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sundaygimp, Februar 2026 (Foto: 1984, Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise)

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The Art of War in the Taiwan Strait

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been in the Arabian Sea since January 26. The Gerald R. Ford transited Gibraltar on February 20. Thirteen Aegis destroyers, 600-plus Tomahawks in single-salvo capacity, 500 aircraft spread across bases from Jordan to Qatar—the largest American force concentration in the Middle East since 2003. Every analyst in Washington is writing about the coming air campaign against Iran. None of them are writing about what matters, which is that Beijing is using this spectacular distraction to take Taiwan without an amphibious landing, without a naval engagement, and without a shot fired.

To understand why the Iran crisis is a feature and not a bug from the Chinese strategic perspective it is first, necessary to understand what actually happened in June 2025, as opposed to what the censors convinced the media happened.

The air superiority story was real. Israeli F-35s and F-15s operated with impunity over Iran. The IRIAF’s fleet of pre-1979 American hand-me-downs was irrelevant. Israel struck 1,480-plus targets and the B-2s hit Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. This is not in dispute.

What is has mostly been suppressed is the cost of defending against Iran’s response. Iran launched roughly 550 ballistic missiles and over 1,000 drones during the Twelve-Day War. The official “90% interception rate” is a masterwork of selective statistics: it describes the success rate of attempted intercepts. Al Jazeera’s analysis found that of 574 missiles, only 257 were engaged at all. The remaining 317 were never intercepted. Of the 257 attempts, 201 succeeded, 20 partially, 36 failed.

The damage to Israel, the extent of which is still under military censorship, included a direct hit on the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv that rendered Netanyahu’s office unusable for four months, confirmed satellite imagery of structural damage at Tel Nof Airbase, devastation of the Beersheba cyberwarfare base, $150-200 million in damage to the Haifa oil refinery, and at least five military facilities directly struck according to the Telegraph. Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker reported that “many strikes went unreported” and that “we were also deterred.” So much for the clean victory.

But the damage to Israel is secondary. The primary problem is the damage to the interceptor stockpile. The United States expended approximately 150 THAAD missiles in twelve days—roughly 25% of total production since 2010. Eighty-odd SM-3s were consumed. Israel was running low on Arrow interceptors by war’s end. FY26 authorized procurement of 37 new THAAD rounds. Twelve days of defending against 500 missiles consumed years of production and a quarter of the cumulative stockpile.

Iran began the war with 2,500-3,000 missiles. They fired 550. This means Iran retained 1,950 to 2,450 missiles post-war. They’ve had eight months to build and otherwise acquire more missiles, disperse them, and harden their launch sites. The interceptor math does not work for a second round. This is not analysis. It is arithmetic. And the more significant danger is if either the Chinese or the Russians have helped them reduce their margin of error from 1 kilometer to 500 meters or less.

Just this week, something happened that the press mentioned in passing and clearly failed to understand the implications. The PLA and MizarVision published high-resolution satellite imagery pinpointing American military assets across the Middle East. Eighteen F-35s and six EA-18G Growlers at Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Patriot positions at Al Udeid. THAAD deployments in Jordan. The PLA produced a video titled “Siege of Iran” showing eight US bases under continuous satellite surveillance, with real-time maritime tracking of carrier groups via Yaogan satellites.

This was not an intelligence leak. It was a gift to Tehran, delivered publicly, with the PLA’s name on it.

The significance is not the obvious warning, but what it enables. Iran has completed its transition from GPS to BeiDou-3 for missile guidance, which means it is now encrypted, jam-resistant, and isn’t subject to American denial-of-service attacks. During the June war, GPS jamming was one of the most effective defensive measures against Iranian missiles using satellite terminal guidance. That vulnerability has been eliminated. Combined with Chinese satellite targeting data showing the exact coordinates of every defensive position, fuel depot, and aircraft shelter in the theater, Iran can shift from the saturation tactics of June to more accurate time-sensitive strikes against specific targets.

Former CENTCOM commander Votel dismissed the Chinese and Russian naval presence in the Strait of Hormuz as “an easy way to show support” that “doesn’t fundamentally change anything.” This is the kind of assessment that sounds reasonable if you think military support means destroyers, and sounds idiotic if you understand that ISR is the decisive enabler of modern precision warfare and that China is providing exactly that. The next Iranian missile will originate from Iranian soil. Its targeting data will have traversed Chinese satellites. No Chinese ship needs to fire a single missile for this to fundamentally change the equation.

The American analytical establishment is organized by regional command. CENTCOM watches the Middle East. EUCOM watches Europe. INDOPACOM watches the Pacific. Nobody’s job is to watch all three simultaneously, which is why nobody in Washington can see the obvious.

Iran: Two carrier strike groups committed, hundreds of aircraft, the largest Middle East deployment in two decades. Iran can’t fold because the regime’s survival calculus has inverted—6,000 protesters killed in December, the rial down 90% since 2018, senior officials telling Khamenei that fear is no longer a deterrent. The Libya precedent governs: Gaddafi disarmed and died in a ditch. Iran’s leaders would rather fight and die than capitulate and die, and they’re now better armed for the second round than they were for the first.

Ukraine: Russia is not “bogged down” and it never was. Russian forces are optimized for modern attrition drone warfare and are methodically advancing. Putin stated in December that “interest in withdrawal has been reduced to zero.” Ukrainian assessments give Russia a 12-18 month window for an Odessa operation, with the summer 2026 offensive already in preparation. Odessa’s fall makes Ukraine landlocked, which marks an end to maritime trade, an end to grain exports, and the end of the war. Every interceptor America fires in the Persian Gulf is one unavailable for European defense. The Russians have an obvious incentive to keep the US occupied in the Middle East during the Odessa push.

Taiwan: No carrier surge. No unusual PLA mobilization. No amphibious lift concentration. Nothing that triggers the satellite-watchers and wargamers.

That’s because the operation isn’t going to be a military one.

The CCP’s annual Taiwan Work Conference in February identified four priorities for 2026: unite “patriotic” forces in Taiwan; integrate PRC-Taiwanese supply chains while weakening US-Taiwanese ones; strengthen the legal basis for unification; and establish a task force using United Front work and cyberspace operations to damage the DPP in upcoming municipal elections.

The KMT isn’t being coerced into this. Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun has publicly and repeatedly sought engagement with Xi. PRC state media reported approvingly on her cross-strait policies. The CCP is transforming the KMT into a recognized party able to speak on Taiwan’s behalf, into a parallel diplomatic channel that bypasses the elected DPP government entirely.

Taiwan’s domestic politics just happen to be cooperating in harmony with this development. Constitutional crises, legislative paralysis, opposition attempts to remove President Lai and his cabinet, mass recall elections, and gridlock of the court system. The AEI/ISW assessment, from analysts who are actively unsympathetic to unification, recognize the instability of the situation: “The CCP can exploit this gridlock and general distrust in Taiwanese institutions to undermine the legitimacy of Taiwan’s government and present itself as a preferable alternative.”

The fishing militia exercises are relevant here, but not as the invasion rehearsal the military analysts believe them to be, but as economic coercion capability demonstration. Between 1,400 and 2,000 PRC fishing boats mobilized in blockade-like formations in December and January. Taiwan’s Coast Guard expanded its “suspicious vessel” list from 300 to 1,900 in response. This doesn’t signal D-Day. It signals the ability to strangle the island economically at will, and therefore the cost of resistance to any incoming government considering whether to cooperate with Beijing or not.

The path forward isn’t complicated. The KMT wins municipal elections. The DPP is discredited. A political crisis—manufactured or organic—produces a change of government. The new government invites dialogue, accepts a framework for integration, and stands the military down. What, precisely, is the US going to invade to prevent? It cannot defend a government that does not wish to be defended. It cannot maintain an alliance with a country whose leadership has chosen the other side.

The military analysts build their models of Taiwan as if Xi Jinping were a US president and someone who receives briefings about a faraway island he’s never visited and doesn’t know very well. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation and the Chinese president.

Xi spent seventeen years in Fujian Province, directly across the strait from Taiwan. Vice mayor of Xiamen, party secretary of Fuzhou, governor of the province, and simultaneously head of the Party Committee’s Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs. His specific job for nearly two decades was courting the top Taiwanese businessmen with tax incentives, land deals, and government support. Xiamen and Fuzhou became the primary hubs for Taiwanese investment on the mainland under his direct management. He opened the direct shipping routes between Xiamen and Kinmen. The cross-strait economic integration model that later became national policy was his personal creation, built from the ground up at the provincial level.

Then five years in Zhejiang, which is the other major destination for Taiwanese investment, followed by Shanghai. He staffed his government accordingly. Zheng Shanjie, now the NDRC chairman, started as a local official in Xiamen when Xi was deputy mayor. In a “surprise” career move, Zheng was appointed deputy director of the Taiwan Office. This should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

Xi doesn’t need intelligence briefings about the Taiwanese business elite. He’s known them for thirty years. He knows who’s leveraged, who owes him favors, who’s sympathetic to unification, and who can lean on others. A political transition doesn’t require tanks. It requires the right phone calls to the right people at the right moment, and Xi has spent his entire career assembling the right numbers.

Washington’s analytical failure on Taiwan isn’t an intelligence failure. It’s a cultural failure.

The entire American strategic establishment runs on Clausewitzian concepts: war as politics by other means, identify the center of gravity, mass force, achieve decisive battle. That’s how they think about Taiwan, in terms of carrier groups, kill chains, amphibious lift ratios. The analytical infrastructure is organized around “can China successfully invade?” as if that were the relevant question. But it’s not.

Sun Tzu’s hierarchy of strategic excellence ranks the highest achievement as defeating the enemy’s strategy, followed by disrupting his alliances, then attacking his army, with besieging walled cities at the bottom—the mark of failure, the option you resort to when everything else has gone wrong. An amphibious invasion of Taiwan is literally the lowest-ranked option in the strategic tradition Xi was educated in. Everything Beijing is actually doing—the economic integration, the KMT cultivation, the United Front work, the three-theater overextension of American forces—maps to the higher levels of the hierarchy. But the Pentagon keeps modeling the lowest one, because that’s the one they know how to wargame.

The entire PLA buildup may serve a dual purpose that the military analysts can’t see because they’re not trained to look for it: fixing Washington’s analytical attention on the invasion scenario, consuming defense budgets and strategic planning bandwidth on the wrong problem, while the actual operation proceeds through political channels. All warfare is based on deception, and the most elegant deception is one where the enemy sees exactly what you’re doing—building an invasion force—and draws exactly the wrong conclusion about what it’s for.

Xi Jinping is 72. He has broken every CCP institutional policy in order to remain in power. The 2027 Party Congress is where he has to either step down or pursue a fourth term. The centennial of the PLA’s founding falls the same year. Taiwan’s next presidential election is January 2028.

Mao founded the People’s Republic. Deng opened it to the world. Neither accomplished reunification with Taiwan island. I believe Xi intends unification to be his crowning legacy, and peaceful reunification would mark the superior achievement, not just in strategic and economic senses, but in the Chinese civilizational context. Military conquest would prove the PLA is strong. Peaceful reunification would prove that Chinese civilization’s gravitational pull is irresistible, that the Western model of strategic competition was defeated by patience and political art, and that the last holdout returned to the fold voluntarily. It would vindicate not just the CCP but the entire Sunzian tradition against the Clausewitzian one. The Americans spent trillions preparing for an invasion that never came while China won through asymmetric unrestricted warfare and 勢—the patient cultivation of positional advantage until the outcome becomes inevitable.

That would be a personal legacy that surpasses Mao, and Xi knows it.

The board is now set. Iran absorbs American attention and interceptor stocks. Russia pushes toward Odessa while the European governments begin to collapse under the weight of their impotence and corruption. The KMT builds its position inside Taiwan. Xi waits for the convergence, the right moment when US forces are committed, interceptors depleted, Europeans are helpless, Taiwan’s DPP is discredited, and the first quiet phone calls are made.

I don’t know the exact timeline. But I know the strategy, and I know about the man, and as an East Asian Studies major and armchair military historian, I know the tradition he operates in. From the Chinese perspective, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting a battle. And while we’re watching Iran, I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening.

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Openbare boekenkast en rendier | Public bookcase and reindeer

Utrecht 2025

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Originally posted at: blog.ernste.net/2026/02/22/ope…

Tragédie de Lyon : diversion et âneries, encore et encore.

Regis de Castelnau

Le festival d’âneries continue autour de la mort de Quentin Deranque. Je ne pensais pas entendre autant de bêtises et voir l’étalage d’autant d’inculture. Et tout cela bien sûr au détriment des véritables enjeux politiques qui sont les nôtres. Donc, je rappelle les termes de la polémique, après les conséquences tragiques d’une classique et politique bagarre de rue, nous sommes sommés de choisir entre : « Quentin Deranque saint et martyr, ou réincarnation de Horst Wessel. » Le tout étant évidemment utilisé avec un savant mélange d’hypocrisie et de bonne foi. Sans oublier bien sûr la totale ignorance de l’histoire. Car parmi les imbécillités que j’ai vu passer, il y avait celle selon laquelle : « on n’a jamais vu une violence pareille. Jamais dans l’histoire il y a eu des combats de rue dans lesquels des militants de « droite » ont été tués par des militants de « gauche ». Et même le 6 février 34, puisque les militants de « droite » avaient été tués par la police. » Tout ça pour convaincre bien sûr que l’auteur direct de la mort du jeune homme est bien Jean-Luc Mélenchon himself.

Ah bon, jamais ?

Et bien on va rappeler un petit épisode qui s’est produit dans notre pays en 1925. La fameuse affaire de la fusillade de la rue Damrémont ou à la suite d’affrontements ayant éclaté entre des militants des jeunesses patriotes et des militants communistes, venus perturber une réunion. Bilan, quatre militants des jeunesses patriotes seront tués par balles lors des affrontements ! On trouve tout sur Wikipédia, y compris une déclaration de mon aïeul Édouard (!). Il y en a eu d’autres depuis, beaucoup d’autres. Pendant la guerre froide et pendant la guerre d’Algérie, ce ne fut pas si rare.

Ce qui est intéressant avec l’affaire de la rue Damrémont, c’est le détail de la présence sur les lieux avec les militants communistes d’un dénommé François Chasseigne qui ne sera finalement pas impliqué dans les meurtres, mais sera cité comme témoin dans le procès.

La trajectoire suivante du dénommé Chasseigne est instructive. Il sera élu radical par la suite, changera progressivement d’affiliation politique pour devenir furieusement anticommuniste, sera un des artisans de l’interdiction du PCF en septembre 39, votera les pleins pouvoirs à Pétain et ira à Vichy pour y finir finir secrétaire d’État avec le statut de ministre. Avant d’être condamné à la libération pour collaboration.

Classique.

Cet exemple est très intéressant car il montre bien le caractère dérisoire de certains aspects des polémiques au-delà de la tragédie. Où en seront les uns et les autres dans 20 ans ? Bien malin qui peut le dire. Pour ce qui me concerne, j’ai vu absolument tous les grands révolutionnaires de mai 68 rentrer à la maison et rallier les pires des pouvoirs (coucou Cohn-Bendit). Et depuis, ça continue encore et encore

Personnellement je ne miserais pas un centime sur le fait que Raphaël Arnault, reste le preux antifasciste (en carton) qu’il prétend être aujourd’hui. Lorsque l’on voit Besancenot militer pour le soutien militaire et financier au bataillon néonazi Azov, ou le pitre influenceur Usul , balancer par-dessus bord ses prurits gauchistes pour afficher désormais son ralliement militant au macronisme.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

regisdecastelnau.substack.com/…