This is a situation with so many permutation, that it really does hurt the head!
Ok so we now assume that the US will not protect Taiwan but will use the invasion of a pretext to declare and try and enforce a global embargo on Chinese Trade.
No, I do not see the US ever voluntarily giving up that final ace card.
Instead I think this is the US feeling that Taiwan is getting a little too uppity with its recent antics has decided to give it a good kick to remind them who’s dog they are.
It is Washington that gets to decide if and when Taiwan will trigger war with China, not Taipei
How does this happen?
Taiwan being fully aware it is not going to be defended is highly unlikely to declare Independence knowing its will prompt an Immediate Invasion by the Mainland and that its erstwhile allies will do nothing of value to try and defend it.
Likewise PRC is highly unlikely to just launch an invasion, when it knows it has no need to do so and the act will prompt massive retaliation against its trade. Easier to just maintain the status quo.
But the Status quo is no use to the USA who wants a pretext. So what do they do?
Throw Taiwan under the bus by claiming a PRC Invasion is about to happen and initiate an embargo anyway?
Possible but gets a bit tricky if Taiwan does not declare Independence and the PRC fails to say "Lets invade anyway, what have we got to lose"? I can easily see Taipei and Beijing holding a joint press conference saying that claims about a war between the two is utter nonsense!
The only way I can still really see it, is if the US can convince the PRC that Taiwan is about to declare Independence by moving massive force into the area, but even this requires a Taipei government to be a willing participant in its own suicide!!??
I think Biden was initially all for Taiwan salami slicing the One China ultimate red line to needle China to put pressure on China to pick up the phone so they can ask Xi daddy to bail out their economic mess.
But now two major factors have completely changed their calculus.
Firstly, they are seeing that China isn’t fucking around and isn’t playing their stupid game with gradual proportional escalation, instead they are going straight for the head to end it in one go. Beijing has drawn a line in the sand and dared the Americans to cross it - change the name of the Taipei trade representative office to include the word Taiwan and the PLAAF take control of Taiwan’s skies. If Taiwan dares to try to take a pot shot and it’s fully on armed reunification. America is in no shape for that fight, so of course they blinked and backed down.
The second major development was that Biden got his coveted phone call with Xi Daddy, during which I am sure Xi would have made it abundantly clear that China won’t play games on the Taiwan issue to remove any possibility of doubt about just where such bullshit will lead to.
It is also clear that Xi gave Biden nothing in terms of economic concessio, so Biden can clearly see that his little mafia shakedown gambit was producing zero results and was instead putting him on the express line to a historic military arse whooping. So of course he folded and has decided it is safer to play economic warfare rather than risk the real thing. Hence the recent nonsense about Trump’s phase 1 deal.
So maybe we are missing a big piece of the picture?
I wonder if Wolfie and his comment about the total pinkness of the AUKUS organisation is the big clue in all this. Not so much the pinkness, but the total absence of yellow in a predominantly yellow part of the world?
We know the US has been cajolling and pressuring many regional countries to join in against the PRC but that none of them have shown the slightest enthusiasm beyond lip service. Certainly no country with a land border with China has signed up, not even India, who mainly danced around the Issue at the recent and much hyped Quad Summit.
Are we then dealing with yet more smoke and mirrors to mask a US withdrawal from the Asia Pacific as well?
Food for thought!
AUSKUS is actually quite an informative move since it gives a clear timeframe for when the US might think they can initiate a hot war with China - in about 25-30 years when these pie in the sky Australian SSNs are supposed to materialise by. This also somewhat fits with recent US cheating war games where they deployed all sort of pie in the sky future tech to produce a win against China. That’s probably when all that promised future tech is supposed to be operationally deployed in numbers by.
I think another major factor is US 6th gen fighter.
I’m pretty sure the F35 is a far bigger lemon than is being publicly acknowledged. It was essentially supposed to be a massive cash cow for LockMart and the US.
LockMart committed infanticide on the F22 because that was a Cold War legacy apex jet with no expense spared for maximum performance. The price tag was already at the limit of what was politically acceptable leaving little room for profit. That’s where the F35 came in.
It was supposed to be a good enough jet where costs could be kept low. That was probably true enough, but what wasn’t part of the deal was that LockMart was going to do monopolistic pricing after it cornered the market and charge F22 prices for the F35 and extracting the overwhelming majority of the promised cost savings as profit for itself.
It was the ultimate swindle, and they could have got away with it expect for those pesky Chinese coming up with a 5th gen raptor class fighter for their own a decade or two earlier than they were supposed to.
The F35 will handle legacy fighters all day long thanks to stealth, but pitch it against a raptor class opponent with comparable avionics, radar and weapons and the raptor will probably kill it as if it were a legacy jet.
In a real shooting war against China over Taiwan, even if the US could overwhelming J20s through weight of numbers with F35s, it’s going to basically cost them almost the entire projected F35 export market as none of their partners who signed up for the F35 wants the Mig21 of the 5th gens. And it’s far from certain that the US would be able to do even that.
That commercial desperation is what I think AUSKUS was all about for the US.
There was little real change or strategic value in forming AUSKUS, an alliance of existing allies with no mutual defence obligations. It’s only point is in bagging the Australian billions for the Americans.
And I think that’s what AUSKUS was - a submarine sales pitch disguised as a strategic alliance (probably to give IAEA enough of a figleaf to cover its own modesty as it diligently look the other way even as it screams at Iran about non-proliferation). The same deal would have been offered to SK and Japan. Maybe even Taiwan. Billions and a meaningless alliance for nuclear attack subs. Only the Australians were stupid enough to take the bait to give America even more money voluntarily even as America continues to to eat Australia lunch in the form of redirected trade from China.
