[AYBABTME]

I think this analysis is missing the big picture.

(1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US; hence Venezuela and Iran ahead of 2028. These are shaping operations. China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.

(2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so. If Iran can cheaply cut off passage, so can Saudi Arabia and UAE and everyone else there. They all have a long term mutual need in keeping this strait open.

All these recent analysis of conflicts in isolation, which always assume a lot of self-interest in disliked politicians, seem to make the analysts and authors blind to a much more probable and sensible grand strategy. Russia invading Ukraine and failing, has been the greatest strategic gift Russia could give to the US against China in setting the stage for shaping a defence of, and deterring an offensive on, Taiwan. Russia lost the ability to defend its proxies at a cost asymetrically small to the US. Hamas broke rank and allowed Israel to eventually decapitate Iran's proxies and air-defense step by step instead of all at once, setting the stage for the opportunity of the current war. And Russia being distracted also gave the US carte-blanche in Venezuela, not only via distraction but by proving that Russian air-defense isn't the thread it was thought to be.

The remaining strategic tension, in my humble opinion, is whether the US depletes its stockpiles too much without a caught up manufacturing capability, so that a Taiwan conflict becomes easy to win by default for China (via a blockade which would essentially be a cold war with few deaths and minimal damage) or if the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.

The situation, in my eyes, is evolving in a state where only two modes become dominant and both are slightly better for Taiwan.

[pibaker]

> China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.

You are missing the even bigger picture. Look back a few decades. The 1973 oil crisis was not just a temporary inflationary event, but the starting point of various technological and political investments that sought reduction in reliance on oil — engine efficiency regulations, nuclear power in France, early research into solar energy. The current war will likely have a similar effect. Suddenly you can't rely on imported fuel any more. And if you look around for alternative energy sources, Chinese solar and batteries and EVs suddenly look a lot more attractive than two months ago. And this is before you factor in the rest of the world reassessing their relation to the US and their confidence in the competence of US military and diplomacy.

[scarier]

(1) Why do you think this is worse for the Chinese government than the US? Also, this view of the strategic goals of the war seems fundamentally incompatible with both how it began and the ongoing US government narratives about it.

(2) I think we all (the author included) agree with you that it's easier to break things than to build them--both hardware and relationships--so it's obvious that maintaining trade through these kinds of choke points requires some degree of cooperation on all fronts. Iran does have a geographic advantage over other players, though (partial exceptions to Oman and the UAE), as well as a clear acute interest in constricting traffic through the strait. Sure, it may be bleeding them, but it seems to be one of the few ways they can meaningfully attack their enemies. It'll be interesting to see if anyone has the will to force the strait open against Iran's efforts.

Generally agree on Ukraine/Taiwan and the bigger geopolitical picture though.

[AYBABTME]

(1) China is more sensitive to shipping and oil shipments (and derivatives) than the US. It hurts both but China much more. The US is hurt in so far as high gas price are bad for elections, a small price to pay for strategic advantage.

(2) Iran has a temporary but unsustainable interest in constricting traffic, and it's not the only country who could impose a filter there. The mere credible threat of a strike on shipping is enough to stop it, so other countries basically have an equivalent capability to restrict traffic. And all countries, including Iran, are unable to sustain a prolonged closure. The current situation is an unstable, non-equilibrium situation for Iran and it's neighbors.

Overall, all of it doesn't really matter to the US because simply taking Iran off the supply chain of China is good for them. They spin the narrative about starting the war for a variety of other reasons so that they can justify the pain it inflicts on their allies (Korea, Japan - very dependent on those hydrocarbons too, and EU) and choke China's oil supplies without looking intentional. Last time the US overtly blockaded an asian nation's oil supplies, Pearl Harbour happened.

Which is another reason why China had such a structural incentive to move toward solar power, battery storage and renewables in general while also powering most of their early growth with dirty power plants.

I think Trump wants to be remembered for having neutered the China threat and having restored American supremacy and dynamism, and doesn't care too much about what it will cost at the next federal elections. I think he cares more about his legacy and wanting to be remembered as a historical figure on the strategic level. He's portrayed as being merely a fool with self interested dictatorial tendencies but I think attributing such simple intentions to him is self deception and leads to poor analysis. It doesn't pay to trivialize figures for disliking them or their actions.

Without taking camp here, I'll say that taking Trump for a fool is shortsighted, in my opinion.

[rixed]

It's also fair to play with the idea that the whole US political establishment understood this, and agree with the plan, thus why the Dems have stayed so silent on those matters.

[scarier]

(1) Sure, I'm not arguing that the Chinese economy is less vulnerable to a SOH closure than the US. I do think the US government is much more vulnerable to economic pressure than the Chinese government is (especially in an election year that even before the war was shaping up poorly for the ruling party), and any calculus the government makes needs to include this. If this was the goal of the war, I think we would also see significantly different targeting and messaging than we do now. If there was a ceasefire tomorrow, it's unclear that China would be the outsize loser here.

(2) Again, sure, but Iran can clearly sustain it longer. They've read their Clausewitz and properly understand this as a contest of political will, which they have much deeper reserves of than capital or munitions. Anyone with any power in the Iranian regime knows they have no offramp.

Absolutely agree that Trump cares strongly for his legacy, maybe more than anything except for his self-image, but the most important part of that legacy is being recognized as both popular and a winner--I would argue that these are far more important to him personally than US power and influence on the world stage (shutting down USAID, for example, was a massive blow to US soft power, and the NATO infighting that he initiated is still probably a net negative for US hard power, even if it has had a positive impact on European defense spending and self-sufficiency). He also clearly wants to see that legacy established in his lifetime (hence the obsession with having things named after him). It's hard to imagine this being a particularly effective way to increase long-term US power and influence relative to China, particularly in a way that will generate positive sentiment within the US--especially among the majority voters who favored his populist-isolationist political platform.

[shykes]

Great analysis. Thank you.

[physicles]

I’d love for it to be true that Trump isn’t just a narcissistic buffoon. Where are you frequently finding evidence of this?

[rawgabbit]

The continued stalemate will likely continue in my opinion. Continued daily strikes by the US and Iran squeezing the strait. China is severely squeezed by loss of oil. Russia benefits from rising oil prices. Everyone else will get to relive the 1970s. Stagflation here we come.

[YZF]

I don't think Iran can take a sustained air campaign for that long. They talk like they can but they can't. The only thing they have right now is their remaining ballistic missile (and to some extent) drone launch capabilities but that is going to keep getting degraded.

The US being a net exporter of oil should benefit from higher oil prices. Defense contractors will also benefit.

The 1970's were probably better than these days. ;)

[eagleal]

> I don't think Iran can take a sustained air campaign for that long

Most probably, but Israel and US are now being more conservative with interceptor targets though so that seems to go both ways.

[rawgabbit]

I hope you are right. My concern is that the Iranian regime is a lot tougher than we may think.

[mememememememo]

Upside: Maybe helps a tiny bit on climate change.

[miek]

Exactly. ~90% of Iran's crude went to China. The oil revenue was ~75% of Iran's budget. Iran has been a significant area of military development for China, serving somewhat as a forward base.

[cbsmith]

That doesn't exactly limit the impact of cutting off the supply. It's a global trade market. If China buys on the global market from other places instead of Iran because that oil isn't available, that still creates a shortage for everyone and that still pushes up the price of oil for everyone.

[lmm]

Sure. But the US has substantial domestic production. So China (and everyone else who has to import the majority of their oil) gets hurt more.

[cbsmith]

Short term, you might be right.

However... higher oil prices also increase energy prices across the board, and China's energy sector is dominant in renewables. I think they're more than happy to have the competing energy sources become even more expensive.

[appointment]

The US oil companies will export their oil to China (or Japan, South Korea and other major oil importers, in lieu of oil bought by China.)

[lmm]

At a minimum that will reduce the trade deficit.

[cbsmith]

Maybe? I wouldn't count on it. The US may be a net petro exporter, but it's about 1% of GDP. The other 99% are not going to do well with inflated energy prices. So exports might net go down.

[mememememememo]

How to win friends and influence people.

[cbsmith]

...and of course the US has a lot of other industries that are hurt by this: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/g-s1-115240/iran-war-strait-h...

[eaglelamp]

China is not the only nation that depends on Gulf oil, all of SEA does as well. If the strait remains closed it will destabilize the region and diminish the prestige of the US, and with the US military focused on the strait China will benefit.

Current US interventions should be read as a sign of weakness - an inability to shape events without resorting to naked aggression. Global hegemony can not be maintained through force alone.

[dxdm]

This is an interesting angle, and I could see how the prospect of reducing the flow of oil to China, and also to teetering democracies in Europe, might have occurred to the US decision makers as beneficial. However, the question is, how much reduction for how long, and how critical this would be for China.

And the point remains that this operation has been started in a way that leaves the US in a weaker strategic position, not just in the Gulf, but also, crucially, in the far east. It has now become harder to contain China, both in the medium term by the reduction of US military capabilities both globally and in-theater by pulling out strategic defensive assets from South Korea and Japan; but also long-term, by putting themselves into a situation where they have to do that, retroactively, after painting themselves into a corner elsewhere, therefore undermining their posture as a credible, rational actor that can be relied on to oppose China's ambition in the region.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the strategic window when it can do so

What's the latest thinking on the 2028 window?

[regularization]

> Russia invading Ukraine and failing, has been the greatest strategic gift Russia could give to the US against China in setting the stage for shaping a defence of, and deterring an offensive on, Taiwan.

Amidst the US bombing Iran, blockading Cuba, slaughtering the president of Venezuela's guards and kidnapping him and his wife, and so on and so forth - US government talk on China can be removed from reality. So this point -

Mainland China says it is the same country as Taiwan.

The US acknowledges mainland China and Taiwan are the same country.

Taiwan acknowledges mainland China and Taiwan are the same country.

So this discussion of "invasion of Taiwan" means PLA troops in mainland China moving to Taiwan. Which could mean the Chinese navy moving into Xiamen harbor (a Mainland city!) and putting its troops onto Kinmen island which is claimed by Taiwan.

Western elites have antiquated ideas, like talking about the rights the Britsh colonialists have over Hong Kong and other imperial nonsense. They brandishing their liberal ideals in their imperial machinations. But those days are over.

[arrrg]

It seems unlikely to me that this conspiracy (conducting a war intent on closing the strait while communicating something else) is anything more than a post-hoc rationalization.

Obviously all actions the US takes have knock on effects elsewhere but those effects tend to become quite unpredictable and also weaker the further you are away from the place where the action happens.

We could talk for days about the knock on effects of the Iran war and sort through them and how all the different actors in the world will react and whether that’s on balance good or bad for the US … but it’s all a bit cute, right?

[jmyeet]

The tl;dr here is, with all due respect, that your premises are basically all wrong.

> (1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US

No, it isn't. For several reasons:

1. China has stockpiled ~1.4 billion barrels of oil. it'a net importer. Supplies from Russia aren't disrupted. At present, Iranian oil is still gointg to China;

2. China is rapidly decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels with renewable energy projects on a scale where they're building more solar, for example, than the rest of the world combined. They also produce those panels so there's no supply chain risk there;

3. While the US is a net oil exporter, it's not universal. California, for example, has no pipelines so 75% of its oil comes from the sea. ~20-25% of that comes from Iraq and is disrupted by the Strait being closed;

4. Qatar produces 20-30% of the world's Helium supply and ~20% of the world's LNG, both of which are disrupted;

5. ~30% of the world's fertilizer is disrupted by the Strait being closed. The US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.

> (2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so.

The other Gulf states are US client states. Why would Saudi Arabia close the Strait, which especially hurts US interests?

I also doubt any of them can to the same degree. The entire Iranian military is geared towards this strategy with drone and ballistic missile production on a scale no other country is really built for. It has hardened military infrastructure designed for decades to resist US bombardment.

Other Gulf states don't have this hardened infrastructure and are more vulernable to Iranian attack if it came down to it. Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.

> Russia invading Ukraine and failing

Russia has basically succeeded. You have fairly stagnant battle lines where neither side can particularly advance but Russia holds certain Ukrainian territory now for years. Russia is just going to wait for the West to get bored and give up. Russia's economy has proven itself to be surprisingly resilient.

Sanctions just don't work on enemies like Iran, Russia or North Korea as well as they do on allies or former allies because enemies have an entire national project to resist American imperialism. They have to be self-reliant in a way that allies just don't.

This is also why the US client states in the Gulf are hurting way more from the Strait being closed: their economies aren't built for it. Iran's is.

> ... the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.

So this is where you've really gone off the deep end. China is less affected by this, in part because of long-term strategy but short-term because Chinese shipments are still going through the Strait.

American imperialists (which is both Republicans and Demorats, for the record) have this weird idea that China will invade Taiwan. Or wants to. Or it can. None of those things are true.

It really feels like projection, like every accusation is a confession. China must be doing violent imperialism because that's what the US is doing.

China can blockade Taiwan but that won't really do anything any more than an aerial bombardment will do anything to Iran. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to land an invasion on Taiwan any more than the US does in Iran. If you think otherwise, I'm sorry but you're gorssly mistaken.

But all of that ignores the real issue: China doesn't need to invade (or blockade) Taiwan. Why? Because all but ~10 countries in the world already view Taiwan as part of China. In the US (and Europe) it's called the One China policy. It is US government policy and consistent across both parties.

Why would China upset the international order when everybody already agrees with them?

[andrewflnr]

China's built strategy suggests they want to invade Taiwan. What else are those bridge barges for?

And yeah, it's a dumb idea, but Taiwan, unification in general, seems to be one of the handful of things China can't quite manage to be rational about. They didn't have to grab Hong Kong ahead of time either.

[jmyeet]

There are three things people often don't seem to realize about invasions:

1. What a barrier water is still to this day;

2. How many troops it would take to occupy a country; and

3. The logistics required to support an invasion.

Knowing these things, even a little bit, can dispel a lot of fearmongering nonsense one will see.

On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.

The Allies did manage D-Day but mostly because German strategy was bad, they were asleep at the wheel and D-Day was logisitcally probably the most complex military operation in human history and it took years to plan.

Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.

100 miles of ocean separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan. It may as well be 10,000. Or 10. It just doesn't matter.

Taiwan has 1-2 million soldiers (including reserves) and a national project to resist an invasion and occupation. China would probably need at least 1-2 million troops to occupy Taiwan and they would have to get them across the ocean and them supply and arm them.

China simply doesn't have that amphibious capability and Taiwan could play havoc with their supply lines.

I really wish more people would ask "what would an invasion of Taiwan take or look like?" because then we could all waste less time worrying about things that just aren't going to happen. You could reduce any scenario to "can they?", "do they need to?" and "do they want to?". The answer to all three is "no".

Creating fear of this is just another tactic to sell weapons and, to some extent, more revealing about the Western imperialist psyche.

So no, I don't care about what barge ships China is building. At all. It doesn't matter.

[lmm]

> On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.

Notably they were in a position of air inferiority the whole time, despite certain popular perceptions. So not really comparable. (Indeed if China, by contrast, is making preparations for an amphibious invasion, surely that says something)

> Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.

That the front in a somewhat evenly balanced war would stabilise on a natural obstacle isn't so surprising. We can't leap from there to say that such natural obstacles would make for stable defensive lines in a less balanced war.

[andrewflnr]

I already agreed it was a dumb idea. If that always stopped the leaders of powerful countries from starting wars, we wouldn't be talking about Iran.

[AYBABTME]

Everything you say is probably true and I agree... and yet.

What matters is not just what you plan to do, but what your opponent thinks you'll do. The US in general believes that China wants to invade or control Taiwan in some way. This mere belief is sufficient to cause it to take action.

[arkensaw]

> Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.

Iran has suffered six consecutive years of drought, which has been bad enough that they were considering (before the war) moving the capital from Tehran to Makran on the coast of the Caspian

[itsmek]

I just want to point out one disagreement I had:

"Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow."

Iran is in a dire situation with its water supply. It used to rely on an ancient system of ancient Qanat wells that only provide a fixed amount of water that can't be overdrawn, but in their quest to be self sufficient in terms of food they have gone to groundwater instead. The Qanats haven't been maintained so their output has reduced, probably permanently to some extent, and the ground water table is running dry to the extent that they are considering moving their capital.

[klooney]

> US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.

China is also a big food importer, they'll feel it eventually

[AYBABTME]

I mostly agree with everything you say, I just see the balance lying elsewhere on the spectrum. I think China is on it's way to securing its energy supplies with renewables but not quite there, and that the US is taking this window of opportunities to do what it can to attempt to degrade China.

Whether China plans to actually invade or blockade Taiwan or not doesn't matter if the US thinks it will. AFAICT the US is convinced it will, and the mere threat of this is enough to justify Venezuela and Iran, I believe. Higher oil prices are less worse than no more semiconductors.

And I think Russia might have gained some territory, but at the cost of being completely sucked into the conflict, having lost strategically by (1) being unable to support and defend its proxies and (2) having its arsenal and technology thoroughly analyzed and proven ineffective against US weapons. All actors involved know this and it will not remain, but until solved this means that the US knows it can strike countries defended by Russian weapons, at least until counter measures are researched, developed and distributed. This is a temporary advantage and moment of clarity that lasts a few years, not a sustained advantage.

The risk of the US being equally sucked into Iran and suffering the same fate is very high. And China's best strategy here is probably to sit and wait and help US opponents keep the US busy for a while, like the US did on Ukraine with Russia.

[jmyeet]

The US is an arms dealer empire. It's economic strength and power come from its ability to sell weapons. The military budget is pushing $1 trillion (and probably will exceed it with supplemental funding for the Iran boondoggle). Rumor has it the administration will be asking for $1.5 trillion in the next Budget. That is a staggering and utterly unsustainable level of spending. Most of that is going to defense contractors.

The US doesn't want to live in a multipolar world. It wants to remain the hegemonic global superpower, basically to make a handful of really wealthy people even more wealthy at the expensive of everyone else.

So do I believe the US wants to treat China like an enemy that "needs" to be degraded? Absolutely. Do I think it should be that way or has to be that way? Absolutely not. But that is a minority position in US political circles. One thing the Republicans and Democrats are united on is the US imperialist project.

You have a handful of candidates like Graham Platner who think the path forward with China is one of cooperation not competition [1]. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, hates this kind of rhetoric. That's what we're dealing with.

Part of selling that is convincing everyone is that China is or wants to do the exact same imperialism that the US is doing. What's China actually doing? The Belt and Road Initiative [2] where China basically sues its massive trade surplus to go around the world and build ports, airports and roads and to fund mines, farms, power plants and oil and gas. All on significantly better terms than the World Bank and IMF offer [3], so much so that Africa is considered "lost" to US interests in favor of China.

Fun fact: the United States Africa Command is headquartered in Germany [4]. Why? Because no African country wants it. It's one region where the US only has a handful of bases (eg Djibouti, Kenya).

When the country that produces most of the world's weapons is telling you that there's some big military threat that can only be solved by selling more weapons I just ask: consider the source.

[1]: https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2028936316285546537

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

[3]: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/chinese-and-world-bank-len...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Africa_Command

[CMay]

You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.

China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.

One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"

China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.

If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.

We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.

Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.

The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.

China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.

[jmyeet]

> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.

This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.

What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.

Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.

You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).

> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology

No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?

China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.

> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"

I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.

> China is now communist.

This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.

> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.

This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.

For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_slavery_in_the_United_S...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

[CMay]

You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.

Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.

There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.

Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.

Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.

Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.

Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.

What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.

Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?

The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.

If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.

[CMay]

I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.

China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.

Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.

As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.

Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.

There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.

Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.

[jmyeet]

> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months

China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.

Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.

> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack

This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.

Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?

> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports

Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.

> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon

This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.

> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan

Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).

China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?

> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy

This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].

Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?

Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.

This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/3/how-much-of-europes...

[2]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[CMay]

China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.

As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.

Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.

When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.

China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.

Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.

Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.

[eimrine]

Your opponent supplies links. You supply a bare words, maybe some bare anti-communist words.

[tw1984]

love your very cute assumption that China is going to sit there and do nothing.

you must be living in the Disneyland?

[prohobo]

Is this some kind of astroturfing comment? China is supporting Iran and Russia economically and technologically, and is preparing for a Taiwan invasion.

[ux266478]

China's foreign policy has been rooted in non-interventionism since the time of Jiang. The only thing happening is Disneyland is belief that this is going to change because gas prices spiked above 10RMB/L

[tw1984]

non-interventionism of letting your oil supply to be cut off?

life must be great in your lala land

[JumpCrisscross]

> assumption that China is going to sit there and do nothing

One of the few advantages this war might bring would be China letting American radars paint its kit.

[YZF]

I agree. He's missing a lot. If the US ends up with some measure of success this is a big counter to China and Russia. Is this some sort of 4D chess by Donald Trump. Probably not. But it can still have good outcomes. Are there risks? Sure.

"I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty." - Then proceeds to tell us about the Iranian regime and other things he is not an expert on.

- Iran's conflict with the US didn't start in June 2025. While it had its ebbs and flows Iran has been in conflict with the US since the Islamic Revolution.

- Iran has been helping Russia in its war with Ukraine. That does have strategic implications to the US. So it's not true that Iran does not matter strategically. Those Shaed drones are flying into Ukraine by the thousands.

- Iran has supported the Houthis in Yemen (which effectively can close the Suez Canal traffic when they feel like it) and has levers on Saudi Arabia both directly and indirectly through Yemen. Another strategic lever.

- The whole comparison to Iraq's ground war is completely irrelevant. Iran and Iraq are very different countries with very different history and this conflict is very different in many ways. The US is not going to invade and conquer Iran.

- If Iran has made so much trouble over the years without ICBMs and nuclear weapons should we just wait for them to acquire these technologies? What do we think about the rationality of this regime vs. the North Korean one? Is North Korea really the right analogy? "Iran was not a major strategic priority" maybe add yet? When it becomes a major strategic priority with ICBMs and nuclear weapons then what?

Nobody knows where this war will end. Did the US have to go to war now? Probably not. Was there an opportunity between the internal unrest, the massacre of Iranian civilians, the intelligence and military superiority. Yes. What would the outcome be of not going to war? What's the certainty of that outcome? I don't think a nuclear Iran with ICBMs would be a good thing for the world and they would definitely go there.