Posted on 07/05/2004 12:26:18 AM PDT by twntaipan
As I pointed out, once the nukes are flying between the PRC and Taiwan, we're going to get nuked. The only way to prevent it is to prevent a nuclear exchange to begin with.
China and the rest of the world should bear in mind that Taiwan is likely an undeclared nuclear power.
Hmmm .. will China trade the Three Gorges Dam and Beijing for Taiwan ? I don't think so.
I hope the ChiComms try something in Taiwan.
I seem to be the only other guy on this thread who is.
Hmmm .. will China trade the Three Gorges Dam and Beijing for Taiwan ? I don't think so.
More to the point...what happens if we sit back and say to Taiwan, "hey, you do what you think you gotta do?"
Think China's going to say, "Shucks, the Republic of China done hornswoggled us!" and let it go?
Or are they going to blame Bush, Cheney, and Halliburton, like everyone else does?
I imagine China would do exactly the same to us, and might well just go ahead and expropriate the lot. Of course, they hold a good chunk of our debt, so they could play some economic games using that, too. I don't think that they have the sophistication to make war on the financial front, though with the trillions (soon to be quadrillions) in derivatives exposure that our GSEs and major institutions have -- predicated on models that only work if everything reverts back to "normal" (i.e., one of the same elements that took out Long Term Credit and nearly the whole U.S. financial system when the spreads didn't close) -- it wouldn't take a lot of sophistication to tip them.
While China may have a huge banking mess, we have our own vulnerabilities in that arena, mostly from allowing too many derivatives that are not soundly modelled. Don't get me wrong -- I am a fan of derivatives, it's just some of the models make assumptions that I question.
I don't put much stock into the "oh no, China's economy would collapse if they took Taiwan" argument. Wartime economies are fevered creatures, and the impetus from just driving the war machine will stave off ordinary economic crises. When survival is at stake, a command economy is an advantage. You can see this with the U.S. in World War II: It certainly cured us of the Great Depression. And with government rationing and huge economic planning, we were a premier command economy ourselves. (And like command economies generally, it created its own vibrant black markets in things such as gasoline and tires.) Germany came out of its economic disaster by building its war machine.
If China does seize and perhaps even nationalize the factories and other assets that we have so handily put over there, it will cost us far more economic hardship than the Chinese, who will suddenly have lots and lots more assets on the books, and we will have lots of losses. I wonder just how many of them are covered by some sort of insurance; OPIC comes to mind. What if we also have a massive drawdown on our system with OPIC suddenly obligated for some nice large payouts in Taiwan? (If you want to get your blood pressure pumped up sometime, just visit the fine folks at OPIC. When links actually work, you can find gems like this one. There are so many things wrong about this particular pair of guarantees that it really deserves its own separate discussion.) I would put that risk number in this post, but I cannot see where OPIC is keeping our numbers, just a lot of rah-rah about what are being done with all of this assumed risk. I particularly was interested to find the 270% coverage bit; that should make for some real nice payouts.
As to the Dragon's Assassin's Mace, consider what I call "Port Arthur 2004." It's low-tech but nasty. China simply uses their enormous export shipping as a delivery mechanism for whatever nightmare they want to create. Massive coordinated explosions at key places such as ports, and particularly those with serious industry and refining going on. We are already at the edge of our refining capacity; taking out just a few (or lots more) would make a serious hobble on our economy. Especially if we were then to declare hot war on China, not having enough oil or means to refine it would be a massive hobble on our efforts. I assert that it is impossible for us to fight a war without sufficient oil and sufficient ammunition, and it doesn't matter if you are talking blitzkrieg wars such as Persian Gulf I (but don't forget the massive logistical build-up prior to that great success. Logistics wins wars, not just battles) or long drawn-out conflicts such as World War II. You can have the most fantastic armed forces, decked out with the finest armanents and bristling with planes, but if you have don't have jet fuel for them, if you cannot fuel your tankers, if you have don't have cartridges for their rifles, then you won't be fighting with anything more effective than what you can operate by hand and get to by foot. I don't see us making forced marches across the Pacific any time soon. Anyone that has read Speer can appreciate that the simplest manufacturing, such as that of ball bearings, can be enormously important. When Germany lost its synthetic oil plant and its Rumanian oilfields, they couldn't even taxi their new jet fighter out under any power except animal.
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