Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

5/16/2026

Worrisome Thought of the day:  Is the People’s Liberation Army “Great General Staff” telling Xi that if he’s going to do it, now’s the time.  (Picking up on something Ross Douthat wrote in Saturday’s New York Times)  By some accounts, in roughly the decade before World War I broke out, the German Great General Staff was telling the Kaiser that the balance of power vis-à-vis France was slowly tilting against Germany and was likely to continue to do, so if there was to be war, now was the time.

From a purely military perspective, might the military leadership of China be saying something similar about attempting to seize Taiwan?  The United States has, by most accounts, expended about half of its stockpiles of precision guided munitions and interceptors, and does not yet seem to have caught on to the drone revolution in warfare.  It frankly cannot handle major commitments in the Persian Gulf and the Western Pacific at the same time.  

The American President is incompetent and feckless and domestically weakened and amazingly unpopular outside the United. States.  He has shown his willingness to break agreements and ignore alliances and seems favorable to autocracies in general and admires Xi in particular — he has shown that he has no problems abandoning Ukraine to Russia, so there seems no reason for him to be any less willing to throw Taiwan to the wolves (or dragon).  Frankly is China likely to see a President of the United States more likely to crumble in the face of Chinese aggression in the foreseeable future?  As a bonus, the American Secretary of Defense s blazingly incompetent as well and much of the defense and intelligence establishment could accurately  be described as in “disarray.”

The United States Navy is tied down in the Persian Gulf, and is about as small as it has ever been relative to any possible threat since before World War II, and the US shipbuilding industry is not in any position to change that quickly.  Much of its combat power is concentrated in carrier battle groups that are, arguably, quite vulnerable to the latest Chinese weaponry and are likely to become more so as the drone revolution rolls on.

Taiwan and China’s nearest neighbors have sheltered under an American nuclear umbrella that now has large holes in it — at the moment absent US support they are relatively helpless. Conversely, if China waits, they might see Taiwan, as well as South Korea, Japan, and possibly Australia develop their own nuclear weapons as well as strengthening their conventional forces and tightening their alliances.

In short, might China’s leadership be thinking that it is time to pull the trigger?