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I May Have Been Wrong About 2027
Why China will probably invade Taiwan much sooner than I predicted
As readers kind enough to peruse my articles from time to time will likely be aware, I’ve been predicting that 2027 will be the year in which Xi orders Chinese forces to invade Taiwan and thereby force it into the loving embrace of his dictatorship. Hong Kong serves as an indicator regarding what Taiwan can expect, although because the Hong Kong takeover was peaceful (the UK ceded the territory to China at the end of its 99-year lease) it’s likely an overly-rosy view of what’s in store for hapless Taiwanese citizens. Basically expect the same kind of repressive legal structure but with a lot more blood, torture, disappearances, and plenty of “re-education” camps far to the north-west of China’s mainland.
I’ve also predicted that very soon after Xi launches the invasion of Taiwan, Russia will quickly take the three Baltic nations, as they lack all capacity for self-defense and are a mere two-hour drive from the Belarussian border. NATO is already a hollow joke and with Trump in the White House the last pretense of capability has evaporated. Without the USA there is no NATO and with Trump back in the White House there’s no USA.
The only open question is whether or not Kim will launch a devastating pre-emptive strike on South Korea at the same time, while promising to nuke the west coast of the USA if any attempt is made to resist him. My gut tells me that Kim will do this, but we’ll have to wait and see as the hard data is less plentiful here and NK would probably prefer a couple of extra years in which to build up its delivery options thanks to all the nice juicy technology Russia has been handing to it recently in return for NK meat to feed into the grinder in Ukraine.
Recently, however, as I monitor the Chinese economy and everyone sees the lessons learned from Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, I’ve begun to wonder if I was too optimistic in thinking 2027 will be the year in which the West finally definitively abandons all pretense and simply goes into pure all-out surrender mode. Given the state of the Chinese economy and the specter of ever-greater inflation in Russia due to the prolonged costs of turning Russia into a full-on war economy, Xi may conclude that moving sooner…
