Now would be a great time for China to start an invasion. It would be a crime. China today, that government is not above committing international crimes.
> Now would be a great time for China to start an invasion
I'm not doubting at all that China has imperialistic designs on Taiwan and the South China Sea. But why would China invade, when its leaders can clearly see that Russia, through strategic patience, bribery, and aggressive hybrid warfare, has finally won the Cold War without ever having to invade the US militarily?
Bribery is rampant among high-ranking military officers in Taiwan, for example. Many of them have been exposed to have sold classified information to the Chinese government for trifling amounts of money. China has also managed to poach a lot of former TSMC engineers to work at SMIC by offering generous salaries. Why take military action against Taiwan today (or in 2027, according to the CIA [1]) when China just has to be very patient?
[1] And do we really trust the CIA, given how many times it has lied throughout its entire existence to justify starting/escalating wars?
When Russia invaded, Trump wasn't the President quickly dragging the US into the realm of irrelevance, and back then it seemed very unlikely (even unimaginable) that Trump would be President again.
But everyone had too much faith in the Americans, and here we are.
China is smart enough to know that US diplomacy lasts longer than a 4 year term. They've been operating off the 1992 Consensus, and had a longstanding agreement with the US re: One China Policy that was upended by Obama, and then Biden. Trump's chaotic swings are a blip.
China is also smart enough to have been watching the "decoupling" pushed by the Obama-era CIA starting in the late 2010s, and then the Russian invasion, so an actual Taiwanese land invasion won't happen until China is fully decoupled, and even then there is the much bigger international fallout. China won't throw away its position as world factory. Within China there are too many people in the party who don't see a land invasion as feasible.
All of the recent sabrerattling by the US and pushing Taiwan for a declaration of independence is what would trigger an invasion. To think that opportunistically exploiting a senile president's term to act on this conflict grossly misunderstands the entire Taiwan/China situation. And it says more about you and how Americans view global diplomacy.
This is what I'm thinking.
Now would be a great time for China to start an invasion. It would be a crime. China today, that government is not above committing international crimes.