The Absolute Necessity of Avoiding a Catastrophic War with China

When I think of the possibility of any kind of military conflict between great powers, I am immediately filled with the emotion of fear so powerful that it produces a kind of fight or flight response. These words are my way of fighting for peace.

This Bluesky thread by George Chidi that I read today ramped up my normal level of War with China anxiety quite a bit:

"The one thing I find most perplexing about the Iran conflict and Trump's saber rattling is how it affects our posture on China.

We are expecting a naval conflict with China. We have been trying-and largely failing-to prepare for it. We say we expect it to cost ungodly amounts of men and materiel."

One thing about that post I need to point out is the "largely failing to prepare [for war with China]" part. Of course we are failing to prepare for something which is definitionally impossible to prepare for. This is in a way a blessing in disguise, because if China were to invade Taiwan with an amphibious assault, and the USA military determined that at that moment there was no way we could possibly counter this invasion with military force without unfathomably large harms to not only the USA but also the entire world, then that might be one way we avoid getting into a larger war over Taiwan.

A US-China war is impossible to prepare for.

It isn't just the vast arsenals of nuclear weapons that each country has which makes it impossible to prepare for, it's the sum total of modern technology and infrastructure that keeps all 8+ billion people alive on this small planet we share. The distribution of food and medicine and the building of shelter for 8 billion people is a task that only became possible in the late 20th century thanks to computers, information technology, and the internet. Information technology in 2025 has become both wildly powerful, as well as wildly complex, and a wildly complex system turns out to be somewhat fragile. Today we are unable to disentangle IT from food and medicine creation and distribution, for example vaccines and most pharmaceutical drugs cannot be manufactured without the help of computers. The same goes for cars, money, bridges, ships, airplanes, etc. The problem we have today with regards to some kind of global war between great powers is that the internet is actually quite easy to turn off almost completely; it would be quite a trivial task for either the US or China to do this without the dropping of a single bomb or the firing of a single bullet.

Destroying every major undersea fiber optic cable could be achieved in mere days or even hours by any navy in possession of tens or hundreds of submarines. If just those undersea cables are cut, our ability to communicate across continents at the speed and scale we have become accustomed to would vanish. You might be thinking, well there are no undersea cables in the North American continent, so we might still be somewhat ok. Until you read about Salt Typhoon , the largest telecoms hack in history which gave Chinese hackers employed by the PRC unfettered access to pretty much every text and phone call sent within the last few years. The news of this hack first surfaced last year but the mainstream media largely ignored it, there is probably an ongoing conspiracy to suppress news of this hack because state actors in the USA aren't capable of dealing with the fallout from it. While the scale of penetration from this hack is still unknown, it is very possible that China now could, using the right command line prompt, cripple every internet connected device they wanted to, including major data centers that we now rely on for tasks both essential and mundane.

In the interests of brevity, I will not detail all the chaos this could cause, I will simply say that if one entity has all the most important passwords in the world, and they wanted to use that power to cause havoc, our entire economy would cease to function at all.

Please keep in mind, this level of chaos can be achieved without using a single physical, chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon. In 2025 and beyond, information itself could become an almost unimaginably powerful weapon.

Then what happens in a naval conflict in the Pacific with no functioning internet is anyone's guess. I'm curious what percent of our 'smart' weapons would still work if the GPS satellites were offline. I'm guessing zero but I could be mistaken. I will refrain from speculating what might be the cause of or happen in a full-scale nuclear war, because the outcome of that is too terrible for my feeble brain to handle, and I must continue praying to a God that clearly does not exist that our leaders are smart enough to avoid ever using weapons of this kind.

But what would happen if many of our ships and aircraft did continue to work as intended in a world with very limited internet? The navies and air forces of China and the US might be able to cut off all international trade in the Pacific, and perhaps start bombing each other's military targets, seaports and airports, but then...

To What End?

At a minimum, this conflict with China would result in the deaths of tens of millions (if not billions) of human beings, sow global chaos that would echo for centuries, destroy any semblance of a functioning modern economy in all of the countries involved, and probably the entire global network of nations that depend on each other for survival.

All this would be done in the name of protecting "democracy" because we are ideologically opposed to "communism" even though there is no real communism in China, it's more "socialism with Chinese characteristics" which turns out to be a mix of capitalism and socialism, which is actually quite similar to what we have in the United States.

Creating a post-apocalyptic hellscape because we disagree with Xi Jin Ping's policies regarding the reunification of Taiwan and China makes no sense to me, and I hope it makes no sense to anyone else. You can make an argument that the Chinese Communist Party does not represent the will of the people because they don't allow for democratic elections, but the USA's own democracy has become comically farcical now, neither the Democrats nor Republicans can claim to represent the will of the nation's people, and both parties work with the system to stifle the emergence of a new party that might gain power at the expense of the old parties.

Towards Peace (Can't we all just get along?)

To begin finding a peaceful solution we must first recognize each other's humanity, stop demonizing each other as monsters, and treat differing political opinions as opportunities for compromise. Talk of China being the USA's "strategic competitor" needs to stop. We need to think of each other and everyone on the planet as existing in a symbiotic relationship, for the fact is that every human needs other people to help them through their journey of life, and these efforts to destroy each other hurt not only ourselves but everyone. John Donne put this much more eloquently than I am capable of doing:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

The wars of "Capitalism" versus "Communism" need to stay in the past and have no place in the present or future. Just because capital is a thing that exists, does not mean that there is any system that functions with the sole ideology of "pure capitalism". Just because humans are social creatures does not mean that "pure socialism/communism" is a real thing that can be achieved. If our economic system was a car engine, then the world we live in would be the car, every living being would be the passengers, capital would be the car parts, socialism would be the engine lubricant, and people's labor would be the gasoline. The system needs all of its parts in order to function as a car.

Just as a "real" war with China would be disastrous, so too would a trade war. We cannot cut each other off economically in 2025, the cost is simply too high, and there are too many things each country makes that the other country needs. Trade is good and allows for specialization in certain areas, everyone benefits from it. We can't close our borders and make everything in the USA without impoverishing ourselves to 19th century levels.

I will end this with a plea for everyone to wake up to reality. These words like communism and capitalism have been used to divide us for far too long. They have little relation to what is important about the world we inhabit. We all want to live long and prosper, but to do that, we must help each other instead of destroying each other.