Has the regeneracy arrived?

[Mikebert]

(01-24-2017, 02:52 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 01:49 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Jordan, if Trump decides to press the South China Sea issue, as Spicer suggested, how would you respond if you were China?  I'd rather play China's hand in this situation and ours.  Not sure what I would do though.

There are a lot of other actors and actions involved, so it's tough to say for sure.  The One Belt/One Road thing is a sensible move, accelerating the ability to secure resources from routes not subject to US interdiction.  Stockpiling, too.  The use of nonmilitary maritime assets to put pressure on the US naval presence while maintaining deniability and escalation dominance would be smart, too, which they're also doing.  They can also do what Putin has, and they've been doing as well, in shifting the point of friction between them and the US to different areas, de-escalating in one area while ratcheting up tensions in another.  Continuing to pursue bilateral deals with places like the Philippines and Vietnam is clever, too, working to split up potential coalitions before they congeal.  Cyberspace is a potential area where they can bring power to bear with some deniability as well.  Somewhat more speculatively, the US private sector has an enormous amount of capital invested on the Chinese mainland, and pressure brought to bear here could lead to political pressure for the US back home.

But it's tough for them, too.  There is a great deal of nationalist sentiment among the Chinese public that needs to be assuaged, limitations in the extent to which land supply routes can replace sea routes, their own fragile economic state, trust issues between them and their neighbors, rising protests in places like Hong Kong and elsewhere, hard red lines with places like Taiwan and its geopolitical status, a military that hasn't fought a war in almost 40 years, technical limitations in the production of certain military goods like jet-engines, the geographic constraints of the first island chain, etc.  It really could go either way, if it comes down to out and out conflict (military or otherwise), between roughly matching adversaries.  And there are tons of ways things could spiral out of control, despite each side's best efforts.

Good analysis.  Supports my view that there are a lots ways China could respond to a belligerent Trump besides all-out war.