Satellite Photos Show China's Warships in Naval Standoff

Thanks for the chuckle...

I'm pretty sure we all know how this ends. The US and EU can't help Ukraine properly, will they help Taiwan with strongly worded statements and meetings? Perhaps send socks and blankets for the first 3 months.

Any country that seeks security needs to pursue Nuclear deterrents. No one should trust the US Nuclear umbrella anymore.

These are drills, but they are clearly extensive drills in preparation for the real event. China will wait for the Trump administration to severely weaken the US before launching their invasion/blockade, most likely in a year or two.

It's complicated. The answer is that nobody knows.

The US policy is "strategic ambiguity". It's enough to let us talk out of both sides of our mouth, making unofficial and non-binding promises privately to the Taiwanese government, while not quite making ourselves explicitly China's enemy.

It's exactly the same kind of ambiguity that China is practicing right now. It's just a military exercise... unless it isn't.

(It's not quite the same as Russia's "military exercise" near Ukraine. China has been doing this a long time, so it has some credibility. Russia's invasion preparations never had credibility.)

So China and the US keep needling each other over Taiwan. It's the kind of "I'm not touching you" BS you get from children, and like with children, it looks like it's guaranteed to proceed from not-touching to punching in a very short but utterly random period of time.

Is it today? Who knows? Stay tuned!