’s China policy? Biden, as Obama’s VP, had a ringside seat to the failed too-small-stimulus in the wake of the Financial Crisis, prolonging the recession and long period of unemployment for millions of Americans. Biden wasn’t going to make that mistake in the wake of the pandemic. I’ll take a too-big stimulus over a too-small stimulus any day of the week. It’s more comfortable to worry about inflation when you’re employed than when your unemployed.
VPs can learn from mistaken policies. They can also learn from successful policies.
OK, but I recommend that you read Peter Zeihan's argument that China will implode within the next 10 years no matter what the U.S. does or does not do. Also, Zeihan points out that the U.S. can defeat China militarily without firing a shot, because the USN can interdict China's imports and exports far out of range of the PLA.
Peter is kind of hit or miss. The book of his that I read boiled down to a very simple theory: US ocean hegemony is no longer sustainable or beneficial for the US and therefore... a bunch of bad stuff. He may be right on China, but he's prone to domino arguments, which makes me cautious of putting too much stock in him.
Isn't one of the reasons why China has subsidized EV manufacturing so heavily precisely because they see dependence on foreign oil as an Achilles' Heel in the event of war?
Not really. China knows that switching from gasoline powered cars to electric vehicles will only slow the growth of China's use of oil. It will not reduce China's oil imports and, even if it did, it would not eliminate China's vulnerability to interdiction of its imports by the USN.
China has an aging population that is slowly realizing that they have only about 30% of the retirement savings that they thought that they had because the asset class into which they had put 70% of their net worth (Chinese real estate) has a true market value of zero. And, the Chinese stock market is cratering at the same time, wiping out still more retirement savings.
China's push into EVs is just another desperate attempt to generate GDP growth and hard currency via exports. I can't blame Xi for trying.
"Another factor driving his skepticism is what he regards as the practical difficulty of defending a small island on the other side of the globe. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he says. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”"
We shouldn't discount this issue. I don't have the time to scour all the geo-political-military forums, websites, articles, and books out there to know if there's been a rational, well thought out analysis of whether it is even feasible to defend Taiwan, and what that would cost in dollars, material, and lives, but I can't help but think this looks like an Alamo situation to me.
Will Taiwan put up a Ukrainian style fight with the PRC? Or will their industrial/political leadership make the calculation, once the missiles start flying, that the inevitable destruction that will rain down on their chip plants and other capital investments would be too great an exchange for the promises of democracy?
Maybe our behind-the-scenes policy should be to assume Taiwan will be lost to the PRC eventually, perhaps soon, and do everything we can now to mitigate the impact that might have once it happens. Even if Taiwan fought to the last man, there wouldn't be much left of it to build chips and other hi-tech items anyway.
Jonah’s G-File, laid out the hope you have for Harris as well. I think it may be wishcasting but I hope I am wrong. For well over two years I have cast doubt that either Biden or Trump would actually commit saliors, soldiers or airmen to a country which would have 1000 more fighter jets a 100 miles from a Tiawan.
I myself don’t see China bombing the thing it covets. A blockade is a much bettre strategy. Our only chess move is to close the South China Sea to shipping by declaring it off limits and a war zone. We might have to sink a freighter to get the point across. That would greatly hurt China.
We haven’t delivered the porcupine weaponry to actually hurt China in an air and seaborne invasion anyway. They are still waiting for delivery of the $19 Billion we sold to them and already have collected the money.
Biden is timid, and Harris will likely be, too. Trump is aware of the war games in which we lost to China over Taiwan. I agree that Trump represents the greatest sell-out of American power and prestige. I don’t believe for one minute that he will defend Latvia or Estonia—any of them. He’ll take the Tucker line: we have no interest in Russia's sphere of influence. Trump is not a reliable partner and doesn’t really believe in contracts or compacts. He is loyal to nothing more than himself.
That said, Harris has a similar problem but in a very different way. Harris as an SF Progressive is more a Bernie Bro than a Mark Warner. Progressives are anti-war. So am I, and so are you. The difference is we know what happens when you acquiesce to bullies and tyrants.
Harris does not have the chops or the inclination to be a Margaret Thatcher. She doesn’t scare me, and I highly doubt she’ll scare Xi or Putin. Will she be wiling to go to war with China? Both of these candidates do not even acknowledge we are already at war. Asymmetrical war, but war nonetheless.
She could mess up both Xi and Putin’s aggression.
Someone will read intentions wrong. Lastly, global disengagement from the world will impact the American way of life and prosperity. Going it alone will end in disaster both economically and militarily.
South Korea and Japan will have to go nuclear to defend themselves. The American nuclear umbrella will end in tatters. Europe will head to accommodation rather than war.
I don’t share you hope for Harris. I share your concern about Trump as I believe it is spot on. He is possibly the Manchurian Candidate. I’d love to see you next column be about the danger of a collapse of rules base globla order that has defined global trade and the benefits America has earned from it.
Noah Smith today: Donald Trump has a tendency to support anyone who gives him a big bag of cash
Kathleen Weber Jul 17 liked by Noah Smith
I believe one reason why big business would be fine with Trump is because they know for a lousy $100 mil, they can get any executive order they want. That's a bargain!
Do I hear an echo in the room?
Big corporate America has no preference in candidates this cycle or any cycle. They are the "establishment" of both parties, what some would call the "uniparty". The last time they really went to war against a candidate was Bernie in 2016, and that may well be the only example in my 50 years of life.
They're probably mildly concerned about Vance actually, since he speaks their language but doesn't subscribe to their ideology. Vance could lead a truly viable counter-elite and that is extremely dangerous to them.
As one who used to work in politics, the campaign cash buys positions argument isn't very accurate. It buys access. But you still have to convince the elected that you're right, or at least that you can hurt them. And the latter plan only works once. Good lobbyists know this, so they focus on being "friends" or being "issue resources" rather than talking up their campaign contributions. Trump is a different kind of politician, but he's not that different.
Get over yourself
Campaign cash is not the only Strong Reason why Trump2 would fully roll over and go full Quisling on China.
There's also Trump's adoration of Putin and history of obedience to him in furthering Russian foreign policy goals. Since Russia is now an ally--or fully-owned subsidiary, if you prefer--of China, Trump will do anything Xi wants; then rationalize/normalize said behavior with the MAGA base as pro-American policy. There's also the darker likelihood that Trump is actually an FSB thrall and will fully betray our Natsec interests when ordered to do so by Moscow Centre.
It is FOX News coverage that will show us if, or to what degree, Trump2 will sell us out: A pronounced uptick of "Why waste American lives on a country (Taiwan) that won't even protect itself?" content will herald the formal GOP subordination to the Beijing consensus.
Trump sure loves his s-t-r-o-n-g men. Whether there's some deep Freudian psychosexual thing going on, I have no idea.
He's got Daddy issues as flavoring for his Malignant Narcissism. Overall, his psychopathology is off the charts. Exactly the type of flawed personality the old KGB (and new FSB) was particularly drawn to in recruitable assets. And once recruited, guess what field they encouraged their new assets to pursue? You guessed it: politics.
Isn't a stronger commonality between Russia's (male) fifth columnists in the West that they tend to be sex pests, or in Scott Ritter's case a bona fide convicted pedophile?
Ritter did sterling service in the lead up to Bush 2's Iraq invasion as a UN weapons inspector, saying repeatedly there were no WMD's (the main reason for our expensive and utterly pointless invasion). He took a lot of GOP shit for that.
Too bad he was/is a pedo.
And yes, DJT is almost certainly an FSB thrall.
WMDs were almost certainly just an excuse to invade Iraq: the real reason being the neocon dream of making the Middle East safe for Israel.
To boil it down, DonOLD Trump is just too dumb and greedy to go toe to toe with China. “Do Xi a favor,”— I can see DJT playing a super old Michael Corleone in the next Godfather sequel.
Don Vito and Don Michael do favors, they don't ask for favors. Some day, and that day may never come, they may ask for a service in return.
Well, Adam Kinzinger definitely failed to do TFG a service when asked.
I agree completely, as far as you go.
One of the classical weaknesses of democratic type governments in dealing with autocratic type governments is the opportunity to buy off leaders and factions and set factions against each other, and this era magnifies that risk. Donald Trump strikes me as singularly susceptible, but one of the problems with a relatively unknown major candidate is that we really don't know how seriously Kamala Harris thinks about such things -- and I doubt that we will find that out prior to November. She will simply be the better choice by default.
Assuming we make it to November. If I were in China's shoes, the temptation to force the issue in the coming weeks would be very strong. A weak looking president, two factions far more concerned about the domestic power struggle than they are about Taiwan, and a communications system that can be flooded with misinformation at will. Hell, I can even imagine their trying for some kind of underhanded deal with one of the candidates.
I hope that she will keep most of Biden's national security and foreign policy team on. That should help keep the ship of state on even keel. I can't imagine her replacing them, because she does not have a deep background in the field.
I was listening to a podcast today (Pivot) and Scott Galloway said this would be a perfect moment for Kamala to argue for balancing the budget. Perhaps she could make a case for that and use Laura Duffy's blueprint from PPI's Center for Funding America’s Future? It looks like there's space to allocate/prioritize an increase in needed defense spending. If she argued against wonton deficit spending tailored with increased defense spending it's not clear to me how Trump/Vance/GOP effectively counter since Project 2025 is turning out to be a nonstarter.
wanton?
😂 Clearly I had dumplings on the mind
If you haven’t, read ‘At The Edge Of Empire’—Edward Wong’s new history of his family and China. It captures the dilemma posed by Chinese exceptionalism and Xi to the United States in particular.
It's on my list!
The reason is that the pro-growth things that are necessary and not populre with either the Left or Right
Lower, essentially zero fiscal deficits
Large expansion of merit based immigration
Cost Benefit Analysis vetting of increased public investment (an incentives to private investment)
Free trade within the OECD
Tax on net emissions of CO2 in lieu of most "green" subsidies and mandates
VAT instead of wage tax to fully fund social security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA (ideally strengthened to nibble away at employer-purchased health insurance)
Actual use (not just calculation) of Cost Benefit Analysis in taking regulatory decisions, especially in EPA, NRC, FDA, CDC and local government land and road use and building code agencies.
Shift from personal income tax to a progressive consumption tax.
Industrial policy executed by production subsidies not import restrictions.
At least some of these are good ideas, but none has a political base.
5:50 PM "Kamala's very good foreign policy guy" by Robert Wright in his Non Zero Letter, high praise for Philip Gordon
5:50 PM "Why Trump or Harris might fail to stand up to China" by Noah Smith, dismayed by Philip Gordon
Me, of a not first rate intelligence: ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and be utterly confused
Noah, you may want to rethink your choice of descriptions. For decades, "Chinese Nationalists" has referred to the Taiwan Kuomintang. You may want to use "mainland/PRC supporters/cheerleaders/patriots" instead.
Excellent distinction.
I don’t think Taiwanese have deserved the “Chinese Nationalists” label for a LONG time; certainly not since we resumed relations with China in the 1970s.
Every Republican I know buys into the idea that Trump's foreign policy is fantastic because he "projects strength". I wish they could see what a paper tiger he is, as you do. Bluster and back down, it's truly the opposite of "speak softly and carry a big stick".
Trump plays a strong guy on TV.
Taiwan's military don't seem to take the supposed threat of invasion seriously. They are still buying ships that wouldn't last five minutes in a real war (as happened to Ukraine's navy) rather than focusing all their efforts on anti-ship missiles and fortifying the potential landing sites. The explanation is the usual stuff about "grey zone" warfare, which basically means spending a fortune on pointless micro-aggressions (fortifying reefs, cutting fishing nets, buzzing each others planes etc), or else talk about ambiguously defined blockades.
I'd say that they judge, correctly, that the missiles they already have would be sufficient to hold off China's tiny fleet of dedicated landing ships, then destroy the civilian ferries that are supposed to transport the PLA across the Straits of Taiwan. So, like any military they are keen to keep buying shiny stuff.
To either stop or contain a PLA beachhead they need a rapid, mass mobilization of citizen militias, much as Ukraine did two years to stall and then push back the Russian advance. Building national guard armories in every town, and stocking them with small arms and man-portable anti-tank/anti-air missiles will turn Taiwan into an indigestible 23-million strong porcupine.
Sounds good to me!
Will Taiwan put up a Ukrainian style fight with the PRC? Or will their industrial/political leadership make the calculation, once the missiles start flying, that the inevitable destruction that will rain down on their chip plants and other capital investments would be too great an exchange for the promises of democracy?
Those chip plants, as well as the associated offices, are rigged to blow the second PLA boots actually set foot on Taiwanese soil.
If that were the case (do you know this to be true or is this wishful thinking?), Taiwan holds the chips plants as a what, a hostage? That doesn't seem to be much of a tactical advantage.
What about Tarriffs on friends?
If Trump follows through on a 10% tariff on everything then Australia will be under real pressure to dump AUKUS and go back to placating China so we can sell our Iron Ore, Wheat and other commodities and we won’t be the only ones
"appeared to argue that the island is indefensible"
While Trump is a poor vehicle for serious discussion on any topic, it's fair to ask if he might have a point here. The analogy to Cuba is apt. Taiwan is 1/3rd the size and 1/3rd closer to its continent. His comments about them "taking our chip business away" (it's untrue but a useful metaphor) hint at a solution that you yourself have previously mentioned though, Noah: open the floodgates for highly skilled Taiwanese immigration.
I prefer fab engineers and chip designers to day laborers from Venezuela, and reducing our incentive to go to war with a nuclear-armed rival strikes me as a nice plus. I'm not letting the war mongers draft my daughters to queer the Donbass. And the same goes for preserving Taiwan. And for Israel (although that one's a little harder for me.) And the Philippines (and my wife is Filipino.) Fundamentally, I'm done "going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." If we care about Taiwanese chips, our national interest is served far better by bringing the Taiwanese here to make them than by spending blood and treasure to protect fabs in Taiwan.
“. . .letting China do all the world’s manufacturing — would cause the country to liberalize. That attitude was already dangerously complacent in the early 2010s, and to bring it back now would be madness. But it’s possible that Harris might not realize this.”
So, Harris has spent almost four years as VP and not realized the effectiveness of the Biden administration’s China policy? Biden, as Obama’s VP, had a ringside seat to the failed too-small-stimulus in the wake of the Financial Crisis, prolonging the recession and long period of unemployment for millions of Americans. Biden wasn’t going to make that mistake in the wake of the pandemic. I’ll take a too-big stimulus over a too-small stimulus any day of the week. It’s more comfortable to worry about inflation when you’re employed than when your unemployed.
VPs can learn from mistaken policies. They can also learn from successful policies.
OK, but I recommend that you read Peter Zeihan's argument that China will implode within the next 10 years no matter what the U.S. does or does not do. Also, Zeihan points out that the U.S. can defeat China militarily without firing a shot, because the USN can interdict China's imports and exports far out of range of the PLA.
Peter is kind of hit or miss. The book of his that I read boiled down to a very simple theory: US ocean hegemony is no longer sustainable or beneficial for the US and therefore... a bunch of bad stuff. He may be right on China, but he's prone to domino arguments, which makes me cautious of putting too much stock in him.
Isn't one of the reasons why China has subsidized EV manufacturing so heavily precisely because they see dependence on foreign oil as an Achilles' Heel in the event of war?
Not really. China knows that switching from gasoline powered cars to electric vehicles will only slow the growth of China's use of oil. It will not reduce China's oil imports and, even if it did, it would not eliminate China's vulnerability to interdiction of its imports by the USN.
China has an aging population that is slowly realizing that they have only about 30% of the retirement savings that they thought that they had because the asset class into which they had put 70% of their net worth (Chinese real estate) has a true market value of zero. And, the Chinese stock market is cratering at the same time, wiping out still more retirement savings.
China's push into EVs is just another desperate attempt to generate GDP growth and hard currency via exports. I can't blame Xi for trying.
"Another factor driving his skepticism is what he regards as the practical difficulty of defending a small island on the other side of the globe. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” he says. “It’s 68 miles away from China.”"
We shouldn't discount this issue. I don't have the time to scour all the geo-political-military forums, websites, articles, and books out there to know if there's been a rational, well thought out analysis of whether it is even feasible to defend Taiwan, and what that would cost in dollars, material, and lives, but I can't help but think this looks like an Alamo situation to me.
Will Taiwan put up a Ukrainian style fight with the PRC? Or will their industrial/political leadership make the calculation, once the missiles start flying, that the inevitable destruction that will rain down on their chip plants and other capital investments would be too great an exchange for the promises of democracy?
Maybe our behind-the-scenes policy should be to assume Taiwan will be lost to the PRC eventually, perhaps soon, and do everything we can now to mitigate the impact that might have once it happens. Even if Taiwan fought to the last man, there wouldn't be much left of it to build chips and other hi-tech items anyway.
Jonah’s G-File, laid out the hope you have for Harris as well. I think it may be wishcasting but I hope I am wrong. For well over two years I have cast doubt that either Biden or Trump would actually commit saliors, soldiers or airmen to a country which would have 1000 more fighter jets a 100 miles from a Tiawan.
I myself don’t see China bombing the thing it covets. A blockade is a much bettre strategy. Our only chess move is to close the South China Sea to shipping by declaring it off limits and a war zone. We might have to sink a freighter to get the point across. That would greatly hurt China.
We haven’t delivered the porcupine weaponry to actually hurt China in an air and seaborne invasion anyway. They are still waiting for delivery of the $19 Billion we sold to them and already have collected the money.
Biden is timid, and Harris will likely be, too. Trump is aware of the war games in which we lost to China over Taiwan. I agree that Trump represents the greatest sell-out of American power and prestige. I don’t believe for one minute that he will defend Latvia or Estonia—any of them. He’ll take the Tucker line: we have no interest in Russia's sphere of influence. Trump is not a reliable partner and doesn’t really believe in contracts or compacts. He is loyal to nothing more than himself.
That said, Harris has a similar problem but in a very different way. Harris as an SF Progressive is more a Bernie Bro than a Mark Warner. Progressives are anti-war. So am I, and so are you. The difference is we know what happens when you acquiesce to bullies and tyrants.
Harris does not have the chops or the inclination to be a Margaret Thatcher. She doesn’t scare me, and I highly doubt she’ll scare Xi or Putin. Will she be wiling to go to war with China? Both of these candidates do not even acknowledge we are already at war. Asymmetrical war, but war nonetheless.
She could mess up both Xi and Putin’s aggression.
Someone will read intentions wrong. Lastly, global disengagement from the world will impact the American way of life and prosperity. Going it alone will end in disaster both economically and militarily.
South Korea and Japan will have to go nuclear to defend themselves. The American nuclear umbrella will end in tatters. Europe will head to accommodation rather than war.
I don’t share you hope for Harris. I share your concern about Trump as I believe it is spot on. He is possibly the Manchurian Candidate. I’d love to see you next column be about the danger of a collapse of rules base globla order that has defined global trade and the benefits America has earned from it.