A managed escalation would blockade China, or at least ensure the rest of the free world never trades with China again.
Similarly, a local conflict could ensure chip facilities in Taiwan aren't surrendered intact.
The US doesn't have to win a hot conflict. Just start a cold war.
I still think the US has allies in Europe that would sanction China indefinitely. They'd probably also show up with something, if called.
which is why china is pre-emptively claiming ownership of the south china sea, in an attempt to prevent the ability for any blockades to form in the first place!
While on paper, the US makes "guarantees" about freedom of navigation, this is even less reliable than the toilet paper it is written on.
China only needs to wait for a couple of years for Musk, Trump and Vance to have destroyed any remnants of the alliances, though.
And by "free world" I guess you mean the anglosphere, gradually shrinking globalist parts of the EU, and perhaps Japan/South Korea. That's now less than 15% of the global population and declining. Economically BRICS overcame the G7 back in 2018 [2], and the difference has only grown far more stark since. The times have really changed a lot over the past ~20 years. I think the collapse of the USSR was probably the worst thing to ever happen to the US, because it gave us a taste of global hegemony that was never sustainable, yet left us addicted to its fleeting flavor.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_of_T...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1412425/gdp-ppp-share-wo...
As is China in respect of energy.
Beijing knows this. But the timeline on which they become energy self sufficient unfortunately meshes poorly with their military demographics. Of course now, they have former American allies from which to recruit manpower if necessary.
Aren't they buying cheap oil and natural gas from Russia?
Most of China’s energy arrives by sea. That makes them intensely vulnerable to blockade.
And how will the free world replace goods and raw materials they now buy from China?
Apart from NATO countries all the rest will continue to do business with China. They do not care about the quarells between US, EU and China.
If a collective west made transitive trade embargoes, anything could happen.
But yes, the world is growing, and the west is a smaller piece of the pie than we used to be.
The whole premise of TSMC is that losing TSMC would cause such a global economic collapse that defending Taiwan is the only option to prevent this from happening. All high-performance computing is dependent on TSMC right now.
How many of us really depend on the latest cpu to survive ?
The question is, is it better to wage a massive war that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives than to make an equal investment into the semi-conductor industry.
TSMC just hits the media often. If Taiwan goes the global economy will have way more problems than just TSMC. There is a long list of companies in many supply chains that would be impacted (not just computing).
This never works. The security through economy pitch. It has never, ever worked.
America was a reliable security guarantor. We promised to protect and had honour. Honour isn’t in the American cultural vocabulary anymore. So the guarantees are proven useless and everyone has to scramble back into realpolitik.
It is, but it also isn't, given the US forces on Okinawa, and also just generally in the region. The US military is not a force that exists for homeland defense, it's a force designed purely to project power across the ocean.
> engage militarily
This can mean a lot of things though. A steady flow of matériel and intelligence given to an island that's basically a giant and highly-defended mountain-range is going to go a very long way.
> is any US president
I mean in the last 150 years they've shown a remarkable willingness to intervene, more than once in proxy wars against the Chinese.
How will they project power? With aircraft carriers? China can destroy those in hours once in close range.
China has more ships than US and 100x shipbuilding capacity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16h4gw8/us_militar...
As if you needed more proof, covid hickup disruption of the supply chains were an ample demonstration.
The US gets this, and has now turned towards being less dependant. The EU still doesn't understand, or is willfully blind as an acknowledgement would mean giving up some fantasies they have.
Since the 70's the US' main export has been printed money, 'IP' and war. The first two are worthless if not backed by the threat of the third. Weapons is about the only thing dollars can buy if oil can be traded in other currencies. BRICS is rapidly becoming a contender for a trade platform that they failed to stop.
You can't wage war in the manufacturer you rely on.
This means drastic changes in US policy are needed. This means returning to self sufficiency. This will take time even when you try to speedrun it.
What I don't get is, in what universe is any US president going to engage militarily against China across the ocean, let alone the current one? The US population does not seem ecstatic to enter something that could turn into WWIII, which makes me feel that even a president in favor of this would quickly fail to do anything.