The U.S. Approach To A Hypothetical Invasion Of Taiwan

Size comparison

The United States military is acutely aware of the possibility that the People's Republic of China on the mainland (the PRC), might try to invade and conquer Taiwan, something that the PRC has repeated threatened to do, although a military conflict with between the Philippines and the PRC in which the U.S. might become embroiled seems more likely in the short term and has resulted in more incidents of low intensity warfare in the last two or three years. I've also explained, elsewhere, why the PRC's reliance on international trade in a wide variety of goods and services to support its economy makes an invasion of Taiwan a much more costly option for it, than a globally unpopular war would be for Russia, whose international exports are dominated by oil and gas, or North Korea, which is very isolated economically from the rest of the world. Further background is available below.

Indeed, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the single largest rhetorical justification used by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser but still great extent by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, for U.S. military expenditures.

The U.S. Strategy

The U.S. doesn't have any major military bases in Taiwan, unlike its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, three U.S. territories in the Pacific, and a smaller U.S. military base in the Philippines (which was once a much larger presence), presumably, in order to formally honor its "One China" policy.

But the U.S. has sold a lot of sophisticated U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, and together with its allies, can marshal considerable naval and air forces in the region.

Basically, the plan is for the U.S., Taiwan, and its allies to direct large numbers of anti-ship missiles and when the opponents are very close, Taiwanese artillery and allied naval gun shells at invading Chinese ships and boats, deployed from land, from surface ships at sea, from every manner of aircraft from long range stealth and conventional bombers, to carrier and land based fighter aircraft (some making the trip with the help of aerial refueling), to maritime patrol aircraft, to C-130 and C-17 military transport planes carrying missile launching cargo, to long range drones, to nuclear attack submarines, with the nuclear attack submarines also launching torpedoes. It would use U.S. satellites, high altitude spy planes, surveillance drones, and U.S. signals intelligence resources to identify targets (as well as any human intelligence resources within China available to the U.S. or its allies). Containerized anti-ship missile batteries will soon make it possible for cargo ships, amphibious transport ships, and merchant ships to also carry and deliver anti-ship missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles.

Long range bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, C-17s, and fighter aircraft that use aerial refueling tankers, can travel thousands of miles and make the trip in about 12-13 hours from Hawaii. The trip from based in Japan or South Korea or Guam or American Samoa or the Northern Marina Islands would be shorter. Surface ships and submarines not already in the area can take several weeks to arrive, rendering them almost irrelevant in a fast developing naval battle, without a great deal of advance warning from satellites and other intelligence that she China mobilizing.

The aircraft and ships and ground batteries firing anti-ship missiles don't have to get particularly close. The aircraft can stay at high altitudes. Even the shortest range fighter and helicopter carried anti-ship missiles have a range of 18-20 miles. Most have ranges from 100 to 600 miles, and the aircraft can get just within range and turn around if the risk of air defenses is great. Modern torpedoes have a range of about 24 miles, although a longer range provides a target a greater opportunity to evade it.

The U.S. and its allies could deposit of small force of mostly light ground troops in the lead up to an invasion and during an invasion, but for the most part, Taiwan would have to rely on its own troops and reserves, and pre-placed equipment for its ground forces, to repel any Chinese troops that managed to cross the Taiwan strait by sea or by air.

The mission of Taiwan and its allies is easier. It need only destroy or mitigate the harm from incoming ships, aircraft, drones, missiles, and naval gun shells (the Taiwan strait is too wide for cannon artillery or all but the longest range artillery missiles on the mainland to cross) with a mix of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. They don't need to board ships of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and don't have to deliver troops or their equipment in an amphibious invasion. PLAN submarines are effective ways to deny access to the ships of Taiwan and its allies and merchant ships bound to Taiwan, but most are fairly short range coastal submarines that have almost no effectiveness against the aircraft of Taiwan and its allies, and pose only a manageable threat to surface warships of Taiwan and its allies that are not in the Taiwan strait or too close to the island of Formosa.

A carrier with F-35C fighter aircraft, for example, need only be close enough for its fighters to fly to the edge of their 700 (non-nautical) mile combat radius which in turn must be within 150 to 700 (non-nautical) miles of the target of their anti-ship missiles. So, the carrier can strike a ship in the Taiwan strait that is 850-1400 miles away from its, for example, from the vicinity of the Northern Marina Islands, or Tokyo, or South Korea, or the southern most islands of the Philippines. 

A carrier group at that distance would also have a decent chance of intercepting long range missiles bound towards it from mainland China, and the range of these anti-ship missiles is greater than all but the most potent anti-aircraft missiles in China's arsenal and would have to be timed to strike the aircraft delivering the missiles only just as the aircraft is about to launch its air to ground missiles or is just returning from doing so. And, of course, if an F-35 is hit by a Chinese anti-air missile, only one pilots life, at most, is lost, and there is a decent chance that the pilot could eject and be recovered by a search and rescue team. The number of Chinese ground troops killed every time a Chinese warship or worse yet, a Chinese troop carrying ship, is sunk, would be profoundly greater.

Certainly, Chinese troops that do manage to reach the Taiwanese shore by sea, or by helicopter or transport plane or as paratroops, as elite soldiers in an massive all volunteer military of professional Chinese soldiers are, on average, going to be better trained and more skilled soldiers, than Taiwanese ground troops at the vanguard of a massive but not terribly ready or elite reserve force. But the Taiwanese troops know their territory, have the support of the locals, have been training for this mission and this mission only, are fighting to protect their homes, and will locally outnumber the modest number of Chinese troops that manage to cross the strait at least at first, if the efforts to Taiwan and its allies to destroy incoming troop carrying ships and transport aircraft is reasonably successful.

Also, in an era of Chinese demographics where one child families are the norm, even in this nation of 1.4 billion people, the lives of young men serving as soldiers in the PRC's military are no longer cheap and expendable. And, China has not fought any actual hot conflict in which its any significant number of its soldiers and sailors have lost their lives in the living memory of the vast share of the Chinese people. They haven't had much of a chance to come to see these losses as a necessary price to meet its geopolitical objectives, which it has mostly achieved with trade, aid, and diplomacy.

For all of China's bluster, one can seriously doubt whether China really has the stomach to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, most of its navy, a substantial share of its air force, and many of its coastal military resources, when it can already extract much of what it wants Taiwan for economically as opposed to culturally or politically, through trade. 

China has nuclear weapons, but those too are less potent of a threat in a Taiwan invasion. Using on nuclear weapon on the island of Formosa pretty much defeats the purpose of conquering it and would make it an international pariah. But missile defenses are effective enough that ICBMs aimed to the U.S. or its allies might be completely or almost completely thwarted, with any successes threatening massive nuclear retaliation against it.

The Historical And Geopolitical Context And Background

The island of Formosa is about 100 miles from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait. 

A typical naval warship can make the trip in about four hours, a very fast one might make it in two or three hours. A helicopter or slower drone could make it in forty-five minutes or less. A subsonic missile or fighter jet or military transport plane can make the trip in ten to fifteen minutes. A supersonic jet fighter can make the trip in five minutes. A hypersonic missile can make the trip in less than two minutes.

The PRC claims the island of Formosa upon which Taiwan is situated is a rebel province which is part of its territory, along with the strait between Formosa and the mainland, despite the fact that the regime has never had any control or authority on the island, and the fact that no mainland Chinese regime has had any control or authority on the island since 1895. The modern Chinese state dates only to the revolution in China in 1911.

Meanwhile, Taiwan, even more laughably, claims to be the legitimate government in exile of mainland China, a territory it lost any remnant of authority or control over from its inception when its regime retreated there after losing the civil war in China that persisted from the end of World War II in 1945 which left a power vacuum there, until the victory of the Maoists and defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, 75 years ago. The Kuomintang party abandoned its claim to be the sole government of mainland China in 1991 in the same year that it ended "emergency rule".

Imperial China ruled the island of Formosa from 1662 when it ousted the Dutch and large numbers of people from mainland China migrated there, until 1895 when the island was conquered by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese ruled it for half a century until the end of World War II in 1945. 

After World War II, there was a civil war in China between the Maoist Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The non-communist Chinese Nationalist Party eventually lost that civil war and relocated to the island of Formosa in a mass migration of its remaining loyalist in 1949 (the same year that the Maoist PRC regimes was declared by Chairman Mao), filling the post-World War II power vacuum caused by the collapse of Imperial Japan's rule there. The following year, in 1950, now 74 years ago, the PRC conquered Tibet.

Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a de facto dictator for twenty-six years until 1975, with U.S. backing against expansion of the Communist PRC as part of the Cold War, running the economy on a capitalist model.

The PRC claimed the island as its territory, even though no mainland Chinese government had ruled there since early 1895, and in 1971, after three-quarters of a century in mainland China had no control or authority there, and despite the fact that the PRC regime had never had control or authority there, in 1971, the U.N. recognized the PRC's claim to the island and expelled Taiwan from the U.N. The PRC terminated its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in 1978. Today, following the U.N.'s lead, only 13 countries, including the U.S., have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The PRC and Taiwan had their first formal talks with each other again in 2014, thirty-six years after breaking off diplomatic relations but have not reestablished diplomatic ties. Per the BBC link below:

Today, only 12 countries (plus the Vatican) officially recognise Taiwan. The US decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 was the turning point. And a richer, more powerful China exerts pressure so more countries do not recognise Taiwan or lend it support. But America remains the island's strongest ally, sells arms to it and has vowed to help in case of a Chinese attack.

The U.S., however, continued to be a strong ally to Taiwan and its military guaranteed its independence from the PRC, and under its influence, Taiwan eventually reformed itself, carrying out land reform to address the feudal era inequalities that led to the Maoist revolution on the mainland, instituting universal public education, modernizing its agricultural and industrial economies, and finally, step by step becoming a democracy. Martial law was lifted in 1987 after 38 years. Four years later in 1991, four decades of "emergency rule" was ended. And, five years after that in 1996, Taiwan had its first direct Presidential election, which the Kuomintang party, the successor to the original Chinese Nationalist Party that had controlled Taiwan for forty-seven years since 1949, won. 

The uncontested rule of Chiang Kai-shek's dominant Kuomintang party finally ended in the year 2000, when the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won the Presidential election, only for the Kuomintang party to regain the Presidency from 2006 to 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party regained the Presidency, in part, over concerns that the Kuomintang party was to friendly with China and might jeopardize Taiwan's independence. The Democratic Progressive Party still holds the Presidency today. China has gradually stepped up its saber rattling towards Taiwan since the Kuomintang Party lost the Presidency in 2016.

Taiwan is now a first world country with a high standard of living in an advanced stage of demographic transition of 23.6 million people (compared to about 1,400 million people in the PRC which is about 59 times a large). Taiwan's economy is best known for its advance computer chip manufacturing which is the global state of the art. Indeed, according to the BBC, "By one measure, a single Taiwanese company - the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC - has over half of the world's market."

Despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations, 21% of Taiwan's imports are from the PRC and 26% of its exports are to the PRC.

About 70% of the Taiwanese people are Han Chinese, another 25% or so are from another Southern mainland Chinese ethnicity, about 2-3% of the Taiwanese people are indigenous Formosans who speak sixteen different languages once of which is the ancestral language of the Austronesian family of languages spoken from Easter Island and Oceania, to Southeast Asia, to Madagascar, with a small percentage of people of other ancestries. Mandarin Chinese, and two other Chinese topolects (one of which has several dialects) are the predominant languages of Taiwan. But even Chinese languages like Mandarin which are present in both Taiwan and the mainland have developed distinct Taiwanese accents that are perhaps as distinct from their mainland counterparts as American and Canadian English dialects, in their spoken versions, in the non-logographic written versions of them, and in subtleties of meaning and pronunciation of their shared Chinese characters. 

Over the last thirty years or so, however, the people of Taiwan have increasingly come to identify themselves as Taiwanese, or as both Taiwanese and Chinese. About two-thirds identify as Taiwanese only. Almost a third identify as both, and only one or two percent now identify only as Chinese.

Taiwan's religious makeup reflects the pre-Maoist religious mix of China, with 42% adhering to Chinese folk religion (a close cousin of Japanese Shinto practice), 27% identifying primarily as Buddhist, 13% identifying as Daoist, 7% identifying with East Asian "new religions", 6% as Christian, and the remainder as non-religious agnostics, although these religious movements are not nearly so mutually exclusive as Western religious denominations and sects.

Taiwan controls a territory of about 13,900 square miles, while the PRC controls about 3.7 million square miles, which is about 2660 times as large.

Critically, the PRC of today is not the PRC of 1949. While the PRC doesn't adhere fully to the extreme version of capitalism found in the United States and has high levels of state involvement in the economy, its record economic growth for many decades has been made possible only through market based economic reforms, soft recognition of property and contract rights, and sufficient openness towards ideas from the world outside of China to allow it to gain the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for it to rapidly catch up to the developed world. 

The assimilation of Hong Kong into China has meant even more growing pains for both sides. 

China is still astoundingly authoritarian, but it is also not the raw, unpredictable cauldron of violence that it experienced in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution. 

Despite being nominally communist, China has its fair share of billionaires and there is a great deal of overlap between its political elites and its economic elites. In other words, China's rules are also among the very wealthiest people in the entire country, which makes a return to an extremely leveling brand of communism that eats the rich unlike to recur there, even if it is quite a dangerous thing to be a billionaire or centi-millionaire in China that can lead to your untimely demise in a usually not officially acknowledged manner if the cross the wrong people or offend the sensibilities of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.

So far, China has liberalized economically in a gradual manner, rather than all at once as the Soviet Union did in what turned out to be a chaotic and sudden mess that transformed the country from Soviet style communism or crony capitalism run by oligarchs in less than a quarter of a century, with intense societal and governmental pain along the way. This lesson schools Chinese Communist Party leaders to be cautious in their reforms, and had discouraged a relaxation of its authoritarian political model. 

But the expectations of continuous fast economic growth that they have developed for themselves puts pressure on them to adopt policies that work to continue that as much as possible and at some point, China's authoritarian rule will have to be relaxed to sustain that, particularly as China starts to have to rely on new innovations of its own, rather than copying proven global economic and technological models to achieve new economic growth. Also, non-economic freedom is, to some extent, one of the luxuries that people in economically prosperous societies crave and desire. The more affluent the Chinese people become, the more they are going to be willing to face significant personal risk and sacrifice and economic resources to escape authoritarian rule. And, there are enough wealthy Chinese people who have traveled abroad to less authoritarian counties, or who have access to less censored international media, that they can know that it is possible to leave in a freer and more democratic world (and the people of Hong Kong have demonstrated that this can work even for ethnically and culturally Chinese people), that it is an enjoyable and desirable intangible luxury to have, and that there are ways of achieving and sustaining it that they can learn and copy as they did less political foreign technologies. It isn't clear how smooth or rocky the path to that end will be, and in the near term, transitioning from China level authoritarianism to Singapore level authoritarianism, or something like it, may be an intermediate step. But it is hard to see a trajectory in which China becomes more insular and authoritarian, rather than less so, in over the next several decades.

This is all to say, then, that it an invasion of Taiwan can be discouraged for a sufficiently long period of time, that eventually mainland China may eventually catch up with Taiwan (which has only enjoyed more or less full democracy and social freedoms for thirty years or so itself), at which point a merger of the PRC and Taiwan might not be so problematic anymore.

Military Capabilities

Taiwan is quite militarized, with 169 thousand active duty military personnel, 1,657 thousand reserve troops, and a defense budget of $16.2 billion. But this is dwarfed by the PRC's 2,035 thousand active duty military personnel, 650 thousand reserve troops, and $242.4 billion USD defense budget. Taiwan has 26 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 4 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels. China has 92 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 59 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels and is expanding its fleet rapidly. Taiwan's air force has 405 jet fighters. China has more than 1,628 jet fighters. Taiwan has 650 tanks. China has 4,800 tanks.

Most of the information above is drawn from a BBC background piece and the 2024 World Almanac (hard copy).

Unlike the United States and Russia, which have large "blue sea Navies", China's ships rarely venture more than 400 miles from its Pacific Coast (although China has deployed as many as a dozen naval ships to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean right up to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and has an ample merchant and fishing fleet that is sometimes pressed into paramilitary service), and Taiwan's navy stays even closer to home.

How Hard Is It To Get Into The University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is undisputedly the most selective and prestigious university in Japan. How hard is to to get in?

The 34% acceptance rate makes it look deceptively easy, but this is because you can only apply to 1-2 public universities a year in Japan, admissions are very heavily exam score based, and people who know they have a low chance of getting in don't apply. 

Basically, only people in the top 1% of Japanese entrance exam scores apply (equivalent to an SAT score of about 1530 out of 1600), and someone in the top 0.5% (equivalent to an SAT score of about 1570 out of 1600) has about a 50/50 chance of admission. This is a very crude estimate, however.

By comparison, the middle 50% SAT scores at Brown University, an Ivy League college, is 1520-1570. The average GPA of an entering student at Brown is 4.1. At Harvard, the 75th percentile SAT score is 1580 and an average of 1520. The average GPA of an entering student at Harvard is 4.0.

Other sources (I'm not bothered to relocate the links) have suggested that admission to the University of Tokyo takes a minimum of a U.S. GPA equivalent of at least 3.8 to 3.9, with closer to a 4.0 or better being highly desirable.

So, realistically, getting into the University of Tokyo is similar to getting into an Ivy League college in the U.S., on the academic front. But, unlike an Ivy League applicant in the U.S., you don't have to have out of this world exceptional level extracurricular activities and achievements, or a parent who went to the same college.

Musings About Language and Religion In Japan

Language Log discuses an interesting evolving issue in the Japanese language, which has four parallel systems of writing that are mixed together, that is somewhat obvious, but I've never really drilled down the frame this way:

Mix and match Japanese orthography

Most Language Log readers are aware that the Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinoglyhs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary). I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component, as they are in the Chinese writing system.

How do people decide when to switch among the different components of the Japanese writing system? Of course, custom and usage determine when to use one and when to use another. (It's a bit like masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender based languages [a frequent and recent topic on Language Log] — you don't ask why, you just do it].) In most cases, convention has fixed which of the three main components of the writing system is used for a particular purpose. On the other hand, since I began learning Japanese half a century ago, I noticed a fairly conspicuous slippage regarding what I had been led to believe were predetermined practices. . . . there is a lot of variability in the way people mix and match hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Not infrequently, multiple different writing systems will be incorporated in the same sentence, although each word will generally be written in a single writing system.

In the case of Japanese proper names, it is common for someone to say their name orally and then to say that it is written with a certain set of kanji, because there is more than one set of kanji that can sound essentially the same, but have very different meanings. 

Indeed, Japanese is full of pun wordplay because its many homonyms and words that sound very similar but are not identical sounding, are common, in large part, because Japanese has a quite small set of phonemes (i.e. distinct vowel and consonant sounds). 

The small phoneme set in Japanese is a big part of why English speakers who learn Japanese often have quite good accents (since almost all Japanese phonemes are present in English), while Japanese  speakers who learn English tend to have a much more difficult time overcoming thick accents (since many common English phonemes are absent in Japanese and English has less strict rules about how phonemes can be combined).

Another nuance in addition to these four writing systems is that there are certain words, like the words for numbers, that are written in a special way in legal documents in order to make them resistant to being forged or modified, with a few strokes of a pen. It is a custom somewhat similar to writing numbers in both words and numerals on a check or in a legal contract.

Scripts aren't the only context in which the Japanese mix and match. 

Japan is also famous for its religious mixing and matching, with the average Japanese person invoking a mix of Confucian philosophy (which is pervasive), Shinto religious practices (with shrine observances especially on certain holidays and in home shrines for deceased family members), Buddhist religious practices (especially with respect to funerals), and even some Western Christian religious/cultural practices (mostly Christmas celebrations heavy on Santa and light on Jesus, and aspects of Christian wedding practices). In Japanese popular fiction, it is almost cliche for supernatural threats to be challenged by mixed religion teams of priests from Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian perspectives, much like a party of warriors who are each trained in a different martial art.

China Is Unlikely To Start A War

With Russia knocked down a peg by its disastrous performance in the Ukraine War, Afghanistan fallen to the Taliban, none of the usual candidates in the Middle East coming forward publicly to try to pounce on Israel in the face of its intense response to an Iranian supported Hamas massacre and Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon, and North Korea lobbing nuclear ready missiles in tests but taking no conventional warfare steps and its leader shaking hands with South Korea's leader, all attention has turned to China.

As a country with 1.4 billion people, a gross national product that is 76% of the size of the U.S. GNP, and decades of intense economic growth, China's has had the resources to fund a large and advanced military, without even seriously militarizing its society with large numbers of soldiers relative to its population or seriously straining the ability of its government to pay for it. 

China's merely regional aspirations also allow it to concentrate its military resources. China hasn't tried to mimic the United States and Russia by deploying a large blue sea navy far from its coast, or by trying to serve as a "global policeman". China has some blue sea navy capabilities with modern aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and longer range than coastal submarine, it has long range missiles (some of which carry nuclear missiles), and it even has some reasonably long range military aircraft. But China has shown little interest in flexing its military muscles further from home than the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific Ocean, and the East China Sea. 

China certainly has no plans to invade any country in the Americas, or to repeat the mistake that Japan made in World War II when Japan attacked Hawaii in 1941.

There is no indication that China has any intention of starting hostilities to the North, with Russia or Mongolia or on its borders with the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia. 

Despite some border skirmishes over worthless, almost uninhabited mountain territory on its border with India, this conflict seems to be more about pride and honor than anything substantive. China shows no indication that it wants to seize meaningfully inhabited parts of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, or Myanmar. China seems to have bitten off as much as it can chew when it conquered Tibet and now thinks better of any other campaigns to repeat that experience.

China could easily have conquered the communist regimes in North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam outright, but appears to be content to merely leave them as tributary states in its sphere of influence that emulate it and kowtow to it. 

In part, China appears to have concluded from the troublesome resistance its has received from ethnic minorities in semiautonomous regions like Inner Mongolia, and from ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Manchurians, that it prefers to be a nation-state dominated by a Han Chinese core to being a sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural empire.

China doesn't really want to have to absorb Japan or North Korea or South Korea or Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or the Philippines or Indonesia or Thailand, let alone Australia or New Zealand or Papua New Guinea. 

China isn't even grumbling about trying to unify Chinese diaspora populations in Western influenced places with large Chinese minorities, like Singapore or Malaysia. It swallowed up Macao easily enough, when its 99 year lease expired, but has found that even trying to absorb Hong Kong without destroying what makes it valuable has been highly challenging, even when the British handed it over without a fight when its 99 year lease expired.

China has a large and technologically advanced Army ground forces with no place to go. It has state of the art tanks and anti-tank forces, but no plausible conflicts, other than an invasion of Taiwan or a campaign to put down North Korea's regime if it gets out of hand, to use it. 

It is conceivable that China might need to fight a counterinsurgency conflict in its own territory, or to aid one of its tributary states in doing so. But there is no way that any plausible insurgent force in these places could acquire "near peer" conventional military force weapons to its own forces in any meaningful amount in the foreseeable future.

The United States also has large, technologically advanced ground forces in its Army and Marines, but unlike China, it has used those ground troops as expeditionary military forces to fight foreign wars on a regular basis since at least World War I. China hasn't been involved directly in a foreign war on an expeditionary basis since World War II, even though it supported proxy Communist regimes in Korea and Southeast Asia.

Since the 1980s, China's military ambitions have focused largely on regaining control of Taiwan (which itself arrogantly claims sovereignty over mainland China, an ambition that has been futile for seven decades) and expanding its dominance in the portions of the seas near it, some closer to the Philippines and Japan than to its own coast, that the rest of the world considers to be international waters.

Taiwan is attractive because it is very close to mainland China, and it is predominantly ethnic Chinese, which makes it feel to the People's Republic of China like a territory that it could assimilate in a manner similar to its current effort to reintegrate Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China. 

The prospect of a military conquest of Taiwan is also attractive to China's military leadership, much as it is the military leadership of the United States, because it justifies immense expenditures for naval forces, air forces, and ground forces who can participate in an amphibious assault on the island of Formosa.

If China's barriers to this conquest were primarily military, it would have happened long ago. The People's Republic of China has something like 70 times more people than Taiwan does, vastly more economic resources, and can focus on this single front without fearing distractions from some other conflict at the same time. Taiwan's economy is more technologically advanced and developed than China's but that gap has fallen steadily, and when it comes to military technology, they are close to parity with China potentially having the edge at this point. Even if China had to incur three or even ten times the casualties as Taiwan did in an offensive war against it, ultimately, China has a greater capacity to bear those losses than Taiwan does. 

This said, however, one of the reasons that the last significant amphibious assault in the history of the world was seventy years ago in the Korean War is that military technologies have shifted in a way this makes this strategy which has always been extremely challenging and costly, even more difficult to carry out effectively. It is just too easy with modern anti-ship missiles, submarines, sea mines, and more to sink amphibious assault surface combatants with hundreds or even thousands of ground troops on them before they even reach the shore. And as military technologies mature and advance, the balance continues to shift, again and again, against warships and toward military forces that want to stop warships. Ukraine has managed to seriously bloody Russia's Black Sea fleet, despite not having any real navy to speak of at all.

Taiwan does have the United States, with the worlds largest and most advanced military force and nuclear weapons as it patron. But a reasonable Chinese military strategist could wager, and would probably be correct, that the United States, while it would provide as much support in conventional warfare to protect Taiwan as it could, would not be willing to start a global nuclear war with China to protect Taiwan's sovereignty, something that Taiwan itself blows hot and cold on in its own domestic politics. Likewise, while China would very much like to have Taiwan as a jewel in its crown, it seems unlikely that China would risk starting a nuclear war with the United States to get it. Nuclear missiles are blunt instruments that serve few legitimate military purposes in the hands of rational military leaders in positions of high command. And, unlike the leaders of North Korea, China's leaders have consistently shown themselves to be calculating and rational, rather than insane and reckless, for the last half century or so since the Cultural Revolution ended.

Instead, the main barrier to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is that fact that both countries "live in glass houses." Modern China's economy and prosperity is rooted in its export oriented manufacturing base, which is increasingly moving up the chain of technological sophistication. Taiwan, likewise, has an export based commercial economy that, most famously, it the global center of advanced computer processor manufacturing. China and Taiwan even have significant and strong trade ties with each other.

Unlike Russia, which has survived global economic sanctions and boycotts with only minor cuts and bruises so far, because the only exports that are very important to the health of Russia's domestic economy are natural gas and oil, both China and Taiwan have economies which are heavily reliant on international trade, much of it with rich Western countries. 

In an all out war, the sophisticated high tech factories that make that export based economy possible would be completely wiped out for decades in Taiwan, although the heavy capital investments of mainland China would be harder to really devastate. But it also isn't just physical capital investments that matter. You can't manufacture world class computer processors with unwilling serfs. The prime exports of both economies require the voluntary, and indeed, enthusiastic participation of legions of sophisticated engineers, factory managers, technicians, financial and managerial professionals, and more generally a health, decentralized, reasonably economically free commercial sector and social class. All it would take for China to kill the goose that lays Taiwan's golden eggs would be quiet work to rule, "quiet quitting" type behavior from its managerial, professional, administrative, and technical classes. No flashing explosives or armed resistance would be necessary.

Equally important, if any significant part of the developed world decided to boycott Chinese exports because of a Chinese invasion and conquest of Taiwan, as part of a general mobilization against it akin to the general mobilization against Russia that took place in the immediate wake of its invasion of Ukraine, the impact this would have on China would be far more severe than the impact these sanctions had on Russia.

China wouldn't lose all of its trading partners. It could still keep selling its ware to the communist regimes of Southeast Asia and to Russia, for example. But its trade to those countries is already close to maxed out, because it is a leading global exporter. There is no place it could sell its wares that could replace its immense exports to developed Western capitalist countries around the world, if it lost access to those markets, which it likely would, at least in the medium term.

The economic blowback that China would experience in reaction to an invasion of Taiwan from the developed Western capitalist countries of the world would be at least as bad as the Great Depression was in the United States, if not worse. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people would lose their jobs and would be trust into abject poverty. Factories up and down China's densely populated eastern coastal regions would be shuttered. People who managed to hold onto jobs might see their incomes cut in half. The massive progress China has made in the past couple of decades in eradicating extreme poverty globally would be undone.

In an economy already heavily driven by extravagant public works projects, there would be little room to boost an economy facing collapse from a sudden interruption of its export trade with more spending on public works and infrastructure. A loss of access to supplies of imported raw materials would further cripple Chinese manufacturers ability to export goods even communist or formerly communist countries that continued to support China, and to manufacture goods for domestic consumption. Imported comforts would dwindle to the consternation of Chinese business elites that now snap up second homes in Vancouver and foreign educations and travel for their children and have acquired expensive and exotic tastes. 

Also, despite its vast population, now more or less tied with India, in China, lives are no longer cheap. The average Chinese woman has less than one child in a lifetime. Many young men in China are not just only children, but are also the only grandchild of four grandparents. A historical preference for boys as China experienced its demographic transition in the face of its one child policy have left China with a surplus of military service aged men, although it has barely tapped it since it has so many young men relative to the needs of its military. 

China is far removed from places with the demographics of places like the Gaza Strip, where almost 50% of the population is under the age of eighteen, couples tend to marry in their early twenties, and women generally have many children in their lifetimes. Too many mouths to feed and too few jobs to support them isn't a problem that China has at the moment. Every young adult man and woman is precious in the eyes of modern China, so each life lost in a war to take Taiwan would have an amplified social impact. China is not psychologically prepared to lose the millions of lives and hundreds of sunken ships that it would have to expend to take Taiwan.

Given the current situation of China and Taiwan, the only way it would make sense for China to conquer Taiwan would be if it could accomplish this in an almost bloodless fait accompli in a matter of days, which the Taiwanese people collective gave up and accepted as inevitable at the outset, much like the sudden, nearly bloodless Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014 that was basically over before the world had time to react to it, or come to Ukraine's aid.

But while the Taiwanese people do predominantly speak a Chinese topolect, and do have strong cultural ties to mainland China, the similarities between Crimea and Taiwan end there. Modern Taiwan's is the product of a society of Western leaning exiles from the Maoist Communist revolution in mainland China. The Chinese speaking people of Taiwan are the majority and have been in opposition to the communist regime of mainland China from the start, unlike the Russian speaking people of Crimea who were a minority in Ukraine and felt cultural and political kinship with their post-Soviet co-ethnics in Russia proper. 

There is no reason to think that Taiwan would accept their new Chinese overlords quietly or peacefully with resignation and obedience to the new regime. This would be a war of people with nowhere else to go in Taiwan defending their home, who have been preparing for this fight for much longer than the Ukrainians prepared for a Russian invasion, and with all of the ferocity of the Ukrainians defending their territory. And, like Ukraine, the Taiwanese would have ample military and economic support from Western-leaning allies including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Australia with technologically modern military forces. So, the only scenario that would make the price that China would have to pay to take Taiwan simply isn't a plausible possibility.

Thus, the only ground war that China has shown any interest in fighting would be far too costly to China, even if it wins, to make the fight worth it to China. And, because China's leadership is rational and pragmatic enough to realize this fact, it is extremely unlikely that China will invade Taiwan.

Really the only military actions that it seems plausible for China to undertake in the near future is a continuation of its low grade, gradual efforts to use its naval and air power, and ground troops on artificial islands, to extend its dominance in the international waters of the East China sea and the Western Pacific as far as the international waters near the Philippines. The prizes here are fishing territory, oceanic mineral resources, greater control of the East Asian shipping industry, and national pride at a modest military cost. And, these are prizes which the allies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are unwilling to exert the level of overwhelming trade, diplomatic, and military power necessary to completely thwart China from achieving these aims.

Tanks Haven't Been Effective Against China For Eons

The U.S. Army's M1 Abrams tanks will "not be effective" or able to "dominate" on the battlefields of the 2040s, especially in the context of a potential high-end conflict against China. This is the conclusion of an official advisory body that is also calling for an Abrams replacement effort that could include a next-generation M1 derivative, as well as lighter 'tanks' armed with larger caliber guns and hypersonic anti-tank missiles, and uncrewed ground vehicles.

The Army Science Board, a federally-sanctioned independent group of experts that advises the Secretary of the Army, recently published an assessment about the future of the M1 tank. It also outlines the need for one or more types of "5th Generation Combat Vehicle," or 5GCV, to meet operational demands in the 2040s. The origins of this study trace back to 2019 and the final report is dated August 2023. . . . 

The Army currently has around 2,500 M1 Abrams tanks in service today, with thousands more in storage that could potentially be refurbished and returned to service, if necessary. The original M1 entered service in the 1980s and significantly more capable variants have been introduced since then.

The Army Science Board study is blunt in its core conclusions about the future of the M1, stating early on:

Based on our findings, The M1 Abrams will not dominate the 2040 battlefield. All of the M1’s advantages in mobility, firepower, and protection are at risk. The M1A2 SEP V3&4 upgrades will improve effectiveness but will not restore dominance. Near transparency in all domains will significantly increase the lethality our forces will experience. China and Russia have studied our forces and doctrine and are fielding countermeasures. We will continue to have to fight outnumbered, exacerbated by a low MBT operational readiness rate and an aging fleet.

From here.

Forget 2040! 

Tanks are not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war now, were not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war at any time in my lifetime, and will indeed, also not be effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war in 2040.

So far as I know, a D-day style invasion of mainland China is not and has not been at any time in recent history, a part of U.S. strategy for engaging the People's Republic of China in a conventional war. If it was, it shouldn't have been. It simply makes no sense to try to conduct a land invasion of a country that currently has 1.4 billion people with a large and modern military on land that is indisputably Chinese territory. 

This is as absurd as the conservative fairy tale movie "Red Dawn" about a Russian invasion of the U.S. by land from Mexico. It makes absolutely no sense.

But Taiwan you say!

Nope.

If any significant number of Chinese tanks make it to the island of Formosa, and infantry carried anti-tank weapons and anti-tank mines aren't enough to thwart them, then the cause of defending Taiwanese autonomy from the mainland Chinese aggression is pretty much a lost cause that U.S. main battle tanks won't help.

Furthermore, unless U.S. main battle tanks are prepositioned on the island of Formosa, they are useless anyway. The U.S. has no way to deliver any meaningful number of its 70+ ton main battle tanks there in time to be useful from anyplace that it has a meaningful number of them in place.

I've railed repeatedly about the extent to which surface warships are sitting ducks and are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of threats. But that goes tenfold for slow, basically unarmed, unstealthy military transport ships less than two hundred miles from the coast of mainland China bringing heavy U.S. tanks to Taiwan. Never mind that it would take weeks for each delivery of U.S. tanks to arrive from the nearest base that has any significant number of U.S. tanks. Yet, a battle to gain a foothold for PRC ground troops on the island of Formosa is likely to have completely run its course in a week or two.

When and if China pulls the trigger to try to invade Taiwan, for all practical purposes, anything that can only get there via a military or commercial transport ship doesn't exist. This is one of the important reasons that the U.S. Marine Corps has divested itself of tanks.

These are not new realities that are just around the corner in seven years or a decade. This has been the reality for at least the last half-century or so.

If U.S. main battle tanks are of any use to Taiwan, to South Korea, or to Japan, the only sensible option is to preposition them in those countries and probably to simply sell them to these U.S. allies or to simply give them away to these U.S. allies. The U.S. already has far more M1 Abrams main battle tanks than it has any reasonable military use for. Then, at least, the tanks could be fully integrated into the military forces of the countries defending their own territory against a Chinese invasion.

Also, just to be clear, North Korea's missiles are a threat to its neighbors (and even Hawaii, U.S. Pacific territories, and the Pacific coastal states of the U.S.). Likewise, North Korea's very numerous but outdated coastal submarines could pose a threat to maritime commerce and the warships of the U.S. and its allies in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. But tanks are useless against both of these threats.

North Korea has no capacity to launch an amphibious invasion of Japan or Taiwan (even with Chinese assistance). North Korea's ground forces are a mere biting fly to China. And, even a North Korean invasion of South Korea over the demilitarized zone with North Korea's profoundly outdated tanks and inferior artillery isn't all that much of a threat. 

In short, there is really no plausible scenario in which U.S. main battle tanks under U.S. command would be particularly important in defending any of the U.S.'s East Asian allies from invasions from either the People's Republic of China or North Korea.

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all have their own home grown tanks, which are less massive than the M1 Abrams, which were purpose built for their task. Our East Asian allies don't have a strong military need for U.S. tanks period, even as part of their own military forces. Even a majorly upgraded successor to the M1 Abrams that is still basically a main battle tank, could do nothing to change this analysis. A next generation tank is something that the U.S. military does not need, at least for any conflicts in the Asian Pacific region.

Hello Baby (Spoilers Below The Fold)

Hello Baby is a webcomic at Webtoons by Enjelicious, a South Korean comic author, who established herself with her first "big time" debut comic, Age Matters, which was recently completed after years of serialization. Hello Baby has been running for about six months and as I write, thirty episodes are available if you are willing to pay a modest price so you don't have to wait three weeks to read episodes for free.

Age Matters, one of the hottest titles in the romance comic genre at the time, was about a young woman filling in for a friend in her friend's job a cook and maid for a young CEO of a social media tech company who falls in love with him, that also has a strong supporting cast of secondary characters, and a backstory of melodrama involving famous models, villains motivated by jealousy and money, and rich family business chiefs looking for marriage alliances. Overall, the tone is cute and funny, if somewhat cliched. The most serious issues it explores, not very seriously, are the propriety of a woman dating a younger man, and the propriety of a woman dating her boss. It has a good chance of being made into a live action K-drama if this isn't already in the works.

Hello Baby is her sophomore romance comic effort. It is more serious, more down to Earth, and explores deeper emotions and issues related to modern marriage, parenting, love, responsibility, and our social instincts that deserve thought and discussion (but can't be discussed without revealing some spoilers from the first dozen or so episodes from what will probably be more than a hundred episodes when it's done, below the fold). It is also a huge hit and also has strong K-drama potential.

Guns, Homicides, Suicides, and Drugs

The Big Picture

Gun control and drug policy are two areas where overwhelming empirical evidence shows that liberal policies on these issues would profoundly increase public welfare, and that conservative policies on these issues are deeply misguided and do profound harm without providing meaningful benefits to society. 

The misguided status quo policies in the United States on these issues are also among the most important reasons that U.S. life expectancies are lower than in other developed countries. While the raw numbers of deaths caused by these policies is not extremely high relative to diseases that cause deaths, because they results in deaths of much younger people on average than other leading causes of death, their impact on U.S. life expectancies is outsized.

Weak gun control laws are a root cause of about 75-80% of the homicides and more than half of all suicides in the United States. 

Insufficiently strong gun control laws cause about 30,000 more deaths per year in the United States than it would have if strong gun control laws were in place. 

These preventable deaths take a particularly strong toll on people who are more than one year old and are not yet elderly, who otherwise tend not to die of "natural causes" and are the leading cause of death for children in the United States. These deaths disproportionately kill men and racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, especially black adolescent boys, and young black men. Deaths due to weak gun control laws also disproportionately kill young white men in the South and in rural America.

This is also the reason that the United States leads the world in its number of mass shootings. And, the evidence is overwhelming that widespread gun ownership does not meaningfully mitigate mass shootings that do occur, and does not prevent mass shootings. Instead, it makes them more common.

The criminal justice system does not deter mass shootings. They continue to occur, even though it is widely known that almost every mass shooter (98% of whom are men): (1) commits suicide, (2) dies in the act as law enforcement tries to shop him or arrest him, (3) is convicted of multiple murders and remains in prison for life (or in very rare cases is executed a decade or more later), or (4) is declared insane or incompetent and is involuntarily committed and never walks free again. Almost no mass shooters escape death shortly after or maximal criminal justice system punishments. The clearance rates for these cases is almost perfect. Because of this fact, the only way to reduce the number of mass shootings is to prevent them, and stricter gun control laws are well proven to greatly reduce mass shootings.

Consideration of homicides and suicides alone fails to consider the way that the pervasive threat of armed crime triggers excessive uses of force by law enforcement and the militarization of law enforcement, sometimes resulting in unjustified law enforcement killings, in legally unjustified killings by civilians claiming to be acting in self-defense, in justified law enforcement and self-defense killings that could have been prevented if guns were less widely available, and in riots causing mass property damage, injuries, and sometimes deaths. These circumstances claim hundreds of lives each year and also lead to hundreds of law enforcement deaths of each year.

Of course, this doesn't even begin to consider the harms associated with gun involved crimes such as non-fatal shootings, extortion, robberies, burglaries, and rapes that are committed with firearms. The rates at which these aggravated crimes would be committed would be significantly reduced if strict gun control were in place, although comparative crime rate studies suggest that the reductions would not be nearly as great as the reductions in the rates of homicides.

The evidence is also overwhelming that the widespread availability of armed self-defense does not significantly prevent crimes from taking place, or mitigate the harm associated with crimes. Instead, gun ownership increases the rate at which gun owners and non-gun owners alike are victims of crimes and commit suicide. Armed self-defense and armed defense of others does succeed, at least partially, in a tiny number of cases, but the benefits of armed self-defense in the rare cases where it is used are profoundly overwhelmed by the harms that widespread gun availability facilitates, even to people who are generally law abiding when they buy firearms who purchase them in good faith solely for the purpose of defending themselves, their homes, and their families.

Widely available firearms, by making crimes more serious, also drives mass incarceration in the United States, by turning people who otherwise would have committed less serious crimes into people who commit serious violent crimes. People serving long sentences for violent crimes make up a large share of all prison inmates and would make up a significantly smaller share of prison inmates in a world with strict gun control.

Weak gun control laws in the United States and the prohibition rather than regulation of controlled substances in the United States are also a leading cause of homicides and other gun crimes in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Strong gun control laws in the United States would save tens of thousands of lives each year elsewhere in the Americas.

The facts that countries with strict gun control laws like the U.K. and Japan have healthy democratic systems, that guns and threats of violence are increasingly being used to thwart the democratic process, and the results of comparative and historical studies of the impact of armed populations on tyranny and the democratic process, all soundly demonstrate that the political theory underlying the Second Amendment is profoundly incorrect as an empirical matter.

Unequivocal evidence clearly shows that the United States, and the Western Hemisphere more generally, would be profoundly better off if the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution were repealed, and the United States then adopted strict national gun control laws along the lines of those current in place in the United Kingdom and Japan.

In short, the Second Amendment is a suicide pact.

A policy towards illegal drugs and unauthorized use of prescription drugs that deals with drugs as a public health problem, rather than treating this as primarily a criminal justice problem would also greatly reduce ever rising number of drug overdose deaths in the United States. It would also profoundly reduce organized crime and gang activity and greatly reduce property crimes committed to fund illegal drug purchases. In the year 2021, 106,699 people in the United States died of drug overdoes (mostly of opiates), and this would be profoundly reduced if the United States instead took a public health approach to the problem. Perhaps 90% of these deaths could be prevented with better drug policies. This has been convincingly demonstrated in places that have shifted fully or partially from a war on drugs criminal justice approach to a public health approach to the problem of substance abuse such as France, Switzerland, and Portugal, and in places that have legalized recreational marijuana. The illegal drug trade that U.S. controlled substance laws facilitate also fuels organized crime worldwide, often making it a powerful rival to the civilian governments of the countries where it is present.

This post addresses many, but not all of the claims above, others of which have been addressed in previous posts at this blog.

Gun Control Laws Compared

The U.S. has the most lax gun control law in the world other than Ethiopia and Yemen (Switzerland is lax, but not as lax as the U.S., Yemen and Ethiopia are also more lax than they seems as Yemen is in the middle of a civil war and Ethiopia is the midst of a lower grade military insurgency).

The U.K. and Japan have the most strict gun control laws in the world, with Japan's regulation of guns being more strict and more effectively enforced, in part because the borders of the U.K. are more open to countries with less strict gun control laws. Japan also might tightly regulates bladed weapons than the U.K. does.

Homicide Rates Compared

How does this affect homicide rates in the respective countries?

The lion's share of the difference in homicide rates between the U.S., U.K., and Japan can be attributed to gun control.

Total Homicide Rates Per 100,000 people:

* U.S.    4.7 (74% involving guns)

* U.K.    1.17 (5% involving guns, i.e. 35 gun homicides per year).

* Japan   1.02 (less than 1% involving guns, i.e. 9 gun deaths including suicides and accidents per year).

Gun Homicide Rate Per 100,000 people:

* U.S.    3.48 (about 58 times as great as the U.K.)

* U.K.:  0.06 (more than 6 times more than Japan)

* Japan: less than 0.01 (more than 348 times less than the U.S.)

The U.S. would have about 11,300 fewer gun homicides per year if it had the U.K. gun homicide rate instead of its own.

More generally (involving slightly different rates due to age adjustments and data from different years):

Non-Gun Homicide Rates Per 100,000 people:

* U.S. 1.22 (21% more than Japan and 10% more than the U.K.)

* U.K. 1.11 (10% more than Japan)

* Japan 1.01

The U.S. would have about 363 fewer non-gun homicides per year (about one less homicide per day, nationwide) if it had the U.K. non-gun homicide rate rather than its own non-gun homicide rate.

Some of the difference in the non-gun homicide rate between the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan (but probably less than 10%), may reflect the inferior health care system of the U.S., which unlike the U.K. and Japan is not universal causing people who need emergency medical care to avoid hospitals.

Some of the difference in the non-gun homicide rate between the U.K. and Japan (but probably not more than 10%) may reflect stricter controls on bladed weapons in Japan than in the U.K.

The fact that the population of Japan is older than the populations of the U.K. and the U.S. may account for some of the difference.

Another factor may  be greater economic inequality and higher poverty rates in the U.K. Economic inequality and poverty are higher in the U.S. than either the U.K. or Japan.

But, all other factors explaining the differences in homicide rates between these countries pale in comparison to gun control.

Mass Shootings Compared

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. also (almost) leads the world in mass shootings:

Mass shootings are a fairly modest share of all murders committed with guns in the United States (about 2.6%):

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 513 people died in these incidents in 2020.

But mass shootings have a disproportionate impact on our public sense of security, because they are comparatively random and unpredictable.

There are no mass shooting in Japan, which has a population of about 125 million people.

The U.S. has:

about twenty-five times as many mass shootings per capita as the U.K., 

about twelve times as many as Italy, 

about eight times as many as Australia, 

about five times as many as Germany, 

about three times as many as Canada, 

about two and three-quarters times as many as Austria, 

about two and two-thirds times as many as the Netherlands, 

about two and a half times as many as France, 

one and three-quarters times as many as Belgium, 

about one point six times as many as the Czech Republic, and 

33% more the Switzerland. 

Finland actually has 80% more mass shootings per capita than the U.S., in part due to random variation in a very small number over a twenty-one year period in a country with a small population (and probably involves fewer victims per capita than the U.S.).

Per capita rates are also problematic and not as statistically significant in countries with only one mass shooting during a twenty-one year period when the country has a small population, where random chance at a given rate and "rounding error" type issues come into play.

Gun Suicides

Stricter gun control would also greatly reduce firearm suicides without corresponding increases in suicides from other causes. 

According to the Pew Center:

In 2020, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (24,292), while 43% were murders (19,384), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were unintentional (535), involved law enforcement (611) or had undetermined circumstances (400). . . .

Nearly eight-in-ten (79%) U.S. murders in 2020 – 19,384 out of 24,576 – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. A little over half (53%) of all suicides in 2020 – 24,292 out of 45,979 – involved a gun, a percentage that has generally remained stable in recent years. 

As noted by the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Variation in state-level suicide rates is largely driven by rates of suicide by firearm.  

Suicides involving firearms vary from the lowest rate of 1.8 per 100,000 in New Jersey and Massachusetts to a high of 20.9 per 100,000 in Wyoming, representing an absolute difference of 19.1. 

In contrast, the rate of suicide by other means is more stable across states, ranging from a low of 4.6 in Mississippi to a high of 11.4 in South Dakota, representing an absolute difference of 6.8. . . .

More than twice as many suicides by firearm occur in states with the fewest gun laws, relative to states with the most laws. . . .

Taking a look at suicide deaths starting from the date of a handgun purchase and comparing them to people who did not purchase handguns, another study found that people who purchased handguns were more likely to die from suicide by firearm than those who did not–with men 8 times more likely and women 35 times more likely compared to non-owners.

Non-firearm suicides rates are relatively stable across states suggesting that other types of suicides are not more likely in areas where guns are harder to access.

Similarly:

A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower. 

Spillover Effects

Stricter gun control laws in the U.S. would also significantly reduce homicide rates in Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America, where a very significant share of all gun homicides are committed with guns smuggled into those countries illegally from the United States, where guns are easy to obtain. 

For example, according to a July 2022 article, in "Ontario, Canada's most populous province . . . when handguns involved in crimes were traced in 2021, they were overwhelmingly - 85% of the time - found to have come from the United States. . . . 70% of all traced guns used in crimes in Ontario came from the United States, while so far this year the U.S. share has risen to 73%, according to the data from the Ontario police's Firearms Analysis and Tracing Enforcement (FATE) program."

A significant share of homicides in Latin America are also attributable to the trade in illegal drugs involving drug cartels and other forms of organized crime from Latin American to meet U.S. demand, which would be greatly reduced if those drugs were legalized but regulated in the United States.

Taking a global view, the six countries with the highest age-adjusted rates of firearm homicides are:

1. El Salvador
2. Venezuela
3. Guatemala
4. Colombia
5. Honduras
6. Brazil

Research has found high levels of homicides in these countries are associated with drug cartels, the illegal trade in firearms from the US, and firearms flowing to civilians after conflicts end, as summarized in the Global Burden of Disease study.

From here.

Thus, stricter gun control in the United States and more enlightened controlled substances laws in the United States would greatly reduce homicides almost everywhere in the Americas.

As an aside, the linked Global Burden of Disease study concludes that the drug trade and smuggled firearms from the U.S. have a much smaller impact on suicide rates in Latin America than these factors do on homicide rates there. 

There is good reason to think that this is also true in Canada.