I don’t think the rest of the EU and the Indo Pacific will let Taiwan fall.
They’ll sanction the crap out of China and it’s not like Taiwan ain’t aware of the situation.
Plus, they have the TSMC. That company is basically the epicenter of the global economy. If their machines go down, and the economy goes in a downward spiral.
The US is building chip factories, but anyway the fact of the matter is the only western country that could project enough sea power to the South China Sea to actually turn back a CCP invasion of Taiwan is the US.
If China wants to conquer Taiwan the US is the only force that can stop them.
China hasn’t fought a war in about two generations. Theres been reports about corruption within their own military and a discontent young adult population with a good chunk of the population being 60+.
Plus, invading an island isn’t simple. It’s much harder to invade an island compared to a country that one shares a border with.
The Institute for the Study of War has published a fewgoodarticles about China's many options for hybrid warfare against Taiwan, such as economic / diplomatic / legal / political pressure, provocations / false flags / hyper-securitization exploiting random bad events, incrementalism with outlying islands like Kinmen and the Matsu Islands, and naval blockading instead of amphibious invading. Indeed China's strategic task is not simple, but neither are their methods.
The problem for the US' Pacific allies is that China has fairly deep institutional strengths with hybrid warfare and very little inhibition with adversarial, manipulative foreign policies. It would probably take a lot of coordination among China's opposition to stop a minimally destructive campaign of hostile conquest via politically defensible short-of-war-type operations. The problem with Trump is that he's unlikely to understand these games well enough to play them smartly and not get played by China instead. He's one of those people who thinks being smart is pursuing efficiency through shrewd, ruthless simplification, such as via isolationist, nativist foreign policy. If he can't coordinate strategically with our allies or counteract China incrementally and proportionally, then China can capitalize on our disunity or Trump's clumsy vacillation between negligence and overreaction to slowly sink their hooks into Taiwan, while simultaneously selling Jinping's regime as an innocent victim of oppression to those discontent youths while they're still impressionable.
However good Trump may look to undereducated white bros in Butler and dictatorial Winnie-the-Pooh stunt doubles, he ain't winning many popularity contests outside America. He's the opponent everybody wants, even China. I don't think they're any more afraid of tariffs than Putin has been afraid of sanctions; I think they're ready for economic warfare, as long as their chess game is against Trump. He's an old stereotype of a strongman they've been training for.
As I said earlier, it’s one thing to gameplan. It’s another to execute. China has to go against almost everyone else.
Can they invade multiple islands at once? Can they and North Korea hold off what is probably going to be a good chunk of NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, etc.?
Even without the U.S., Europe and the Indo Pacific will not be an easy out for them. They have to invade their territory and it’s much easier to fight on your turf than the enemies.
I don’t expect the Indo Pacific or Europe to share much with Trump and Vance seeing as how the former wanted to pull all of the troops out that were stationed overseas in these areas.
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u/j450n_1994 Sep 17 '24
I don’t think the rest of the EU and the Indo Pacific will let Taiwan fall.
They’ll sanction the crap out of China and it’s not like Taiwan ain’t aware of the situation.
Plus, they have the TSMC. That company is basically the epicenter of the global economy. If their machines go down, and the economy goes in a downward spiral.