Thoughts on Coming Apart and the Coming Great Reset
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Kit Webster
Themes and Theses
Why I'm Contemplating Out Loud
(Initially formulated in the early 90s, following decades of reading history, philosophy, religion, psychology and a lot of contemplation, particularly on the subject of cycles. In the end, this is a relatively straightforward story about human nature and of history rhyming.)
The US will enter a period of crisis in the early 2000s. In the late 90s, I incorporated Strauss' and Howe's terminology of the Fourth Turning (without incorporating their generations paradigm) and agreed with Howe that the end stage of the crisis began with the Great Financial Crisis and would last into the early 2030s. We are now at the beginning of the end stage of the crisis.
The crisis will be serious and could be existential.
Internal strife will increase, up to and including secession and civil war.
International conflicts will increase as the vacuum created by the weakening of the US is filled by other players.
There will be many threads to the crisis, but the primary thread will be debt, deficits and entitlements. Other factors include, eg, demographics, a loss of meaning and myth and a loss of self-discipline.
Politics will move leftward as citizens look for some refuge from the chaos. The US will become increasingly susceptible to a (man) on a white horse, who can come from either the left or the right.
Inflation, as the most likely way to address debt since austerity is not politically acceptable, will significantly lower standards of living, exacerbating the civil crises.
Eventually, the dollar will be inflated away and lose its reserve status.
Once the old rot is cleared out, and assuming continuity, there will be the basis for the establishment of a new order.
There will be what Strauss and Howe calls a First Turning . It will be constructed out of the physical infrastructure, wealth, energy sources, thoughts and values in the culture at the time. At this point in time, those components are unknowable. We can anticipate that the next future will be increasingly chaotic. We can anticipate that there will be destruction, and then reconstruction from some level. We cannot yet anticipate the form of the reconstruction or the level from which it will begin.
(Added in the early 00s) While humans are contributing to global warming, policies implemented to address manmade global warming will create a significant energy crisis, probably toward the end of the Fourth Turning.
(Added around 2020) The loss of faith by our youth in our founding principles means that the new order will at least partially be based on new principles. As yet, I have no visibility as to what those principles might be.
(Added in 2023) The lowering / elimination of standards in education, the judiciary, law enforcement, the military and other segments of our society will create a population unable to adequately comprehend, do or respond to the challenges of democracy and culture.
(Added in 2025) China has won - at least for the next 5-10 years. The US is dependent on China for the materials it uses to create defense items. We literally cannot fight China without China's help. China's industrial base is impressive; the US has to rebuild. China is out-innovating the US. China is turning out more engineers and scientists than the US by far. This does not mean that China does not face challenges - demographics perhaps being its primary challenge. The US military remains stronger than China's, but in an age of drone warfare, that statement means less than it has historically. The US still has bargaining chips and will need to use them to maintain any kind of status quo.
(Added in 2025) AI has the potential to profoundly affect human culture. However, AI faces several significant hurdles, including the demand for massive amounts of electricity, which may not be available, and a cultural revolt against its existence. Since it could be existential, and since China is pursuing it, the US has no alternative, at least in the short term.
(Added in 2026) Maneuvering for control of critical materials will be a primary driver of geopolitics for at least the next decade.
The T-Word
August 28, 2026
Quotes to Contemplate
Truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. - anon
The insult only works if you accept it. - Diogenes
I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that's why everyone does everything. - Norm Macdonald
Reading about Robespierre, and his obsession with moral purity tests. So glad those days are over! - Tom Holland
The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” - Dr. Rudi Dornbusch
Broadly speaking, conditions favorable to general hostility to a social system or specific attack upon it will in any case tend to call forth groups that will exploit them. But in the case of capitalist society there is a further fact to be noted: unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. - Joseph Schumpeter
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou
Summary of Primary Thoughts To Contemplate In This Issue
This (Canadian tariffs) is beyond ridiculous. Not universal tariff ridiculous. Not Epic Fury ridiculous. But the kind of unrelenting unforced errors that just keep piling up. I don't have any evidence that Trump is a Russian asset, but, I ask myself, what would an actual Russian asset do to make things worse?
When the long-term damage of the Trump administration is accounted for, the anti-vaccination drive will be among the greatest long-term effects as diseases lose containment and increasing numbers of people die.
What elections are about and what I think are the primary challenges facing our nation are entirely different things.
Transgender is the moral panic of the day, and is probably an unsolvable problem in terms of women's sports and bathrooms. There is no baby to split. This is a zero-sum game.
So, You Say You Want A Revolution?
> When the long-term damage of the Trump administration is accounted for, the anti-vaccination drive will be among the greatest long-term effects as diseases lose containment and increasing numbers of people die.
> U.S. cuts Colorado River water allocations to Arizona, California, & Nevada by roughly 25% over the next two years amid severe drought.
> Trump being Trump - executed 1,000 stock trades last month; picked another senseless fight with Canada. The Wall Street Journal called the Canada thing "Trump's dumbest." If you stay within trade policy, I agree. Peter Zeihan notes that the US needs to reindustrialize and all of the US's moves against Canada are sending us "screaming" in the other direction. He notes that business' faith in Trump has diminished to close to zero and that there will be little investment until the rules of the game have been made clear.
This is beyond ridiculous. Not universal tariff ridiculous. Not Epic Fury ridiculous. But the kind of unrelenting unforced errors that just keep piling up. I don't have any evidence that Trump is a Russian asset, but, I ask myself, what would an actual Russian asset do to make things worse?
> It'll be back - LinkedIn users are scrubbing “DEI” mentions from their profiles at historic rates.
> Russia is suspected of launching a series of sabotage operations against European weapons factories in an effort to test NATO's resolve, The Telegraph reported Sunday, citing Western intelligence sources.
Russia is recruiting members of local criminal gangs and carefully planning the attacks with "plausible deniability" so they do not reach the threshold that would trigger NATO's Article 5 mutual defense provision.
> Did not see that one coming. Mail-in voting is mostly a bad idea, but I just assumed everyone would keep doing what they have been doing. It's a bad idea, not a terrible idea and has its uses. - Supreme Court rules Trump can proceed with crackdown on mail-in voting.
> Saudi Arabia removes antisemitic content from its school textbooks.
> Data centers are America's new moral panic - Jonah Goldberg. From pronouns to ... computing?
It has to be something, I guess.
> Sigh - Trump officially renames Canada's Lake Ontario "Lake America" by executive order.
> 𝕏 reveals it uncovered a Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, including hundreds used to influence U.S. debate over AI data centers & energy policy.
> Federal appeals court says Constitution protects owning child porn if it is made with AI and not shared.
Read - Bill Gates on AI
Bill Gates on AI here. I don't agree with all of this, but there is a lot to think about.
SS on Taiwan
Reader SS just put together a great analysis of the Taiwan situation. I don't agree with all of it, as he mentions in the piece. That is not the point. The point is to think about what he is saying. Text at the bottom of this post.
Election Interpretation - Tear Down the Prisons, Redux - Abolish ICE
Reader JD wrote in after last week's article mentioning that a professor of his discussed corporal punishment. That led me to ask Claude for data on what actually works in criminal deterrence. In my world, the answer is complicated because there are really bad guys, including those abandoned by our culture; there are those that commit what Democrats would call "crimes of necessity" ... in other words, I would doubt that one size fits all. As I noted to JD, humans are violent, Americans are violent, but the least violent are arguably Japanese, and they use culture and peer pressure (but it is more complicated than that - see below).
Here is a summary of Claude's response -
"If your goal is fewer crimes, the evidence says: raise the odds of being caught, keep sanctions swift and reliable but not necessarily brutal, and invest in the interventions that change behavior rather than the ones that express condemnation. Escalating severity — longer sentences, execution, and by strong inference corporal punishment — buys much less than intuition suggests, and sometimes buys negative returns.
Two caveats worth holding. First, deterrence isn't the only reason societies punish; retribution and expressive condemnation are separate arguments that this evidence doesn't touch. Second, the certainty finding cuts in an uncomfortable direction for people on both ends of the political spectrum: it implies more policing and less incarceration, a combination neither coalition tends to want."
Claude on characteristics that lead to low violence: "Interpersonal violence (homicide rate) is the cleanest metric — homicide has a relatively consistent legal definition across countries and is hard to conceal, which makes it the most internationally comparable crime statistic. On that measure the floor is occupied by East Asia, Western/Northern Europe, and parts of Oceania, typically under 1 per 100,000, with Japan around 0.2. Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, and Italy all sit in roughly that band. Global context: UNODC put the world rate at about 5.6 per 100,000 in 2022. So the safest countries are running something like 20–30x below the global average. ... The low-violence cluster doesn't share a culture; it shares structural features: high state capacity and legitimate policing, low income inequality, low firearm availability, strong welfare provision, and small-to-mid population. Iceland, Japan, and Singapore have almost nothing culturally in common."
Abolish ICE
This is another baby-with-the-bathwater solution to a real problem or set of problems - defund the police, believe all women, shut down prisons ...
I'm not going to go into issues on which there will be no agreement - we need to keep our borders secure, and we need to expel noncitizens who are here illegally. I think both of those propositions are true, but they have become vastly complicated by decades of insecure borders and illegals who have become parts of our communities. A more nuanced discussion would take pages.
But, just assume that my two propositions are true, holding your nose if you have to.
That's only part of the issue here.
ICE, without any question in my mind, has in some/many instances exhibited unwarranted, bullying behavior. They have also killed more-or-less innocent bystanders.
That's unacceptable and has stirred outrage, including the call to abolish ICE.
So, this is a bloody-shirt rallying cry, but if you wanted to do something constructive about ICE, how would you go about it?
Let's start with some facts:
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 statutorily created an immigration-enforcement bureau inside DHS — but Congress called it the "Bureau of Border Security." The codified section still opens by saying there shall be in DHS a bureau to be known as the Bureau of Border Security. ICE exists because it is part of a plan submitted to Congress.
The Executive branch can reorganize various associated departments, but is responsible for the functions, regardless of who carries them out - the law charges the Secretary with administering and enforcing the immigration laws; mandates detention of certain criminal aliens; commands removal within 90 days of a final order; grants arrest and warrantless-arrest powers to immigration officers.
The bottom line is that changes from within the Executive branch can mandate that ICE play nice, but cannot make its duties go away.
And the One Big Beautiful Bill funded ICE through September 30, 2029.
Bottom line - Fundamentally changing immigration law is up to Congress. You can throw actual ICE overboard, but someone will have to take up the slack.
Maybe you are seeing a trend here. A lot of emotional arguments that, as a practical matter, cannot go anywhere. People are upset, so promise you can do something about whatever is upsetting them, when you actually cannot do much.
Not only can these problems not be solved, they are, imo, the wrong problems in the first place.
What do I think the most important issues facing the US are? What should we actually be talking about?
1. Debt and deficits - there is a severe decrease in living standards in our future. This is the inflation problem, but no one is discussing it in these terms.
2. AI's impact - it is probably both inevitable and life-changing. We need to begin to figure out what that means.
3. The shared premise that election results, court rulings, and the neutrality of enforcement are binding on the losing side. Both coalitions currently believe, sincerely, that key institutions have been captured by the other — which is exactly the condition under which legitimacy erodes fastest, because each side's defensive measures confirm the other's suspicion.
4. Demographics and immigration - getting control of the borders was important, but now we have to create a viable immigration system. Primary points of discussion include that we are not replacing ourselves and we need skilled and knowledge workers.
5. Healthcare - our system is expensive and dysfunctional. We literally need to tear it up and create a new one. "Medicare for all" is not only a bad idea, it is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There are no other ideas on the table.
6. Redefining our role in the world. We cannot afford to rule the world. The world will become an increasingly unstable place once the US begins withdrawing. And it will fracture into power zones. It is not clear where the US will end up over the next 5-10 years when the first iteration of this change will take place. This process will likely encompass one or more wars of varying magnitudes.
Social media, crime, drugs, loneliness etc., are important, but don't make the top 6. Also on that list is the dysfunction of parts of the black community. We are wasting a lot of lives and generating a lot of crime, but not as fundamental as the top 6. Another of my hobby horses - the incompatibility of Western values and fundamentalist Islam - is just now beginning to pop up in the US. Far from important now, but the world may look different in 5-10 years.
People running for Congress are doing so on unrealistic, all-but-irrelevant platforms at a time when Congress is not doing much of anything, anyway.
In the meantime, the beginning of the end of my predicted end game has officially begun.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men" and we are now caught in it and have lost most of our ability to do anything but go with it.
Scorecard so far - political position vs. the real world:
Doing away with the Electoral College - all but impossible.
Doing away with the Senate - all but impossible.
Packing the Supreme Court - doable with control of both Houses and the Presidency and elimination of the filibuster.
DC and Puerto Rico statehoods - Huh?
Doing away with inflation - our economy will have disinflationary and maybe deflationary periods, but the inevitable end game for our debt and deficits includes higher inflation and a lower dollar. In general, allowing for volatility, inflation is inevitable. Look for typical, self-defeating, political tactics like rent and price controls to make everyone feel better as pressures increase and foundations rot.
Medicare for all - highly unlikely and, if implemented, a total shock to the system as severe rationing of health care sets in. Our healthcare system badly needs significant reform, but this is a very, very big, complicated problem.
Taking down prisons - kinda fringy, some justification in the sense of reforming prisons. Overall, bad idea. Expensive and resource intensive.
Shut down ICE - Fundamentally changing immigration law is up to Congress. You can throw actual ICE overboard, but someone will have to take up the slack. Practically, the call to shut down ICE is an emotional response to real events and not a viable platform. Meaningful reform of immigration will take a lot of work.
The Market
> US stock market retracement coming up. Bull market should continue, but economy is extraordinarily fragile - particularly the bond market.
The Iran War
> Oh, my god, no! Anything but that - Iran accuses the U.S. of pursuing “full-scale classic colonialism.” It could have been worse, I guess - racism, fascism, genderism.
I think it would be more effective to turn to Monty Python:
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"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
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"I fart in your general direction!"
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"You empty-headed animal food trough wiper!"
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"Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!"
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"I unclog my nose in your direction, sons of a window-dresser!"
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"You cheesy load of second-hand electric donkey bottom biters!"
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"No chance, English bed-wetting types!"
> Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain are now privately reaching out to Iran for new security arrangements, sending multiple messages almost daily to Iran out of concern that the US cannot protect them anymore due to interceptor shortages and the vulnerability of hosted US bases, per Iran's Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf and a senior Iranian source in Tehran familiar with the matter.
> The US military has permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases, with Iran now poised to control access to the Gulf states, and the US having to negotiate new access in western Saudi Arabia, Israel, and southern Europe, per retired four-star US Gen. Barry McCaffrey. This comes as the Trump administration is already weighing a smaller US military presence in the Persian Gulf due to damaged bases, and the Pentagon saying it might not rebuild its US bases as they were before the Iran war.
> Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack, The Telegraph can disclose.
> New York Buffalo International Airport out of fuel and unable to refuel aircraft.
> "Financial D-Day" could add pressure to a very fragile Iran. But, China and Russia are not going to comply.
The T-Word
I've pretty much left transgenderism alone - but the time has come. This is my next-to-last taboo subject and I can't wait to see when/if I will address the last one.
It is one of our latest cultural fads and confrontations and affects a very small portion - less than one half of one percent - of the population.
Lots of histrionics. Effects far beyond any reasonable proportion.
But, that seems to be what we do these days.
However, we are discussing real people and real problems.
Let's cut to the chase.
There are a couple of key things we need to understand.
First, sex is not binary. I don't want to go into the details, but biological traits like chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy can vary, resulting in intersex individuals who possess physical or genetic traits that do not fit strict binary definitions. Estimates vary widely, depending on definitions, but maybe 1% and up to 1.7% of the population is intersex. It is not unreasonable to assert that there are only two sexes, but it is not strictly accurate.
Gender can be both physical and a mental construct.
Homosexuals of both sexes clearly exist. While most male homosexuality appears based in genetics, some female homosexuality is also based on some combination of life experience and mental orientation. And both male and female homosexuals include masculine and feminine roles.
Homosexuality and gender fluidity have become trendy and cool, so that statistics have varied widely in recent years. However, prior to this trendiness, it was estimated that approximately 5% of the population was homosexual.
Then, transgenderism pops up and torques the entire culture.
Gender is also a mental construct. Regardless of genetics, someone just thinks they are of one sex or the other or wants to be of one sex or the other. They are wired differently and/or they think differently. Humans have a large number of non-standard mental constructs and transgender is one of them.
Again, the primary concept has to be that all humans are worthy of respect and that, all things being equal, you should try to meet them on their own terms.
Issues with transgenderism include the flamboyance and tendency to confrontation of some of their group.
However, many transgenders live more or less "normal" lives, and you may even encounter a transgender in your daily life and have no idea they are one. As opposed to their in-your-face sisterhood, they are generally actually quiet and unassuming - at least in my very limited experience.
(In my college years, I went to Mardi Gras and also went to a "female impersonator" show on Lake Pontchartrain. That show created severe sexual disorientation that I remember to this day.)
We need to get beyond the pronoun stupidity. My thought is that you should respect someone's wishes. However, if I went ballistic every time someone assumed from my asexual names - Kit and Francis - that I was female, I would be living a very agitated life. (My pronoun is ya'll.)
Beyond all of the noise, it seems that there are three, real issues to be dealt with:
1. Conversion therapy;
2. Transgender females in women's sports;
3. Transgender females in women's restrooms.
"Conversion therapy" is long, painful, expensive and generally irreversible. The term is a euphemism for injecting hormones and whacking off body parts. But so is cosmetic surgery. If you are an adult, all things being equal, go for it.
However, two questions arise - who pays for it and what about kids?
It is far from clear that anyone should have to pay for anyone else's elective surgery. Proponents will say that this is critical for quality of life, but for me, that is not persuasive. I arguably would have been much happier in my youth with a stronger chin line - maybe attracted more women - but that is just not your problem.
As for kids, the question is more complex and is further complicated by trendiness. You are in these days, particularly in Hollywood, if you have a trans child. So, there are a lot of trans children.
However, this is a real, complicated problem.
Kids, maybe most or all kids, go through phases where they grapple with their sexual identity. You have to be very, very careful not to extrapolate to transgenderism and make irreversible changes. The odds of your child's being transgender are 200:1 against at best.
While most - essentially all - of this is a "phase," there are a number of children who are stuck in a genetic and/or hormonal and/or emotional state where they are actually transgender. As I understand it, there are benefits to helping them transition before they hit puberty.
They should be helped, but very, very carefully and not by those who are predisposed to see transgenderism everywhere.
Now to sports and bathrooms.
The world is engineered for normalcy.
Take height of airplane aisles. If airplanes were engineered for Victor Wembanyama at 7 feet 4 inches, every airplane and terminal in the world would be unnecessarily high at great expense for a very small number of people. And cars and busses and doorways ...
Whether it is lane width on roads or the width of doorways in houses, or the size of screw holes, the world is put together for the mean, plus or minus maybe 2 standard deviations - 95% of the population.
Men's teams, women's teams. Over 99% of the population.
(Over generalizing) That works for centuries and then transgenders pop up at 0.5% of the population and say, I want in.
The world is caught between, that's fair, and, there is no way to create the exceptions necessary to accommodate you. It's not size; it's that you don't fit the construct. We only have two kinds of bathrooms built into hundreds of thousands of buildings.
I am emphatically not trying to be demeaning but am trying to make a point when I say that this is the equivalent of furries demanding litter boxes in every store and public place.
But, this is sex, gender, women, homosexuality - all very hot buttons for a portion of our population. We can make Wembanyama stoop, pretty much ignore furries all together, and exactly no one cares if I am addressed as Miss or Mrs., but transgenders must have their day.
So, there is no good answer, but here we go - yelling all the way.
Most people do not understand that even average male pro athletes can defeat premiere women pro athletes. It's not even close in sports that require speed and strength. There is an outstanding offer of $10 million for the WNBA champion team to take on a state champion high school boys' team and it has not been accepted. (Men also dominate in areas from ping pong to chess to poker for reasons that are not clear and may be cultural/historical.)
I'm not a basketball fan, but even I can see the difference between a men's game and a women's game - it is huge.
So, letting biological males who identify as women compete in women's sports will completely upset the game. At the extreme, every winner will be a biological male.
Two former NBA players have identified as female and applied to enter the WNBA draft. They are probably having a little fun, but they are also making a point.
What to do?
There is no right answer. There is no baby to split. In real life, all corner cases cannot be accommodated.
I would vote to exclude biological males, but I accept the counter arguments. For me, it is deciding what rules suit the game best. Just as golfers cannot use carts in various tournaments, women's basketball is open to only females.
The bathroom thing is much more cultural. By a certain age, essentially all women have seen a man's penis, which does not mean that anyone is looking forward to seeing random penises pop up in bathrooms. The effect on girls is a real problem and by itself argues for exclusion of males from women's bathrooms. But it goes further. Some men are sexual predators. Some men identify as women in order to get into places where women are vulnerable.
And, there are many, "normal" trans women who would come in, do their business, leave, and no one would know. We are discussing the big, hairy, clearly biologically male trans here as a stereotype.
On the other hand, a person dressed up as a woman would, in terms of body parts, not create much of a stir in a men's bathroom. Men generally don't care about body parts as they stand at urinals next to each other (well, etiquette dictates one urinal over if possible). However, there is a definite probability that the trans person would be harassed or even worse.
Again, no right answer, and I don't have one either. As a male, I cannot relate to women's discomfort from having a biological male in their presence. If a trans woman or man came into my bathroom, I would look once, shrug and move on.
So, my rule would be entirely unenforceable.
If you can fake it as a biological female - use the women's restroom.
My tie breaker would be girls.
If you are clearly a biological male, use the men's restroom.
That's the best I can do.
Bottom line is that trans is a mostly unsolvable problem, given current culture and infrastructure. Unfairness may, unfortunately, be the only practical answer.
Short Takes
> I liked this
1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
The great quote from LeShrub - "Once you understand that it's all nonsense, it begins to make sense."
> Ebola gets worse.
> AI dating startup Ditto reveals 160,000+ students have signed up for its app that automatically picks their match and sends them a fully planned date itinerary.
> Medicare for All. From the Telegraph - Only 1,500 men in England are to be offered prostate cancer screening, with thousands at high risk of the disease in danger of “being left invisible”.
> We are running low on universally beloved people with Dolly Parton's death. Mr. Rogers was one. There are several cartoon characters that are beloved - Winnie the Pooh comes to mind. There are those who were very much admired as opposed to beloved, such as Carl Sagan.
They have always been few in number, but it seems we have now run out.
Gallery
Ok, everybody follow along. If lower tariffs lower prices ...
Miscellaneous
SS on Taiwan
"Food for thought: Taiwan
As it becomes clearer and clearer that Drones have totally changed the dynamics of Land and Near Coast Sea Warfare (the war impact dynamics caused by Drones continue to rapidly change, they are not yet stable) the WINDOW for China to have a Lower (military) Cost Invasion for a Taiwan Invasion is shrinking fast.
By the end of 2027 Taiwan's defense abilities via the use of Drones and Rockets will have skyrocketed. Taiwan is implementing plans right now for the manufacturing of massive numbers of Drones and they should start coming off the production lines starting in about 3 to 4 months (they are looking at 10,000/mo). Once manufactured and deployed they would raise the cost of China launching an attack on Taiwan quite considerably.
My point of this email is that the MILITARILY LEAST COST time for China to invade Taiwan, if they are going to do it at all, is literally within the next 6 months, before Taiwan has the ability to deploy Drone technology en-mass, ideally within the next 3 months.
The problem for a Taiwan is different. Even if a War is delayed and thus it can employ massive use of drones for defense against an invasion Taiwan remains mired in the same multi week problem after such a War begins that it already faces ... ie: it's resupply. Taiwan is NOT food independent or energy independent.
Without re-supply Taiwan would basically be in the same position as General King who still had 75,000+- combined US /Filipino Troops when he surrendered to the Japanese at Bataan. He had NO resupply enroute and NO resupply even potentially coming anytime in the foreseeable future. Ditto wrt what General Percival's situation in Singapore in the same time frame who surrendered 80,000 to 130,000 British, Australian, Indian, and local troops (largest manpower surrender EVER by the British military) once his forces were surrounded and cut off from resupply, a surrender he did only one week+- after the siege of the city began.
When faced with a guaranteed loss with NO resupply possible how long will Taiwan's own defenses continue before the Taiwan political and military leadership decides to do what General King did in the Philippines and General Percival did at Singapore so as to prevent the destruction on the island that would occur if they would "try" to engage in a long fight, which they are guaranteed to lose in the end anyway?
I long ago concluded the defense FIGHT mentality in Taiwan could remain strong for about a week (the length of time it took for General Percival in Singapore to come to terms with his situation and surrender) though sporadic and isolated fighting in the mountainous interior could continue for up to a month, but the leadership of Taiwan would quickly cave once they realized NO resupply was coming and they were going to lose in any case.
The risk for China if they choose to do an invasion of Taiwan is not the military aspect of such an invasion, particularly if they would move before the new drones could be deployed. China clearly has the forces to take over the island but their real risk is the fact that they are a HUGE Importer and a HUGE Exporter and rely upon the world's oceans for those doing both of those tasks.
China may be able to take control Taiwan and the seas around Taiwan but they can NOT control, at least immediately, the world's seas so that they could continue their commercial import /export activities via the seas. China now has more navy ships than the US but it does NOT currently have foreign bases for supporting a world wide blue water navy.
I know Kit thinks Xi will wait out Taiwan's current unwillingness to merge with China. "IF" in his brain though Xi is committed to forcing the merger according to his original timetable while he is still in office (his health reportedly is not good) then the military window for a low cost Chinese invasion is fast closing ... as in the next few weeks, NOT even months.
My read on Xi's personality is that a Taiwan takeover is part and parcel of what he wants his legacy to be no matter what the cost is to China, militarily or economically. If that is the case then an October /November move by China against Taiwan may be on the table, particularly if the US quagmire in West Asia gets deeper and sucks in more US assets and uses up more US defense missiles. The loss of an US aircraft carrier in that region (as seen by several different visionaries) would add further to that US quagmire and give a further impetus for Xi to think seriously about an invasion yet this fall.
(reminder note: 2026 is the exact middle of the window for my projected conflict between China and the US to begin, a conflict for determining WHO would be the King Of The Hill going forward .... ie: the "Thucydides Trap" dynamic)
IMO LIFE is about to get much more "interesting". Hang on, the ride of our lives may be just on the horizon."