"The Battle for Taiwan: Long or short? Invade or Squeeze?" Topic

… Bomb or Seize?

"On Taiwan and its sovereignty, alarmism has become a hallmark of conflict prediction and analysis. Some of it is well-founded, such as the critical lack of interceptors and exquisite strike munitions available to the United States and its allies, but much of the current fear is the sum of highly specific views on how a war would unfold. The prevailing framing relies on readers accepting that China can pursue multiple strategies at once while Taiwan and its allies merely observe, which drives an unrealistic view of the "China Threat" as potentially overwhelming. A recent example is the claim that warning times of a Chinese attack have been decreasing. In reality, this does not mean that the People's Liberation Army can make thousands of troops and their logistics appear overnight on the beaches of Northern Taipei; it more likely means the missiles on the ships that China keeps moving ever closer to Taiwan (within range of Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III batteries) have to travel less distance to hit their targets.

This position should be reframed: policy makers should focus on what is possible, and analysts should present causal arguments organized by their commonalities or contrasts with past cases. This is the essence of John Stuart Mill's method of agreement and disagreement, which identifies common or uncommon variables across like or differing cases. On China, two key factors, both with abundant historical examples, should drive analysis: what does Beijing seek to accomplish, and what can the Chinese military actually do? Crucially, these assessments cannot be made in a void in which each analyst selects the variables that best justify a preferred conclusion. To be credible, an argument must engage the existing body of work, and it should either challenge the conventional wisdom or build upon it; reinventing premises from scratch only propagates confirmation bias…"

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Armand