re: Israel–Hamas War Discussion Thread: News Links On First Page

China is giving me Ottoman Empire / Austria-Hungary vibes right now.

They are staring down the barrel of demographic disasters, economic disasters, etc, and seem to think that a military victory would shore up their position.

If the idea is human wave attacks against other countries, they may succeed.

If the idea is to try and use naval and air power to pull off something like invading Taiwan,
I see it going VERY poorly for them unless they plan on bombing the shite out of it, which isn’t their intentions because they want it intact.


Taiwan isn’t going to roll over for them because they have seen what happened to Hong Kong and the agreements China made with the British for turnover. So they have no reason to surrender and are in a very defensible position as long as they can stay fed.

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It's feels like Iran orchestrated the timing of this knowing that the world was tied up with the Russia/Ukraine war...I would not be surprised to see China soon take advantage of this in some way.

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I hope you are wrong.

I'm usually not one for screaming "WORLD WAR III!" but like people have said multiple times in this threads, things have a June-July 1914 feel to them. If China throws their hat into the ring, I can then see the three separate conflicts merging into a world war, like how the European conflict merged with the Pacific/Jap-Sino conflict in World War II.

With weak leadership both here and in Europe on top of everything else going on, I can see China saying "well, why the hell not?"