Sarah Paine

You like the little natty upgraded mouse suit?

Here's his world.

Welcome to it.

And what he's got are 20 neighbors, 13 by land, seven by sea, many of which despise China for excellent reasons.

Not all of them, but some of them.

And if you look at it, it's all of these narrow seas.

If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody, I guess you could try Korea.

because you've got the Yellow Sea and then the Sea of Japan, except Japan sits out there.

That's a complicating factor.

Better bets in the South China Sea, because Vietnam, Brunei, and Cambodia, they don't have alternate coastlines.

If they want to reach the open oceans, they've got to transit the South China Sea.

However...

Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan all have other coastlines that face the high seas.

And remember, I've just given you a whole discussion about the Battle of the Atlantic, where when people have a high seas access, it's really difficult to shut them down because China would have to go all the way around to be on the far side to shut everything down on the other side.

Or maybe they're just going to obliterate it.

I don't know.

But anyway, the South China Sea is such a legal mess.

No one knows who owns what.

And in any kind of war, you're going to have all these neutrals who might suddenly join sides if they don't like what's happening.

But you can get a sense of what the possibilities are there.