Sir Niall Ferguson

And that plan is to use air, sea, and undersea drones to sink Chinese vessels, which is quite a big move when you come to think about it.

So Hellscape implies war.

And all the war games I'm aware of, even the ones that the US comes out of ahead, are

are really large-scale conflicts in which a lot of ships get sunk, planes get shot down, missiles get fired, and people die.

So President Trump could at some point be faced with the dilemma, do you accept a quiet Chinese takeover of Taiwan like what they did in Hong Kong?

Or do you risk World War III by actually letting hellscape happen and having US naval assets sink Chinese ships?

That's going to be the decisive moment of Donald Trump's presidency if it happens, because they're in the situation where they will have to decide, is America going to stay number one in the Indo-Pacific but have to fight a war to do it?

Or is it going to accept Chinese privacy, in which case the whole world reconfigures

particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and Beijing becomes the central hub.

We don't really know how advanced it is.

I think that if one talks to the people who do know

that there's still quite a bit of confidence in the US military about what they could do right now.

But the Chinese are adding to their own naval, submarine, air, missile, and space capabilities at a much faster rate than we are modernizing ours.

And so I've just been reading an excellent forthcoming book about this

by my Hoover colleague Ike Fryman and his co-author Harry Halem.

And the balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific is inexorably tipping China's way.

So that's the kind of military-naval dimension.

It's

going to get worse.

And remember Ferguson's law.