Unless you're very careful and hedge your words, claiming that X ("war will cause economic harm to both parties") will cause a reduction in Y ("likelihood of war") leads everyone to say your claim is "disproven" whenever Y happens. Doesn't automatically mean the claim has actually been disproven.

It’s a different scenario imo. The economic ties between the US and China are much stronger than the European powers prewar, which were all colonial powers with protectionism and merchantilist trade policy.

News coverage of China is asinine, vacillating between the WSJ/Gordon Chang “the communists are about to collapse” nonsense and the “General <x> says the Chinese are aggressively aggressive and catching up” patter. The chip bullshit is all about Intel lobbying for billions to pull its nuts out of the fire.

IMO Chinese policy is methodical and not unlike what the RAND people cooked up in the 1960s. They make investments in Africa and Latin America that benefit China, build up a military power as deterrence, and have a trade relationship with the US and Europe that transformed the nation from a decrepit backwater into a global power in 50 years.

Why would they want a pyrrhic victory (or defeat that would damage the Beijing government) in Taiwan? Taiwan isn’t Hong Kong. Aggressive rhetoric and policy accomplishes political objectives, and the long game is to foment instability in Taiwan and wait it out.

The risk of conflict with China is North Korea and Japan, not Taiwan.

Genuine question: does the elevation of Xi as (effective) dictator for life change the approach of the Chinese State to be less rational?

I want a graph with the dictatorshipness on X, age of the head on Y and rationality on Z.

That would require their government to have acted rationally in the first place. The first 30+ years of economic reforms weren't done out of rationality, but one of necessity to survive as the country was on the verge of total economic collapse by the end of the Cultural Revolution. Their hands were forced in the process of keeping everyone employed and fed, which gave a sense of rationality. Even during this supposed golden era of economic liberalism, there was rampant government corruption, oppression of dissent, and censorship (that was easily permeable because the technologies and funding for total blanket surveillance weren't ready until the mid-2010s).

The “this time it’s different” arguments also have a history of falling flat on their face. That was the common argument in Germany in favor of energy dependence on Russia, for example. It’s a bit wild to claim this theory is still legitimate when we’re literally in the middle of a shooting war proving it wrong.

It’s not like everyone just accepted the German policy as a smart idea.

They made a seemingly knee-jerk policy decision after the Japanese nuclear disaster.

The cause of WWI, if you can boil it down to a simple statement, is that red lines, vaguely drawn, were crossed by both sides, resulting in escalating tit-for-tats, with no one on any side acting to deescalate the situation.

The risk of this happening in a US-China conflict is moderately high. Chinese red lines are vaguely drawn. US red lines are more firmly drawn, but the US government system has multiple loci of power, and China seems to have a poor read on US policy as a result. De-escalation on both sides looks rather difficult to pull off, especially because China has a tendency to do things like through hissy fits whenever it feels slighted and shut down existing mechanisms to help de-escalate.

Another way a war can break it is something like WW2 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where you declare a war because you think you have a window of opportunity for victory. And if you guess wrong, well, you can ask Nazi Germany how well that works out for them.