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0 pointsjmyeet4h ago0 comments

The tl;dr here is, with all due respect, that your premises are basically all wrong.

> (1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US

No, it isn't. For several reasons:

1. China has stockpiled ~1.4 billion barrels of oil. it'a net importer. Supplies from Russia aren't disrupted. At present, Iranian oil is still gointg to China;

2. China is rapidly decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels with renewable energy projects on a scale where they're building more solar, for example, than the rest of the world combined. They also produce those panels so there's no supply chain risk there;

3. While the US is a net oil exporter, it's not universal. California, for example, has no pipelines so 75% of its oil comes from the sea. ~20-25% of that comes from Iraq and is disrupted by the Strait being closed;

4. Qatar produces 20-30% of the world's Helium supply and ~20% of the world's LNG, both of which are disrupted;

5. ~30% of the world's fertilizer is disrupted by the Strait being closed. The US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.

> (2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so.

The other Gulf states are US client states. Why would Saudi Arabia close the Strait, which especially hurts US interests?

I also doubt any of them can to the same degree. The entire Iranian military is geared towards this strategy with drone and ballistic missile production on a scale no other country is really built for. It has hardened military infrastructure designed for decades to resist US bombardment.

Other Gulf states don't have this hardened infrastructure and are more vulernable to Iranian attack if it came down to it. Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.

> Russia invading Ukraine and failing

Russia has basically succeeded. You have fairly stagnant battle lines where neither side can particularly advance but Russia holds certain Ukrainian territory now for years. Russia is just going to wait for the West to get bored and give up. Russia's economy has proven itself to be surprisingly resilient.

Sanctions just don't work on enemies like Iran, Russia or North Korea as well as they do on allies or former allies because enemies have an entire national project to resist American imperialism. They have to be self-reliant in a way that allies just don't.

This is also why the US client states in the Gulf are hurting way more from the Strait being closed: their economies aren't built for it. Iran's is.

> ... the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.

So this is where you've really gone off the deep end. China is less affected by this, in part because of long-term strategy but short-term because Chinese shipments are still going through the Strait.

American imperialists (which is both Republicans and Demorats, for the record) have this weird idea that China will invade Taiwan. Or wants to. Or it can. None of those things are true.

It really feels like projection, like every accusation is a confession. China must be doing violent imperialism because that's what the US is doing.

China can blockade Taiwan but that won't really do anything any more than an aerial bombardment will do anything to Iran. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to land an invasion on Taiwan any more than the US does in Iran. If you think otherwise, I'm sorry but you're gorssly mistaken.

But all of that ignores the real issue: China doesn't need to invade (or blockade) Taiwan. Why? Because all but ~10 countries in the world already view Taiwan as part of China. In the US (and Europe) it's called the One China policy. It is US government policy and consistent across both parties.

Why would China upset the international order when everybody already agrees with them?

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andrewflnr3h ago

China's built strategy suggests they want to invade Taiwan. What else are those bridge barges for?

And yeah, it's a dumb idea, but Taiwan, unification in general, seems to be one of the handful of things China can't quite manage to be rational about. They didn't have to grab Hong Kong ahead of time either.

jmyeetOP3h ago

There are three things people often don't seem to realize about invasions:

1. What a barrier water is still to this day;

2. How many troops it would take to occupy a country; and

3. The logistics required to support an invasion.

Knowing these things, even a little bit, can dispel a lot of fearmongering nonsense one will see.

On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.

The Allies did manage D-Day but mostly because German strategy was bad, they were asleep at the wheel and D-Day was logisitcally probably the most complex military operation in human history and it took years to plan.

Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.

100 miles of ocean separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan. It may as well be 10,000. Or 10. It just doesn't matter.

Taiwan has 1-2 million soldiers (including reserves) and a national project to resist an invasion and occupation. China would probably need at least 1-2 million troops to occupy Taiwan and they would have to get them across the ocean and them supply and arm them.

China simply doesn't have that amphibious capability and Taiwan could play havoc with their supply lines.

I really wish more people would ask "what would an invasion of Taiwan take or look like?" because then we could all waste less time worrying about things that just aren't going to happen. You could reduce any scenario to "can they?", "do they need to?" and "do they want to?". The answer to all three is "no".

Creating fear of this is just another tactic to sell weapons and, to some extent, more revealing about the Western imperialist psyche.

So no, I don't care about what barge ships China is building. At all. It doesn't matter.

lmm1h ago

> On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.

Notably they were in a position of air inferiority the whole time, despite certain popular perceptions. So not really comparable. (Indeed if China, by contrast, is making preparations for an amphibious invasion, surely that says something)

> Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.

That the front in a somewhat evenly balanced war would stabilise on a natural obstacle isn't so surprising. We can't leap from there to say that such natural obstacles would make for stable defensive lines in a less balanced war.

andrewflnr2h ago

I already agreed it was a dumb idea. If that always stopped the leaders of powerful countries from starting wars, we wouldn't be talking about Iran.

AYBABTME2h ago

Everything you say is probably true and I agree... and yet.

What matters is not just what you plan to do, but what your opponent thinks you'll do. The US in general believes that China wants to invade or control Taiwan in some way. This mere belief is sufficient to cause it to take action.

AYBABTME3h ago

I mostly agree with everything you say, I just see the balance lying elsewhere on the spectrum. I think China is on it's way to securing its energy supplies with renewables but not quite there, and that the US is taking this window of opportunities to do what it can to attempt to degrade China.

Whether China plans to actually invade or blockade Taiwan or not doesn't matter if the US thinks it will. AFAICT the US is convinced it will, and the mere threat of this is enough to justify Venezuela and Iran, I believe. Higher oil prices are less worse than no more semiconductors.

And I think Russia might have gained some territory, but at the cost of being completely sucked into the conflict, having lost strategically by (1) being unable to support and defend its proxies and (2) having its arsenal and technology thoroughly analyzed and proven ineffective against US weapons. All actors involved know this and it will not remain, but until solved this means that the US knows it can strike countries defended by Russian weapons, at least until counter measures are researched, developed and distributed. This is a temporary advantage and moment of clarity that lasts a few years, not a sustained advantage.

The risk of the US being equally sucked into Iran and suffering the same fate is very high. And China's best strategy here is probably to sit and wait and help US opponents keep the US busy for a while, like the US did on Ukraine with Russia.

jmyeetOP2h ago

The US is an arms dealer empire. It's economic strength and power come from its ability to sell weapons. The military budget is pushing $1 trillion (and probably will exceed it with supplemental funding for the Iran boondoggle). Rumor has it the administration will be asking for $1.5 trillion in the next Budget. That is a staggering and utterly unsustainable level of spending. Most of that is going to defense contractors.

The US doesn't want to live in a multipolar world. It wants to remain the hegemonic global superpower, basically to make a handful of really wealthy people even more wealthy at the expensive of everyone else.

So do I believe the US wants to treat China like an enemy that "needs" to be degraded? Absolutely. Do I think it should be that way or has to be that way? Absolutely not. But that is a minority position in US political circles. One thing the Republicans and Democrats are united on is the US imperialist project.

You have a handful of candidates like Graham Platner who think the path forward with China is one of cooperation not competition [1]. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, hates this kind of rhetoric. That's what we're dealing with.

Part of selling that is convincing everyone is that China is or wants to do the exact same imperialism that the US is doing. What's China actually doing? The Belt and Road Initiative [2] where China basically sues its massive trade surplus to go around the world and build ports, airports and roads and to fund mines, farms, power plants and oil and gas. All on significantly better terms than the World Bank and IMF offer [3], so much so that Africa is considered "lost" to US interests in favor of China.

Fun fact: the United States Africa Command is headquartered in Germany [4]. Why? Because no African country wants it. It's one region where the US only has a handful of bases (eg Djibouti, Kenya).

When the country that produces most of the world's weapons is telling you that there's some big military threat that can only be solved by selling more weapons I just ask: consider the source.

[1]: https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2028936316285546537

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

[3]: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/chinese-and-world-bank-len...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Africa_Command

klooney4h ago

> US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.

China is also a big food importer, they'll feel it eventually

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