China Will Invade Taiwan, and There’s Nothing We Can Do

This century belongs to them.

We’re about to learn a painful lesson.

Sometime soon, China is going to invade Taiwan. We won’t be able to stop it, not with sanctions, not with force.

Here’s why:

China wants Taiwan for one big reason.

Let’s push through all the political and historical reasons why China might want to take back Taiwan. They’re important, but they don’t explain why all of a sudden China would risk so much to take back one island. It’s been doing just fine without it for 70 years.

The question isn’t just why.

It’s why now.

Taiwan enjoys a huge edge in the production of semiconductor chips. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the one thing nobody can do without. It’s at the center of all our supply woes.

Consider this piece:

The U.S. currently can’t make our own semiconductor chips. We’re actually trying to make a deal with Taiwan so they’ll make more for us. China can rebuild their capabilities, but their technology lags Taiwan by a decade. Essentially, both the U.S. and China have found themselves almost completely dependent on Taiwan for all of its technology.

This situation is going to get worse…

Climate change isn’t going to suddenly stop destroying key semiconductor sites. If anything, it’s going to keep shredding our economies along with our capabilities to make electronics, including cars and appliances. Whoever dominates the production of tech and key resources will, basically, rule the world. Nobody will be able to oppose them.

Especially not us.

Taiwan is China’s Cuba.

Taiwan has more than semiconductor factories. It has a highly trained, highly educated workforce. It has a strong economy.

It also plays an important strategic role. After all, you wouldn’t want a large island right off your coast that’s friendly to your enemies, and has a history of not liking you very much.

America knows a little about that.

Think about all the trouble we’ve gone through over the last several decades trying to exert influence over Cuba. We’ve tried to overthrow their government. We’ve tried to assassinate their leaders. We’ve done everything we could to undermine their economy.

Cuba could be a nice economic, political, and strategic ally for the U.S. The problem is they won’t let us boss them around like we do other countries, and that keeps tanking our relationship.

It’s the same thing with Taiwan.

China doesn’t like having a disagreeable neighbor, especially one who occupies land that used to belong to them.

Who would?

China might do the unthinkable.

We keep overlooking one major calculation in the minds of our enemies, and it makes us weaker. So let’s go there.

At first glance, it looks foolish to invade Taiwan with a military force and risk damaging or destroying their manufacturing capability. Even if they successfully took control, economic sanctions from western countries would cut them off from material they need to run their factories. It would also eliminate a big customer base.

There’s a strategy we’ve seen in warfare for centuries now. If you can’t have something, blow it up.

This lesson applies very much to Taiwan. Let’s face it, China doesn’t want to share Taiwan’s semiconductors with the rest of the world. I suspect they would be okay blowing up the world’s preeminent supplier of semiconductors, so the world is forced to rely on them from every single angle. That puts them in a great position. If they can’t win, everyone will lose. China will weather the loss better than us, though.

They’re prepared.

Now let’s talk about how China’s planning to turn the tables on us, and thwart future moves at economic sanctions.

They’re ready for us.

China is making lots of new friends.

If you’ve been paying attention, China has only solidified its economic and political partnership with Russia over the last year. They’ve all but come out in support of their invasion of Ukraine. They’ve very quietly agreed to offer economic and military assistance.

Meanwhile, China has also been making all kinds of deals with countries that don’t like the U.S. very much. They’re making oil deals with Saudi Arabia, who pretends to be our ally. They’ve started singing love songs to India, despite border tensions. They’ve also recently made a security pact with The Solomon islands. We don’t even know about some of these deals until leaked documents reveal them to us.

China has invested a lot of energy in making friends with countries that westerners have ticked off. A growing partnership between China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and a handful of other resource-rich countries is nothing to sneeze at. China is building a coalition of economies that can make western sanctions worthless.

They’re making powerful friends.

We’re not.

China is playing real live war games.

We know Russia and China have been talking about things, a lot. It would be naive to assume everything they talk about winds up in the news. Some of their most important conversations are top secret. Here’s the most important conversation we haven’t heard:

Putin to China: I’m thinking about taking back the Eastern bloc, starting with Ukraine. Will you have my back?

Xi to Russia: Sure. By the way, we’re thinking about annexing Taiwan. Maybe we can help each other.

Putin: Sounds great. So, do we invade at the same time?

Xi: No, you first.

China’s learning a lot about how western countries respond to a land invasion in the 21st century. They see how we’re willing to send money and weapons, but not troops. We’re not willing to impose no-fly zones. We’re willing to impose sanctions, but only sanctions that don’t hurt us too much. In the face of nuclear war, we’ll back down.

I’m not saying this is wrong.

If anything, these western countries have spent the last twenty or thirty years putting themself into a corner where they can’t really do much besides wag their fingers and make empty threats.

To anyone but us, it’s obvious.

It’s tempting to say Xi played Putin for a fool. I don’t think that’s the full story. I think Xi played the west for fools. We just showed the entire world where we’re most vulnerable.

China sees it.

China has been preparing for the worst.

While climate change decimates us with pandemics and natural disasters, Americans are getting high on wishful thinking.

China hasn’t.

The Chinese government has made massive investments in clean energy. They’re been building hydro plants, solar plants, and wind plants. They’re even building nuclear plants. Soon, they’ll have something western countries have toyed with for decades — true energy independence. I don’t just mean from other nations, but from fossil fuels.

China has also been hoarding grains. They’ve been telling their own people to stock up on food. Between drought and fertilizer shortages, they know the world is in for rough times.

They’re going to weather it.

We won’t.

Over here in America, we’re more reliant on fossil fuels than ever. We’re so dependent that we’re having to send stimulus checks for gas, just to keep our own citizens from rioting in the streets.

Our shelves are going empty.

Let’s not give our politicians too much credit for caring about us. They’re sending us a gas allowance for one simple reason. They know our economy can’t function without it.

So, there you go.

China has put themselves in a great position to dominate the world through economic and military strength.

We haven’t.

China and Russia control our reality.

Here’s another bitter truth.

Both China and Russia know how much Americans love their freedom of speech and their second amendment rights. We’ve spent the last century bragging about our democracy.

It’s powerful stuff.

If you hated western culture, and Americans in particular, but you couldn’t oppose them through conventional military just yet, you would do exactly what China and Russia have done.

You’d turn freedom inside out.

You’d wage information war.

Maybe you’ve noticed that freedom of speech only seems to apply to the loudest idiots now. The most radical extremists and conspiracy theorists have hijacked all of our slogans. The anti-vaxxers even managed to steal our most popular phrase, “my body, my choice.”

Let’s face it, these people aren’t the sharpest crayons. I doubt they came up with these strategies on their own.

They had help.

We’re just now learning that Russia spent the last decade creating a fifth column in the U.S. They recruited everyone from pundits to politicians, and I suspect they did it on the right and the left. I’m even starting to wonder if “defund the police” didn’t originate from somewhere outside America. It was a slogan practically built to lose.

Americans wanted the freedom to be idiots.

Russia gave it to us.

China blessed it.

There’s nothing we can do now.

It’s too late.

While Americans were out partying and bullying impoverished nations, we let everything fall apart. We didn’t invest in infrastructure. We didn’t invest in energy. We didn’t invest in healthcare.

We didn’t invest in education.

China did.

The only thing we invested in was an inflated military, and we can’t even use it against countries who match us in size and strength. Our military is nothing but a giant commodity for corporate arms dealers. While we coasted on the greatest generation’s achievements, countries like China quietly built an empire right beneath our feet.

China will move to annex Taiwan. It’s just another step on the way to them becoming the strongest superpower.

There’s nothing we can do.

In fact, the less we do, the better.

America has done nothing but make the world a less stable, more dangerous place. It’s time for us to get out of the way and focus on our own problems for once. We don’t have to be isolationists. We just don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room. We don’t have to keep imposing our own hypocritical conception of human rights.

You don’t have to be an expert in China to see this. You just have to be an expert in western arrogance, on full display now. China spent centuries enduring western imperial aggression, first from Britain and then the U.S. They’re going to revisit all of this on us, tenfold.

We’ve already lost these wars.

We just don’t know it yet.