Subject: Re: Looming Taiwan chip disaster
Well of course. Nobody gets out of a war unscathed, even the victor. It’s that the difference in vulnerability is HUGE. Taiwan shuts down in days without energy imports. China could last for weeks, maybe months.

Taiwan would run out of food in a week. China, not so much.

Nobody is saying there aren’t risks on both sides, there are. But it’s like Cuba trying to take on the US.

Well, except the West cares a lot more about what happens in Taiwan more than Cuba's allies care about what happens to the Cuban government.

China might try to blockade Taiwan. But it's extremely unlikely that they would prevent a U.S. flagged ship delivering food or energy from reaching the island. It's the same reason why the Soviets didn't shoot down the planes carrying out the Berlin Airlift - they didn't want to provoke a war between the two superpowers by shooting down unarmed planes delivering non-military supplies.

That's not happening with Cuba, because China isn't trying to send a legal, unsanctioned tanker of oil to Cuba. They weren't sending oil to Cuba before the blockade - only Mexico and Venezuela did. They don't care enough to start doing it now. If they did send a Chinese tanker of oil to Cuba, the U.S. would have to think really long and hard about whether they wanted to intercept it, in a way we don't worry too much about Venezuelan tankers. And with Mexico, we've basically pressured them to not even try to supply oil to Cuba. We don't have to deal with the issue of what happens if we try to stop the vessels of a powerful country.

That's very different from Taiwan. The U.S. is one of Taiwan's largest oil providers. We are their largest agricultural provider. They are our fourth largest trading partners in the world, behind only Mexico, Canada, and China itself. An effective Chinese blockade would present square on a conflict with a global superpower in a way that Cuba does not.