[wood_spirit]

China only has to attack Taiwan to deny the US of TSMC’s production capacity.

Prediction: they will do this as soon as they see sufficient domestic chip production.

The attempts to inshore fabs to the USA is too little too late.

And it doesn’t matter if Trump defends Taiwan and makes China back down - the fabs will have been bombed to bits.

As it is, trump would probably just do sanctions and tariffs, which - like Russia - China will expect to weather.

[hellojesus]

> And it doesn’t matter if Trump defends Taiwan and makes China back down - the fabs will have been bombed to bits.

What would prevent the US from directly attacking China's domestic fabs in this scenario? Defending Taiwan doesn't seem as proxy-ish as Ukraine considering China considers it their territory already.

[juliuskiesian]

That's a extremely dangerous, disproportionate and self destructive strategy. What would prevent China from bombing US targets as revenge?

Both mainland and Taiwan belong to China, it's written even in the Taiwanese constitution. The controversy is in the definition of China, basically they are supposed to unify mainland while the mainland wants to unify them. A balance will be reached at some point either peacefully or violently.

Peace is more likely if the US stops pouring oil on fire.

The US should stay out of this situation if its leadership has its own people's interest in mind. A hot war between US and China will cause many millions to die and possibly end of human civilization. Let that sink in.

[hellojesus]

> Let that sink in.

Yes, I'm aware. My reasoning follows from my response to the sibling of your comment. I think the US is piuring gasoline on the fire to use ww3 as a mechanism to reset the national debt.

[wood_spirit]

It seems unlikely the US will take military action to protect an ally.

It seems even more unlikely that, should the US be prepared to bomb land targets in China, that they would do anything beyond overt military targets that are being used to attack Taiwan.

When trump has recently been asked what he’ll do when China attacks Taiwan he has just said sanctions and tariffs.

[hellojesus]

Maybe so. Thank you for the perspective.

My going hypothesis is that the US cannot politically solve their Modern Monetary Theory national debt blackhole problem and is therefore itching for WW3 to be able to "reset" debts when the dust settles. Taiwan seems like a good opportunity for that, but maybe there is some sanity left in Congress.

[tevon]

While Russia has certainly found ways around the sanctions, look at their economy... Putin is spending his reserves out from under the next decade. They're rather fucked.

Clearly china could last longer under similar conditions, but they're also looking weaker than they did 5 years ago.