[elzbardico]

This is delusional. There's no real way the United States military and NATO can effect a long sustained blockade on China. American Industry will slow to a halt before the chinese will feel the pain. The Chinese may like our dollars. But we rely on their manufacturing.

People sometimes fail to understand the real world meaning of having a trade deficit of more than one trillion dollars.

[nradov]

Not at all. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention but the process of decoupling the USA from China is well underway. A lot of manufacturing is moving to other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Losing access to cheap Chinese imports would be painful but mainly just for consumers. We don't rely on them for strategically important stuff, especially not for military equipment.

If there is a conflict with China then I doubt that other NATO members will play much of a role since they have no critical national interests in the Indo-Pacific region. It will mainly just be the USA with perhaps some assistance from a loose coalition of Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Philippines, and/or India.

[hollerith]

Beijing's main concern is an uprising by the population. They are right to be concerned: there have been dozens of uprising and civil wars in Chinese history each of which has killed millions of people. Beijing has successfully used export industries to give 100s of millions of citizens manufacturing jobs which provide a good-enough living to keep their population from revolting. In other words, Beijing has been dependent on exports just to avoid social chaos. In contrast, the US has not been and is not dependent on exports to anything like the same extent.

Beijing did not want the trillions of US dollars it owns: it does not have some master plan the implementation of which requires $trillions. These trillions are an unwanted side-effect of Beijing's policy over the decades of keeping the dollar strong relative to the yuan to makes Chinese good cheap in dollars to encourage owners of dollars to buy Chinese goods (which, again, it does to try to avoid social chaos).

And also, like other commenters have mentioned, China needs to import food, fertilizer and liquid fossil fuels to prevent its people from starving whereas the US is self-sufficient in liquid fossil fuels and food (though I don't know about fertilizer).

The reason it is prioritizing electric vehicles is because right now, if China stops being able to import enough liquid fossil fuels on tanker ships (e.g., from the Gulf and from Russia's European ports), it loses the ability to deliver food to its people. If they manage to make their electric-vehicle infrastructure robust enough, then in some future year, they'll be able to run their delivery trucks on electricity generated from coal, which it has enough of without having it import it.

Beijing is currently in a weaker position than Washington economically and militarily and the difference is quite significant. If Beijing ever launches an attack on Taiwan, that is a strong sign that the leaders in Beijing think the gulf between China and the US is widening (i.e., China is falling ever further behind) because if they thought that the gulf were narrowing, they would conclude that they can afford to wait and snap up Taiwan in the future.

[nradov]

The USA imports a significant fraction of fertilizer (including from China and Russia). But longer term we're in pretty good shape as long as we can get past these ridiculous trade disputes with Canada and Mexico. In particular a lot of fertilizer uses natural gas as a key input, and we're fortunate to have a lot of that.

https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2025/02/tariff-threats-and...