Yes Russia is weak today, yet America doesn't attack them.
Why would it need to? America has Russia's entire European neighbourhood in its pocket and is bleeding Russia in a proxy war and increasing its vassals' dependence at no cost to itself. It doesn't have to take Russia as well, it's content with just taking everything around it. Far be it from me to ever accuse Americans of being reasonable, but they seem satisfied with taking 99% of everything; they don't have to have 100%.
Same with North Korea. North Korea doesn't have resources or anything worth conquering it for the way Russia does, it's just a shithole with nuclear weapons. Why would the US attack it? The same rules of nuclear use apply here, only North Korea couldn't threaten MAD the way Russia can. It could just scuff America before it was glassed.
America doesn't attack either because America
is satisfied with how the world is arranged. China is not, that's China's incentive to attack - to reorder at least its immediate environment to be conducive to its security interests.
American foreign policy is anything but pacifist
Where did I claim it was? What does this have to do with what we're discussing?
So in your future scenario where China dwarfs America in military strength, what's stopping America from doing what North Korea is doing?
I think we've had this discussion before and I find myself repeating what I said then: There is a difference between state survival and maintaining hegemony. America can't threaten to use nuclear weapons to maintain its hegemony because if it uses them it will get destroyed. Nuclear weapons can only ensure state survival against external aggression, nothing else.
I don't think China needs to take on America militarily to retake Taiwan as you're proposing. Taiwan is not the same as controlling the west pacific.
Perhaps not, but that cedes the crucial decisions to America and wastes China's historical opportunity in a way I discuss below. Why would China willingly give its enemy such a commanding position?
International law is the framework you project your power through. It's a lot easier for China to take control of Taiwan, which is legal by international law, than somewhere like Mongolia.
No, it isn't. Destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines, bombers, ballistic missiles, fighter jets,
et al. are the framework you project your power through. Short of war, financial systems, technology, capital, etc. are the framework you project your power through. International law is fit only to be toilet paper.
Granted, China would have to come up with more creative excuses for invading Mongolia, but the point is that China has no interest in invading Mongolia. That's wholly independent from what international law says about it.
I've said to you before as countries become more developed they become more risk adverse. China is/will be in the goldilocks zone of development over the next few years. Developed enough to field a modern military but not so rich that citizens become indolent.
This is exactly why I don't want Taiwan resolved in the short term. That dynamic would be the default, but Taiwan is the exception. No matter how wealthy China is - whether its terraformed Mars and colonized it in its entirety - it would still go to war over Taiwan. There were people on Douyin and Weibo crying that Pelosi's plane wasn't shot out of the sky. This is a unique opportunity that every great statesman dreams of:
casus belli in a can with no expiration date. Open whenever desired.
Yes, China should maintain the pressure on Taiwan through more extensive exercises, more provocative deployments, etc. But that's entirely different from launching a war to take Taiwan prematurely, and even if China could prevent US interference and take Taiwan at limited cost, it would be premature if China couldn't broaden the scope of the war to encompass the western Pacific. Taking Taiwan and accomplishing nothing else would be an appalling waste of perhaps the one free pass the Chinese government gets from its people to go to war.
Furthermore, there's a pragmatic objection that has nothing to do with my desire for Chinese hegemony: Limiting the scope to a regional war is inherently uncertain. Who's to say America wouldn't broaden the scope of the war? If it does, what then? We're still in the same boat of deferring the war no matter how one approaches the problem.
