Taiwan creep
China is quietly moving in on Africa like an unwanted uncle.
No Taiwan invasion anytime soon, so says the most recent intel-report. Chinese officials know an amphibious invasion would be logistically suicidal. Taiwan's terrain is a defender's paradise. Its strait is 100-miles wide, violent currents, hardly any beaches. Taiwan spent 70 years fortifying every part of this—with minefields, anti-ship missiles, all of it. The US Navy and Japanese SDF are also literally sitting right there, watching. Intel still gave 2049 the real deadline (China's centenary party) for the invasion. Everything between now and then is just China playing a long, slow, ugly distraction game—rehearsing useless war drills just to exhaust Taiwan's military readiness, threatening rare-earth exports, and interfering in elections to get a softer government in. China's Coast Guard has been doing the classic 'I'm not touching you, I'm just gonna stand three inches away from your door every single day' near Taiwan's waters for 23 years. Xi just showed up to a summit to lobby Trump directly to halt arms sales to Taiwan on the basis of the 1982 joint communiqué.
Why does China keep stalking Taiwan like a creepy ex to begin with? Taiwan dominates advanced chips. 90% of them are in their control. This is the input, irreplaceable, behind every modern military/economy. Xi doesn't like TSMS sitting there making China look like it's begging for 3nm chips. Second: Taiwan permanently cockblocks China from projecting real navy power. Taiwan is the only way out to open ocean, the exit door to the Pacific. Taiwan also sits right in the middle of a wall of US-allied islands (the First Island Chain), basically caging China inside its own waters. Every one of China's ships has to funnel through narrow little lanes that everyone else can watch, track, and target.
Funnily enough Xi will still give you the same 'the Taiwanese are just confused Chinese' shtick as Putin. Taiwan is a culturally distinct island that has spent 70+ years doing everything except 'feeling Chinese.' But obviously, Xi can't just come out and say 'TSMC is embarrassing us, I want my own chips.' Same way Putin can't just say 'I'm having an ethno-nostalgic breakdown about the USSR. Also I want the farmland. Also I want the ports. Mostly I want people to look at the map and be afraid of me again because my economy is literally a gas station with nukes and I'm running out of ideas.' So instead you get 40-page essays about 'de-Nazifying a country whose president is Jewish.' The gap between what they obviously want (strategic depth, sphere-of-influence dick measuring) and what they say they want is so wide it's genuinely laughable here.