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One of the biggest limitations China has is a dependence on imports of oil and natural gas; if those are cut off sufficiently, any invasion of Taiwan is stillborn (and Xi runs the risk of his head ending up on a pike). Russia (and areas in Central Asia in which it has a lot of influence) is a very important backstop; with Malacca closed off, land-based imports of oil would still allow China to wage a war on the scale of a couple years instead of months. Russia offering a credible promise not to export fossil fuels to China would be worth a lot, if it were possible.
Oil and gas only matter if a war is fought on the years scale, not the weeks or months scale. This is virtually guaranteed not to be the case. Any Taiwanese conflict is going to be a months-long affair at best. And if it's longer, there are larger macroeconomic considerations more important than oil. I think you dramatically overestimate how much oil a country goes through mid-conflict. No one is going to boycott selling China oil in peacetime, either. In short, this entire line of reasoning is irrelevant and severing the so-called Russia-China military alliance (which mostly only exists on paper, it's not like the Russian fleet would ever, under any circumstances, fight alongside China against the US, which is the only thing of real value Russia even has in that theater.).
How would US even figure out whose submarines are attacking them?
They don't even need to surface. Even if you sank one, odds are that finding whose sub was it would require a deep diving ROVm
As any Clancy reader could tell you, from their distinctive audio signature.
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The war will last for only a couple months if one side or another gets a decisive victory. If it's more evenly matched, it will extend for years. Though I agree that if China does get that decisive victory, Russian oil will have been irrelevant and the world will quickly adapt to the new norm and eagerly sell fossil fuels to the new hegemon in the Western Pacific.
China obviously wants a 6-week campaign of victory after victory to happen, but that's not guaranteed. And if it gets stuck in long attritional warfare, it'll end up losing, but only after years of rationing and hopeful delusions being dashed. Without Russia enabling China to continue a war, all those delusions would be crushed much sooner, which is best for everyone involved.
There's pretty much zero chance that a conventional conflict over Taiwan lasts years. Maybe either a blockade or an insurgency could lass that long, but even those are unlikely. Taiwan is less than 6% of the size of Ukraine, while also being an island. Either a Chinese invasion gets stopped on the beaches, or it's pretty much game over. Taiwan's rugged terrain could plausibly let it fight for a few months, but little beyond that.
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I really cannot understand how you can believe that China, a nation with 1.4 billion people, would lose a war of attrition with Taiwan, a small island with a population of 23 million. Could you please explain or elaborate how China loses the war of attrition with Taiwan?
A war of attrition with the US, Japan, and every country which doesn't want China to be hegemon in the Western Pacific. Which is to say, all of China's neighbors. Vietnam and other regional players would maintain neutrality to not get too much on China's bad side, but they'd be rooting for US victory.
Here, Chinese victory would mean gaining control of Taiwan; US victory is not-Chinese victory.
So why would attrition mean China losing? If China can't get victory over ~3 months, its existing capabilities can't win it Taiwan. Over time, its warmaking capabilities will face increasing degradation relative to the US and its allies due to its sea lane imports being cut off. That's the core dynamic.
There are wildcards: China will be doing terribly economically, but so will US allies and the US itself. But less so than China. (Taiwan will be doing worst of all, but its military capabilities are irrelevant compared even to Japan's). That could cause domestic issues in those countries that would undermine warmaking efforts.
This is the bit that I can't understand. The US is currently unable to fully extricate Chinese gear from military supply lines and has frequent issues with counterfeit Chinese equipment showing up in military procurement. At the same time, the US navy agrees that China has approximately 232 times the amount of shipbuilding capacity that the USA does. Ukraine has proved that drones are now an increasingly important element to modern wars, and China's manufacturing capacity in that arena so dwarfs the US that there's barely even any comparison possible. At the same time, China's manufacturing base has made it a far more crucial trading partner to a lot of the world than the US. I just don't see how the US is going to interdict trade to and from China without causing the entire global economy to disintegrate overnight and make dedollarisation take place overnight rather than over a longer timespan.
In short, it comes down to oil. You need oil to make an economy run, which includes making jet fuel but also civilian purposes. China consumes around 15M barrels/day and produces only around 5M barrels/day domestically, with a strategic supply of around 1B barrels. There are workarounds--rationing, increasing imports from accessible sources--but the deficit after the strategic reserves are exhausted within 3-6 months will be crippling and destabilizing. You can run a pretty effective war machine on 5M barrels/day, but you can't sustain civil society on an 80% cut on civilian oil consumption.
The USA, for all its issues (both military and civilian), is not gonna be starved for oil. When China sinks its ships, the USA can rebuild them: it's true that China accounts for 48 per cent of global shipyard output, but South Korea (less likely) accounts for 25 per cent and Japan (more likely) does 15 per cent. Purely legal regulations prevent the US from taking advantage of those capacities, regulations that will be promptly discarded in the case of a real war.
It will happen, it will be brutal, and it will restructure the world economy. But I'm counting an obliterated world economy where China has failed to take Taiwan as a loss for China and a "win" for the US.
Aside from feeding the machine, there is also literal feeding to consider. The difference between food imports, strategic reserves and indigenous calorie production between the US and China is a very similar picture as to the oil import/reserve/local production capability differences with the US having much greater food security compared to China.
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I strongly agree with this particular part of your assessment and have frequently posted at length on the topic here. That said, I don't think your conclusions necessarily follow. Russian oil will allow them to get by with a very thin haircut, and given the nature of Chinese society they can absolutely just use force and other import options to get by. I don't see how the US manages to prevent China and Russia from trading here.
The current leadership of the USA has been raiding the SPR to depress prices in time for an election. The US would absolutely be starved for oil when you take into account the amount of oil needed to cover up the lack of imported products from China - there's a massive amount of manufacturing that would have to take place in the US, and tooling those systems up takes time. And that's one of the other problems.
How confident are you that a war will immediately cause the US to switch to good, sober governance? Why do all the existing problems in the US government just evaporate when the war begins? Ukraine was incredibly corrupt, and yet despite an existential war taking place within their borders the corruption hasn't even gone anywhere. I just don't see how you can get those problematic regulations repealed without time that the US just wouldn't have in a situation like this, especially when those problematic regulations have constituencies with voices and influence in politics. Furthermore, the system is corrupt enough that the only presidential candidate who would actually be willing to do this (Trump) would be opposed from inside the system at multiple levels - why would these generals, who have in the past actually called China and disregarded the chain of command entirely, suddenly turn into patriots willing to do whatever it takes to win? But furthermore, bringing factories back online takes time. The US currently has severe manufacturing issues, even for military equipment, and the industrial base that could speed that up has already been shipped off to China - and I don't think the Chinese are going to give it back just because the US asked nicely.
I do not think the political will exists in the US for a long war against China. It might seem that way on paper, but the sheer dependence of the American economy on Chinese manufacturing means that a conflict with China would have such dramatic impacts on civilian life that I do not think a war-fighting regime would actually be able to stay in power. Furthermore, I think that those outcomes would actually lead to a Chinese victory anyway.
So, I'm torn: a lot of commentary thinks a seaborne oil embargo will by itself shut down China and win the war, and I think that's entirely wrong, so I get where you're coming from. At the same time, Russian/Kazakh oil imports can't replace even half of those current seaborne imports. It's not production but transport that's the issue. You can increase utilization of existing pipelines to the max, and build new pipelines, and transport oil via rail and truck, which China absolutely can and will do on short notice, and that can get to an extra one or (very optimistically) two million barrels of oil a day. Civilian rationing will cut consumption by 30%. Old, currently uneconomic domestic wells could be brought back online and add another 1M/day. That still doesn't make up for the existing 10M/day that are currently imported via the sea. The only option is civilian rationing >50%, which is unheard of in history, let alone the modern world. During WW2 US rationing cut its oil consumption by 35% IIRC. China does have advantages around civilian control here, but at some point, people break. With its own SPR, China can wage a full on war for 3-6 months without too much civilian pain, but after that it gets incredibly dicey for them. (Realistically they'd frontload a lot of the pain to keep a more stable level of wartime civilian consumption.)
As for the rest: if the US handicaps itself, it will lose. It's not a war the US will be able to win with one or both hands tied behind its back. If we're dealing with energy issues and we decide that the entire war has to be fought on solar power, we'll lose. That said, call me an optimist, but I have a bit more faith in the US than that. Once we lose our first carrier, the population will rally. Mindless, blind patriotism is obnoxious a lot of the time, but you can't give full credit to China's while entirely discounting the US's.
Frankly, I worry more about the domestic politics of Japan, Taiwan, and other regional allies, because their economies will be far more shot through than the US's. Which is not at all to minimize how much pain the US will go through (biggest economic contraction in history) but more to speak to just how absolutely screwed every country in the area is going to be. If China does get a foothold in Taiwan, many of them will want to throw in the towel and adjust to the new status quo as soon as possible just to end the pain. Probably even Taiwan.
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