We can see that Japan has accepted that the US cannot win a war by itself over Taiwan, and the US needs access to Japanese bases.
At a minimum, that becomes an East Asian regional war with China versus US/Japan.
At the same time, it would be foolish to allow Japan to provide safe rear area bases when these are only 1100km from Northeast China, if they could cross a small strip of North Korea or Russian territory.
If China goes down, then North Korea knows they will be next to fall. So I don't see North Korea protesting very much if Chinese aircraft based in Northeast China start conducting operations against Japanese bases. That begs the question of a renewed South Korea war.
My guess is that Russia would likely stay neutral in such a scenario.
The Japanese Air Force and South Korean Air Force have nowhere to withdraw, so they would take the brunt of any missile attacks.
But after the missiles are mostly expended, we could expect US reinforcements to arrive.
Yes. But the Chinese economy is far larger and more self-contained than Iran.
The key is to persuade the US that it is not in their interests to get involved in Taiwan.
If the H-20 stealth bomber is comparable to the B-2 with a range of 11000km, that means the few US bases in the Pacific, Australia, Alaska and Diego Garcia are now subject to sustained attack. Even Hawaii wouldn't be safe from long-range cruise missiles if the H-20s were refuelled offshore from Y-20U tankers but still under fighter cover.
You could also achieve something similar in the future with SSGNs carrying land-attack cruise missiles.
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We could also see H-20s or SSGNs operating in the Persian Gulf.
Afghanistan has no Air Force or air defences. Again, if H-20 bombers started to overfly Afghanistan, I doubt they would protest very loudly if the targets were US ships in the Persian Gulf. It's a similar scenario for Iran, although they do have an Air Force and Air Defences.
Both Afghanistan and Iran have nothing left to lose because they are already subject to maximum sanctions imposed by the USA.
So now we've now an active war zone in the Middle East, with many US-aligned countries panicking that they will be drawn into a wider war involving Iran and/or China. At the same time, their main oil customer (China) will be embargoed by the US military forces they are hosting.
As mentioned earlier, Iran literally has nothing left to lose because its few remaining oil exports to China have now been blocked by the US military. So from the Iranian perspective, why not block the Straits of Hormuz and all oil exports from the Persian Gulf? So now you have a regional war in the Middle East.
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We could also see Chinese SSGNs and SSNs operating globally, once they've ramped up production at the 2 new assembly halls at Bohai which have a ridiculously high amount of capacity.
At this point, I think Russia will still remain officially neutral against the US, but they may decide this is an opportunity against Georgia and Ukraine.
But you've pretty much got a world war at this point, because the US decided to intervene in Taiwan.
And we haven't even considered the possibility of a nuclear exchange yet.
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And it's not like this is the first step in China rampaging and invading the entire world like an evil Darth Vader as some suggest.
The Chinese military voluntarily withdrew from Northeast India (1962) and North Korea (1955) when it would have been straightforward to annex these lands. And the Communist Party founding myth for the past 70 years is that it created a strong unified China against nasty colonial powers like the British Empire or Japanese Empire who tried to carve up the country. It's a big stretch to go from this founding myth to celebrating conquest like nasty colonial empires of the past. These days, the driving goal is domestic economic development.
Taiwan fits into this because it is the result of an unresolved Chinese Civil War and is seen as taken by the Japanese Empire during a war. Consider the question of whether the Confederate States of America should have been allowed to exist?
And on the military side of things, Taiwan is the lynchpin of any effort to keep the Chinese military contained. An independent Taiwan would inevitably host foreign military forces and cement this situation. So any attempt at Taiwanese independence or hosting foreign military units will likely trigger China to start a war.
But as mentioned previously, China can live with the Taiwan status quo as it has done for the past 70-odd years.
There's still at least another 20 years of domestic development and relatively fast growth in China.
The economic and military balance will shift sharply towards China over this time.
But at the same time, China will be a very different place as the generation shaped by the cultural revolution dies out. They will be replaced by a softer generation who grew up after the 1980s.
So this is how I see a Chinese Grand Strategy playing out over the next 20 years.
