Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "Taiwan and the US Reach a Trade Deal || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. ​ @mikehammer4018  Any cross-Straits shooting is going to cause all voyages to China's ports to become uninsurable. The West doesn't even need to dominate the seas and skies, just provide enough return fire to keep the SCS unsafe for civilian traffic and thus starve the Mainland of vital food and fuel imports.
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  2. Right, the PLA's overwhelming manpower means nothing if most of them are stuck on the Mainland waiting for an increasingly delayed boat ride straight into the target reference points of Taiwanese artillery.
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  3. Taiwan is pro-American, but that doesn't mean it actually wants to become part of the US. Japan and the Philippines would be stronger candidates and they're not petitioning to cede itself to Washington.
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  4. The last one the PLA pulled off was Hainan in 1950, but that operation had a much closer distance and plenty of pro-Communist agents already staged on the island. On the other hand, the PLA never managed to gain a foothold on the even smaller Kinmen and Matsu Islands that are likewise just a short swim away.
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  5. Our subs just have to take out the PLAN's underwater "washing machines" and the relatively few surface vessels that pose an anti-air threat. The rest of the PLA's ships can then be dealt with through cheap guided gravity bombs, of which the US has hundreds of thousands of Mk-80 series in stock ready to bolt on a JDAM kit.
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  6. Only more visibly. Obama committed the Pivot to Asia after our economic faceplant under Bush Jr got Beijing emboldened.
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  7. Plus Taiwan's geostrategic location as the keystone of the First Island Chain, which ensures PLAN boomer subs don't reach the deep ocean undetected.
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  8. More like the better part of a year, since enough U-235 for a warhead still needs to be collected. The US once had to stop Taiwan from building The Bomb because of how provocative it would've been, but Taiwan is a nuclear threshold state along with Japan and South Korea.
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  9. ​ @steffengustavsen9678  If you believe their numbers, which I'd bet are seriously inflated like the rest of their economic statistics. Most of their strategic granary reserves seems to be filled with rotted grain, or couldn't be inspected due to a recent "mysterious" fire. Plus their agriculture critically depends on constant input of imported fertilizers and feedstock, and then gets further polluted by toxic chemicals (inadvertently if not deliberately) before entering the market. Their agricultural yields and affordability will nosedive if a shooting war scares off the foreign inputs they rely on for "domestic" production. Warships and warplanes don't run on coal or batteries. Their EV infrastructure might relieve oil usage in a land war, but a cross-Straits conflict is not a land war where China's EVs are. Plus most of China's own oilfields are under the sea or near the eastern coast, meaning those facilities are much easier to strike at and cause China's mobile energy consumption to likewise become prohibitively expensive.
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  10. From the individual family standpoint yes, but China is a lot more effective at isolating and silencing grievances. It won't be until the PRC's internal security apparatus becomes degraded that the Chinese people will find each other and create an overwhelming revolt against the CPC.
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  11. The inhumane shortsightedness of straight "apolitical" capitalism is why business executives should not be leading governments or driving public policy.
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  12. Not completely end, but ensure there's an alternative fab source in case Taiwan gets cut off for whatever reason. Taiwan will still be making the absolute best chips; the key is that the US itself has the capacity to fab better chips than what Mainland China can cobble together.
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