Will Taiwan Cause a World War?

as of this video's writing in january 2022 the world watches the tiny island of taiwan off the coast of china as we collectively hold our breath we ask the question of if the unimaginable is possible could the u.s and china have a war this is a video to analyze how likely a war between the two is what could start it and how worried we should be this video is meant to look inside the war rooms of what both the u.s and chinese government are thinking seeing their trade-offs and tensions over a possible war conflicts define world history and war captures all of our imaginations with conflict of nations you can experience war and define history right from your computer or phone conflict of nations is an online real-time strategy game that lets you play as a nation in the modern world and vie for domination against up to 128 opponents the game's intense with wars that can last weeks it's super fun and engaging and i love the challenge of trying to lead a country into a war for supremacy it has an incredible combat system with complex and amazing battles that have over a hundred beautifully modeled modern fighting units such as nuclear ballistic submarines airborne infantry stealth strike fighters and more if that's not enough for you you can escalate with weapons of mass destruction there's a complex diplomacy system as well where you can backstab and form alliances with real people so in total if you're into warfare strategy games or world domination this is a game for you right now conflict of nations is offering anyone using the link below 13 000 gold and a one month free premium subscription the offer is only available for 30 days so don't lose time join the fight on conflict of nations the chinese stand astride the era of the fastest economic growth in all of history they went from being a poverty-stricken nation 40 years ago economically on par with a lot of african countries to buy some measurements being the largest economy in the world due to this meteoric rise china's bursting with energy and confidence right now china's rise has been so fast that it hasn't caught up politically and the chinese don't even control their own neighborhood let's briefly compare it to america which is surrounded on both sides by oceans and basically has its entire hemisphere as some degree of satellite with a couple notable exceptions china is bordered by vietnam and india that despise it and our american allies alongside russia to the north that's a completely untrustworthy ally even its allies like north korea kazakhstan and burma are unstable and don't even like the chinese that much when you look at china's actions you can see the result of this geographic insecurity and that america could hypothetically sail right up to the chinese coastline but at the same time the historic insecurity that comes from china's century of humiliation under the qing dynasty 200 years ago china believed itself to be the greatest nation in the world but from 1840 to 1945 china faced defeat and humiliation at the hands of western powers in japan with death tolls around 150 million if you count disease in famine it's impossible to understand the taiwan situation from a non-chinese perspective the chinese feel the need to regain the honor they lost from the century of humiliations by pushing for symbolic victories like taiwan or the spratlys which in of themselves don't matter a tremendous amount on the international stage something that's also really key is the symbolic importance taiwan has is that it's run by the old chinese nationalist party which the chinese communist party gained power from in the civil war 80 years ago the communist and nationalist party sort of justified their existence in opposition to the other thus it's also considered important to the communist party's honor that taiwan is seized at the same time taiwan's a model for another trajectory of chinese civilization one that's democratic and richer than the communist which is a threat to the chinese communist party's legitimacy china's more afraid of taiwan as a symbol to people in china to rally against their rule than the tiny island that it really is when westerners look at china we tend to see its strength and that's largely what the communist party wants us to see but we don't see its weaknesses a situation i go into depth in this video the link to which is the description we don't see china's horrible demographic structure for example how their birth rate's a quarter of what it should be and they'll have half their population in 80 year time alternatively are immense class systemic and resource problems china like most newly industrialized nations is burning with energy but is also exhausted from the social pain that comes from industrialization it's no coincidence that the u.s fought a civil war during its industrialization europe was wrecked a generation after industrialization with world wars in japan in the same camp the chinese communist party stayed in power for so much longer than other international communist parties by implicitly buying support from the chinese people with economic growth as china becomes a more mature economy and it also gets involved in trade wars it slows its economic growth and as i talk about in this video the government pushes for both nationalism and oppressive authoritarian measures as a way to keep control over its own population when china pushes for taiwan it's not doing it out of either strength or weakness but almost like a drug-induced burst of confidence that comes from a profound insecurity over its position the parallels in world war one are horrified there's this thing called thucydides trap which is basically the dominant powers incentivized to try to crush a rising power before said rising powers strong enough to overtake the dominant one there was a study that found there were 15 examples of this over the last 500 years and that 12 of them resulted in war from this logic the u.s should fight a war with china before china is capable of overtaking america for decades the u.s and china work together since they could make a lot of money from trading with each other the us ignored china's rise to great power as well as american industry's relocation there however starting a little bit with obama and really ramping up with trump the united states started to see china more as a rival this was driven partially by the social unrest that came from america due to de-industrialization but also by china's greater geopolitical predominance and aggression thus with america's changed views on china it's been making more pro-taiwanese stances although taiwan in real terms has been an american ally since the beginning the u.s has recognized communist china as the real china in official documents in a weird dance starting with trump the u.s has been breaking diplomatic taboos like the us president taking direct phone calls from the taiwanese one for the chinese coming from a shame-based culture this is an attack upon their honor as a nation the u.s sees a china that's spreading its influence and that scares america which forces the us's hand in a lot of ways the u.s maintains an alliance structure that includes taiwan but also the whole pacific perimeter around china including indonesia vietnam philippines south korea and japan the problem with alliance structures is that they're maintained more by pride than by military force thus if the u.s let china take taiwan without a fight that would precipitate a crisis in america as the world's policeman which might result in a collapse of the already weak u.s dollar or u.s allies leaving the american alliance structure possibly going to china which might look to be a more stable ally and the power of the future if i was part of the american leadership i would try to isolate china gradually strangling it rather than being direct but a major problem of all american international policy across its history is that it often lacks subtlety and gradation americans are always either in or out the us would probably do something big and brash just out of its own nature also like china and frankly everywhere else in the world america is torn by its own class political and systemic issues that make effective political action more difficult america's not united at home and disorganized which means that its actions abroad will be more foolish and ineffective the question i'm going to ask here is what factors normally create wars across history and what's different about the us and china's struggle from the norm i normally find it annoying when people say wars won't happen anymore this is since that argument's been used so many times before in history and it was wrong every single time people thought that global trade made wars unprofitable which is the argument people use today and before world war one however there is one point that has to be taken very seriously which is nuclear weapons the united states and russia both have over 6 000 nukes which means they could end modern civilization as we know it this is the biggest reason why the cold war never became a real war in that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent against full-scale industrial war however the complication here is that china only has 300 nukes most of which are in regional missiles and so can't even hit north america that means that the u.s has over 60 times as many nukes which makes it look like the u.s is overwhelming superiority however the us due to being a nation with at least a little bit of moral consciousness is unwilling to wipe the nation of china off the face of the earth if they don't nuke america first both the us and china have signed treaties saying they won't use nuclear weapons and that actually plays into china's self-interest since they have a larger population industrial base which would serve them better in a conventional war however even if the us and china decide not to use nukes nukes are still on the table the idea that the human race and hundreds of millions of lives could be at stake could make the situation more tense just to say the least if china were to invade taiwan the u.s might not intervene just due to fear of the possibility of nuclear weapons being used so nukes might prevent a war but they also might not thus industrial wars only break out when one society views the survival of their society at risk the american civil war happened when the south knew that if things kept going the way they were the industrializing north would abolish slavery democratically world war one broke out when the british and french knew that if things kept going the way they were that the germans would dominate them and the germans had the same anxiety about the russians both japan and germany's economies would have imploded if they didn't start world war ii thus probably removing their regimes from power the brilliant historian david hackett fisher found that you can predict collapses in world systems with pretty easy regularity i made a video about it here but we can basically check out all the boxes pretty easily high inflation inequality rising cost of living and declining standard of living all of which cause international tension in civil wars we basically know there's going to be a lot of wars in the next couple decades but the question is whether the big worst case scenario of a full u.s china war happens the problem here is that the world system at this point and you see this in both the us and china is that both countries are crushed by their own internal problems and so they try to tilt the world system to favor them either by creating tariffs or shutting off immigration for america or gaining political power for china however when everyone needs concessions from the international system to keep their countries functioning the world system just dies the previous world crises that have happened have combined both internal and external wars an example of this is how france fought the 30 years war and then collapsed into civil war or in the 18th century france had their own revolution and then fought the napoleonic wars russia fought world war one then collapsed into civil war i think given china's massive demographic problems there's no way the communist party stays in power if their population is supposed to have buddy in this century that means they're going to have a remarkable social collapse the problem here is the sheer amount of chaos in modern world system makes it very difficult to predict actual results as an example a conflict between chinese and american allies in a place like the middle east or eastern europe could spiral into a war involving the us and china it's hard to say what the exact conditions would be in a u.s china war or a chinese invasion of taiwan so we're going to start here with the assumption that china does invade taiwan what would happen afterwards let's say that the chinese fleet crosses the ocean to invade taiwan most military projections in the u.s would say that china would be able to conquer taiwan relatively easy and i'm assuming chinese war games say roughly the same the major problem is that we don't have the important classified details that the chinese and american governments do on combat details i know some of the weapon systems but not how effective they are for example no major war was fought like people expected since people calculate the importance of variables incorrectly as an example i've heard the chinese have the ability to jam satellite signals off the coast of china that would destroy u.s naval communications and that their missile force is extremely impressive however i'm not sure how effective either of these are in the real world it's also totally possible that the us would be able to defeat the chinese landing force given the us's much more powerful navy another factor is that amphibious invasions of well-defended coastlines are extremely difficult as a rule especially with a nation as well armed and defended as taiwan as another possibility once the chinese reach the beachheads it's entirely unclear how effective the chinese military really is as a rule chinese organizations tend to be pretty binary and either being extremely competent and efficient or mired in corruption largely determined by how honest the top leadership is alternatively it's unclear how effective the taiwanese military is either given that i've heard some reports saying it's really good and others saying they have an outdated and foolish military doctrine the biggest and primary question we have is whether the u.s would get involved to protect taiwan on one side the chinese attack on taiwan is a direct attack on an american ally and more abstractly the american world order which might result in u.s allies leaving america or the dollar world system on the other hand starting a world war that would kill at least tens of millions of people over a tiny island is an expensive decision although it's really a coin toss i think under the current biden administration the us is less likely to protect the island i honestly think that the most likely option america would push for if china seizes taiwan is that america blocks off trade to china and puts the country under trade embargoes the us navy is extremely powerful and can do this easily but the problem is that china's so dependent upon foreign trade especially in fossil fuels from the middle east that it might launch into war to protect its economic survival some of you might be reminded of the u.s embargo of japan during world war ii that practically forced the japanese to declare war on america at pearl harbor there are two ways of thinking about this in that either the u.s would pursue this policy while forgetting history and i know that the u.s would cynically position china to start the war in order to make china look bad on the international stage and alienate its possible allies which brings up the question would china push for another target after seizing taiwan if taiwan was seized it wouldn't solve any of china's internal problems which might mean that they would need to go after something else if returning to china's pre-century of humiliations is important as it is for many chinese nationalists than the annexation of mongolia or more importantly the very strategic okinawa islands off the south coast of japan which have american military bases might become new targets however to be honest i think the chinese pushing against america that directly is unlikely i think saba rattling with india is more plausible i think that if the u.s didn't start a war over taiwan and engage china indirectly that china would fall apart in the next few decades due to its own internal problems i think the us put the nail in the coffin by forming allies with russia and promoting rebellions in central asia to fully surround and isolate china however a war with china results in tens of millions of deaths in a truly history forming war a war i've gone over in more detail in that video what a feltest and thanks for watching if you enjoyed that video please like comment subscribe or stay tuned for additional content or alternatively check me out in patreon where i've got the first couple hundred pages of my social history of america and cultural history of the world or my social media as always thanks so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: Whatifalthist

Views: 308,976

Keywords: Premiere_Elements_2021, fdsfsd

Id: gXDQQxpkpZk

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022