Answering your questions

Many thanks for all the questions you sent in last week. It was a record haul - testament to the growing subscriber base. We haven’t been able to answer everything but have done our best to cover the key areas of interest. In some cases we’ve amalgamated questions on similar topics.

Lawrence answers on subjects including:

• A prospective US/China war

• Trump and Ukraine

• Russia’s nuclear threat

• Israel and war crimes

• The botched Libya intervention

• The Crocus Hall attacks

Sam answers on subjects including:

• Rejoining the EU

• Getting better people into politics

• Citizens’ assemblies

• Why Britain’s welfare state seems so weak

• Whether Labour can win a second term

• Austerity

• And how his ideology has changed

And we both answer on whether we ever considered going into frontline politics, and what it’s like doing the substack together.

Questions to Lawrence

Diarmid: I'd be interested on your take on what the shape of a hypothetical US-China war might be, as a corrective to people who glibly talk about such a war without considering what that might actually involve for the two countries and the rest of the world. 

AND

Martin Treacy: How do you see things looking in terms of possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, at this point? Will current Chinese economic difficulties make this more or less likely?

AND

Finn Wheatley: US grand strategy seems to be starting to move on from its post-91 'world policeman' mentality, and accept that choices and trade-offs must be made. Everyone agrees that China is the only state with the strength to truly rival the US over time. But relatively few active politicians/officials are willing to expressly advocate doing less elsewhere to do more countering China… Do you have any strong sense of how fast the American-led globalised 'world order' might start to disintegrate?

The conventional wisdom is that, in the first instance, a US-China war will be maritime. It is certainly not obvious where a ground war would take place. A naval war could break out over freedom of navigation issues, for example in the South China Sea, or else an attempt to break a blockade of Taiwan or alternatively to support Taiwanese forces resisting an attempt at reunification by force. China has built up formidable military forces very quickly but has yet to use them in any major operation so it is difficult to know how well they would function if they were suddenly propelled into war.

Navies perform best with devolved command structures but that might not happen with such a centralised political system. China is assumed to be technologically competent when it comes to digital warfare but nobody can be sure about what might happen in the cyber domain. Chinese capabilities are geared to denying US forces access to forward positions, but that again will depend on how untested systems will perform when it comes to the crunch. China has a no-first use doctrine on nuclear forces so its aim will be to deter the US from making nuclear threats rather than making any of its own. If a war is over Taiwan a lot will depend on how the Taiwanese resist any aggression. They will not be a pushover. 

The overall challenge for China therefore is to prepare for what would undoubtedly be a big war with all these uncertainties including untested systems. It is hard to see how this would be a war that started small and gradually escalated. For these reasons my guess if that Beijing will be cautious, relying on the threat of war to discourage Taiwan taking provocative action, and in particular abandoning the idea that it has anything to do with the mainland.  

I think the economic difficulties facing China at the moment make war less rather than more likely (I have never been convinced by ‘wag the dog’ scenarios).