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-_-_-_-_-  13d ago (noahpinion.blog)   1800 thread views

Noah Smith: Manufacturing is a war now

noahpinion.blog

Industrial policy has been a frequent subject on Smith's blog, for those who don't follow it. (He's for it, and thinks that Biden's industrial policy was mostly good - it's worth following the links in this post.) This post focuses on defense-related geopolitical industrial policy goals and pros and cons of anticipated changes under the incoming Trump administration and Chinese responses. Particularly, he highlights two major things China can do: Restrict exports of raw materials (recently announced) and use their own industrial policy to hamper the West's peacetime industrial policy (de facto policy of the last 30 years). These are not extraordinary insights, but it's a good primer on the current state of affairs and policies to pay attention to in the near-future.

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Why don’t we just let China have Taiwan and the South China Sea? I really don’t care about China. China doesn’t care about most of the rest of the world. China doesn’t seek dominion over European civilization. China is uninterested in the export of world revolution in the way that, say, some historic communist states were. The Taiwanese will do just fine under Chinese rule; even the old KMT vets are unlikely to face any retribution in their very, very old age. Most people neither require nor care about democracy; they want streets that are safe, low crime, affordable and decent food on the table, a youth that is disciplined and hardworking, and a feeling that their country is headed in the right direction.

What matters is civilization. What matters is mass immigration. What matters is law and order. What matters is the cultural rot that has hollowed out the West, leaving a small class of feckless, neurotic elites and a vast population of normal people held hostage by the scum at the bottom of society who continuously go un- and under-punished. What matters is ugliness, in architecture, in obesity, in fonts, in advertising, in fashion. China is responsible for relatively little of this.

Challenging China is both pointless and cruel. The Chinese, for all the great flaws of their system, still have the kind of state capacity and self-belief that Western nations can only dream of. Waging a war against China would be an act of nightmarish self-harm. Fix the West, first, on a cultural level, then worry about whatever the fuck is going to happen with Taiwan (I don’t care).

China doesn’t care about most of the rest of the world.

This is very inaccurate. China has so called Belt and Road initiative which is used to economically influence foreign nations. They have many projects including investing in ports, extraction of natural resources in Africa or influencing South America.

leaving a small class of feckless, neurotic elites and a vast population of normal people held hostage by the scum at the bottom of society who continuously go un- and under-punished

And why you think that China is improvement here? And if you think that people praising greatest mass murderer in history (that targeted own nation, though combination of arrogance, mismanagement and stupidity) are improvement here, then I really prefer feckless, neurotic elites that at least manage to pretend that pointless mass murder is bad. Over feckless, neurotic elites that fail to achieve this.

What matters is ugliness, in architecture, in obesity, in fonts, in advertising, in fashion.

http://hipsterhitler.com/comics/05_typewriter.jpg

Why don’t we just let China have Taiwan and the South China Sea?

Ignoring geopolitics, which others have commented on, Taiwan produces over half of the world's semiconductors and almost all of the most advanced ones.

War between China and Taiwan would almost certainly throw global supply chains into chaos in the short to medium term (possibly longer, depending on how intact the industry remained after any conflict), as well as cede an advantage to China in fields such as AI which require the most advanced chips.

China doesn’t seek dominion over European civilization.

Neither does the U.S., and yet we continue to keep it aligned. Cooperative. The legacy of WWII was that you don’t have to literally occupy a territory to get value from it. Set up the right rules, and the subsequent international order serves your interests.

China would prefer a different set of rules. That’s why they’re reclaiming SCS islands, pushing the rules on international waters, and making passes at Taiwan, eroding the (admittedly weak!) rules about self-determination. The SCS connects major U.S. allies to the rest of the world. Handing those routes over to Chinese control would seriously damage the current order.

What matters is the cultural rot that has hollowed out the West,

I do not believe this can be done while abandoning the world stage. Hand-wringing over whether we’re worthy of dominating the planet is quintessential slave morality. Extending it down to surrendering our own borders and our own cities—isn’t that the source of most of your complaints?

China is responsible for relatively little of this [fecklessness].

I think that’s a difference of opportunity rather than one of character. Say what you will about modern Chinese urbanism; I draw the line at whitewashing the Cultural Revolution.

Waging a war against China would be an act of nightmarish self-harm.

Well…yes. I desperately hope it doesn’t come to this. If the CCP is rational, they hope it won’t, too. We can make it out of this without any nightmares.

Extending it down to surrendering our own borders and our own cities—isn’t that the source of most of your complaints?

If anything, I’m an American imperialist. I think America should directly rule the majority of the world, especially Central and South America, Western Europe and probably Japan and Korea. I just don’t care about China. The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct the way the Japanese, Russians, Anglos and French have or have had. They don’t seek to rule me or convert me to the Chinese system and never have. Theirs is not - in a deep sense, deeper than surface level marxism - an imperial civilization with global aims.

The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct

That is absolute nonsense. Where you got this idea? See: Xinjiang, Tibet, nine dash line. See: long line of emperors. See: obsessive superiority obsession. See: growing military. See: their wolf diplomacy self-inflicted mess. See: belt-and-road attempts.

They don’t seek to rule me

Well, for now they try for example with Latvia, Tibet, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, bunch of places in Africa (all in various coercive stages). Hopefully they will bungle it as most as they can.

And on top of that, I expect that they - like any other humans and nearly all animals - would proceed to run extractive imperialism if they could get away with it. (to the limits of their abilities, for deer it would be gorging on all the grass they have. Still smarter than say praising Mao.)

It really feels like a stretch to say that they'll domino their way from Tibet and Hong-Kong to the US. Those places are chinese speaking neighbors that were part of their territory not long ago. I really can't imagine them trying to invade Europe or the US. They might try to dominate the economy and make censor movies but... that's what the US is already doing.

If they fuck around Taiwan then you immediately will be hit by effects. See where CPU are produced.

Also, I was not disputing "USA will not be invaded" claim. I was disputing mainly "The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct" and "not (...) an imperial civilization with global aims."

"they will not invade USA in predictable future" is hardly proof of "have no great imperialist instinct"

It feels like you're making a bizarre 19th century type argument over which countries have an "imperialist instinct" or are an "imperial civilization." Should we also go after Mongolia and Macedonia just in case they try to take over the world again?

I also find it dubious that the US would fight WW3 just to protect our high-end gaming rigs and bitcoin miners. It's more likely we would simply onshore production (as we are already attempting to do) and put up with slightly decreased performance for a few years.

I am disputing claim that they have some unique "imperialist instinct" or are an "imperial civilization." or lack thereof.

I think America should directly rule the majority of the world

*proceeds to ignore the 1st/2nd largest population country on earth*

Bruh.

No one can afford to be imperialist in the coercive military sense anymore. Wars take far too long and are far too expensive, even for relatively small fronts (see: Ukraine). We're talking about Taiwan, which is a tiny island very very close to Mainland China. Even taking that would likely push the Chinese economy to the brink ... and they may still try.

What matters is who is at the "center" of the world order - economically, military, politically (in the power projection sense). USA is still number 1 in this but it's easy to identify the likely challengers; look at the places with the most people and largest economies contained within a totally self-governing polity. That's China. For a while in the 1990s-2000s, there was some speculation that the EU might create a new pan-Europa, but this was largely a feels based analysis and any intelligent observer saw that the political architecture of the EU and its member states created all sorts of horrible barriers to collective action that would be necessary to displace the Americans. But, I digress.

The Chinese aren't going to sail to Hawaii and San Diego to murder all of us counterrevolutionaries. But they, starting with Taiwan, can change the balance of power in East/Southeast asia .... an area with about 1/3rd of the global population and disproportionate importance in global shipping and trade ... and really disproportionate importance in the semiconductor industry.

"Letting China have Taiwan" doesn't result in the Taiwanese only having a no-good-very-bad-day, it results in the kind of trade war that can destabilize and, frankly, deflate (in all ways) the economic prosperity of the entire planet. The end state scenario of an ascendant China is a generation or two of global depression.

The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct

Throughout most of it's history China had a tributary empire, regarding itself as the centre of civilisation (hence the 'Middle/Central Kingdom'). Neighbouring states were generally forced to adopt Chinese customs and pay tribute (with those that didn't being considered barbarians). It also expanded considerably over the centuries.

It wasn't colonial in the same way as Western European powers were and didn't have overseas territorial expansion or settler colonies (presumably largely due to China having such extensive land borders and territory to expand into), but it was definitely imperialistic.

One might argue that imperial Chinese history has little to no bearing on the posture of the modern Chinese state. As I understand we don't have good insight into the internal dynamics and political factions within the CCP, so it's difficult to talk definitively, but I do think it's pertinent that:

  • The period from the 19th century up to the formation of the current People's Republic of China is known as the Century of Humiliation, which emphasises China's loss of sovereignty and exploitation at the hands of European powers. Restoration of territorial integrity and becoming a global superpower is seen as a response to this. Personally, I think that the long history of China as the perceived centre of civilisation commanding tribute from surrounding nations is undoubtably relevant here.
  • Unlike say the US, China is a major importer of food (with relatively little arable land compared to its population) and energy (especially oil). Even if it wanted to, due to this it cannot be isolationist in the same way that the US now arguably could since the advent of fracking.

In terms of foreign relations policy the argument is more mixed. Certainly the CCP's stated foreign relations principles generally emphasise territorial respect, non-aggression and non-interference, and as I understand it the CCP does generally vote in accordance with these at the UN. However:

  • The CCP is frequently belligerent with its neighbours, and has the view that any territory formally part of the Chinese empire is rightfully theirs.
  • While it is always difficult to determine intent, it's quite plausible that this foreign policy position is a temporary posture. Its origins are from Xiaoping who came to power of the CCP in the 1970s, and while it emphasised the avoidance of controversy and use of cooperation, it was based on a Chinese idiom about biding one's time while building up strength.
  • Since the 2010s, and with China being in a much stronger position, the CCP's public diplomacy has definitely been much more combative (being colloquially dubbed 'Wolf Warrior' diplomacy).

Fix the West, first, on a cultural level, then worry about whatever the fuck is going to happen with Taiwan (I don’t care).

To join some of the other replies here, I would contend that allowing random revanchist tendencies to go unchecked would actually make it much harder to fix the West when economies go into the crapper, because wars of annexation tend to be pretty bad on a world of global trade (military border control being a damper on international movement of goods and money). Now, it is possible to head towards law-and-order without the backdrop of a strong economy, but the West has generally been about not resembling the countries that do so for quite a while now.

My answer here is that there is no meaningful "we", and your level of analysis is decoupled from actions you can personally take, because the US natsec blob gains meaning from opposition to China and is thus pretty set on that.

Coupling it with actions would be much more interesting, e.g., "why don't we form a voting block that attempts to influence either mainstream party into doing so?", "why don't we see if we can get 100 people to call their US representatives about [whatever]?", "why don't I personally see how I can meaningfully trade with China, e.g., by manufacturing stuff there".

Most people neither require nor care about democracy; they want streets that are safe, low crime, affordable and decent food on the table, a youth that is disciplined and hardworking, and a feeling that their country is headed in the right direction.

How is it possible then that there are US cities with urban cores that have none of these, and yet the local population clings to their idea of democracy?

They don’t cling to it, they simply know nothing else, nothing better.

You're much smarter and better than this.

"They've all got a chronic case of the Stupids!" is some reddit level shit.

You know the answer. You actually said it in your original jeremiad in this thread. San Franciscan and Chicagoan political elites have a relative value preference that prioritizes fealty to their political orthodoxy over real-world solutions. Why? Because it sustains and supports their status within their political groups, thus growing their access to power and resources. It is an elite circle cannabalizing the plight of normies for their own game. This is actually one of the closest things to consensus on The Motte - the ways to deal with it are the sources of argument.

Give an inch, they take a mile. If you just let China take Taiwan with no fight because the war would be so costly, why would China stop there? Would you let them conquer every island in the Pacific until they have everything except Hawaii too?

Because they don’t want. China for much of the last 2000 years had insane state capacity, a centralized government and some of the most modern technology of the age, and yet its territorial expansion was highly restrained.

Lol. 'We conquered to our technological limits to afford and maintain a coherent empire that, bounded by the jungles and the himelayas and the steppe and ocean, was still one of the largest in the world' is not what most historical contexts would consider 'highly restrained' imperial conquest. The Chinese imperialists conquered what they could hold, extorted what they could not, and weren't aware of what else they could profitably do.

The Chinese empires of old certainly lost out on the expansionism of overseas colonization, but this was a result of oversight and court politics, not knowing alternative opportunities existed and choosing restraint out of virtue. The modern Chinese state generally consider this a mistake not to be repeated.

Great point, and great way of wording it

I guess it depends on how invested you are in American hegemony. Which if you are a westerner, or especially a non-American westerner, might seem like a silly thing to be rooting for. But you might not realize how good you have it.

If the US lets China take Taiwan, then much of south-east Asia probably reorients politically. The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. fall out of American orbit and into the Chinese sphere; on the other hand, India might seek a formal American military alliance. International waters are no longer guaranteed by the US Navy, and the costs of cross-oceanic bulk cargo increase massively. Major economic disturbances ripple out as markets realign; international computing and mineral markets take years to recover. South Korea and Japan become nuclear states in a matter of weeks or months; Japan rips up its constitution immediately. Australia prepares to be the bulwark of southeast Asia.

Agreed. I don't see why I should be happy about some global crusade that tries, and realistically probably fails, to save the Chinese people from their despotism while I have to call the employee to unlock the toothpaste at the store because our own society has increasingly made it possible to do violent crime and property crime,

A failure to adopt a pro-social care and concern for others is why they locked up the toothpaste.

You're talking about being anti-social on a global scale.

You can absolutely be 100% "America First" without being "America Only"

Well, the fact is that these two things have basically nothing to do with one another. And it isn't even a matter of "political capital is finite and government can only do so much" because China policy is federal and locking up toothpaste is local. We're talking about completely different policy spheres.

Why don’t we just let Russia have the territory of former Novorossiya? The same arguments apply as here.

  • China is about 10x as strong
  • China does not seem to want more than taiwan and access to the ocean
  • Russia has a (recent) record of using military means and nuclear threats to expand its borders – China’s relative peacefulness (100x) should be rewarded and Russia’s behaviour punished . If nothing else, to avoid nuclearization.

China does not seem to want more than taiwan and access to the ocean

Dude ... why do they want access to the ocean? You're answering your own implied question here.

They don't want to get blockaded to shit every time they displease Current Hegemon?

right, now follow the thread further.

If you don't want to be beholden to the whims of Current Hegemon, the only way to guarantee that is to be roughly equivalent in overall power and capability to Current Hegemon. If you grow to that size, however, Current Hegemon will suspect you're a rival - which you are.

That precarious balance of power creates a tension that can go cold to hot very quickly.

China having a "history of peaceful behavior" (I would contest this assertion) does nothing to resolve this.

If you don't want to be beholden to the whims of Current Hegemon, the only way to guarantee that is to be roughly equivalent in overall power and capability to Current Hegemon.

I would say that this is not only legitimate but the right and proper aim of any nation. As opposed to the British strategy, which is to bleat endlessly about the ‘special relationship’ and hope America throws us some scraps.

I see it fas a fundamentally legitimate demand, they don’t want to be at the mercy of their rival. I’m not fighting a world war to deny them that modest amount of autonomy.

Your reasoning doesn’t seem to allow for any legitimate demand on their part, they’re just supposed to accept being beholden to the whims of current hegemon forever. Like, if they build a fort in the suburbs of beijing, the US will seemingly go: “wowowow, hold on, your capital is now less vulnerable to my potential attacks, I can’t order you around anymore, that is an obvious threat to my hegemony, you’re now a rival for world domination, let’s have a war”.

From that perspective, you could say that just china strengthening and no longer starving is ‘destabilizing’ and causing war. For my part, I don’t think the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspires the Lacedaemon, makes war inevitable.

A hegemon who wishes to keep any potential rival too weak to ever present a challenge (for example, I sometimes hear the idea that the US should have bombed China into the stone age in the 80s, while it still could) is a terrible tyrant who should be overturned.

The PRC wants the South China Sea, Taiwan, Senkaku, Ryukyu (they've openly put out feelers, even if they haven't officially demanded it yet), and a few territories along the Indian border, plus maybe Korea, plus some degree of control over the policy of ~everywhere (see e.g. the Fourteen Demands).

Japan and South Korea will nuclearise if Taiwan falls unfought. Pure if-then. In a world where the USA is not willing to defend East Asia and the PLAN has Pacific Ocean access unobstructed by the First Island Chain, Beijing would otherwise be able to dictate terms to them due to the threat of blockade (neither country is remotely close to food security).

Unless we feel like performing the kowtow, we're probably going to have to fight the PRC, and if so we should fight it while our allies are all intact and the geography works against it.

I don’t care if South Korea and Japan have nukes and would probably consider it a good thing. I’m very confident that Xi Jinping does not personally want to rule over the Japanese the way Putin dreams of reconstituting the Russian Empire, so I don’t really care.

I don't care .... I don't really care

I care .... I really, really care.

the Great Man theory of history really is some midwit shit. This isn't about Xi or Putin, this is about large scale economic-military-political spheres of control and influence that will outlive both of these men. The post WW2 world order was started by a bunch of Americans that are now very dead and has been sustained for going on 80 years because of a system maintained and reinforced by cultural, political, economic, and military forces.

China is not seeking Taiwan as an end state. They are seeking to create a Chinese system (of cultural, political, economic, and military means) that similarly self-sustains and self-supports for centuries. That can only come with a reduction in both the relative and absolute power of the West, especially the United States. Such a drastic shift in power will necessarily alter our cultural values and operation. I don't want Beijing's incredibly global presence to dictate cultural norms to any extent (aside: Ban TikTok).

The world hasn't gotten any smaller, but nations (in the conceptual sense) have become larger and can move faster and further. There is no "over there" any more.

Who’s next?

Just like Japan and Korea’s fear of being cut off from the ocean is understandable, so is China’s. Even a reasonable and peaceful China would do everything to remove this knife from their throat. I’m uncomfortable getting into a massive war without trying appeasement first. You can speculate on China’s ultimate goals, but there is no record of defection and increasing demands like there is with Russia. Every power gets one tschekoslovakia, one free defect, that’s my rule.

Are you perhaps forgetting Hong Kong? They agreed to preserve Hong Kong's political systems from 1997-2047; that didn't even last until 2022.

They also have been building villages inside Bhutan, apparently confident that Bhutan can't do anything about it and nobody will call them out on it. I think there was one inside India as well.

Let's not forget their long-standing habit of taking hostages to extort their home countries' governments, and of controlling their diaspora by holding their non-diaspora families hostage.

I seem to recall a recent incident where they lit up an Australian ship with targeting radar (usually considered sufficient cause to fire back), but I can't find a citation.

The PRC is currently playing defect-bot*. A lot of these incidents are "nothingburgers" because the other side just cries and takes it, but that just means it's playing defect-bot successfully.

(Also, Japan and South Korea have far, far more to worry about from blockade than China; China has a much-better land:people ratio and it has access to land imports; Japan has no land borders and South Korea's only one is with North Korea i.e. a close Chinese ally that would take part in any such blockade. China would feel some pain from a sea blockade, but it's a long way from "lol state failure as people eat each other".)

*Its strategy is probably technically "Spiteful-Bully", but eh.

We can't tell how efficient the Chinese armed forces are. Their performance was surely not exactly stellar the last time they were sent into combat, between 1979-88 in the Chinese-Vietnamese border region. Their navy is pretty much an unknown entity in that regard in particular. There's nothing to suggest that they'd turn out to be more impressive than their Russian counterparts.

Also, you're comparing apples to oranges. The Russian Federation exists on the ruins of an empire that lost her entire periphery in 1991. This never happened to Communist China. Of course they're going to appear to be more peaceful.

There's nothing to suggest that they'd turn out to be more impressive than their Russian counterparts.

Economic, industrial and demographic might.

The Russian Federation exists on the ruins of an empire that lost her entire periphery in 1991. This never happened to Communist China. Of course they're going to appear to be more peaceful.

I don't care if it had a rough childhood. It has proven itself incapable of behaving in a civilized manner and should be incapacitated whether it has moral responsibility or not (rabid bear).

It has proven itself incapable of behaving in a civilized manner and should be incapacitated whether it has moral responsibility or not (rabid bear).

This standard means the US empire needs to be incapacitated as well. What the US has done in Libya, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc is well beyond the bounds of 'civilized' behavior. You don't get to talk about the evil Russian empire while defending the same empire that dumped agent orange on Vietnam.

Vietnam was before Russia had its own Afghanistan debacle, ancient history. I’ll grant that the US has a weaker record of peacefulness than China. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the US’ moral responsibility and war justifications either, it’s largely irrelevant. Most of the reasons why Russia should be fought and China let off the hook apply to the US as well: order of magnitude stronger, no expanding-expansionist goals, no nuclear threats.

Pretty sure that the US has been trying to expand into Russia and China for the last half century.

To quote @netstack

The legacy of WWII was that you don’t have to literally occupy a territory to get value from it. Set up the right rules, and the subsequent international order serves your interests.

The US is very keen to make Russia and China follow US rules, and I'm pretty sure they would bring about regime change if they could.

The rabidness of the Russian Bear should not cause us to discount the hunger of the Chinese Bear. Xi Jinping has made it clear that he wants China to have prestige and respect, and for all the power it has built up and all the subterfuge it has done, China does not yet have the same level of world-historical importance as the US. Anything and everything to reverse the Century of Humiliation should be considered as on the table for such a goal.

We have centuries of Chinese history in which imperialism was highly limited, contra centuries of Russian imperialism in which it very much was not.

Yes, but I suspect the point of view of China's current rulers is that these choices in its history were mistakes that they will consciously not make, which potentially means "take the opposite actions"--again, see the Century of Humiliation. Modern China will not do something as hindsightedly retarded as "ban oceanworthy ships."

This doesn't preclude China constraining itself in ways that are objectively counterproductive (overjuiced real estate, zero-COVID policy), but they seek to be the next hegemon, to embrace the Imperial history instead of trying to make it disappear, and thus we must assume they will not abstain from things that states try to do when they feel they have no limits.

True, if you were to have knowledge of Putin vs Xi’s wildest territorial dreams if they could get away with anything, I think I’d be quite sure the latter’s would be Taiwan, nine-dash-line and the US out of Korea (and probably also the end of the Kim regime, which the CCP has long been ambivalent about). Putin’s wildest territorial dreams clearly go way beyond Eastern Ukraine.

I find all this to be a bit far-fetched. When exactly did the Chinese Communists express any intent to unify Korea after expelling the Americans? Their intervention in the Korean War didn't go to such lengths either. We might as well say that their wildest dreams include Vladivostok. And what Russian ambitions are 'way beyond' Eastern Ukraine? Don't tell me it's Moldova of all places.

Their intervention in the Korean War didn't go to such lengths either.

Uh, yeah, it did? Mao was absolutely trying to unify Korea under Kim Il-Sung. They captured Seoul and would have taken all of South Korea had the UN forces not driven them back.

I don't think we can say that with certainty. The intervention happened when North Korea was on the verge of complete defeat and I'd be surprised to learn that it had goals more ambitious then restoring the status quo.

I think you might need to read up a bit more on Mao Zedong. The Sino-Soviet split occurred because Mao thought Khrushchev wasn't being aggressive enough in spreading communism; Mao was very aggressive, and was involved in the planning of the initial North Korean invasion of South Korea.

It's debatable whether Mao would have come in if the UN hadn't invaded North Korea, but once he did he absolutely intended to unify Korea under Kim.

(To be clear, this particular incident has little bearing on modern Chinese intentions; Xi Jinping is not Mao and has different objectives. He is also aggressive, but in a different fashion.)

Rhetoric is one thing, actions are another. Altogether I find it a bit of a stretch to say that Chinese foreign policy was markedly aggressive during Mao, either compared to that of the USSR or the Qing Dynasty for that matter.

Yeah, I agree that we should, but it would have been smart to negotiate that at the nadir of the Russian campaign in early 2023 when we could have gotten some major concessions.

Because if we weaken the norm that powerful countries can't just annex other countries, then we should expect to see a lot more war and a break down of the international order that allows global trade.

I can think of half a dozen countries off the top of my head who could start wars to gain territory if they knew they had the implicit permission of NATO and the western powers. This will hurt civilisation, increase illegal immigration, reduce law and order and generally results in a shittier world.

Because if we weaken the norm that powerful countries can't just annex other countries

What norm? There is no such norm.

The us overthrew a democratically elected leader from Ukraine and installed a puppet.

The us has been engaging in fuckery funding terrorists in the middle east, assassinating Haitian presidents and countless other "norm breaking". Israel has been bombing military generals inside other countries sovereign territory.

At this point if the Russians decide to start assassinating US military command staff on US soil, I wouldn't bat an eye.

You galactically overestimate the effect the CIA, or any spy agency for that matter, can ever have. Spy agencies can only nudge, or, at most, provide a spark when there's a highly flammable situation.

Saying the US overthrew the president of Ukraine is like saying the Russian FSB elected Trump in 2016.

The us overthrew a democratically elected leader from Ukraine and installed a puppet.

The Ukrainian people overthrew a leader who had lost their support. Russia likes to frame it as 'the US overthrew Ukrainian democracy', but they also frame their attempt to annex and genocide the Ukrainian nation as a defensive war against NATO.

Other countries have agency too.

Ah yes, such agency, much wow. Supporting Nazi larping snipers and having CIA handlers on the ground, very democracy, lots of self determination. Russia also wouldn't be invading Ukraine if NATO wasn't trying to cut them off the black sea.

and genocide the Ukrainian nation

If they wanted to genocide the Ukrainin nation they would have nuked it already.

Russia also wouldn't be invading Ukraine if NATO wasn't trying to cut them off the black sea.

NATO was planning on taking Krasnodar Krai? That's a new one to me.

Nazi larping snipers

There's a weird overlap between wokes, who think everyone right wing is a Nazi, and Russian nationalists, who think anyone who doesn't want Russia to invade them is a Nazi.

For clarity, Nazi refers to the National Socialist German Workers Party, which was in power in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Using it outside of that is just a lazy slur and the kind of thing we try to avoid on this site.

CIA handlers on the ground

Do you genuinely believe that if the CIA hadn't had any involvement, the Maidan wouldn't have happened and the Ukrainian people would have happily seen their country tied to the poor dictatorship to the East rather than the wealthy democracies to the West? You really think a handful of intelligence agents have so much power that they are able to control the actions of hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise have done nothing?

There are always dissatisfied factions in any country. As the country’s condition worsen, dissenting factions become stronger, but I’m pretty sure foreign support can significantly affect: a) which dissenting faction ends up on top, b) whether they’re strong enough to beat the existing government.

These things are exponential, like avalanches, or pandemics. That’s why repression almost always aims to wipe out dissidents when they’re weak and isolated.

It seems entirely plausible to me that no US support = no Maidan revolution.

Why would no US support for a primarily European supported pro-European movement mean no European support for a pro-European movement?

I can think of half a dozen countries off the top of my head who could start wars to gain territory if they knew they had the implicit permission of NATO and the western powers.

None of those countries are as powerful as China, most don’t have nuclear weapons and - if they do - so does the other guy. That’s the difference.

I'm a believer in de-escalating tensions with China. Their political system repulses me, but what is more likely to bring freedom to the people who are oppressed in their system, escalating tensions with the US or de-escalated ones? Many people were repulsed by Russian czarism in 1917, but when that system fell it was replaced by a vastly more brutal one. We don't necessarily need to fight. Why not try to be friends instead, at least as much as possible? This all doesn't necessarily have to be a zero sum game. Maybe we can all win. At the end of the day, I don't care much about the US economic success versus China at all, for me this geopolitical question is one that should be decided on moral grounds. How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them. I feel like there are probably better ways to try to bring about that outcome than pure video game style strategic considerations of resources and tariffs and so on. The Chinese people, like Russians, are fundamentally somewhat poor biomass when it comes to liberalism... the average person of both ethnic groups is just fundamentally inferior to the average Westerner when it comes to liberalism, they might tend to not understand the benefit of it on a fundamental psychological level. But how to improve the biomass, is the question. I don't think that Russians or Chinese are fundamentally genetically incapable of liberalism, I doubt that it goes as deep as that. I always come back to thinking about how the Germans went from a backwater that probably didn't know that the Earth was round, 2000 years ago, to being the world's leaders in science about 1700 years later. How can we help the Chinese to make that happen? To turn them into nice people who don't necessarily want to conquer the world and oppress others, at least not any more than the modern West wants it (which is substantial, but at least we're not back in pure colonialism mode)?

How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them. I feel like there are probably better ways to try to bring about that outcome than pure video game style strategic considerations of resources and tariffs and so on.

Well, in the case of Japan and South Korea (and West Germany), we accomplished that by way of "benevolent" military occupation, for which hot war is a prerequisite. Have any other historical examples for us to consider?

How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them.

The only likely ways for the CPC to fall are:

  1. Partial or total state failure due to some catastrophe (e.g. invasion, mass nuclear attack, maybe food supply failure or some form of total communications disruption);
  2. The PRC being humbled in a major way (e.g. recognising Taiwanese independence) so that the CPC's devil's bargain of "accept our tyranny and China will again be the centre of the world" falls through.

They took steps to ensure they wouldn't wind up liberalising like the Soviet sphere or Taiwan or South Korea, and those steps work. You need something huge. Note that the CPC knows about #2, which means it won't co-operate easily; this threat (if made with the will and unquestioned ability to follow through) might get them to cave in, and military defeats of course don't have to be consensual, but that's about it.

I fully agree but we need to first fix the leadership problem before getting into the specifics of damage control.

Why is China now the world capital of industry? Because we let them build up earlier as opposed to hammering them back when they were weak. It would've been so much easier to constrain their semiconductor industry 20 years ago. It would've been so much easier to stop them moving into the South China Sea before they put down all these airbases and artificial islands. It would've been so much easier to choke off their strategic industries when ours were bigger. It would've been so much easier to maintain military superiority if we weren't fighting stupid, expensive and pointless wars in MENA.

The US actually sabotaged and suppressed Taiwan's nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. Twice! Now it's far too late to put nukes there, the Chinese would go in before they could be set up.

Our strategy has been to appease China when they were weak and harass them now that they're strong. This is not wise.

Why has all this happened? The people at the helm have been arrogant fools. Biden laughed at the notion of a Russo-Sino-Iranian compact back in 1997, when there were so many ways we could've headed this off with lower costs and risks: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788

Bill Clinton went 'oh the Chinese are trying to censor the internet, that's like nailing Jell-O to the wall!'. He was wrong. Censoring the internet is easy and desirable for any state, as we now understand.

Unless we get rid of all the arrogant fools from high office, there's no chance of success. They'll hector India for being too fascist, they'll open up yet another Middle East sideshow, they'll constantly cancel every naval procurement program so that billions are spent and no capabilities produced, they'll let in all these Chinese nationals to leading AI companies (and the military), they'll squander wealth on green technology, they'll DEI meritocracy away. They will find ways to blunder that we can't even imagine!

Even today people are going on TV saying '400% tarriffs! Let's bring Beijing to its knees': https://www.newsweek.com/kevin-oleary-donald-trump-tariffs-china-defcon-1-1992284

People like this are so stupid, it's laughable. That's not how tarriffs work and it misjudges the balance of economic power. But they are running the show, the lesson still hasn't been learnt.

Bill Clinton went 'oh the Chinese are trying to censor the internet, that's like nailing Jell-O to the wall!'. He was wrong. Censoring the internet is easy and desirable for any state, as we now understand.

You can easily access dissident material in China and most internet-literate Chinese could do so by VPN even with the crude blocking implemented as part of the great firewall. Chinese don’t do so not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. The US should implement a similar policy of making socially deleterious messaging (like much of TikTok) hard to access for plebs, but easy for anyone with a modicum of intelligence.

China is a largely functioning, largely peaceful society. Democracy has nothing to offer them, countless genuine democracies in Asia, Africa and the Americas are complete shitholes with a much lower quality of life than China.

The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes. They want their little slice of East Asia, they don’t even really want Japan and are semi-ambivalent on Korea. They want to control the SCS, which is reasonable for the world’s second power given the US controls oceans and waterways many times further away from North America than the furthest extreme of the nine dash line is from mainland China.

As far as AI and related tech goes, they’ll have it anyway, it’s way too easy to steal cloud compute and divert GPU shipments and - even if it wasn’t - the Chinese could still just tune and run the models after they were created. The US needs peace with China, a 50 year plan to hand over Taiwan to the CCP in a negotiated fashion (OR a commitment by the Taiwanese that they’re prepared to fight this themselves, which they are not) and some kind of pathway to a settlement around the nine-dash that either extracts significant concessions from Southeast Asian allies or cedes the space to China in the interests of peace.

The Mongols desired world domination and a good chunk of their genepool is in China today.

And power is seductive. One could easily say 'America doesn't want world domination they just want to stay in isolation on their continent' back in the 19th century. But they had the power, they had global interests by virtue of their size, they got sucked in and began to enjoy wielding their strength.

The Chinese are the same. When East Asia was all they knew, they worked hard to dominate it. China today has global interests in market access, resources, ideological legitimacy. They buy Iranian and Russian oil, they're building ports in Argentina, they refine nickel in Indonesia, Chinese companies fight drug wars against Mexican gangs for distribution rights in US cities: https://x.com/SantsPliego/status/1748496050543837404

They are so big that they end up doing almost everything, almost everywhere. Every day there will be some dispute over fishing rights, some struggle with local interests, some crisis that needs a response. There is a voice shrieking 'use power' in the ear of their leaders every single day, from events and from their subordinates (who were raised in the atmosphere of intense nationalism they used to replace Maoism). It would require leaders of superhuman passivity and benevolence to resist the urge to start wielding their economic and military power forever.

The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes.

You know that for like two millennia China had a policy of "no equals, only tributaries and rebels", right? That's a large part of why the Opium Wars happened; Qing China insisted that it wouldn't treat the Western powers as sovereign nations - there were to be no negotiations, only tribute, acknowledging the Emperor as their feudal overlord, and begging him for magnanimity - and while the Dutch played along with the farce, the Empire on which the Sun Never Sets said "fuck that" and kicked over the anthill.

And the core tenet of the CPC's legitimacy is that that pratfall was a terrible injustice and that it will bring China back to the glory that preceded it.

Why is China now the world capital of industry? Because we let them build up earlier as opposed to hammering them back when they were weak.

Or in other words, because American industry couldn’t compete with Chinese industry on an even footing. I’m open to tariffs and other things but the idea that America should pre-emptively destroy anyone who looks like they might be able to do better is not one that brings me joy.

What is an even footing?

China plays all kinds of games with its currency, industrial policy and so on. They have cards to play due to their privileged position in terms of size and talent pool. Since Deng Xiaoping they play the hand that they're dealt pretty well - not without mistakes of course but pretty well.

Western countries also have cards to play, we also have tariffs, industrial policy, currency manipulation and a privileged position in terms of a pre-built capital base and advanced technology. China was spending 1% of GDP on their military for many years as they focused purely on building up economically, that would've been a great time to impose military pressure.

If we don't play our cards, how can we expect to win? If we play our cards too late, how can we expect to win? Do we want to face weak enemies or strong enemies? Do we expect our enemies to show us the same level of mercy that we show them, if they have the upper hand?

Let's not forget that China has been a ruthless one-party state the entire time. The reformists got crushed in '89. They had a Taiwan Straits Crisis in the mid 90s. It really takes a world-historically stupid elite class to stay deluded about Chinese ambitions until the mid-2010s.

I’m fine with tariffs or industrial policy. Those strike me as ‘fair’ cards to play, preserving and/or improving your own industry. (I don’t approve of China’s dumping either fwiw).

What I don’t like is the idea that America should economically and/or militarily destroy anyone who might ever become its peer. I am not interested in living under a tyrant to protect me from living under a tyrant.

At this rate we're going to be living under a tyranny that fails to protect us from living under a tyrant.

But look back over US history. You guys stomped the Native Americans, conquered much of Mexico, ripped various colonies off Spain because you could, mandated that an entire hemisphere was yours alone to dominate. You took steps to crush Germany and Japan before they could even potentially threaten you (defanging Britain and France along the way). You then fought a fifty-year campaign to contain and eventually eliminate the Soviet Union. That ignores all the little wars, going in on Panama and Grenada, all the regime changes around the world, Operation Gladio, Iraq of all places...

The history of the last two hundred years is dominated by the US destroying real or imagined threats, wherever they are. Why stop when you face by far the biggest threat? For the first time in US history, you're up against someone as big, or even bigger than you guys. There won't be any allies that can do much of the heavy lifting this time, it's down to you. This is the final boss and it requires full commitment.

Do remember that a lot of Chinese industry uses semi-slave labour and that there's substantial government support - Smith actually mentions the latter in the linked article.

My understanding is that if there is a sino american war that isn't over instantly it'll be basically a stalemate. China cannot project power in any way that threatens America nor control the sea enough to do much outside of their immediate coasts and they are not surrounded by friends.

The flipside of the rules of the US hegemony being that US interests at best end at the adversary's border is that the victory conditions for the US, as far as perceptions are concerned, are much steeper. Just like both sides agree that a loss for Ukraine would be a loss for NATO, the US would likewise already lose if Taiwan were taken, or SK/JP forced into neutrality (with the attendant removal of US bases): geopolitical implications aside, there is the cold logic of bluster that says that if you assert or imply that you will never allow something happen and then you let it happen anyway, all other claims you made that you will never let something happen will also become suspect in the eyes of pretenders. Each bluff called successfully moves the boundary to be tested a bit further inwards, and if the US getting its way does not seem quite as inevitable anymore, Iran would be a little more tempted to make a swing at Israel, assorted South American populists might once again be tempted to kick out DEA and the United Fruit Company for cheap votes, Turkey would seize some Greek islands and/or buy more Russian air defense with telemetry enabled, and before long even Germany might resume trading with the Russians and installing Huawei tech. How many of those could the US actually weather in the long run, without all the interlocking benefits it currently reaps from its position entering a downwards spiral?

The US stance on Taiwan is still strategic ambiguity, doesn't really seem like there's been a "this will never happen" bluff

If China can get across the strait and onto Taiwan, that's not a stalemate for them, it's an absolute victory.

China doesn't want the US to collapse. They just want Taiwan (and maybe less American influence in the Pacific).

My own view is that if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose, largely due to the factors mentioned here. While I support Noah Smith's vision of the reindustrialisation of America, I think it will face a significant uphill battle. The share of the US population working in manufacturing has fallen from 30% in 1950 to around 8% today. While some of this reflects more capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there's no way for the US to compete with China without considerably increasing the number of people employed in the secondary sector; note that China has more manufacturing robots per worker than the US and still has around 30% of its population in industry.

This leads to the core problem, namely that white-collar labour is higher status than blue-collar labour, even controlling for salaries, and as a consequence of deindustrialisation, a larger share of the US population now thinks of itself as being entitled to a white-collar job (a form of Turchin's elite overproduction). The kids of accountants, teachers, doctors, and business professionals generally won't want to become welders or machine lathe operators, even if these careers offer a better salary. Consequently, price signals alone won't drive reindustrialisation; some social engineering will be required to boost the status of manufacturing labour, and I'm doubtful of the cultural feasibility of this.

I think drones are plenty scary, but Noah's analysis [more drones = winner] kinda misses that the DJI drones are much more relevant in a land war. At sea they have a lot of value as a day-zero strike weapon but after that are close to being useless because of their limited range.

if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose

The way I see it is that longer the war goes, the more important submarines get. Submarines are extremely good at killing ships, but they're not particularly fast. The US probably still has a decent qualitative edge in submarines. If the conflict isn't decided quickly (it will almost certainly take longer than a couple of days for it to resolve, but in theory a decisive blow against e.g. Taiwan could be struck practically in a single day) than it probably means that China has failed to take Taiwan in a timely manner and the US is methodologically sinking every Chinese ship on Earth.

And yes, China's greater production capability doesn't necessarily help them out of this hole. If China can't sink our nuclear submarines reliably, and can't find a way to stop our stealth bombers strike from CONUS, then we merely have to build more missiles, mines and torpedoes than China can build ships. Guess which is considerably less manufacturing-intensive to build? And yet, if China wants to meaningfully strike at the US, it has no options besides that fleet or ICBMs (I don't think its own strategic bomber force is up to the task).

I definitely think we're silly behind in manufacturing and it's actually an open question as to whether or not we'll have said missiles, mines and torpedoes that we need, but China's problem if they go to war against the United States is much, much harder than "print infinite drones, win." It's more like "the United States has just sortied 25 aircraft from airbases you can't strike to launch 1000 stealth anti-ship cruise missiles at you in a single strike. You have 800 interceptor missiles in your VLS cells. Good luck! Oh, and by the way, this missile strike that's going to sink both of your carriers? It's launched from cargo aircraft, and they're going to sortie again tomorrow."

You can't solve that sort of problem with all the FPV suicide drones in Ukraine (unless you manage to stage them outside of US airbases and blow up all our aircraft on day zero of the conflict, which I will admit I find extremely concerning a possibility.)

But China has an answer to US Submarines: the underwater great wall. It's a massive network of underwater surveilliance platforms that they've been methodically building up for many years now. Will it work? Who knows, this is all untested and highly classified. But we shouldn't dismiss offhand the idea that they're able to build a defense, when they have unlimited time and money to do it. (I also think it's blase to think they wouldn't be able to defend against stealth bombers or cruise missiles for that reason). And more specifically, in the Taiwan Strait, the water is quite shallow- only about 100 meters deep on average. It's a horrible environment for submarines.

China doesn't have to cruise in open water to win, it just has to defend its coastline. The US and its allies have the much more difficult job.

China doesn't have to cruise in open water to win, it just has to defend its coastline. The US and its allies have the much more difficult job.

Well, this assumes a far blockade doesn't cause them problems – the best use of US submarines might not be near the Chinese coastline, but in interdicting shipping escorts thousands of miles away. I think cooperation with Russia would help alleviate a lot of the concerns China has to have with a far blockade, but that doesn't mean it is a non-issue.

It also assumes a purely defensive war. But pure coastal defense probably won't be sufficient to conduct a blockade of Taiwan, which is what doglatine suggests. A blockade will require, almost certainly, getting ships onto the far side of Taiwan, where submarines will be considerably more lethal and Chinese ships will be outside of their ground-based air-defense net. There's a reason China is building aircraft carriers!

China doesn't have unlimited time and money to do any of these things, any more than we do. I don't think they will be incapable of defending against stealth bombers or cruise missiles. In fact, if you look at Russia's track record against stealthy cruise missiles (and Russia has very good air defense) it appears they can shoot them down! We should presume the Chinese can too. But they don't have a 100% track record, and that's very concerning when the target is a ship that might go to the bottom or be combat-incapable for months based on a single hit instead of a bridge (which can be repaired in a matter of days).

My point is that China's problem isn't a problem you can solve with mass-produced FPV drones.

I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this article: https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2022/11/submarines-and-asw-in-china-war.html

He agrees with you that subs and ASW are the most decisive weapon, but he thinks that the balance is relatively even thanks to China's numbers and sensor arrays.

My point is that China's problem isn't a problem you can solve with mass-produced FPV drones.

I do agree with you on that. I think the linked article is way off base to think we can somehow "bring back manufacturing" and then mass produce drones like they're WW2 liberty ships and have it be effective.

I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this article

I thought it was fairly sensible. I have a quibble and a comment or two:

  • He writes off the LCS as an anti-submarine platform. But as I understand it, a lot of ASW warfare is done by helicopters. The LCS is relatively small and, uh, "attritable." It might actually make a relatively good platform to patrol off of Taiwan's eastern side. It's not going to be great in a situation where it's facing the Chinese fleet or air threats, but if we keep the Chinese fleet bottled up it might make a decent makeshift escort simply by virtue of the helipad. This isn't praise of the LCS, just noting that it is probably not entirely useless.

  • He writes off our airborne ASW capability. While it's probably true the P-8 and MQ-4 should avoid close encounters with the Chinese air-defense net, they will probably have utility operating out of Japan and the Philippines to bottle up Chinese SSKs. (Here's another area where we see that naval capabilities compound: if China can operate a carrier battle group in the SCS a bit aggressively, they might be able to open gaps in our air ASW coverage and slip submarines through to Taiwan's eastern seaboard.) Of course, I have no idea how reliably the P-8 is at catching transiting submarines anyway, but I assume it will have an edge against non-nuclear submarines in open water.

Furthermore, the US has a number of stealth reconnaissance assets, of which we don't know much. Might the RQ-170's speculated AESA radar have snorkel-detection capability? How well will it hold up to China's anti-stealth radar capabilities? I don't know the answer to that. But it wouldn't surprise me if those assets were tapped in an SCS fight, even in a makeshift fashion.

I do agree with you on that. I think the linked article is way off base to think we can somehow "bring back manufacturing" and then mass produce drones like they're WW2 liberty ships and have it be effective.

I think it would be good to "bring back manufacturing," but imho the key isn't to print drones or ships, but rather munitions. If you look at the war in Ukraine, it's good that Russia has a robust manufacturing system, but being able to make munitions. And of course suicide FPV drones are munitions in that war. In a war with China, that's going to be anti-ship missiles, mines, etc. I think that ideally the US needs to be able to make a lot of anti-ship missiles, quickly, because if they are utilized correctly there will be relatively little attrition to the launch platforms, in theory.

Obviously it's ideal to be able to make ships, planes, and missiles overnight. But in terms of manufacturing, I think the first focus should be on munitions. And that's something that the US is aware of and working to mitigate. I really think people are sometimes unaware of just how many air-to-ground munitions the US manufactures (e.g. Wikipedia says 7,500 JASSM stealth cruise missiles and more than half a million JDAM bomb kits produced). I think the US is behind where it needs to be in terms of anti-ship weapons specifically but if China gives it two or three years to manufacture weapons like the LRASM the Navy/USAF will have thousands of them.

I find that blog quite fascinating. He seems like the sort of obsessive weird nerd who can produce great insights, since he's been obsessively writing his google blog on the navy for well over a decade now. And he makes a lot of sensible points. On the other hand he's also quite iconoclastic, and not afraid to go on rants about how the entire navy is stupid and only he can see the truth, so sometimes he's totally inaccurate. He has an obsessive hatred for the LCS and most other modern naval technologies, and wants to bring back the battleships, or at least something with heavy armor and gunfire. He usually advocates for single-purpose ships, so he'd probably say that a ship won't be good at ASW unless it focuses completely on that mission with it's equipment and training.

On munitions manufacturing, I agree that it's critical. But the Ukraine war has given me a dim view of US/NATO manufacturing capacity. We're getting massively outproduced by Russia and North Korea. All the money in the world doesn't seem to translate into much of an actual production improvement.

wants to bring back the battleships

that seems to disqualify him, that is just absurd

I think it's possible to have some good ideas and some bad ideas at the same time, but I am very, very skeptical of his assessments of armor. However, it's worth noting that naval warfare hasn't changed much since the Iowas were reactivated. When they were, though, they were filled to the brim with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

In principle a long-range naval gun is actually pretty swell, because bullets are cheap and naval support gunfire is good. I think it's too bad we haven't made more progress on railguns.

A blockade will require, almost certainly, getting ships onto the far side of Taiwan

The four ports responsible for >95% of shipping are all on the west side. The east side of Taiwan is obnoxiously mountainous.

Taiwan's largest trading partner is China – which presumably would no longer be the case in the event of a blockade – so of course most of the trade is from western ports. Taiwan has multiple ports on the eastern side of the island, which is presumably where it would accept incoming traffic from the United States and Australia in the event of a blockade.

Obviously, being blockaded is far from ideal for Taiwan. But I haven't seen convincing evidence that the ports on the eastern side of the island are physically incapable of handling the necessary sealift.

Now, I grant that China has options besides sending a fleet to the eastern side of the islands:

  • Ballistic missiles
  • Airstrikes
  • Submarine-only blockade

But at the end of the day, I suspect that failing to place surface ships east of Taiwan will complicate any attempt to blockade it. (Keep in mind, too, that in at least some versions of the China blockade scenario doglatine proposed it is framed as a police action rather than a military one, which makes it likely that China would try to enforce the blockade with Coast Guard vessels.)

Ports require lots of heavy machinery to do their job, you can't 10x their capacity in a few days. LNG terminals (Taiwan imports 98% of energy) also cannot be easily migrated.

The routes between west and east are highly mountainous. One was closed for 13 years due to typhoon damage. They could all be shut down with well placed missiles, crippling resupply.

This is all ignoring submarine warfare/anti ship ballistic missiles.

Ports require lots of heavy machinery to do their job, you can't 10x their capacity in a few days.

Sure – but Taiwan has at least some of that machinery on their eastern side. The question is whether or not they can receive sufficient emergency supplies from eastern ports, not whether or not they can do business as usual from eastern ports.

LNG terminals (Taiwan imports 98% of energy) also cannot be easily migrated.

This does seem like a serious weakness, although it looks only around 40% of Taiwan's imported energy comes from LNG specifically.

They could all be shut down with well placed missiles, crippling resupply.

Allow me to register some skepticism that this would amount to anything more than a temporary inconvenience.

This is all ignoring submarine warfare/anti ship ballistic missiles.

I specifically mentioned submarine warfare and ballistic missiles in my prior post as options China had outside of a surface blockade. Happy to discuss:

  1. Antiship ballistic missiles are useless without a way to cue them. This would traditionally be satellites, recon aircraft, or surface ships. In the event of a war going hot, satellites are likely to be a prime target, and it's hard for them to hide, particularly in the face of superior American surface-to-orbit throw weight. If China's plan is to sit and defend their territorial waters, satellites or recon aircraft won't be effective either. One possibility is using long wave radar to detect surface ships at long distances and use that to cue, but I don't know how effective that would be, so I am agnostic on this front. Obviously, ballistic missiles are also vulnerable to interception, and while China has a lot of them they probably also have a lot of places they will want to put them.

  2. Submarines – in many ways I find these scarier than ASBMS. I am inclined to believe that flooding the zone for them would be dangerous, and China could plausibly surge 40ish of their 66 submarines in the field. (I'm assuming they won't send their boomers and won't be able to field every single ship for maintenance reasons). And once subs get to Taiwan's eastern side, they will be in deeper water and be able to lie in wait around Taiwan's ports.

However, if China's plan is to keep its surface fleet back in coastal waters, it deprives the submarines of air cover, which gives Japanese, Taiwanese and American helicopter and air anti-submarine assets a lot of leeway to operate. China only has about nine nuclear attack submarines, and the rest might be fairly vulnerable while snorkeling (I haven't done a deep-dive on the specifics of their diesel fleet). Submarines are also slower than ships, torpedoes have relatively short ranges, and submarine-launched anti-ship missiles (which China also has) suffer the same guidance problems ASBMs do.

This raises the possibility that simply running the blockade at high speeds escorted by anti-submarine aircraft could pose a serious complication to Chinese submarines, as if they weren't lucky enough to be in the correct position, they'd have to travel at high speeds underwater to reach an intercept, dramatically raising the chances they are identified by anti-submarine aircraft. But on the other hand if they do get a torpedo off, they will immediately be targeted and possibly sunk by escorts.

Now – subs are sneaky, and I think that a sub blockade of Taiwan might be extremely painful for Taiwan. While past submarine blockades haven't worked, there are a variety of reasons to think that Taiwan might be different. (It seems quite possible that a lack of Western manufacturing of transport ships is a huge Achilles heel, here!) But you can see how a blockade of Taiwan is (to use my word) complicated if you don't put large surface combatants with surface-search radars east of Taiwan.

To be clear – I am not saying a war against China would be an easy win for the United States. The United States might even lose! I am saying that mass manufacturing of cheap weapons systems of the sort that have been effective in Ukraine is unlikely to be as helpful in a naval war.

And this is not a new problem for the United States – the Soviet army significantly out-massed and out-gunned NATO forces during the Cold War. The US solution to this problem was to develop high-end capabilities that increased combat effectiveness so that brute manufacturing capability was not the determinative factor on the battlefield.

Now, looking at how that's turned out in Ukraine, I think it's clear that the US definitely underestimated the importance of manufacturing. But on the other hand, I think that air war and ocean war are much less vulnerable to the simple expedient of raising larger armies and manufacturing more artillery shells, and I do think high end technological edges matter more at sea in combat.

I do agree that abysmal rates of US manufacturing of ships and weapons systems are a legitimate issue here. I just think the story is not quite as simple as one might be tempted to conclude.

Good response! Yes, I agree FPV drones are unlikely to be decisive in a naval war. Insofar as China's dominance in drones raises concerns about a US-China conflict, it's what it suggests about China's wider industrial dominance. I think the most plausible 'long war' scenario here involves China imposing a blockade/maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan, triggering an ongoing and gradually-escalating naval conflict with the US. I agree that submarines will likely be very important here, and I also agree that the US has a pretty significant edge here. Where I expect China to dominate is in anti-ship missiles and light combatants like the Houbei class which will effectively exclude the US Navy from the SCS.

Yes. I just question if the US needs to operate the Navy (outside of maybe submarines) in the SCS, particularly in a long conflict such as the one you mention, when it can launch airstrikes from Hawaii or CONUS. Big question here, of course, is how long Taiwan can hold out under a blockade. But if China blockades Taiwan and the United States decides an attritional strategy, it will likely go very poorly for the Houbei.

(Of course, how everything would play out is based on a lot of unknowns – nobody really knows exactly how well the technology and personnel involved in both sides will perform.)

Sortie generation is inversely proportional to distance, and Hawaii is ~5000 miles away from China's coast. If you can't stage out of Japanese bases or Guam then can you bring meaningful fires?

Yes – the distance would impede sortie tempo but I don't think it would stop the US from putting together extremely large strike packages. I particularly doubt that China can actually take out all the airstrips in Japan and keep them taken out.

If we were staging out of Hawaii the size of the package would probably be regulated by the ability to put aircraft and tankers in the air – it'd be a Rube Goldberg machine to stage bombers out of Hawaii or CONUS but I don't think it's impossible. Hawaii's got a couple of military bases and it looks like seven major commercial airports to boot, so I think a large sortie from there would be possible.

On doing a little poking around – Hawaii is probably too far to do a massed Rapid Dragon raid with C-17s, but you could probably send 50 B-52s with 20 LRASMS each for a 1,000 missile strike.

I'm not sure that's actually worth it – it looks like you'd need a decent fraction of the tanker fleet to support it. But I think it's doable considering that the US has hundreds of tanker aircraft.

If people want I could actually sit down and do some napkin math and write this up, but it would take a bit!

I saw this blog article too and I think it's a convincing case why we need tariffs with China.

Noah even undersells the benefits of tariffs when he says something like "with peaceful partners (i.e. not China) the best economic policy is free trade plus redistribution to the losers of free trade". While that may be true when it comes to maximizing GDP, it is not true on a more holistic level.

People who live in a burned out city in the Midwest probably don't reflect warmly on the destruction of their community just because they now qualify for food stamps, Section 8 housing, and other forms of welfare. They would much rather have a good paying job and a thriving hometown.

But going back to Noah's argument, he's spot on. There has been a lot of cope in the Western world about the rise of China.

Cope exhibit 1) Look at Germany, they are still making stuff!

Cope exhibit 2) The U.S. still has a massive manufacturing sector!

Cope exhibit 3) The U.S. and Europe will continue to make high value products while China takes only lower end items

These arguments have all been brutally shattered in the last decade, as China continues to take more and more of the pie, and is moving into higher end items. Germany and Japan in particular are being hollowed out by Chinese competition. China will soon produce as much as the rest of the world combined.

Moving into industrial policy, Noah accurately points out that we need something like it. And he rightfully acknowledges that government spending isn't enough. California has spent $100 billion on high speed rail, has created 13,000 jobs, and has almost nothing to show for it. But he seems to be too sanguine on the Chip Act, which is itself a massive boondoggle, and not a great success for Biden as he frames it.

Tariffs and the free market will solve a lack of domestic manufacturing in a way that bloated government programs cannot.

I like the end of your post the most.

Noah Smith can admire the problem all he wants, but his solutions have a big problem; they're Government operated or implemented solutions.

Philosophical questions about the role of the Government aside, pretty much all the literature I can find clearly demonstrates that state capacity and ability are utter dogshit, and have been trending that way since the 1970s. It's largely a regulation problem, but, more deeply, a matter of difficulty in managing complexity. Market systems manage complexity much better because there is "skin the game" and cost-benefit is more well informed. Market participants crash towards an equilibrium in a way that a central planning authority simply cannot.

I am not only suspicious, but highly doubtful that any sort of Federal level industrial policy will bear fruit. The CHIPS act is a great case in point.

So let's tag in free markets and de-regulate, right? Well, first, absolutely yes! But there's also the unfortunate reality that one of the byproducts of this is unpopular at the moment; a very small number of people will get incredibly rich.

We can set Wall Street and the Tech Bros loose on re-building American industrial capability and they will do it faster, better, and cheaper than the government. Jobs with good salaries will be created (though I am suspicious enough of those jobs will be created). And something like 100 new billionaries could be minted, with even more money being chopped up between VC/PE investors, banks, etc. I think this creates a cultural problem where people will want the good jobs, but hate the New Elons that emerge from the new companies.

This is the cultural tradeoff for economic growth; for the median to do better (much better) you have to allow for the fact that a tiny minority will do astronomically better.

Right now, there are major parts of both American political parties that look at wealth as inherently unearned at the best or morally wrong at the worst. If that attitude doesnt' change, a return to growth ethos is inherently limited.

Tariffs and the free market will solve a lack of domestic manufacturing in a way that bloated government programs cannot.

I'd like to think so, but I'm also pretty bullish on the ability of bloated government regulations to get in the way. We really could just strangle ourselves here.

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