Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 20, 2025
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43 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
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The Pentagon says in a war with China over Taiwan, we’d get our asses handed to us. We’d lose so badly Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and the Philippines would have no choice but to seek accommodation with China. If the report is correct then we have the same chance against China that Japan had against us in WW2.
We can’t fight them head-to-head, not in Chinese waters. We can still bottle them up at chokepoints in Malaysia and the Gulf, and we can continue to own the wider Pacific, but they’re going to own Asia.
We should really let that sink in, and think about where that leaves us in the big game of Risk. We need markets, resources and cheapish labor. People with deeper history chops than I have should think about how empires in decline might have limited that decline.
The Florida headline of the day- Catholic Church names New York priest as new bishop of Palm Beach
We got new cell phones at work last Monday.
First, I’m a bit concerned over the wisdom of replacing phones every two years. IMO most should last far longer. Partly it’s a function of frequent OS updates. let’s face it, improvements are ever more incremental these days, and have been for the past five years or so. I’ve a Samsung Galaxy Note 8, c. 2018, and it works perfectly well (Android 9 and all).
Anyway, it turns out I’ve been bumped up one tier. Instead of the cheapest mid market phone, I now get the mid-tier just below flagship model. In this case a Motorola G15, whatever that means.
It has one very nice feature I hadn’t come across or heard about, but for all I know is everywhere. The power button has the fingerprint reader. This means touching it unlocks the phone. I never locked my phones. I use them so frequently throughout the day, that having to scan a fingerprint, do a dot pattern, or typing a PIN, would have driven me crazy. This one, though, unlocks in the same action I’d use to turn the screen on, so it’s no inconvenience to have the phone locked.
Now, if only I can get the password manager to work…
Slugger’s point yesterday about that ridiculous ballroom should also consider that all of the future care and maintenance of that room–which will be considerable–will all be on the taxpayers’ shoulders.
@Jen:
Demolition would be so much cheaper.
There’s also the option to revive the old Roman practice of damnatio memoriae.
@Bill Jempty:
Sigh, another New Yorker retiring to Florida.
@Michael Reynolds: I can’t look at sourcing, since the piece is behind a paywall. But I would be careful with sourcing on stuff like this. And also careful with what exactly is stated.
The critical question is whether we can turn back an amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Straits. That is a very ambitious project for a Chinese military that has next to no naval tradition. (Maritime tradition, yes. I’m talking about warships.) It’s a fair distance, and they would be vulnerable. They have some good air assets and missiles, to be sure.
I do think that we would have zero chance of defeating the Chinese Army and occupying China. Not gonna happen.
Meanwhile, people leak stuff to advance their funding agenda.
@Sleeping Dog: But look at the bright side, the New Yorkers mostly go down I 95 and stay on the Atlantic side. I live on the Gulf of MEXICO side with the midwesterners. We already have Gen. Flynn, who lives about ten miles from me and is doing his utmost to eff up politics in Sarasota County.
My usual line is the east coast has nice sunrises, the west sunsets, and I’m retired, I don’t do sunrises.
@Jay L. Gischer:
The study – a leaked Pentagon study – says we lost in 97 out of 100 simulations. It’s not a hard job per se for the Chinese military. It could be costly to them, but the logistics are pretty straightforward. The distance is about the same as Normandy, 100-120 miles.
The Taiwanese themselves can sting the PLAN but if China has control of the air they’d have to be pretty reckless to bother. And there’s not much question the Chinese can achieve air superiority if not supremacy. Our carriers have to stand well out so would likely be crossing much greater distances. The bases in Philippines may or may not be available to use depending how Manila rates the odds. Ditto Japan. If Trump is still in office do you think Tokyo is going to risk it? They’d be fools to. And Guam is a looong way away.
Also, while I keep hearing that our naval tonnage is still greater than China’s, it wouldn’t be the whole US Navy, just the 7th fleet, though other fleets could contribute depending on warning time, etc…
It comes down to just how determined Xi is. He’s said flatly he’s doing it, and not making the effort would be a huge loss of face. So I think we’d have to assume their pain tolerance is much higher than ours. Do we want to risk the 7th fleet and our bases for what the Pentagon believes is a lost cause? The calculation may be that it’s better not to engage, rather than risk losing aircraft carriers in a doomed effort.
@Bill Jempty:
Hey, Bill, are you aware of the Anthropic Settlement? The payout is $3000 (with various caveats, could be more, could be 25% less for lawyers) per book they ripped off. We are mostly done applying and it looks like low six figures for us. Deadline is end of March. You might want to take a look.
Smoke:
Trickle release of Epstein files on a Friday signals move to bury Trump ties
Fire:
FBI notes detail grim demands Epstein made for procurement of underage girls
Yeah, he did it.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s sobering, but you aren’t being skeptical enough about sourcing and exactly what’s being looked at.
These were simulations. Simulations are only as good as the assumptions that they are built with. What assumptions were made about the readiness and effectiveness of Chinese air assets which are really completely untested, and which we have some reports of reduced effectiveness and readiness due to corruption?
Taiwan has airbases. Carriers can be used to do transfers. The entire focus of the Trump administration (if not Trump) has been to counter China. Do you really think we would walk away? That the Philippines would walk away? Japan? I am doubtful.
How much we will fight will depend on the timing. Taiwan is still a very critical link in semiconductor fab. In maybe 2-3 years time, it will not be so critical, as the world sees the threat and is working to counter it with new fab lines (even built by TSMC) built elsewhere.
So, in a couple of years, it would be much easier to walk away, but right now, we can’t. And sad to say, with Trump looking so feeble, that might encourage people.
@Jay L. Gischer:
There is a long, multi part essay at War on the Rocks regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It covers the terrain, there’s no equivalent of Omaha Beach or anything similar to the beaches of Normandy. Rocky shores will add to the difficulty. China’s military lacks any experience in this type of operation and there navy will be vulnerable. China lacks the logistical support needed, that is, landing craft.
IIRC, the authors summation was that China lacked the ability to carry out an invasion in this decade, but that it could develop the capability.
I’m hoping this is a gift link. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I’m excerpting the intro grafs but the whole piece is worth reading.
I agree that there may be problems with this estimate, but interestingly the thrust of the article is not that we need more spending on the Big Toys. We’ve seen in Ukraine that our tanks have not been of much use; HIMARS has. On the other side, the vastly larger Russian air force has not achieved air superiority after three years – not even from quite close-in bases. At the same time, Russian ships in port have been hit so hard by drones that they’ve had to withdraw from Crimea.
Carrier groups are very good at knocking down a dozen incoming missiles. How about two dozen? How about a hundred? Two hundred? Ships only carry a finite number of interceptors. Do we have more defensive missiles than China can throw at us? I doubt it.
It all comes down to air superiority. I am reminded that the RAF won the Battle of Britain mostly with the advantage of proximity – the Luftwaffe had to fly in, the RAF was already on the scene. RAF pilots could bail out and hop in the next plane, Luftwaffe pilots became POWs. How far do carriers have to stand out to sea? If we have to fly 500 miles to get into action and the Chinse only have to fly 100 miles, we lose. Will the Filipinos and Japanese back us up? And will the American people think a fight for TSMC – because that is what this is about – is worth losing sailors and airmen and capital ships?
@Michael Reynolds:
Yes I am. Some of my books were used but as requirement to be part of this settlement, ” “Book” refers to any work possessing an ISBN or ASIN which was registered with the United States Copyright Office within five years of the work’s publication and which was registered with the United States Copyright Office before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of publication.” As you know, I self-published for almost 10 years. Business was good but didn’t explode till 2020-21 for me. Before then I was careful with what I expended my royalties on. Therefore most of my self-published books, weren’t registered with the Copyright office as required. Two of them are however and on the Anthropic works list.
My settlement won’t be anywhere near as good as you and your wife’s.
@Michael Reynolds:
Just two slight comments on this-
Logistics would always favor China because they would have the much shorter supply lines.
A war over Taiwan could go nuclear if the US intervenes. It was a Chinese blockade of Taiwan that sparked just that in a 2000 television mini-series rendering of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach.
Dear Wife and I are going to watch Les Miserables at the Broward Center this afternoon. Afterwords we’re going out to dinner.
@Bill Jempty: I am guessing that you have decided to neither provide a defense of your position/explain yourself, nor apologize for yelling at me the other day.
Instead, you are content to use a space provided for you on a daily basis. So, enjoy that, I guess.
@Steven L. Taylor: Steven,
I explained myself before. You don’t like my answer. Tough on you. Oh where is that proof of me being a Trump apologist or supporter like I asked you to provide.
You have been making personal attacks on me. There is no need for me to apologize.
@Michael Reynolds:
Well, I have at least one title on the list.
A US/PRC war is something that we must avoid. There would be enormous costs in lives, destruction, and dollars no matter who won. The war in Vietnam was fought with 2.7 million soldiers and resulted in 58,000 KIA. It nearly tore the country apart. Our subsequent military actions were fought without wide participation of the citizenry against clearly outranked foes. A war with China can’t be done on the cheap. Huge numbers of our young people would have to enlist and die. Service on one of our aircraft carriers is fairly pleasant, good food, no seasickness, barber shops and bowling alleys on board. Against an opponent with lots of rockets and drones in their home waters it would become very unpleasant quickly. Let’s say that the war games are pretty wrong and we would win 2/3 of the time; it doesn’t make sense to gamble 50,000 lives. Xi’s China is not Saddam’s Iraq. Iraq was two trillion dollars and 4,500 KIA. China would be a much tougher nut to crack.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
@Jay L. Gischer:
And the Pentagon always says they need more $$. Always.
@Bill Jempty: People can read the initial interchange here. I honestly think your reading skills are sufficient to see that I did not make an accusation, but instead was pointing out the problems with making a comment by dropping a link. It was an offer for clarification, albeit a snarky one. But given you made the opening salvo (and then snarked some more in a previous open forum), I don’t think I was the one who set the tone.
You have been on this site long enough to know that I will engage in good faith with those who do me the same courtesy. But if you want to snark at me, I tend to snark back.
If you wish to state that you really don’t understand what was going on in my comments on that thread, I’d be happy explain.
But I will also say again: if you want to interact, be willing to be criticized.
I find hit-and-run comments annoying, especially from people who have thin skin, such as yourself, especially those who I know benefit daily from the work we do here on the site.
I don’t expect you to agree with me, but I do expect some level of comity.
You were rude the other day, which is not the first time. If you wish to ignore that fact, it is your business, but your pettiness is showing. And yes, that is a personal assessment, but if the shoe fits and all of that.
While the denizens at OTB can clearly see that I am letting you get under my skin a bit, I would note that how you continue to behave will also tell on you as well.
Given your daily sojourn on the site, on forums that I manually create for your enjoyment (and for the community), you’d think you could take a step back and behave like an adult.
That ball is in your court.
@Bill Jempty: BTW
What, are you twelve?
Compared to other sites I visit, this place has been a model of comity and decorum. At the risk of getting in the middle:
@Bill Jempty: I would have to say that you made a couple of at best ambiguous remarks. Reading them again, I still don’t quite see your meaning or your intent. As a professional writer, perhaps you could clarify, and maybe apologize for any unintentional misunderstanding.
@Steven L. Taylor: I agree you have consistently engaged in good faith. I have at least a couple times in comments here complimented your patience. I should be the last one to offer advice on diplomacy, but you’ve been good at it.
@CSK:
Did you apply? It’s not the most streamlined process.
@gVOR10:
He’s put up with me for years. Were my wife here she’d have something to say about that.
@Jay L. Gischer: “The entire focus of the Trump administration (if not Trump) has been to counter China. ”
The entire focus of the Trump administration is corruption, both financial and ideological.
@Michael Reynolds:
Thanks for posting this lookup tool. Doesn’t apply to me personally, but to several of my friends and acquaintances.
It’s a curious thing to search for authors and titles with the lookup tool. What’s included vs. what isn’t. Food for thought.
@Michael Reynolds:
@CSK:
Are there any of your books missing from the list that surprise you?
@Michael Reynolds: The only air force in the world that has both equipment and training for establishing air superiority in the current era is the USAF. Russia, along with most others, do denial of air superiority. Ground based anti air is very very good these days. And the Russians have some of the best. And yet that best S-300’s and so on, have been defeated in piecemeal by Ukrainian drone forces.
Xi could order the capability, but wishing doesn’t make it so.
This is serious. We should take it seriously. However, 97 percent is a scare number. People in a position to critically evaluate the simulation understand its limitations. You and I are not those people.
Let’s not forget that stopping Russia contributes to stopping China. It’s less of a tradeoff than some might want you to think.
Also, it appears that most everyone in the government other than Trump thinks so, and wants to support Ukraine. They pass aid bills quietly, but they pass them.
Sometimes in order to avert war, it may not be necessary to prove you can beat or drive back an aggressor, but only to have him know you can hurt him very very hard.
The US, may or may not stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Under a normal president, however, it can certainly bomb infrastructure and industrial targets in China. While China cannot do likewise past perhaps some US bases in the region.
China, right now, can hurt the US most by withholding resources like rare earths, not by military force.
The ability to badly hurt China might not be a successful deterrent, but neither is the ability to beat back the invasion of Taiwan. Not if Xi believes differently. See Mad Vlad in Ukraine. If he had not believed he could topple the government and take over a great dela more territory than he has by now, and in only a few weeks or months, I don’t think he’d have invaded to begin with. Maybe the Mad Tsar of Greater Russia might have settled on seizing all of the Donbas and maybe some of the adjacent oblasts on the Black Sea coast.
But then, counterfactuals can’t be falsified.
@Steven L. Taylor: That’s such an underwhelming response from somebody with a PhD. You can’t back up your accusations so you reply with insults instead. That is not a display of intelligence.
@Bill Jempty: Sigh.
So I guess your reading comprehension is as poor as it seems. Note that isn’t an insult, it is a professional assessment.
I would submit that you are the only one of us who has been insulting.
Indeed, you are being a rude.
I guess your Christmas wish is to be banned again?
Fine.
I guess your goal is to get banned again.
Video under ten minutes of a real life test of two AI agents.
TL;DR: it gave away the product and lost a lot of money.
I can’t get over the fact it ordered live fish and a Playstation.
@Michael Reynolds:
If there was a large island nation strongly allied with Russia and China just off the US’s eastern shore we would be demanding a military capability of taking it too, “just in case”.
The US has shown increasing political instability and recklessness for the past 30 years now. We have elected a reality TV show host who is obviously a bozo as CIC of the greatest military force in the world twice. We can’t assume attempts built a credible defense against us is proof of aggressive intentions, not anymore.
The US is China’s biggest customer. Why would they want a war with the US?
Can we hurt China if they invade? Of course. Does Xi believe we will? Putin didn’t think the West would back Ukraine, and if he’d been right Ukraine would have long since been defeated. If I were Xi I would have serious doubt about the US, especially under Trump, actually engaging. Maybe that’s a miscalculation, but Trump has been trashing alliances and doing his best to bend the knee to Moscow. I personally don’t think he’ll go to war for Taiwan. Pete Hegseth might, but Trump is done, he’s sick and demented and in the back of his mind he has to be remembering his father. They set up a phony office for Fred Trump to pretend he was still doing business, and I think we’re getting to that point with Don.
Xi makes no bones about it, he is planning to invade Taiwan in 2027 – while Trump is still in office. And he’s building the tools to do it. Between now and 2027 we don’t have the ability to really augment our forces, we don’t build ships in two years, we are struggling just to produce enough missiles. We absolutely make the best toys, but we make Ferraris and, as the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own. China is in the quantity business. And they don’t have to spread their navy across seven fleets, they just need the one.
China has a long-held and justified grudge over being repeatedly humiliated by the West and Japan. Right now they are being bottled up behind the first island chain. Every Chinese ship travels only because we let them use ‘our’ ocean. Xi knows we can cut off his oil any day we choose to do so. I think he sees that as more of the same, more of China being humiliated.
If China can take Taiwan they will have broken out of containment. Their humiliation will be avenged. And a US without allies, unreliable, random and impulsive, with a doddering cretin in charge of a corrupt administration, an administration that is already trying to surrender Europe, doesn’t look all that hard to beat. Fight Trump and his band of thieves and yahoos, or wait to possibly face an actual US president? If Xi wants it, now is the time.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Not if Xi is eyeing outer Manchuria, and he almost certainly is. If Xi thought he needed Russia, Russia would be getting a lot more support. Russia and China are natural enemies, there are a fukton of Chinese right up against a border Russia cannot hope to defend without going nuclear. All those sweet, sweet resources and no one guarding them. China has ordered map makers to use the old Chinese name for Vladivostok, a not-at-all subtle sign. And beyond Manchuria, all the rest of Siberia, not just resources but a foothold on the arctic.
@Mimai:
A number of our copyrights are not included. Most are, but a couple of series are only patchily represented. All-in it looks like we have 110 books listed, maybe 10 or 15 left out, I’m too lazy to do a complete inventory, this was all the form-filling I can handle. The books we ghosted are not our copyrights, and some more recent books were never in the Anthropic database. The first One and Only Ivan is in, the three sequels are not.
The terms are a bit hard to parse since they start with 1.5 billion in the kitty and expect a max of 500,000 claims. Minus 25% for the lawyers. If only 250,000 claims are made, the payout goes up to 6,000 per book, again minus 25%. I have no idea how many authors are filing.
We are in an unusual position, the vast majority of authors will have one or two books, not a hundred. People like Patterson or King or Stine will undoubtedly file, but some authors won’t know about it, some won’t bother, some are dead and their heirs may not even know about the settlement.
@Michael Reynolds:
That’s really interesting, thanks.
And very impressive! Bully for you and Katherine.
I’ve never written a book. I’ve written a lot of research articles. I wonder how I’d react if something like this happened to my articles.
That is, how would I feel about some being illegally acquired (on the list) whereas others went untouched (not on the list)? I think I might take a hard look at the latter category.
Some articles in this latter category would probably not surprise or bother me: “Yeah, this wasn’t a great paper / interesting enough paper… not worth pirating.”
Others articles in this category would no-doubt offend me: “This is great / meaningful work… how dare you not steal it!”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baumohl’s “The Secrets of Economic Indicators” is on the Anthropic list.
@Mimai:
Some of our work was not on the list. We (mostly I) wrote a work-for-hire series called Barf-O-Rama, which is exactly what it sounds like, but even worse. Somehow it failed to make the list and we are totally okay with that. We generally just say we’ve written ‘about 150’ books because honestly every time we do a count we come up with a different number.
@Michael Reynolds: One of my books is in there as well.
I also know another company used practically everything I have ever published to train their AI.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It is patently unfair that I get the same 3 Gs for a 140 page manuscript I tossed off in three weeks as you get for a researched work you presumably spent months on.
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t begrudge you the payout, but I appreciate the sentiment, nonetheless.