Political considerations come first to communists, economic considerations are secondary.
“Political considerations come first to communists, economic considerations are secondary.”
Yes, you’re correct. But expending blood and treasure to capture what they see as a golden prize might cause severe political costs if that prize is taken from them. Whoever orders the assault will have political enemies who can leverage that loss against him.
My feeling is, if Taiwan is about to fall and they haven’t destroyed those plants then we need to do it for them. Those plants control a huge amount of the world’s supply, and it would be akin to, and actually worse than, losing the Middle East’s oil supply as far as impact goes. I can tell you from working in the defense industry, if those plants fall into Chinese control, then probably 60-80 percent of our hardware will be unreplaceable*. It will take the US ten years to recover from the loss. But that loss would be doubly bad if those plants fall into the CCP’s hands.
* We were not supposed to use IC’s that were sourced overseas. The edict was universally ignored because those IC’s can’t be sourced at home.
“Political considerations come first to communists, economic considerations are secondary.”
That is true and a corollary of that is even when making economic decisions for economic reasons there is a political agenda behind it. The CCP has spurred the economic growth in China but contrary to western myths the state has not been liberalized in the political sense and the greater power of the economy has been put to use enhancing state control and its ability to maintain control. The economy of China is a power wielded by and for the CCP, in spite of the obvious material improvements that has also brought to most mainland Chinese.