Sounds like a reason for China to grab Taiwan sooner than later
It has been my belief that China has been planning for a Taiwan invasion as a serious, realistic, near term contingency for at least the last year.
However, I had watched another video, I think with the same guy, where they went over all the reasons that a China Taiwan invasion would be
much harder than Russia's Ukraine invasion.
* Ukraine has been preparing for this Russian invasion for 8 years. Taiwan has been preparing for 80 years.
* Russia had thousands of miles of open, shared border with Ukraine where they had the choice of entry points for their core military capability (i.e. heavy armor). China would have to cross 100 miles of the worlds most heavily militarized open water to reach Taiwan shores. China's naval capability is not their core competency.
* The US had no defense obligations to Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion. The US has had a long standing (though unofficial) commitment to the defense of Taiwan. If the US couldn't stand by idly and watch Ukraine be invaded, it is guaranteed we couldn't with Taiwan.
* Russia is a net energy exporter. For now that is keeping them afloat despite the other sanctions. Still the sanctions are massive and crushing. Later this year as EU starts turning off pipelines, they will turn terminal. China is a net importer of energy and their entire economic existence relies on exporting. The same sanctions/embargos/blockades on China would have 10x the effect. It would probably be kinder to just nuke them.
* Russia and China expected the West to be disunified and dither and wring our hands and stand by and watch as Ukraine was invaded without serious consequences. The sudden and massive coalescing of the West against Russia has changed China's calculation of the likely costs of a Taiwan invasion. The projected ROI is now totally different.
* The entire nature of the China\Russia axis has been undermined. Russia was supposed to be the military arm of the alliance able to provide hardware and military expertise to the partnership and China was supposed to be the economic powerhouse funding the alliance. Now it is obvious that Russian hardware is sub-standard, their tactics are outdated and ineffective, and they are a pale shadow of their former Soviet glory days. As well, China has seen just how sweeping and devastating the Western sanction capability is and how willing we are to use it under the right circumstances and how vulnerable they would be to it. China's economic power would vaporize within months of such a response.
As long as Ukraine has a desire to resist, we should be pouring the entire military production capacity of the western world into that battle-space. It's the best deal for our money we could hope for. Ukraine is the killing-field to destroy Russia and keep the rest of EU safe so we can fight them there by proxy and destroy their military and economy, instead of fighting in Poland or Finland, or Latvia.
Every Russian we kill in Ukraine makes it less likely of losing an American serviceman in an attempt to defend Taiwan. If Ukraine is willing to fight, we should drown them in weapons and material and supplies.
