Haas it deterred China from grabbing Taiwan?
[Update a while later]
The wheels are sort of coming off the Russian army.
22 thoughts on “Western Aid To Ukraine”
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Haas it deterred China from grabbing Taiwan?
[Update a while later]
The wheels are sort of coming off the Russian army.
Comments are closed.
No.
A similar scenario means the USA and other countries did not directly respond with their militaries, giving China a sort of permission and resupply would be very difficult at that point. China scared us off from direct confrontation but also prevented us from fighting a proxy war.
Do the weapon systems deter them? They are challenges that must be countered to meet their objective and China has shown they are patient and pragmatic. They must have restraint because they are not taking advantage of this fortuitous time.
and China has shown they are patient and pragmatic.
And China has also shown it can be impetuous and delusional too. Every country has their propaganda.
A similar scenario means the USA and other countries did not directly respond with their militaries, giving China a sort of permission and resupply would be very difficult at that point. China scared us off from direct confrontation but also prevented us from fighting a proxy war.
Resupply would be particularly difficult for China. And does China have the nuclear weapons to force a similar scenario or scare off the US? Sure, China can fix those deficiencies in the future, but perhaps by then their tyrannical government might be fixed as well.
China would have all kinds of problems but if you can think of them, why can’t they? They aren’t idiots. Do you think they are stupid?
In WWII we didn’t roll into the Pacific thinking the Japanese were mentally infirm. We analyzed their actions based on what a rational person would do that was in their best interest.
China would have all kinds of problems but if you can think of them, why can’t they? They aren’t idiots. Do you think they are stupid?
Yes, I do think they’re that stupid. Remember they still have the Communist party in charge. That’s a glaring sign of such.
Also keep in mind that thinking of problems is a vastly simpler problem than fixing those problems, particularly when constraints (like requiring that the Communist party stay in charge) prevent you from employing those fixes.
In WWII we didn’t roll into the Pacific thinking the Japanese were mentally infirm. We analyzed their actions based on what a rational person would do that was in their best interest.
And yet, the Japanese made many bad decisions that made their defeat much more inevitable. Such as emphasizing army power over navy and air force. Or not getting the weaknesses of Japanese equipment (especially their big ships). But the biggest was simply the expansionism that defined the viewpoint of the Japanese empire of the time. Just like with their Fascist allies, they expanded until they couldn’t maintain that expansion.
You seem to think things are fated and your opponent will always ruin themselves. That is short sighted but you do you. I’m advocating a serious approach and you are bah whatever no thinking required, and that isn’t how you solve problems regardless of their complexity.
You play tough but are dismissive of the details.
I have higher standards for how our military should conduct itself.
You seem to think things are fated and your opponent will always ruin themselves. That is short sighted but you do you. I’m advocating a serious approach and you are bah whatever no thinking required, and that isn’t how you solve problems regardless of their complexity.
You play tough but are dismissive of the details.
What details? This is the first I’ve heard of your serious approach. Here’s what I have heard. Motives more important than results:
Also you expressed concern about Ukraine striking at “prestige targets” even though those have obvious military reasons for why they got struck.
Ukraine being independent actors creates a dangerous situation
In a follow up post, you claim that Russia could get spiteful in a way that would take US “secret weapons” to counter. My take on that BTW is that the US has plenty of non-secret options for deterrence.
Concern about people having the wrong opinions.
Kind of how fanciful theoretical notions about how to deal with disaster, crime, or other pressing issues go right out the window when they hit the real world?
Then there’s your concern that the US isn’t declaring war (an earlier post to the above post about motives.
In another story, you posted:
“Very risky” strike on all of Russia’s nuclear weapons? That’s not serious.
If you want to seriously discuss this issue, particularly what rational alternatives we could or should be taking in place of the present strategy of arming Ukraine, then I’m interested. But these things you’ve discussed so far just aren’t that serious approach.
““Very risky” strike on all of Russia’s nuclear weapons? That’s not serious.”
Interesting that you don’t even consider the possibility that this war extends beyond proxies and what it would take to defeat Russia without unacceptable damage to the homeland. It is totally serious to not think of second order consequences to your actions.
Do you have a point in quoting me? At any time, you can address anything specifically I said and you have had that chance on each of those posts. You haven’t addressed anything I said because you aren’t arguing with me.
Even in quoting me you don’t say anything.
What’s next? You move on from inventing positions that I hold to insults?
Interesting that you don’t even consider the possibility that this war extends beyond proxies and what it would take to defeat Russia without unacceptable damage to the homeland. It is totally serious to not think of second order consequences to your actions.
Because it’s just not that useful to consider the possibility. It basically devolves into a straightforward nuclear exchange scenario with a lot of dying. Even if you know where every nuclear weapon is (and thus, can take out all those nuclear subs without warning, you still have the problem that you can’t hit deep interior Russian targets any faster than you could with an ICBM.
Basically, the US just doesn’t have the capability in the first place, even if we use Ukraine as a stepping stone and had amazing intelligence on the positions of Russian nuclear weapons. You would need a much larger conventional force (if you’re planning a non-nuclear approach) and it would have to be prepositioned close to Russian nuclear forces in order to work.
So you’ll get hundreds, perhaps even thousands of nuclear missiles and decoys even if you do everything right and it won’t look any different than a normal, large-scale nuclear exchange scenario.
My bet is that at that point, the US (and perhaps Canada and Europe too) will need to figure out how to integrate it’s territory and remaining population into a neighboring power, perhaps Mexico or Brazil.
It certainly will be a horrid disaster and a huge setback. Which is a big enough reason on its own why I don’t think it’s worth considering as a strategy.
Second, there are consequences to attempting the strategy, even if you carry it out successfully. Namely, you struck first. Sure, if Russia is going to strike in a few hours, then anything you can do to save the lives of millions is worth it. But you mentioned no such conditions (details!) and hence, the US is the aggressor for real.
My take is that in a post-nuclear war, that could mean the difference between having a bunch of allies that can help protect you while you recover or being a Russia II, with only a residual military force to protect you from annexation by a greater power.
Just look at all those Russian trolls working themselves into a froth over “western propaganda”. They don’t get that the aggressor automatically loses the propaganda war. And their silly claims of provocation for the invasion (that NATO expansion, Nazi cooties, or that a pro-Russian puppet government allegedly got replaced by a pro-US puppet government in 2014) just underline the utter immaturity and immorality of their arguments.
You play tough but are dismissive of the details.
Again, what details? Let me note what the present strategy of arming Ukrainians does:
1) It presents no pretext for increasing the number of Russian troops in Ukraine. Russia has to increase its presence, if it’s going to win. But what’s the excuse?
In the early stages, nobody in Russia would have dared looked carefully at a solid Russian win. If they had managed to decapitate the Ukrainian government and annex that territory without much of a fight, they would have won big domestically too. But now, the bloom is off that rose. Every fake pretext and fabricated nonsense will increase further the distrust of government and unrest.
But a gift from the enemy, such as having revealed the above crazy ass plan to somehow take out all Russian nukes, gives them plenty of cover to do the necessary escalation needed to win.
2) It similarly provides no serious provocation for Russian nuclear arms. Sure, the nutcases that think you should be able to invade any country with even a trace of nazis or other feeble excuse will likely rationalize it, but what about the Russian military? Or the Russian public?
3) It provides an escape for the enemy. It’s actually rather pure Art of War strategy since this drives a wedge between Putin and his coterie, and everyone else in Russia. Everyone knows that when the Russian army leaves the Ukraine, the war ends. It’s that simple. We saw this in the Russian retreat from Kiev and Kharkiv. Ukrainian nazis aren’t pillaging Russia or Belarus.
Only Putin has an interest in continuing this war. And the more Russian soldiers that die or are maimed by western weapons in the hands of Ukrainian defenders, the stronger this wedge grows.
Finally, it’s the groupthink thing among the Russian trolls to publicly worry about nuclear war now, probably in an attempt to spread FUD. They were oddly unconcerned when Russia threatened nuclear war right out of the gate. But now that Russia is losing, suddenly scary nuclear weapons are all the rage with the west or the US being at fault somehow.
Do you have a point in quoting me? At any time, you can address anything specifically I said and you have had that chance on each of those posts. You haven’t addressed anything I said because you aren’t arguing with me.
Yes, I do. There is a pattern here of nebulous concerns and frivolous scenarios. I think there’s little point to “details” that never get described (the supposed machinations of China, the alleged seedy motives of western leaders, or the risks of Ukraine not acting in lockstep with the US/west, for example) or weird scenarios that just don’t make sense strategically (let’s take out all the nukes in a region that is more than a tenth of the world’s land area before they can be used against us).
Sure, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about the direction we’re collectively taking, but ultimately it’s straightforward game theory. The supplying of weapons to Ukraine provides disincentive to Russia’s invasion without escalating to a nastier level of conflict. Sure, Russia has the option to escalate, but US isn’t the only party to this conflict and some of the other parties aren’t so easy to discourage. Ukraine’s success in this war is a matter of survival for the Baltic states or Poland. My take is that their degree of involvement has been reduced because the US and the European powers are involved and contributing extensively.
It’s not my tough talk that is the problem here. Perhaps you should consider my details, particularly the strategies that have been employed to provide disincentive while limiting escalation.
Yes.
The fact that the USA and other countries did not directly respond with their militaries to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine yet still, via previous training of the Ukrainian military, plus recent and ongoing arms shipments, has enabled Ukraine to put “mighty” Russia on its back foot has made a hell of an impression on the PRC.
Perhaps even more impressive to Beijing have been the crushing sanctions imposed on Russia. Any comparable sanctions regime imposed on the PRC would end that country as a going concern in a matter of weeks.
Russia does not face utter privation from sanctions as it can use its former exports of energy, food and fertilizer within its own borders. Russia will be rendered progressively unable to continue on its chosen path of imperial restoration by sanctions, but will not be put in danger of imminent and utter disappearance. The PRC, which must import all of the things Russia used to export in massive quantity, would, instead, quickly starve if comparably cut off.
Ironically, there is no real internal Russian infrastructure that would allow Russia to continue exports to the PRC at any major level. Where energy is concerned, especially, Russian exports to China depended crucially on the technical and maintenance assistance of Western oil and oil field services companies which have all departed Russia’s eastern Siberian oil and gas fields. Thus do the Russian sanctions also wound the PRC as collateral damage.
China, far from having “scared us off” from defending Taiwan, has, instead, been scared off from attempting an invasion. It can hardly have escaped Beijing’s attention that Russia, even with all the advantages conferred by land-based invasion routes, has been pushed back across its own borders in a number of places since originally going in.
The PRC has no land routes into Taiwan. That would mean either a massive amphibious operation or taking a pass entirely. And any troops the PRC could get ashore on Taiwan would be even more vulnerable to logistics interdiction than the Russians have proven to be in Ukraine. Getting pushed back off of Taiwan would not be a matter of retreating across a line on a map, but being pushed back into the sea and utterly destroyed. Once again, I don’t think the lack of any Russian amphibious operations in Ukraine – despite supposedly “owning” the Black Sea – has been lost on the avid observers in Beijing.
The PRC has hardly “prevented us from fighting a proxy war” – except by the simple expedient of failing to challenge us over Taiwan at all. Should the PRC go for Taiwan, there would be no “proxy war” anyway. We have formal defense obligations anent Taiwan. Any war over the island would be in no sense a “proxy war” but a full-on slugging match between the PLA and the entire U.S. DoD – unless the Japanese and the Indians also wanted a piece of the action. I think Beijing is rapidly relearning at least a modicum of discretion and humility anent its actual situation in the world.
This is anything but a “fortuitous time” for the PRC. It’s economy is in shambles from an implosion of its bubble housing and construction markets and the draconian, and open-ended, city- and region-wide lockdowns due to Covid. Western supply chains have been thrown into such disarray that there is now a full-blown stampede out of China to other places with more predictable circumstances, not least the U.S. itself. “Re-shoring” is the new term of art.
In retrospect, the PRC would have been far better advised to have tried to grab Taiwan during the Obama administration than now or at any subsequent time. Chinese “patience” is far more legendary than actual. And, in the case of the PRC, probably pointless as that regime will likely be gone quite soon – even more quickly than I previously believed.
Except in the scenario laid out, it compared our response to Ukraine vs same thing in Taiwan.
We are obligated to defend Taiwan, not Ukraine, so the absence of an immediate response by us, as the author set up, means we would have already been cowed.
All the other post capture of Taiwan nonsense doesn’t matter if China keeps Taiwan.
Don’t conflate what I said with an argument about whether the USA or China is a better country. I was talking about a specific scenario.
We can all speculate the different ways Taiwan will defend itself and the challenges China faces.
It is a fortuitous time for China, they have never had more power over DC, but that doesn’t mean the timing is right and I’m sure you know the difference.
You appear to have imbibed too freely of the PRC Kool-Aid. There is no credible way the PRC could “cow” the U.S. from coming to Taiwan’s aid in the event of any invasion attempt from the mainland. IOn any event, the linked article, far from positing a scenario in which the PRC invades and conquers Taiwan, posits exactly the opposite – that the PRC will not now attempt any such land-grab because of what the U.S. has been able to do to Russia over Ukraine without any direct military intervention.
There are, of course, a number of other reasons why the PRC should not scruple to invade Taiwan not least of which is that Taiwan could quickly assemble a handful of nuclear weapons from plutonium culled from power reactor fuel if its intelligence apparat detected PRC preparations for an invasion.
Well, the future is packed full of crazy and who knows what shape the US will be in after a few decades. Maybe it’s still a going concern with a powerful military and strong alliances, maybe there’s a three way civil war with nobody able or willing to do anything about a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.
Sure, the Ukraine scenario just isn’t going to work for Taiwan IMHO because Taiwan has about 60% of the population and 6% of the land area of the Ukraine and would be facing an enemy that likely is at least as powerful as Russia was at the beginning of the Ukrainian invasion. But there’s a lot of other scenarios out there as you noted.
I think the big lesson of Ukraine for China was that there were three big sources of problems that Russia either didn’t know about or had strongly discounted. Russia way overestimated the existing capabilities of Russian logistics, underestimated the effectiveness of western-armed Ukrainian resistance, and perhaps the effectiveness of economic sanctions.
That increases the ante for a Chinese invasion. If they’re willing to commit against that increased uncertainty (and really, they weren’t before this new information came out), then they’ll do it and there’s a good chance that they’ll succeed (depending on how the US and other ally responses play out). They aren’t going to invade, if they think they’ll lose.
“You appear to have imbibed too freely of the PRC Kool-Aid. There is no credible way the PRC could “cow” the U.S. ”
Sure there is. One is by subverting our leadership class enough for them to dither if not outright betray us. How many retired admirals and generals lobby for foreign interests? But beside the point, the question was posed where that situation existed, where we didn’t immediately respond. You say it can’t happen but the situation was a what if.
“There are, of course, a number of other reasons why the PRC should not scruple to invade Taiwan”
No kidding. That is why I said the timing wasn’t right. But you weren’t arguing with me you were arguing at me.
The PRC already has subverted our political and academic elites. But it is hardly obvious they are getting their money’s worth. That’s especially true of the Biden family, which the PRC has certainly bought. The problem is that Joe isn’t an honest politician – he won’t stay bought if he thinks there is advantage in double-crossing a would-be patron.
I don’t like what’s going on in Ukraine, and I don’t want to see China invade Taiwan.
If China were to do that, it would probably cause more global economic meltdown than anything else. Maybe I’d finally be able to understand what my parents went through with double-digit mortgage rates and “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” water prices.
We’re already facing $4 gas and $4/doz factory farm grocery store white eggs. I struggle to picture any significant number of Americans being okay with economic sanctions and boycotts on China if they were to invade. Heck, I don’t see this country even being able to stomach the sacrifice of their comfort even if China were to use nukes. Could we legitimately refuse to export grain to China in that scenario, or would that mean we were contributing to another Holomodor?
Could we legitimately refuse to export grain to China in that scenario, or would that mean we were contributing to another Holomodor?
Honestly, it doesn’t matter what you or I think. What matters is that a non-zero portion of suppliers will almost certainly stop shipments. The stuff that matters in this is not the majority that are set in their ways, it is the few that change their minds. The marginal supplier, if you will.
Which means China gets less food, which means someone China goes without – and it won’t be party officials. Then, possibly, the party would cease to exist.
They are stockpiling grains and ordered people over a certain rank to divest of all foreign holdings.
Beijing has also been sending audit teams into the interior to inspect and tally those grain caches. A really quite astonishing number of grain silo fires have occurred just prior to the auditors’ arrivals. The pervasive corruption of local cadres seems to have seriously compromised PRC grain reserves. As with Russia, the PRC leadership cadre can’t be confident that anything reported to them by subordinates is actually true.
“As with Russia, the PRC leadership cadre can’t be confident that anything reported to them by subordinates is actually true.”
Oh, I agree. I hope you weren’t saying that as something you thought I disagree with.
But remember all the ghost cities and impending collapse? That didn’t come to pass. It wasn’t that those the ghost cities weren’t real or that they don’t have major issues with commercial real estate just that the predictions of doom were wrong.
One could say China wants their elites to pull their resources home to prevent the impact of sanctions but it is also a sign they are worried their elite will bolt.
I listen to all of this stuff and enjoy speculating but I treat it the same way I do news about this or that new medical treatment, perhaps there is some truth here but chances are the person relaying the information to me isn’t getting it right and I should keep those grains of salt handy.
“If China were to do that, it would probably cause more global economic meltdown than anything else.”
But what if everything is already melting?
I don’t know what China is ultimately up to but they are taking specific steps to prepare for an uncertain future illustrated by recent global developments. We aren’t the only ones making economic and industrial adjustments.
Everything – at least in the PRC – is already melting.
Its been melting for a long time. The world is always in crisis. Somehow, we persevere.
I hear what you are saying. I just don’t think things are fated or predestined. We maintain our position through a commitment to not being complacent.
You and I can both rattle off a ton of cool shit about the USA and what we would do to China, how awesome our system is, and how much further we will be in the future but my responses are things like, “And?” “What’s next.” “Yesterday doesn’t matter.”
The perfect analogy is how people were warning about Marxist subversion of the education system and those people were ridiculed. Fast forward twenty years and the take over was complete but these same people said nothing was to worry because STEM would be OK. Turns out STEM wasn’t OK.
So, I will listen to people whisper sweet nothings in my ear about how everything will be ok, and I do think this is the best time to be alive in human history, but that doesn’t mean I believe in the tooth fairy and think things just magically turn out the way I want them without putting in the work.
It is such a non-controversial stance…